Patrick Modiano - The Occupation Trilogy - La Place de l'Étoile – The Night Watch – Ring Roads

Lévy-Vendôme’s apartment is furnished in the Napoleon III style. The vicomte ushers me into his library.

‘Have you ever seen such exquisite bindings?’ he says, ‘I am a bibliophile, it is my secret vice. See, if I take down a volume at random: a treatise on aphrodisiacs by René Descartes. Apocrypha, nothing but apocrypha. . I have single-handedly reinvented the whole history of French literature. Here we have the love letters of Pascal to Mlle de La Vallière. A bawdy saga by Boussuet. An erotic tale by Mme de La Fayette. Not content with debauching the women of this country, I wanted to prostitute French literature in its entirety. To transform the heroines of Racine and Marivaux into whores. Junia willingly copulating with Nero as a horrified Britannicus looks on. Andromache throwing herself into the arms of Pyrrhus at their first meeting. Marivaux’s countesses donning their maids’ uniforms and “borrowing” their lovers for the night. As you can see, Schlemilovitch, being involved in the white slave trade does not preclude being a man of culture. I have spent forty years writing apocrypha, devoting myself to dishonouring the most illustrious writers of France. Take a leaf out of my book, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance, Schlemilovitch, vengeance!’

Later, he introduces me to his henchmen, Mouloud and Mustapha.

‘They are at your disposal,’ he says, ‘I shall send them to you the moment you ask. One never can tell with Aryan women. Sometimes one has to make a show of brute force. Mouloud and Mustapha are peerless when it comes to taming even the most unruly spirits — they’re former Waffen SS from the Légion nord-africaine. I met them at Bonny and Laffont’s place on Rue Lauriston back when I was secretary to Joanovici. Marvellous fellows. You’ll see!’

Mouloud and Mustapha are so alike they could be twins. The same scarred face, the same broken nose, the same disturbing rictus. They immediately show me the greatest kindness.

Lévy-Vendôme accompanies me to the gare Saint-Jean. On the station platform, he hands me three bundles of banknotes.

‘For personal expenses. Telephone to keep me up to date. Vengeance, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance! Be ruthless, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance! Ven. .’

‘As you say, monsieur le vicomte .’

III

Lake Annecy is romantic, but a young man working in the white slave trade must put such thoughts from his mind.

I catch the first bus for T., a market town I have chosen at random on the Michelin map. The road rises steeply, the hairpin bends make me nauseous. I feel ready to abandon my fine plans. But before long, my taste for the exotic and the desire to air my lungs in the Savoie win out over my despondency. Behind me, a few soldiers start singing ‘Les montagnards sont là,’ and I immediately join in. Then I stroke my wide-rib corduroy trousers, stare down at my clumpy shoes and the alpenstock bought second-hand in a little shop in old Annecy. The tactic I propose to adopt is as follows: in T., I will pass myself off as a young, inexperienced climber who knows of the mountains only from the novels of Frison-Roche. With a little skill, I should quickly ingratiate myself. I can introduce myself to the locals and furtively scout out a young girl worth shipping off to Brazil. For greater security, I have decided to take on the unassailably French identity of my friend Des Essarts. The name Schlemilovitch sounds dubious. The local savages doubtless heard about Jews back when the Milice were overrunning the area. The most important thing is not to arouse their suspicions. Suppress my Lévi-Straussian ethnological curiosity. Refrain from staring at their daughter like a horse trader, otherwise they will sniff out my oriental ancestry.

The bus pulls up in front of the church. I sling my rucksack over my shoulder, make my alpenstock ring against the cobbles and stride confidently to the Hôtel des Trois Glaciers. I am immediately captivated by the copper bedstead and the wallpaper in room 13. I telephone Bordeaux to inform Lévy-Vendôme of my arrival and whistle a minuet.

