My job was to take her to her lessons. Piano lessons. Dance lessons. Elocution lessons with our teacher from Rue Beaujon. Photo sessions in a studio on Avenue d’Iéna, in her various costumes. Riding lessons at a bridle school in the Bois de Boulogne. For those, at least, she was outdoors and got some color back, so small, so blonde, on a dapple gray horse that blended in with the snow and morning fog.
She never said a word and always showed complete obedience, despite her exhaustion. One afternoon when Madeleine-Louis and Sonia had granted her a break, we went to the Trocadéro gardens, and she fell asleep on her sled.
Before long, I had to leave for the South of France. Paris had become dangerous, and I was no longer sure I could rely on the identity card I’d been given by an old friend from Valvert. Jewel’s name wasn’t really Jewel, Sonia’s wasn’t Sonia, and I wasn’t really called Lenormand.
I asked them to let me bring Jewel, who would surely be happier in the South. In vain. Fat, hard Madeleine-Louis was stuck on her idea of making Jewel a child star. And Sonia . . . She was so suggestible, so evanescent. With her constant habit of listening to the “Moonlight Sonata” and staring into space . . . Still, I always suspected that beneath her tulles and vapors lurked the toughness of a fishwife.
I left early one morning, before the girl woke up.
A few months later, in Nice, I came across a picture of her on the arts page of a weekly magazine. She had a part in a film called Archer’s Crossing. She was standing, in her nightgown, holding a flashlight, her face a bit leaner, looking as if she were searching for someone in the empty apartment on Cours Albert 1er.
Me, perhaps.
I never heard from her again. So many winters have passed since then that I don’t dare count them.
Pudgy made out fine. He had the flexibility and bounce-back of a rubber ball. But she? The Kulm School on Rue Jean-Goujon, where I used to pick her up mornings and afternoons, no longer exists. When I walk along the river, I remember the snow from those days, which coated the statues of Albert I, King of the Belgians, and of Simón Bolívar, symmetrically placed at a hundred yards’ distance. They, at least, haven’t budged, each one stiff as ever on his horse, indifferent to the swirls in the murky water that the houseboats leave in their wake.
VI.
It was always in the dining hall, after mail call, that Pedro would announce a student’s expulsion. The guilty party had his last meal with us, doing his best to save face, either acting cocky or fighting back tears. I felt anxious and depressed whenever one of us had to suffer this trial. To me he was like a condemned man, and I would have loved to see Pedro grant a stay of execution at the last moment.
Philippe Yotlande’s expulsion had affected me deeply, even though he, like Bourdon and Winegrain, was considerably older than I. When I was entering eighth grade, he was repeating eleventh. Our principal had appointed him “cadet” for the Nursery.
As was customary, Pedro served notice of his sentence in the dining hall. Yotlande had chosen to take it lightly and cracked jokes with his tablemates throughout the meal.
At the start of the afternoon, our “cadets” made us walk in quickstep from the Swiss Yard up to the Castle patio. Pedro and the entire faculty, standing on the porch, waited for the noise to die down. Then our principal pronounced the ritual sentence, in a grave, staccato voice:
“Your classmate, Philippe Yotlande, has been expelled.”
He and the other teachers stood at attention.
“Philippe Yotlande, will you leave the ranks and come up here . . .”
Yotlande left his friends from eleventh grade and jogged up the porch steps. He had donned his blazer with the school crest that we were expected to put on for dinner every evening.
“Philippe Yotlande, stand at attention facing your schoolmates . . .”
He stood immobile on the porch as if on a scaffold, wearing a shy smile and an apologetic expression.
“Philippe Yotlande, you have been deemed unworthy to remain among us. I hereby expel you from Valvert.”
Before going back down the steps, Yotlande held out his hand to Pedro and all the teachers, with such good grace that not a single one of them refused to shake it.
Many years later, one evening at around seven, at the exit of the Paris Racing Club, I spotted Philippe Yotlande from afar, without having the courage to go up to him. Would he still remember Valvert? I didn’t need to talk to him. I could guess his frame of mind . . .
