Death on the Installment Plan

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  I asked him again … risked it … if there was any objection to my starting out again… having a look at the want ads … “You stay right here,” he says to me. “Aren’t you happy? Is anything eating you, kid? Go out for a walk. It’ll be better for you. Don’t worry about a thing … You’ll only get mixed up with the same dopes … I’ll find you a job … I’m working on it. Just leave me alone. Don’t stick your nose in. You’re still too jittery … You’ll only bollix everything up … You’re too nervous right now. Anyway I’ve arranged everything with your parents … Go roaming around some more … You won’t always have the chance. Go out to Suresnes along the river. Or take the boat, come to think of it. Give yourself a change of air. There’s nothing like those boats. Get off at Meudon if you feel like it. That’ll clear your mind … I’ll tell you in a few days … I’ll have something very good for you … I can feel it … I’m sure of it … But we mustn’t try to force things … And I hope you’ll be a credit to me …” “Yes, Uncle.”

  You don’t meet many men like Roger-Martin Courtial des Pereires … I was a good deal too young at the time, I’ve got to admit, to appreciate him properly. My uncle had the good fortune to meet him one day at the office of the Genitron, the favorite magazine (twenty-five pages) of the small artisan-inventors of the Paris district … in connection with his scheme for obtaining a patent, the best, the most airtight, for all kinds of bicycle pumps … folding, collapsible, flexible, or reversible.

  Courtial des Pereires, let’s get this straight right away, was absolutely different from the mob of petty inventors … He was miles above all the bungling subscribers to his magazine … that crawling mass of failures … Oh no! Roger-Martin Courtial wasn’t in that class … He was a real master! … It wasn’t just neighbors that came to consult him … but people from all over, from the departments of the Seine, the Seine-et-Oise, subscribers from the provinces, the colonies … even from foreign countries …

  But the remarkable thing about it was that in private Courtial expressed nothing but contempt and ill-concealed disgust for all those small-fry, those weights around the neck of Science, those misled shopkeepers, those delirious tailors, those gadget peddlers … all those harebrained delivery boys, always being fired, hunted, cachectic, driving themselves nuts about perpetual motion or the squaring of the world … or the magnetic faucet … The whole miserable swarm of obsessed screwballs … of inventors of the moon! …

  He had his bellyful of them right away, just from looking at them and especially when he had to listen to them … He had to put a good face on it in the interests of the paper … That was his routine, his bread and butter … But it was disgusting and embarrassing … It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have kept quiet … But he had to comfort them! flatter them! get rid of them gently … according to the case and the mania … and above all collect his fee … It was a race between all those maniacs, those dreary slobs, to see who could get away a little quicker … only five minutes more! … from his furnished room … his workshop, his bus or shed … just time to take a leak … and then dash to the Genhron … and collapse in front of des Pereires’ desk, like a lot of escaped convicts … panting … haggard … tense with fright … to shake their dunce caps some more … to fire thousands of puzzlers at Courtial … about “solar mills,” the junction of the “lesser radiations” … ways of moving the Cordilleras … of deflecting the course of comets … as long as they had a gasp of breath left in their dottering bagpipes … to the last twitch of their stinking carcasses … Courtial des Pereires, secretary, precursor, owner, founder of the Genitron, always had an answer to everything, he was never embarrassed or disconcerted, never maneuvered to gain time … His aplomb, his perfect competence, his irresistible optimism made him invulnerable to the worst assaults of the worst nitwits … Besides, he never put up with long conversations … Instantly he parried, he himself took over … Whatever was said, decided, settled … was settled once and for all … no use starting up again or he’d go purple with rage … He’d tug at his collar … He’d spray spit in all directions … Incidentally he had some teeth missing, three on one side … In every case his verdicts, the most tenuous, the most dubious, the most open to argument, became massive, galvanized, irrefutable, instantaneous truths … He had only to open his mouth … He triumphed instantly … There was no room for a comeback.

