Today I’m trying to reconstruct the layout, but at the time when I went to visit Claude Bernard, I would never have imagined such a thing. Claude Bernard had not lived long in that large chalet decorated with verandas and bow windows. A wooden kiosk rose in the back of the garden.
Who had the previous owner been? A certain Jacques Henley? Henley’s photo figures in old film directories, with the caption “Speaks English and German without an accent.” A very British face: blond mustache, very pale eyes. His address is given as: Jacques Henley, “Les Raquettes,” Ile des Loups, Nogent-sur-Marne (Seine), Tremblay 12–00. But in the phone book, at the same telephone number, he is listed under the name E. J. Dothée. Among the other former inhabitants of the island that I was able to inventory:
Willame, H.
Tremblay 33-44
Magnant, L.
Tremblay 22-65
Dothée alias Henley and the two above-mentioned persons lived in the part of the island that belongs to Nogent-sur-Marne; these others lived in the eastern part, in Le Perreux:
Hevelle
Tremblay 11-97
Verchère, E. L., Les Heures Tranquilles, Ile des Loups (May to Oct.)
Tremblay 09-25
Kisseloff, P.
Tremblay 09-25
Korsak (de)
Tremblay 27-19
Ryan (Jean E.), La Pergola, Ile des Loups
Tremblay 06-69
The Société d’Encouragement du Sport Nautique (Tremblay 00–80) was in the part belonging to Nogent-sur-Marne. I believe Claude Bernard’s house, for its part, was located in the eastern sector, part of Le Perreux. In short, the Ile des Loups called to mind that island in the Caribbean split between two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic — the difference being that it hadn’t won its independence, since it was under the sovereignty of Nogent and Le Perreux. The viaduct crossed through it, and this was what marked the boundary of the two zones.
Clumps of trees lining the banks concealed Claude Bernard’s house. He came to get us at the Quai de l’Artois in a small boat. The neglected garden was surrounded by a white fence. On the ground floor, a huge space that opened onto the veranda acted as the living room: a sofa, two leather armchairs, a coffee table, and a large brick fireplace. Claude Bernard was always alone in that house and gave the impression of camping out in it. When he invited us to dinner, he did the cooking himself. He had told me he was tired of living in Paris and that he couldn’t sleep without country air, and water nearby.
I suppose there’s no trace of countryside left in Le Perreux and on the Ile des Loups. They’ve no doubt razed Claude Bernard’s house. The trees and pontoon boats have disappeared from along the banks.
At the time of our first meeting, in his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, the day when I offered him the twenty-volume set of Balzac’s complete works — the Veuve Houssiaux edition — and he had bought it from me for three thousand francs, we talked literature. He’d confided that his favorite writer was Buffon.
The works of Buffon bound in green morocco leather on the brick mantelpiece of his living room were the only books I noticed at his house. Naturally, that house on the Ile des Loups seemed strange to me, and I found Claude Bernard’s occupation as a dealer in “secondhand goods” intriguing. But most often we talked about film or literature, and that’s what he liked about me.
I remember the heavy wood paneling on the living room walls, the ironwork, but especially the elevator lined with red velvet — it no longer worked — that Claude Bernard, one day, laughingly told us had been installed by the former owner for the sole purpose of going up to his bedroom on the next floor.
That elevator was the only remaining clue to the night in April 1933 when the T.’s had ended up in Le Perreux with the two other couples. Afterward, they had returned to their sober quarters on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, but it no longer mattered. It was too late. Their fate had been sealed in Le Perreux and in the house on the Ile des Loups.
At the time, I didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores of “the tragic orgy,” or about the role of the red velvet elevator that Claude Bernard had shown us at the back of the living room. To us, the Ile des Loups and its environs were just one more suburb. On the route we took from the station to the Quai de l’Artois, where Claude Bernard was waiting for us in his boat, I was thinking that we’d soon be going away, thanks to the money from the Balzacs and the old music box I’d sold him. Before long, Jacqueline and I would be far away from the Marne and Le Perreux — in Vienna, where I’d turn twenty.
I’d like to linger on the Left Bank a while longer, being a child of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I attended the public school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi and studied catechism with Father Pachaud on Rue de l’Abbaye and Place Furstenberg. Since then, however, I’ve avoided my former village, which I no longer recognize. This evening, the Carrefour de l’Odéon seems as desolate to me as the Breton port of Montparnasse in the drizzle.
One of my last memories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés goes back to Monday, January 18, 1960. I was fourteen and a half and I had run away from school. I had walked all the way to La Croix de Berny, skirting the hangars of the Villacoublay airfield. Then I’d taken a bus to the Porte d’Orléans, and then the metro. I had gotten off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I ended up in a café, Chez Malafosse, at the end of Rue Bonaparte where it meets the quay. At least, Chez Malafosse is what my father used to call it. After lunch, we’d be in his office with his friends and he’d say to me:
“Go get us some Partagas at Malafosse.”
That afternoon, at Chez Malafosse, a group of people my mother knew, who were always hanging about in that neighborhood, were standing at the bar. Among them was a pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said:
“What the fuck are you doing here, old top?”
I confessed that I was playing hooky. There was an embarrassed silence. I was on the verge of bursting into tears. Suddenly, she said, with her Danish accent:
“What the fuck does that matter, old top?”
Then she slammed the palm of her hand down on the counter:
“A whiskey for Old Top here …”
I recall the billiards players upstairs at the Café de Cluny. I happened to be there, one Saturday afternoon in January, the day of Churchill’s funeral. It was in 1966 that they renovated all the cafés on Place Saint-Michel and the boulevard; in recent years, some became McDonald’s, like the Mahieu, where the off-track bettors used to gather, and where one could hear the crackling of the machine as it spewed out the racing results.
Until the late sixties, the neighborhood had remained unchanged. The events of May ’68, which it hosted, left only black-and-white news images, which at a quarter-century’s remove seem as distant as the ones filmed during the Liberation of Paris.
Boulevard Saint-Michel is engulfed in a December-like fog this Sunday evening, and the image of a street resurfaces in my memory, one of the few streets in the Latin Quarter — the only one, I think — that often figures in my dreams. I finally identified it. It slopes gently down to the boulevard, and the contagion of dreams into reality ensures that Rue Cujas will always remain frozen for me in the light of the early sixties, a soft, limpid light that I associate with two films from that time: Lola and Adieu Philippine.