Arms resting on the steering wheel, chin on the back of his hand, he sat pensively for a long while in the old convertible that he’d never wanted to give up. It would have been like amputating a part of himself, for that car was linked to a whole period of his life.
What should he do with himself this evening? Every morning was spent at the Racing Club, by the pool. Then he had a pan bagnat and tomato juice at the bar, where he watched the stages of the Tour de France on TV. And then he went back to poolside.
He hadn’t spoken to a soul since early in the month, and that suited him fine. Two or three times, at the Club, he had dodged a familiar silhouette. He was surprised by his antisocial behavior, as he had always been so outgoing.
The only time he felt a hint of anxiety was around seven. The prospect of an entire evening and dinner with just himself for company made him nervous, but his nerves settled as he crossed the Bois de Boulogne. The summer air was mild and the park brought back so many memories. There, at the Pré Catalan, he had attended several wedding receptions. Over time his friends had all gotten married.
Farther on, near Neuilly, the bowling alley at the Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park had been the “in” place, back when Yotlande used to play hooky from a cram school after he’d been expelled from Valvert. He spent almost every afternoon there. You could meet up with the “gangs” from the Molitor or La Muette swimming pools and decide where to hold the next party.
Why had he been thrown out of Valvert? For bringing in a suitcase stuffed to the gills with American blue jeans and records that he sold to the other students at half-price. A friend from the Molitor Pool crowd supplied the goods, which came directly from the PX, where only U.S. Army personnel could shop.
PX: those two letters with their prestigious aura, that inaccessible store that had set the boys of Philippe Yotlande’s generation dreaming, would mean nothing to a twenty-year-old today. PX had been shoved in the attic, along with other old accessories like the ID bracelet on which he’d insisted they engrave “Jean-Philippe”: a double first name was more stylish.
At Porte de la Muette, he turned left onto Boulevard Suchet. He drove down it every evening to Porte d’Auteuil, then back up Boulevard Suchet to Porte de la Muette; then he took Boulevard Lannes, arrived at Porte Maillot, made an about-face toward Porte d’Auteuil, and hoped that by the end of this aimless ramble he would have picked a spot to have dinner. But he couldn’t make up his mind, and he continued to wander for a long while, very slowly, through the streets of the 16th arrondissement.
At eighteen, he had been the little prince of this neighborhood. In his room in the apartment on Rue Oswaldo-Cruz, he straightened his tie in the mirror one last time, or smoothed his hair against his forehead, or sometimes kept it brushed back with a dab of clear makeup. He often wore a blazer and gray slacks, the jacket emblazoned with the crest of the Motor Yacht Club on the French Riviera, where his father was a member; and for footwear, Italian loafers with a small coin in each slot—very fashionable back then. Some even used a gold louis.
Stuck in the mirror frame were invitation cards for Saturday evening. Engraved on those white cards were compact upper-crust names sporting nobiliary particles or hyphens. The parents invited their daughters’ friends to what they called a “soiree.” Every Saturday evening, Philippe Yotlande hesitated among a dozen such soirees. He chose two or three, aware that his presence would lend them extra cachet. Indeed, a soiree attended by Philippe Yotlande was livelier, more successful than the others. And so he had been among
the most sought-after guests at hundreds of soirees.
Soirees in the affluent precincts of Auteuil and Passy, given by a dapper bourgeoisie and minor nobility that frequented the beaches of La Baule or Arcachon. More obscure soirees in the Ecole Militaire neighborhood: the father, colonel or functionary, had stretched his budget so that his daughter could invite her well-heeled girlfriends from the Lycée Victor-Duruy; the atmosphere was a bit dour, the parents present throughout the evening, and they served orangeade. In the 17th arrondissement, staid but convivial soirees thrown by prominent lawyers, whose families summered in Cabourg and wintered in Chamonix. More spectacular soirees at La Muette and Avenue Foch, where the offspring of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish banks hobnobbed with the most prominent coats of arms of the French aristocracy and several exotic names with Chilean or Argentine inflections. But the evenings Yotlande enjoyed most, and upon which the other parents looked askance for their whiff of scandal and “nouveau riche” taint, were the ones given by the son and two daughters of a corporate lawyer married to a former model, in one of those apartments with balconies in the first addresses on Boulevard Suchet.
