Day and night, from the streets and the alleyways, the familiar inscriptions of nighttime hotels blinked incessantly, enticing passersby. And on an evening filled with all the clamor of a Javanese orchestra, after a long hiatus, the fiery windmill of the Moulin Rouge spun its eternal circle where it had been reconstructed in Lyon, and Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief, as if to say: “So it’s really spinning.”
Champagne flowed in a pearl-white, all-cleansing stream through the gutters of the new Montmartre, and emaciated, ragged workers flowed in a black stream from the evacuating villages to the factories.
In the autumn of the second year, the government – the forty-sixth in a row – was stabilizing the franc. France’s lousy economic condition had made people stop buying automobiles. Factories were being threatened with closure. The workforce was being cut by half everywhere you looked. To avoid any commotion, people were being dismissed a handful at a time and from different divisions, staggered throughout the day. Hiring more workers was out of the question.
In the Chamber of Deputies, a white-maned socialist by the name of Paul Boncour was forwarding a motion to double the police force.
One beautiful August evening, the streets teeming with that random and unsynchronized throng of extras cast by Europe’s rickety film projector onto the screen of Lyon’s boulevards every evening, on the corner of Rue Vivienne and Boulevard Montmartre, Jeanette informed Pierre that she would most definitely be requiring a pair of evening slippers.
IV
The dun London fog slowly crept across Europe, spreading its vapors of damp toxic gasses.
During those years, scholars noted a marked change in the European climate. In the winter a slushy snow covered Nice, and the astonished palm trees, their leaves undulating under the frost like odd flat-chested skirt suits, swayed a phantom tango.
In London there was fog as always. The lampposts burned in the foggy daylight, and bristling figures flitted through the milky gelatinous haze – blind submarines with strangely short periscopes.
Londoners must have sponges for lungs, to soak up the fog and breathe it out, like factory smoke through pointy-faced chimneys.
In the noon fog, the pointy faces of the chimneys turned skyward and howled like dogs sniffing a corpse, then millions of human sponges poured out of the factories, the offices, and the government buildings to suck in the fog and carry it back to the six-story anthills of their offices.
Bloated ships roared into the coal-black ports daily, always at the same time, and on these ships soldiers, civil servants, and ordinary citizens of the British Empire floated off to their dominions, so that there, under the sweltering skies of India, they could exhale a bit of the fog that spreads across their land in a leaden vapor – for the sun-scorched Hindus, the London fog is more toxic than poison gas.
That summer a fine, prickly rain fell incessantly in Europe, and in August a fog swam in from the shores of Brittany. The fog pulled a heavy veil over the Channel, hugged the green coastline of Normandy, and pushed further inland, wrapping objects and cities in its soft, gray suede. The fuzzy gray puffs crawled through the valleys like smoke. Scientists predicted a damp autumn and ended their prophecies there, unlike the peasants, who recalled that smoke clings to the ground before a storm and began muttering of future calamities.
In the Channel, steamships blundering in the fog hailed one another with a constant scream of sirens.
In Dauville, the fog blew away the vacationers who had come to the beach to soak up the sun, and the greedy tongues of the sea lapped the white sand as if it were cold mashed potatoes left on a plate. Tourists wandered around the hotel terraces with tussled hair, flannel scarves wrapped tight around their necks.
In the restaurants, cafés, and hotel dance halls the jazz music started its barking in the morning, and the unfortunate half-naked vacationers, dripping with the yellow, cadaverous light of the chandeliers, in dresses not unlike swimsuits, convulsed in syncopated bliss, latching like crabs onto the chests of the male divers, who shook themselves as they danced.
In the morning, the express train leapt out of the gray cloud in an electric zigzag, descending upon the station on the lightning-rods of the rails. Two men in black top hats were waiting on the platform, accompanied by some twenty photographers and a restless mob of journalists. A clean-shaven, grayish gentleman in a French kepi stepped out of the first-class car, accompanied by a few younger gentlemen. The men in top hats ceremonially rushed to greet him. Camera shutters clicked. The gentlemen tipped their hats politely and began speaking in English. Two cars were waiting at the entrance. They swayed gently under the weight of the gentlemen settling in their seats, and then drifted off into the fog. Reporters hopped into the first available taxis and gave pursuit, lured by the sweet hope of an interview. The gentleman who had arrived was the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
An hour later the prime minister’s secretary went down to a hotel lobby swarming with journalists. He was dressed in a charmingly discreet pullover and a loose-fitting English suit, and with a politely bored expression on his face he informed the persistent reporters that the prime minister had arrived in Dauville with no particular political plans in mind, simply to relax for a few days from the rigors of affairs of state, and that he was quite distressed to see that the weather was not shaping up.
The reporters took all this down to the letter. They knew perfectly well that the President of the Council of Ministers of France had arrived from Lyon just the day before. They’d met him at the station, followed him to the very same hotel, and heard him make nearly identical remarks. They also knew that two days earlier a Polish emissary had come by train from the Belgian border to Dauville, though only one man in a top hat had come to the station to meet him, and no photographers or journalists were in sight.
So having urgently transcribed the secretary’s statement, they all scrambled to send their editors news about the important political summit between the representatives of the three great powers. Then they ran back with all possible haste to lie in wait for the tight-lipped diplomats.
Both statesmen remained in their suites all morning. They ordered room service for breakfast, and each devoured theirs with gusto. At four o’clock in the afternoon, a reporter dressed as a butler noticed the British prime minister himself going to the bathroom, where he remained for a considerable time before returning to his quarters.
It was only around six in the evening that, to the delight of all the reporters patiently lurking behind their doors, the French president and his secretary left their suites in the left wing of the hotel and, without straying from their paths, headed straight toward the right wing, to the suites of the British prime minister. No matter how hard the reporters strained their eyes, they could not discern any kind of definite expression on his face. One of the reporters did notice, however, that the president was softly whistling a popular melody while passing the door where he hid.
The visit dragged on. Three times a reporter disguised as a bellboy brought cocktails to suite No. 6 and silently busied himself with the glassware for a long time. The whole time he was present the statesmen discussed the weather, complained about the poor harvests in their countries, and exchanged opinions on the most recent races at Wembley. In the end, the reporter accomplished nothing, though he did break a glass from his eavesdropping and his lack of professional training.
At around eight that evening a call was made, and ten minutes later the Polish emissary was knocking at the door to suite No. 6. Aristocratic in bearing and stylishly disheveled, a careful part ran right down to his collar between his sparse clumps of hair.