The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  I waited for what seemed to me an eternity, sitting on a bench until a detective could be found to interrogate me. Mr Hyde, who was a private detective employed by PUF, seemed calmer now and all the cops who had been there when I first arrived had now disappeared. One of them had picked up Genesis and Structure and tried to read the first page – completely incomprehensible to a layman – then turned to page two, page three, increasingly nervously leafing through the whole book before setting it back down with a sneer. Standing in front of me, he too slapped me across the face with the sacrificial commentary, ‘You see, you bastard, I’d rather go through my whole life without reading rather than steal a book.’ The time finally came for my interrogation, something that was quickly dispatched as daylight was failing now and everyone was in a hurry to have the matter settled. I repeated my confession and the officer said to me, ‘Tomorrow, you’ll bring back the other books you stole and thank PUF. They won’t take the matter any further. You’re very lucky.’ I couldn’t believe it. I signed my statement, Mr Hyde tucked Genesis and Structure under one arm, put the other through mine and we walked back from the police station towards the place de la Sorbonne, and Dr Jekyll resurfaced, all charm, all smiles. I said, ‘Let’s go to my place quickly, my mother might not be back yet.’ ‘No, no, that’s OK, I trust you. Bring back the two volumes of L’Action tomorrow morning.’ But his series of transformations was not yet finished: barely had we stepped into the bookshop – which was crowded, given the hour – than Mr Hyde re-emerged, grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and, thundering for all the staff and customers to hear, ‘I nabbed another one!’ He jumped around waving his arms, a little like the milicien in Brioude, then marched me roughly up the stairs, barking at the astonished philosophers, and pushed me into a tiny office occupied by the manager and a very curvaceous secretary. She stared contemptuously at my face, still flecked with spit and red from being slapped. The manager immediately checked the price of the book and shrugged his shoulders in a weary, fatalistic fashion. I stammered that I had also stolen the Blondel, promising that I would bring it back the following morning. ‘Thank the manager,’ Jekyll-Hyde commanded. This I did.

  Washed in purifying waters, forever cured, I spent a very joyous, friendly, philosophical evening with Alquié, his wife, Monny and my mother. I was careful to humble myself again when I returned the two volumes of L’Action, and put the whole sordid story completely out of my mind, not knowing that it would rear its ugly head some months later. One afternoon, when I got home from the lycée, my mother greeted me with the words, ‘Have you been hiding something from me?’ I said, ‘No,’ then under her hard inquisitorial glare, added, ‘Maman, I hide so many things from you that it’s like I tell you everything.’ ‘What about this?’ she retorted, brandishing a piece of paper that I was flabbergasted to see was a summons ordering me to appear before a magistrate’s court for ‘Theft, to the detriment of the bookshop owned by Presses Universitaires de France’. Despite the assurances I had been given, the bookshop had pressed charges. I told my mother exactly what had happened, begging her to say nothing to Monny. She replied that this was serious, that she could not keep it from him, and that the first thing we had to do was engage a lawyer. I said I didn’t want a lawyer, that I was quite capable of defending myself, that stealing philosophy books wasn’t the same as mugging an old lady for her handbag, or being involved in a stick-up. Monny, whom she told as soon as he got home, agreed with her and accused me of being reckless.

  We lived at number 11, and there was a lawyer living next door at 11 bis. It was late, but Monny immediately took me over to see him. The lawyer showed us in and Monny explained that I was in the throes of an unwholesome passion for philosophy, citing my tutor and his friend Ferdinand Alquié, and Jean Hyppolite, the author of the stolen work, who lived – I knew this because he had invited me to his home – fifty metres away, at 7 rue Alexandre-Cabanel. The lawyer, whose name I have forgotten, suggested that statements from the two philosophers would be very useful at the trial. A guilty verdict would ipso facto lead to a criminal record, meaning I would be ineligible to matriculate at the École normale supérieure. So I asked for a meeting, to which Hyppolite happily agreed and, I have to say, I never imagined that such complicity could exist between victim and thief. His first words were, ‘So, you like my book so much you’re prepared to steal it?’ ‘It’s worth stealing,’ I said, ‘it’s even worth buying, which is what I had to do in order to read it.’ And I proved to the author that I really had read his book. Jean Hyppolite was ecstatic, exuding transcendental joy from every pore, puffed up with pride. Never before had anyone so flattered him: for a khâgne student to steal Genesis and Structure was the ultimate accolade, the equivalent of being a bestseller. Feeling obliged to take me to task, he adopted a half-heartedly stern tone throughout our conversation, but pleasure got the better of him at every turn. This great Hegelian scholar was a charming man with a lisp who, in his youth, in verbal sparring-matches with Sartre, invariably remarked, ‘If you want to split hairs, let’s split hairs,’ which Sartre imitated to perfection. Hyppolite agreed to write a long letter of mitigation, testifying to my gift for philosophy, a letter so beautiful that, on its own, it would have been enough to have me acquitted. That a victim should attest to the intellectual brilliance of the thief who stole from him is rare in the annals of jurisprudence.