  At the slightest sign of disagreement he gave free rein to his temper and the martyred consultant didn’t have a chance … Instantly turned inside out, crushed, routed, massacred, volatilized forever … It was a regular fantasia, a trapeze act over a volcano … The poor insolent bastard saw stars … Courtial was so imperious when he got mad he would have made the most insatiable nut drop through the floor, he’d have made him crawl into a mousehole.

  Courtial wasn’t a big man, he was short and wiry, the small powerful type. He himself told you his age several times a day … He was past fifty … He kept in good shape thanks to physical culture, dumbbells, Indian clubs, horizontal bars, springboards … he did his exercises regularly, especially before lunch, in the back room of the newspaper office. He’d fixed up a regular gymnasium between two partitions. Naturally it was kind of cramped … But all the same he swung himself around on his apparatus … on the bars … with remarkable ease … That was the advantage of being little … he could pivot like a charm … Even so he collided now and then … good and hard … when he was swinging on the rings … He’d shake the walls of his cubbyhole like a bell clapper! Boom! Boom! You could hear him exercising. Never in the worst heat did I ever see him take off his pants or his frock coat or his collar … Only his cuffs and his ready-made tie.

  Courtial des Pereires had a good reason to keep in perfect form. He had to watch out for his physique and keep limber … It was indispensable … In addition to being an inventor, an author, and a journalist, he often went up in a balloon … He gave exhibitions … Especially on Sundays and holidays … It usually went off all right, but occasionally there was trouble and plenty of excitement … And that wasn’t all … He led a perilous life, full of unforeseen dangers and a hundred different kinds of surprises … That’s how he’d always lived … It was his nature … He told me what he was aiming at …

  “Muscles without mind, Ferdinand,” he’d say, “aren’t even horse meat. And intelligence without muscles is electricity without a battery! You don’t know where to put it … It leaks out all over the place … It’s a waste … It’s a mess …” That was his opinion. He’d written several conclusive works on the subject: “The Human Battery and its Upkeep.” He was gone on physical culture even before the word existed. He wanted a varied life … “I don’t want to be a pen-pusher.” That was the way he talked.

  He was crazy about balloons, he’d been an aeronaut almost from birth, ever since his earliest youth … with Surcouf and Barbizet … highly instructive ascents … No records, no long-distance flights, no breathtaking performances. No, nothing showy, colossal, unusual … He had no use for the clowns of the atmosphere … Nothing but demonstration flights, educational ascents … Always scientific … That was his motto and he stuck to it. The balloon was good for his magazine, it rounded out his activities … Every time he went up it brought in subscribers. He had a uniform for climbing into the basket, he had an uncontested right to it, like a captain with three stripes, he was an “associated, registered, graduate” aeronaut. He couldn’t even count his medals. They looked like a breastplate on his Sunday rig … He didn’t give a damn about them, he wasn’t a show-off, but it meant a lot to his audience, you had to keep up appearances.

  To the last, Courtial des Pereires was a staunch defender of “lighter-than-air” craft. He was already thinking about helium. He was thirty-five years in advance of his times. And that’s something. Between flights he kept the Enthusiast, his veteran, his big private balloon, in the cellar of the office, at 18 Galerie Montpensier. As a rule he only took it out on Friday before dinner to straighten out the rigging
and fix up the cover with infinite care … the folds, the sleeve, the cords, filled the miniature gymnasium, the silk puffed up in the drafts.

  Courtial des Pereires himself never stopped producing, imagining, conceiving, resolving, making claims … his genius tugged at his brains from morning to night … And even at night it didn’t rest … He had to hold tight to resist the torrent of ideas … And be on his guard … It was incomparable torture … Instead of dozing off like other people, he was pursued by chimeras, new crazes, fresh hobbies … Bing! The whole idea of sleeping ran out on him, it was out of the question. He wouldn’t have got any sleep at all if he hadn’t rebelled against the torrent of inventions, against his own enthusiasm … This disciplining of his genius had cost him more trouble, more superhuman efforts, than all the rest of his work … He often told me so …