At first, I noticed an unease among the natives. They were unsettled by my tall stature. I knew from experience that one day this would work to my advantage. The first time I crossed the threshold of the Café Municipal, alpenstock in hand, crampons on my shoes, I felt all eyes turn to size me up. Six foot four, five, six, seven? The bets were on. M. Gruffaz, the baker, guessed correctly and scooped the pot and immediately struck up a keen friendship with me. Did M. Gruffaz have a daughter? I would find out soon enough. He introduced me to his friends, the lawyer Forclaz-Manigot and the pharmacist Petit-Savarin. The three men offered me an apple brandy that had me coughing and spluttering. They told me they were waiting for their friend Aravis, a retired colonel, for a game of belote. I asked permission to join them, feeling grateful that Lévy-Vendôme had taught me belote just before I left. I remembered his pertinent remark: ‘I should warn you now that working in the white slave trade is not exactly exciting, especially when one is trading in young French girls from the provinces. You must cultivate the interests of a commercial traveller: belote, billiards and aperitifs are the best means of infiltrating these groups.’ The three men asked the reason for my stay in T. I explained, as planned, that I was a young French aristocrat with a keen interest in mountaineering.

‘Colonel Aravis will like you,’ Forclaz-Manigot confided. ‘Stout fellow, Aravis, used to be a mountain infantryman. Loves the peaks. Obsessed with climbers. He’ll advise you.’

Colonel Aravis arrives and looks me up and down, considering my future as an alpine chasseur. I give him a hearty handshake and click my heels.

‘Jean-François Des Essarts! Pleased to meet you, sir!’

‘Strapping lad!’ he says to the others, ‘perfect for the force!’

He becomes paternal:

‘I fear, young man, that we don’t have time to put you through the rock-climbing exercise that would have given me a better sense of your talents. Never mind, another time. But I guarantee I’ll make a seasoned climber out of you. You seem hale and willing and that’s the important part!’

My four new friends settle down to playing cards. Outside, it is snowing. I engross myself in reading L’Écho-Liberté , the local newspaper. I discover there is a Marx Brothers film playing at the cinema in T. There are six of us, then, six brothers exiled in the Savoie. I feel a little less alone.

On reflection I found the Savoie as charming as I had Guyenne. Was this not the homeland of Henry Bordeaux? When I was about sixteen, I read Les Roquevillard, La Chartreuse du reposoir and Le Calvaire du Cimiez with devotion. A stateless Jew, I hungrily drank in the rustic redolence of these masterpieces. I cannot understand why Henry Bordeaux has fallen from favour in recent years. He had a decisive influence on me and I will be forever loyal to him.

Luckily, I discovered my new-found friends had tastes identical to mine. Aravis read the works of Capitaine Danrit, Petit-Savarin had a weakness for René Bazin and Gruffaz, the baker, set great store by Édouard Estaunié. He had nothing to teach me about the virtues of that particular writer. In What is literature? , Des Essarts described the author as follows: ‘I consider Édouard Estaunié to be the most deviant author I have ever read. At first glance, Estaunié’s characters seem reassuring: paymasters, postmistresses, provincial seminarians, but do not be deceived by appearances: the paymaster has the soul of an anarchist bomber, the postmistress works as a prostitute after her shift at the PTT, the young seminarian is as bloodthirsty as Gilles de Rais. . Estaunié chose to camouflage vice beneath black frockcoats, mantillas, even soutanes: he is de Sade as petty clerk, he is Genet dragged up as Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.’ I read this passage to Forclaz-Manigot, telling him that I had written it. He congratulated me and invited me to dinner. During the meal, I surreptitiously studied his wife. She seemed a little mature, but, if I found nothing better, I decided I would not be choosy. And so, we were living out a novel by Estaunié: the young French aristocrat, so keen on mountaineering, was really a Jew working in the white slave trade; the lawyer’s wife, so reserved, so provincial, would all too soon find herself in a Brazilian brothel if I so decided.