by Paul Nizan
— We’ve still got fine weather ahead: the glass is set fair.
— But it’s thundery, said the young woman. I don’t know if you’re like me, Madame Lucienne, but it makes a person all tense. If you ran a hand through my hair, it would crackle like the fur on a cat’s back.
Laforgue asked for a telephone number that did not exist.
— There’s no reply, said the cloakroom lady.
— That doesn’t surprise me, said Laforgue.
The woman had applied powder, rouge and – after spitting on a little brush – mascara. She smiled at Laforgue and started off ahead of him; on the steps of the narrow, winding staircase she asked him:
— Is tonight the night, then?
Laforgue was standing three steps below her and, at the level of his eyes, could see a belly which bulged slightly beneath the black crêpe-de-Chine of her dress.
— That’s just what I was wondering, he replied. But we’d better make it some other day, the weather’s not right, the glass is set too fair.
— It’s a shame, she said, we’d have been good together. You’ll regret it, and as for me, I’ll have been downstairs for nothing.
— You’ll have a drink all the same, won’t you? said Laforgue.
They sat down at a table in the café’s deserted interior: the percolator hissed over the till-lady’s head, the waiter was nodding – they woke him up. Through the open window they could see a row of necks that told a lot about their owners’ faces. The woman drank green peppermint cordial and began talking, and since he had followed her for the sake of one action alone, Laforgue began to caress her knees; then he rose and rejoined his companions.
— You were hitting it off? asked Bloyé.
— As you say, replied Laforgue. She was a woman with a thirst, especially for affection; she was tender; she was just getting round to making plans for the future. One Sunday, she was saying, we might go and see my little daughter, she’s with a wet-nurse near Feucherolles, perhaps you know it, you get out at Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, beyond Marly-le-Roi, you must like children. A fine Sunday was in the making – for someone fond of children, canaries and cats.
When it was almost midnight Rosenthal left, since his home was far away from that neighbourhood, at La Muette, where people live in over-large stone shells, on streets as clean as the avenues in cemeteries where plots are leased in perpetuity.
Rosenthal, as he stood on the platform of the AX carrying him from the Jardin des Plantes towards the Gare de Passy, was thinking furiously about the potent domain of families. Since he had been breathing that La Muette air (no match for the breeze wafting at midnight over the paulownias of Parc Montsouris, but still . . .) for twenty-three years now, he had the wherewithal to fill the time of his homeward journeys with childhood memories: the gatherings of nannies and nurses on the lawns of La Muette, round perambulators drawn up in a circle like the wagons of nomads none too sure about the darkness; the games with the children in the Bois who play in white gloves, who play without disarranging their silken hair; and later, after a day at Janson, the walks in Allée des Acacias or Allée de Longchamp thinking about Odette de Crécy, and the Sunday-morning girls beneath the flowering chestnuts on the avenue in the Bois when everything is redolent of spring, petrol, horses and women.
There is more than one Jewish quarter in Paris. The 16th arrondissement was not the one where Bernard Rosenthal would most readily have chosen to live, but each time he thought of Rue Cloche-Perce and Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, that was not possible either: the corkscrew ringlets of the latest immigrants from Galicia did not strike him as much less revolting than the Charitable Works of the Rothschild family; and he did not think a leap from the twentieth century and La Muette into the sixteenth century and Vilna or Warsaw was such a brilliant solution.
When a young French bourgeois like Laforgue is seized by a desire to rebel against the condition his class imposes upon him, he experiences less complex problems in making the break: the race and its mythologies, the complicities of church, clan and charity, do not long mask from him society’s true contours. A deviation from the path traced for him, like the reaction of a foal that takes fright and shies; the rift with paternal allegiances: these are enough to cast him back into the midst of a human space bereft of history, or which history scarcely trammels. Everything sorts itself out quite speedily: if, in an attempt to find his bearings, he seeks a bit of posthumous advice from his peasant forebears, they are never far away. Disloyal to his father who has done so much for him and, by God, makes no bones about telling him so, he can console himself by exclaiming that he is at least loyal to his grandfather: nothing threatens bourgeois stability more fundamentally than this constant interchange of compensatory betrayals, which are simply the normal consequences of the celebrated stages of democracy.
