Jolie madame. .
The record is scratched, but I never tire of listening to it. Sometimes I put another record on the gramophone:
Tout est fini, plus de prom’nades
Plus de printemps, Swing Troubadour. .
The inn, like a bathyscaphe, comes aground in a sunken city. Atlantis? Drowned men glide along the Boulevard Haussmann.
. . Ton destin
Swing Troubadour. .
At Fouquet, they linger at their tables. Most of them have lost all semblance of humanity. One can almost see their entrails beneath their gaudy rags. In the waiting hall at Saint-Lazare, corpses drift in serried groups; I see a few escaping through the windows of commuter trains. On the Rue d’Amsterdam, the patrons streaming out of Le Monseigneur have a sickly green pallor but seem better preserved than the ones before. I continue my night rounds. Élysée-Montmartre. Magic City. Luna Park. Rialto-Dancing. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand drowned souls moving slowly, languidly, like the cast of a film projected in slow motion. Silence. Now and then they brush up against the bathyscaphe, their faces — glassy-eyed, open-mouthed — pressed against the porthole.
. . Swing Troubadour. .
I can never go back up to the surface. The air is growing thin, the lights in the bar begin to flicker, and I find myself back at Austerlitz station in summer. Everyone is leaving for the Southern Zone. They jostle each other to get to the ticket windows and board trains bound for Hendaye. They will cross the Spanish border. They will never be seen again. There are still one or two strolling along the station platforms but they too will fade any second now. Hold them back? I head west through Paris. Châtelet. Palais-Royal. Place de la Concorde. The sky is too blue, the leaves are much too delicate. The gardens along the Champs-Élysées look like a thermal spa.
Avenue Kléber. I turn left. Place Cimarosa. A peaceful square of the kind you only find in the 16th arrondissement. The bandstand is deserted now, the statue of Toussaint L’Ouverture is eaten away by greyish lichen. The house at 3 bis once belonged to Monsieur and Madame de Bel-Respiro. On 13 May, 1897, they held a masked ball on the theme of the Arabian Nights; Monsieur de Bel-Respiro’s son greeted guests dressed as a rajah. The young man died the next day in a fire at the Bazar de la Charité. Madame de Bel-Respiro loved music, especially Isidore Lara’s ‘Le Rondel de l’adieu’. Monsieur de Bel-Respiro liked to paint in his spare time. I feel the need to mention such details because everyone has forgotten them.
August in Paris brings forth a flood of memories. The sunshine, the deserted avenues, the rustle of chestnut trees. . I sit on a bench and look up at the façade of brick and stone. The shutters now have long since been boarded up. Coco Lacour’s and Esmeralda’s rooms were on the third floor. I had the attic room at the left. In the living room, a full-length self-portrait of Monsieur de Bel-Respiro in his Spahi officer’s uniform. I would spend long moments staring at his face, at the medals that bedecked his chest. Légion d’honneur. The Order of the Holy Sepulchre, the Order of Saint George from Russia, the Order of Prince Danilo from Montenegro, the Order of the Tower and Sword from Portugal. I had exploited this man’s absence to commandeer his house. The nightmare would end, I told myself, Monsieur de Bel-Respiro would come back and turn us out, I told myself, while they were torturing that poor devil downstairs and he was staining the Savonnerie carpet with his blood. Strange things went on at 3 bis while I lived there. Some nights I would be wakened by screams of pain, footsteps scurrying to and fro on the main floor. The Khedive’s voice. Or Philibert’s. I would look out of the window. Two or three shadowy forms were being bundled into the cars parked outside the house. Doors slammed. The roar of the engines would grow fainter and fainter. Silence. Impossible to get back to sleep. I was thinking about Monsieur de Bel-Respiro’s son, about his tragic death. It was not something he had been raised to consider. Even the Princess de Lamballe would have been astonished if she had learned of her own execution a few years beforehand. And me? Who would have guessed that I would be a henchman to a gang of torturers? But all I had to do was light