She could not meet his eyes. She felt as if she’d uncovered something nasty about a friend. She opened her mouth to tell him that she had decided not to accept his job, but he spoke first.
“You went to the theater, I imagine.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“One is not meant to like it. One is meant to respond to it.”
“It was … awful.”
“The Grand-Guignol is not me,” he said, simply.
She did not answer.
“Let me tell you how I came to be involved. Like many of my countrymen, I lost loved ones in the War. Like many of us, my reaction was to push it away, believing that to speak of it would grant it authority. It was not until a friend introduced me to the work of a neurological clinic treating shell-shocked soldiers that I began to understand: the only way to overcome one’s fears is to confront them. The clinic aimed at bringing the dark things to light.
“We French, as you English, have survived a time of unparalleled horror. Our impulse is to deny it, to paint a pretty stage set of normality and tell ourselves, again and again, that this is the real world.
“But the horror behind the painted set invariably leaks through. The effort of maintaining it, of convincing ourselves every day that this is life and it is lovely undermines our balance, eats at any faint trace of happiness.
“The only way is to face it.”
He might have been talking about Sarah’s life, rather than his own.
He told her about finding the theater, how offended he was—and yet how drawn he was, too, both for what was on the stage, and what was in the audience. How those in the seats seemed lighter when they left, as relieved as if they had survived an actual ordeal. How he talked to doctors, psychiatrists, soldiers—and learned how a play could be a catharsis, freeing those who had spent far too long bottling up their natural impulses. How a theater might bring in people for an illicit thrill, but in the end, perform an act of psychological cleansing far greater than any priestly confession.
By bringing the dark things to light.
The Grand-Guignol had opened in 1897. Many assumed its appeal would shrivel after the real-life horrors of the Front, he told Sarah, but it had not. Plays that immersed an audience in stark terror followed by wild laughter opened a door. They invited the audience to believe that their own fears were as ephemeral as what took place onstage.
And if she thought this cerebral view contrary to the visceral reaction of the audience, he said, it was not: as Freud would explain, the analysis of a mental aberration and the experiences of the sufferer were two sides of treatment’s coin.
His voice was soothing, gently pulling her from her state of prolonged shock. She picked up her cup, took a swallow of the cold chicory-flavored liquid, and lifted her gaze.
His eyes crinkled and he sat back. “I see you begin to understand. As I told you the other night, what I require is an assistant with both ability and imagination. There is considerable responsibility. The hours are erratic. You would be dealing with everyone from dukes to dustmen. And although when I request that something be done, I expect my instructions to be followed promptly and to the letter, I also would ask that you contribute your own thoughts concerning the projects you undertake. My assistant is, to some degree, a partner.”
“Just what does this ‘assistant’ job entail?” she asked.
“Ah,” Le Comte said, “now, there is the question. When is a job not a job? When is a theater not a theater?”
He reached into his vest pocket to draw out a silver lump about two inches across: a skull. With a touch, the top of the skull came open, revealing a watch-face.
“The death-watch,” he told her. “A joke, of course, but also a serious and beautifully made timepiece. My tailor despairs, because there is no way to wear it that does not wreak havoc on the waistcoat. But I carry it for two reasons. First, it amuses me. But equally important, this particular watch is purported to have belonged to the Marquis de Sade—a ‘fact’ known by many. Every time I draw it out to check the time, those around me experience that brief quiver of fascination we all have at the forbidden.”
He tucked the timepiece away.
“It represents what I try to contribute to the Grand-Guignol.” He spoke in more detail about the history of the theater, the changes he has made after becoming involved half a dozen years ago.
She found she was leaning forward on her elbows, interested at last. Le Comte pointed out that, as the Opéra sold the voices on its stage and the Folies Bergère sold its dancers’ legs, the Grand-Guignol sold its atmosphere. “Our audiences are not fools, they know it is not real violence and bloodshed taking place before them, but we go to enormous trouble to make them suspect it could be—just as my watch could have been in de Sade’s pocket when he performed his atrocities.
