The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  There was a Palace of Electricity, with a Tower of Water in front of it, a hall of dynamos and a hall containing hundreds of new automobiles, in every shape and size. The Tyrolean Castle was juxtaposed with the Pavilion of Russian Alcohol, the Palace of Optics and the Palace of Woman, next to the pretty sugar comfit-box Palace of Ecuador, which was to serve later as a municipal library in Guayaquil. In the Place de la Concorde, where you bought your tickets, stood the astounding and unloved Porte Binet—a monumental gateway, like something out of The Arabian Nights, decorated with polychrome plaster and mosaic, studded all over with crystal cabochons. It was flamboyantly artificial but was based on living forms in nature, the vertebra of a dinosaur, the cell-structure of beehives, the opercules of madrepores. On top of it stood a monstrous effigy of a woman—La Parisienne, huge-bosomed and fifteen feet tall, modelled on Sarah Bernhardt and dressed in a negligee or a dressing-gown designed by Paquin himself. On her head she wore the crest of their City of Paris, a prow, like a peaked tiara. She was generally disliked and jeered at.

  The two largest exhibits in the whole Exposition were Schneider-Creusot’s long-range cannon and Vickers-Maxim’s collection of rapid-fire machine guns. The Kaiser had not been invited to his, or any other, sumptuous displays. His advisers and the French hosts were both afraid that he would say something disconcerting or incendiary. If British troops were killing Boers, the Germans were engaged in combat, in the outside world, with the Chinese. The Kaiser had reprimanded Krupp for equipping Chinese forts with cannon that fired on German gunboats. “This is no time when I am sending my soldiers to battle against the yellow beasts to try to make money out of so serious a situation.”

  The Chinese, despite murder, rebellion and war, had nevertheless constructed an elegant and expensive pavilion in the shining Parisian microcosm. It was carved in dark red wood, with jade-green tiles and pagoda roofs, and an elegant tea-room. It stood in the exotic section, side by side with a Japanese pagoda and an Indonesian theatre.

  Art Nouveau, the New Art, was paradoxically backward-looking, flirting with the Ancient of Days, the Sphinx, the Chimera, Venus under the Tannenberg, Persian peacocks, melusines and Rhine maidens, along with hairy-legged Pan and draped and dangerous oriental priestesses. Some of its newness derived from the deep dream of the lost past which informed both Burne-Jones’s palely loitering knights and porcelain-fine maidens, and Morris’s sense of saga-scenes and bright embroidered hangings. But it was radically new also, in its use of spinning, coiling, insinuating lines derived from natural forms, its rendering in new metal of tree-shapes newly observed, its abandonment of the solid worth of gold and diamonds for the aesthetic delights of nonprecious metals and semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl, grained wood, amethyst, coral, moonstone. It was an art at once of frozen stillness, and images of rapid movement. It was an art of shadows and glitter that understood the new force that transfigured both the exhibition and the century to come. Electricity.

  The American Henry Adams visited and revisited the Exposition whilst it was open, driven by a precise and ferocious combination of scientific and religious curiosity. He wrote a riddling chapter of The Education of Henry Adams and called it “The Virgin and the Dynamo.” He saw where the centre was, in the gallery of machines, in the dynamos. He began, he wrote, “to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” The dynamo was “but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere that heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight.” But he found himself comparing it as a force-field to the presence of the Virgin, the Goddess, in the great mediaeval cathedrals of France. “Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”

  The dynamo that drove the exhibition was on the ground floor of the Palace of Electricity. At first it failed to work. In front of it was a Château d’Eau, designed to be brilliantly lit by a rainbow of light. There were tiers of fountains, like the fountains at Versailles, and the palace was covered with stained glass and transparent ceramics, surmounted by a statue of the Spirit of Electricity, driving a chariot drawn by hippogryphs. When all this failed to come to life, there was an uneasy black cavern, a gaping hole, at night. But workmen attended to it, oiled it, polished it, stroked it, like a beast being urged out of inertia. Adams was right: a bunch of fresh flowers was placed on the back of the cylinder as an offering. Its pulse was felt as it shuddered into life. And when it worked, it transformed the façades of buildings into rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, and the dark cloth of the night into a tapestry of shimmering threads. The Water Tower ran liquid diamonds, shot with changing opal and garnet and chrysoprase. The Seine itself became a heaving, dancing ribbon of coloured lava, where variegated threads intertwined, sank, and rose again, changed and relumed.