the lamp and go down to the living room, and the familiar order was immediately restored. Monsieur de Bel-Respiro’s self-portrait still hung on the wall. The wallpaper was still impregnated with the Arabian perfume of Madame de Bel-Respiro’s that made my head spin. The mistress of the house was smiling at me. I was her son, Lieutenant Commander Maxime de Bel-Respiro, home on leave to attend one of the masked balls that brought artists and politicians flocking to No. 3 bis: Ida Rubinstein, Gaston Calmette, Federico de Madrazzo, Louis Barthou, Gauthier-Villars, Armande Cassive, Bouffe de Saint-Blaise, Frank Le Harivel, José de Strada, Mery Laurent, Mile Mylo d’Arcille. My mother was playing the ‘Le Rondel de l’adieu’ on the piano. Suddenly I spotted small bloodstains on the Savonnerie carpet. One of the Louis XV armchairs had been overturned: the man who had been screaming a little while earlier had clearly put up a struggle while they were torturing him. Under the console table, a shoe, a tie, a pen. In the circumstances, it is pointless to carry on describing the guests at No. 3 bis. Madame de Bel-Respiro had left the room. I tried to keep the guests from leaving. José de Strada, who was giving a reading from his Abeilles d’or, trailed off, petrified. Madame Mylo d’Arcille had fainted. They were going to murder Barthou. Calmette too. Bouffe de Saint-Blaise and Gauthier-Villars had vanished. Frank Le Harivel and Madrazzo were no more than frantic moths. Ida Rubinstein, Armande Cassive, and Mery Laurent were becoming transparent. I found myself alone in front of the self-portrait of Monsieur de Bel-Respiro. I was twenty years old.
Outside, the blackout. What if the Khedive and Philibert came back with their cars? Decidedly I was not made to live in such troubled times. To ease my mind, I spent the hours until sunrise going through every closet in the house. Monsieur de Bel-Respiro had left behind a red notebook in which he jotted down his thoughts. I read and re-read it many times during those sleepless nights. ‘Frank le Harivel lived at 8 rue Lincoln. This exemplary gentleman, once a familiar sight to people strolling along the Allée des Acacias, is now forgotten. .’ ‘Madame Mylo d’Arcille, an utterly charming young woman who is perhaps remembered by devotees of the music halls of yesteryear. .’ ‘Was José de Strada — the hermit of La Muette — an unsung genius? No one cares to wonder nowadays.’ ‘Armande Cassive died here, alone and penniless. . ’ Monsieur de Bel-Respiro certainly had a sense for the transience of things. ‘Does anyone still remember Alec Carter, the legendary jockey? Or Rital del Erido?’ Life is unfair.
In the drawers, two or three yellowing photographs, some old letters. A withered bouquet on Madame de Bel-Respiro’s desk. In a trunk she left behind, several dresses from Worth. One night I slipped on the most beautiful among them: a peau-de-soie with imitation tulle and garlands of pink convolvulus. I have never been tempted by transvestism, but in that moment my situation seemed so hopeless and my loneliness so great that I determined to cheer myself up by putting on some nonsensical act. Standing in front of the Venetian mirror in the living room (I was wearing a Lambelle hat adorned with flowers, plumes, and lace), I really felt like laughing. Murderers were making the most of the blackout. Play along, the Lieutenant had told me, but he knew perfectly well that one day I would join their ranks. Then why did he abandon me? You don’t leave a child alone in the dark. At first he is frightened; then he grows used to it, eventually he shuns the daylight altogether. Paris would never again be known as the City of Light, I was wearing a dress and hat that would have made Emilienne d’Alençon green with envy, and brooding on the aimlessness and superficiality of my existence. Surely Goodness, Justice, Happiness, Freedom, and Progress required more effort and greater vision than I possessed? As I was thinking this, I began to make up my face. I used Madame de Bel-Respiro’s cosmetics: kohl and serkis, the rouge it is said that gave sultanas their youthful, velvety complexion. I conscientiously even dotted my face with beauty spots in the shapes of hearts, and moons and comets. And then, to kill time, I waited for dawn and for the apocalypse.