The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Cau went crazy when I told him the story and he was determined to find out for himself what a luxury brothel was like. I pointed out that it was very expensive (my fathers, who had paid for me, had been given a special price) and that neither he nor I had a sou to our name. I don’t care, he said. We decided not to go to the Sphinx, which was old-fashioned, but to the One-Two-Two or the Chabanais, rival brothels of similar standing. In the end we settled on the One-Two-Two, at 122 rue de Provence, a windowless seven-storey building near the Galeries Lafayette. I’ll pass over the ritual of our entrance: the door was opened just a crack and we were led into a small alcove like a confessional where, hearts hammering, we waited. Unlike the Sphinx, the One-Two-Two had no bar where clients could wait and meet; adopting all the precautions of a psychoanalyst’s consulting rooms, secrecy was paramount. For this reason, the great and the good of this world, or, rather, ‘the world of yesterday’ to borrow the title of Stefan Zweig’s devastating book, preferred the One-Two-Two over the Sphinx, knowing that anonymity was guaranteed. After the confessional box, the lift led to the salon de choix towards which we were ushered by a small woman dressed in a short black skirt. Fabienne Jamet, the proprietor – not of the ‘bawdy house’ but of the ‘bawdy building’ (her husband Marcel had added four floors in the early 1930s) – described the last part of the ritual thus:

  Having escorted the client to the main hall, the woman in black disappeared. What man has not fantasized about thirty nubile young girls offered for his pleasure? Well here, suddenly, his fantasy became reality. Imagine a vast circular room, the floor covered with a carpet designed to look like moss, with tall colonnades supporting a canopy in the style of a Greek temple. Between each pair of pillars was a pedestal illuminated by a spotlight, and upon each pedestal, a woman, who might be slim or voluptuous, tall, bejewelled, in evening dress, frozen like a statue, shoulders bare, sometimes with one breast completely exposed. Other young women were seated on the moss, skirts gracefully spread like the petals of a flower. Fabrics in reds, pinks, blues, yellows. Lights. Pale flesh. Bare arms. Radiant make-up. Long legs swathed in silk glimpsed through a slit skirt. Pert breasts. A spectacular déjeuner sur l’herbe. The man’s palms would begin to sweat, he would grow excited. From behind him, a woman’s voice would whisper, ‘Has Monsieur made his choice?’ A wave of overwhelming desire surged through him. All of them. And then reason prevails. For that he would require the might of Hercules himself. Alas, he is merely a man…

  ‘Have the messieurs made their choice?’ the woman in black whispered to us. We had already twice passed slowly along the line of women-objects who, on our first tour, had gazed at us, smiling, gesturing, enticing, changing their poses, but were now staring at us fixedly with a rebellious glare and an air of freedom. They seemed to harden beneath our silent inspection. Cau’s face, a mask of severity, eyes down, his sidelong glances, playing the flesh trader, examining only legs, stomachs, breasts, arses, never venturing above their necks to their faces; my expression, unlike his, was clearly panicked, because I could see only their eyes, I had forgotten the flesh. We made two more passes and finally Cau had the nerve to say listlessly, ‘No, I’m afraid it won’t do.’ Thirty hand-picked beauties whom crowned heads, ambassadors and iron-masters fought to be with, reserved months in advance, were being insulted in their very being by a couple of twenty-year-old jerks. We left with our tails between our legs to a rising crescendo of boos and insults: ‘Little fuckers, fairies, queers, losers, cheapskates, pussies, voyeurs, filthy little oglers!’ Our problem was not a lack of Herculean strength, but they were right: to pretend to be disgusted, not to make a choice in the salon de choix was an unspeakably boorish act, a crime that makes me blush to this day.

