The World of Alphonse Allais

by Alphonse Allais

  Yes, your friend is quite right. I do indeed hold the world millimetre record on the track as well as on the road. My track record stands at 1/17,000 of a second and was accomplished entirely without the aid of pacemakers. My road record is not quite so good: 1/14,000 of a second or thereabouts. I should add that this time was set up during a violent thunderstorm which gave me a lot of trouble with strong headwinds. I should also add (perhaps I should not, actually) that my trainer and timekeeper were dead drunk at the time.

  In the coming season I hope to improve on my two world records and am already busy preparing for a new attempt. I put in fourteen hours’ hard training every day, half of it on wet sand, the other half on a bedspread embroidered with a rather impressive picture of a tiger in the jungle.

  My diet? I train exclusively on a plain diet of sturgeons’ roes from Beluga, washed down with a pure sparkling beverage derived from the grape which comes, I believe, from the Champagne area.

  What position in the saddle do I personally recommend? Well, right from the start I have always followed the advice of my grandmother who, when I was still very young, made me learn the following rhyme by heart:-

  As rigid as a cyclamen

  Bestride your bicycle! Amen.

  So I never lean forward over the handlebars at all but remain in an absolutely upright position. And there you have as much of my technique as modesty permits and patience allows. For further information, I refer you to my forthcoming book: Fan de Cycle.

  A PETITION

  Onézime Lahilat, a law-abiding citizen of the town of A-on-B, or even B-on-Sea, was in the habit every weekday morning of walking to the station to buy his daily paper and watch the Paris express go by.

  One day, as he was coming back from the station, he was just passing the ironmonger’s next to the Café de la Poste when he got involved in a moderately serious accident. A pot came flying out of the shop and broke against his right ankle, showering its contents (greasy juices and organic offal) on the poor man’s light chamois-coloured trousers. The main result of this disaster was that a middle-aged woman, who was not only the wife of the ironmonger but also the cause of the accident, burst into loud, ill-mannered laughter. (There was a secondary result; their young lout of an assistant burst into identical laughter, revealing a set of yellow, curiously vulpine teeth.)

  Onézime Lahilat felt rather upset, not so much by the accident itself, as by the crude mirth it released in these intellectually deprived people. He carefully mopped the disaster area with his checked handkerchief and murmured:

  ‘I do think you might be a bit more careful.’

  At which the ironmonger himself emerged and shouted angrily:

  ‘Careful? You stupid, clumsy oaf! If you don’t like people throwing rubbish out on the pavement, all you have to do is cross over and walk on the other side!’

  ‘Which is just what I shall do in future,’ said Onézime Lahilat, rather coldly.

  And it was just what he did do in future. Heretofore, he had always walked to the station along the right-hand side of the main street and come back via the left-hand side; from now on he took the unconventional course of sticking to the right-hand side both on the way there and on the way back.

  But after a while it began to trouble his conscience.

  Was a trivial disagreement with a tradesman really enough to justify his abandoning one side of the main street altogether? he wondered. Might not his action perhaps be described as high-handed and selfish? Could he even be failing in his duty as a citizen, voter and tax-payer, if he perpetually discriminated against one side of the public highway?

  Eventually his storm-wracked conscience could take it no longer, and he sat down to draft a petition to M. Carnot, the President of the French Republic. He wrote it out on fine white official paper, adopted the most respectful tone and explained everything in great detail. It ended as follows:

  ‘…. in view of the above-mentioned facts, the signatory of this petition humbly begs the Head of State to authorise him to adhere exclusively to the right-hand side of the main street of B-on-Sea.’

  By great good fortune our land of France is governed over by a man of honour, in the shape of M. Carnot, who takes a deep pride in his job and insists on keeping an eye on everything personally, as he so strikingly puts it. (Which is at least much better, let me add, both for the health of our supreme office-holder and for the state of the nation, than having a President who goes off gallivanting in the cafés of Montmartre till two or three in the morning.) So when M. Carnot came to read the petition from Onézime Lahilat, a flicker of keen interest passed across his face. He turned to one of his colleagues.