  Wonderful illuminated portals, curving like the vegetation of an artificial paradise, led down to the flashing electric serpent of the new Métro. The whole exhibition was encircled by a moving pavement where citizens could travel at three different speeds, squealing with amazement, clutching each other as they moved from strip to strip. There was incandescent writing in magazines about the “fairy electricity.”

  The Palace of Electricity was set about with warnings. Grand Danger de Mort. It was a death without tooth, claw or crushing. An invisible death, part of an invisible animating force, the new thing in the new century.

  22

  Prosper Cain’s party had rooms in a hotel called Albert, in Montmartre. Cain had work to do—he visited the Bing Pavilion to study the delights of Art Nouveau, and the Petit Palais to look at the rich collection of historic art. He went repeatedly to the German decorative section, where the new elegance of Munich was displayed in rooms decorated by von Stuck and Riemerschmid, in their new young style, the Jugendstil. He went to the Austrian and Hungarian rooms, audaciously swirling with linear curves, round simple but luxurious furniture, with a lurking wickedness and suggestiveness.

  When the young men went out in the morning, ready to get into the omnibus, covered with a striped awning and drawn by four horses, a figure appeared out of a side-alley and raised his hat to them. It was Joachim Susskind, who said he was surprised and delighted to see them there. He himself was attending a congress, but had already visited a great deal—by no means all, that would take months—of the Exposition. He was afraid they would find the German pavilion ostentatious. But there were things from his native Munich of which he was proud.

  Julian thought immediately that Susskind was not there by chance. He was there by arrangement with Charles. Julian’s imaginings were sexual, not political. He considered Susskind’s hay-coloured moustache and did not think it would be pleasant to be kissed by him. He considered Charles’s sharp blond slimness, and decided that Susskind was probably in love with Charles, as teachers tended to be in love with self-assured, eager boys. His smile of greeting had been both self-effacing and hungry, Julian thought, pleased with his own perceptiveness. Because he had been watching Susskind he had not been able to notice whether Charles appeared to be abashed, or confused, or gleeful. When he did look at him, he saw he was blushing, with what was certainly the self-consciousness of having engaged in a subterfuge—but what else was there? Julian was intrigued. But he was more interested in the possibilities this opened for himself.

  Julian asked casually, when they reached the exhibition space, what everyone wanted to see. Tom said he should like to go on the travelling pavement, and ride on the Great Wheel. Charles looked at Susskind and said he would like to see the Hall of Dynamos and the motor cars. Julian said he himself wanted to see the Bing Pavilion, with the decoration which his father had said he must not miss. They agreed to meet later in the day in the Viennese tea-shop and eat cakes.

  When Charles and Joachim Susskind were out of earshot of Julian and Tom, Susskind said, with some excitement, that there was a young woman he wanted Charles to meet.
She was lecturing on anarchy and the sex question. She was here, in Paris, as he was, to attend the Second International Anti-Parliamentary Congress. She was also a delegate to a secret gathering of Malthusians, who wished to discuss birth control, which was outlawed in France. Her name was Emma Goldman. She had come from America, where she was a great Anarchist leader, and she was earning her keep, by showing American tourists round the Exposition. “She will certainly know what we should most like to see and learn about,” said Susskind. “But you must be very discreet, and not repeat what I have told you. I said we would meet her outside the Palace of Woman.”

