“Dans le jardin de mon père. .”
The refrain and chorus buried the solo, as the masquerade procession buries the buffoon’s monologue.
“Auprès de ma blonde. .”
The refrain, a good-natured rascal, ruminated over what might be left of the individuals.
The people in this train compartment got along as no one had gotten along before, as no one would get along again: through words that were not the words of any of them.
And he suddenly understood that a great happiness had burst in here, that in which each would lose his trace, finding the trace of those similar to himself, and he is following it greedily.
His defiance broke into torrential relief: this is happiness! — Now he wanted it.
“Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon. .”
He joined in, he felt like a fish in water.
“Qu’il fait. .”
He shrieked into silence, into a silence ordered by the dancer’s outstretched hands.
“Hold on! That sounded off. . Who’s spoiling it?”
The eyes of the entire compartment are simultaneously upon him; halberdiers clearing the way; and behind them, the dancer’s finger, like the finger of a public prosecutor:
“It’s that gentleman there! Please, don’t spoil it for us. .”
The song rolled out again like a ball in a steep trough; if only it could know what it was rolling through!
He, however, cast a timid glance to the side, where his encouraging “I’m unhappy” had still been sitting a moment before. Something shabbily diaphanous was sitting there. It had long, groomed eyelashes over ashamedly downcast eyes. It had the attractive and sticky-sweet smile of the fine-looking man from yesterday. It was only now that this yesterday was making itself manifest in its hidden truth. It was like a morsel that he couldn’t get rid of, and that tasted like a purgative.
Boulevard Poissonnière is under the sovereignty of young men with lacquered hair, with manicured, slightly bar-blackened nails, with broad neckties under soft collars, with crumpled lapels, the responsibility for which falls to working girls taken to one-hour hotels; under the sovereignty of young men of the standard beauty of Languedoc brunettes resisted by just barely a fifth — statistics, please! — of the girls and boys they accost. — On Boulevard Poissonnière, there are marvelous shops with chic frocks — cotton garments whose finish weighs as much as the thing itself, with jewels for the most part cheaper than a single one of the light bulbs for their eye-catching illumination — public gramophone listening booths, vainglorious cafés with chicory coffee, half-blind display mirrors that go all the way out to the pavement.
Before a mirror stands a young girl; she has slight little hands, which please her. Her hands slide down from her bosom to her belly; it doesn’t mean anything, and Boulevard Poissonnière doesn’t ask about it: it’s used to it. — Before a mirror stands a fine-looking man, he’s tugging at the too-short sleeves of his heartbreaking Alba suit (heartbreaking, for it breaks the young ladies’ hearts), he squints at his own Toulousian profile, which is his better side; he tightens his slipped tie. Boulevard Poissonnière doesn’t ask what it means, for it’s used to it; for that matter, it has long since known what it means: the tyrants of Boulevard Poissonnière hang around in front of display mirrors like this every time, by some unfortunate accident — which for that matter they don’t whine about: c’est la vie—they’ve thrown themselves at one of those fifth of the girls they’ve accosted who is, with a nod to statistics, immune to them.
And right away there’s this one here, whom we’ve had our eyes on for a while now, having our eyes on our hero, who noticed him where the boulevard meets Rue d’Hauteville. And how not to notice an idler hovering with that oh-so-familiar sham busyness, from which he makes a show of not seeing so as to assume the equally affected look of a wretch struck by lightning out of the blue a moment later, that is, when (if) the doe he’s set his sights on reemerges, because he hasn’t just set his sights on another he wants to get, because if a young man from the Boulevard Poissonnière says “she’s the one,” love becomes a matter of prestige, and the one that has popped into the shop over there. . But this haberdashery on Rue d’Hauteville, it seems, has told her that the back room is still occupied. It so happened that the lightning’s command, already rescinded, could be given after all, and just as the doe, walking in the direction of the Porte Saint-Denis, lashed the cunning huntsman with that look, after which, as they say, a prudent man loses his taste for it forever. But the dark-haired man was barely twenty-three; in other words, he was of a generation for whom the verb “to despair” is a synonym for the verb “to dishonor oneself.” To them, everything is an encouragement: even the look “no, you’re not worth it,” which begins at the shoes — according to which everything else is unerringly surmised — and ends at the eyes, at which she hurls an apodictic “out of the question” that leaves no room for doubt.
Before phenomena by no means entirely unambiguous, the youths from the Boulevard Poissonnière are also likely to say “you never know.” But their “you never know” is not so much dubitative as an affirmation of life, and the truism “dames are fickle” is, on the Boulevard Poissonnière, a mathematical postulate. It excludes the possibility that a woman would make firm decisions according to a principle, whatever it might be; it establishes that they only ever decide on a case-by-case basis, not suspecting that it is therefore assigning them a pragmatic posture; on the contrary, it holds that the most distinctive mark of feminine thinking is capriciousness; the Boulevard Poissonnière is an optimistic skeptic.
The idler, brushed off by the doe’s look, has admitted to the universe and to the boulevard — and admitted without bitterness or embarrassment — that he has lost so far. He’s slipped his finger under his collar, tilted his head to the side, and turned on his heels: such is the conventional speech of the Boulevard Poissonnière for expressing one’s having been rebuffed, a defeat that is never sealed; it’s a mere outpost skirmish, and the main detachment can christen itself with the name “outpost” as well, an opportunistic stratagem, to be sure: optimism’s unconquerable bulwark. — So the idler turned on his heels: 360 degrees; behind them is the firm confession, through them the return to the point of departure: physically and morally: see the rebuffed man who’s traced 360 degrees around his own axis! No longer is he rebuffed, he’s just unattainable, he’s once again a fine-looking man through and through, whom just a fifth of the girls and boys he accosts— statistics, please! — can resist.
See him before the mirror, and how he’s raised his head! See him, how he admires his own image with such natural assurance, and say whether you can come up with a failure for him, a ruination that could hold a candle to this confidence! — He is so immersed in affectionate and deferential self-regard that the dense flow of passers-by has as if spat him out and forsaken him as punishment for his having betrayed the community of the street. He’s been left alone, but then what is solitude to someone whose plethoricity is such that he is a community unto himself? The street has cast him out? He’s brushed it off. He and his image have fallen in love with each other with so unfussy an ardor that it was actually the two of them, irresistible, invincible, who had been in control; he was in control. She there, the one who’d rebuffed him? There is no she; there is only the fact that the number of those who aren’t worth the trouble has increased by one. One of that fifth for whom he’s not their “type.” But anyway, there are also people who don’t like oysters. All the worse for them; he pities them, a somewhat contemptuous pity. For him, the problem of one-hundred-percent-ness is not a problem of the attainable and the denied; it’s a question of eccentric idiosyncrasy.