IX. The Monopolist
My investigation for the Universal Informer would have been incomplete if I had not managed to discover the state of mind of one of those enormous monopolists who have organized trusts. Having formed my resolution, I no longer hesitated, and departed for Chicago with the intention of interviewing Burcket—the great Burcket, nicknamed “the hog king.”
I was initially surprised by the warm welcome accorded to me by that excellent man, in his veritable palace on Four-Hundred-and-Thirtieth Avenue. No expansive southerner has ever greeted one of his old comrades with more enthusiasm and joy than Burcket lavished on me. My amazement peaked, however, when the billionaire, full of cordiality and French good humor, told me that he was my compatriot!
As supportive proof, he gave me the following manuscript, to which he had consigned his surprising story:
I’m sure that by making a slight effort of memory, you’ll recall the name of Pierre Labrique, which is mine. Twice it had the honor of widespread publicity. The first time was…I can’t remember the exact date, but it was at least twenty years ago. At that time, pale young adolescents, faces thinned by long hair drooping like weeping willows, gazing into the distance, with a phantasmal gait, were intoning rhymes in the smoky basements of the Latin Quarter. We were translating, in impenetrable stanzas, the emotions of our Self, wandering in the obscure park of the Ideal amid lilies and swans while the water of fountains pearled over the crystal of lakes!
Without flattering myself, I can avow that I had become jolly good at giving the most banal thoughts an unfathomable profundity. My lyricism plunged the youth of my generation into an admiration that increased as it became less intelligible, and Verlaine said, without laughing, to anyone who cared to listen, that I was “the genius of the abstruse.”
My mistake was to believe that that was “arriving”—or, rather, that I had arrived at the first flap of the wing at the summit of Parnassus. A little book of verses, Waves and Frissons, printed in an edition of fifty copies, completed my intoxication. Petty literary magazines sang my praises. I was mentioned in the large dailies. And I still possess the handwritten letters of true masters—Academicians—who consecrated me as a poet.
Ah yes, a poet! I was one to the marrow of my bones, and the scorn that down-to-earth humankind and its prosaic needs inspired in me soon caused a breach with my family. My father, a small businessman, had always counted on me, his only son, being his associate and successor. One morning, I told him that a poet of my ability couldn’t accept the existence that he had intended for me, and after a painful scene, I left the paternal ground floor to install myself in a sixth-floor room close to the stars.
That rupture, I believe, dealt my father a blow from which he never recovered. The worthy man had done everything possible to give me a complete education. All his hopes were invested in me. When I was no longer there, he became discouraged, neglected his business, which went into a decline, and eventually died facing certain bankruptcy. My mother followed him a few months later.
I had wanted to be free, and I was, more than I would have wished, left alone—absolutely alone—in Paris. To tell the truth, like everyone else, I still had a few relatives in a distant province, but I didn’t know them. As for friends and neighbors, my father’s suppliers or clients, I preferred not to know them.
A few scraps of inheritance wretched—not without difficulty—from the voracity of the men of law gave me a little time to sort myself out; which is to say that, when the time came to settle my bills, I didn’t have to pretend to be digging deep into my pockets. The bad times came all too soon! In truth, although my verses were highly praised, no one bought them. The periodicals that enthusiastically opened their columns to me kept their cash-boxes firmly shut. The publication of my second collection, Lights in the Darkness, was a disaster, and obligatory borrowings considerably diminished the number of my admirers.
I knew well enough that a good poet has to be a vagabond, only rich in his dream, and that he must scorn monetary contingencies. Perhaps that was possible in the epoch when feudal lords entertained troubadours. Today, the parasitic poet has had his day, and the starveling poet too. The Bohemian life, although so recent, seems a prehistoric concept. Thanks to the repeated cramps of my empty stomach, I understood that our democratic and bureaucratic society was hermetically sealed to those who seek to give a little of themselves to the ideal.
