The Conspiracy (8 page)

PHILIPPE LAFORGUE TO PAULINE D.

Strasburg, 2 April 1929

Dear Pauline,

I have a tiny favour to ask of you, which you must be in a position to do for me thanks to the bad company you keep. One of my friends, who is a private in the 21st Colonial at the Clignancourt barracks, wants to come across to the Left Bank, and specifically to the 23rd Colonial at the Lourcine barracks. He has entirely serious reasons which are none of your business, as they are none of mine. Since you are up to your neck in generals, you might perhaps ask one of those fellows decked out in oak leaves how the matter should be tackled. I should add that my friend is particularly desirous of being assigned to a post which is about to fall vacant and which he says is a cushy number, that of secretary to Area 2 of the Paris Garrison, which is housed precisely in the Lourcine or Port-Royal barracks. He is called André Simon, private in the 21st Colonial Infantry Regiment, Headquarters Wing, Clignancourt Barracks, 18th.

P.S. After the Easter break is over, dear Pauline, if the notion takes you to come back to Rue d'Ulm, I should like it to be after nine at night. Given the house customs, there is no doubt about the porter letting you past, he has seen even nigger-women come in.

PAULINE D. TO PHILIPPE LAFORGUE

Paris, 9 April 1929

Philippe dear,

I do a favour for you! It is too diverting for me to refuse. As you can imagine, your conduct does not deceive me and I am too fond of our reprehensible little sessions at Rue d'Ulm to hold your bad manners against you. I found the right general, of course, he was an old friend of my uncle's and a telephone call was all it took. Your friend will be appointed to the post he set his heart on. Apparently this was not one of those ambitions that cannot be satisfied. Do not thank me, I detest
written
expressions of gratitude. I shall come and see you. After nine at night, since that is what you want. Till then.

PHILIPPE LAFORGUE TO BERNARD ROSENTHAL

Paris, 9 April 1929

My dear old Rosen,

It is all settled. Simon will go to Port-Royal. I arrived in Paris yesterday evening and think we shall see each other soon. Nothing is simpler than the beginning of a Great Conspiracy. Yours.

VIII

André Simon was a rather weak young man. He was the son of rich tradespeople from Nantes, who brought up their children admirably, but who had ended up respecting only the Spirit, without thinking that this ludicrous veneration for the most disinterested activities of life ruined everything, and that it was merely the mark of their commercial decadence and of a bourgeois bad conscience of which as yet they had no suspicion. They had plenty of excuses: never had the values of commerce and status attached themselves more powerfully to writers, artists and diplomats – to all creators of alibis.

This gifted boy – who would no doubt have settled for managing the purchases and sales of his father's silk business in Rue Crébillon, while consoling himself for having above him only the shipowners of Boulevard Delorme and the great maritime brokers of the
Fosse
– had entered the
Ecole des Chartes
. What an adventure!

There are few social movements more remarkable than the fate of certain great Nantes houses in the years following the War: the deviation which led Simon out of the paths of commerce towards the little curiosities of Diplomatics was at the same time propelling young men from his background – whom he may have known at the Lycée Clemenceau, in the years when old men and young women were replacing teachers away at the front or dead on the field of honour – towards the Ecole des Sciences Politiques and the little secrets of diplomacy.

Sons of wholesale grocers, brought up beneath the bell-towers of Sainte-Croix, in about 1925 discovered golf at La Baule, horses in Paris, and plunged into proud but obscure careers in the French legations of this Europe of Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon in which treaties with the names of châteaux and parks cannot conceal the blood and violence to come. Others, echoing Parisian appeals or Alsatian voices, hurled themselves blindly into poetical activity. Yet others, at a loose end thanks to easy money and the dispersal of their schoolfellows, with frivolous enthusiasm collected the records of the American hot jazz greats, played poker, chased married women impelled by boredom into provincial adulteries; they learned to find cocaine and ether in the shady chemist shops of the town, and borrowed one-hundred-franc notes from the antiquated whores of Place Royale and Place Graslin, who demanded them back with insults on the pavement of Rue Crébillon or beneath the white arcades of the Passage Pommeraye, which still displays its braces, etchings, jokes and novelties, sheaths, trusses, and the outdated model of the battleship
Jauréguiberry.
Jewellers' sons end up burgling their fathers' shop-windows, sparing neither First Communion medals, nor betrothal salvers, nor wedding rings, nor christening baubles. Youths, huddled behind the Quai de la Fosse or the embankments of the Ile Gloriette, in mouldy cellars which must remind them of London warehouses and the literary quaysides of Hamburg, organize secret societies bound by childish rituals and the practices of an eroticism as antiquated as the kept women of their native town.

