The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  After a vicious argument, my mother cut off my allowance and I resolved to be no longer dependent on her. Within a few days my financial situation became intolerable: I wasn’t a boarder any more and I found I was incapable of providing for even the basic necessities, such as food. Cau and I spent hours going over the most lunatic ways of finding me some money, foolishly persuading ourselves that we had to take it from its source: from the rich. With my last sous, I rented a priest’s outfit – the soutane, alb, hat, dog-collar – I bought a missal and stored everything overnight in Cau’s room on the rue des Écoles, although he clearly thought I wouldn’t dare go through with the plan. I spent the whole evening poring over maps of the smartest neighbourhoods in Paris and decided to begin my quest – for I intended to collect money – on the rue de l’Alboni, a very short street in the 16th arrondissement, whose buildings are all on the odd-numbered side and which, most important for my purposes, was close to Passy station and the pont Bir-Hakeim, on the Nation-Étoile métro line that served my mother’s house. The following morning, Cau ceremonially dressed me, in much the same way as, years later, those young Israeli airforce dressers would strap me into my G-suit. This would transform me into a fighter pilot. As Cau and I looked in the wardrobe mirror, the priest’s robes transformed me into a parish priest. No one could doubt I was a young cleric, serious, gentle, fervent, with my missal under my arm and a large exercise book I’d bought at the last minute, in which to inscribe the names of benefactors who donated small change, maybe a large banknote, to the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb of the rue Saint-Jacques, which I would pretend to represent. It was too late now to turn back.

  At the very first building, 1 rue de l’Alboni, I was prevented from going even as far as the lift by the concierge: ‘Where are you going, Father?’ ‘I’m making a collection, Madame, for the deaf and dumb…’ I did not even have time to finish the sentence, before the virago virtually roared, ‘There’s no collecting in this building!’

  I didn’t have to be told twice. I fled the building and the street. I had chosen the wrong time of day, I realized, the time when concierges prowled the stairwells, cleaning and dusting, delivering the post. I strode unctuously down the boulevard Delessert, before suddenly becoming aware that, with every step, my suede shoes were visible beneath my cassock. I returned to the rue de l’Alboni an hour later and decided to start again, but at the far end. This time, no one barred my way, and I took the lift to the sixth floor, where I rang the only doorbell, and a door was opened to this young priest by a marvellous apparition, a beautiful, smiling woman. She listened attentively to my request and said, ‘Wait here a moment, Father,’ and came back with a sizeable donation. I took my exercise book, asked if I could note down her name ‘to include you in our list of benefactors’. She declined. ‘We’ll pray for you,’ I said as I left. I took the stairs to the floor below, quickly calculating that at this rate I would soon make a fortune. Castles in the air and all that… An imposing matron appeared in the doorway of the fifth-floor apartment and said, ‘I’m sorry, Father, we do good works and we donate directly to the archdiocese. People do not make collections around here.’ Keeping my composure, I calmly replied, ‘Madame, the Deaf and Dumb Institute of the rue Saint-Jacques is entirely independent of the archdiocese; we receive no funding from them.’ ‘Just a moment, Father,’ she said, and disappeared into the depths of an immense apartment, leaving me standing in the open doorway. Should I wait or should I run? That was the question. The minutes ticked by slowly, each one longer than the last, and I thought I could hear a breathless telephone conversation somewhere down a corridor. The priest stopped weighing the pros and cons, hiked up his cassock, took the stairs two at a time, rushed past the concierge’s lodge, strode swiftly up the rue de l’Alboni to Passy station and vanished. Four stops later, he was catching his breath in his chambre de bonne wondering whether to try again or give up.