  ‘What do you think of this, Kornprobst?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Minister for the Navy, ‘well …. in this matter I feel in full agreement with you, M. le Président.’

  ‘I agree. It’s a matter for Loubet, not for me.’

  M. Kornprobst sounded a gong and a mounted republican guard appeared.

  ‘For the Ministry of the Interior!’ snapped Kornprobst, in the superior tone of voice which naval officers slip into as soon as they have a mere military man to deal with.

  ‘And tell Loubet to act sharp,’ he added. ‘It’s important!’

  The mounted republican guard dashed off, leaving his horse behind. (The Ministry of the Interior being only fifty yards off, it was quicker that way.) Loubet took the petition and studied it.

  ‘M. le Président is very kind,’ he murmured, ‘but he does sometimes pass on to me things which are not strictly my business at all. This, of course, is something for the local police chief to deal with.’

  He called for some paper and wrote a note to the police chief in question, asking him as a favour to get the matter settled as soon as possible.

  When the note arrived, the police chief was just settling down with a very different piece of business (young, brunette, very pretty).

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he broke off long enough to say, ‘what on earth has this got to do with me! This is the mayor’s business, not mine. Send me a gendarme!’

  ‘Sir,’ said a voice.

  It was a gendarme. The police chief briefed him.

  ‘And tell the mayor to get the matter expedited.’

  (He said ‘expedited’ just to impress the gendarme.)

  When the mayor received the petition, he went as pale as a ghost.

  ‘What a time for this to come along!’ he thought. ‘Just as the New Year’s Honours List is being decided.’

  By now it was quite late in the day. Everyone who was anyone in B-on-Sea was just sitting down to dinner. But it never occurred to the mayor to take the responsibility of the decision himself. He called for a police sergeant and gave him fifteen notes to bear to the town councillors, summoning them to a council meeting extraordinary. They all turned up except one who was dead. The mayor explained to them what it was all about and they settled down to a full and frank discussion, which did not end until midnight.

  I am privileged to be able to bring to my readers the decision of the council, which was as follows:

  ‘Whereas, etc. etc. etc. ……

  ‘Whereas the considerations adduced by Onézime Lahilat do not seem to be sufficiently well grounded, and such a precedent would be a source of great inconvenience ……

  ‘Whereas the municipal authority has provided a pavement on each side of the street so that equal use should be made of both ……

  ‘Whereas, if the entire population of B-on-Sea took it into its head to start favouring one side of the main street and ignoring the other, or indeed vice versa ……

  ‘Therefore the Town Council of B-on-Sea does not permit Onézime Lahilat to make exclusive use of the right-hand pavement of the aforesaid main street.’

  THE HENRI II CHEST

  There comes a moment at every dinner party when the conversation becomes almost impossibly liberal, and this dinner party was no exception. Unanimously we decided to inveigh against the horrible
and unnatural practice of slavery, the subject having been brought up by a plump young man said to be the illegitimate son of a cardinal. (A rumour based entirely on his rubicund complexion, which was a bright monsignorial scarlet.)

  It was a high-spirited gathering, most of those present being Portuguese; as the Arab proverb says, who ever heard of a Portuguese being a wet blanket? According to the notes in my diary, the names of these Portuguese guests were ‘Major Saligo, et Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes,’ (the only lady present) ‘et Sinon, et Vero, et Ben Trovato’ and several others whom I have forgotten. The only Frenchmen present were the scarlet bastard, a naval officer called Becque-Danlot and myself.

  When I said just now that we all inveighed against slavery, I was guilty of a slight exaggeration. Captain Becque-Danlot seemed in no mood for inveighing either against slavery or against anything else. But the fair Dona Ferentes was the only one who noticed his abstention.

  ‘What about you, Captain?’ she said in her beautiful Portuguese accent. ‘Does that not revolt you, the thought of men being sold by other men in this horrible traffic?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, senhora,’ said the Captain. ‘It disgusts me more than I can say. But a man who has done what I have done would be a hypocrite if he condemned the institution of slavery.’

