by Paul Nizan
‘What a dreadful creature!’ thought Laforgue in his bed that evening, mulling over Pauline’s visit before falling asleep and thinking with some distress that he really should have had her. ‘I don’t like this little war of escapes, these solitary pleasures. Let’s hurry up and be done with onanism for two.’
He is a bit quick to generalize his own experiences. The fact is, he knows only whores or young girls, no women: which amounts to saying he knows nothing about anything. As yet, he has access only to that desert of solitude and bitterness through which a young man shapes his course towards love; of pleasure itself, he knows only a kind of organic wrench. He has never met a woman who has said to him dreamily after lovemaking:
— How painful it must be for you too!
He hopes to discover that love is a suspension of hostilities when, for a split second, a man and a woman escape from hatred and from themselves; when they forget themselves like two wartime soldiers fraternizing between the lines around a well or the burial of the dead.
‘When I know that,’ he said to himself, ‘will it be much more fun?’
IV
Half-way through November and with the interminable family holidays now over, Civil War made its appearance, with Pluvinage’s machine-gun, which they had finally adopted, in black on the blue cover. They were all rather proud of themselves because of their names in capitals on the contents page and Serge’s machine-gun.
People took out subscriptions. At the editorial offices they had established in a damp and gloomy little shop in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, where the electric lamps were on all day, they received enthusiastic letters written by students from Dijon and Caen or Aix-en-Provence – people are so bored in the provinces that the faintest cry uttered in Paris will always find echoes there – or by country schoolteachers, sentimental and critical; by women; by lunatics, who would send them plans for perpetual Peace, suppressed inventions, symbolic fates, the imaginary documents and the defence speeches of never-ending trials, or heartrending appeals to Justice: their unknown friends consisted above all of defeated people. There also arrived abusive letters, and letters along the lines of Aren’t-you-ashamed-of-yourself-young-man, because Civil War expressed rather well a natural state of fury, and its editors used to attack, by name, living and genuinely respectable individuals. The reasons they used to give for these indictments, though based on a great display of philosophy, were not all rigorous or valid; but when you think that France at that time, by way of great men, had Prime Minister Poincaré, M. Tardieu and M. Maginot, it must be admitted that their instinct ran no risk of leading them far astray.
The team’s first political memory went back to nineteen hundred and twenty-four. That was a year which had begun with deaths, with the disappearance of the most considerable symbols or actors of the first years of the Peace: Lenin had died in January, Wilson in February, Hugo Stinnes in April. In May, elections full of poetic enthusiasm had brought the Left Cartel to power: having just got rid of the Horizon-Blue Chamber, people thought war was over and done with for good and they were going quietly to recommence the little regular shift to the left in which serious historians see the Republic’s secret, finding that this providential inevitability solves many things and allows everyone to sleep like a log. In November, to please a country which in five months had not stopped hoping, it was decided to transfer the body of Jean Jaurès to the Panthéon, where the man who died in July ’14 was awaited by the grateful Fatherland and the mortal remains of the Great Men – La Tour-d’Auvergne, Sadi Carnot, Berthelot, Comte Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac and Comte Paigne-Dorsenne.
That year Laforgue, Rosenthal and Bloyé were at Louis-le-Grand, preparing for the Ecole Normale. The lycée was a kind of great barracks of pale brick with sundials bearing gilded inscriptions, where boys of nineteen could not learn much about the world on account of having to live among the Greeks, the Romans, the idealist philosophers and the Doctrinaires of the July Monarchy: they were, however, as people say ‘on the Left’. With what was going on in the world, even on their free days, they would have had to be blind . . .
A normalien of Rosenthal’s acquaintance procured them invitations on 24 November to the lying in state. It was to take place at the Palais-Bourbon, in the Salle Mirabeau, which had that very morning ceased to be called the Salle Casimir-Périer: at the last moment people had judged the latter to be impossible, because of the memories that hyphenated name evoked. Echoes of the Lyon risings crushed in eighteen hundred and thirty-one by the Interior Minister grandfather would, after all, have jarred; nor could any great connection be discerned between Jaurès and the President of the Republic grandson. Mirabeau could be accommodated, by stressing his speeches and his historic sallies in the Summoned-here-by-the-will-of-bayonets style, while casting a veil over his intrigues with the Court. Since there was in any case no question of Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Babeuf . . .
