Therefore, one day, the big Saint-Charles train brought this letter, and it fell into his bag at the very end of the Mediterranean Line. Roulin read the young girl’s words; and maybe it was early in April of ‘93 when the sky expands and unfolds from Estaque to Cassis and one’s spirit is as fresh as the leaves of a plane tree; when the day is full of promise; it was Chez Jean Marie or A la Demi-Lune, bistros where you might have a morning glass of white. His wine in front of him, he read these words and learned of a downfall that shocked him no more than had Badinguet’s, but that pained and perhaps revolted him as much as the recent topple of rebellious, red-scarved youths, falling in groups at the wall of Père-Lachaise under machine-gun fire, in this Paris he didn’t know. That Vincent had fallen too? He wasn’t shocked at all. He had been undergoing such shocks for so long that they had sunk into his skin and wouldn’t leave, so he kept them hidden beneath the little veil of alcohol and his postal routine, just as he kept his balding head hidden beneath his hat; these shocks, however, remained unchanged, remained juvenile, without his even knowing it; and without even knowing that it was astonishment he was feeling, which is to say emptiness — the fear of this emptiness and the taste for that fear — he had placed his convictions behind barriers like absinthe and his cap. And it’s time we talk more about these shocks.
He was born in Lambesc, not far from Aries, near the middle of the century. I have never been there; they tell me that it’s one of those desolate places right off a highway where you happen to stop and eat a slice of leathery pizza, and you see nothing but a dusty sky, a few people on a street, a vague dome that shines in the background, decapitated plane trees in the fore — nothing. No doubt little has changed. Still, it’s a place that figures in his memories. It’s the place of his childhood, and from it he must carry with him memories of almonds he swiped, or of the derelict house that was a haunt for runagate kids, or of the earliest emotions that were overlooked, once or several times, that got mixed all together in one head with the memories of the living silhouette, the rage and the red beard of a man as massively notable today — and perhaps for as few reasons — as the Manhattan skyline. There, in Lambesc, nothing had shocked him; or, if you prefer, everything had, ever since he was a very young child: the name of Eugenie de Montijo, Empress; the Algerian infantrymen on parade; perhaps the rooster’s cry; father clutching mother close; the great ochre facades exposing themselves to the sky; the cymbals atop the slanting veils trailing a hearse — memories of all that is brutal and delectable. And it was no more of a shock to be promised to a minor occupation, to have to earn a living, and to have to lose it someday, and face it all honorably, cheerfully, as if it were all just tinkering in a forecastle. The time came when he let his beard grow. Perhaps an uncle pulled some strings and he joined the Post Office, and there he wasn’t even a postman, as legend tells us and I amuse myself to imagine, not a mail carrier, but a desk clerk, or more precisely, a guard, something like a custodian for the mail that the trains unload in the stations of Aries and Marseille.
There — when a young sultan’s beard was beginning to grow, when he was still a little uncomfortable in the big peacoat and fringed cap that weren’t really designed for his gestures, for his body that hadn’t yet become the liturgical second skin, dalmatic or pschent, that one now sees in the holy sanctuaries of Boston or New York — he underwent his first shock (and of course it was, in fact, his second, because at about the same time he’d had the surprise of the female body first unveiled, its massive appearance, its weight; it happened near the exit of a dance hall in Lambesc, in Rognes or Saint-Cannat, at night beneath a tree, lifting up a skirt interminably, trembling, or maybe in a whorehouse where everything is stripped away and given in one shot, but, of course, one trembles less; and it doesn’t really matter here, because that surprise is universal. It matters no more to me than does that other trembling — the fissure of light penetrating the soul, striking once and for all the first cymbals of alcohol, as high and strong as those in the sky: but this too is a commonplace). I think that what surprised him, while his beard was growing and while, little by little, his body was becoming the Prussian blue peacoat, was the idea of the Republic, the eternal republican utopia, whatever name one might choose to give it; and if someone had asked him what about it had fascinated him since his youth, since he had developed the means or the curiosity to study a little and to think for himself, he would have responded with the eternal radical arguments; he would have said that he only wanted this: that men have dealings without spitefulness, or at least without the spitefulness that usually is the bread of their dealings, as if Cain’s were a Mother Goose tale, as if both words and teeth weren’t made to bite, the value of money were not the only thing people could see, as if other things were visible, were valued as highly; that bread be broken each day across the Earth in a perpetual Eucharist, with everyone cast as both messiah and apostle, where there was no Judas; that the last became the first, and a postman’s cap a crown amongst all others. He would have responded this way and he would have been lying. Because what he loved about this idea that he couldn’t acknowledge was that, nourished by it, he could leap outside the law: when he walked toward the postal wagon with his heavy stride, when he heavily opened the door that creaked on its hinges, when he bent docilely as his shoulders received the weight of the mailbags, trudging under it — all the while, watching him work and fooling around right next to him, there was another Roulin, unburdened, clandestine, and idle, a prince Roulin whose beard was perfumed and whose youth was eternal, wearing a sky blue frogged-dolman and a simple naval officer’s cap that the princes wore out of modesty or to affect a more casual air. And this unburdened prince — who fluttered around him while he toiled, who burst into easy laughter when Roulin got bawled out, trumpeting in the notes of absinthe and charging like a soldier while a Marseillaise resonated impeccably — the world simply did not want him; the world did not see him; he was off-limits and invisible, perhaps as incomprehensible as the idea of the republic itself. And Roulin enjoyed this prohibition, this little outlaw prince who lived within him. He had grown up under the rule of the Empire during an era when the republic was truly off-limits; when later it was instituted for good and was in some way compulsory, he decided once again that it hadn’t yet arrived, because when it was declared, when it had a clear president and a clear flag, prince Roulin still remained invisible; therefore, the day when the playful prince would finally, patently appear, probably with red flag in hand, ready to leave the old clothes of the old Roulin behind, was put off indefinitely, until the sun would rise in the West, until the Grand Soir. I wonder if the postman had really wanted that advent, because he knew too well that this frolicsome prince was also ferocious; he had a taste for vengeance, and so it happened that at the end of Roulin’s long days of humiliation the prince would appear in Roulin’s kitchen, forever young, but no longer larking about, his face long like a day without bread, pale, romantic, contrived, impeccably topped by Fouquier-Tinville’s great, black-plumed hat, and above the weary head of mother Roulin, who didn’t see this prince, he would read the names of another cartload of people sentenced to death. The republic was something ferocious: and that he loved this impeccable savagery, this promise of black plumes, and of names to cross out of existence — that, above all, is what long ago had upset good little Roulin.