  I decided I couldn’t leave it at that: the experiment had been far from conclusive and I chose to try again. I didn’t go far. I easily gained access to a building on the avenue de Suffren, where the first door was opened by two Spanish maids who, at the sight of me, immediately took out their purses and gave me some change; the second door was opened by a small, plump, charming woman who invited me in and had me sit in a large living room, never doubting for a moment that I was a man of the cloth. She asked me about the Institute I was collecting for and about my vocation as a priest. She seemed to know a lot about the subject. Suddenly, she said, ‘Won’t you please stay to lunch, Father? My brother, who is a canon at St Francis-Xavier, will be here any moment now.’ I responded as quick as lightning, said I would be delighted, then got up, saying, ‘Excuse me a moment, I’ve forgotten something,’ and dashed into the hall, not bothering to close the door as I took the stairs four at a time.

  I recounted my exploits to Cau that afternoon and we were forced to face the fact that my dreams of riches had actually cost me money: my charity collection had not even made enough to pay for the rental of the soutane; it was imperative I make up with Paulette. Cau offered to act as a go-between, to tell my mother I had a wonderful surprise, something she would never guess. He walked in front of me down the rue Alexandre-Cabanel and helped me put on the priest’s garb in the stairwell of the building so that the Spanish concierge did not see. Then he went to the door and rang the bell. My mother, who was on her own that day, let him in. A few moments later, I rang the bell. I was not expecting what came next: she opened the door, stared at me without saying a word, then slapped me twice, resoundingly across the face and, without stammering, screamed, ‘A priest? In my house? Never!’ Rather than calming me, my mother’s slaps spurred me on, I had to up the ante, I had to go all the way – that was how I was. I put on the cassock again the next morning and went to class at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand when the boarders were studying, when the future élite of France were diligently working. My fellow students’ astonishment at this strange irruption was marked by a silence that lasted several minutes, broken by clapping and booing from the group, which immediately split into opposing factions. I had all but managed to incite civil war in the class when I took a bottle of champagne from under my cassock – to celebrate my conversion, I announced.

  After another day of fabulous poverty, and hours of deliberation with Sartre’s newly appointed secretary in his hotel room, we decided that I should go to Deauville, stand in the doorway of one of the casinos and solicit donations from lucky gamblers. I’d never been to Deauville, had never seen a casino, which I considered a place of utter wickedness since in such places people gambled money, ‘the economic sanction of work’, as Deleuze used to call it, one of the many revelatory phrases I mentioned earlier. In fact, money and life are one and the same thing: a financial wound can be fatal, a gambling debt is a debt of honour, and there are those who chose death before dishonour. I was mad, I was starving and I had no experience of the world: I assumed the rich were naturally generous, I hadn’t yet read Albert Cohen or the bitter, hilarious account of the transformation of Les Valeureux [The Valiant], those fictional Cephalonian cousins to Solal, Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations, after he gave them a big cheque drawn on a Swiss bank account. The Valiant – Mangeclous, Saltiel, Mattathias, Salomon and Michaël – who had been the embodiment of Ionian innocence, credulity, imagination, fantasy, goodness and impulsiveness, suddenly became melancholy hawks, constantly on the alert, the moment they pocketed the cheque (they pronounce it Czech), having lost all joy, all gaiety, seeking out the most sordid dives in which to eat. ‘They were,’ writes Cohen, ‘struck down with the disease of the rich; they thought themselves poor.’ In Deauville, the gentleman, beaming from his winnings at the tables, to whom I addressed a modest, well-turned plea for a contribution – it was two in the morning, I was thirsty and famished, having hitchhiked from Paris to Deauville – walked straight past without even looking at me, but he muttered, ‘Je suis navré, cher ami.’ It was the first time I had h
eard the word navré, ‘heartbroken’, spoken by anyone and it sounded very different from ‘Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes’ [‘True, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking’] in Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’. This was my only attempt at begging. I went and lay down under the arches that ran along the boardwalk next to the beach, shivering, curled up in a ball until the dawn, which was, truly, heartbreaking.

