The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]

by Michael Moorcock

  Paris has been a grand courtesan for hundreds of years. She has suffered indignities (what harlot has not?) and even known periods of enforced virtue, domestic dullness, of half-hearted remorse; but she has recovered herself soon enough, flashed her scarlet petticoats, put on her most ravishing hat, displayed herself in all her well cut coquetry with its tiny betraying touch of vulgarity, the suggestion of a bawdy pout; but how outraged she is when her virtue is questioned! How she shrieks and threatens the Law. Moreover, if she fails to receive satisfaction by this means, she will forget her ladylike pretensions altogether. She will rush to attack. Yet possibly the person she threatens refuses to be frightened by her: whereupon she becomes her soft-voiced, placatory, eyelash-fluttering, melting professional self, full of crooned apologies and endearments, offering comforting luxury in her arms. Later, if she feels she can succeed without detection, she will murder her supposed conqueror while he sleeps, strip him naked and toss his body from her carriage into the river.

  Paris is a wistful, acquisitive lullaby. She is able to pretend to good manners with all the skill of the truly arrogant. She preserves her looks at any cost, whether to friend or foe. When she has fallen to an enemy it has been with a glance over her shoulder, to make a virtue of surrender: it is hard, but what else can I do? I am helpless to defend myself. This harlot is a screen upon which men project their supreme fantasies, invest her with qualities she does not actually possess, which no city could ever possess, but which their imagination demands should exist. And women are defeated by her, too. She takes them by the arm, she shows them the secrets of her beauty, she pretends to make them confidantes while plotting their profound destruction. Occasionally, if her plans all fail, she will let herself go. Her hair falls prettily out of place. She slumps. Her little dress speaks of impoverished courage, she sings with hopeless, sardonic determination of betrayal, death and the end of romance. And so again, with this affectation of vulnerability, she wins sentimental allies, makes new conquests, until it is safe to be her old, jaunty, grasping self again. She knows how much to drink and exactly what she should eat. She is dedicated to appearances above principle, graciously applauding the appropriate lie while impatiently frowning upon inexpert honesty. And how she loves to entertain soldiers; preferably her own, but any soldier will do. She has a relish for gold braid and silver medals; the sniff of wounds and gunpowder from a safe distance is sufficient to excite her without alarming her; the brave sound of a marching band, the curl of an unblooded banner, the prance of the parade-ground stallion are as good as cash in hand, for she knows the weakness of soldiers and can price them out to the last sou. She loves fame. She pursues lions. And if no lions exist, she will manufacture some out of whole cloth. Where there are inflated egos, there are wallets to maintain them. And equally she worships intrigue; the more secrets there are, the more golden louis there are to buy silence. So her politics are conducted in hidden chambers, in bedrooms, in alleys and well guarded houses, while the rhetoric of her deputies is excessive in its glorious idealism, its talk of honour, glory and morality. Paris does not possess the shallow cynicism of the wounded young; frequently she will feign a horror of cynicism, make a huge protest in favour of the virtues of sentiment and humanity, but by her actions, like any very successful harlot, she is actually cynical to the core, and the only value she places on affection is what she can store in her private safe. Paris will rob the stranger more prettily, if she has to, than any other city. She begins by taking your money and then, if she finds it is worth something to her, your heart, your talent, finally your life. In contrast to Paris, all other cities are peopled with amateurs. She looks upon rivals with contempt or loathing. If they are brash or obvious or crude, she is offended, fearing their bad name might attach itself to her. She does not wish the game to be given away. She has been called an aristocrat, a madonna, an angel. She believes one day she will wake to discover she no longer need maintain a pose and will overnight have become a genuine gentlewoman, a dignified dowager like Vienna or Prague, able at long last to age gracefully, her power gained not by means of blackmail and flattery, but from the world’s respect. It is impossible. She knows it is impossible, but she clings to the hope as another might cling to her religion.

