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

Loïtia gives me a panicked glance. I tell her I will be right back.

That night, I walked along the banks of the Rhône thinking of Jean Giraudoux, of Colette, Marivaux, Verlaine, Charles d’Orléans, Maurice Scève, Rémy Belleau and Corneille. I am coarse and crude compared to such people. I am unworthy. I ask their forgiveness for being born in the Île-de-France rather than Vilnius, Lithuania. I scarcely dare write in French: such a delicate language putrefies beneath my pen. .

I scrawl another fifty pages. After that, I shall give up literature. I swear it.

In Normandy, I will put the finishing touches to my sentimental education. Fougeire-Jusquiames, a little town in Calvados, set off by a seventeenth-century château. As in T., I take a hotel room. This time, I pass myself off as a sales representative for exotic foods. I offer the manageress of Les Trois-Vikings some Turkish delight and question her about the lady of the manor, Véronique de Fougeire-Jusquiames. She tells me everything she knows: madame la marquise lives alone, the villagers see her only at high mass on Sundays. Every year, she organises a hunt. Tourists are allowed to visit the château on Saturday afternoons for three hundred francs a head. Gérard, the Marquise’s chauffeur, acts as guide.

That same evening, I telephone Lévy-Vendôme to tell him I have arrived in Normandy. He implores me to carry out my mission as quickly as possible: our client, the Emir of Samandal, has been daily sending impatient telegrams threatening to cancel the contract if the merchandise is not delivered within the week. Clearly, Lévy-Vendôme does not understand the difficulties I face. How can I, Raphäel Schlemilovitch, make the acquaintance of a marquise overnight? Especially since I am not in Paris, but in Fougeire-Jusquiames, in the heart of rural France. Around here, no Jew, however handsome, would be allowed anywhere near the château except on Saturdays with all the other paying guests.

I spend all night studying a dossier compiled by Lévy-Vendôme on the lineage of the marquise. Her pedigree is excellent. The Directory of French Nobility , founded in 1843 by Baron Samuel Bloch-Morel, offers the following summary: ‘FOUGEIRE-JUSQUIAMES: Seat: Normandie-Poitou. Lineage: Jourdain de Jusquiames, a natural son of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Motto: “Jusquiames, do or damn, Fougère ne’er despair.” The House of Jusquiames supplants the earlier comtes de Fougeire in 1385. Title: duc de Jusquiames (hereditary duchy) under letters patent of 20 September 1603; made hereditary member of the Chambre des pairs by the decree of 30 August 1817. Hereditary Duke-Peer (duc de Jusquiame) Cadet branch: baron romain , papal brief of 19 June 1819, ratified by the decree of 7 September 1822; prince with right of transmission to all descendants by decree of the King of Bavaria of 6 March 1846. Advanced to the dignity of hereditary Count-Peer, by the edict of June 10, 1817. Arms: Gules on a field Azure, Fleurs-De-Lis sautéed with Stars per Saltire.’

In their chronicles of the Fourth Crusade, Robert de Clary, Villehardouin and Henri de Valenciennes offer testaments to the good conduct of the Seigneurs de Fougeire, Froissard, Commynes and Montluc and heap praise upon the valiant Capitaine de Jusquiames. In chapter X of his history of Saint Louis, Joinville recalls a good deed by a knight of the de Fougiere family: ‘Then did this right worthy man raise up his sword and smite the Jew ’twixt the eyes dashing him to the ground. And lo! the Jews did turn and flee taking with them their wounded master.’

