The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Between the discovery of the mountain site where tourists come from far away to contemplate the panorama and that of the masterpiece that seems to have been painted only in order to become, for its part, too, the goal of a pilgrimage, between these two discoveries of wonders of the world that did not operate on the same plane—the first on the level of what I had been taught about the seven days of Creation, the second on the closer but hardly less imposing level of the marvels that certain people have had the gift to achieve—a year at the most had elapsed. But certainly in passing from the excursion to Gornergrat to the visit to the Amsterdam museum, the kid that I was had crossed an important threshold: whereas at Gornergrat the ride on the cable car and the presence of instruments such as the panoramic table and telescope played a large part in my pleasure, in this respect hardly distinct from that which I found among my playthings (except that in this case things were taking place on a large scale and it was well understood that this was not “for fun”), the Amsterdam museum had offered me nothing that was on the order of a game or spectacular play, and the pleasure that I had taken there, if it was not yet that of an art lover, was at least the profound contentment of a boy very proud of having been judged capable of appreciating what one was presenting to him as a shrine of painting.

  The heavy dress of the frail creature who seems to have encountered the civil guard by chance, and, in passing, to have turned toward the man who was observing the scene and has now created the picture of it, the jackets barred or belted with silk, the plumed hats, the pointed beards of the two officers one sees walking at the head of the cortège, the gleam of helmets and halberds (or other arms of large complicated iron), the flags, half unfurled, in the background and, in a corner, a drum whose muffled beat one would think one could hear, somewhere a dog that reminds one of an army dog—how can one know exactly what, out of all these details, was recorded by the child of eight or nine years openmouthed before The Night Watch, so debased that I now rank it among the works which one eventually doubts having seen, so difficult is it to distinguish between what one has derived from really seeing them and from seeing, many times over, their reproductions! Referring to a dictionary engraving (the most discreet memory aid and because of this fact the most reliable) in order to try to rediscover my first impression while falsifying it as little as possible, I realized right away that this was leading nowhere . . . What reappeared via the engraving was a quantity of Night Watches seen at various periods, and the oldest of them—if, of course, my desire to remember is not pushing me to imagine this—was not at all the original (with its warm tonality, dark and golden) contemplated at the time of the visit to the Amsterdam museum, but a print that must have been part of the modest art treasure exhibited on the walls of our 8 rue Michel-Ange. Besides its most important piece, the portrait in charcoal or pencil that the celebrated Munkacsy had drawn before the eyes of my maternal grandfather by copying his own image reflected in a mirror (which was presented to us as a kind of tour de force and which explained, if our educators were to be believed, a certain singularity of gaze), this heteroclite assemblage included, along with a Rouget de l’Isle Composing “La Marseillaise” as well as a lithograph by Léandre representing Pierrot and Colombine in company with a black cat whose pale lunula, which it would be indecorous to name, was visible under its raised tail, a medium-sized oil painting signed “Horace de Callias,” a submission to the Salon whose career ended, I do not know why, in our home and which depicted the avenue of a public garden, in autumn, I think, with a woman strolling in formal visiting dress presented in profile, there being in addition to this many works of various different techniques and sizes that had scarcely any other meaning than that of family relics: miniatures dating from the great Revolution and depicting three or four of those ancestors who on my mother’s side were royalists but on my father’s side included a republican listed as a regicide; etchings of my father and his own father, the deportee from Lambessa, by that paternal uncle who, dying too early for me to have known him, had been an engraver by profession; a group of eighteenth-century cupids painted by a deceased relative of my mother’s, also a professional, the wings of which embellishing their chubby bodies made for me charming “little angels”; an old canvas, lastly, reproducing the features of one of my great-grandmothers, a woman of middle age, it seemed to me (even though she had to have been still young when she posed thus as Motherhood), coiffed in a vast straw hat with strings and holding asleep in her arms a naked baby—my maternal grandmother—in whose hands the anonymous portraitist had placed a bunch of grapes.