  When he was overcome in spite of himself, when after no end of resistance he felt swamped by his own enthusiasm and began to see double … or triple … to hear queer voices … there was no other way of stopping the onslaughts, of falling back into his rhythm, of recovering his good humor, than a little trip in the clouds. He’d treat himself to an ascent. If he’d had more free time, he’d have gone up a lot more often, just about every day, but it wasn’t compatible with the operation of his rag … He could only go up on Sunday … And even that wasn’t so easy … The Genitron took up all his time, he had to be there … he couldn’t fool around … Inventors are no joke … He always had to be on tap. He stuck to it bravely, nothing diminished his zeal or baffled his ingenuity … no problem, however stupendous, however colossal, however microscopic … He made faces but he put up with it … The “powdered cheese,” the “synthetic azure,” the “rocker valve,” the “nitrogen lung,” and the “collapsible steamship,” the “compressed café au lait,” or the “kilo-metric spring” that would take the place of fuel. No vital innovation in any of these far-flung fields was ever put into practice before Courtial had found occasion, not once but many times, to demonstrate its mechanisms, to stress its advantages, but also, without mercy, to point out its deplorable weaknesses and defects, its hazards and drawbacks.

  All this of course brought him terrible jealousies, hatreds without quarter, long-lasting grudges … But he remained impervious to these trifling contingencies.

  As long as he wrote for the paper, no technical revolution was recognized as worthwhile or even workable until he had said so and endorsed it in the columns of the Genitron. That gives you an idea of the authority he wielded. For every invention of any importance his verdict was decisive … The OK had to come from him. Take it or leave it. If Courtial wrote on his front page that an idea was no good … heavens above! … persnickety, cockeyed, absolutely unsound, that was the end of it. The contraption was dead and buried … The project was sunk … But if his opinion was definitely favorable … the thing would be all the rage in no time … The subscribers came running …

  In his office looking out over the gardens from under the arcades, Courtial des Pereires, thanks to his two hundred and twenty absolutely original handbooks, read all over the world, and thanks to Genitron magazine, exerted a peremptory and incomparable influence on the progress of the applied sciences. He directed, oriented, and multiplied the inventive effort of France, Europe, the universe, the whole vast ferment of the petty “certified” inventors …

  Naturally all this took some doing, he had to attack people, defend himself, and watch out for underhanded tricks. He could make or break an inventor, you never could tell which, by word of mouth or a stroke of the pen, by a manifesto or a flea in somebody’s ear. One day he’d almost started a riot with a series of talks on “the tellurian orientation and memory of swallows.” … He was a wonder at writing digests, articles, lectures in prose, in verse, and sometimes, to attract attention, in puns … “Spare no effort to enlighten the family and educate the masses”: that was the motto presiding over all his activities.

  Genitron: Discussion, Invention, Aerostatics, that was the range of his interests, and actually those words were written all over the walls of his offices … on the title page and on the shop front … You couldn’t go wrong … The most up-to-date muddled, complex controversies, the most daring, most subtly ingenious theories on physics, chemistry, electrothermics, or agricultural hygiene shriveled up like caterpillars at Courtial’s command, and there wasn’t another wiggle out of them … In two seconds flat he punctured them, knocked them cold … You could see their skeleton, their fabric … He had an X-ray mind … It took him only an hour’s effort and furious concentration to knock the damnedest damnfoolish-ness, the most pretentious quadrature into shape for the Genitron, to make it accessible to the recalcitrant understanding of the most hopeless dolt, of the most boneheaded of his subscribers. It was magical work and he did it marvelously, turning out definitive, incontrovertible explanations and digests of the most preposterous, hairsplitting, farfetched, and nebulous hypotheses … By sheer force of conviction he’d have made a flash of lightning pass through the eye of a needle and light up a cigarette lighter, he’d have put thunder into a tin whistle. That was his destiny, his training, his rhythm … to put the universe in a bottle, to cork it up, and then tell the masses all about it … Why! And how! … Later on when I was living with him, it was frightening to think of all the things I managed to learn in a twenty-four hour day … just by hints and snatches … For Courtial nothing was obscure, on one side there was matter, lazy and barbaric, and on the other the mind to understand between the lines … Genitron: invention, discovery, inspiration, light … That was the subtitle of the paper. At Courtial’s we worked under the aegis of the great Flammarion,* his portrait with a dedication stood in the middle of the shopwindow, he was invoked like God almighty whenever the slightest argument came up, any pretext would do … He was the highest authority, providence, the shining light … we swore by him alone and maybe a little by Raspail. Courtial had devoted twelve manuals to summaries of astronomical discoveries and only four to the brilliant Raspail, to “nature healing.”