“We accomplish this in two ways: verisimilitude, and the wider stage.
“As you have seen, we pay meticulous attention to detail. The blood looks real, the motions of violence are closely choreographed, the mutilations look extraordinarily realistic.
“But the workings of the stage—the believable effects, the intensity of the actors, the subtle effects of lighting and sound—are only a part of our impact. Reality and fiction blur at the Grand-Guignol, every step along the way: anticipation rises and builds, becoming nearly intolerable as a patron gets off the Métro, walks down the ill-lit alley, enters a former convent sacked in the Terror, passes the house doctor who stands ready to treat the faint of heart.
“But the performance begins even before that patron leaves his front door. Rumors of darkness pervade the theater: the actors are unstable, the directors and owners untrustworthy, bitter feuds are written up in the newspapers. Even the format of the plays—one is immersed in unbearable, claustrophobic madness, and a moment later plunged into light comedy, only to have the stage darken and terror creep in again—makes one doubt one’s very sanity.
“Between the staged effects and the real-world knowledge, people who come to the Grand-Guignol are already half-convinced that one day, those in control of the plays may lose their hold, and permit a murder to become real. That a fake knife or vial of poison may be replaced by a real one. You heard giggles during the performance, did you not?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Those were the high-pitched laughs of fear, not of relief. We consider it the highest applause when a Guignoleur cannot help calling out a warning as a man creeps across the stage with a knife.
“Max Maurey, the theater’s last owner, established the idea that a performance is never limited to what happens onstage. He made publicity stunts central to the world of Guignol. Some of those feuds are, frankly, inventions. When a murder is discovered, we volunteer comments to the Figaro and Petit Journal. When a Surrealist makes a film with dramatically mangled bodies, one of us will write a prominent review.
“And as you might imagine, when a theater presents such disturbing fare as ours, the owners are suspected of their own dark doings—and so much the better. When unsavory acts are suspected of one of us—myself, Jouvin the owner, Zibell the director—it contributes to the effect. When I am at the opera, I want those in the boxes around me to wonder if my ring conceals poison or my stick a dagger.”
Sarah couldn’t help chuckling, at the arch to his eyebrow, the faint quirk to his lips. “How very Dada!”
“Truth told through lies—the Surrealists are discovering what the Grand-Guignol has known for years: when art is indistinguishable from real life, it comes alive. And when it lives, it changes the viewer.”
“But what if you’re, I don’t know, out at night with mud on your trousers? Aren’t you afraid someone would report you for burying a corpse in the Bois de Boulogne?”
“Excellent! Precisely the kind of suggestion I expect from my assistant. Though it would be the Parc Montsouris.”
“You don’t live here in Montmartre?”
“My family home is near the Place Denfert-Rocherea
u. It is but two minutes’ stroll from the public entrance to the Paris Catacombs,” he added with a twinkle.
“How convenient. Still, I’d think the constant act rather, well, all-consuming.”
“Mlle. Grey, I am a mediocre painter, a bad musician, a worse actor. The Grand-Guignol is my art, and my craft. Most of all, it is my service to the mental and emotional well-being of the city. A part of that performance takes place on what one might call the larger stage: Paris itself.”
“So, what do you need an assistant for?”
“To ensure that the machine runs smoothly—on stage or, more often, off.”
“I can imagine that would be a problem. One hitch and the dramatic climax becomes a farce.”
“You are absolutely right,” he said intently. “The Guignol is a precise tool, as exacting and specific as the torture instrument of a Mediaeval Inquisitor.”
And just as the hair on the back of her neck began to rise, his features rearranged themselves into a boyish grin.
Le Comte was a troubling man, and a troubled one. The smooth, easy surface of the aristocrat was his public face, along with the illusionist’s act of delight in wickedness, but the more Sarah knew him, the more she felt the well of despair underlying it all.