  In Paris rather than in Rome one discovers the final expression of refined Catholicism. The Italians are notoriously careless of their history; they once ruled the world and know they could do so again if they cared enough; but are too easily bored with power. Even Mussolini began handing over the reins of his nation almost as soon as he gained them. His death was a tragedy. He had already shrugged and walked away. He might have wound up living a happy life, running a shop next door to mine, perhaps a little restaurant or a dry cleaner’s. And Rome is a fierce mother. When she tries to sell her favours she stands on a broken monument lifting her skirts and shouting for customers, just as if she were hawking hot chestnuts or ice cream. She has neither the patience nor the ambition for suggestive pouts or coy glances. She would rather get it over with and have something approaching a good time while she did it. She is and always has been more pagan than Catholic. To her, religion is worthless unless full-blooded and passionate. French priests, famous for their intellects, their cunning manipulations, their calculating and controlled ferocity, are symbolised best by Cardinal Richelieu who foreshadowed Lenin, a fanatic willing to destroy any individual who, by his very individuality, threatened the abstract idea of the State, his actual religion: himself. By definition a dedicated Catholic seeks power: every law his Church maintains speaks of it. The demand of women to multiply has the twofold effect of subjugating wives and increasing the numbers of children over whom power can be exercised. How beautifully the French have shaped their religion to their needs. It is a religion which makes no real demands upon its followers, save that they maintain appearances. There are certain prices to pay for the continuation of the proper façade: the occasional discreet penance. But God, to them, is an eighteenth-century Grand Seigneur, turning a blind eye to any crime so long as His own convenience is undisturbed. He possesses the practical rationality of the merchant, like so many French philosophers, and keeps neat accounts. And He would rather cathedrals be restored and decorated and organs not play out of tune, than have vulgar people throw themselves upon the floors of His houses in a flurry of unseemly hysteria. The French have refined their religion to its highest possible point. The Italians have left theirs alone in all its half-pagan incongruity, while the Spanish, who never quite lost the habit of human sacrifice, are barely restrained from soaking His altars in the blood of bulls and goats.

  With what chill and lofty dedication did Richelieu destroy the Huguenots! Probably not a single expression of emotion ever passed his lips. He understood their point of view. But the Spanish Inquisition pursued its butchery with genuine lust, with hatred and hot cruelty, glad of the opportunity to fulfil its love for ritual murder; honouring its dark God with the screams of a million souls in the extremes of anguish; sending the stench of burning flesh to grace His quivering, bovine nostrils, for it is Moloch Himself who hides behind the mask of the Spanish Jehovah. Here lurks Carthage and all the sons of Shem, the descendants of Babylon, Assyria, Canaan, Aramea, Arabia, Ethiopia and Israel. The bull-gods grumble and prowl through the streets of Barcelona still.

  The knives of the French are needles to prick a man’s life out of him, inch by tiny inch. They pretend friendship. They made me the toast of the town. I was one of their lions for a while. But Parisians only pretend to accept the manifestations of progress; to them these things are toys. One has to make bright, noisy, colourful things to impress them. Paris has a whore’s taste in trinkets. Santos-Dumont became their idol because his balloons and airships were gaudy and buzzed and because his attempts at powered flight were spectacular, highly publicised, conducted in machines of multicoloured silk! Much the same can be said of all their flyers, who had dash and filigree and well cut uniforms, but were rather poor at application, like the show caval
ry of the nineteenth century. They were interested, as always, in appearances rather than pure science. To prove myself to them I was forced to become something of a Barnum (one of their favourite Americans). I was very quickly a darling of the Left Bank. I met every artist and intellectual worthy of the name. I was courted and proposed to by both men and women. I smoked opium in the houses of fashionable hostesses and sniffed ‘coco’ in Lesbian garrets. They took me up. I was their Monsieur ‘P’, their ‘Professeur Russe’, their ‘Petit Colonel’. Esmé and I were Hansel and Gretel wandering into the Palace of Versailles. We were overwhelmed. From Santucci’s friends, the exiled anarchists called Peronini, both of whom sported dyed red hair and masculine evening dress at all hours of the day, we moved into the company of criminals and radicals. I shook hands with Lamont himself. I shared a table with Antoinette Ferraud and Wanda Sylvano at Laperousse. The great astronomer Lalande would lunch regularly with us at the Café Royal and there I met his cousin Apollinaire, just returned from four years in the Foreign Legion. But for all they protested undying friendship and admiration of my creative genius, not one could help us in our efforts to reach England.