  After a pause, he said dramatically:

  ‘You see – I too have sold a man!’

  The Captain did not seem particularly tortured by the memory of his misdeed, for he burst into long and loud laughter at the thought of it.

  ‘You Captain? You, the personification of the honour of the French Navy? You have sold a man?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I really did once sell a man,’ said Becque-Danlot, between roars of laughter.

  ‘Was that in Africa?’

  ‘No, not in Africa. Here in France.’

  ‘In France!’

  ‘Better still; here in Paris.’

  ‘Paris!’

  ‘And not just anywhere in Paris. I sold him at the Auction Rooms in the rue Drouot.’

  It suddenly occurred to the assembled company that the fearless seaman might be pulling our communal leg. The cardinal’s natural son spoke up for all of us.

  ‘May we suggest, Captain, that you go and tell that to the marines?’

  The Captain took no notice.

  ‘Yes, senhora, yes, gentlemen, I once put up a man for auction in the rue Drouot and sold him. It wasn’t a particularly profitable transaction – I lost 350 francs on the deal, as a matter of fact – but I certainly got my money’s worth.’

  We all sat mystified.

  ‘Tell us about it,’ said Dona Ferentes.

  It is well known that a French sailor never refuses an order given by an Andalusian lady. So he obeyed, pausing only for the traditional rituals of lighting a cigar, contemplating the blue spiral of smoke, etc., etc., all of which I shall completely ignore.

  *

  It happened about three years ago. I had been out in Senegal and had come back to Paris with six months’ leave of absence to convalesce from illness, so as you can imagine I was determined to convalesce in style. Luckily I had just come into a small inheritance which enabled me to rent a ground floor apartment in the rue Brémontier, do it up properly and prepare for six months of non-stop festivity.

  Well, one evening I met a young lady in the Jardin-de-Paris whom I took to immediately. I don’t say she was particularly pretty, but she had real character and charm, and modesty to match, unlike most of the tarts you find round there.

  We got talking and she told me her life story. A damnably tedious life story it was, too – father an Army general, brought up in the barracks, mother dies, father remarries, wicked stepmother, endless scenes, life becomes impossible, runs away from home, despair, considers suicide – till I had to cut the whole recital short, even if she was dabbing at her tears with a scented handkerchief the whole damned time.

  I’m sure you can guess the outcome. I took the young lady home with me, let her stay in my place as long as she wanted and even got a treasure of a lady’s maid to look after her. I set her up nicely, as you might say. Gave her everything she wanted, treated her right and behaved like a perfect gentleman.

  I didn’t see much of her during the day, but I always turned up about six in the evening to take her out to a concert, or to a theatre or just to dine.

  The tiresome thing was, though, that she seemed to fall passionately in love with me after a while and took to saying:

  ‘When you have to go away and leave me, my darling, I think I shall kill myself.’

  The deuce she would! I was beginning to get rather worried about the serious turn things were taking, when one day the little treasure of a maid gave me a note which she asked me to read later in the morning. I did, and it said:

  ‘It’s about time someone told Monsieur about Madame’s little games, because as soon as Monsieur disappears in the morning Madame lets in a little gigolo as low-class as I’ve ever seen and he stays here all day, and if Monsieur ever does come back unexpectedly, which did happen once, they have a plan, which is for the gigolo to hide in the big Henri II chest we use for keeping firewood in during the winter.

  What your eye doesn’t see, her heart doesn’t grieve for! The gigolo gentleman is quite comfortable while Monsieur is here because the lid doesn’t fit very well and the chest is very big. If Monsieur wants to catch him, the best time is about two in the afternoon.

  Marie’

  Well, I had never heard such a vile, terrible, unbelievable pack of lies in my life. Despite which I turned up promptly at two o’clock that afternoon and got a few nods and winks from my little treasure as much as to say that my journey had not been in vain. Ellen (I don’t think I told you that my mistress was called Ellen) received me with open arms as cool as you like and said with a big smile:

  ‘Dearest! How wonderful to see you out of the blue like this!’