This unruliness of youth commenced after the peace of '19 in the large provincial towns, at Nantes as at Rheims, Nancy, Bordeaux, Rouen or Lille, when the time came for the provincial grandes bourgeoisies to entertain anxious doubts about their future. It seemed that their heirs could choose only between two temptations: the son of a Bordeaux wine merchant, who on leaving the Ecole Normale goes off to Athens to prepare for digs in the Chersonese or at Delos, is perhaps no less wayward than the Rouen notary's son hauled before the assizes for a motor theft, a swindle or trafficking in drugs.

Eight or nine years later, when the time of Leagues, arms deals and plots came, people thought everything would be settled by political adventures: the unruliness of the sons then seemed to protect their fathers' Ledger.

What André Simon feared most of all was to be despised by Rosenthal, with whom he had graduated from Louis-le-Grand and whom he admired, as Bernard from time to time thought he admired François Régnier, but in a different way. What a concatenation of influences, what an interplay of mirror reflections, in the lives of young men who feel themselves still somewhat too spineless to walk without companions, confidants and witnesses. One day Simon wrote in a letter to his father:

My friend Rosenthal is perhaps the only
living
philosopher there exists at present in France. People do not know this, and he probably does not know it either. But when he has published, or delivered, his first lectures, people will realize the truth, realize that they have a philosopher as important as Bergson.

These rhapsodies, however, were based only on a few sentences from Bernard.

The first effect of this admiration was that André Simon was doing his military service as a private. He could have been a second lieutenant, he even should have been if he had obeyed the laws on the military training of students; but Rosenthal had forbidden him to submit to those rules, against which many young men put up a violent resistance in '27 and '28.

— If you agree to become a reserve officer, said Rosenthal, I shall never speak to you again. We must remain in the ranks. They would like us to become their accomplices, utterly their accomplices; they believe almost sincerely, in any case, that this is our due, as it is theirs to command. But we shall give ourselves all the opportunities we can to be against them and with their enemies. Military service is the first chance we have to find ourselves mingling with peasants, workers and bank clerks. To separate ourselves from our class. Are we going to miss our first chance!

Now a private, Simon could never accustom himself to so inhuman a condition. Everything depressed him. The barbarous world which, at Clignancourt, extended between the walls of the outer boulevard and the muddy villages of the periphery was subjected to rules and customs of an astonishing violence, which would be given vent in its ways of eating, sleeping, washing, speaking about women, or passively receiving orders which had been passed down so many times that they seemed absurd by the time they reached the men.

Obscure passwords and an omnipresent wish to humiliate governs military life: on his arrival at the barracks, Simon had little idea of the refinements an NCO in a colonial regiment can achieve in the debasement of man.

The young Paris workers of the 21st Colonial – who used to defend themselves against army life with inimitably dexterous puns, jokes and ripostes; who in town had mistresses or wives, children, a profession which they sometimes continued to pursue between supper and lights out . . . in short, a life; who managed to ward off Breton sergeants and Corsican sergeant-majors by dint of levity, irony and a disdainful knowledge of men – to Simon appeared like heroes. This young archivist, barely emerged from the warmth of provincial life and from a kind of old bourgeois distinction, was possessed by the same hopeless love of freedom as young miners from the Pas-de-Calais whom war and the ravages of invasion had kept from learning to read; or as farm boys from the Vendée, dazed by their first weeks in the Army, who grew thin and at once fell ill.

Lieutenant-Colonel de Lesmaes – who sometimes used to summon Simon to his office to question him about the philosophies of China and India, in which he took an interest and whose great names and systems Simon, in order to avoid disappointing his superior, had to invent on the spot – Lieutenant-Colonel de Lesmaes said to him:

— You see, Simon, your comrades do not understand the need for external marks of respect: the halt at a distance of six feet, or the salute before addressing a superior, strike them as idiotic. But external marks of respect shouldn't be seen as pointless annoyances. It's quite obvious that a man's first reaction would be to kill his officer: a regiment is burdened with a vast quantity of explosive substances, so such impulses must be disciplined by the external marks of respect. Have you never seen an animal caught in a trap? No? It no longer moves, it knows there's nothing to be done. Standing to attention is a trap, military discipline a civility motivated by caution. There's no question of prostituting yourself to the men. Discipline means being the boss, and giving that lot the idea that they're buggered without you . . .

— You should reread
Alain
, Sir, said Simon, who was distressed by this philosophy of command.

He was quite aware that the system eventually won over many of his companions: it was on 1 May that he heard Corporal Palhardy, who was completing his service before returning to his Poitou smithy, declare:

— What do you expect the workers to do? They're not armed against us. And with old Papa Chiappe . . . They get taught some respect . . .