A nucleus had formed on Boulevard Suchet, a clique of about a dozen boys and girls, a number of whom had sports cars and, like Yotlande, had been students at the Valvert School. The corporate lawyer’s son had received an Aston Martin for his eighteenth birthday; Yotlande made do with a red MG convertible; another drove a pale green Nash . . .
The mistress of the house, the ex-model, sometimes joined in her daughter’s parties, as if they were the same age. And one of Philippe Yotlande’s most dazzling memories was of that June night when everyone was dancing on the terrace and his friends’ mother had started flirting with him. Today she must be getting on in years, but at the time she looked no more than thirty. Freckles on her face and shoulders. That night, between her and him, the flirtation had “gone pretty far”—to use an expression that doesn’t mean much anymore.
There were hundreds and hundreds of such evenings. You danced or went off to a quiet corner of the terrace for a few hands of poker, or two of you hid out in a bedroom, like Yotlande and one of the family daughters. You let your mind wander to the strains of Miles Davis, watching the leaves flutter on the trees in the Bois de Boulogne. That happy time in Philippe Yotlande’s life had been cut short by his military service.
They sent him to Algeria, two months before the Evian Accords. Then he stayed for a while in Val-de-Grâce hospital and, thanks to the intercession of a friend of his father’s, he finished his military career as driver to a naval officer, a good-looking man who was close friends with the maréchal de Lattre. With that officer, Yotlande went on long excursions through the forest.
He had just returned to civilian life when his father passed away. His mother bravely took over Maurice Yotlande Pharmaceutical Laboratories, and since Philippe was old enough to work, they put him in charge of “public relations” for the family firm. He didn’t exactly shine, but they turned a blind eye, out of respect for the late, lamented Dr. Yotlande. Several years later, his mother retired to the Midi after selling Yotlande Laboratories to a foreign concern, which netted her and her son a huge profit. Since then, Philippe, who had picked up some rudiments of stocks and bonds, tepidly managed their fortune.
He had come to the intersection of Boulevard Suchet and Avenue Ingres. A car passed him, and the driver, jutting his scarlet bulldog face out of the lowered window, cursed at Yotlande, who answered with a bland smile. There had been a time when he’d have sped up and cut the other car off, but he was past the age for such tomfoolery. He halted beneath the trees of Avenue Ingres and turned the knob on the radio. In a metallic voice, an announcer related the final stage of the Tour de France. The trees, the bench, the little green wooden kiosk, and one of the buildings, to the right, took him back twenty years.
It was there, on Avenue Ingres, that he had gone to visit a beautiful Danish woman, famous at the time, named Annette Stroyberg. A photographer for Paris-Match, a man much older than Philippe Yotlande who had developed a liking for him, introduced him to a less bourgeois milieu than the one he’d been frequenting. And so he rubbed shoulders with a few cover girls and starlets, at the Belle Ferronnière or the Bar des Théâtres. But his most memorable encounter was with Annette Stroyberg.
He saw Annette a second time the following winter in a nightspot in Megève, went up to reintroduce himself, and as luck would have it a flash went off. The photo took up a full page of a magazine with the caption, “Stars of the screen and Paris High Society meet for après-ski.” There was Philippe Yotlande, a star sitting with Annette Stroyberg and a dozen other stars. He was smiling. The photo was passed around at soirees and earned Yotlande even more prestige. The darling of the 16th arrondissement, photographed in Megève at Annette Stroyberg’s side, had hit his peak at the age of nineteen.
It was after his military service that he slowly began feeling his age. At the soirees he continued to frequent, he met fewer and fewer of his contemporaries: work, marriage, and adult life had claimed them one by one. Yotlande found himself facing kids for whom the calypso and cha-cha-cha of his adolescence were as outmoded as the minuet, and who had no idea what the PX was. He refrained from showing them the Megève picture, which had yellowed in the five years since, like those photos from the summer of ’39 in which you see night owls in Juan-les-Pins dancing the Chamberlaine.