Rosenthal really did not know which way to jump, whom to be loyal to. His rabbi forebears were no joke, and in Paris what use was their advice full of Zohar and Talmud? He had too much self-esteem not to admit to himself – in spite of that human respect which does so much for the defence of lost causes – that the humblest of his relatives disgusted him no less than the richest and most triumphant; than those who had ended up acquiring an astonishing security like that of Catholics – as if Heaven and Hell belonged to them too. The pathetic synagogues on the first floor of some fissured building in the Saint-Paul neighbourhood, from which on Saturdays such unkempt old men would descend; the kosher inscriptions on the butchers’ windows; that incense-laden aroma of the East you can inhale only two hundred metres away from the Hôtel de Ville emporium and the church of Saint-Gervais; the tall girls, somewhat too pale-skinned and disdainful, beside a bowler-hatted father on the threshold of a tailor’s shop; the little gangs of pickpockets in the Polish bars; the white silk scarfs woven with threads in the hues of twilight and the moon – Bernard could no more put up with all this than with his cousins’ grand weddings in the temple on Rue de la Victoire or Rue Copernic, with the top-hats in a ring round the hupa and the ladies’ fur coats in the left bay; with tales of contango and backwardation, of outside market and official market; with the young girls who, when he met them at his beautiful sister-in-law Catherine’s, would speak to him in careless tones with the hint of an English accent of their holiday cruises to Spitzbergen or in the Cyclades, for which the fashion was then beginning. Bernard had no desire to exchange prisons.
Nor were the impassioned fur-trade workers’ meetings, in the little hall on Rue Albouy, any great help to him: the speakers held forth almost exclusively in Yiddish, he did not know a word of it. In his family, no one uttered a word of the forgotten language any more without laughing, ever since they had forsworn poverty, exile and anger. He did not in any case believe Jews had the right to a special liberation, a new act of alliance with God: he saw their liberation as submerged in a general emancipation, wherein their names, their misfortune and their vocation would disappear all at once. Besides, Bernard still wished only to be freed – he gave little thought to freeing anybody else.
It was quite hard actually for Rosenthal to forget that he was Jewish: his name sometimes inspired him with a kind of shame, which he considered ignoble and blushed for; it inspired him also with pride, and among his friends he would sometimes begin a sentence with the words ‘As a Jew, I . . .’, as though he had inherited secrets of which they would always remain ignorant – recipes for knowledge of God, intelligence or revolt; as though, for his salvation, he had had an exhilarating and bloody history to exploit, a history of battles, pogroms, migrations, legal proceedings, exegesis, knowledge, real power, shame, hope and prophecy. But he had only to find himself among his kinsfolk to detest them, to tell himself that the Jewish bourgeoisie was more dreadful than all others, Jewish banks more ruthless than Protestant banks or Catholic banks: he had scant acquaintance with the economy of other faiths.
How hard it was to be burd
ened by the problems of two millennia, the tragedies of a minority! How hard, not to be alone!
The Rosenthals lived in Avenue Mozart, at a time when almost all their relatives and friends still remained loyal to the Plaine Monceau, sending their sons to the Lycée Carnot or Lycée Condorcet and their daughters to the Dieterlen School; when the great movement towards Passy and Auteuil had not yet assumed the remarkable dimensions it was to assume in the years that followed.
First you went down a spacious corridor in white marble set off with long mirrors and blood-red wall-settees in garnet velours, then you arrived at the Rosenthals’ ground-floor apartment. This was large, its french windows opening onto a damp garden enclosed by railings and shaded by tall white buildings. The large and small drawing-rooms were crammed with statues, bound volumes, gloomy paintings and console tables with gilt feet: there was a grand piano, a great glossy saurian protected by a Seville shawl; a harp; and canvases by Fantin-Latour and Dagnan-Bouveret, dating from the period when painters had everything to gain by adopting double-barrelled names that endowed them with a plebeian nobility.
