Armand reminded Lou of her father and also of Arlette. She wished she could think of a graceful way to mention that she’d starred in a nightclub act in which a brave French sailor humiliates a Brit, a Chinaman, an American, and needless to say, a Jew. But for all she knew, Armand disapproved of cabaret, and her instincts warned her against disclosing too much. She often spoke of her devotion to Joan of Arc, eliciting from Armand a flicker of the smile that a teacher might give a slow-witted but eager student who, after getting everything wrong, finally guesses right.
From Paris in My Rearview Mirror
BY LIONEL MAINE
An Essay on Ambition
FEBRUARY 1934
YESTERDAY, ON THE rue du Bac, a boy ran past me with blood trickling down his face. I grabbed him and asked if I could help. He said a filthy fascist bastard had just thrown a Communist hero into the Seine. Minutes later, I stopped another bloodied warrior who told me he’d just seen a Commie son of a bitch toss a veteran off the bridge.
No one is surprised any more when a riot breaks out. Demonstration is a euphemism for some poor slob getting his skull cracked. And no bridge is wide enough for the problems streaming across it. Unemployment, inflation, mass bankruptcy, immigration, a crushing national debt, an increasing tax roll, and a diminishing tax base, political scandal, poverty, a shrinking middle class—and the high jinks, over the border, of our neighbor, Mr. Hitler.
Yesterday’s demonstration was unusually violent. By the time the dust cleared and the blood was hosed off the pavement, the leftist government had resigned and the right wing had taken over.
Am I boring my readers yet?
All that anyone talks about is the riot and the handover of power. Is it any wonder that no one took the slightest notice of a book published in Paris that same day: the first volume of Lionel Maine’s Make Yourself New. Only an egomaniacal American writer would view cataclysmic historical change through the narrow keyhole of his literary career. But couldn’t the revolution have waited another week? Couldn’t the coup have held off long enough to give a few citizens time to read my first chapter?
When I say “a few citizens” I mean “a few.” The week before my book appeared, one newspaper ran a survey claiming that the average Parisian bookshop sells less than one book a day. My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be only five hundred copies. Five hundred readers? I accept! And the lunch was delicious. The Pixho brothers drink the best wines—in the middle of the day!
My hopes were endearingly modest. But the day on which my book was launched was still a red-letter day. I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished. I kept my expectations low, and yet when I had heard the pop of rifles being fired at the demonstrators, I confess that my first thought was: A twenty-one-gun salute to Make Yourself New!
In any case, my work is out there. It will find its readers. And if not? It’s nice to have a riot to blame my failure on. Minor success is better than none. The fact that my book has appeared helps me resign myself to the fact that my friend Gabor’s overproduced, outrageously expensive volume—Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932—was a sensation the minute it hit the stores.
Gabor and the baroness will talk your ear off about why people admire his work: his surrealistic vision, his sly wit, his love for the dark side of Paris, his genius for revealing the city’s nocturnal beauty, the sacramental nature of his relationship with his subjects. And Suzanne is in love with him, so there’s no point asking her for an objective opinion.
Were I asked, which I am not, I might humbly suggest that one reason for his book’s popularity is that Gabor has arranged the perfect union of serious art with the ever-beloved dirty French postcard. What red-blooded male wouldn’t contemplate a quartet of naked whores bellying up to a bar and have his wife admire his taste in the visual image?
I know that it’s undignified to compare myself with my friend; it can only harm our friendship and further diminish my self-esteem. It is a far, far better thing to focus on my hopes for my own work. All I want is to say: I am here. I existed! No one else has led my life or seen the world through my eyes!
Just yesterday someone told me that James Joyce admired my book. First I was elated, and then I thought, Great. How will James Joyce’s admiration help me repossess the hotel room from which I have again been evicted?
Enough! I hate to repeat myself, and as all of my five hundred readers will know, I have already written the last word on the subject of self-pity.