A man who sought to find meaning in personal devastation.
A goal Sarah Grey could understand, more than most.
In any event, she’d been hired in May. Since then she had supervised a script, hired two actors, put together and distributed half a dozen flyers, helped actors rehearse, edited three short plays, found a source of taxidermied bats, and bought a thousand cows’ eyes swimming in formaldehyde inside decorative glass urns. She had arranged for the purchase of a car, overseen three elaborate parties, and hired a group of Satan-worshippers to perform a Black Mass. She had drawn up contracts with several artists for panels to make up a danse macabre in the Charmentier mansion. She fed rumors into conversations like a stoker feeding a firebox. She soothed the engineers who built machines for Le Comte’s beloved stage effects—everyone else hated the complicated devices, which always threatened to fail at key moments, but as far as her boss was concerned, the more complex the better, in effects or plots. She no longer flinched at the terrible screams of the actresses; and although she was not inured to the effects and she closed her ears to the more repulsive perversions, she could sit through a show with a degree of grim humor. In the process, she learned a dozen ways to kill a person.
She had taken the job as an impulse; she had been surprised by how satisfying it was. Not that it was easy. Le Comte was demanding, and empathy was a tool he rarely chose to employ. But as the summer went on, she began to see the good that he did—for Paris, and for her. A prolonged assault of fictional horrors could indeed be as cathartic to the soul as a dose of foul-tasting medicine was to the body: she saw it not only in the faces of the audience as they left, but in the undeniable fact that she was sleeping better than she had for years.
She had spent the hot summer in a state not unlike that of the Grand-Guignol audience, veering between sheer delight and skin-crawling dread: Le Comte definitely participated in all aspects of his adopted theater.
It took a while to catch the correct note of his style, that banter-with-an-edge he used for the press, the sense of This is a joke … isn’t it? that permeated his most outré remarks. At least once a week she decided he had gone too far, that he was too … disquieting to be around anymore. Then the next morning he would say something that reduced her to helpless laughter, and she would be captivated anew by his outrageous imagination.
Two weeks ago, as the August vacances were coming to an end, he decided to bring Africa to the Grand-Guignol. A writer was ordered to begin a play on voodoo; the stage crew puzzled over a bit of trick machinery, to unfold at a key moment; the makeup crew investigated various kinds of blackface; some Nigerians were located, and actors dispatched to consider their gestures and stances. In the meantime, groundwork was laid for the external play: Le Comte bid prominently at an auction of African masks; a few days later, he was seen to buy a Matisse à l’Afrique, followed by a Picasso. He did the rounds of the jazz clubs, befriending musicians around Josephine Baker and Bricktop.
As the play took shape, he was struck by another idea: the Grand-Guignol was limited by its size, but the world was full of cinema houses. Why not adapt the stage production for the screen?
As it turned out, one of the artists doing a panel for the Charmentier danse macabre was a photographer who was interested in film. Tonight, Le Comte was entertaining this ugly little American and his young lover-assistant, a woman so stupefyingly magnificent she made Sarah want to wear one of those all-over Arab robes. Le Comte needed Sarah there, and she would not be able to return home before evening: hence her early-morning conundrum over which hand to wear.
The long day wore on. Sheaves of drawings were produced. The gorgeous lover turned out to actually know nearly as much about photography as Man Ray himself, leaving Sarah feeling like a mouse in the corner. The mismatched quartet settled down for dinner. Long before they reached Bricktop’s, three hours later, Sarah wasn’t sure if she felt more scorn or despair at the dark-eyed photographer’s bombast.
Bricktop’s small club was crowded, as usual. When they were shown to their table, Sarah excused herself to use the lavatory, desperate to permit her aching face to lose its polite smile for a few minutes. She touched up her powder; she tsked at a new chip in her hand. She renewed her lipstick, straightened her stocking seams, glanced through her incomprehensible notes.
