"'After several turns we came at last to the Café Voltaire and stopped to have a final chat over cigarettes, a farewell drink. A table exploded as we entered. You, Herr Peeperkorn, rose and warmly opened your arms to my friend, who returned your greeting no less cordially. You were at your usual five o'clock table, as you later explained, with your circle.
"'"My circle, I mean that literally, since I term those in my circle whoever circumscribes me at table," you said without a trace of irony or joking. At first I looked for some sign from my friend assuring me that you were a fool and an absolute idiot, but detecting none, I sat squeezed beside you as you had indicated after making much to-do about my friend and the circumstances that had brought him to Paris. You asked several questions of me, too, happy to discover a compatriot, as you called me, and one who looked as though he might become your companion, so alert and so profound did I seem to you, so sympathetic, as you declared several times to the table during the course of the several coffees we shared with you and your circle, although nothing of note or substance had passed my lips to give you any indication of what qualities I might or might not in fact possess.'
"'Why, how good of you to remember that, Herr Raiss. Rest assured that I must have meant that sincerely or I would never have spoken those sentiments, but I'm still afraid I don't know what to make of it since I can't remember ever seeing you again.'
"'Never until this moment.'
"'But then how flattering your memory of that encounter.'
"'Ah, yes, you still do not remember, you have no recollection, then, of your topic of discourse?'
"Well, here I was stuck, and here I thought it best to make my stand, for I felt that what passed from that moment on had to be or appear to be the most frank and candid of utterances — on my part at least.
"'Well, sir, in truth I do not recall my topic of discourse, and I'm finding even greater trouble in recalling you or your friend whose parents are friends of my parents. In fact, at the risk of appearing bizarre, I'm almost at the point of accusing you of perpetrating a kind of hoax on me, and I would think so had I any idea of what would motivate you to do such a thing.'
"'My dear, dear Peeperkorn,' he said with the utmost show of concern, '"hoax," a "joke" — I should be offended or think you mad, yet I understand from your point of view, yes, very clearly how, why you might think such things. In my gratitude and joy in seeing you in these fortunate circumstances I have burdened you with details unessential to this narrative.'
"'Fortunate for you,' I allowed myself to say a bit tartly, but so intent was he on his own evocation of the past, of our encounter, of who knows what that the comment merely disappeared, as if never made.
"'Let me say directly,' the young director of companies continued, 'that as the saucers mounted on our table that afternoon three years ago, so, too, my intense excitement at your words describing the universe, especially the art of the Second Empire. Never had I heard history so lucidly and fascinatingly presented. From your lips I learned that what I had thought merely as a decoration, as a frill of life — art, I mean — is bound tightly to the everyday concerns of society and that at the base of these concerns is power, not merely money, and that money is but a branch to the trunk of the tree of power, and the effect of your discourse was to wash away for that afternoon, and many days following, the painful self-pity and depression that had possessed me for months. "'And more, I began, perhaps for the first time, to care about elevating myself from my base spiritual and economic station and to think of ways I might start to climb, perhaps even to ascend, to success and power. Something prompted me to consider a reconciliation with my parents as the right beginning, and I was not far from wrong, for when I returned home (I quit the hotel and returned home on the first train), I recanted my obdurate, willful mismanagement of my life and threw myself on whatever kindness was left in them to aid me. They were not sentimental people, nor had they ever shown much love for me on any occasion, and this moment was no exception. But fortunately they were not vindictive persons, neither was bent on making the usual charges and recriminations, there were none of the "we told you so's" — and they did not enlist themselves, as some parents gladly would, in the drama of the return of the prodigal son.
"'"In what way may we best be of service to you?" my father asked, finally.
"'"Help me to find some employment leading to a career.
Some employment not menial and somewhat worthy of my intelligence, for I do think you have sufficient respect for my brains to know that I may be of use to some firm or governmental office."
"'Within three days I began my visits to those who opened their doors to me because of my father's solicitations. So eminent a man as he could help pave the way for my entrance into the office of this or that influential esteemed personage, but for all the kindness and respect tendered me in the various offices and reception rooms I entered, I soon realized that there was nothing but courtesy to my father behind it. I was of no use, none even for a clerkship. I had no skills of any sort, excepting those of a kitchen drudge, and no one was about to hire this untested and, by reputation, wayward youth merely out of respect for my father. Presently it grew clear that even with the best of intentions and hopes for a new start, the world was not there waiting to minister assistance and opportunity simply for my asking. Goodwill and my promise of industry and application were not enough out there in the world, where all but exchanges for profit count for very little and where good breeding and manners count for even less (unless, of course, one is a waiter at some exquisite restaurant). Thus rejected, I racked my naive and untested brains in hopes of finding a route neither I nor my parents had considered.