  I had a quick look at the chest. Wherever the key was, it wasn’t in the keyhole. But it wasn’t an easy thing to hide, being a large period cast iron sort of thing and it took only the odd passing intimacy to establish that it was now in my lady friend’s pocket. So it was all true, eh!

  Where my next idea came from I haven’t a notion. I’ve always liked to think it was a sudden flash of genius, because what I did was send Ellen off to buy a tie for me in a shop a long way away, in the avenue de Villiers, on the pretext that she was the only person whose taste I could trust. Then, as soon as she had gone, I stopped a cab and got the concierge to help me load the chest aboard en route for the auction rooms!

  When I arrived I found there was already a sale in progress, but it needed only the judicious greasing of a few palms here and there to make sure my chest was included as a late entry. They didn’t particularly like my not being able to produce a key for it but they reckoned that it should be in as good condition inside as it was out, so they accepted it for auction.

  And before half an hour had passed, it had been bought by a man from the Auvergne for the princely sum of 250 francs (I had only paid 600 francs for the thing).

  I stayed to watch the chest being loaded on to an enormous removal cart where it was quickly submerged beneath an extraordinary flood of other objects – bedsteads, bronze statuettes, crates of wine, bird-cages, child carriages, chandeliers, etc. etc…… and, presumably, the gigolo right at the bottom shouting for help through the thick, sound-proof walls of my antique chest.

  Where did fate take him next? How soon did he regain his liberty? Or is he still there to this very day? Ah, senhora and gentlemen, these weighty questions have to remain unanswered for the very simple reason that I found it impossible to raise any interest in the answers. All I can tell you is that I never laughed so much in my life as I did that day.

  I never did see Ellen again. The little treasure told me that when she came back with the tie she packed her things and left straightaway, without so much as making any comment on the missing item of furniture. Can’t say it w
orried me much. Funny thing is, though, I can’t bear large antique chests any more.

  IN WHICH CAPTAIN CAP TAKES GREAT EXCEPTION TO BEING MADE A FOOL OF

  Captain Cap pushed a coin into the slot machine and waited. Nothing happened. Not the slightest bar of chocolate. Not even a peanut. He flew into the most tremendous rage and kicked the machine.

  ‘Pack of thieves!’ he roared. ‘I’ll get you for this!’

  And added to me, rather more softly:

  ‘I’ll come back with a stick of dynamite tonight and blow their damned machine to smithereens.’

  ‘Come on, Cap!’ I said. ‘That’s going a bit far, just to get two sous back.’

  ‘It’s not the two sous. I don’t give a damn about the two sous. I just don’t like being made a fool of.’

  I can bear this out, having seen Cap react to similar imagined affronts in the past. When he gets the idea that mankind has conspired to short-change him, nothing less than the most violent and drastic revenge will do. I once saw him weigh out 500 grammes of sugar he had bought from a grocer and find that it came only to 485. The next day he went back to the shop and quietly sprinkled strychnine in their salt, sugar and flour.

  ‘Please don’t think I was upset about the 15 grammes they cheated me out of,’ he told me apologetically. ‘I really didn’t mind about that. I just don’t like being made a fool of.’

  Sometimes he went even further.

  I remember once, when he had been staying in an hotel in Marseille and was packing his bags on the last day, he found that he was missing a collar. There was only one possible explanation. One of the staff must have stolen it while he was out of the room. So the Cap took immediate revenge action. Instead of going back to Paris, where he was wanted on urgent business, he took the next boat to Trieste. As you all know, Trieste, along with Hamburg, is the most important market in Europe for wild animals and zoo specimens, and as soon as Cap arrived he was lucky enough to find a real bargain: a large wild jaguar which was so uncontrollable that no-one wanted him, going dirt cheap. So Cap bought the beast and packed him into a large trunk made, apart from a few air holes, entirely of solid steel, then set sail again with his ferocious travelling companion on a fast boat bound for Marseille.