On Sunday morning, he posted himself at the entrance to the church. Shortly before eleven o’clock, a black limousine pulled into the square; his heart was pounding. A blonde woman was walking towards him but he dared not look at her. He followed her into the church, struggling to master his emotions. How pure her profile was! Above her, a stained glass window depicted the entrance of Eleanor of Aquitaine into Jerusalem. She looked just like the Marquise de Fougeire-Jusquiames. The same blonde hair, the same tilt of the head, the same slender, delicate neck. His eyes moved from marquise to queen and he thought: ‘How beautiful she is! What nobleness! I see before me a proud Jusquiames, a descendent of Eleanor of Aquitaine.’ Or ‘The glories of the Jusquiames precede the reign of Charlemagne, they held the power of life and death over their vassals. The Marquise de Jusquiames is descended in direct line from Eleanor of Aquitaine. She neither knows nor would she deign to know any of the people gathered here.’ Certainly not Schlemilovitch. He decided to abandon his efforts: Lévy-Vendôme would surely understand that they had been presumptuous. To transform Eleanor of Aquitaine into the denizen of a brothel. The prospect was repugnant. One may be called Schlemilovitch and yet nurture a flicker of sensitivity in one’s heart. The organ and the hymns awakened his nobler disposition. Never would he give up this princess, this fairy, this saint of the Saracens. He would strive to be her hireling, a Jewish pageboy, granted, but mores have changed since the twelfth century and the Marquise de Fougeire-Jusquiames would not take offence at his origins. He would take on the identity of his friend Des Essarts so he might more readily introduce himself. He would talk to her about his own forebears, about Foulques Des Essarts who gutted two hundred Jews before setting off for the Crusades. Foulques was right to do so, these Jews boiled the Host, their slaughter was too kind a punishment, for the bodies of even a thousand Jews are not the equivalent of the sacred Body of Our Lord.

As she left the mass, the Marquise glanced distantly at her congregation. Was it some illusion? Her eyes of periwinkle blue seemed to fix on him. Did she sense the devotion he had vowed to her not an hour since?

He raced across the church square. When the black limousine was only twenty metres away, he collapsed in the middle of the road, pretending a fainting fit. He heard the brakes squeal. A mellifluous voice murmured:

‘Gérard, help that poor young man into the car! A sudden malaise no doubt! His face is so pale! We will prepare a hot toddy for him at the château.’

He was careful not to open his eyes. The back seat on which the chauffeur laid him smelled of Russian leather but he had only to repeat to himself the sweet name of Jusquiames for a scent of violets and brushwood to caress his nose. He was dreaming of the blonde tresses of Princess Eleanor, of the château towards which he was gliding. Not for a moment did it occur to him that, having been a collaborationist Jew, a bookish Jew, a bucolic Jewish, he was now in danger, in this limousine emblazoned with the Marquise’s coat of arms (Gules on a field Azure, Fleurs-De-Lis sautéed with Stars per Saltire), of becoming a snobbish Jew.

The Marquise asked him no questions as though she found his presence entirely natural. They strolled together through the grounds of the château, she showed him the flowers and the beautiful spring waters. Then, they went up to the house. He admired the portrait of Cardinal de Fougeire-Jusquiames. He found the Marquise enchanting. The inflections of her voice were pierced by the jagged contours of the land itself. Subjugated, he murmured to himself: ‘The energy and charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families of France who from her childhood had been brought up in the saddle, had tortured cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits. .’

After a candlelit dinner served by Gérard, they sat and chatted by the monumental fireplace in the drawing room. The Marquise talked to him about herself, about her grandparents, her uncles and cousins. . Soon, nothing of the Fougeire-Jusquiames family was unknown to him.

I stroke a Claude Lorrain hanging on the left-hand wall of my bedroom: The Embarkation of Eleanor of Aquitaine for the Orient . Then I study Watteau’s Sad Harlequin . I step around the Savonnerie carpet, fearful of soiling it. I do not deserve such a prestigious room. Nor the epée de page — the little sword upon the mantel. Nor the Philippe de Champaigne that hangs next to my bed, a bed in which Louis XIV slept with Mlle de La Vallière. From my window, I see a woman on horseback galloping through the grounds. For the Marquise goes every morning at five o’clock to ride Bayard, her favourite horse. At a fork in the path, she disappears. Nothing now disturbs the silence. And so I decide to embark upon a sort of biographical novel. I have memorised every detail the Marquise graciously gave me on the subject of her family. I shall use them to write the first volume of the work, which will be called The Fougeire-Jusquiames Way, or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon as revised by Scheherazade and a handful of Talmudic Scholars . In my childhood days, on the quai Conti in Paris, Miss Evelyn would read me the Thousand and One Nights and the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. Then she would turn out the light. She would leave the door to my room ajar so that I might hear, before I fell asleep, Mozart’s Serenade in G major . Taking advantage of my drowsy state, Scheherazade and the Duc de Saint-Simon would cast shadows with a magic lantern. I would see the Princesse des Ursins step into the caves of Ali Baba, watch the marriage of Aladdin and Mlle de la Vallière, the abduction of Mme Soubise by the caliph Harun al-Rashid. The splendours of the Orient mingling with those of Versailles created a magical world which I will try to recreate in my novel.