  By the end of two weeks my optimism was waning. The British Embassy refused me the most ordinary kinds of information; the Russian émigré organisations could promise me nothing and had no concrete news of Kolya. Paris was awash with Russians, many of whom had credentials even better than my own, and the authorities were sick of us. Esmé, I could tell, began to have doubts about me, particularly when we were forced to move from our pension and take two miserable rooms in a street little better than an alley in Montparnasse. Rue de la Huchette consisted of a number of seedy bars and so-called ‘dancings’; there were cheap fishmongers, butchers and sellers of mouldy fruit and vegetables. Whores infested it. The alley was a rendezvous for every clochard on the Left Bank; at least one of the buildings was completely derelict, taken over by tramps and beggars of the worst sort. Our rooms were nearby, at the top of a crumbling house, scarcely any better than the squalor from which I had, in Galata, removed my Esmé. I was conscious she must be thinking this. The only advantage to our quarters was that they were high above the noise of the street. Esmé at first made the best she could of it, even sweeping and tidying and cleaning, but she quickly became depressed and lassitude set in. She implored me to spend more and more time outside, in the lively company of our new friends, inhabitants of the Montparnasse and Montmartre cafés, who at least were always generous with their wine. I think they meant well, those who swore they could provide Esmé with proper papers. They took photographs; they examined my own Russian documents. They claimed friendships with the highest and lowest: a master forger in St Germain, the secretary to the British Ambassador. But they were useless. I hated to be so dependent on them. There were no easy engineering jobs for me in Paris as there had been in Kiev or Pera. The French Army had disbursed thousands of half-trained jobbing mechanics upon the nation and most of those could find no work. My only hope lay in finding a backer for one of my designs. I knew it had to be an invention to impress the light-minded Parisians, something which would seem sensational to them. So I said I intended to build a great airliner able to fly to America with a hundred passengers in record time.

  Esmé begged me to be cautious. ‘You have no plans for such a ship, Maxim! We must not attract the police.’

  I reassured her. I laughed loudly. ‘What can the police do? Prove I am not a legitimate inventor? My little dove, if I get a bite - then it will be the work of a few hours to draw up the plans. In fact, if it will improve your state of mind, I’ll start at once.’

  I began to mention my invention around the cafés. I spoke of the enterprise’s automatic success, how huge fortunes would be made from it. ‘Indeed, it must be considered as a sound commercial venture and nothing else,’ I would say.

  American tourists had virtually taken over Montmartre and the Champs Elysees. The faster they could be brought in, and in the greatest numbers, the better for everyone, I said. Tourism would from now on become one of the main sources of any great city’s revenue.

  By pawning my fur coat I paid for new visiting cards advertising The Franco-American Aerial Navigation Company and these I judiciously handed out at every sensible opportunity. My reputation slowly infected the Parisian consciousness. Many said they already knew of Professor Pyatnitski, the Russian aircraft expert, the same boy genius who had built Kiev’s Purple Ray and single-handedly held off the Red Cavalry. One of Lalande’s journalist friends interviewed me for his newspaper and in due course a large piece appeared about me. It exaggerated, but in my favour. I was described as ‘Le Quichotte Cossack’, a man of science and a man of action combined, an adventurer to rival Munchausen. I still have the cutting. It is from Le Review Coucou for 15th September 1920. This was by no means the only publicity I received. Everywhere toasted me in print.

  My chief fear at the time was not that I should fail to survive but that Esmé would become bored and disenchanted. I had, after all, failed miserably to keep my wonderful promises. We were overly dependent on others for our entertainment. Since Rome, she had developed a profound craving for the cinema and the money was not always available to pay for the latest Pickford or Sennett. As my anxieties increased I paradoxically grew plump on the free dinners supplied by bohemian friends. What was worse, Esmé felt ashamed of her clothes. Even Paris’s artists had a certain style and their women looked elegant no matter how eccentric their frocks, and try as she might Esmé could not emulate them. I assured her she looked wonderfully attractive to me, but women never trust their lovers in these matters.