In my distress, I went to ask for help and advice from one of our poets whom I considered to be the most uncontested of our masters. In the matter of aid he could do nothing, his staff of secretaries being complete for the moment; as for advice, he gave it to me generously. According to him, it was necessary to have an annual income of at least twenty-five thousand francs to permit one to write verses. Poetry did not sell. Only Victor Hugo had sold, and only because he had written novels too. “Life is prosaic; to live, one must write prose.”
Write prose! A girl to whom I had promised the dignity of being my Muse had already told me that I ought to give up verse! Write prose! And realism too—why not? Write prose, when lyrical inspiration had never been as imperious and proud!
Well, since the necessities of existence condemned me to it, and since it was a question of life or death, I set down my lyre on the glorious pedestal of my past and took up the acerbic pen-holder of the man of letters.
If only I had preferred death to prose! I set to work with furious determination; they wanted prose, they would have it! One person advised me to write short stories for periodicals, another to harness myself to a novel, a third to work for the theater, where crazy sums could be made. I resolved to buckle down to all those tasks, and the quantity of paper I blackened in a matter of weeks was incredible.
It was certainly not inferior to what I read in periodicals or saw in theaters, but I soon had to recognize that it is easier to produce masterpieces than to place them. I was sent packing more or less politely, especially when I had the misfortune to mention that I was a poet. To relieve themselves of my persistence, editors published a few short stories; as for novels, that was out of the question—I had no reputation! In vain I assured them that the publication of my work would give me one; no one would listen.
A feuilleton-dealer to whom I was introduced by a grocer to whom I owed a little money made me a firm offer for fifteen thousand lines. He resold them verbatim to a daily that paid him two francs an episode for them, but only gave me a derisory sum. Another illustrious man, an up-and-coming dramatist, bought a four-act comedy from me for five hundred francs, which consolidated his fame and was a rare commercial success
I ought to tell you that I had previously observed that, in order to be put on in any theater, it is not necessary to offer it a good manuscript, but simply a financial arrangement. Now, the state of my finances attesting to an intense crisis, I had no hope in that direction.
Everything that I had produced thus far could still pass, strictly speaking, for literature. Afterwards…great gods, when I think of it—what abomination! Obliged to “cook with tiny canards,”61 if I might express myself thus, to report on society events, market prices and gossip, to interview personalities worthy of reportage in a fawning manner and plagiarize Larousse outrageously, like my great colleagues. Then, haunting the streets as poor wretches haunt the woods, I picked up shreds of rumor, which I hawked from editor to editor. Glad when a colleague in misery had not arrived ahead of me bearing the sensational news redrafted in publicans’ slang.
Yes, I was reduced to those expedients and many others, going so far as to produced imbecilic monologues for dubious characters. You’ll admit that, except for murder or theft, I couldn’t have sunk any lower.
My comrades no longer knew me; my admirers had never known me! And yet I was still the author of Waves and Frissons and Lights in the Darkness. Tears came to my eyes when I thought about that.
The little Muse, unable to cope with the irregularity of meals, disappeared; and that departure turned my thoughts s
o dark that death—the death about which I had so often sung, beautiful death—became my only hope.
Although I gladly accepted the dispersal of my genius in oblivion, like a soap-bubble iridescent with the most delightful colors vanishing into the ether, I became nauseous at the idea of suicide. Suicide is a crime and all crime is ugly! I was also reluctant to be the artisan of my end. I did not want that at all; I even professed for myself a particular esteem. Besides, had I the right to extinguish the divine flame that burned within me?
Then again, was there anything more vulgar, more bizarre and more prosaic than suicide? That means of finishing with life, within the range of any idiot at all, which financiers employ to balance their accounts, could not be mine. No, I would not climb over the parapet of a bridge! No, I would not throw myself under the wheels of a locomotive! Merely thinking about the mocking articles that would announce the fat in the press, I was disgusted.
