7 An allusion to the typically southern hero of Alphonse Daudet’s burlesque novel, Tartarin de Tarascon and its sequels.
8 Precursors of the Guides Michelin, the Guides Joanne were a series of guidebooks named after their creator, Adolphe Joanne. After 1919 they became known as the Guides bleus.
9 Untranslatable pun. In French à l’arrêt means “stationary”, whereas être aux arrêts means “to be under arrest”.
10 In French the word coureur can mean “runner”, but also “womanizer”.
AN ART OF LIVING. A LETTER TO PAUL MORAND FROM A CLOSE FRIEND
From Lettres de château by Michel Déon (Gallimard, 2009)
After a freezing winter, the heatwave of summer 1976 came like a second omen. Who was to blame? The gods? We had fired them. The politicians? They were on holiday and, in any case, they turned out to be the most surprised of all. The press was not yet riding its climate hobbyhorse, which it desperately depends upon for survival. It was not a matter of climate change or of planetary disaster, but of those people dying from indifference, some frozen, others wilting or starving. By printing two-column headlines on their front pages, newspapers were certainly able to exaggerate the prospect of a world reduced to a ball of ice or a burning desert. An elderly man is not averse to contemplating the notion of this kind of devastation.
In 1976 Paul Morand was eighty-eight years old, my own age, which today, in 2008, may perhaps draw me closer to him, not that we were ever very far apart, in fact. In one sense, we share the same curiosity: how much time is there left?
Five years previously he had published Venices, bringing his work to a close, leaving behind odds and ends in his bottom drawer, but resolved solely to maintain his Journal inutile [his “pointless diary”, as he himself called it], which stopped on the 10th of April 1976 with his replies to questions posed by a women’s magazine:
ELLE: “What do you think of love today?”
I: “It’s the age of the caveman.”
ELLE: “What will follow it?”
I: “The age of the barrack room (Mao, Brezhnev).”*
In May 1976, we were expecting him in Ireland. He would be travelling with Claude Gallimard, whose firm published both of us. On transferring flights at Heathrow, where the plane for Shannon was delayed, the departure board announced a shuttle flight leaving for Jersey, a place he did not know. He gave Claude the slip and jumped aboard. It was to be the final flourish of a traveller who behaved as though he were being pursued by the Devil.
We know what happened next: Brittany, his wandering around in the Mini Cooper sports car (Paris to Vevey in six-and-a-half hours), from Les Hayes to Bourdonné, from Brittany to Switzerland, from the Château de l’Aile to avenue Charles-Floquet and the emptiness of the vast apartment where everything reminded him of his wife Hélène. Heat discourages one’s determination, including the will to go on living. Ever since her death, surrounded by friends though he was, his life had been beset by grief. On the evening of the 22nd of July, the hostile or merciful hand of death gripped him by the throat. He still had enough strength to be driven to the Hôpital Necker, where he died on the 23rd.
We had, of course, been sorry about his volte-face at Heathrow, while at the same time we understood his reasons. As far as Ireland was concerned, an article about hunting in La Revue des voyages and a short story, ‘Bug O’Shea’, had said a great deal.
For him, there remained the Unknown: Jersey.
Up until his last breath, this nomad would reject a French cemetery. His family was buried in a grave in Yerres.† The prospect of finding himself — should we say “waking up?”—in some confused mass, in serried ranks, among the tombs of a large city and having “enemies or strangers” roaming around appalled him. It is understandable. In Trieste, he had chosen “a sort of forgotten pendulum above the Adriatic ogive”, the funerary monument to Hélène’s family. She was already buried there.
He was delighted to be accepted in this refuge even though he risked being regarded as an intruder:
“It is,” he wrote, “a noble stone pyramid, six metres high, a piece of Italian eloquence, above which an angel twice as tall as a human opens a black marble door to the afterlife, as thick as that of an empty safe.”
At the same time as he changed burial places, he changed dogmas:
“I shall be watched over by the Orthodox faith towards which Venice has led me, a religion of joyful stillness that continues to speak the language of the Gospels.”
He was not frightened of death. He dreamt of it as though it were another life:
“Perhaps there are kindred souls who wait for the deceased and greet them with cries of joy, like newborn babies, on the other side of life…” (1930)
It is true that he did not envisage this final resting place without a few luxuries or liberties. He was born into a well-to-do middle-class background — his family was “radical”—that society so well depicted by Gide or Martin du Gard. At the age of eighteen, after a flirtation with Marxism at a time when it could still be considered chic, he was induced away by the influence of Hélène and that disillusionment which awaits all the world’s great “seers”.
“Would anyone,” he noted sadly, “wish to take responsibility for my suicide or for doing my work?”
One of his last letters illustrates the tone of a correspondence that never became bogged down in generalizations:
FROM P.M. TO M.D:
11th November 1975
Thank you, cher Michel, for your letter of the 25th which arrived the day after a small stir caused by Castries’ speech. He spoke of “a Gaullist gathering… a disparate hotchpotch”. Debré almost left the Coupole when Maurice Schumann was admitted…
FROM M.D. TO P.M.,
THIRTY-THREE YEARS LA TER:
March 2008
Cher Paul, there is nothing to stop one from replying to the same letter twice. The first reply is probably lost. The second rounds it off many years later. If I dare respond to your “cher Michel” with “cher Paul” after addressing you goodness knows how many times with the traditional “cher ami” it’s because we are the same age at last: eighty-eight. The years in between have slipped away in the sands of time. Wisely, Paul, you would not have stopped growing older and I would never have caught you up and so at about this time we would be celebrating your 120th birthday. This is also the day that I dare to use your first name. A step not taken lightly. From Venice, in 1974, you complained: “In Paris there’s no longer any difference between the pavement and the road: at parties I lose myself among so many first names…”
They would lose themselves in the company of Cocteau who, to hear him talking about his circle of friends, lived in a kindergarten filled with Loulous, Jeannots, Francettes, Zizis, Dédés… I forget, having failed to ask him, which infantile names he used for Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Picasso or perhaps… Einstein.
I notice you have begun to use the familiar tu form of address. As a respectful friend I should not display too much humility, even though I find it hard to use tu myself, but anyway… let’s try. Your time clock stopped at eighty-eight years. Mine also stands at eighty-eight. We are therefore on a relatively equal footing. It’s worth pointing out that this number eight has clung to you since your birth. In 1988, you would have reached a century. Reduced to ashes, you have remained tremendously fruitful. I should have made a note of everything that has been published: new editions, unpublished work, updated material, correspondence, preparations for a Pléiade edition, and the Journal inutile. You have probably never been so much in the public eye since you left us. The volumes of my Morand collection bristle with yellow bookmarks. If I pick up any of your books at random, one of these bookmarks unveils a sentence that catches the eye: