French Rhapsody

by Antoine Laurain

  He pulled a digital Dictaphone out of his pocket and repeated the phrase, then nodded in a satisfied way.

  ‘I record everything; I always have this with me, this digital little gizmo. I record my interviews with journalists, and all my telephone conversations. As soon as I speak to someone, I start recording.’

  ‘Are you recording us?’ asked Alain nervously.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Vaugan, shrugging, ‘it’s not the same with you. You’re not dangerous, you’re nice – you’re an old mate. And I’m going to do something for you. Kevin!’

  One of the young men got down from his bar stool and came over.

  ‘Get me two invitations to the Zénith for my good friend. We’re launching the new party next week. There are hardly any places left,’ said Vaugan proudly. ‘Oh yes, we can fill the Zénith, no problem.’ He gave a little click of the tongue. ‘This is just the beginning.’

  *

  A few minutes later, after Alain had gone, the communications adviser came and sat in the chair he had vacated. He started to talk about the suit Vaugan should appear in: something very smart, dark grey with a light-grey tie, similar to what a banker might wear, but not exactly the same. A suit that said, ‘Here is someone influential from a major city.’ And lace-up shoes were essential, not loafers. Vaugan listened without really hearing. He was distracted by the letter that had been lost by the postal service and then reappeared. He couldn’t help seeing himself in a vast dwelling in the LA Heights. With dozens of jukeboxes, bass guitars hanging on the walls, a magnificent swimming pool and deep sofas. It was a haven of peace when he was not on a world tour; he had gone much further than the Holograms and had played with numerous famous groups and artists. He was a renowned and respected bassist, as good as Pastorius and Tony Levin, maybe even Roger Waters. He had become a sort of myth. Sometimes, but rarely, he would give an interview to Rock & Folk or Rolling Stone from beside his swimming pool or in the bar of a grand hotel.

  ‘So,’ said the communications adviser, beaming, ‘what do you say? It’s going to be great, isn’t it?’

  Vaugan looked at him, wondering how much he paid this buffoon. There had been two things he had been determined on from the start: he wanted a big stage, high up, that he could speak from with a clip-on microphone, and even more importantly, he wanted his appearance to be heralded by the music from Rocky III, ‘Eye of the Tiger’.

  Meanwhile, Alain was seated on a café terrace with an espresso. He was watching the winter sun setting over the buildings as it bathed them in purple light. A man in a loden coat and elegant little tweed hat with a feather, like hunters wear, came and sat down at a neighbouring table and ordered coffee. He removed his suede gloves when the waiter brought him the cup and had a sip before he too was lost in contemplation of the sunset. Without taking his eyes from the buildings, he said, ‘You seem like a nice man, Doctor.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Alain. ‘Do we know each other?’

  ‘No,’ replied the other, apparently regretfully, ‘but can one ever really know another person? Restif de La Bretonne used to say, “When you look at someone, you only see half of what is there.”’

  There was silence between them and the man turned to Alain, fixing him with his pale-blue eyes, a smile on his lips.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Alain. ‘Special Branch? Homeland Security?’

  The man’s expression became nostalgic. ‘Special Branch, counterintelligence, the secret services … All that was over a long time ago. Vaugan gave you something – would you be so kind as to show it to me, Doctor?’

  At first Alain wanted to refuse, feeling slightly indignant. There was, after all, no obligation for him to obey. But the entirely courteous way the man had formulated his request somehow made him want to acquiesce. He took the tickets from his coat pocket and held them out.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man as he took them.

  He looked at them for a moment. ‘First row, prime position. Were you planning to attend?’

  ‘Who knows?’ replied Alain, defiantly.

  The man nodded calmly then tore the tickets in two.

  ‘Now, hang on,’ said Alain. But that had no effect at all on the man in the little hat, who conscientiously finished his task, letting the scraps of paper fly off in the evening wind before saying, ‘There are some excellent programmes on the television that evening.’

  He took a ten-euro note from his wallet, tucked it under the saucer of his coffee cup. ‘The coffee’s on me.’

  He got up, pulled on his suede gloves and bowed slightly. ‘Delighted to have made your acquaintance.’

  As he walked away, Alain wanted to shout after him, ‘Hey! Where are you going? Come back!’ But the words froze on his lips. The figure in the loden coat was met by a white car that came to a stop at his side. Alain thought it was an Audi, or maybe a Mercedes. The man got in and the car disappeared into the traffic.

  Pot-au-feu

  ‘Who are we kidding? I look like a total idiot,’ JBM complained, pointing at the wooden spoon in his hand.

  ‘You don’t look like an idiot, JBM; you look like an ordinary Frenchman.’

  As he stirred the bubbling pot-au-feu his cook had prepared for him, JBM looked up at Domitile. He had put on an apron, rolled up his shirtsleeves and taken off his cufflinks and Breguet chronometer watch.

  ‘But I’m not an ordinary Frenchman. I’m one of the richest men in France,’ replied JBM.

  ‘Yes, but people don’t know that and, if they find out, we’ll just say it’s not true, the figure’s been exaggerated and, anyway, the fact that you’re a man of means and yet still cook for yourself shows just what a good guy you are. Look at this kitchen,’ said Domitile, spreading her arms wide, ‘these lovely cupboards, spices, vegetables, this sunlight; everyone’s going to want to come to your place and enjoy JBM’s pot-au-feu! People will fantasise about you, women especially – you’re the ideal man!’ she squealed. ‘The bon vivant who cooks the Sunday lunch while Madame lies on the sofa reading the Femina supplement and getting texts from her grown-up children …’

  ‘Give it a rest, will you, Domitile? All this nonsense is giving me a headache,’ JBM hissed under his breath.

  ‘Look happy,’ ordered the photographer. ‘Smile; that’s it, perfect. Let’s do another one. Can you take a spoonful of stock and give it a taste?’

  For half an hour, JBM had been stirring a now-overcooked pot-au-feu under the spotlights set up in the kitchen, to the constant flash of the camera. The domestic staff – the cook who had actually made the pot-au-feu, the butler and the housekeeper – had withdrawn discreetly to the doorway, where they stood watching Monsieur pretend to be an enthusiastic weekend cook, while doing their best not to smirk or nudge each other. Monsieur, who couldn’t boil an egg and was barely capable of pouring himself a Nespresso from the machine.

  ‘Who do you think I am, Alain Ducasse?’ JBM said with irritation in his voice.

  ‘He’s right. Taste the stock – there you go, excellent. Look this way, well done … that’s perfect. Just like that! Fantastic! Smile, that’s wonderful! That’s exactly what we’re looking for. We believe it, we’re there with you, we’re all going to eat your pot-au-feu!’ squawked Domitile.

  After the photo with the expertly diced vegetables, during which JBM had almost sliced through his thumb, and the one in the garden of the mansion in which he had had to place one hand on Blanche’s shoulder and point up at the sky, with Blanche smiling up at whatever he was drawing her attention to – a pigeon, a plane, a fly, whatever; it was about them sharing the simple pleasures of the moment, while looking symbolically towards the future – and now they had reached the ‘Pot-au-feu sequence’, the last before they were due to leave for Gare de Lyon to capture the shot of JBM in front of the railway lines that was sure to be a minor masterpiece. ‘A six-page feature in Match is worth going to a bit of effort for,’ as Domitile said. Blanche had not taken part in the ‘culinary moment’, but had said go
odbye to JBM and gone to Roissy. She was meeting some of her staff there to fly to New York for a few days to attend the annual board meeting of Caténac’s American business.

  JBM took advantage of a break in proceedings to join Aurore in the sitting room, where she was watching Vaugan on BFM-TV promoting the rally that was being held that night. He had swapped his usual black T-shirt for a suit and tie which looked tailor-made.

  ‘I’ve got a message for the people of this country. I’m on a mission. I didn’t set up France République to line my own pockets.’

  ‘A party of the extreme right,’ the journalist immediately bounced back.

  Vaugan brushed the comment aside and went on to dismiss the entire political establishment and the elite énarques who ran the country. He proposed that their Alma Mater, the École Nationale d’Administration, be abolished and why not knock the building down too, since ‘there aren’t enough green spaces in our cities’.

  Many people considered Vaugan to be a ‘useful idiot’, but JBM did not share that view. Instead, he saw him as one of those prophets of doom who spring up before a catastrophe.

  The internet had allowed all kinds of fanatics to build themselves a reputation, or construct an entire persona. Through social networks and other free platforms, they could spread their ideas among a not inconsiderable number of followers, whose identities were hard to uncover. Back in the other world – the world before the digital revolution of the late twentieth century – these false prophets simply could not have existed. They would have had to rely on countless connections in order to get a pamphlet put out secretly and read by almost no one, or perhaps have had to self-publish and distribute their writings among a small circle confined to a couple of bistros and associations. They would never have found their way into the newspapers, still less onto TV screens. The creation of a parallel space stretching right round the globe had allowed Andy Warhol’s prediction to come true: everyone really did have a chance at fifteen minutes of fame; singers, comedians and aspiring film stars had stepped into the breach, and ran their small businesses via paid websites and the various consumer products they offered for sale: CDs or DVDs, VOD, T-shirts, mugs, books, you name it. The lucky ones were picked up by producers and put to the test in front of an audience and cameras. Only a handful of them survived their emergence from the internet fishbowl and adapted to the oxygen of the real world, like fish emerging from Jurassic lakes with feet for walking on dry land. The best-case scenario was that one of them might go on to enjoy a career in pop for a few years. The worst would see a silly and narcissistic shampoo girl living the dream on reality TV shows and in celebrity magazines, before being spat out by the machine like a spent fuse.

  And there was a darker element on the margins. Version 2.0 of the world had opened up to the new preachers. Whether religious or otherwise, they were all out to initiate a growing number of non-believers into the mysteries of modern life, to which they claimed to hold the key. Jihadists, fascists, conspiracy theorists, survivalists, anti-Zionists and other self-proclaimed experts mixed together a murky cocktail of political theories and alternative solutions. These new heretics were everywhere on the Net, and swept across the entire political and religious spectrum – aside from the Buddhists, who advocated a kind of good-natured shamanism that was close to Swiss-style neutrality.

  Vaugan had successfully jostled for his position at the furthest end of the far right several years before, and had no intention of giving it up. He kept a weekly current affairs vlog on his group’s website, in which he would appear alone in front of the camera, giving his point of view, his analyses and solutions with total impunity. He had come to the attention of the press and even TV execs, who had cautiously invited him to appear on a few late-night programmes. Vaugan had been smart enough to tone it down for the cameras, coming across as fairly level-headed and even quite smiley, like an ex-army uncle who initially seems scary but over the course of lunch turns out to be quite nice. When he was confronted with videos showing him ranting into the camera, he simply explained he was a hot-blooded man and that was a French quality. Vaugan had succeeded in bringing together disillusioned people of every stripe, from the most radical elements of the extreme right to Bible-bashers, by way of the dejected long-term unemployed, the angry, the paranoid, the bitter and the lost. Which, come to think of it, was quite a lot of people.

  ‘Doing a good job, isn’t he?’

  JBM and Aurore turned towards Domitile, who had just entered the living room.

  ‘He has a communications adviser,’ she went on, ‘David Bachau, one of my protégés. If I may say, that’s why you need PR-ing too, JBM, and you don’t have the pupil, but the master,’ she said proudly, placing her immaculately manicured hand on his shoulder.

  ‘So Vaugan has the cash to pay for communications advisers?’ JBM asked quietly, turning the TV off with the remote.

  ‘Apparently he has a large personal fortune,’ said Domitile.

  ‘A personal fortune? Are you kidding? His father was the local cobbler in Juvisy and his mother was a typist. He didn’t have a sou to his name …’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Domitile asked, surprised.

  JBM shrugged.

  ‘I must have read it at the barber’s …’

  One of Domitile’s assistants came to fetch her to discuss something to do with camera settings for the shoot at Gare de Lyon.

  ‘Did you really know him?’ asked Aurore.

  ‘Yes. In another life, he was an exceptional bassist.’

  ‘A bassist?’