Violet gauze hangings draped the stone walls, which recalled the Expiatory Chapel in Boulevard Haussmann and also, already, the cellars and subterranean glory of the Panthéon; they shrouded the chandeliers and diffused a gloomy mauve light, just right for half-mourning, over a fragile scaffolding that awaited the coffin and a black cloth with silver stars that had done sterling duty. The women seated at the foot of the walls were saying to themselves that this mauve lighting must give them an odd complexion, but that they would not solve the problem by putting on more powder. The guests all consisted of figures from a house of bereavement: little groups of individuals were chatting quietly in corners; deputies were shaking hands, with a mien and bowed shoulders imbued with grief-stricken familiarity; every now and then, the husky tones would be heard of someone who could not manage to keep his voice down. The ushers, who carried their little cocked hats with the tricolour cockades under one arm, marched in double slow time like Swiss Guards, in well-broken shoes that did not squeak; they kept a passage open between the catafalque and the door, through the crowd that had grown denser as though Jaurès had really had quantities of brothers, relatives and inconsolable friends. Everyone kept glancing towards the door. People were thinking about that great man, dead ten years and five months, who was still not arriving. They were vaguely uneasy: the news spread that the Albi train had had an accident at Les Aubrais. Someone said in the vicinity of Laforgue and Rosenthal:
— It’s really rotten luck.
Bernard sniggered.
Then they recognized Lucien Herr, who was chatting to Lévy-Bruhl and whom they respected, since being told that Herr still talked to young men about the will not to succeed. Lucien Herr, who already bore – along with the invisible weight of the great books he had not written – the burden of his imminent death, came up to them. They greeted him. Herr said to their companion from Rue d’Ulm:
— Don’t go too far away now. I want to introduce you to Blum.
Herr moved off and returned with Léon Blum, who proffered them a long hand, which they found soft and burning, and said nothing to them. He did not seem to take much interest in these young men; after turning his head this way and that, like a large bird on the lookout, he moved away with a strange stiff, jerky gait.
At a quarter to eleven, the two leaves of the door at last slowly opened as if upon a scene at the Opera; everyone thronged forward, the crowd made the same noise as a theatre audience does when the curtain goes up. Outside there was a milky darkness astonishingly luminous for the end of November, as though somewhere behind the sky there had been a moon of frost or spring; those sparkling mists on the black courtyard of the Palais-Bourbon caused the insipid violet twilight of the Salle Mirabeau to grow pale; people felt cold and anxious to leave that long cavern to walk beneath the trees; the women shivered.
The bearers deposited the coffin on the bottommost tread of the stairway; their steps resounded heavily in the murmurous silence. Miners lined the way. An outburst of shouts exploded brutally like a great nocturn
al bubble above the crowd that was surging against the gates of the Cour de Bourgogne and that had just rushed through the sleeping streets behind the hearse, after its departure from the Gare d’Orsay. But the coffin entered, the double doors fell shut again and the shouts were stifled. The Carmaux miners, who were wearing their black pit overalls and their leather caps, lined up clumsily around the catafalque where the ushers and undertaker’s men were piling the withered wreaths which had just made the journey in the icy gloom of the goods van.
No one was weeping – ten years of death dry all tears – but men were fabricating masks for themselves: Saumande, who gave rather a good impersonation of a lizard’s grief, Lautier of a pig’s, François-Albert of a ferret’s.