M. Rosenthal was a broker, but you would have thought yourself in the home of some great surgeon. On days when Mme Rosenthal received, her guests would all have the air of people waiting for an appointment and a verdict on the condition of their appendix or their ovaries. The moment had not yet come to yield up those apartments, furnished twenty years earlier with distraught passion, to the decorators of nineteen hundred and twenty-five. It was only young married couples who were beginning to set up house in white rooms furnished in glass and metal – and the atmosphere still remained medical.
Bernard entered his domain. In that stately apartment, his room’s sole ambition was to be austere. It was furnished with a large table, a brass bed that Bernard had deemed less frivolous than a divan, and an English wardrobe: on the walls there were shelves of books (not many of them bound like the ones in the large drawing-room), a poor lithograph of Lenin, a fairly good reproduction of Hals’s Descartes, and a little metaphysical landscape by de Chirico rather reminiscent of a provincial museum’s reserve collection beneath a stage moon – and which dates the period when this tale of young people unfolds. Bernard took a bath and went to bed, thinking that he had definitely smoked too much and that he was rather hungry. He then thought vaguely about the Revolution, and with exactitude about his family, the furniture in the large drawing-room, and the kitchen where there must be things left in the refrigerator. He told himself things had to be settled one way or another, without really knowing whether it was a matter of covering Paris with barricades; catching a train next morning that would take him for a few weeks far away from his father and mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and the servants; or simply going down to the kitchen – he was really too sleepy, eventually he fell asleep.
A quarter of an hour after Rosenthal, Pluvinage in turn had left the Canon des Gobelins. Pluvinage, who was preparing for his agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, lived alone in a fairly dismal room in a hotel in Rue Cujas inhabited by Chinese students and by whores from the Pascal, the d’Harcourt and the Soufflot. As always, his companions felt faintly relieved by his departure; but since they regarded this as a pretty unworthy sentiment, they did not speak of it. Laforgue, Bloyé and Jurien did their best to postpone the moment of going home to bed. Luckily, they were passionately attached to Paris, their neighbourhood and night strolls.
Nine years ago the neighbourhood round the Panthéon still formed a fairly enclosed little world, its frontiers following Rue Gay-Lussac, Rue Claude-Bernard, Rue Monge, Rue des Ecoles, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, Place du Panthéon, Rue Soufflot and Rue Saint-Jacques; the authorities had not yet begun bisecting the houses with streets of hospital severity, overlooked by sheets of glass and by brick and concrete towers dedicated to Knowledge. The passer-by would proceed through winding lanes frequented by flocks of Irish seminarists, through alleys that boasted food and destitution round Place Maubert, without any desire to go beyond the frontiers down towards the banks of the Seine, the gusts of Notre-Dame, the long funereal shelters of the Gare, and the barren, hopeless folly of the skeletons of fish and monsters, the gemstones, the culinary herbs, the animals and the palm-trees imprisoned in dreamlike dens and glasshouses at the Jardin des Plantes.
It was a neighbourhood that gave its inhabitants all they needed: their greatest demands were gratified by the rural memories still lingering round Rue Lhomond, Rue Rataud and Rue du Pot-de-Fer, in the depths of leafy yards and acacia-shaded lodges, towards the Panthéon riding-school with its gilded horses’ heads. Nowhere could you hear more cocks crow at dawn; and even in the afternoon, on stormy days, their rain calls would suddenly ring out through the lulls of Paris. It had not been so long since the last stock-rearers had abandoned the courtyards of Rue Saint-Jacques, where they had been replaced by cabinetmakers, sculptors, teachers of painting and dance; among the polytechniciens going up Rue Lhomond of a Wednesday, you would not have been surprised to encounter a cow or a sheep-dog.
Behind the worn façade of great Louis XV town-houses, abandoned gardens proliferated where weeds and brambles overran stone vases and statues the weather had beheaded like queens; where, as dusk fell, the children of concierges and button-sellers used to organize never-ending games and chase one another, twittering like swallows and squeaking like mice; and in Rue Lhomond there still existed houses where the arm of the hay-winch jutted out above the rotting loft-door.
