The Conspiracy (4 page)

III

In Rue d'Ulm it was that uncertain time when examinations are over and you have to wait for the results in a state of extreme idleness that is full of charm for naturally lazy adolescents forced for years into absurd labours.

Laforgue used to spend whole afternoons on a divan covered in a golden material now grown very dark. He would take a book and begin to read, but he would soon fall asleep. When he was too hot, he would go down to the ground floor and take a shower, or a glass of something in a bar in Rue Claude-Bernard.

One afternoon at around four, someone knocked: it was Pauline D., a young woman (no longer all that young) who from time to time used to come and see Laforgue in Rue d'Ulm, when she felt like being kissed. Laforgue had met her on a little beach in Britanny, where the young men would kiss the young women after strolls back and forth along the sea-wall, when they had stretched out on the sand and were disarmed by the darkness, the stars or the green phosphorescence of the sea which came to sputter out at their feet. Philippe always had great trouble keeping the conversation going with Pauline: he told himself he had never detested a woman as much as her, but since he did not have all that many opportunities to caress a bosom and legs, he made the best of it. He used to tell her roughly:

— You know incredible people, like the parish priest of the Madeleine and the military governor of Paris. To think you're the niece of a police commissioner! What on earth do you come here for?

One day Pauline had taken him to a charity sale in the Hôtel des Invalides. It was spring on the streets. War invalids, sitting in their little carriages, read their newspapers in the sun.
General Gouraud
was parading his empty sleeve among the ladies of the Union of the Women of France; these former nurses, forewarned about the illusion amputees entertain (as much of a byword as Aristotle's marble, or the well-worn quips of opticians), would move aside to avoid knocking against the empty sleeve, the phantom arm: did they picture the general suddenly letting himself go and releasing the scream of pain he had suppressed to the last on the fields of battle? Objects were being sold that nobody wanted to buy – it is always like that at sales, but luckily gifts are always needed for housekeepers or poor relations – cushions, mats, brushes and utensils made by blind veterans and sad as their guide-dogs, or by the yellow and black wards of the French nuns of Annam and the Somali Coast. Pauline always reminded Laforgue of wartime in the provinces, when he used to go each Thursday to the Sainte-Madeleine convent hospital to see the wounded making macramé or knitting mufflers and the sisters running about – those holy young women who had never had such a good time – and when, on Sunday evenings after he had served at the Office, tinkling the altar bells in front of the soldiers who would be dozing and thinking they were as well off there as anywhere, the convalescents used to give him cigarettes which made him throw up; returning home in a taxi with Pauline kissing him, he told himself that she was acceptable only as a childhood memory, the image of the blue-veiled nurses with their breasts so lovely beneath their square tuckers, beneath the throb of their epidemic medallions.

Pauline began talking about the Conservatory auditions and the exhibition of artworks on loan from Rome; she never had a great deal to do, she did not miss a concert, an exhibition or a big sale; she used to go one day a week to a surgery and advise young mothers about the feeding of newborn infants and the illnesses of early childhood; she did not have much money; she was not getting married.

Laforgue affected never to set foot in a picture gallery or an art dealer's, in the Opera House or the Salle Pleyel: this was typical of him. Like his friends, he used to proclaim proudly to all and sundry that he didn't give a fig for painting, music or the theatre, and that he preferred bars, fairs at the
Belfort Lion
, neighbourhood cinemas and the festivals in Avenue des Gobelins. This was a kind of challenge they threw out to people for whom the arts served as a merit, a justification or an alibi. Since he knew Spain and Italy quite well, Philippe could have spoken all the same about painting; but Pauline did not come to Rue d'Ulm to have a serious talk about pictures or music, and Laforgue considered there was no good reason to take the trouble to be polite. He sat down next to Pauline on the divan and she told him he wasn't very chatty.

— I'm sorry Pauline, he said. And Heaven knows there's a lot going on! Thirty degrees in the shade at Perpignan, an anti-cyclone from beyond the Sargasso Sea is moving towards the Azores. The financier Loewenstein has drowned in the Channel, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange is significantly affected.
Maya
is playing at the Théâtre de l'Avenue, where we shall not be going. There were forty-eight dead at Roche-la-Molière, but since they're miners the accident is hardly of much consequence; and
M. Tardieu
has had an informal chat with the wounded, which was extremely helpful. In Paris . . .

— Just kiss me, said Pauline.

Philippe kissed her and found a slightly irritated pleasure in doing so, because summer perspiration made Pauline's lips rather salty, her lipstick had an odd taste, and she was one of those impossible women who parade all their feelings, tremble when you touch their breasts and late in life will stage perfectly faked nervous breakdowns.

‘Such airs and graces!', thought Laforgue. ‘How would I look if Bloyé came home, with this histrionic girl apparently in a trance? Perhaps I'd better go and lock the door.'

He detached himself from Pauline and went over to shoot the bolt.

— Do you by any chance have evil intentions? she asked with a little contrived laugh. I'd probably better take off my dress.

— I think so too, said Laforgue.

Pauline stood up and took off her dress, a dress the colour of dead leaves that actually made a dry little rustle like dead leaves; she was wearing a mauve slip with broad strips of ochred lace running across her bosom and her legs.

‘This woman has no taste,' Philippe said to himself: he liked women to wear either virginal underwear or the extravagant artifices of the tarts at the Madeleine or the Opéra.

