He had used an extremely coarse verb to refer to the sexual activity in which, according to him, Lenin was deficient. A verb I should never have dared to use and which, applied to Vladimir Ilyich, became a monstrous obscenity. Taken aback, I heard the echo of this iconoclastic verb resounding in the long empty corridor…
"Félix Faure… the president of the Republic… in the arms of his mistress…" More than ever Atlantis-France seemed to me a terra incognita where our Russian notions no longer had any currency.
The death of Félix Faure made me aware of my age: I was thirteen; I guessed what "dying in the arms of a woman" meant, and from now on I could be spoken to on such subjects. Furthermore, the courage and total absence of hypocrisy in Charlotte's story demonstrated what I already knew: she was not a grandmother like the others. No Russian babushka would have ventured on such a discussion with her grandson. In this freedom of expression I sensed an unaccustomed perception of the body, of love, of relationships between man and woman – a mysterious "French outlook."
Next morning I went out onto the steppe to brood alone on the fabulous transmutation effected in my life by the death of the president. To my great surprise, rerun in Russian, the scene no longer made a good story. In fact it was impossible to tell! Censored by an inexplicable modesty of words, revised, all of a sudden, by a strange offended morality, when finally told, it swung between pathological obscenity and euphemisms that transformed the pair of lovers into characters in a badly translated sentimental novel.
"No," I said to myself, stretched out in the rippling grass under the warm wind, "it is only in French that he could die in the arms of Marguerite Steinheil…"
Thanks to the lovers of the Elysée Palace, I now grasped the mystery of that young serving maid who, surprised in the bath by her master, gave herself to him with all the terror and fever of a dream finally realized. Yes, before that there had been this bizarre trio I had come across in a novel by Maupassant that I had read in the spring. Throughout the book a Parisian dandy desired the inaccessible love of a female creature, an amalgam of decadent refinements. He sought to gain entry to the heart of this cerebral, indolent courtesan, who was like a fragile orchid, and who always left him to hope in vain. And alongside them – the serving maid, the young woman in her bath with her robust and healthy body. At first reading all I could see was this triangle, which seemed to me artificial and lifeless: for how could the two women even consider one another as rivals…?
From now on I beheld the Parisian trio with new eyes. They became concrete, flesh, palpable – they were alive! I now recognized the blissful dread that caused the young servant maid to shiver when snatched from the bath and carried, all wet, to a bed. I sensed the tickling of the drops meandering over her full breasts, the weight of her haunches in the arms of the man; I even saw the rhythmic stirring of the water in the bath from which her body had just been lifted. Gradually the water grew calm… And the other, the inaccessible mondaine, who had previously reminded me of a dried flower between the pages of a book, now revealed an opaque, subterranean sensuality. Her body contained a perfumed warmth, a disturbing fragrance, made up of the throbbing of her blood, the polish of her skin, the alluring languor of her speech.
The fatal love that had caused the heart of the president to burst reshaped the France that I carried inside me. This came mainly from storybooks. But on that memorable evening the literary characters who rubbed shoulders on its highways seemed to be awakening after a long sleep. Before that – however much they had waved their swords, climbed rope ladders, swallowed arsenic, declared their love, traveled in carriages while holding the severed head of their beloved on their knees – they never escaped from their world of fiction. Exotic, brilliant, comic perhaps, they did not move me. Like that curé in Flaubert, the country priest to whom Emma Bovary confessed her torments, I had not been able to understand the woman either: "But what more can she desire, she who has a beautiful house, an industrious husband, and the respect of her neighbors…?"
The Elysée lovers helped me to understand Madame Bovary. In a flash of intuition I seized on this detaiclass="underline" the plump fingers of the hairdresser deftly tugging and smoothing Emma's hair. In the cramped salon the air is heavy, the light from the candles that banishes the evening darkness is hazy. This woman, seated before the mirror, has just left her young lover and is now preparing to return home. Yes, I guessed what an adulterous woman might feel in the evening, at the hairdresser's, between the last kiss of a rendezvous at the hotel and the first, very ordinary words that must be addressed to the husband… Without being able to explain it myself, I felt as if I heard a string vibrating in the soul of this woman. My own heart sang out in unison. A smiling voice that came from Charlotte's stories prompted me: "Emma Bovary, c'est moi!"
Time passed in our Atlantis according to its own laws. To be precise, it did not pass but rippled around each event described by Charlotte. Each fact, even perfectly accidental ones, became encrusted forever in the daily life of that country. A comet was always crossing its night sky, even though our grandmother, consulting a press cutting, gave us the precise date of this sudden apparition in the heavens: October 17, 1882. We could not picture the Eiffel Tower without seeing the mad Austrian who had leaped from its jagged spire, whose parachute had failed him and who crashed in the midst of a gawking crowd. For us the Père Lachaise was far from being a tranquil cemetery, animated only by the respectful whispers of a few tourists. Not a bit of it: armed men ran among the tombs in all directions, exchanging gunshots and hiding behind the funerary monuments. Recounted to us once, this battle between the Communards and the Versailles government troops was forever associated in our minds with the name Père Lachaise. Furthermore we also heard the echo of this shoot-out in the catacombs of Paris. For according to Charlotte, they did battle in those labyrinths too, with bullets shattering the skulls of the dead of several centuries. And if the night sky above Atlantis was lit by the comet and by German zeppelins, the clear blue of day was filled with the regular chirring of a monoplane: a certain Louis Blériot was crossing the channel.
The choice of events was more or less subjective. Their sequence was chiefly governed by our feverish desire to know, by our random questions. But whatever significance, they never escaped the general rule: the chandelier that fell from the ceiling during the performance of Faust at the Opéra immediately unleashed its crystalline explosion in all the auditoriums of Paris. For us real theater implied a light tinkling from an enormous glass cluster, ripe enough to become detached from the ceiling at the sound of a musical flourish or an alexandrine… And as for real Parisian circus, we knew that the lion tamer was always torn apart by wild beasts, like the "Negro called Delmonico" who was attacked by his seven lionesses.
Charlotte sometimes drew this information from the Siberian suitcase, sometimes from her childhood memories. A number of her stories went back to a still earlier age, related by her uncle or by Albertine, who themselves had inherited them from their parents.
But for us the exact chronology mattered little! Time in Atlantis knew only the marvelous simultaneity of the present. The vibrant baritone of Faust filled the auditorium: "Let me gaze, let me gaze on the form before me…"; the chandelier fell; the lionesses hurled themselves at the unfortunate Delmonico; the comet cut through the night sky; the parachutist took off from the Eiffel Tower; two thieves, taking advantage of the summer season carelessness, walked out of the Louvre at night, carrying off the Mona Lisa; Prince Borghese stuck out his chest, filled with pride at having won the first Peking-Paris via Moscow car race… And somewhere in the half-light of a discreet salon at the Elysée a man with a fine white mustache enfolded his mistress in his arms and suffocated in this last embrace.