Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

At first, Max did not understand Calmette’s death there in the offices of Le Figaro, the reasons for it, not Henriette Caillaux’s reasons, a woman whose letters someone intends to publish is fully entitled to shoot the swine who would do such a thing, no, what Max did not understand at first were Calmette’s reasons, such a serious-minded man, with no interest in scandal, he had just noted in his diary that The Rite of Spring was an offence against morality and that Nijinsky displayed ‘gross indecency’ in certain of his choreographed movements.

So why publish private letters? It was the sort of thing sensation-seeking newspapers did. And in Le Figaro ! The same Figaro that went so far as to denounce the tango for obscenity, a so-called ‘society’ dance which, let it not be forgotten, requires the man to thrust one leg between those of his partner. Calmette had not dared write these details down in full, but he had spelled the message out to the men on the presses in the print-room: ‘I will not allow such filth to corrupt the Family!’

And Max, ten years after the war, will be told that Calmette, normally so prudish and sober-sided, had a very good reason for turning his worthy Figaro into a rag filled with scandal and purloined letters, not a political reason, but rather a madness, because Calmette was mad and madly in love with another woman, a woman of letters whom Caillaux also loved to the point of wanting to divorce Henriette. Let’s summarise.

Monsieur Caillaux, Madame Caillaux, Monsieur Calmette, and bringing up the rear, a woman of letters. Calmette, madly in love and jealous of this woman of letters, had unearthed Caillaux’s old letters to his wife Henriette and was about to publish them. When she read the letters written to Henriette Caillaux, the woman of letters would lose interest in Caillaux. So Calmette decided to put an end to Caillaux, his policies and the designs he was said to have on a woman of letters who had the nerve to hesitate between a politician and the editor of Le Figaro.

A formidable lady, this woman of letters, all caustic and cream, a great name, a voice of her own, poison and poems, ‘you have strength and I have guile; your strength is to be the one I love’. An ambassador, very much an admirer of the lusty male form, is about to sit down facing her. There is a hat on the chair, no point in sitting down, the hat’s quite soft. A literary lady with genuine poems to her credit, ‘even in my heart where your blood beats’, then later the mistress of a married man, the man dies, the literary lady turns up at the funeral, very dignified, stays in the background, and when the mourners file past the open grave she throws her cloak into it.

The tango, the Holy Office decides, is an infernal dance, one final demonstration of this impious dance is given in the presence of Pius X by a couple of young Roman aristocrats, a brother and sister of irreproachable moral rectitude, who nevertheless wish to defend the tango, which tango did they dance? for the Pope commiserated with them on having to perform these ‘very tiresome movements’, nevertheless the tango is forbidden by the Vatican, and at least three of the shots fired in Calmette’s office turn Calmette into a corpse, Henriette into a tragic heroine whom it is henceforth impossible for him to divorce even to marry a woman of letters, Calmette into political flotsam, and peace into a cause amputated of all leaders save Jaurès — whose voice Péguy would dearly love to drown out beneath the drums of the guillotine — who is a habitué of the Café du Croissant, with its carved wood façade and gold lettering.

He was young and good-looking, he said ‘I love you, Lena’, he put a lot of feeling into the way he looked at me, we were on a mountain, he didn’t know where to begin, the back of his neck was soft, it made me want to drag him into my room, I did it, it felt good, I managed to say Liebchen and Hansele but it wasn’t love, it was the mountain, I might have started to fall in love with him later on, when Marie-Thérèse…

He just went on staring at her, I was furious, I didn’t want him to fall for another girl but that in itself is not enough to make a man love you. You can write books about it, but it’s not enough. I thought he was very silly to stare at her like that, she started kicking up like a mare in season, she was insufferable, he just looked moony, a woman and a damp-eyed puppy, in a farmyard, I didn’t bother to say anything, anyway I wasn’t really in love with him.

He could have done whatever he liked with her, it wouldn’t have bothered me. To start loving a man because you see him straightening his tie before going up to some Marie-Thérèse who jiggles all she’s got for everyone to see, wears vulgar dresses, in that pink Liberty print, a pink muslin blouse, pink pearls and shows as much cleavage as it takes to attract looks from the morons, and very few from me.

I suddenly had this feeling that I had ceased to be anything, that I had no breasts, no backside, but I didn’t feel that I had fallen in love. I didn’t say anything and it didn’t last. Anyway she’s got peculiar breasts. I left the pair of them to it, he came after me, men are like that.

I know exactly when I started to love him, three months after we’d been together, Arosa, that farcical episode at Arosa, on the first floor of the chalet we’d rented for one night, with the raised bed.

I’d climbed into it, I was waiting for him, he was also already in his nightclothes, a little painted wooden chair, at the foot of the bed, the solemn look he gave me as he stood on the chair to join me, very amorous, as was only right and proper.

His foot went right through the chair, foot, calf, knee and halfway up his thigh, went clean through the flimsy wooden seat of a chair which was never intended for amorous use, a chair painted pale blue. He nearly fell over, he couldn’t free his leg, it might have happened to me, he wasn’t really hurt, only very annoyed.

He tried to extricate his leg but the splinters began sticking in his thigh, he swore, turned red in the face, a parfit knight with a chair circling his naked thigh, that’s what set me off with the giggles, I shouldn’t have, the most awful giggles, I bit my lip, I didn’t want anyone on the floor below to hear me, my hot-blooded knight in a nightshirt, with one leg through a chair, we must get help, out of the question, he tried to break off the splintered wood but he was standing and couldn’t do it, I was helpless with laughter, I bit the inside of my cheeks, we must have been making a terrible row, I could see he was in a bad way, I got down clinging to the bed posts.

He was beginning to be in real pain, I stopped laughing, I made him lie down on the floor, on his back, with his leg in the air, the chair clamped around his leg, I managed to slide the chair up his thigh to ease out the splinters which had started to dig into his flesh, he had good thighs, he didn’t seem to be thinking about sex any more.

I kept my eyes on the job, I snapped off the splintered ends one by one to widen the hole in the chair and pull it off without doing him any damage, gently, and then I got the giggles again because I suddenly wanted to say: if only Marie-Thérèse could see you now!

Of course all that was already over and done with, but I still wanted to say it, naturally I didn’t do anything of the sort, a fit of the giggles, my lover man, on his back, beautiful light of a candle, one leg in the air, his white nightshirt pulled up, with him doing his best not to make too indecent a spectacle of himself, come on try, with one leg in the air and a chair wrapped round it, I was laughing, I couldn’t get the last of the splinters out and pull the chair down over his knee.