Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Gaspard Winckler’s puzzle matched exactly what Bartlebooth had wanted. Winckler had made it from an image in the style of popular Epinal prints, signed with the initials M. W. and entitled The Last Expedition in Search of Franklin. For the first few hours of his attempt to solve it, Bartlebooth believed that it consisted only of variations on white; in fact, the main body of the picture showed a ship, the Fox, trapped in pack ice: standing by the ice-covered tiller, swaddled in light-grey furs from which their deathly pale faces could barely be distinguished, two men, Captain M’Clintoch, leader of the expedition, and his Inupik interpreter, Carl Petersen, point towards a group of Eskimos emerging from a swirling fog covering the whole horizon, and coming towards them on dog-drawn sledges; in the four corners of the picture, four insets showed, respectively: the death of Sir John Franklin, succumbing to exhaustion in the arms of his two surgeons, Peddie and Stanley, on 11 June 1847; the expedition’s two ships, the Erebus, under Fitz-James, and the Terror, captained by Crozier; and the discovery by Lieutenant Hobson, the Fox’s first mate, on 6 May 1859, on King William Island, of the cairn containing the last message left by the one hundred and five survivors on 25 April 1848 before they abandoned their ships crushed by the pack ice and attempted to get back to Hudson’s Bay by sledge or on foot.

  Gaspard Winckler had just arrived in Paris at that time. He was barely twenty-two. Nothing has ever leaked out about the contract he made with Bartlebooth, but a few months later he and his wife Marguerite moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier. She was a miniaturist: it was she who had painted the gouache Winckler had used for his trial puzzle.

  For nearly two years Winckler had almost nothing to do apart from equipping his workroom (he had the door padded and the walls lined with cork), ordering his instruments, preparing his materials, carrying out trials. Then, in the last days of 1934, Bartlebooth and Smautf set off, and three weeks later Winckler received the first watercolour from Spain. Thenceforth they followed without interruption for twenty years at a rhythm of two per month. None was ever lost, even at the height of the war, when sometimes a second secretary at the Swedish Embassy would bring them round himself.

  On the first day Winckler would place the watercolour on an easel near the window and would look at it without touching it. On the second day, he would glue it to a backing board (poplar plywood) of slightly larger dimensions. He used a special glue, of a rather pretty blue hue, which he made up himself, and he would insert between the Whatman art paper and the wood a blank sheet of fine paper intended to make the later reseparation of the reconstituted watercolour from the plywood easier, and which would serve as a border to the future puzzle. Then he coated the whole surface with a protective glaze which he put on with a wide flat brush shaped like a fishtail. Then for three or four days he would study the watercolour under a magnifying glass, or, putting it back on the easel, he would sit opposite it for hours on end, getting up now and again to go and examine a detail more closely, or padding around it like a panther in its cage.

  The first week would be spent uniquely in such anxious and minute observation. Then everything began to happen very quickly: Winckler would put an extremely thin piece of tracing paper on the watercolour and would draw the puzzle’s cutting lines in one sweep of the hand. The rest was only a technical business, a slow and dainty procedure demanding scrupulous care and craft but requiring no further inventiveness. From the tracing paper, the craftsman would make a kind of mould – prefiguring the open-work grid Morellet would use twenty years later to reconstitute the watercolour – which allowed him to control efficiently the movement of his swan-necked jigsaw. Filing each piece with glasspaper, then with chamois leather, and a few final fiddlesome tasks filled the last days of each fortnight. The puzzle would be stored in one of Madame Hourcade’s black boxes with their grey ribbons; a rectangular label, showing the time and place of the watercolour’s painting

  FORT-DAUPHIN (MADAGASCAR) 12 JUNE 1940

  or

  PORT SAID (EGYPT) 31 DECEMBER 1953

  was glued inside, beneath the lid, and the box, numbered and sealed, would go off to join the other puzzles in a safe-deposit box at the Société Générale; the next day or shortly thereafter another water-colour would arrive in the post.