  Had we waited a week or two, this humiliating escapade might have been avoided: Marthe Richard, a former prostitute from Nancy, a man-eater, the widow of several rich men, aviatrix, compulsive liar, spy, member of the Resistance and friend to the Germans, supported by the serried ranks of the Catholic party, the Mouvement républicain populaire, which was very influential at the time, managed to convince the municipality of Paris to close the brothels. The Sphinx, the Chabanais and the One-Two-Two disappeared forever, as did the ordinary knocking shops, whose proprietors immediately rushed to open whole streets of cheap hotels. By this act, Marthe Richard earned herself the nickname ‘Veuve qui clôt’, ‘the widow who closes’ – a pun on Veuve Clicquot, coined by Antoine Blondin, a talented somewhat right-wing writer. Prostitution, however, continued to thrive, tirelessly finding new guises, to become the terrible slavery of globalized prostitution. I’ve just remembered an issue of Les Temps modernes from December 1947 that had an article entitled ‘A Prostitute’s Life’. The prostitute told how she had moved from a brothel for German soldiers billeted in France to a brothel serving American GIs. Germans and Americans alike beat a path to her door, under the watchful eye (so that order could be maintained) of their Military Police: she never left her bed, she explained, never closed her legs, kept them spread for days on end to save time. I remember a conversation with Deleuze, in his mother’s apartment on the rue Daubigny. His perceptiveness shone forth in everything he said. He knew how to take a formula entombed in marble and make sense of the whole world: ‘Where there is trade in things,’ he told me, ‘there is trade in humans.’

  Deleuze’s formulations did not bring a conversation to an end but, on the contrary, opened it up, always revealing and illuminating a whole horizon of concepts. When we were twenty it was an immense joy, a godsend we were entirely aware of. But to watch Deleuze write was, to me, a source of infinite wonder: his handwriting was large and cursive and he seemed to press his pen onto the paper with all his strength; he wrote with no margins, no space between the lines, often at great speed as though obedient to some imperious dictation that would countenance neither break nor pause. To watch his fingers, with their abnormally long, sharp nails that all but hid his pen as they raced along, was an extraordinary spectacle that, to my eyes, testified to his genius.

  Chapter 8

  In those first post-war months, I was also present at long writing sessions of a very different kind: I watched Paul Éluard write, in that beautiful script as blue as his eyes, Aragon, Cocteau, Francis Ponge and others. These were the most famous. The great poets needed money, as did Monny. Since he had spent the war years buying and selling rare books, he knew not only the bibliophiles and the booksellers of Paris I mentioned earlier, but also dealers in autographs, letters and manuscripts. So he set up a business dealing in manuscripts, specifically of poems, either complete, if the poem was short, or in individual pages. All this with the consent – or rather the complicity – of the poets themselves, to whom he handed over the proceeds of the sale, less a commission. And so, ten times in a single morning I watched Paul Éluard write out the same page – ‘I write your name, liberty…’ – each with different crossings-out and deletions. This took considerable time, it required thought, it could not be done in a slipshod way. Obviously, Monny did not sell all ten copies to the same dealer. It was a con, I suppose, but a perfectly moral once, since everyone involved profited: Monny, Éluard, the dealer – and the collector, thrilled to own an original Éluard. Because it truly was an original, the ‘real’ original having long since disappeared, either through carelessness, or because Éluard – and the others – had no idea that it might one day have value as a piece of art. It was Monny who, literally, added value, or created it if it did not yet exist. Each poet had an individual style: Éluard was meticulous, serene; Aragon, hurried, not daring to look in the face those who witnessed what his superego considered to be a suspect act.

  After the session of ‘I write your name, liberty…’, Nusch, Éluard’s wife, had joined him, and my mother served an impromptu lunch in their room filled with overflowing bookshelves, littered with the graffiti of the poets, originals rejected by Monny as ‘not sufficiently authentic’ (the other room was the bedroom). Nusch had beautifully chiselled lip
s, her blood-red lipstick emphasized her voracity, her long black hair highlighted her bone structure, her whole body, the way that she moved, exuded a fiery sensuality. Éluard, who was tall and somewhat ungainly with astonished watery-blue eyes, was clearly in thrall to her. At some point the conversation turned to Jesus, and Nusch, who had been silent, seemed to wake suddenly from a long sleep, realizing what was being discussed and passionately interjected, ‘Ah, yes, Jesus de Saint-Nazaire!’ One day Monny sent me round to Éluard’s house with an envelope containing a thick wad of banknotes. Éluard invited me into the kitchen, which overlooked the street; I heard moans from the adjoining room, the door to which was ajar. In the bevelled mirror, I glimpsed the red pompom of a marine’s beret. Éluard seemed to have quickly thrown on pyjamas before opening the door to me.