  This year of ever more insane challenges and dares I set myself reached its height with the theft of philosophical works from PUF – the Presses Universitaires de France – on the place de la Sorbonne. Stealing books was both a fad and almost a moral obligation to which a number of us felt pledged. Not to steal books was considered cowardice; thieves boasted of their exploits to their fellow thieves – not all the khâgne students stole – recounting the events leading up to the crime in great detail. The rivalry between thieves was ruthless. It’s important to know that the thieves were, first and foremost, passionate readers. It is impossible to explain to young people today how we pounced on the first two volumes of Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté [The Roads to Freedom] – L’ge de raison [The Age of Reason] and Le Sursi [The Reprieve] – the instant they were published in late 1945. Contrary to the clichés of anti-Sartrian doxa, the volumes of Les Chemins de la liberté were not literary exemplifications of his philosphical theses, but genuine novels, with a wealth of ambiguous, contradictory and fantastically alive characters in the grips of the indomitable conatus of liberty; its immortal youth, its fragility, and perennial return of anguish that it constantly stirs up. To us, at the age of twenty, Les Chemins de la liberté was a ‘literary injunction’ that clamoured to be imitated – in the same way that St François de Sales spoke about The Imitation of Christ, the height of devotion. Les Chemins de la liberté required an action, our action. Boris, in L’ge de raison, stole books from the Librairie Garbure ‘on the corner of the rue de Vaugirard and the boulevard Saint-Michel’ – in other words, the place de la Sorbonne, the precise location of PUF, the sole theatre of my exploits. I was taking over from Boris, I was the hero of my own Sartrian novel, as Cau and others, whose names I won’t mention, were heroes in the same mould. Sartre meticulously describes the hesitations, the tactics, the mounting tension, the countdowns Boris imposes on himself before the dazzling act of appropriation; just as Malraux, in the three opening pages of La Condition humaine [Man’s Fate], closely watches and details, in a suffocating tension of imminence, the inner resistance that Ch’en must overcome in order to strike through the mosquito net and stab the man he has a mission to kill.

  I only ever stole philosophy books. In my chambre de bonne on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel I amassed quite a library of abstruse works, many of them in several volumes, such as Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Jean Hyppolite, the two volumes of L’Évolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte [The Evolution and Structure of the ‘Doctrine of Science’ in Fichte] by Martial Guéroult, or, in a different genre, L’Action [Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice] by Maurice Blondel, or again, since I was eclectic, Le Moi, le monde et Dieu [The Ego, the World and God] by Lachièze-Rey. The latter had studied under Jean Laporte, the thesis adviser on my études supérieures philosophy thesis, to whom he had sent his book, and who thanked him with the words, ‘Mon cher ami, I acknowledge without delay receipt of Le Moi, le monde et Dieu. And yet I cannot help but wonder, not without a certain trepidation, what the subject for your next book will be.’ Laporte still laughed about it when he told me the story. I have to confess that I was a talented thief: good at keeping my head, skilled at reconnoitring a place, familiar with every nook and cranny on the ground and first floors of PUF, effortlessly able to identify the numerous security guards the management had specifically hired to neutralize my peers because of the thriving thievery from the shop. But I was also decisive, capable of acting very quickly, slipping the book I wanted into my briefcase or between the pages of a newspaper with the skill of a Neapolitan conjurer. I began to think I was invincible; I was convinced I had earned the title of best thief at Louis-le-Grand.