"'Frankly, I thought of a life of crime, not that I had actually experienced such a life or understood fully what it entailed, but there was a certain allure to it, especially after suffering rejection and humiliation at the hands of the very class I naturally would have robbed. How often in my imagination did I thrill to my own exploits, my bank robberies, and housebreakings of the homes and the kidnappings of the very persons who had seen fit to dismiss my application into their service, who had shut the doors to the warm hallways of the middle class. Well, finally, attractive as it was, I did not take the criminal path.
"'Low, very low, the last on my father's list of people to see, and thus someone who, by the time I got around to visiting him represented for me just another futile and humiliating interview, was Herr Mack, a man my father had not been in contact with for several years, a man whom I suspect my father did not have much regard for, since it seemed he was no more than a wealthy, simple, self-made man in the import and export business. My father had saved his daughter from dying by operating in time, and there seemed nothing to lose, after all, in trying to discover whether the man had kept the memory of his gratitude intact. My letter went to him, his to me designating a day and hour of appointment, but all this perfectly polite on his part, nothing more than "I shall be pleased to meet you at my office." Polite with a shade of the gruff actually.
"'Herr Mack's office was housed in one of the shabbier buildings of a shabby district hard by the railroad terminus. I expected his office to match the edifice and environs in their soiled and stale dustiness. Not even the vaults of the Paris hotel I worked in had depressed me as much as the waiting room of that import and export business. I wanted to turn and run, but I was sinking so fast into a great sadness and depression and self-disgust that I couldn't bring my body to move. Here was the final end of my youth, my intelligence, my bright green eyes. And now the last and worst to come as the office door opened and I beheld a smallish and balding fellow in his sixties, a kind, ruddy face, a benevolent smile, and all this only made me feel worse, a faster sinking into the collapsing shaft of myself, for now I imagined he might employ me out of some sense of obligation to my father, employ me at anything, and then what would I do for heaven's sake?
"'For I could not refuse employment, yet this place, that kind face seemed more s
uffocating than death by pressing — oh, please! Take those stones off my chest! And so I entered his private chamber and there received the first of my several shocks: The furnishings and decor were as splendid as the waiting room and entrance were squalid. And more, they were wholly made up of objects and furniture from France's Second Empire. I said nothing at first but left myself to discuss the matters at hand. Presently it turned out that Herr Mack, like all those who had preceded him, was in no way ready to do more for me than what he was at that moment doing, giving me the courtesy of some few minutes in order to tell me directly that indeed, decent fellow that I appeared to be, and surely one as worthy as the recommender himself (and be sure to give the most cordial greetings to said person), there was no position in any capacity that he might propose at the moment.
"'My face clearly brightened. Clearly he was not insensitive to the meaning of this suddenly sparkling illumination and with measured, calm voice, terrible in its absolute neutrality, added, "My debt to my benefactor never implied obligation to his offspring."
"'"Perfectly correct, sir, and grateful I am, too," I said, "but I'd rather die than work in a place such as this. And I am also grateful for the chance to meet at least one of my father's acquaintances who showed his true colors and let down all these civilized pretenses of interest in my welfare. And dear sir, not that you could have a hint of understanding of the things you live among here, grateful I am for the rare chance of seeing such high-quality examples of such and such and not to mention — "
"'"You are one of the very few who even know what these things are. Most who visit here think they're knickknacks I've picked up randomly at the junk shops. Then again, in my line of business there're not many who would understand the difference between ordinary nineteenthcentury junk and these, may I say, great treasures."
"'And then I repeated to him almost verbatim what you, Herr Peeperkorn, had said in the café, repeated that disquisition on art that had interested me so deeply as to send me to the museums and antiquarians and libraries to learn more, an investigation that further confirmed for me that I had to alter the terms of my life contract.
"'"Some art," I expounded, "seems to have proceeded from spiritual impulses in the creator, the motive a kind of religious longing — that is, that sentiment which aspires to an act of homage to the transcendent. Thus the paintings of Cezanne, whose mounds of apples are arrangements on the secular side of this religious impulse, expressed in its purest form. Cezanne does not require factors of anecdote and narrative to manifest the spiritual, and Giotto, who does use these factors, is spiritual despite them. To say it another way, Cezanne might just as well have painted scenes from Christian mythology and Giotto painted bourgeois apples; the aesthetic result would have been the same, an art that intuits the metaphysical geometry and is thus the highest form of art.
"'"Is the art of the Second Empire spiritual in the sense we speak of Cezanne and Giotto? No, the opposite. It is an art that galvanizes the great moments of materialist cultures, an art expressive of the most comfortable and happy times known in the Western bourgeois world.