  For Paulette, who adored anything to do with culture, these years were among the happiest she had known. Every Saturday she held a real salon littéraire, which I was instructed to attend although it clashed with the hunting escapades Cau and I carefully planned during our ascetic weeks at boarding school. One evening the guest of honour was Jean Cocteau, who began speaking and went on in his mesmerizing fashion, without cease. After he left, my mother berated me for not saying a word, which was understandable given that I was a proud, intimidated philosophy student who had reluctantly sacrificed his night out on the town to be there. I had listened, that was all, and in any case Cocteau had left no openings for anyone else to speak. To pit my wits against him, as she probably hoped, would have been ridiculous. Monny could do so, he was more than equal to the enchanter when he decided to spar with him. But Paulette was not content simply to reproach me; she suddenly exploded, ‘His feet! Did you see his feet? Jean’s tiny feet, did you notice them?’ she said through teeth gritted with rage and regret. I realized that she had been comparing them to mine, which must have seemed lumpen and oafish, whereas Cocteau’s feet – every toe and even the arch – seemed to her to be shaped by the keenest intelligence.

  I was very fond of the author of Les Parti pris des choses [The Voice of Things], another of Monny’s forgers. Francis Ponge, that extraordinary poet, was a man of few words; more often than not he dressed in English tweeds, with a ruddy complexion, forehead, cheeks and neck. He was a big man, with not an ounce of fat on him, and the way he held himself indicated formidable reserves of energy. He used to arrive with his wife, a tall, blonde, anaemic-looking woman who constantly played the martyr, eyes rolled heavenward in mute supplication. The Ponges were comfortable with Monny and Paulette, who were good at winning people’s trust and had a gift for inciting the most intimate confidences, and this is how we came to learn of the illness the Ponges suffered from. We learned it from husband and wife simultaneously, they suffered together, talked about it together and took little trouble to hide it. Francis Ponge suffered from priapism, he was in an almost constant state of arousal; his permanently flushed complexion he owed to his dilated blood vessels, as though he were constantly being drip-fed Viagra or Cialis, drugs that did not exist at the time. Ponge loved his wife and was never unfaithful to her. The doctors could do nothing and were powerless to help.

  Cau was convinced that if a young man from the provinces wanted to succeed in literature, he had to become the secretary of a famous writer. For him, it was an obligatory apprenticeship, in the mould of Balzac, a rite of passage and one he talked to me about for weeks, trying to pluck up the courage to act. One afternoon in study hall, he began writing dozens of letters, addressed to Sartre, to Malraux, to Camus, to Gide, to Mauriac, to Paulhan, to Julien Benda whom he admired because of La Trahison des clercs [The Betrayal of the Scholars], to Montherlant, to Aragon, and others whom I’ve forgotten; letters that were almost identical in form and content, varying only in what he knew about the addressee. He showed them to me; I thought they were excellent and gave them my seal of approval, although not, I confess, without a pang of jealousy because, after all, the idea of earning my living from such an exceptional profession also appealed to me. This was in 1946, and we were now in khâgne, our second year of preparation for the École normale supérieure, and though we enjoyed Alquié’s lessons – on one occasion I got the top mark for my philosophy dissertation, and, coming ahead of Deleuze and other big names such as Le Goff, who would later be a leading light in medieval history, I felt pretty proud of myself; I should add that it happened only once and I felt that Deleuze had been the victim of a terrible injustice – although, as I say, we enjoyed Alquié’s classes, I could not see either Cau or myself, after the long parenthesis of war and adventure, embarking on an academic career, in spite of the many admirable historians of philosophy and philosophers under whom I was later to study, including Martial Guéroult, Jean Hyppolite, Jean Laporte, Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard.