  Like everything that our apartment on the third floor of the rue Michel-Ange contained in the way of art objects or knickknacks, these works, painted, drawn, or engraved, and even those that were not connected by the slightest invisible fibril to some sequence of events in the family mythology—the poster with Léandre’s white Pierrot, for example, or the public garden painted by Horace de Callias, which were only, in the case of the first, a framed image that my father liked very much, in the case of the other, a picture concerning which I do not know why it was there and which besides said nothing to me—these works attached to the walls within which I breathed were, more than anything else, pieces of the everyday decor and differed scarcely at all from a pious object like the crucifix on a bed of red velvet that my mother preserved up to her last day, nor from the other references with which might be associated what I knew about my parents and those who, living or dead, belonged to our circle. In order to open a first window for me on the species of other world which it is the function of a work of art to create, what was needed was not only an authentic masterpiece, before which I would be expressly invited to go into ecstasies, but also, no doubt, a masterpiece that was out of reach, like The Night Watch, and which a trip as considerable as was, for me, the trip to Holland, at the age I was when I made it, would lead me to discover. What I could have seen at the Louvre would, for lack of the proper remove, have participated to some extent in the family memories, as was the case for me with monuments such as the Palais de Versailles or Napoleon’s Tomb. More distant, and endowed with extensions into history distinct from those that were more or less familiar to me, The Night Watch awed me with all the kilometers that had had to be traveled in order for one to be in a position to look at it and led me to begin to suspect that there existed paintings whose inestimable virtue, beyond their subject, is to show what great painting is.

  It was in Holland, then, that I crossed the preliminary threshold, which would be followed by another threshold that I would not cross until I became an adolescent, if not a young man: to be moved by a painting that was not exalted by any fame and that did not owe its attractiveness to any historical or anecdotal feature. It was, I believe, some landscapes by Jongkind—another Flemish painter—that I saw thus by chance in the course of a walk through the Musée du Louvre. I would find it very difficult to date this walk and just as difficult to identify its circumstances. What I am, however, almost certain of is that, standing before these paintings or watercolors by Jongkind, I experienced for the first time something that was neither the slightly formal or ceremonial feeling of admiration that had been inspired in me by The Night Watch, its grand-opera types of costumes and accessories contributing to that feeling, nor the still quite childish interest I had had in the elegiac and coquettish expression of motherly love presented by the double portrait in which Mme Vigée-Lebrun (who painted Queen Marie Antoinette) was represented holding her daughter in her lovely arms, which one presumes were very soft, nor the stupefaction before imposing compositions like Les Noces de Cana or Le Sacre de Napoléon, nor the amused wonderment produced in me by the romantic vivacity of Gustave Doré when I leafed through the books he illustrated (Roland furieux, Don Quichotte, La Divine Comédie, La Fontaine’s Fables, or Le Capitaine Fracasse, which happens to have been the first properly literary book that I read and which I understood was, as we said in my house, “well written”). Landscapes that I recall as being
stretched out horizontally like the long plains they depicted, with perhaps mills, boats on the water of the river or canal, skies with frayed clouds above the yellow earth, perhaps also thin trees, the works of Jongkind—whatever their precise content may have been—had opened for me astonishing holes in the solemn walls of the museum. That ambiguous state of passionate tenderness and sadness which, much later, my voluntary disappearance into the coma caused by the phenobarbital provoked as though it were its conclusion in the full sense of the word—it seems to me I felt a very distant premonition of it as I stood before those landscapes about which, even today, I am not capable of saying precisely what was the source of their insidious power. As I looked at the light touches of color with which this man with the name of joncs [reeds], or jonquils growing thickly in the cold of the North, evoked places that were undoubtedly localized but whose limits they denied, rather than set, I felt fulfilled, but at the same time in some sense aspirated out of myself and projected toward an infinitely receding horizon. A bizarre mingling of distress and exultation similar to that which, afterward, seemed to me expressed by the productions of modern genius that—on a plane very distinct from that of pure painting—touch me the most closely. I might mention, for example, without trying to produce a compendium: Picasso’s acrobats and his curtain for the ballet Parade; the Cubist canvases in gray and beige scaffoldings syncopated like ragtimes for troops of English chorus girls; certain sequences by Max Jacob and a few other poets in which poetry itself becomes the theme of poetry; the story L’Enfant polaire by my friend Limbour (a native of Le Havre); and the strangely denuded music of Satie (born in Honfleur, as we know). In more carefully considered terms: these are things that I love quite apart from any intellectual or aesthetic judgment, and that, in moments which are certainly melancholy but probably better than any others I know of, express with a melodious simplicity what—during the time, at least, that this enchantment lasts—seems to me to be my truth, unintelligible in any other form . . .