"'"Second Empire art does not waste itself on social homilies, and it is truly democratic in its frank appeal to the broadest spectrum of a culture that equates the amount of labor, the expense, uniqueness, and rarity of materials as the true measure of a work's value — that is, its cost. The more ivory, the more gold inlay, the more precious and semiprecious stones larding a marble-top dressing table, the better. It is an art by and for a class that knew how to take its pleasures, an art celebrating a class that as yet did not whine away its power in bemoaning the very power, daring, and vulgar rapacity that afforded it the pleasures and luxuries of which we speak. Second Empire bourgeoisie did not chew its own entrails in self-loathing for the comforts it enjoyed at the expense of others — its colonial serfs and domestic hired hands. It did not feel the need to apologize for exploitation, dominion, imperialism. The working class and communards of 1871 tried to destroy this culture, but this culture did not, of itself, wish to commit suicide. Pure it was that epoch, as pure as its art."'
"'And these were my words, you say?' I asked the young director of companies.
"'Almost word for word, I assure you. The very words that had so sparked my imagination.'
"'And what was the result, then, of this little speech, quoted, as you claim, from my lips?'
"'Do not think that was your entire address on the subject. There was much more, and the rest that I have omitted is the real substance of the matter. I cited him only your preface. At any rate, this was the "result" as you call it:
"'Gorged with pride, with self-satisfaction at my own boldness and effrontery before this man and all that he so unwittingly represented and that I had come to revere — power and capital and money — I was about to leave.
"'But a change had come over Herr Mack. Where before he had been polite and curt, he now was gentle and solicitous, his diction direct but smooth. Even his rigid, stiff-necked bearing had altered, his body relaxing, till he even seemed shorter than when I first had entered his chamber.
"'"Well, there's more to you than you present on first delivery; more brains and more mental experience. When I first laid eyes on you, I sensed a vain, spoiled lad, a silly-headed one at that. I don't know how you came upon your ideas, but they fit mine and are the skeleton of my philosophy of life, business, and society. I work here among the artifacts of my class. They are, of course, ugly, but they are the genuine artifacts of a time and a society that knew the value of a minute lost and a minute used, when a man of intelligence, industry, and force might still alter the raw face of this globe and leave his name on an iron bridge spanning the upper Seine or the lower Congo or found a sunny orphanage whence issued healthy striplings fit for the cash-and-carry conduct of this negotiating world."
"'How to explain that this rough-looking man had within him a mind and character of great fineness and imagination, that his personal appearance and his public facade were guises assumed to ward off the eyes of the curious and the attention of those who habitually pursue the rich and forceful; he was a gentleman of considerable depth and breadth of culture. All this and more, as I was later to learn, was Herr Mack, my benefactor, my patron, my second father soon to be.
"'But for the moment he allowed himself the declaration of his admiration for my little — your little — speech, admiring most that passage treating the absurdity of guilt in those with power, and in a distant yet courteous manner, he interrogated me on my past, my hopes and plans for a future. Finding in me that balance of revolt and desperation, eagerness and determination, the desire to master obstacles, he offered me the position of his personal secretary, which offer, needless to say, I immediately accepted. Within a brief time I learned the business, and earned Herr Mack's trust and, do I dare even add, his affection. And why not? I found him greater than I had imagined in the initial stage of our professional relationship. I lived in order to do his work, and this devotion didn't go unappreciated. He entrusted me with greater and greater responsibilities until I was brought to the position you now find me, the director general of Mondex International SA.'
"'Most deserved, I'm sure. You and your enterprise have journeyed high into realms that must have once seemed unattainable. And is it because of you that this humble import-export enterprise of Herr Mack's has entered such empyreal realms?'
"'Your irony is unmerited and unwarranted, Herr Peeperkorn, yet I still feel well disposed toward you, sufficiently so to come to the point as concerns you and your visit here.’
"'You are gracious,' I said sincerely, taken aback by his civility toward me, 'and I do expect you will understand that I was unprepared for an encounter of this nature. Moreover, I confess I feel defensive, considering I'm in your presence as a candidate for your favor, a position of inferiority I never before have experienced with anyone.'
"'This tale, meant to allay, seems only to have disquieted you,' Herr Raiss said. 'I should have s
aid simply: "Shall I, who am in your debt, do no less for you than what was done for me by my benefactor?" I shall give you the chance you deserve and need, so not another word on that matter except to outline the range of your future activities for us.’"
"That's quite a tale, a saga of metamorphosis and achievement, but I notice, if I may be so bold," interjected Settembrini, "that you neglect to mention that this equitable treatment received by your downcast friend, and yours through him, was occasioned by the facts of your bourgeois parentage; neither you nor he would have had the opportunity to rise once fallen had you had no connections, no old school cravat, as the British would say, to provide you with the necessary ladder on which to scale."
Before Peeperkorn could reply — he had paused to quench his thirst with a nearby jug of beer — Tintin asked: "And what became of you, Herr Peeperkorn? What were your future activities with this enterprise?"
"Pray, Herr Peeperkorn, do not leave us hungry now," added Naptha, ''just when we've swallowed your stimulating appetizer."
"By no means shall I leave you famished," bellowed the narrator, "but with so heavy a vorspeis in your guts, I'm sure you've space only for an additional morsel or two."
Tintin in the New World: A Romance Page 14