  Gaspard Winckler did not like to be watched working. Marguerite never went into his workshop, where he could shut himself off for days on end, and when Valène came to see him the craftsman always found a pretext for stopping and hiding his work. He never said, “You are disturbing me”, but rather something along the lines of “Ah, how convenient you came, I was just going to stop”, or he would begin to do the housework, opening the window to air the room, dusting his bench with a linen cloth, or emptying his ashtray, a huge pearl-oyster shell in which apple cores were piled high amongst the long stubs of yellow-paper Gitane cigarettes which he never relit.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Plassaert, 1

  THE PLASSAERTS’ FLAT consists of three rooms under the eaves on the top floor. A fourth room, the one that Morellet occupied until he was interned, is in process of conversion.

  The room we are now in is a bedroom with a woodblock floor; there is a divan that can be turned into a bed and a folding table of the sort used for bridge, the two items so placed that, given the smallness of the room, the divan-bed cannot be folded out unless the table is folded up, and vice versa. On the walls there is a light-blue wallpaper with a regularly spaced pattern of four-pointed stars; on the table, a game of dominoes is set out alongside a porcelain ashtray in the shape of a ferocious-looking bulldog head with a studded collar, and a bouquet of pretty-by-night in a parallelepipedal vase made of that special substance called azure stone or lapis lazuli and which owes its colour to an oxide of cobalt.

  Lying flat out in the divan, dressed in a brown pullover and black short trousers, with espadrilles on his feet, is a twelve-year-old boy, Rémi, the Plassaerts’ son; he is sorting his collection of promotional blotters; for the most part they are medical prospectuses, distributed in specialist journals such as Medical Press, The Medical Gazette, The Medical Tribune, Medical Weekly, Hospital Weekly, The Doctor’s Week, The Doctor’s Journal, The Doctor’s Daily, The Family Practitioner, Aesculapius, Caduceus, etc. – with which Dr Dinteville is regularly inundated and which he sends down without even opening to Madame Nochère, who gives them to students making wastepaper collections, but not before taking the trouble to share out the blotters between the children in the building: Isabelle Gratiolet and Rémi Plassaert are the main beneficiaries of this operation, since Gilbert Berger collects stamps and is not interested in blotters; Mahmoud, Madame Orlowska’s son, and Octave Réol are still a bit too young; as for the other girls in the house, they are already too grown up for this kind of thing.

  * * *

  Using criteria known only unto himself, Rémi Plassaert has sorted his blotters into eight piles topped respectively by:

  – a singing toreador (Diamond Enamel toothpaste)

  – a seventeenth-century Oriental rug from a Transylvanian basilica (Kalium-Sedaph, a soluble propionate of potassium)

  –The Fox and the Slork [sic], a print by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Marquaise Stationery, Stencils, Reprographics)

  – a sheet entirely covered in gold ink (Sargenor, for physical and mental fatigue, insomnia. Sarget Laboratories)

  – a toucan (Ramphastos vitellinus) (Gévéor series of Animals of the World)

  – a few gold coins (Courlandish and Toruń rix-dollars) shown head-side, enlarged (Gémier Laboratories)

  – the huge open maw of a hippopotamus (Bristol Laboratories Diclocil [dicloxaciilin])

  – The Four Musketeers of Tennis (Cochet, Borotra, Lacoste, and Brugnon) (Aspro series of Great Champions of the Past)

  In front of these eight piles the oldest of these blotters lies on its own; it is the one which started the whole collection off; it was produced by Ricqlès – the mint with bite that makes you feel all right – and reproduces a very pretty drawing
by Henry Gerbault illustrating the children’s nursery song Papa les p’tits bateaux: the “papa” is a little boy in a grey cloak with a black collar and equipped with top hat, eye glasses, gloves, walking stick, blue trousers, and white spats; the child is a baby in a big red hat, a large lace neck-ruff, a red-belted jacket, and beige spats; in his left hand he holds a hoop, in his right hand a stick with which he points to a little circular pond on which three toy boats sail; a sparrow sits on the rim of the pond; another one flutters inside the rectangle in which the rhyme is printed.

  The Plassaerts found this blotter behind the radiator when they took possession of the room.