  With Alquié, things were very different. He judged me harshly and I did not dare think he might have been moved by base motives, envy or jealousy, since his books, in limpid French, were neither large nor daunting enough to merit being stolen. He kept me in his office for several hours, starting out drily with Kant’s categorical imperative, asking whether, in my misdemeanour, there was some maxim that could become a universal law. He treated me to a private lesson in moral philosophy. Yet Alquié was genuinely fond of me, and he too sent a letter to the court that spoke so highly of me that, to the end of my days and in my darkest hours, it would have provided inexhaustible fuel for my ego, had I kept it.

  The trial was very disappointing. My case was the first to be called, my lawyer approached the bench with some papers – probably the letters, which had already been added to the case file. I heard, ‘Monsieur le président, if I might…’ and the magistrate, already swayed, interrupted, leaned down to the clerk of the court and immediately pronounced his verdict, which to me was an inaudible mumble. The next case was called. The whole affair had taken less than three minutes. My lawyer, who had a sharp ear, informed me that I had been sentenced to pay a fine of 4,800 francs, suspended. The philosophical conspiracy had been successful; I would not have a criminal record, I was eligible to sit my entrance exams. This, as it turned out, proved of no particular use: my life was to play out otherwise.

  Chapter 9

  Two events that were to prove critical in shaping my life occurred in the tumultuous year of 1946: my sister Évelyne’s arrival in Paris and my meeting with Judith Magre. A noble soul, if fortunate enough to encounter Monny and Paulette, could not but immediately be captivated by their charm. In this case, the infatuation between them and Judith was mutual. They met by chance at the Café de Flore and were so smitten with each other that after several hours’ conversation Judith was invited to the rue Alexandre-Cabanel for dinner. I happened to be there, I was introduced and, as usual, showered with praise by Monny and Paulette. I, meanwhile, was immediately taken with this nervous sylph-like girl of twenty, by her firm, slender body, her deep voice rich with every possible inflection, her face with its high cheekbones, her blazing eyes, her sensual red lips, her strong nose. At the time, her name was neither Judith nor Magre: obedient to some imperious inner voice, she had fled without a penny to her name from a family of industrialists in the provinces and enrolled at the Cours Simon, where she trained to become the towering actress we all now know. In the lift on the way down from my mother’s apartment to the ground floor, we fell into each other’s arms, never for a moment breaking our wordless, passionate
embrace, which we continued in the service lift, the only way to get to my chambre de bonne on the sixth floor. We still had not said a word to each other; everything went without saying. For six months we lived out a torrid passion, we spent the whole night making love before my entrance exam for the École normale supérieure and, obviously, I failed. Judith then left to go on tour and I never heard from her. I suffered like an animal. She vanished from my life for fifteen years. In the early 1960s, we bumped into each other on the rue des Saints-Pères, I married her in 1963, she was my first wife. I might come back to that, perhaps.

