William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Under the eyes of Napoleon I (atop a column in the Place Ven-dôme, "en Cesar") the Third Republic bickered on. Having established their own squalid bohemias, there was no objection to handing the original over to their hungry neighbor across the Maginot Line, who was busy scrapping the Versailles treaty, fragment by fragment, until the day when a German envoy would be shot in Paris, and, weeks later, a peace pact signed to prepare for a re-enactment of the bloodshed which had provoked this expression of faith from one killed in it, "II y a tant de saints, ils forment un t.el rempart autour de Paris, que les zeppelins ne passeront jamais." And Paris waited, as ever ready as Phryne beset by slanders and threats, to rend her robe and bare her breasts to the mercy of her judges.

In an alley, a dog hunting in a garbage can displayed infinite grace in the unconscious hang of his right foreleg. Little else happened that Saturday night in August. Saint Bartholomew's Day was warm. It was the dead heat of Paris summer, when Paris cats go to sleep on Paris windowsills, and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo. The center of the city was empty. A sight-seeing bus set off from the Place de 1'Opéra. A truck and a Citroen smashed before the Galeries Lafayette. At the Pont d'Auteuil, a man's body was dragged out of the Seine with a bicycle tied to it. Among the fixtures, tiled and marbled shapes remindful of a large outdoor bathroom, in the cemetery at Montrouge a widower argued with his dead wife's lover over who had the right to place flowers on her grave. In front of the Bourse, a deaf-mute soccer team carried on conversation in obstreperous silence. On the Quai du Pont Neuf, a Frenchman sat picking his nose. Then he put his arm around his girl and kissed her. Then he picked his nose. It was Sunday in Paris, and very quiet.

On the terrace of Larue, under the soiled stature of the Madeleine's peripteral imposture, Wyatt considered a German newspaper. Taxis limped past, bellicose as wounded animals, collapsing further on at Maxim's, late lunch. Unrepresentatively handsome people passed on foot. Some of them stopped and sat at tables. — In Istanbul in the summer, a lady said, — it was Istanbul, wasn't it? We used to take long rides in the cistern, in the summer.

Wyatt read slowly and with difficulty in Die Fleischflaute, an art publication. His show was over. No pictures had been sold. He had thrown away La Macule quickly, after reading there Crémer's comments: —Archaïque, dur comme la pierre, derive sans cœur, sans sympathie, sans vie, enfin, un esprit de la mort sans 1'espoir de la Resurrection. But at this moment the details of that failure were forgotten, and the thing itself intensified, as he made out in Die Fleischflaute that there had just been discovered in Germany an original painting by Hans Memling. Crude overpainting had transformed the whole scene into an interior, with the same purpose that Holofernes' head had once been transformed into a tray of fruit on Judith's tray (making it less offensive as a 'picture'): this one proved to be a figure being flayed alive on a rack, since over-painted with a bed, and those engaged in skinning him were made to minister to the now bedridden figure. A fragment of landscape seen through an open window, said Die Fleischflaute, had excited the attention of an expert, and once it was taken to the Old Pinakothek in Munich and cleaned, the figure stretched in taut agony was identified as Valerian, third-century persecutor of Christians, made captive by the Persian Sapor whose red cloak was thrown down in the foreground before the racked body thin in unelastíc strength, anguish and indifference in the broken tyrant's face, its small eyes empty with blindness. Possibly, the experts allowed, it might be the work of Gheerardt David, but more likely that of Memling, from which David had probably drawn his Flaying of the Unjust Judge. There followed a eulogy on German painters, and Memling in particular, who had brought the weak beginnings of Flemish art to the peak of their perfection, and crystallized the minor talents of the Van Eycks, Bouts, Van der Weyden, in the masterpieces of his own German genius.

Saint Bartholomew's Day in Notre Dame, reflecting commemoration of the medal which Gregory XIII had struck honoring Catherine de' Medici's massacre of fifty thousand heretics: the music surged and ebbed in the cathedral, and in the Parisian tradition of preconcerted effects the light suddenly poured down in fullness, then faded, together they swelled and died. At the end of the service, as the organ filled that place with its sound, the body of the congregation turned its many-faced surface to look back and up at the organ loft, and from the organ loft they formed a great cross so. Then the cross disintegrated, its fragments scattered over their city, safe again in the stye of contentment.

Paris simmered stickily under the shadowed erection of the Eiffel Tower. Like the bed of an emperor's mistress, the basin she lay in hadn't a blade or stitch out of place; and like the Empress Theodora, "fair of face and charming as well, but short and inclined to pallor, not indeed completely without color but slightly sallow.," Paris articulated her charm within the lower registers of the spectrum. So Theodora, her father a feeder of bears, went on the stage with no accomplishment but a gift for mockery, no genius but for whoring and intrigue. An empress, she triumphed: no senator, no priest, no soldier protested, and the vulgar clamored to be called her slaves; bed to bath, breakfast to rest, she preened her royalty. — May I never put off this purple or outlive the day when men cease to call me queen. She died of cancer.

Toward evening the shadow of the Eiffel Tower inclined to the Latin Quarter across her body. She prepared, made herself up from a thousand pots and tubes, was young, desperately young she knew herself and the mirror forgotten, the voice brittle, she lolled uncontested in the mawkish memories of men married elsewhere to sodden reality, stupefied with the maturity they had traded against this mistress bargained in youth. Revisiting, they could summon youth to her now, mark it in the neon blush uncowed by the unquerulous facades maintained by middle age, and the excruciating ironwork and chrome, the cancerous interiors.

At a bar in Rue Caumartin a girl said to an American, — Vous m'emmenez? Moi, je suis cochonne, la plus cochonne de Paris. Vous voulez le toucher? ici? Donnez moi un billet. oui un billet, pour le toucher… ici… discrètement.

A girl lying in a bed said, — We only know about one per cent of what's happening to us. We don't know how little heaven is paying for how much hell.

Someone said, — But you've been over here so long, to an American in a hotel room who was showing his continental savoir faire by urinating in the sink. He said, — I wanted to marry her, but you know, she's tied to her envirement. Someone said, — I never knew him very well, he's of the Negro persuasion. On the left bank, someone had just left his wife and taken up the guitar. It was at home in bed. — I dress it in her bathrobe every night, he said. Someone else suggested using a duck, putting its head in a drawer and jamming the drawer shut at the critical moment. A young gentleman was treating his friends to shoeshines for the seventh time that hour. He was drunk. The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France. At that table someone said, — This stuff doesn't affect me at all. But don't you notice that the sky is getting closer? — Of course I love art, that's why I'm in Paris, a girl said. The boy with her said, — Je mon foo, that's French for. — Putas, putas, putas, muttered the man in the sharkskin suit. Someone said, — My hands are full, would you mind getting some matches out of my pocket?. here, my trouser pocket. Someone said, — Do you like it here? Someone else said, — In the morning she didn't want to, so I put it under her arm while she was grinding the coffee. A man in an opaque brown monocle said, — Gzhzhzhzhzt… hu… and fell off his chair. Someone told the joke about Carruthers and his horse.