  Cau received only one reply to all the letters he sent; it came from Sartre, who offered to meet him on whatever day suited him between two and three o’clock at the Café de Flore. Cau must surely have written his own account of this fateful encounter, but I remember what he told me at the time: Sartre’s candour, in stark contrast to all the glory heaped on him, which no one today can imagine, his brotherly manner and his utter lack of self-importance made a great impact on Cau. At that meeting, there and then, Sartre dug out at least a hundred crumpled letters from the pockets of his trousers and jacket, which he handed to my friend saying, ‘See what you can do with these.’ Thus I can affirm that the first session of Sartre’s secretarial work took place in the study hall of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Neither Sartre nor Cau had the faintest idea of the nature or the scope of the role of secretary. Nonetheless, Cau consequently devised both the method and its object, gradually compelling Sartre to organize the contents of his pockets, then his finances (with mindless generosity Sartre regularly doled out money that he had only just earned to anyone who asked) and, finally, his schedule, thereby freeing up for Sartre the vast swathes of time he desperately needed to do his work. It quickly became clear that Cau would need a real office in the little flat Sartre shared with his mother, Madame Mancy, on the fourth floor of 42 rue Bonaparte, with its windows overlooking the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the junction that today bears his name and that of Simone de Beauvoir. Sometime in 1946, Cau gave up the preparatory course for the École normale supérieure, took a room in a hotel on the rue des Écoles and, now secretary to a great writer, set about becoming a writer himself.

  After his departure, I too left the boarding school, although I continued my studies, and I moved full-time into the sixth floor chambre de bonne on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel. My friendship with Cau did not change, in fact we probably spent more time together than we had before, but now Deleuze and I were forging a close friendship based, for my part, on an enormous admiration for him, and for his, on my ability to listen, to be astonished, to demonstrate a keen understanding and a properly philosophical enthusiasm. A year and a half my senior, he thought of our relationship as that of master and disciple: we talked for hours in his apartment on the rue Daubigny, he recommended books to me and, for a while, he even set up a little group consisting of Tournier, Butor, Robert Genton and Bamberger to which, with a complete lack of miserliness, he gave brilliant presentations on a thousand different subjects to prepare us for our examination.

  I forgot to mention that, the previous year, when I was in hypokhâgne, having discovered that there was a cell of Communist students at Louis-le-Grand, I introduced myself to the secretary. He was a handsome young man with an open, intelligent face and very black hair. At first he thought I had come for information, or to enrol, since the reputation of the Parti communiste – Le Parti des 75,000 fusillés, as L’Humanité repeated daily – was so great at the time. I set him straight on this point and, utterly deadpan, declared, ‘I am here, comrade, to insist that the death sentence imposed on me by the Party be carried out. It has been more than a year now, and the waiting is unbearable.’ The handsome secretary, who was studying history and politics, imm
ediately realized he was dealing with an angry young man, with someone who in reality had no wish to die but who wanted a serious and scandalous miscarriage of justice to be righted. I explained the situation in detail and he listened attentively; he knew Aglaé and revealed to me her real name, Annie Blanchard – she would later become a professor at the University of Bordeaux. ‘Stupid bastards,’ he said, none too surprised, when I had finished, ‘don’t worry about it, I’ll sort it all out today,’ and he offered to retrieve my Party membership card. ‘We’ll see about that later,’ I said, ‘there’s no hurry.’ The following day he summoned me in order to offer a solemn apology on behalf of the Parti communiste – which he would himself leave shortly afterwards. His name was Jean Poperen, he became famous in the Parti socialiste, becoming, during Mitterrand’s presidency, an influential member of the old guard. He was also a wonderful man whom I would see many times.

  That final year of khâgne, as a day pupil, was not simply one of studies, but also of youthful indiscretions and mad escapades. I suppose that my childhood, the responsibility of being the eldest, had weighed too heavily on me; the war years also had been heavy, the fear, the perilous balance between life and death. The new freedom opening up before me required, like proofs of its existence, gratuitous acts. I was reading Gide and Sartre, and to commit such acts seemed to me an innermost obligation that would truly sanction my passage into manhood. Was I cured of the war? I embarked on these transgressions like an act of bravery: I would have felt ashamed to seem a coward by not doing them.