  Évelyne, who was still living in Brioude with my father, came to Paris for a few days’ holiday that year. Through me she met Deleuze, and the moment they set eyes on one another I had the feeling of being a helpless witness to something inevitable. She was sixteen, with the body of a pin-up, huge cobalt-blue eyes and a beautiful Semitic nose. I hadn’t seen my sister for months and in that time the gawky, angular adolescent had blossomed into an attractive young woman, brimming with intelligence, vivacity and humour. From his first words, she fell in love with Deleuze, fell in love with philosophy, the irony and philosophical humour that, in him, went hand in hand with the great thrusts by which he illuminated the world, sweeping away stupidity, transforming anyone who listened to him into an accomplice, a witness, a disciple, a producer of thought, inspiring others through his extraordinary sagacity, his capacity for astonishment before things that seemed self-evident. At sixteen, Évelyne threw herself into this love affair, heedlessly, recklessly, dazzled by the concepts, and she began to speak, to reason, to mock like Deleuze himself. She was in thrall to him as so many others, men and women, would be throughout the philosopher’s life. In Vincennes and elsewhere I have known people who, without realizing it, imitated the tone and rhythm and the modulations of Deleuze’s voice. My sister was more smitten than most because she was very young: she did not lie, she knew nothing of compromise, she was prey to the demon of the absolute. During the war, in order to protect her, Hélène la Normande had persuaded my father to allow Évelyne to convert to Catholicism and be baptized. She had made her first communion in the basilica at Brioude, a jewel of Romanesque architecture, and I still remember her solemnity, her earnestness as she received the host beneath her white veil. She devoted herself entirely to Christianity, she was St Blandina in the lions’ den, with all her soul she loved the Abbé Goergé, her spiritual adviser, and was determined to become a missionary in distant lands. Évelyne extended her stay in Paris – or came back soon afterwards, I don’t remember. In any case, she and Deleuze were soon inseparable; Paulette welcomed him with an excessive fondness that cut her short at the first syllable of his first name: ‘Gi-gi-gi’. Like her daughter, she was thrilled by Gilles’ manifest genius. Then one day, as he and I crossed the pont de Bir-Hakeim beneath a gloomy sky, he asked if I would be prepared to do him a great and difficult favour. Worried, not daring to believe that he would ask the impossible of me, I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ only to refuse when he told me what it was: he wanted to break up with my sister and he wanted me to tell her. It was a terrible shock. I feared and anticipated the worst for Évelyne; but I was also hurt and dumbfounded by the cowardice of my friend, who was both using me and making a fool of me. At that moment, on the bridge, leaning on the railing next to him, looking down on the Seine, with the roar of the traffic from the passing métros overhead, something in my bond with Deleuze was irreparably broken. What I most feared came to pass. My little sister headed back to Normandy not knowing anything and I told my mother, Monny and my father, preparing them for any eventuality, asking them to look out for her and not to leave her alone. She was in Brioude when she received Deleuze’s letter, awkward as such letters invariably are, but this one more so than others, as intelligence attempted to struggle against violence with unequal weapons. I read the letter many years later, feeling very ill at ease, after Évelyne showed it to Sartre. She wanted to die; she could not be left alone for an instant.

  It was Serge Rezvani who brought her back to herself. We had met through my brother: these future writers had chosen painting, they wanted to be artists, and painters they became. Together with Dmitrienko the Russian and the Welshman Raymond Mason, they founded a group called Jouir, or, as it was known, the Boulogne School, since the four of them lived a Spartan, industrious, creative life in a tumbledown folly on the banks of the Seine. These talented young painters and sculptors were quickly recognized when the Galerie Maeght exhibited works by all four of them, in November 1947, for a show entitled Les Mains éblouies [‘The Dazzled Hands’]. The apartment on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel, Paulette and Monny, inevitably became, for Serge, a haven and his only home. With the family’s consent – more than that, its blessing – he took Évelyne to the south of France to the still-unspoiled coast of Les Maures in the Var, where they spent several months sleeping under the stars and fishing for their food. By the time they returned to Paris, Serge and Évelyne had decided to get married. The wedding took place in Brioude. Serge assures me I was there but I have no memory of it.

  With his painter’s eye, Serge was an astute and admiring judge of the beauty and expressivity of the face, and perfect body, of his wife. He persuaded Évelyne to become an actress. In the difficult act of remembering I have set myself today, forty years after her suicide, I find an old photograph of Évelyne, undoubtedly taken by Serge, completely naked, sitting in the noonday sun on a rock by the sea. She is seen in profile, one arm clasping her left knee, her face is hidden, as she stares into the distance, veiled by a curtain of golden hair. A naked woman in profile: the body must be stamped with something of the divine to hold such a pose and for every part of it to remain exemplary – the posture of the feet, the tenderly muscular calves, the long thighs, the buttocks hard as the rock on which she sits, the flat stomach, the narrow waist, the high, firm, plump breasts, a woman’s breasts not a girl’s, the perfect curve of the back, the shoulders, the slender arms. How old was she? Seventeen, eighteen perhaps? As I look at her, two lines from Gombrowicz’s Operetta, a play in which Judith appeared at the Théâtre National de Chaillot, ring out:

  O nudity forever young, hail!