  One day Uncle Édouard got the brilliant idea of going up to the Genitron office to sound out the possibility of a little job for me. He had another reason, he wanted to consult him about his bicycle pump … He’d known des Pereires a long time, since the publication of his seventy-second handbook, the one that people still read more than any of the others, that was most widely distributed all over the world and had done the most for his reputation, his fame: How to equip a bicycle in all latitudes and climates for the sum of seventeen francs ninety-five, including all accessories and nickel-plated parts. At the time of which I am speaking this little manual published by the specialized firm of Berdouillon and Mallarmé, on the Quai des Augustins, was in its three-hundredth printing! … Today it is hard to conceive of the enthusiasm, the general craze that this piddling, insignificant work aroused when it came out … But around 1900 How to Equip a Bicycle by Courtial-Martin des Pereires was a kind of catechism for the neophtye cyclist, his bedside reading, his Bible … Still, Courtial never ceased to be shrewdly self-critical. A little thing like that didn’t turn his head. Naturally his rising fame brought him bigger and bigger mountains of mail, more visitors, more tenacious pests, extra work, and more acrimonious controversies … Very little pleasure … People came to consult him from Greenwich and Valparaiso, from Colombo and Blankenberghe, on the various problems connected with the “oblique” or “flexible” saddle … how to avoid strain on the ball bearings … how to grease the axles … the best hydrous mixture for rust-proofing the handlebars … He was famous all right, but the fame he got out of bicycles stuck in his craw. In the last thirty years he had scattered his booklets like seeds throughout the world, he had written piles of handbooks that were really a good deal more worthwhile, digests and explanations of real value and stature … In the course of his career he had explained just about everything … the fanciest and most complex of theories, the wildest imaginings of physics and chemistry, the budding s
cience of radio-polarity … sidereal photography … He’d written about them all, some more, some less. It gave him a profound feeling of disillusionment, real melancholy, a depressing kind of amazement to see himself honored, adulated, glorified for the stuff he had written about inner tubes and freewheeling … In the first place he personally detested bicycles … He’d never ridden one, he’d never learned how … And on the mechanical side he was even worse … He’d never have been able to take off a wheel, not to mention the chain … He couldn’t do anything with his hands except on the horizontal bar and the trapeze … Actually he was the world’s worst butterfingers, worse than twelve elephants … Just trying to drive a nail in he’d mash at least two of his fingers, he’d make hash of his thumb, it was a massacre the minute he touched a hammer. I won’t even mention pliers, he’d have ripped out the wall, the ceiling, wrecked the whole room … There wouldn’t have been anything left … He didn’t have two cents’ worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep … The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit … The result was wreckage … He could tackle a problem in theory … But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room … or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout “Let her go” … and roll up in a ball to land when he was through … Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn’t even move anything without dropping it or upsetting it … or getting it in his eye … You can’t be an expert at everything … You’ve got to resign yourself … But among his vast panoply of achievements, there was one in particular that he took the greatest pride in … It was his soft spot … He’d tremble with emotion if you even mentioned it … If you came back to it regularly, you were his pal. As a digest, it won’t be any exaggeration to call it an incomparable gem … a shattering triumph … The Complete Works of Auguste Comte Reduced to the Dimensions of a Positivist Prayer in Twenty-two Acrostic Verses!