She delayed as long as she could.
She stepped back into the ferocious noise of the club just as a big man in a cheap evening suit assaulted her employer and his artist, then half-collapsed against a female companion.
Reassuring herself that Le Comte and Ray were not hurt, Sarah whirled to confront the assailant—and stopped, more shocked than any macabre play had left her.
Sandy hair, pugnacious jaw, crooked nose, dots of shrapnel along his cheekbone. A look of astonishment dawning in those cynical blue eyes.
Harris Stuyvesant.
TWENTY-TWO
A LETTER:
Wednesday 11 Sept.
Cornwall
Dearest Sarah, sister mine,
I send you a photograph-pin and a story, both for your amusement.
The photograph comes via an itinerant photographer who just happened to be passing through the village yesterday, my usual day of the week to walk up to the shops for fresh milk and the London papers. He had arrived early that morning in an ancient Morris converted into a mobile studio, a display of Autochrome photos on its sides to tempt the peasants into spending their hard-earned shillings for the glories of a colour portrait to hang on Grandmama’s parlour wall. And, for those with fewer resources or less time, he also had a clever device that snaps a picture and instantly manufactures it onto a round button with a pin on the back—I suppose for young lovers wishing to decorate their lapel with the object of their affections? Or perhaps for a farmer proud of his prize hog.
Autochromes, to judge by the man’s display, require long exposure, resulting in a satisfying solemnity on the faces of his victims. The button camera, on the other hand, is but a snapshot, with the button itself emerging from the device in under a minute.
This, as you might guess, is a more useful means by which to capture the image of a reluctant passer-by, a man willing to take but the most fleeting of looks into a camera lens, a man who is rarely to be found in the more customary hunting grounds of the genus photographus itinerantus.
I will say, the Project are nothing if not creative in their efforts: this man clearly knew his business, and was prepared to spend his morning taking photographs of grubby urchins and farmers’ simpering daughters in order to get a chance at me. I might almost have thought him a genuine member of his profession had I not been forced by the placement of his wheeled studio to edge between it and the grocer’s bins.
C
lose-up, I could not fail to notice the singular lack of wear on his coat shoulder from carrying the long tripod of a portrait camera, and the relative lack of chemical stains on his skin, and the slight deliberation of his fingers when performing actions that should have been automatic, and the lack of a dark tan that one expects on a man who spends his summer following the traveling fun-fairs and seaside crowds. That, and the depths of foreboding in his eyes: God only knows what they told him about me.
I took pity on the poor fellow and did not instantly slip away, but freely granted him the button-snapshot. If I were a good man, I would have played along and posed for one of his Autochromes, that you might admire my green eyes, orange neck-tie, strawcoloured hair (straw-textured, too, if truth be known, after a long summer) and the pretty red bruise on my forehead from where Robbie tried to show me how to play rounders with a rock on Sunday. But I am not a good man (a claim I know you will refute with sisterly indignation), so I made the photographer work for his picture of the Hermit of Land’s End, thus giving you nothing but a button to attach to your pinafore or garden-smock.
This is by way of an answer to your recent question, if the Watchers are leaving me alone: not as much as I might wish, but without the intrusiveness I might fear.
I hope your time in the country has darkened your freckles and brought a bounce to your step, little Sarah. I look forward to meeting this Comte of yours. I was thinking that I might be able to prise myself out of Cornwall again next year. January or February perhaps—yes, the weather will be abysmal, but since no-one travels then, I might be able to face the ferry without being tempted to commit murder. Or suicide.
Keep well, and give your blacksmith my respects.
Your loving—
Bennett
TWENTY-THREE
THE LIGHT HAD that kind of knife’s-point brilliance to it that made a fellow bleed over his sins of the night before. Stuyvesant washed down a palmful of aspirin he’d bummed from the Dôme’s maître d’, and waited for the coffee to do its work.
The Bones of Paris Page 13