She had a rather skinny torso and shoulders, but fairly heavy legs and hips for which Philippe had a sufficient liking to forgive her her underwear. She stretched out on the divan and spread her dress over her knees; Laforgue, lying alongside that moist body, was thinking he ought to have drawn the curtain, what with all that sun they had full in their eyes and which was highlighting the freckles on Pauline's white skin above the broad hem of her stockings; but he was beginning to purr and couldn't face getting up. Pauline was not a woman with whom there was any question of going all the way; she used to defend herself with a stubborn presence of mind that scarcely hampered her pursuit of pleasure. She closed her eyes; the make-up disappeared from her cheeks; the movement of her belly was reminiscent of the spasmodic, dreamy throbbing of an insect's abdomen; she was alone, absolutely enclosed within herself and the strange concentration of pleasure; her heart beat strongly throughout this intense labour; Laforgue remembered that he had not shaved that morning, and that Pauline would get red spots round her mouth and pink patches in the hollow of her shoulder – but since he was thinking about this alien being with resentment, he congratulated himself on that. These caresses, these movements, these jerky exhalations involved a mute and shifting torpor, a blind urgency, a grimness that seemed never-ending. Suddenly, however, Pauline clenched her teeth, opened her eyes again, and Laforgue was furious to see that distraught look – that anguish of the runner who has given his all – and the girl's body grew taut, her thighs locked with incredible force upon Laforgue's wrist, while he himself achieved a dubious pleasure.

Pauline sank back, laying one hand on her breast:

— We're crazy, she sighed.

She stretched, closed her eyes again. Later, she raised herself on one elbow, took a mirror from her handbag and looked at herself:

— I do look a sight! she exclaimed.

— A sorry sight, said Philippe.

She was dishevelled, beads of sweat still bedewed her temples, her nostrils, the roots of her hair, after the hard begetting of pleasure. Laforgue looked at those pale lips:

‘Love doesn't suit women,' he said to himself.

— Wipe your mouth, said Pauline. If your friends saw all that lipstick . . .

She covered her breasts, which were set rather low, then stood up to slip on her dress. Pauline accomplished with admirable promptitude the difficult transition from the disorders of pleasure to life in society: with her clean face, her smooth hair, her ankle-length dress, nobody would have dreamed of showing her insufficient respect. She wanted to talk: idle chatter was one of the last echoes of pleasure for her. She read the titles of the books lying about everywhere; Laforgue had just finished a Greek year, the books were austere, on his table there were the
Politics,
the
Nicomachean Ethics
and
Simplicius' Commentary.
Pauline sat down again on the divan. Her dress revealed the great silken beaches of her stockings; she looked at Philippe with a killing smile intended to speak volumes.

‘That's quite enough for today,' thought Laforgue. ‘We're not accomplices on the strength of so little.'

— How exciting it must be, all that Greek wisdom! she exclaimed.

— As if I didn't know! replied Laforgue.

— So much more exciting than a woman like me, isn't that so? sighed Pauline. A woman of no importance . . .

— No comparison, said Philippe, telling himself: ‘She's simpering, this is the limit.' But you remind me, I was busy working when you arrived. It was one of my good days, would you believe . . .

— Which must mean, replied Pauline, that I might perhaps now relieve you of my presence.

Laforgue shrugged his shoulders slightly, but Pauline smiled: it was over, she was dressed again, she knew she could not demand of men any passionate gratitude for what she gave them.

Laforgue accompanied her to the Rue d'Ulm door, she went off in the direction of the gate and the porter's lodge.

‘One's really too polite,' he thought. ‘This time I should have had that girl.'

Bloyé arrived at the foot of the portico steps, he was returning from the gardens. Laforgue said to him, rather loudly:

— Bloyé, do you see that lady? Well, she doesn't go all the way!

Pauline turned round and cast an angry glance at them. Laforgue told himself ashamedly that the insult would not prevent her from returning, that she was not so proud – and he went back inside to wash his hands.

This is how some of their love affairs used to pass off: it will perhaps be understood why these young men generally spoke of women with a crudity full of resentment. This department of their lives was not in order.

At parties, at dances, during the holidays, they would meet girls whose lips before too long they could almost always taste, whose breasts and nerveless legs they could caress; but these brief strokes of luck never went very far, and left them irritating memories that engendered rage more than love. They thought with fury about how the girls were waiting for older men than they to marry them: how they were reserving their bodies. Philippe, when he danced with them, would sniff them with an animal mistrust; he preferred the insolent perfume of the tarts with whom he used to form easy liaisons on Boulevard Montparnasse or Boulevard Saint-Michel. Those gaudy women would permit silent relations, free from the theatricals of language and protocol; they were labourers in an absent-minded eroticism denuded of anything resembling an unlawful complicity.

Rosenthal did not breathe a word about any women he might know. Bloyé used to go once a month to a house in Boulevard de Grenelle, from which he would hear, in the furthest bedroom, the trains roaring past on the elevated track where it entered the La Motte-Picquet Métro station. Jurien was sleeping with the maid from a little bar in Rue Saint-Jacques, a red and tawny woman with a missing incisor. Pluvinage's lady friend was a tall, mannish girl who worked in an office.

‘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 nocturnal 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.