Paul Morand: The Man in a Hurry

“Then you will be disappointed, doctor. Just content yourself with this evening’s episode.”

“I want to do better.”

“My autopsy?” asked Pierre with a laugh.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! Your autopsy! Ha! Ha! You are laughing, Monsieur Niox. Sie gehen zu schnell! You are going too fast!”

Regencrantz got to his feet.

“Man is a magnetic needle that is never still,” said Pierre.

“Except at the pole…”

“Yes, indeed! Amid the polar ice, in death… Death which is nothing but a word! I drink to our life, doctor!”

“ Prosit! ”

CONFINED TO PARIS all afternoon, Pierre had been longing for fresh air, and being eager to sample the cool of the evening, he was consumed with the desire to go up to the woods at Robinson. But now that Regencrantz had left him, all he could think of was sliding downhill again towards his bed, like a river; he tumbled down the slope at full speed so that he could sleep.

The concierge just has time to catch him as he speeds by and to hand him a message from Placide.

“Monsieur Niox, from your colleague. It’s urgent.”

Pierre tears open the letter in the lift and reads it between floors: “ Latest development, ” writes Placide, “ the house that was not for sale is for sale; but there’s not a moment to lose. Phone me this evening when you get home .”

“Not a moment to lose!” Pierre exclaims. “Marvellous! When do we leave?”

He rings Placide, who agrees to come along with him. Tomorrow morning at six o’clock, it’s settled, they will both be on the road.

In bed, Pierre manages to fold himself in three in such a way that even when he is lying still he seems to be making a perilous plunge. He concentrates, then relaxes into a soliloquy: “Pierre, think hard before you fall asleep and before waking up and finding out you’re a landlord. Pierre, you’re going to tie yourself down! You’re taking root. You’re settling down. You’re becoming stable! Your agile legs are going to bind together like those of a stone god! Your rushing stream will end up in a lake, in a bog. Is it possible? You, owning a house! You should know that there are snails that die crushed by their own shells! Are you going to swap the turmoil of a free man for the turmoil of a home owner? Think carefully while it’s still dark before collapsing into a deep sleep. Up till now, what do you own? Treasures that are in any case not yours and which would fit into a single suitcase. You are one of those men who don’t have any excess baggage.

“Here, in three lines, is the inventory of your belongings:

“A game of chess made of rock crystal, said to be from the time of Charlemagne (ninth-century), deposited in a bank in Buenos Aires. That’s the large piece.

“A Byzantine vase (sixth-century) with a winged sparrow hawk mounting, in bond in New York.

“An illustrated manuscript known as the Ratisbon Gospel (1025), on gold and violet parchment, on loan to the Bodleian exhibition.

“A Greek paten (Mount Athos, sixth-century) in safe custody at Spink’s of London.

“Six gold Théodebert sols, Merovingian coins (sixth-century).

“A Carolingian comb in the shape of two confronting birds of prey, bought in Brussels three days ago.

“A small golden bull on a pearl necklace, excavations from the valley of the Indus (fifth-century BC).

“These latter two pieces are in Paris, on your bed, the bed on which you will fall asleep if this continues because inventories are the best soporifics. When one possesses such compact wealth in such a minimal amount, it’s pointless to encumber yourself with a house.”

“Excuse me,” Pierre says to himself, “I also have four Frankish sarcophagi, three Syrian twisting capitals, a porphyry Lombard armchair. ( A snore .) And a black-andwhite mosaic waiting for me in a garage in Antioch. These scattered pieces that risk being lost justify the purchase of a house. ( Another snore .) Furthermore, a Roman cloister is not a house, it’s more a work of art than a house. No, it’s not a basilica, I’m exaggerating because I’m beginning to feel sleepy… It’s a cloister. Let’s think more slowly. But when you think slowly, you fall asleep. How boring it is to sleep!”

Pierre switches on the light again.

“I like counting the hours of the night: if I sleep I’m robbed of these precious hours. Sleep is unjustifiable.”

Pierre falls asleep; not for long: the thought of his future acquisition wakes him up after ten minutes.

“This cloister really does exist and I’m soon going to take possession of it, unless the owner asks me to pay too much. All I have are the banknotes I earned yesterday; I’ll take the whole wad just in case; perhaps it will be enough.”

Pierre pictures himself three weeks ago on a flight from Marseille to Salonica, about to embark for Mount Athos and go to the cloister of Xeropotamos where the priests offered him the paten that is now part of his inventory. He had left Marignane at dawn and was flying over the Var. For a moment, the plane was hedge-hopping over the Maures hills. To his right, the Îles d’Hyères stretched out, to his left, the Alps. Beneath Pierre’s feet, less than fifty metres beneath him, amid the tangled mass of trees, far from any roads and surrounded by scrub, he remembered perfectly having spotted a clearing; in the middle of this clearing, like a reliquary lying on green velvet, he had noticed, buried amid the rosemary bushes, a most exquisite Romanesque chapel, every detail of which his hawk’s eyes immediately registered. “I have an excellent visual memory,” Pierre often used to say; “It’s the memory idiots have, but I have it; or rather: and I have it.”

Primitive art is rarely exquisite; that is precisely what made him fall in love with his cloister. In the rising sunlight, this miniature chapel appeared brand new and as though it had barely left the donor’s pocket. A thousand years had passed over it without it getting at all grubby; on the contrary, the stone looked as though it had been washed by the dawn. Between the blades of the propeller that drew him onwards, Pierre could make out every detail of the small stone steeple; beneath the undercarriage, the bell-tower and its lantern, like a cow with its calf, the thick walls and the apse that was rounder than a crinoline, passed by. “A manure cart was coming out of the porch, from which I concluded, even before the wheels of the monoplane had robbed me of my discovery, that the chapel was deconsecrated, that farmers used it, and that they might possibly relinquish it were I to offer to buy it. At that decisive moment, the last object to register on my retina was an ancient basin, in the middle of the courtyard, which I thought might serve as a drinking trough.

“Very well, I did what Lindbergh did when prospecting the Mayan temples that overlook the Guatemalan rainforest: I jotted down a rough sketch on my knees, with reference points and information provided by the pilot. The trees beneath us were the Dom forest; the beach to our right was Le Lavandou; the Provençal villas on the hillside, Bormes.” On arriving at Brindisi two hours later, during a miserable wait (journeys by plane are spent waiting!) Pierre had dispatched a telegram to Placide. The reply reached him in Athens:

“Chartreuse du Mas Vieux, eleventh-century. Stop. Not for sale. Sorry.” And now, here was the Mas Vieux for sale!

Pierre goes to sleep so as to prepare himself the better for his next raid. It’s not so much a rest as a gathering of momentum. This man who is unable to keep still is not even grateful to the little cloister lost in the depths of the Var for having waited 1,000 years for him.