  From the hospital room that I peopled each night with my dreams, while a few meters from me vegetated a sort of living dead man, one had a view, during the day, over the worksites and warehouses of the Compagnie du Gaz de Paris. After a sunrise of which, getting out of bed in order to look through the window at the sky that was at last illuminated, I could admire the delicate colors while my ear was cheered by the chirping of the birds, a beautiful and sinister landscape took shape, with piles of coal almost as big as slag heaps, a metal walkway of impressive height and length, a surmounted building of steel beams, windows, and wood, the whole very dilapidated. It is only now that I measure to what extent the picture which, until the end of the day, was thus presented to me was kin to that which one sees of the coal-bearing regions of France and Belgium when one makes the train trip from Paris to Brussels. At the time, I limited myself to savoring a spectacle that moved me to the extent that it seemed to me the image of my life’s ambiguity: a sky with exquisite rosy tints above a distressing piece of industrial suburb; birdsongs that came to me in a retreat so covered with coal dust (despite the care of the ward maids) that one day when I rubbed the top of my head with a little eau de Cologne, I blackened my cotton pad in an instant, birdsongs similar to those that, in my basement room in the Musée de l’Homme, at the moment when the wound of a bad quarrel was closing, we heard suddenly, I and the woman who, that afternoon, had seemed to me clearly to have been sent to restore some freshness to my life but at the same time to instill a poison into it. If certain aspects of Belgium and Flanders finally became coupled with this fragment of northern suburb, I had to have, for this, an occasion to return to Brussels when I had already been digging for a long time into the magma of daydreams from which I try steadfastly to extract some identifiable substance.

  This journey that allowed me to see the pyramids of the mines again, scarcely less beautiful from a distance than the tombs of Giza, was made last year, while an international exhibition was being held in Brussels, as depressing as ordinarily are these sorts of events, which tend in fact to place the products of our arts and industries on the level of inventions for the Concours Lépine and show the little to which our creations are reduced. From lack of time even more than discouragement, I scarcely cast a glance in passing at the monuments or architectural groups (Saint Gudula, for instance, and the Grand Place) the visit to which had been one of the main attractions of the first of those tours that we made in Belgium when I was a small child, and which, followed by Holland and then a stay on the other side of the Channel two or three years after, as though the North attracted us the way it does a magnetized needle, prepared the way for the taste I professed for the nordic regions until the period when my trips as an adult began to teach me that romanticism can find its climate elsewhere than in the mists or snows of the septentrion.

  Except for one initial rainy day, it was fairly nice during the long weekend that my wife and I, escorted by a friend, spent there, so that we were out and about a good deal, those who hosted us taking us sometimes to the exhibition, sometimes to other spots in Brussels (whose large commercial streets were abundantly illuminated at night, with, as far as the eye could see, triumphal arches of a sort, made of lightweight strips of electric lightbulbs, like a succession of slender, shining bridges thrown over the roadway), driving us also to Ghent (to pay our respects, of course, to The Mystic Lamb), to Bruges (for the museums, the Beguinage, and the motorboat excursion on the canals), to Liège, to Ostende, and even to Waterloo (where the battle is reconstructed within a single room, in a vast and dusty panorama). One ethnographic detail: I observed here and there what (I was told) they call “postures,” that is, vases, statuettes, or other shoddy art objects that many people of the petty and middle bourgeoisie display behind the glass of their bow windows, facing the street, which would induce one to make an ironic comment about art as a response to a need for ostentation: isn’t a beautiful thing the thing that one likes (or would like) to display—in the case of the collector, what a beautiful diamond is for the one wearing it on his finger; in the case of the author, what his member in its glory is for the exhibitionist? In Ghent, I think, I drank a little of the beverage that some people (as others mention crushed bugs in relation to whiskey) describe as horse piss but of which I am very fond, gueuze lambic, with its tart, sour, and at the same time slightly fruity taste, whose beautiful orange color verges on mahogany and which, in a manner more surprising still than the fermented drinks of Africa such as millet beer and palm wine, gives when one swallows it the impression that one is assimilating the plant world itself. In short, despite the disenchanted reflections to which I had been led by the exhibition and its funfair tumult, I had some pleasant days there, with people I like very much, with whom I could forget to some extent the nasty turn politics in France had taken some months before, already, with the war in Algeria dragging on, the army quite determined to do only what it liked, and the total disorientation of most people in the face of the reactionary spirit of certain ones.

  I had no desire to see the church of Saint Gudula again; not that a visit to a cathedral arouses in me some anticlerical bile, but because I no longer have the same taste I used to for gothic churches in a very flowery style (those of Rouen and of Reims, for instance, other touristic objectives of certain early Easter vacations), those monuments of which my parents had me admire the “stone lacework” and of which I learned, perhaps a little later, that the soaring of their ogives invites prayer. I would happily have stopped at the Grand Place, on the other hand, for the memory I have of it is that of an ensemble, if not of a high quality, at least picturesque and lively, that I see today as a theater set framing in its garland of sculpted figures a procession of various guilds, in some small town, German, Swiss, or in fact Flemish, of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, craftsmen and merchants passing in groups with banners and emblems in profusion before the burgomeisters and aldermen, for the finale of a spectacle that would resemble Hans le joueur de flute, William Tell, an
d The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.