  It was Hegel – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich – who brought about my ruin. Whereas Ferdinand Alquié had taught us philosophy in K1, Jean Hyppolite was his opposite number in K2. He and Sartre had studied together at the École normale supérieure and he had not only translated Hegel, but was considered an eminent authority on the subject; we had all been waiting with bated breath for the release of his long deferred magnum opus: The Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Finally, his publisher, Aubier, announced the publication date. I rushed to the bookshop and froze, seized by reverential dread at its beauty, its heft and thickness; skim-reading from the first page on, it seemed to be the only book that might make accessible the fundamental thinking of the great German philosopher. I needed this book; to me it represented the ultimate challenge after which, I was certain, I would give up stealing, since nothing could ever match it. It was my Holy Grail. I later realized that the quest was more important than the reading, the possession more important than the content. If reading had been paramount, I could have spent many quiet, studious hours in the library. But Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jean Hyppolite had thrown down the gauntlet. The trouble was that I spent days, weeks probably, picking up that gauntlet; having spent hours browsing the shelves of PUF, solemnly leafing through other books to throw any security guards off the scent, a powerful, uncontrollable force stayed my hand the moment I tried to act. I was scared; I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I endlessly procrastinated and my feints and my faint-heartedness, rather than making me invisible, only called attention to me. Unable to bear it any longer, unable to stand my own cowardice yet incapable of giving up, I went about the theft in the most foolish way possible. One afternoon I strode into the PUF bookshop, headed straight upstairs to the philosophy section, knowing exactly where to find The Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, picked up a copy without encountering any opposition, slipped it into my briefcase, went back downstairs, walked straight past the cash desk and opened the door on to the place de la Sorbonne; only when I stepped out into the fresh air did I dare to breathe, believing for a moment that I was free and triumphant. But I had not taken three steps before a hand was brutally shoved into the right pocket of my jacket, gripping my hip and stopping me in my tracks. I turned to face my aggressor, a short man of about forty, wearing a trilby hat. ‘Young man,’ he whispered to me, ‘have you by any chance forgotten to pay for a book?’ He held me hard, I didn’t have a penny and since I was incapable of pretending, of making up a lie, I had no choice but to tell him the truth. ‘No, I didn’t forget. I don’t have any money, I stole it, but here it is, here’s your book, have it back, I don’t care,’ I said, taking it out of my briefcase and insolently proffering it to him as he tightened his grip. ‘If you think that’s how it’s going to work out, young man, you’re mistaken. Hold out your arms,’ he ordered, suddenly brandishing a pair of handcuffs and cuffing one of my wrists with astonishing dexterity. ‘No, please, not handcuffs, not here, everyone knows me, I won’t try to make a run for it.’ He looked me up and down. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I can see you’re not a lout,’ and removed the handcuffs, grabbing me by the arm and, sticking very close, walking me across the place de la Sorbonne and down the rue de la Sorbonne towards the rue des Écoles. From a distance his hug might have seemed paternal, but no father ever hugged his child as fiercely. He knew where we were headed, I did not. As we walked, he took it upon himself, in his soft voice, to tell me what a loser I was and to lecture me about stealing from bookshops, smugly explaining all the tricks I already knew, all the ruses I had put into practice perfectly on every previous occasion before I had suddenly become paralysed with fear, frozen to the spot, before the baleful refulgence of the Hegelian grail. Then, out of the blue, he announced, ‘After we’ve been to the police station, we’re going to your house, I need to che
ck that you don’t have any other stolen books.’ I stopped dead, like a mule refusing to go any further, as I remembered that Alquié and his blonde wife were to have dinner at our place that evening. I said, ‘You saw how useless I am. You caught me on my first attempt, I haven’t stolen anything else.’ ‘I believe you, but we’ll just check anyway.’ At that, I staked everything I had: ‘Let’s go now then. If we go later my mother will be there and if she finds out I’ve been stealing, it’ll kill her. She went through a lot during the war.’ He held me firmly, forcing me onward, towards the rue Saint-Jacques and the boulevard Saint-Germain. ‘No,’ he insisted, ‘we’ll go afterwards.’ ‘We have to go now,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ll be honest with you, I stole two other books – well, one book. But it’s in two volumes, L’Action by Blondel, so it’s like I only stole one.’

  By this time we had reached the police station on the rue Dante, he flung the door open, shoved me roughly inside and the gentle voice of Dr Jekyll became the savage howl of Mr Hyde as, in front of his police colleagues, he brutally twisted my arm behind my back and tossed the copy of Genesis and Structure on to the desk, roaring, ‘Look at him, another thieving bastard, I caught him in the act.’ A tall cop came over and stood in front of me, ostentatiously rolled a gob of spit in his mouth, then spat in my face and gave me a hard slap that left me dazed.