Paul Nizan: The Conspiracy

Nor were the impassioned fur-trade workers’ meetings, in the little hall on Rue Albouy, any great help to him: the speakers held forth almost exclusively in Yiddish, he did not know a word of it. In his family, no one uttered a word of the forgotten language any more without laughing, ever since they had forsworn poverty, exile and anger. He did not in any case believe Jews had the right to a special liberation, a new act of alliance with God: he saw their liberation as submerged in a general emancipation, wherein their names, their misfortune and their vocation would disappear all at once. Besides, Bernard still wished only to be freed — he gave little thought to freeing anybody else.

It was quite hard actually for Rosenthal to forget that he was Jewish: his name sometimes inspired him with a kind of shame, which he considered ignoble and blushed for; it inspired him also with pride, and among his friends he would sometimes begin a sentence with the words ‘As a Jew, I. .’, as though he had inherited secrets of which they would always remain ignorant — recipes for knowledge of God, intelligence or revolt; as though, for his salvation, he had had an exhilarating and bloody history to exploit, a history of battles, pogroms, migrations, legal proceedings, exegesis, knowledge, real power, shame, hope and prophecy. But he had only to find himself among his kinsfolk to detest them, to tell himself that the Jewish bourgeoisie was more dreadful than all others, Jewish banks more ruthless than Protestant banks or Catholic banks: he had scant acquaintance with the economy of other faiths.

How hard it was to be burdened by the problems of two millennia, the tragedies of a minority! How hard, not to be alone!

The Rosenthals lived in Avenue Mozart, at a time when almost all their relatives and friends still remained loyal to the Plaine Monceau, sending their sons to the Lycée Carnot or Lycée Condorcet and their daughters to the Dieterlen School; when the great movement towards Passy and Auteuil had not yet assumed the remarkable dimensions it was to assume in the years that followed.

First you went down a spacious corridor in white marble set off with long mirrors and blood-red wall-settees in garnet velours, then you arrived at the Rosenthals’ ground-floor apartment. This was large, its french windows opening onto a damp garden enclosed by railings and shaded by tall white buildings. The large and small drawing-rooms were crammed with statues, bound volumes, gloomy paintings and console tables with gilt feet: there was a grand piano, a great glossy saurian protected by a Seville shawl; a harp; and canvases by Fantin-Latour and Dagnan-Bouveret, dating from the period when painters had everything to gain by adopting double-barrelled names that endowed them with a plebeian nobility.

M. Rosenthal was a broker, but you would have thought yourself in the home of some great surgeon. On days when Mme Rosenthal received, her guests would all have the air of people waiting for an appointment and a verdict on the condition of their appendix or their ovaries. The moment had not yet come to yield up those apartments, furnished twenty years earlier with distraught passion, to the decorators of nineteen hundred and twenty-five. It was only young married couples who were beginning to set up house in white rooms furnished in glass and metal — and the atmosphere still remained medical.

Bernard entered his domain. In that stately apartment, his room’s sole ambition was to be austere. It was furnished with a large table, a brass bed that Bernard had deemed less frivolous than a divan, and an English wardrobe: on the walls there were shelves of books (not many of them bound like the ones in the large drawing-room), a poor lithograph of Lenin, a fairly good reproduction of Hals’s Descartes , and a little metaphysical landscape by de Chirico rather reminiscent of a provincial museum’s reserve collection beneath a stage moon — and which dates the period when this tale of young people unfolds. Bernard took a bath and went to bed, thinking that he had definitely smoked too much and that he was rather hungry. He then thought vaguely about the Revolution, and with exactitude about his family, the furniture in the large drawing-room, and the kitchen where there must be things left in the refrigerator. He told himself things had to be settled one way or another, without really knowing whether it was a matter of covering Paris with barricades; catching a train next morning that would take him for a few weeks far away from his father and mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and the servants; or simply going down to the kitchen — he was really too sleepy, eventually he fell asleep.

A quarter of an hour after Rosenthal, Pluvinage in turn had left the Canon des Gobelins. Pluvinage, who was preparing for his agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, lived alone in a fairly dismal room in a hotel in Rue Cujas inhabited by Chinese students and by whores from the Pascal, the d’Harcourt and the Soufflot. As always, his companions felt faintly relieved by his departure; but since they regarded this as a pretty unworthy sentiment, they did not speak of it. Laforgue, Bloyé and Jurien did their best to postpone the moment of going home to bed. Luckily, they were passionately attached to Paris, their neighbourhood and night strolls.

Nine years ago the neighbourhood round the Panthéon still formed a fairly enclosed little world, its frontiers following Rue Gay-Lussac, Rue Claude-Bernard, Rue Monge, Rue des Ecoles, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, Place du Panthéon, Rue Soufflot and Rue Saint-Jacques; the authorities had not yet begun bisecting the houses with streets of hospital severity, overlooked by sheets of glass and by brick and concrete towers dedicated to Knowledge. The passer-by would proceed through winding lanes frequented by flocks of Irish seminarists, through alleys that boasted food and destitution round Place Maubert, without any desire to go beyond the frontiers down towards the banks of the Seine, the gusts of Notre-Dame, the long funereal shelters of the Gare, and the barren, hopeless folly of the skeletons of fish and monsters, the gemstones, the culinary herbs, the animals and the palm-trees imprisoned in dreamlike dens and glasshouses at the Jardin des Plantes.

It was a neighbourhood that gave its inhabitants all they needed: their greatest demands were gratified by the rural memories still lingering round Rue Lhomond, Rue Rataud and Rue du Pot-de-Fer, in the depths of leafy yards and acacia-shaded lodges, towards the Panthéon riding-school with its gilded horses’ heads. Nowhere could you hear more cocks crow at dawn; and even in the afternoon, on stormy days, their rain calls would suddenly ring out through the lulls of Paris. It had not been so long since the last stock-rearers had abandoned the courtyards of Rue Saint-Jacques, where they had been replaced by cabinetmakers, sculptors, teachers of painting and dance; among the polytechniciens going up Rue Lhomond of a Wednesday, you would not have been surprised to encounter a cow or a sheep-dog.

Behind the worn façade of great Louis XV town-houses, abandoned gardens proliferated where weeds and brambles overran stone vases and statues the weather had beheaded like queens; where, as dusk fell, the children of concierges and button-sellers used to organize never-ending games and chase one another, twittering like swallows and squeaking like mice; and in Rue Lhomond there still existed houses where the arm of the hay-winch jutted out above the rotting loft-door.

In Rue Mouffetard that evening, odours of dead meat, cat and urine hung about, along with the invisible flakes of poverty; as ever, in those sleeping wildernesses of Paris, Laforgue and his comrades saw flitting away only the last prowlers down on their luck: those old women, trundling from doorway to doorway with shopping bags full of papers, crusts, rags and the same shiny fragments of iron, bone, mother-of-pearl and pottery that lunatics in asylums sew onto their coarse petticoats; those Negroes and Algerian labourers, who can be heard singing so late in summertime under the green-paper trees of Place Maubert, as though on an African rooftop. As ever, all that remained for them to do was decide to go to bed, telling each other this was really no life at all — then they went home. It was no use their dreamily probing the day’s little pile of rubbish, they did not find anything much there: nothing had happened.