It was still necessary to wait, nobody knew for what – the dawn perhaps. From time to time a band would play Siegfried’s ‘Funeral March’ to relieve the waiting. It was an unbearable night. In that great stone cell, Laforgue and his friends had the impression they were the silent accomplices of adroit politicians who had deftly filched that heroic bier and those ashes of a murdered man, which were destined to be the important pieces in a game whose other pawns were doubtless monuments, men, conversations, votes, promises, medals and money matters: they felt themselves less than nothing among all those calculating, affable fellows. Luckily, through the walls and above the muffled sound of trampling and music, there would sometimes arrive what sounded like a stormburst of shouts; they would then tell one another that in the darkness there must exist a sort of vast sea which was breaking with rage and tenderness against the blind cliffs of the Chamber: they could not catch the words that composed these shouts, but they sometimes thought they could make out the name Jaurès at the peak of the clamour. The guests looked at one another with a particular expression, like people warm and snug in a house near the sea on a stormy evening, who do not care to think about the squalls the night is fashioning.
Rosenthal felt like a smoke, and said to Laforgue in an undertone:
— Did you spot that society type Léon Blum shaking the miners’ hands, those horny hands of theirs? Talk about old family retainers, I must say . . .
Around one in the morning, Laforgue said:
— I can’t take any more of this. Let’s get the hell out of this cellar!
They made their escape, taking precautions, but no one noticed their departure. Outside, Laforgue continued:
— Well, we’ll have had the honour of keeping watch beside the body of Jean Jaurès.
— Yes, said Bloyé. It’s even an honour we’ll have shared with M. Eugène Lautier.
— And with Herr, said Rosenthal.
— Which is much odder, Laforgue went on. Because after all, with him you really don’t have to worry, he’s not got any little trick up his sleeve. He must have been the only person who was actually thinking, as if the body blow of July ’14 had happened only yesterday, about Jaurès – a fellow who had been in the same year as Baudrillart and Bergson, and who had strength, hairs on his chin, courage, a voice and who, in his youth, had written a thesis in Latin on the reality of the sensible world . . .
People were beginning to move away from the Chamber, taking the Pont de la Concorde or Boulevard Saint-Germain, in order to catch the last Métros. Some groups lingered, however, still listening to the muffled strains of the funeral marches issuing from the loudspeakers between the columns. An imponderable haze submerged the flutings and the great tricolour drape that flapped from top to bottom of the Palais-Bourbon’s façade; the Seine was unusually lonely and black, and in the silence of Paris you could hear it rending and gently hissing round the piles of the bridges as though you had been walking through open countryside beside its waters. When they reached the Légion d’Honneur building, Laforgue said:
— All in all, there was a prize little band of swine there this evening. Instead of playing at being pallbearers and pious young university types, we’d have done just as well being out on the embankment with the others.
The next day, at the start of the afternoon, they had positioned themselves on the corner of Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel, and were circulating from group to group: they were beginning to love the echoes and contingencies of large gatherings. It was 25 November, the weather was grey, the women were feeling none too warm with that little wind round their legs, under their coats. A voice was raised behind them:
— Proper All Saints’ Day weather.
Another voice replied:
— It’s the month, isn’t it . . . Funeral weather, you might say. It must have been finer the day Jaurès died, in July ’14 . . .
By and large, people were fairly content with this apposite climate, since it was a death parade that was about to take place, starting from the Palais-Bourbon and finishing in the frozen crypts of the Panthéon in a clutter of standards and immortelles, and people do not like contradictions between the heavens and humanity – funerals in spring when the cemeteries are flowering, or weddings beneath the rain.
The crowd was dense on the pavements all the way from the Law Faculty to Rue de Bourgogne: with crowd-like decorum, coughing and stamping its feet, it waited patiently for the great men in the cortège and for the communists, who had assembled around noon all along the Champs-Elysées as far back as the Marbeuf Métro station, so people were saying.
The boulevard was as empty as a dried-up riverbed. From time to time a dark police vehicle would pass slowly by, its tyres crunching over the sand. At last a noise was heard coming from the West, then a swelling tide of shouts in which were intermingled relief, anger and joy.
— If it’s another instalment of last night, said Rosenthal, it’s going to be a really trashy affair.
— Can’t tell, said Laforgue. Let’s not forget the people who were calling for Jaurès last night outside the Chamber, as if they had the power to raise him from the dead – and who weren’t looking any too happy . . .
