Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

If it had been up to Anne-Kathrin, Monsieur Delormes would have added, ‘ Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori .’ But Mimi and Pinchas had firmly rejected that one.

‘The steely grip of the siege was closing ever more tightly around the French capital, and soon the city of lights sank into leaden darkness. The fearful silence of a hospital reigned where once everyone had sung and danced so gaily. Where the Erinnyes rule, the Muses fall silent.’

Pinchas had to explain to the others what Erinnyes were, and Mimi, who had always taken him as a pure student of the Talmud, was surprised by his knowledge.

‘Food supplies were growing increasingly scarce. Each inhabitant of Paris was given a daily allowance of just a hundred grammes of bad bread, and anyone who managed to acquire this pitiful amount for himself and his loved ones considered himself lucky.

‘For François Delormes, who had been made rich long since by the popularity of his fashionable creations, it would have been an easy matter to escape the restrictions of these days of starvation and buy the choicest delicacies from the profiteers who, as everyone knows, multiply like bluebottles on a carcass in times of need. But nothing could have been further from this brave man’s mind. He had the contents of his cellar distributed among the needy, and he himself settled for water and dry bread.’

Inspired by his newly discovered journalistic talents, Pinchas had also sketched out a passage in which Monsieur Delormes set one day each week aside for fasting, but the others deleted it again as being too Jewish.

‘But that was not enough! When the siege was at its worst François Delormes gathered his closest colleagues around him—’

‘Colleagues?’ asked Anne-Kathrin. ‘Doesn’t he have any family?’

‘That wouldn’t be good for the story,’ said Pinchas.

‘—and informed them of something that was to shock them to the very core. In spite of his seventy years—’

‘Sixty,’ Anne-Kathrin suggested.

‘Fifty,’ said Mimi.

‘In spite of his mature years he had volunteered for the national guard, to go to the front and face the foe who were making his beloved native city endure such hardships. Everyone tried to talk him out of his decision, knowing that in the given situation it would mean certain death—’

‘ Dulce et decorum ,’ said Anne-Kathrin.

‘Sha!’

‘—but François Delormes would not be dissuaded either by pleas or by tears. With admirable calm and circumspection he sorted out his affairs, determined a successor to carry on the business of the fashion house as well as possible, and gave this successor, one Paul-Marc Lemercier, his first and at the same time his final commission. “The best worker I have had in the last few years,” he said, “the only one I found truly worthy one day to wear my mantle, is as I speak fighting somewhere in France against the mighty foe. I don’t even know if this master pupil of mine is still alive, or whether an enemy bullet might not have whipped him away. But be that as it may: the best fabrics, the most artful materials from my studio, I leave to none other than to him. If he is no longer alive, then let them crumble to dust rather than belong to someone else less appropriate to the task. I therefore determine that a cart bearing this precious cargo be dispatched today on the way towards his native town—”’

‘Where does Janki come from?’

‘Guebwiller.’

‘No one’s heard of it.’

‘“—on the way towards Colmar, and await him there until he or his coffin returns from the battlefield.”’

‘With the shield or on the shield!’ said Anne-Kathrin.

At that point a problem arose which nearly defeated them: how do you transport noble material from a city hermetically encircled by the enemy? But Pinchas, inspired by Rabba bar bar Chana, who had a snake swallow a crocodile as big as a whole city, again found a solution here.

‘That night Paris enjoyed a spectacle unparalleled in the annals of wars and sieges. A member of parliament appeared in the front box holding a white flag, and handed the German officer a letter addressed to his most senior commander. No one will ever know what the King of Tailors wrote to the King of Prussia, but it is well known that François Delormes supplied many royal houses, and that a manikin with the exact measurements of the Prussian monarch stood in his studio for many years.

‘Be that as it may, it is a fact confirmed by a considerable number of witnesses that on that same night a heavily laden cart, drawn by four horses, rolled out of Paris and through a cordon of Hessian hussars on the road to Colmar.

‘In the early morning of the following day François Delormes was mown down in a reckless grenade attack from a very short distance. Nothing was left of him but his hand, with which he had wielded the needle more masterfully than any other.’

Anne-Kathrin dried her eyes with the red silk ribbon that held her braid together, and Mimi too felt strangely moved.

‘But the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.’ (Anne-Kathrin.) ‘The receiver of this unusual transport, the only person that François Delormes had considered worthy as his successor, knew not the slightest of any of these events, for he lay unconscious in a German military hospital, his delicate yet manly face’ (Mimi) ‘aglow with fever. The Carmelites who tended to him self-sacrificingly, had long since abandoned all hope for him.

‘How does a French soldier end up in a German military hospital? Many of our readers may rightly ask that question. But here too we must mention a whole concatenation of events behind which one may, however devoted one might be to the factuality of modern science, see the hand of providence.

‘François Delormes’ inheritor had been hit in the leg by a bullet in the great battle of Sedan, but dragged, with an effort that we can only describe as superhuman, another soldier who seemed to be more seriously wounded than he was himself, out of the deadly rain of bullets.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Mimi.

‘There’s better to come,’ said Pinchas, delighted by her praise.

‘This other man, whose life he saved with his heroic deed, was not a Frenchman, but a Prussian soldier. Seldom has it been possible to confirm so beautifully that the voice of humanity knows neither states nor borders. And so it came to pass that the two men, the rescuer and the rescued man, were operated upon the same day and lay bed by bed, in the same field hospital. One of them recovered. The other, whose wounds were inflamed, spent a long time waiting on the narrow ridge that divides this world from the next.’

‘ Media in vita in morte sumus ,’ Anne-Kathrin suggested, and Pinchas wrote it down.

From then on, the job became easier and easier. Pinchas, who was for the first time able to put his imagination, those pointless daydreams as his mother called them, to good use, wrote faster and faster. Only a paragraph later Janki opened his big sad eyes, modestly dismissed the attestations of gratitude from the soldier whose life he had just saved, and returned at last to his home town of Colmar — ‘No, Miriam, absolutely not Guebwiller!’ There to his inexpressible surprise he found the fabrics…

‘… fabrics which have particular value not just because of their origins in the famous studio of the tragically departed François Delormes, but perhaps still more the fact that they left Paris even before the great plague of rats that our correspondent has so vividly evoked, and are thus hygienically quite unimpeachable.’

‘Yes!’ said Mimi and clenched her fist.

‘Their owner who, after all the dramatic events that he lived through at such a very young age, yearns for nothing so much as tranquillity, decided to emigrate to the peaceful land of Helvetia, where he could offer his unexpected treasure-trove on sale to a select clientele. Avoiding any public brouhaha, he has asked us not to mention his name, a request with which we are of course more than happy to comply. So we must content ourselves with revealing to our honoured readership that Jean M. has set up his modest shop in one of the oldest and certainly one of the most beautiful towns in our Canton, and that the shop is open every day apart from Saturday and Sunday between the hours of nine in the morning and seven in the evening.’