Yvonne
ONE AFTERNOON, FAT Bernard knocked on Yvonne’s office door and said that the prefect of police, Monsieur Chanac, was here to see her.
The former prefect of police. Did Bernard not know that Chanac had been fired after the recent riots, accused of ordering his men to fire on the Communists and protect their right-wing opponents? Hadn’t she heard that he was involved in the financial scandal that nearly destroyed the economy? Had no one told her that he had been implicated in the death of the swindler responsible for the scandal, the billions of francs stolen from small investors, a criminal who died—a suicide, supposedly—while in police custody? For weeks no one in Paris talked about anything else, not even at the Chameleon, where pains were taken to leave politics at the door with the umbrellas and galoshes.
“Monsieur the prefect of police,” repeated Bernard.
Were the tips of Chanac’s mustaches always so aggressively waxed? Perhaps he meant the sharpened ice picks curling under his nose to compensate for his recent loss of power and status. He shook Yvonne’s hand and gave her his most penetrating interrogator’s stare. His eyes were opaque and reptilian. Yvonne thought of her lizards. What a bother they had been, and how much she missed them!
Bernard brought Chanac a large whiskey, and a dancer skipped in with a brandy for Yvonne.
“Monsieur Chanac,” Yvonne said. “To what do I owe your visit?” She assumed it had to do with Arlette, with whom Chanac was living, across town from his wife and children. Now that he’d lost his job, Arlette was probably planning to leave him for someone richer and more influential. Had he come to ask Yvonne’s advice? The country was falling apart, and she and an ex-cop were meeting to discuss the tender feelings of a tone-deaf gold digger.
Pushing some clothes aside so he could sit, he held a camisole to his lips and gazed over it at Yvonne. Was he flirting? She’d lost her intuition, along with her voice and her interest in romance. She no longer cared if she seemed like a fascinating woman, a pool of secrets that a man might want to plunge into. The red dresses had begun to make her skin look yellow. Now she more often wore black. Red was for the very young and the very old.
Chanac dropped the camisole and swatted it off his lap. “It’s come to my attention that you have, displayed in your club, a tasteless so-called work of art, a heavily doctored photograph that purports to show a female friend of mine in the company of a degenerate.”
“I know the photo,” said Yvonne. “But degenerate is not a word we use here at the Chameleon.” Now she had to flirt a little. She had to pretend she was joking.
Gabor’s pictures had been good for business. Tourists—the few who still visited Paris—came to see the place where the photos were supposedly shot. It would have been pointless to explain that they had been taken elsewhere. Yvonne had been silly to protect the privacy of the customers who’d flocked to the studio where Gabor and the baroness had re-created the club. She’d failed to understand how times had changed. Everyone wanted to be famous, no matter how they dressed.
“It is my impression,” said Chanac, “that shooting this picture involved coercion, deception, and ultimately, trick photography. I would like this offense to public decency taken down at once.”
Lou will miss it, Yvonne thought.
Yvonne had worried that Lou would be devas
tated by Arlette’s desertion. But Lou had been too busy with her new job, racing cars for the Rossignols. Still, every few weeks, Lou came to the club and got drunk and stood there, weaving, staring at the double portrait. Yvonne liked to think that the club had helped Lou, that it wasn’t just a place where people went to drink and dress up, but a ship of storm-tossed souls that Yvonne offered safe harbor. Now Lou had found work she was suited for, a career Yvonne had helped launch.
The prefect wished to obliterate Arlette’s entire past. The former prefect. He no longer had the authority to tell Yvonne what to do.
Yvonne said, “To be truthful, Monsieur Chanac, it’s not even a proper print. Just a page I tore from a book.” She’d never admitted this to anyone. Not that anyone, including Chanac, cared about the provenance of her decor.
“Mademoiselle,” Chanac said. “I am first and foremost a police officer. And as a policeman it’s my professional duty to know what you are thinking. Correct me if I am wrong, but you are thinking that I no longer have the power to tell you what you can and cannot hang on your walls. But let me be the first to inform you that you are the one who is wrong.”