Others, if they wished, could soil their hands with my blood; I only demanded not to have “committed suicide.”
The thing was not as easy as one is led to believe; it’s a matter of luck. It’s claimed that the streets of Paris are unsafe by night—what an error! On the darkest nights I roamed the most eccentric quarters without encountering an apache bent on planting his “spike” between my shoulders. The drivers of automobiles are also, whatever anyone says, extremely honest men. I walked up and down the Avenue de la Grande-Armée for an entire afternoon without one of them consenting to run me over. I could not, however, ask a policeman to put a revolver-bullet in my head.
Momentarily, I had the idea of having myself admitted to a hospital. Enjoying a robust constitution and not possessing, in spite of my thinness, any infirmity, it was a safe bet that the physicians would discover an incalculable number of diseases and enable me to pass from life to death secundum artem.62 It would have been amusing to mock the pontiffs of science in that fashion, except it would be a slow death and I preferred to finish things at a stroke.
I dreamed about a gigantic pile-driver squashing me flat.
After mature reflection, the exceedingly simple idea occurred to me that it was unnecessary to search for an executioner, that in a society as well organized as ours, where it is forbidden to poets to live, facilities must to be provided for them to die. I searched hard, but our civilization, much inferior to barbarity, only offered me two admissible and truly expeditious means: rifle fire and the guillotine.
Poets are not generally given to heroic gestures. My bellicose sentiments are non-existent, and I couldn’t see myself going to the colonies to make war against inoffensive natives, given that we no longer make war in Europe. There remained the guillotine—but Monsieur Deibler doesn’t cut off just anyone’s head.63 One can’t go to hum as to a barber and ask for a “haircut and shave.” It’s necessary to be sent to him by eminent magistrates with the recommendation of the President of the Republic, and for that, it’s necessary to have committed a notorious crime.
Was it really indispensable to have committed a crime? There are so many judicial errors! I could accuse myself of imaginary crimes, or declare myself guilty of crimes as yet unpunished. But that would mean lying, and lying is also ugly. Could I not, at least, be compromised by some dark affair? As, once one has a finger caught in the gears of justice, it does not make much for the entire body to be drawn through them, I had a good chance of not getting out of it. That was no longer a banal judicial error; the innocent went to the guillotine and took a kind of bitter pleasure in seeing the judges go astray. His end would be reached on the day when they pronounced an iniquitous sentence upon him. He wagered his head against the truth; the gamble was not lacking in poetry, nor in grandeur.
Curiously enough, as soon as the idea of being guillotined had entered my head, not once had I thought about the dishonor that might by reflected on my family and myself. I delighted in savoring in advance the refined vengeance that I would be taking on the stupidity of my contemporaries. For me, the worst that might happen was that a pardon might throw me back on to the streets. But in that case, since documentation is now required, I would have first-hand experience of the justice system, and would be able to make a living.
Between unpunished crimes that had made some noise, I had an embarrassment of choice: murdered prostitutes; men cut into pieces. It was definitely only stupid villains who got caught, and they were in a tiny minority. I wanted a crime of a good sort, a crime hiding a dark family drama, a fine crime—which was not a crime of passion, for then I would surely be acquitted.
At the time when I was still ghost-writing, I had gone several times to the home of the well-known stockbroker Monsieur D*** in Montmorency, who dabbled in literature and passed for a protector of young women. There I had heard long discussions of different hypotheses relating to the Hurelle affair. Do you recall the famous Hurelle affair, also known by the sensational title of the Mystery of the Plaine Saint-Denis? The body of a famous banker, Monsieur Hurelle had been found with a single stab-wound, on an embankment of the Northern railway, at a place where the tracks crossed. Monsieur Hurelle was a country neighbor of Monsieur D***, and the murder had interested him greatly, so I had first-hand information about it.