But he was still basically carefree at heart; he learned the new dances and preserved his role as life of the party.
She was eighteen and they met at a gathering. She belonged to a family of Belgian industrialists. The Carton de Borgraves owned apartments in Paris and Brussels, a chateau in the Ardennes, and a villa in Knokke-le-Zoute. Their daughter seemed completely smitten with Philippe Yotlande and after a few months her parents held his feet to the fire: either get engaged or Philippe Yotlande would never see her again.
The engagement ceremony was held in Brussels; that evening, the Carton de Borgraves gave a reception in their home on Avenue Louise. Yotlande had invited all his Paris friends. His future in-laws were taken aback by the eccentricities in which these young French persons indulged, come midnight. One of the corporate lawyer’s daughters from Boulevard Suchet, who had had a bit too much champagne, performed a striptease, while another partygoer downed glass after glass to the health of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, tossing his empties over the balcony.
The family had decided that the fiancés would spend a well-chaperoned holiday at the villa in Zoute, and the Carton de Borgraves invited Philippe Yotlande’s mother to join them for the month of August. At first, Yotlande played tennis with his betrothed and some of her friends. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the villa, the “Castel Borgrave,” a huge Tudor-style edifice in which his future mother-in-law, at tea time, detailed for him all her important relations: with the princesse de Rethy, with whom she was on a first-name basis; with the baron Jean Lambert, who couldn’t stand the sun. Perhaps it was the gilded—heavily gilded—youth of the place, with their craze for go-kart racing. Or the gaggle of mature men in yachting outfits, who greeted each other on the sidewalks of seaside cafés, laboring to give their gestures a nonchalance worthy of Saint-Tropez. Perhaps it was the leaden sky, or the wind, or the rain. But it was too much for Philippe Yotlande. After ten days, he skipped out of Zoute by the first train, leaving behind a letter of apology for the girl who had been his fiancée.
Evening fell over Avenue Ingres, and he finally made up his mind to drive on. He followed Boulevard Suchet toward Porte d’Auteuil. The memory of his broken engagement still pained him.
At the time, he had felt a certain relief and returned to his old habits. But at the soirees that he persisted in attending, they made him feel old. Naturally, everyone still loved him. He had become a kind of mascot.
Yes, things had changed. First and foremost, Philippe Yotlande’s appearance clashed with his juniors’. Yotlande wore his hair short and still affected the kind of blaz
er he’d sported at eighteen. He tended toward beige suits with crepe-soled shoes and kept his tan year round. In this, he remained faithful to the model for adolescents of his generation: athletic Americans from the early nineteen fifties.
Time passed. And Philippe Yotlande had to fill his days. He devoted much of his life to tennis and winter sports, and took on the habits of an aging bachelor, spending a month every year at his mother’s in Cannes.
His old friends invited him for the holidays, for they knew Yotlande would be pleasant company. Their children loved him. With them, more than with their parents, he rediscovered his former verve, from the time of parties on Chris-Crafts and nights out at the Esquinade.
Gradually, a certain melancholy wormed its way into him. It had begun around the time of his thirty-fifth birthday. And since then, he preferred to remain alone, to “meditate,” as he said—something that had never happened to him before . . .
Reaching Porte d’Auteuil, he took the opposite direction back up Boulevard Suchet, to Porte de la Muette. He braked at the top of Avenue Henri-Martin. His wristwatch said eight-thirty, and he still didn’t know where to have dinner.
No matter. He had time. He followed Avenue Henri-Martin, then veered left onto Avenue Victor-Hugo. Farther on, at the square, he got out of the car, shutting the door gently behind him, and strolled toward the sidewalk tables of the Café Scossa.
It was there that he ended up every evening at the same time, as if he had slid, without even realizing it, toward a mysterious center of gravity. There are places that act as magnets for disoriented souls, solid boulders in the storm. For Philippe Yotlande, the Scossa was like the final vestige of his youth, the last fixed point in the chaos.
Such Fine Boys Page 6