  The previous occupant was Troyan, the secondhand bookseller with a shop in Rue Lepic. In his attic room there had indeed been a radiator, and also a bed, a sort of pallet with a completely faded flower-printed cotton bedspread, a straw-seated chair, and a wash-stand with a chipped pitcher and a bowl and glass that didn’t match, and on which you were more likely to find the remains of a pork chop or an opened bottle of wine than a towel or a sponge or a piece of soap. But most of the space was taken up by heaps of books and miscellaneous things piled up to the ceiling, in which anyone brave enough to rummage could well make interesting discoveries: Olivier Gratiolet found a stiff cardboard panel, perhaps for use by opticians, on which was printed in large letters

  * * *

  YOU ARE REQUESTED TO CLOSE THE EYES

  * * *

  and

  * * *

  YOU ARE REQUESTED TO CLOSE AN EYE

  * * *

  Monsieur Troquet came across a print depicting a prince in armour, riding a winged horse, couching his lance against a monster with a lion’s head and mane, a goat’s body, and a snake’s tail; Monsieur Cinoc unearthed an old postcard portraying a Mormon missionary named William Hitch, a man of tall stature and very dark complexion, with a black moustache, black stockings, black silk hat, black waistcoat, black trousers, white tie, and dog-skin gloves; and Madame Albin discovered a sheet of parchment on which the music and words of a German hymn were printed

  Mensch willtu Leben seliglich

  Und bei Gott bliben ewiglich

  Sollt du halten die zehen Gebot

  Die uns gebent unser Gott

  which Monsieur Jérôme told her was a choral song by Luther published at Wittenberg in 1524 in Johann Walther’s famous Geystliches Gesangbüchlein.

  It was Monsieur Jérôme, in fact, who made the finest discovery: at the bottom of a big carton full of old typewriter ribbons and mouse droppings, he found all folded and lined but otherwise almost intact a large canvas-backed map entitled

  The centre of the map showed France, with a plan of the Paris area and a map of Corsica in two inset panels; beneath it, the legend and four scales measured respectively against kilometres, geographical miles [sic], English miles, and German Meilen. In the four corners of the sheet were maps of the French colonies: top left, Guadeloupe and Martinique; top right, Algeria; bottom left, quite damaged, Senegal and New Caledonia with its dependencies; bottom right, French Cochinchina and La Réunion. Along the top of the sheet, a row of coats of arms of twenty cities and twenty portraits of famous men born in them: Marseilles (Thiers), Dijon (Bossuet), Rouen (Géricault), Ajaccio (Napoleon I), Grenoble (Bayard), Bordeaux (Montesquieu), Pau (Henri IV), Albi (La Pérouse), Chartres (Marceau), Besançon (Victor Hugo), Paris (Béranger), Mâcon (Lamartine), Dunkirk (Jean Bart), Montpellier (Cambacérès), Bourges (Jacques Coeur), Caen (Auber), Agen (Bernard Palissy),Clermont-Ferrand (Vercingétorix), La Ferté-Milon (Racine), and Lyons (Jacquard). On the right- and left-hand edges, twenty-four small insets, twelve of them depicting towns, eight showing scenes from French history, and four showing regional dress: on the left: Paris, Rouen, Nancy, Laon, Bordeaux, and Lille; local costumes from Auvergne, Arles, and Nîmes, and those of Normans and Bretons; and the siege of Paris (1871); Daguerre discovering photography (1840); the Capture of Algiers (1830): Denis Papin discovering the motive power of steam (1681); on the right: Lyons, Marseilles, Caen, Nantes, Montpellier, Rennes; local costumes from Rochefort, La Rochelle, and Mâcon, and those of Lorraine, the Vosges, and Annecy; and the Defence of Châteaudun (1870); Montgolfier inventing hot-air balloons (1783), the Storming of the Bastille (1789) and Parmentier presenting Louis XVI with a bouquet of potato flowers (1780).