Simon saw his anger and concern as a systematic revolt against the system that gives birth to modern armies. In reality they were keen but unprincipled: the barracks was simply a place where he could not breathe, as though it had been four thousand metres above sea-level, or below the ground. He often used to go and lean on the parapet of the rampart-walk facing the smoky district of Saint-Ouen, thinking in despair how in the evening he would have to return to the office where he slept beside the regimental flag and boxes full of war trophies, helmets, German colours and braid torn from the sleeves of dead men; opposite a window rent by the violet flashes of Paris; hearing, when he could not sleep, the North trains whistle. He thought only of escape, to which he devoted the same skill as those old re-enlisted soldiers who used to be billeted for a few weeks at the Clignancourt barracks between two terms in the colonies: long enough to tell lurid tales from Cochinchina and the Lebanon and find, among the black ruts of the periphery or in the streets that climb towards the town hall of the 18th arrondissement, women whom they still had the heart to argue over with the pimps of Rue du Poteau. Simon had quickly learnt to imitate fairly accurately all the signatures needed to get him past the guardhouse or the little gate in the bastion where the sergeants' families lived. That was nothing: life does not consist in a few midnight passes, which do not prevent you from relapsing into the nightmares that barracks and prisons manufacture all night long. Simon was really proud of himself on the day when he simulated a hepatic attack so well that the regimental doctor sent him to spend three weeks in the confined atmosphere of the fever wards and classic grey monastery gardens of the Val-de-Grâce. Among his chance companions, he really liked only the absent without leave, the deserters, those whose Army file bore the fine black-and-red arabesques of punishments for habitual misconduct, the insolent soldiers whose unauthorized absences expired an hour before becoming desertion. Anything seemed to him better than this blind servitude, this feverish barrack-room brooding: hospital, prison, suicide. Nothing discomfits the military authorities more than suicide, whereby a man craftily escapes all the Army's supernatural threats. But nothing seemed more natural to Simon, who as long as he lived would see as the most heartrending symbol of order, and the noblest image of courage, the plain wooden coffin of a peasant from the Vendée who had hanged himself one night with his tie, after sixty hours' confinement to barracks, from the banister on the top landing of the stairs in C Block: the officers were dreadfully put out, the men prowled about in front of the open door to the showers which were serving as a mortuary, the colonel's staff captain recalled the time when a forceful colonel would make all his men march past a swine of a suicide's corpse, exposed on the stable dungheap.

As he had hoped, at the Port-Royal barracks Simon found a few freedoms. In this barracks, an astonishing, easygoing disorder reigned, maintained by the to-ings and fro-ings of colonial arrivals and departures, which allowed many prisoners to escape. Those on secondment like Simon, since the sentries scarcely knew them, used to enter and leave their quarters without anyone dreaming of asking them to account for themselves.

The offices of Area 2 of the Paris Garrison were installed on the first floor of a main building facing onto Rue de Lourcine: it was an isolated refuge, where two secretaries lived – Simon and a private named Dietrich, whom he saw only rarely. Each morning, a company sergeant-major would come and smoke a cigarette in the office. Two or three times a week, a major would pay a brief visit to the men under his command, whose names he had forgotten, although he knew vaguely that one of them had been a student and had been recommended by the high command of the colonial regiments.

Sergeant-Major Giudici, while awaiting his retirement, which would come soon what with his years of campaigning and his semi-campaigns at sea between Indochina and Marseilles, carried on an existence rich in complicated intrigues, centred upon a number of whores from Rue Pascal and the Carrefour des Gobelins.

He liked Simon, because he thought he could rely more upon men who had a mysterious education, and whose unknown concerns and civilian world were no doubt too far distant from his own for them to take a notion to intervene dangerously in his affairs: he did not imagine that a young bourgeois could ever become a rival, or a spy.

The discretionary power of military command, the baseness that habitually attaches itself to the sovereign exercise of absolute power, and the certainty of always being believed before an inferior, generally induce NCOs to look upon their men as servants and to force them into waiting upon their persons: the relationship of subordination which discipline establishes with a view to war turns in peacetime into a relationship of servility. A barracks is scarcely anything but a great assemblage of employers and servants – no feature of military life is more feudal than this. A strange game of social compensation and revenge takes place: a sergeant, who in civilian life has been unable to achieve anything, avenges himself for many former humiliations by ordering a young lawyer or engineer to sweep his room or empty his pail.

Sergeant-Major Giudici, who had always had underlings, promptly found it natural to entrust Simon with errands to the sombre bars on the streets that cross Boulevard de Port-Royal beneath iron bridges, linking the Mouffetard to the Broca and Santé neighbourhoods.