  Meanwhile I persisted in my enquiries about Kolya. I was discovering Paris to be a city of people who cannot bear to say they do not know something. So many pretended to have heard of him; a dozen Russian exiles claimed to have met him in some nearby thoroughfare or to have dined with him only a night or two earlier, but most of these turned out to be rogues, only interested in getting money from me. Possibly because our Russian nobility had always looked to France for its manners and its language, Paris seemed to have almost as many émigrés as Constantinople. Russian restaurants were in vogue. Russian artists gave exhibitions of their garish paintings. Russian dancers shocked a sophisticated world with bizarre choreography and costumes, with hideous music. Those very elements of decadence which ushered the triumph of Lenin were now, like dangerous spoors, infecting France. As a result - and who could blame them? - Parisians became wary of us. I had made an initial mistake in admitting my nationality. I should have been better off if I had claimed to be a Jew or an Egyptian! Either I was besieged by bluestockings telling me soberly how much they ‘sympathised with your country’s terrible plight’ or I and my fellows were regarded as members of some gigantic circus come to town merely for the purpose of entertaining bored sensation-seekers.

  Paris will seize on any passing fashion. I heard only recently that her latest craze is American comic-strips. The Minister of Culture awards prizes to the illustrator of Little Orphan Annie while Paris’s municipal authorities renamed the Avenue Roosevelt. Now it is Boulevard du Batman. So thoroughly do these modern French make nonsense of any claim to cultural superiority! They imitate the worst American and English pop music, the worst cheap fiction, the worst films. They presumably identify this trash with a vitality they themselves lost over half a century ago. I had hoped De Gaulle would pull his country together (though he seemed a pompous dullard when I met him in 1943). His reign is marked by student riots and an increase in violent pornography. He failed to subdue Algeria as he failed to put his harlot capital in her place. (More sinister rumours concerning his race and real loyalties I discount for lack of evidence. It is significant, however, that he proved inept at reducing Moslem power abroad yet thinks nothing of welcoming the Arab and the Turk to his capital! As a rational man I refuse credence to the conspiracy theories so prevalent these days amongst Western Reds. The truth is that the real conspiracy has been hatching for cen
turies, so perverting the Christian world it is nowadays barely recognised!)

  Our material circumstances grew worse and worse. Esmé wept at the grey sheets, the filthy windows. She said we should never have left Rome. Italians were certainly more generous than the French. The news from Russia was appalling. Our loyalist armies, pushed back at every turn, received scant help from the Allies, now involved with the Turkish question. Newcomers from Southern Russia, questioned by me for news of my mother, my friends, had nothing to offer. The poor souls were still dazed, still ‘within the nightmare’. It seemed as dangerous to try suddenly to wake them as it was to wake a somnambulist. There were plenty of Russian language newspapers of all political colours, from rabidly monarchist to violently nihilist, reporting opinion rather than fact. Russian publishing companies and Russian information centres, together with certain cafés operated and patronised entirely by Russians, dealt chiefly in gossip and blind hope. These exiles and their Berlin counterparts were the lucky refugees. Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands were crushed into civilian concentration camps, dying of disease or sheer despair. Even amongst these pathetic refugees Lenin and Trotski had their supporters. Though the appalling consequences were visible everywhere, French socialists plotted a similar fate for their own nation! Perhaps resistance to all this would have been stronger if our newspapers had not published true stories of atrocities so ghastly the average Parisian could not accept them, dismissing them as partisan lies. I insisted they were true, for I had seen such things with my own eyes. I had suffered at the hands of Red irregulars, barely escaping with my life! But I soon learned to say nothing. During that everlasting, frenetic post-War party, people hated you if you spoke of death and terror (or even less dramatic realities). All they wanted was the latest American jazz, the newest dances, the most outrageous fashions. The heroes of the War were already forgotten. Sweating Negro banjo players were hailed in their place. And when the cost of these fresh sensations proved too high, they demanded money from an exhausted Germany! (In due course Germans grew tired of such demands. They marched back into the city, whereupon Parisians merely shrugged, doubled the price of drinks to German soldiers, and danced on.)