  Julian was planning a campaign to come close to Tom, without being at all sure what he wanted, finally, to achieve. He was himself very strung up, his nerves full of electricity, a state he intensely enjoyed. He had looked at himself in the hotel bedroom mirror, before they set out, trying to see his body through Tom’s unimaginable eyes. He was slim, and looked agreeably wiry inside his cord jacket and egg-blue shirt. On the other hand he was—small, short—there was no good word for it. He had his Italian ancestors’ olive skin, and dark line of moustache. His eyes were deep-set. His hair was slick, that was how it liked to be. How did he look to Tom, who was red-gold and casual, and sculpted where Julian was drawn with pen and ink?

  Julian was good at being in love. He had needed to know about sex. He had needed, precisely, to know what an emission felt like in contact with another body, as opposed to his own hand and sheet. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being “in love” was the state of unconsummated tension. Public school made one a connoisseur of beautiful boys, boys in surplices with angel-faces, always deliciously veiled in sweat as they toiled after a football or swung a bat, boys anxiously kneeling at the toe of one’s boot, polishing a shoe. The beauty of them was the danger—even more, in some cases, the impossibility—of touching them. Their grave or gentle or mischievous faces hung in the half-dark before the imagination as one wrote one’s clever essay on Plato’s Forms of the Good, or as one snuggled one’s head into one’s solitary pillow and slept. Of course, one had to believe that these lovely creatures were, in potentia, the longed-for intimate friend, from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated. “Love is a standing, or still growing light / And his first moment, after noon, is night.” “What will it be, when that the watery palate tastes indeed / Love’s thrice repured nectar?”

  Did he really want to know?

  He sometimes thought, he chose to love people like Tom, who seemed simple, good in some way, and opaque, so as to preserve some essential loneliness, or solitude, in himself, that he needed more profoundly than any human contact. He liked to make Tom smile. He liked to give him things, and see him flush with pleasure. But he liked this best when he had got back into his solitary bedroom, and could look at himself taking pleasure.

  That was not the morality anyone taught him. Love is the highest thing, the books said, the teachers said. He had to think it must be. Or might be. So he would love Tom, and see how it felt, and suffer, delectably, the distance between them.

  They left the omnibus and stood in a queue in the Porte Binet to buy tickets. They travelled on the moving pavement past various attractions and the windows of Parisian houses, some decorously shuttered, some offering glimpses into foreign drawing rooms and balconies. Each strip of the escalator had regular posts with brass knobs, to steady those changing speed. Women giggled and gripped their skirts as they made the little jump. Gentlemen and pickpockets offered arms to steady them. Julian and Tom, indulging in boyishness, gripped each other’s arms and made several rapid transitions. There were thousands of people, from hundreds of towns and countries, carrying bags of food, elegant canes, parasols, parcels. There was a smell that was foreign. Julian knew it was garlic, added to cheese. Tom didn’t. He sniffed it, like a hunting dog in a field.

  They went on the Great Wheel. They sat side by side in the sunlight in their little cart and rose into the blue sky, next to the erect iron cage of the Eiffel Tower and the belching chimneys of the powerhouse. They saw the river and its bridges, the imaginary palaces along its front, the huge Celestial Globe inside which you could whirl around the zodiac.

  Julian remarked lightly that he was afraid of vertigo. Tom touched him with a reassuring hand, and said that the secret was to look out, not down. He said he was happy up there, and confessed that he was more worried by a kind of choking feeling in crowds. He said he was unsure whether he could ever live in a big city. What did he want to do, Julian asked. They were still mounting. Julian remembered the Donne quotation again. At the very top, at the apex, he should touch Tom. Tom said he liked being up on the downs, and didn’t know what else he might want, though he supposed he had to want to do something. They both laughed at the idea of thinking, up above Paris, in the sky, of being “up” on the “downs.” They began to descend, and at that exact moment Julian swayed against Tom, as if by accident. Tom shrugged comfortably in response. There was no electric prickle.