The affair made an enormous noise. It was seen successively as a family drama, a case of mistaken identity, a political plot, the vengeance of a husband or a ruined speculator, etc. The imagination of the reporters could be given free rein, for no clue emerged to support one version or another. The finest sleuths were unable to turn up anything, and the police and the law floundered in competition with them.
Incontestably, it was a fine crime. But how, with respect to a matter forgotten for so long, to which I had absolutely no connection, could I attract the sword of justice to hang over my head?
Entirely at hazard, I re-raised the affair in a bar in the Rue Montmartre, near the Croissant, where we sharp-shooters of reportage met in order to extract information from one another. For no particular reason, I exclaimed: “It’s just like the Hurelle affair; they’re searching though a heap of explanations, each more complicated than the rest, when he was simply a mug ready to be knocked over, and the compromising documents he had in his wallets were his banknotes! I’ll say no more—make of it what you will.”
I was secretly convinced that, falling upon avid ears at a time when there was a shortage of news, that indication would run its course, and it did.
I had often suspected some of my colleagues of having acquaintances in the Sûreté—one always thinks that about silent comrades—and I had palpable proof of it. At the same time as an item appeared in various newspapers announcing that the Hurelle affair, so often resumed, had taken a new direction and that the magistrate finally believed that he was on the track of the real guilty party, I received a note from Monsieur Meynadier, the famous examining magistrate, inviting me visit his office the following day at two o’clock.
Things were working out even better than I could have hoped. But what was I going to say to the judge? I had not expected the summons so soon, and had nothing prepared.
At two o’clock I arrived at the meeting. Monsieur Meynadier, who was very busy, made me wait in the corridor until half past two. Finally, I went in. The judge enveloped me with an investigative gaze, then, shrugging his shoulders, like a man carrying out a task whose utter futility he has foreseen, after a summary confirmation of my identity, he said to me in a hasty and indifferent tone:
“In a bar in the Rue Montmartre you said something that encouraged the belief that you know something about a murder committed on 31 July 1900 on the train that that left Enghien-les-Bains at thirty-two minutes past midnight for the Gare du Nord, the victim of which was Ferdinand Victor Hurelle, banker, of the Boulevard Haussmann, Paris. Tell me quickly what you know, for I’m very busy at the moment.”
The scornful welcome annoyed me and I replied, very grumpily, that I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the crime he had mentioned. I had chatted about the Hurelle af
fair with my comrades, as I would have chatted about any other famous affair. I did not understand why, on the denunciation of an over-zealous informer, I had been summoned to give an explanation of what I had said. One would never finish if one had to account to the law for everything that one said. Besides which, I had better things to do than spend entire in the corridors of the Palais. I had a living to earn.
“Come now—don’t get upset,” said Monsieur Meynadier, stirred by the violence of my protest. “I agree that what’s happened to you is very irritating, but my duty is to seek enlightenment by all means possible, just as yours is to help me in my investigation. You’ve said that the police were on the wrong track, that theft was the motive for the crime; what is your basis for making such an affirmation?”
“It was merely an idea! I have no other information—none. I said that as I might have written a short story or novel—it’s my profession.”
“I understand that,” said Monsieur Meynadier, who was beginning to take an interest in my deposition. “But why,” he added, subtly, “in citing a crime still unpunished, did you chose the murder of the banker Hurelle—which goes back several years and has slipped out of memory—when you had so many recent examples available?”
“Because, Monsieur, I heard a great deal of talk about the crime in a house when, at the time, I went to Montmorency.”
“Ah! You went to Montmorency in the month of July 1900?”
“July, August…you understand, Monsieur, that after so many years, it’s difficult for me to be precise about the date.”
“Undoubtedly…but tell me, what did you go to Montmorency to do?”
“My God, Monsieur, I can tell you that—there’s no dishonor in it. I went to see Monsieur D***, the stockbroker, of whom you must have heard, in order to recite verses and to tout for some work. At that time, just like today, I was very short of money.”
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