Paul Nizan: The Conspiracy

— How about going for a drink, said Pluvinage.

— Let’s go, said Jurien.

They left the gardens to go drinking and had all the cafés that lie between Place du Panthéon and the Jardin des Plantes to choose from. They went down Rue Claude-Bernard then up Avenue des Gobelins till they arrived at the Canon des Gobelins, which still stands at the corner of the Avenue and Boulevard Saint-Marcel. The café’s pavement seats were full of people shattered by work and the heat, who mumbled absurd, truncated conversations or told each other insulting truths, as they waited until it was time to go off and sleep two by two in damp beds hidden away in wretched rooms; there were also a few showy pieces with watchful eleven-o’clock eyes, one of them a rather buxom young woman whose tight curls were faintly repulsive, reminiscent of an armpit or a pubis, but she had handsome knees that gleamed like black stones.

They sat down and looked at the drinkers around them, but it was too hot to get very excited about other people’s existence or even convince oneself very easily that they were anything but images, projections, reflected forms. Laforgue was more interested in the woman with curly hair and eventually she rose from her chair and went inside the café; Laforgue followed her to the cloakroom in the basement. The cloakroom lady said:

— We’ve still got fine weather ahead: the glass is set fair.

— But it’s thundery, said the young woman. I don’t know if you’re like me, Madame Lucienne, but it makes a person all tense. If you ran a hand through my hair, it would crackle like the fur on a cat’s back.

Laforgue asked for a telephone number that did not exist.

— There’s no reply, said the cloakroom lady.

— That doesn’t surprise me, said Laforgue.

The woman had applied powder, rouge and — after spitting on a little brush — mascara. She smiled at Laforgue and started off ahead of him; on the steps of the narrow, winding staircase she asked him:

— Is tonight the night, then?

Laforgue was standing three steps below her and, at the level of his eyes, could see a belly which bulged slightly beneath the black crêpe-de-Chine of her dress.

— That’s just what I was wondering, he replied. But we’d better make it some other day, the weather’s not right, the glass is set too fair.

— It’s a shame, she said, we’d have been good together. You’ll regret it, and as for me, I’ll have been downstairs for nothing.

— You’ll have a drink all the same, won’t you? said Laforgue.

They sat down at a table in the café’s deserted interior: the percolator hissed over the till-lady’s head, the waiter was nodding — they woke him up. Through the open window they could see a row of necks that told a lot about their owners’ faces. The woman drank green peppermint cordial and began talking, and since he had followed her for the sake of one action alone, Laforgue began to caress her knees; then he rose and rejoined his companions.

— You were hitting it off? asked Bloyé.

— As you say, replied Laforgue. She was a woman with a thirst, especially for affection; she was tender; she was just getting round to making plans for the future. One Sunday, she was saying, we might go and see my little daughter, she’s with a wet-nurse near Feucherolles, perhaps you know it, you get out at Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, beyond Marly-le-Roi, you must like children. A fine Sunday was in the making — for someone fond of children, canaries and cats.

When it was almost midnight Rosenthal left, since his home was far away from that neighbourhood, at La Muette, where people live in over-large stone shells, on streets as clean as the avenues in cemeteries where plots are leased in perpetuity.

Rosenthal, as he stood on the platform of the AX carrying him from the Jardin des Plantes towards the Gare de Passy, was thinking furiously about the potent domain of families. Since he had been breathing that La Muette air (no match for the breeze wafting at midnight over the paulownias of Parc Montsouris, but still. .) for twenty-three years now, he had the wherewithal to fill the time of his homeward journeys with childhood memories: the gatherings of nannies and nurses on the lawns of La Muette, round perambulators drawn up in a circle like the wagons of nomads none too sure about the darkness; the games with the children in the Bois who play in white gloves, who play without disarranging their silken hair; and later, after a day at Janson, the walks in Allée des Acacias or Allée de Longchamp thinking about Odette de Crécy, and the Sunday-morning girls beneath the flowering chestnuts on the avenue in the Bois when everything is redolent of spring, petrol, horses and women.

There is more than one Jewish quarter in Paris. The 16th arrondissement was not the one where Bernard Rosenthal would most readily have chosen to live, but each time he thought of Rue Cloche-Perce and Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, that was not possible either: the corkscrew ringlets of the latest immigrants from Galicia did not strike him as much less revolting than the Charitable Works of the Rothschild family; and he did not think a leap from the twentieth century and La Muette into the sixteenth century and Vilna or Warsaw was such a brilliant solution.

When a young French bourgeois like Laforgue is seized by a desire to rebel against the condition his class imposes upon him, he experiences less complex problems in making the break: the race and its mythologies, the complicities of church, clan and charity, do not long mask from him society’s true contours. A deviation from the path traced for him, like the reaction of a foal that takes fright and shies; the rift with paternal allegiances: these are enough to cast him back into the midst of a human space bereft of history, or which history scarcely trammels. Everything sorts itself out quite speedily: if, in an attempt to find his bearings, he seeks a bit of posthumous advice from his peasant forebears, they are never far away. Disloyal to his father who has done so much for him and, by God, makes no bones about telling him so, he can console himself by exclaiming that he is at least loyal to his grandfather: nothing threatens bourgeois stability more fundamentally than this constant interchange of compensatory betrayals, which are simply the normal consequences of the celebrated stages of democracy.

Rosenthal really did not know which way to jump, whom to be loyal to. His rabbi forebears were no joke, and in Paris what use was their advice full of Zohar and Talmud? He had too much self-esteem not to admit to himself — in spite of that human respect which does so much for the defence of lost causes — that the humblest of his relatives disgusted him no less than the richest and most triumphant; than those who had ended up acquiring an astonishing security like that of Catholics — as if Heaven and Hell belonged to them too. The pathetic synagogues on the first floor of some fissured building in the Saint-Paul neighbourhood, from which on Saturdays such unkempt old men would descend; the kosher inscriptions on the butchers’ windows; that incense-laden aroma of the East you can inhale only two hundred metres away from the Hôtel de Ville emporium and the church of Saint-Gervais; the tall girls, somewhat too pale-skinned and disdainful, beside a bowler-hatted father on the threshold of a tailor’s shop; the little gangs of pickpockets in the Polish bars; the white silk scarfs woven with threads in the hues of twilight and the moon — Bernard could no more put up with all this than with his cousins’ grand weddings in the temple on Rue de la Victoire or Rue Copernic, with the top-hats in a ring round the hupa and the ladies’ fur coats in the left bay; with tales of contango and backwardation, of outside market and official market; with the young girls who, when he met them at his beautiful sister-in-law Catherine’s, would speak to him in careless tones with the hint of an English accent of their holiday cruises to Spitzbergen or in the Cyclades, for which the fashion was then beginning. Bernard had no desire to exchange prisons.