The mobile catafalque arrived, a strange scarlet-and-gold platform recalling the civic displays of the French Revolution, its draped daises, its baroque floats celebrating the harvest, youth, war, patriotism and death. The cortège followed: it was a narrow ribbon of men in mourning, and magistrates, professors, military officers, in which there were peaked caps, top-hats, white starched shirtfronts, sashes worn across chests and around bellies, ermines, taffeta robes, pale-blue masonic ribbons, medals, sabres, famous faces casting furtive glances to right and left, all along that petrified stream, at the two moving ridges of chests, heads, legs and shouts that were perhaps about to surge onto the carriageway. People were thinking, of course, about the crossing of the Red Sea: and the Prime Minister was doubtless not much prouder than Moses – with that Pharaoh and his war chariots galloping at his heels, and the two liquid walls growing impatient at being miraculous for so long – and was in a hurry to reach the shore of the Panthéon.
An empty space opened up, then voices in the ranks of the crowd said:
— There they are!
The boulevard filled up: it was the workers from the outlying districts, the masses from the city’s densely populated eastern and northern neighbourhoods; they held the carriageway from one bank to the other bank, the river had finally begun to flow. The people in the first cortège, who were respectable people, did not sing, but these ones were singing, and since they were singing the Internationale, the tenants in Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel, who had never seen anything like it and who were beginning to feel rather small behind their looped drapes and their half-curtains, started shouting out insults and shaking their fists – but since no one heard their shouts, these demonstrations by the residents were of no particular importance.
The spectators on the pavements opened their eyes wide and craned their necks to read the inscriptions on the banners, which were along the lines of: ‘Jaurès, a victim of war, is being glorified by his murderers’, and which protested a
gainst the Dawes Plan, the Left Cartel, fascism and war, and called for Revolution and the arraignment before a revolutionary Tribunal of those responsible for the War: perhaps these were slightly Utopian slogans, but no doubt could be entertained as to the fresh truth of these rallying cries when people told themselves how the socialist deputies had just voted through the Interior Ministry’s secret budget.
One could not help thinking of vigorous forces, of sap, a river, the flow of blood. The boulevard suddenly merited the appellation ‘artery’. The men and women on the pavements had perhaps from the outset wanted to remain calm, because they had come here with their families, out of curiosity, or out of gratitude, or to see famous people pass by, or out of loyalty to the sentimental images Paris retained of Jean Jaurès and his boater and his old tailcoat and his fists uplifted against war, there beneath the wide skies of the Pré Saint-Gervais: but there was no way of remaining calm. It is of no avail being a Parisian and accustomed to great funerals – what with all the ministers and cardinals and academicians and generals who die – and to parades and cortèges; there is no fever that spreads faster than the flames of great processions, and since it had never crossed the minds of the demonstrators coming from the Champs-Elysées to assume suitable expressions, those on the pavements told themselves that if Jaurès were all at once to return, he would probably be rather pleased to see people happy at being two hundred thousand in his honour, and that the crowd filling the carriageway was in the right: this is why the pavements allowed themselves, after hesitating for a moment, to be seduced. The motionless men no longer resisted the moving men, nor the spectators the spectacle, nor the silent ones the singers; they stepped down to experience the river’s movement. Laforgue, Rosenthal and Bloyé lost what deference to convention they had left, they too plunged in and began to sing.
Later, the Prime Minister slowly climbed the steps of the Panthéon, between two lines of miners who were still playing a decorative and symbolic role, and began to speak: he could be seen extending his arms, puffing out his chest, laying his hand on his heart, but not a word of his speech could be heard amid all the bursts of cheering and booing that were erupting from all sides on the black-and-grey square. The demonstrators, moving forward as slowly as lava, threw their placards against the railings; and the Thinker, who had never looked greener or more hungry, gazed vaguely with his eyes of bronze at that pyre of wood, calico, cardboard and everlasting flowers that rose up before Jaurès’s coffin, like the crutches, votive offerings and sticks before a miraculous site. The whole crowd was drifting away via Rue Valette, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, Rue Clovis and Rue de l’Estrapade: darkness began to fall and yellow lamps were lit over its dispersal.