  Hail, O youth forever nude!

  Évelyne was entranced by the idea of being an actress, she seemed happy and she enrolled in turn at the Cours Simon. I don’t know whether she knew Judith at the time or whether they met later. René Simon, the founder of the drama school, had a powerful influence on his students, both male and female. He decided that my sister, with her flawless body, should have a career in films, but that her Jewish intellectual nose was an insurmountable obstacle. It was overcome. Against her husband’s advice, Évelyne could not rest until she had plastic surgery, a victim of the ontological problem my mother’s nose imposed on all her progeny. Having a nose job was a new and exciting fashion in those days, a liberating adventure according to its pioneers, who undoubtedly associated it, in a roundabout though understandable way, with the liberation of France and the liberation of women, for which Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe [The Second Sex] was the first act. The leading plastic surgeon of the day was so popular that he gave his name to the procedure: people referred to ‘the Claoué nose’, which was not, however, always a success. Juliette Greco had a Claoué nose. Évelyne Rey – this was the stage name my sister had decided on – had one too, and very beautiful it was. I only saw it later since, for much of the time during her years with Serge, I was in the Auvergne, in Tübingen and later in Berlin.

  During one of my trips to Paris, I arranged to met her and Serge at the Royal, a lively café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés – a real bistro with a huge, curved bar, tall bar stools upholstered in red and an enormous back room – just opposite Les Deux Magots, on the corner of the rue de Rennes and the boulevard Saint-Germain. No one at the time could have imagined that the Royal would one day vanish to be replaced by the Drugstore Saint-Germain, which in turn would come to seem as though it had always existed, and
would always exist. But the Drugstore too is dead; it died both a natural death and by a terrorist’s bomb. It was replaced by a boutique belonging to the king of Italian fashion, with a chic, expensive restaurant on the first floor. The persistence and the disfigurement of places are the rhythm and measure of our lives. I have seen as much in other, desperate circumstances during the filming of Shoah, when I encountered the landscape of extermination in Poland. This battle, this contrast between continuity and destruction, was for me an overwhelming shock, a veritable explosion, the source of everything. Of course Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Quartier Latin are not killing fields: that the Royal, the bookshop Le Divan on the corner of the rue Bonaparte at the far end of the square, even the PUF bookshop on the boulevard Saint-Michel, the theatre of my petty thefts, have, with so many others, succumbed to the fluidity of fashion is simply sad. More than sad, perhaps: we may be alive, but we no longer recognize the places of our lives; we are no longer contemporaries in our own present. Few now share with me the knowledge that the Royal existed and I still think, with absolute admiration and scepticism, of the plaque on the wall at 1 quai aux Fleurs, where Vladimir Jankélévitch lived, as I did for a while. On it one can read this pensée by the philosopher, a passage from one of his books, which so moved me that I immediately learned it by heart and often repeat it to myself at night or when I happen to pass the quai aux Fleurs: ‘He who has been cannot henceforth not have been. Henceforth, the mysterious and obscure fact of having lived is his viaticum for eternity.’

  So, barely had I met Rezvani and my sister at the Royal than Deleuze appeared in my field of vision, or, rather, the field of vision of all three of us. In a second we saw each other, four glances exchanged in an instant: me seeing Évelyne as she saw Deleuze, Deleuze seeing Évelyne, Serge seeing the two of them seeing each other, a fateful, shimmering mise en abyme. I knew, we all knew in that instant, that Évelyne would inevitably go back to Deleuze. In Howard Hawks’s splendid film noir, Scarface, two arms reach out, two lighters simultaneously blaze, each offering a flame to the cigarette that the femme fatale has just brought to her lips. There are three of them: the woman, the old mobster whose mistress she is, and the young wolf who covets both his boss’s woman and his empire. It is she who must decide: she hesitates between the two flames. The suspense is agonizing, not a word is exchanged, not a second too long, she chooses, as one kills, the young man. We know that her choice is a death sentence and that the same hand that holds the chosen lighter will gun down the man whose flame was spurned. Pure cinema.