In Rue Mouffetard that evening, odours of dead meat, cat and urine hung about, along with the invisible flakes of poverty; as ever, in those sleeping wildernesses of Paris, Laforgue and his comrades saw flitting away only the last prowlers down on their luck: those old women, trundling from doorway to doorway with shopping bags full of papers, crusts, rags and the same shiny fragments of iron, bone, mother-of-pearl and pottery that lunatics in asylums sew onto their coarse petticoats; those Negroes and Algerian labourers, who can be heard singing so late in summertime under the green-paper trees of Place Maubert, as though on an African rooftop. As ever, all that remained for them to do was decide to go to bed, telling each other this was really no life at all – then they went home. It was no use their dreamily probing the day’s little pile of rubbish, they did not find anything much there: nothing had happened.
In order to keep young people quiet, men of forty tell them that youth is the time of surprises, discoveries and great encounters; and tell all those stories of theirs about what they would do if they were twenty years old again and had their youthful hopes, teeth and hair, but also their splendid experience as fathers, citizens and defeated men. Youth knows better, that it is merely the time of boredom and confusion: nary an evening, at twenty, when you do not fall asleep with that ambiguous anger a giddy sense of missed opportunities engenders. Since the consciousness you have of your existence is still uncertain and you rely on adventures capable of furnishing proof that you are alive, late nights are none too cheerful. You are not even tired enough to experience the joy of sinking into slumber: that kind of joy comes later.
No one thinks more steadfastly about death than young people, though they are reticent enough to speak of it only rarely: each empty day they deem lost, life a failure. Better not risk telling them that such impatience is unfounded, that they are at the lucky age and preparing themselves for life. They retort that such an existence – as infant larvae waiting to be brilliant insects at the age of fifty – is a merry one indeed! Everything for our future wings – do you take us for hymenoptera? What is this insect morality? At the age of thirty, it is all over, you make your peace; since you have begun to grow accustomed to death and tot up the remaining years less frequently than at twenty, what with all the work you have, the appointments, the obligations, women, families and the money you earn, you end up believing in your existence entirely. Youth has had its day, you go and pay little visits to the corpse, find it touching, happy, crow
ned with the pathetic halo of lost illusions: all this is less hard than seeing it die in vain, as one does at twenty.
This is why Laforgue and his friends stayed awake so late, as if to multiply their chances. But at two o’clock in the morning in Paris, you can really count only on picking up a girl with legs so exhausted by her vigil and with such a longing for sleep that her bedroom is no place to expect much from life, as she undresses, all yawns and without any thought for those heart-rending gestures of coquetry, or humility, which women resort to when awake, to hide some defect of their breasts, a crease in the stomach, a scar, or age, or the flaccid symptoms of misfortune.
Every evening they went home cheated. Should they then have stuck it out to the end, not slept at all, seen the day born in the whitening of the stubbly small hours when, at least for a moment, one can believe that everything is beginning, that one will see everything, that one will be able to sing like the colossi of the dawn? But at their age, eyes close . . .
II
Two days later, Rosenthal came to meet with his friends again.
All these encounters take place at the Ecole Normale, in Rue d’Ulm. This is a large square building dating from the time of Louis-Philippe; a courtyard forms its centre, with a cement pool where goldfish circle lazily; a festoon of great men runs between the windows, to set an example; a cold stench of refectory soup hangs about the glazed arcades; a naked man dying against a wall, proffering a stone torch that nobody is willing to take from his hands, symbolizes the War Dead; flanking Rue Rataud there is a tennis court, and between Rue Rataud and Rue d’Ulm a garden embellished with a carved stone bench and two naked women of somewhat flabby outline, often decorated with obscene inscriptions. At one extremity of the tennis court stands a little physics laboratory, in the style of the historic sheds where famous inventors discovered the internal combustion engine or the wireless detector; at the other extremity ten years ago there used to be a gymnasium and some plant biology laboratories, falling into ruins round a little botanical plot dubbed ‘Nature’.
