There is no talk of redemption here, or even of understanding. Just as in The Waste Land the thunder gives a hint of rain to come but no more, though the poem, having exhausted itself, so to speak, ends in the quiet threefold repetition of that mysterious word, so soothing to pronounce: shantih, shantih, shantih. In both works, as in the majority of Modernist works, something happens as it unfolds, but it does not happen so much to the characters (though in a novel like To the Lighthouse there may be one especially privileged character, a sort of proxy of the author, such as Lily Briscoe) as to the reader (and to the author as reader of his or her own work). All we can say is that something has become unblocked, a change has taken place.
‘Building a modern imperial capital’, writes Robert Gildea about mid-nineteenth-century Paris,
meant piercing broad boulevards, cutting long perspectives from one grand monument to the next … increasing the number of avenues radiating from the Étoile from five to twelve … and redesigning the Bois de Boulogne to include lakes, gardens, two race-courses and a zoo. In the railway age that was now reaching its apogee it meant driving arterial roads to the main termini, from which railways fanned out to every part of France. ‘Everything moves towards Paris: main roads, railways, telegraphs,’ Haussmann announced in 1859, ‘everything moves out from it: laws, decrees, decisions, orders, officials.’
The modern capital is thus both like the classic novel itself and the place of entertainment and leisure where such works are to be consumed; and if not on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne then on one of the trains carrying the eager visitor to the capital or taking the weary inhabitant of the city on holiday to one of the far-flung parts of the country now so easy to reach.
In 1967 Marguerite Duras published a novel which almost seems to have been written to challenge Haussmann's confident imperialism. L'Amante anglaise deals with a crime, and, to that extent, is precisely the sort of book you would read on a train. But the crime it deals with and the manner in which it deals with it make it the very opposite of a detective story.
A murder has been committed: dismembered portions of a body, but not the head, have been turning up in the open carriages of freight trains all over France. By a brilliant piece of deduction, the police work out that there is only one spot in France through which all the trains have passed, a viaduct in the village of Viorne on the western outskirts of Paris. The book begins with the arrival in a local café of a police inspector and his (female) assistant, in plain clothes, a few days after notices have been posted in the village asking the inhabitants to report anything suspicious to the police, especially the mysterious disappearance of a friend, neighbour or lodger. The book consists of three sets of taped interviews, the first with the proprietor of the café, Robert Lamy (and into this has been inserted the tape that was secretly running in the policeman's briefcase, and recording the opening scene), the second and third with a couple, Pierre and Claire Lannes, who were in the café that evening. The interviews are conducted, after the case has been solved, by someone who appears to be an investigative journalist of sorts, a kind of Truman Capote or Norman Mailer. Unlike his American counterparts, however, he does not figure in the book except as the person who (we understand) sets up the tape machine and asks the questions. We as readers are only given what is said on the tapes. This is frustrating, for what is the point of a murder mystery without background and explanations and conclusions, but also exhilarating as it is we, like everyone else involved, who have to make up our own minds, only given words to work with. The investigator sets things in motion with a comment of his own which is duly recorded: ‘All that is said here is recorded. A book about the crime of Viorne begins to unfold. (Un livre sur le crime de Viorne commence à se faire.)’
In the first interview Robert Lamy tells how they heard about the crime; how naturally everyone was talking about it; how that evening Pierre and Claire came in with their friend Alfonso, a Portuguese odd-job man; how the stranger and the girl joined in the conversation and were quickly identified as the police; how the policeman explained that since no-one had come forward to report anyone missing the victim must have been a close member of a family or a friend; and how, as the policeman went on to reconstruct the events and to suggest that the body must have been cut up in the forest, Claire, who had been silent throughout, suddenly interrupted him and said that, no, it had been cut up in the cellar. She then confessed everything, Lamy says: she was the culprit, the victim was her cousin, Marie-Thérèse, a deaf-mute who lived with them and looked after the house, and who, she had told her husband, had returned for a while to her native Cahors.
‘I'm trying to understand who this woman, Claire Lannes, is and why she says she committed the crime’, says the interviewer to Robert, towards the end of the interview with him. ‘She gives no reason for the crime. So I am looking for a reason for her.’ Motive had already been discussed before Claire confessed. The policeman says, ‘it seems to me that here one person killed another as they might have killed themselves (il me semble qu'ici on a tué l'autre comme on se serait tué soi) … It's what often happens, you know.’ ‘Because they loathed themselves or the other?’ ‘Not necessarily … Because they were together in a situation that had gone on for too long, not an unhappy situation, you understand, but fixed, without issue.’ The interview with the husband yields nothing further: he had once loved his wife but she had grown absent, strange, a little mad. He didn't feel she even noticed him any more. She was fond of her cousin, he thought. She liked sitting in the garden for hours at a time on a bench by the English mint, la menthe anglaise. At one time she wrote letters to the papers. She wrote about the mint. She spelt it ‘L'amante en glaise’. ‘Perhaps the minute before she killed her she had no idea she was going to do it. Don't you think?’ When the interviewer asks him who his wife was, he says: ‘I don't know.’ ‘Think’, says the interviewer. ‘I don't want to’, he says. ‘One can explain everything if one wants to, or nothing, as one likes. So I'm keeping my mouth shut.’