  Prosper Cain was very busy, on behalf of the Museum, and on his own account. He was exchanging information and advice with the new Austrian Museum of Applied Arts. He was interested in purchasing new metalwork, from the Scandinavians. He was concerned by the enthusiasm of one of the jurors at the Exposition, George Donaldson, who had purchased a collection of examples of the new Art Nouveau furniture, which he was to present to the Victoria and Albert. Cain himself took pleasure in the company of the designers from Austria, Germany and Belgium. The fact that he was a military man produced social awkwardness in certain French contexts. He felt he was judged guilty of the whole military adventure in South Africa, of which in fact, both as a soldier and as a political animal, he disapproved.

  He also had problems with French military men over the Dreyfus affair. It had always seemed likely to him that the unfortunate Jewish officer, condemned six years ago for treachery and sent to Devil’s Island, was innocent. With the fury of his supporters, and the investigations of the brave, and the suicide of his principal accuser, it became a certainty that he himself had been horribly betrayed. Last year, a decrepit shadow of a man, he had been brought back and retried. And found guilty again. This had appalled Cain as much as it had appalled Dreyfus’s French supporters. Dreyfus had now been offered a pardon, to avoid an international incident, or national violence in the streets, on the occasion of the Exposition. That was rich, Cain thought, a pardon for a crime he had never committed.

  Tensions ran high between the French and the English. The French published wicked caricatures of the Widow at Windsor, resembling a demented and malign spider or witch with bulging eyes. There was talk of international tension leading to a war between France and Great Britain. Cain smiled at the fierce dedication of a vase by Gallé, mounted in silver, bearing a ragged flamboyant iris in appliqué, and a quotation from Zola on Dreyfus. “Nous vaincrons. Dieu nous menè.” A similar vase had been presented to La Bernhardt, who was also a passionate Dreyfusard.

  Julian had arranged to meet his father in the Bing Pavilion, and went early, so he could saunter with Tom through its delights. Julian was suspicious of English aesthetes. Wilde he found silly and sordid, without knowing his work very well, and Aubrey Beardsley delighted and alarmed him with glimpses of a malign naughtiness which he liked to see but did not wish to share. He did not know, at nineteen, who he was going to be, and was acutely aware of this. But he was not going in for mascara, pot pourri, and green chrysanthemums. Like Kaiser Wilhelm and Prosper Cain, Julian secretly liked the mixture of opulence and severity in a well-cut military uniform. But he had no intention of joining the army, that was one thing he knew. At the Exposition he discovered a European self who needed to think precisely about the new European elegance. He found his velvet jacket sitting more sharply on his shoulders. He thought he might buy new shoes.

/>   Siegfried Bing, from Hamburg, had introduced Japanese art to French connoisseurs, and had a gallery in the rue de Provence where he showed very modern paintings—not only the Impressionists, but the Symbolists and the dreamers. His pavilion was a make-believe small mansion. It was later transported to Copenhagen. This was another aspect of the Exposition that resembled Russian fairytales of flying houses, or Arabian tales of palaces transported overnight to lands beyond the oceans and deserts. This sense was in turn made more intense by the Palace of Mirrors, which from inside was a false infinity of exotic Middle Eastern vistas, in which you yourself were endlessly repeated from every angle, over and under, advancing and receding, or hanging in the void. And as well as that, there was the Upside Down Palace, in which, as in a tale for small children, you could plod across the ceiling and stare up/down on the tables and chairs. On its façade was a fresco showing two darkly slender young females with black-gloved fingers, fine waists, rounded small buttocks visible under their clinging garments, and swirling skirts or peacock tails. They stood in front of a fairytale house in a forest. They looked back invitingly over their shoulders. Julian was unprepared for Tom’s comment, which was to regret that his mother couldn’t see them, she would have liked them so much. They had transparent shawls floating like wings from their shoulders.