  ‘Yes, he played bass guitar in a rock band, a new-wave pop band; well, cold wave to be precise. Stan Lepelle, the artist, was in the band too. The guitarist is a doctor now, I think, like his father. I financed the demo tape, Pierre wrote the lyrics … Sadly it didn’t come to anything, but it was good. I’ve often told myself that group was my one real failure. The only thing I’ve backed that didn’t work out.’

  ‘Did you sing vocals for them?’

  ‘No, not me. That was a woman.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. Then he went quiet.

  ‘I’ll go and see how they’re getting on,’ said Aurore, and she went off towards the garden.

  JBM’s gaze rested on the black leather bag that held Pierre’s urn. He had gone to fetch it from the bank the day before. The previous week, he had stumbled on an article about the Désert de Retz, a once privately owned garden on the edge of the Forêt de Marly filled with bizarre and esoteric-looking structures, and it had seemed to match Pierre’s wish to have his ashes scattered in a ‘place of beauty and history’. What was more, Pierre had often talked about this mythical place, the last flight of fancy of a misanthropic aesthete aristocrat, unveiled just a few years before the French Revolution. JBM would head over there later that afternoon. The park-keeper had granted his request, despite the fact it was against the law to scatter ashes in a public park – JBM had offered a substantial donation towards the restoration of park buildings and upon handing over the cheque became a ‘five-star friend’ of the garden.

  ‘Where do we go when we die, Pierre?’ JBM whispered. He got no reply. ‘Sometimes I can feel you near me, sense your presence and the smell of your cigars … and sometimes I can’t. Shit,’ he mumbled, leaning forward on the sofa, ‘why did you leave me? Send me a sign, anything …’

  Aurore took a step back, and then another. He hadn’t noticed her come back into the living room. JBM smoothed back his hair and stared straight ahead. He sniffed, threw a cushion against the sofa in a fit of rage, and took several deep breaths. Aurore waited a few seconds and then knocked at the glass pane of the door. JBM turned round.

  ‘Come in.’

  His expression was almost calm.

  ‘Shall we go then?’ he said, getting to his feet and picking up the black leather bag as they headed out to the car.

  ‘He’s livid,’ she whispered in his ear, nodding in the direction o
f Max, the driver.

  Max was standing beside a Renault, arms crossed and chin raised, glaring at Domitile, who was on the phone. He took their bags – except for the one with Pierre’s ashes, which JBM kept with him – placed them in the boot and snatched the Louis Vuitton handbag from Domitile as she handed it to him. Then he got behind the wheel and slammed his door shut. The ‘confiscation’, as he put it, of the Lincoln had been taken as a personal affront. Domitile had decided it would be a good idea if for the time being JBM swapped his American car for a French one. For the sake of a quiet life with Blanche, JBM had agreed to everything, though he fully intended to take the Lincoln back as soon as ‘all the fuss’ was over.

  Le Train Bleu

  The nicest and most cheering thing about Domitile was that everything was always ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’, ‘spot on’. People in comms must have been raised in special nurseries; they had surely been drip-fed transfusions of optimism and self-confidence from the moment they were born. Indeed, perhaps the very purpose of their job was to try to pass on this fabulous fluid to their clients. The whole time JBM had been standing on this platform at Gare de Lyon, Domitile had been as excitable as a small child. Placing him at the end of the platform and getting his picture taken seemed to please her as much as if she were a little girl opening a Barbie doll’s house under the Christmas tree. She marched about in her stilettos, showering JBM with a stream of pointers as the shots flashed up on the preview screen: ‘So handsome, amazing, spot on, look up a bit.’

  ‘How long is this going to go on? We’ve got a lot of work to do,’ said Aurore.

  ‘Well, so have I,’ replied Domitile. ‘I’m working for France here.’

  As she stopped and glanced at Aurore, who was staring at her blankly, she reminded herself that the young woman she was talking to was not a nobody, but someone who had taken up an entire page of the last issue of Forbes as part of its ‘Tycoon’s Angels’ piece; she wasn’t the work experience girl on photocopying duty, but a PA whom many of the world’s top business people would happily poach for a six-figure salary.