  Troyan had enlisted in the International Brigade and spent almost the whole of the war as a prisoner in the camp at Lurs, from which he succeeded in escaping at the end of 1943 to join the maquis. He returned to Paris in 1944, and, after a few months of intense political activity, became a secondhand book dealer. His shop in Rue Lepic was in fact just a barely converted entrance porch to a building. He sold mostly one-franc books and obscure reviews of undressed girls – with titles like Sensations, Paris by Night, Pin-Up – for gulping schoolboys. Three or four times more interesting items passed through his hands: Victor Hugo’s three letters, for example, but also an 1872 edition of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide, or the Memoirs of Falckenskiold, preceded by an account of his campaigns in the Russian Army against the Turks in 1769 and followed by considerations on the military situation of Denmark and a note by Secrétan.

  END OF PART TWO

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Servants’ Quarters, 7

  Monsieur Jérôme

  A ROOM ON the seventh floor which is virtually uninhabited; like many other maid’s rooms it belongs to the building manager, who has kept it for his own use primarily and secondarily for lending to friends from the provinces spending a few days in Paris for this or that International Exhibition or Fair. He has furnished it in an utterly impersonal style; panels of hessian on the walls, twin beds separated by a Louis XV-style bedside table with an orange plastic promotional ashtray on the eight sides of which are written, in alternation, four times each, the two words COCA and COLA, and by way of a bedside light, one of those clip-on lamp fixtures of which the bulb is adorned with a little painted metal cone-shaped cowl serving as a shade; a worn floor-rug, a mirrored wardrobe with miscellaneous coat hangers from various hotels, cubic poufs covered in synthetic fur, and a low table with three puny legs ending in gilt metal ferrules and a kidney-shaped coloured formica top, supporting an issue of Jours de France with a cover embellished by a close-up of the singer Claude François, smiling.

  It was to this room that Monsieur Jérôme returned, towards the end of the 1950s, to live and die.

  Monsieur Jérôme had not always been the bitter and burnt-out old man that he was in the last ten years of his life. In October 1924, when he moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier for the first time – not into this maid’s room but into the flat Gaspard Winckler would occupy after him – he was a young history teacher with the highest qualifications earned at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, sure of himself, full of enthusiasm and ideas. Slim and elegant, fond of American-style white starched collars over pin-striped shirts, he enjoyed the good life, took pleasure in fine food, had a penchant for Havanas and cocktails, went to English bars, mixed in fashionable circles, and held advanced opinions which he propounded with just the right balance of condescension and casualness so as to make his listener feel humiliated for not knowing about them and at the same time flattered at having them explained to him.

  For some years he taught at the Lycée Pasteur at Neuilly; then he won a scholarship from the Thiers Foundation to work on his doctoral thesis. He chose for his subject The Spice Road, and analysed with a not entirely humourless subtlety the economic evolution of exchanges between the West and the Far East, setting it in the context of Western culinary habits of the relevant periods. Since he wanted to show that the introduction into Europe of those small dried pimentos called “bird pepper” corresponded to a real transformation in the way game was prepared for cooking, at his examination he did not hesitate to make the three old professors who constituted the board of examiners taste the marinades he had made up himself.


  He passed, obviously, with the examiners’ commendation, and a little while after, on his appointment as Cultural Attaché in Lahore, left Paris.

  On two or three occasions Valène heard people speak of him. At the time of the Front populaire, his name appeared several times beneath manifestoes and appeals put out by the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ Vigilance Committee. Another time, on a visit to France, he gave a lecture at the Guimet Museum on Caste Systems in the Punjab and Their Sociocultural Consequences. A little later he published a long article on Gandhi in Vendredi.

  He came back to Rue Simon-Crubellier in 1958 or 1959. He was unrecognisable, done in, worn out, done for. He didn’t ask for his old flat back, but only a maid’s room if there was one free. He was no longer a teacher or a Cultural Attaché; he was working in the library of the Institute for the History of Religions. An “aged scholar” whom he had, apparently, met on a train, was paying him one hundred and fifty francs a month to make a card index of the Spanish clergy. In five years he had made out seven thousand four hundred and sixty-two biographies of churchmen in office in the reigns of Philip III (1598–1621), Philip IV (1621–1665) and Charles II (1665–1700), and had sorted them under twenty-seven different headings (by a marvellous coincidence, he would add with a grin, 27 is precisely the number used, in the universal decimal classification system – better known as Dewey Decimal – for the general history of the Christian Church).