Chanac smiled each time he said the word wrong, as if it were a joke, but Yvonne understood that he would rather kill than be wrong. He would rather murder someone in cold blood than have someone think he was wrong when he wasn’t wrong, or even when he was.
“Surely you realize that the crimes committed against me will be exposed, that these perversions of justice will be reversed, and I will be restored to power. I’ve had some bookkeeping problems, I’ll admit. But my replacement—my temporary replacement—is a murderer and a fool. When the demonstrations resume, he will shoot into the crowd. The rioting will escalate. Our pathetic excuse for a government will collapse. The people of Paris will beg me to return and restore order.
“Perhaps I should also warn you that the laws are about to change. Degeneracy won’t be as freely tolerated as it is now. It would be in your interests to protect yourself against the crackdown that, I promise, will occur.”
Was Clovis Chanac bluffing? Yvonne didn’t think so. It was humiliating to take orders from a bullying petty crook. But she had to safeguard her business. She owed it to her clientele.
“Could I trouble you for another taste of that delicious whiskey?” Chanac asked. Yvonne was reluctant to leave him alone in her office. She went to the door and yelled for Bernard, and Bernard, her fat angel, appeared.
Turning, Chanac scooped more room for himself out of the mess on the couch, and settled back against the cushions, with his drink. He was silent for a while. Then he said, “People say I am Corsican, but that was only my father. He died when I was seven. We returned to France when my mother inherited a tiny plot of land. She asked an uncle for enough money to buy one male and three female rabbits. By the time I was fifteen, I was killing seven hundred rabbits a week.”
Yvonne gave flirtation one last try. “Poor man! We both grew up too young.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Chanac said. “But I would like to take the photograph with me. As a memento—a souvenir—of our pleasant conversation.”
Yvonne called Bernard, who returned with the photo. Chanac examined the picture, then gingerly turned it over, as if something even more disgusting might be stuck to the other side.
Yvonne pictured Lou at the wheel of a race car. Drive faster, Yvonne thought.
PART TWO
From A Baroness by Night
BY LILY DE ROSSIGNOL
The Race at Montverre
BEFORE THE WAR, our family firm employed Lou Villars, first the famous auto racer and later the infamous spy. Years earlier, I’d seen her throw a javelin at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. After walking away from a promising athletic career, she resurfaced as a “dancer” at the Chameleon Club. There her duties involved clumping around in a sailor suit and lifting Arlette, her tramp of a girlfriend, in their crude but popular Little Mermaid routine. Later Arlette would become the toast of Nazi-occupied Paris.
At the beginning, nothing, or almost nothing, hinted at the fiend that must have been lurking inside Lou. There was that time she punched a referee after a race in Louvain. But I’d missed the confrontation, having been kept in Paris on business with Gabor Tsenyi. Apparently Lou apologized, and the matter was forgotten.
Lou was never a normal person. A woman athlete who dressed like a man was in a class by herself. Sometimes she reminded me of a twelve-year-old boy balancing on the razor’s edge between baby fat and manhood, hiding his insecurity beneath a veneer of surly aggression.
Anyone could see how unhappy Lou was. Her love for Arlette was like a dog’s love, but so is all love, in a way. Arlette broke Lou’s heart when she ran off with Clovis Chanac. He and Arlette were made for each other. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In any case, I believe that Lou’s unhappiness went deeper than romantic heartbreak, that it ran like a vein of coal through the dangerous mine of her soul.
Once or twice I considered broaching the subject of psychoanalysis, which was becoming fashionable in our circle. I assumed that Lou must have suffered some childhood trauma. I vaguely recall her mentioning an invalid brother. It also occurred to me that rage and sadness were part of what made Lou such a maniac behind the wheel: fierce, focused, apparently fearless. As a patron of the arts, I’d learned that it could be counterproductive to fix whatever was “wrong” with an artist.
By then I’d helped many artists. But Lou was the only athlete whose career I advanced, whose success might not have happened without my help. For better and worse, I take partial credit. By which I mean blame. Partial blame.
Writing in full knowledge of the result, I add this entry to the catalogue of Good Intentions Gone Wrong. Could psychoanalysis have helped Lou? Would history have been changed if I hadn’t asked Lou and Arlette to sit for Gabor? If I hadn’t seen, in Lou, a person who would get noticed, photographed, talked about, and—to be honest—who could sell cars? Could a war have been averted had I not introduced her to my husband and brother-in-law?
The same things would have happened, regardless. Anyone could see that.
Our small but influential family business was always ahead of its time. Didi and Armand hired Lou to race our cars and to be the modern, semiscandalous face of Rossignol Motors. And so we became the first luxury brand to consider, as they all do now, the commercial value of a company’s public image.
We were not like the Renaults, who made tires for German tanks. If you insist on blaming someone for Lou’s crimes, blame the government. Blame Clovis Chanac and his thuggish Municipal Council for turning her against her own country, when all she ever wanted was to be its twentieth-century Joan of Arc.
Could I have seen what was coming? I suppose I could have paid closer attention on that day when Lou came to the studio so Gabor could photograph her and Arlette. He and I were arguing. I can’t remember why. Suddenly, I looked up and saw her in the doorway. I wondered how long she’d been there, watching. But neither a psychiatrist nor a psychic could have made the connection between a bit of rude social eavesdropping and telling the German army where to breach the French defenses!
When Rossignol hired Lou, it was assumed—and Lou agreed—that she would end her professional association with the Chameleon Club. After a while, Didi, Armand, and I decided that we would work toward the 1935 Women’s International, in June, at the Montverre track, near Paris. That race would open the door to the rest, to winning major backers and earning a chance to compete in the important, formerly all-male races. There were other women drivers, but Lou would be the best. It would take months of training. Lou would compete in local rallies and qualifying events throughout France and elsewhere.
I began bringing Gabor to the track, and he started taking pictures. He’d been having a bit of a dry spell since his book appeared, and especially after a visit from his adoring, adorable parents. He was paralyzed by grief at how much they’d aged since he’d seen them last. For a few worrisome w
eeks he stopped working altogether. He’d begun to say that his muse had left Paris and that he might have to leave the city to find her again.
How fortunate that the racetrack was one of the milieus in which Gabor would reinvent himself as an artist. He was able to sell his racing photos to Auto magazine, where circulation was booming. This lessened Gabor’s dependence on me, which in turn was good for our friendship.
My brother-in-law found Lou a cottage near the track, to which, he told me in confidence, she brought a succession of women. That my pious brother-in-law permitted this was proof of his high hopes for Lou. In her sitting room Lou set up an altar to Joan of Arc, which may have consoled Armand for her unholy romances.
Armand hired an assistant, Fraulein Schiller, a Prussian who’d coached the German swim team in the ’28 Olympics. Starched up, sporting a monocle, she was straight out of Madchen in Uniform, a German film about lesbians that was a big hit in Paris.
It was the fraulein’s idea—rejected—that Lou exercise outdoors, naked. In fact she did jumping jacks in a man’s shorts and undershirt. A farm ox would have mutinied from exhaustion and boredom. It was painful to watch Fraulein Schiller counting to a hundred while Lou did knee bends in the cold. Lou boxed, ran, jumped, swam in the icy lake, and worked out on parallel bars. She lifted weights to strengthen her arms, for better control of the wheel. We all understood what had to be done so she could drive on instinct without her body or brain interfering.
Like all of us, Lou loved speed. And she wanted to win. I wouldn’t have wished—I wouldn’t have dared!—to compete against her.
When I was asked if I’d glimpsed warnings of what was to come, I could have mentioned the look of transport on Lou’s face when Fraulein Schiller shouted orders at her, in German. Later I observed that gleam on the faces of the Hitler youth in the film of the Nuremberg Rally, faces that Lou must have seen when she attended the Berlin Olympics.
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