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

I felt that the French provinces would provide these more effectively than Mexico or the Sunda Islands. And so I turned my back on my cosmopolitan past. I was keen to get to know the land, with paraffin lamps, and the song of the thickets and the forests.

And then I thought about my mother, who frequently toured the provinces. The Karinthy Theatre Company, light comedy guaranteed. Since she spoke French with a Balkan accent, she played Russian princesses, Polish countesses and Hungarian horsewomen. Princess Berezovo in Aurillac. Countess Tomazoff in Béziers. Baronne Gevatchaldy in Saint-Brieuc. The Karinthy Theatre Company tours all over France.

II

My father was wearing an eau de Nil suit, a green-striped shirt, a red tie and astrakhan shoes. I had just made his acquaintance in the Ottoman Lounge of the Hôtel Continental. Having signed various papers making over a part of my fortune to him, I said:

‘In short, your New York business ventures are a dismal flop? What were you thinking, becoming chairman and managing director of Kaleidoscope Ltd.? You should have noticed that the kaleidoscope market is falling by the day! Children prefer space rockets, electromagnetism, arithmetic! Dreams aren’t selling any more, old man. And let me be frank, you’re a Jew, which means you have no head for commerce or for business. Leave that honour to the French. If you knew how to read, I would show you the elegant comparison I drew up between Peugeot and Citroën: on the one hand, a provincial man from Montbéliard, miserly, discreet, prosperous; on the other, André Citroën, a tragic Jewish adventurer who gambles for high stakes in casinos. Come, come, you don’t have the makings of a captain of industry. This is all an act! You’re a tightrope walker, nothing more! There’s no point putting on an act, making feverish telephone calls to Madagascar, to Lichtenstein, to Tierra del Fuego! You’ll never offload your stock of kaleidoscopes.’

My father wanted to visit Paris, where he had spent his youth. We had a couple of gin fizzes at Fouquet’s, at the Relais Plaza, at the bars of Le Meurice, the Saint James Albany, the Élysée-Park, the Georges V, the Lancaster. This was his version of the provinces. While he puffed on a Partagas cigar, I was thinking about Touraine and the forest of Brocéliande. Where would I choose to live out my exile? Tours? Nevers? Poitiers? Aurillac? Pézenas? La Souterraine? Everything I knew of the French provinces I had learned from the pages of the Guide Michelin and various authors such as François Mauriac.

I had been particularly moved by a text by this writer from the Landes: Bordeaux, of Adolescence . I remember Mauriac’s surprise when I passionately recited his beautiful prose: ‘That town in which we were born, in which we were a child, an adolescent, is the only one we must forbear to judge. It is part of us, it is ourselves, we carry it within us. The history of Bordeaux is the history of my body and my soul.’ Did my old friend understand that I envied him his adolescence, the Marianist Brothers school, the Place des Quinconces, the scents of balmy heather, of warm sand, of resin? What adolescence could I, Raphäel Schlemilovitch, recount other than that of miserable little stateless Jew? I would not be Gérard de Nerval, nor François Mauriac, nor even Marcel Proust. I had no Valois to stir my soul, no Guyenne, no Combray. I had no Tante Léonie. Doomed to Fouquet’s, to the Relais Plaza, to the Élysée Park where I drink disgusting English liqueurs in the company of a fat New York Jew: my father. Alcohol fosters a need in him to confide, as it had Maurice Sachs on the day we first met. Their fates are the same with one small difference: Sachs read Saint-Simon, while my father read Maurice Dekobra. Born in Caracas to a Sephardic Jewish family, he hurriedly fled the Americas to escape the police of the dictator of the Galapagos islands whose daughter he had seduced. In France, he became secretary to Stavinsky. In those days, he looked very dapper: somewhere between Valentino and Novarro with a touch of Douglas Fairbanks, enough to turn the heads of pretty Aryan girls. Ten years later his photograph was among those at the anti-Jewish exhibition at the Palais Berlitz, accompanied by the caption: ‘Devious Jew. He could pass for a South American.’ My father was not without a certain sense of humour: one afternoon, he went to the Palais Berlitz and offered to act as a guide for several visitors to the exhibition. When they came to the photo, he cried: ‘Peek-a-boo! Here I am!’. The Jewish penchant for showing off cannot be overstated. In fact, my father had a certain sympathy for the Germans since they patronised his favourite haunts: the Continental, the Majestic, Le Meurice. He lost no opportunity to rub shoulders with them in Maxim’s, Philippe, Gaffner, Lola Tosch and other nightclubs thanks to false papers in the name Jean Cassis de Coudray-Macouard.

He lived in a tiny garret room on the Rue des Saussaies directly opposite the Gestapo. Late into the night he would sit up reading Bagatelles pour un massacre , which he found very funny. To my stupefaction, he could recite whole pages from the book. He had bought it because of the title, thinking it was a crime novel.

In July 1944, he managed to sell Fontainebleau forest to the Germans using a Baltic baron as a middleman. With the profits of this delicate operation, he immigrated to the United States where he set up the company Kaleidoscope Ltd.

‘What about you?’ he asked, blowing a cloud of Partagas smoke into my face, ‘Tell me about your life.’

‘Haven’t you been reading the papers?’ I said wearily, ‘I thought Confidential magazine in New York devoted a special issue to me? Basically, I’ve decided to give up this shallow, decadent cosmopolitan life. I’m retiring to the provinces, the French countryside, back to the land. I’ve just settled on Bordeaux, the Guyenne, as a rest cure for my nerves. It’s also a little homage to an old friend, François Mauriac. I’m guessing the name means nothing to you?’

We had one for the road in the bar at the Ritz.

‘May I accompany you to this city you mentioned earlier?’ he asked out of the blue, ‘you’re my son, we should at least take a trip together. And besides, thanks to you, I’m now the fourth-richest man in America!’

‘By all means come along if you like. After that, you can go back to New York.’

He kissed me on the forehead and I felt tears come to my eyes. This fat man with his motley clothes was genuinely moving.

Arm in arm, we crossed the Place Vendôme. My father sang snatches of Bagatelles pour un massacre in a fine bass voice. I was thinking about the terrible things I had read during my childhood. Particularly the series How to kill your father by André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre (the ‘Read Me’ series for boys). Breton advised boys to station themselves at the window of their house on the Avenue Foch and slaughter the first passing pedestrian. This man necessarily being their father, a préfet de police or a textile manufacturer. Sartre temporarily forsook the well-heeled arrondissements for the Communist-controlled suburbs of the banlieue rouge : here, middle-class boys were urged to approach the brawniest labourers, apologise for being bourgeois brats, drag them back to the Avenue Foch where they would smash the Sèvres china, kill the father, at which point the young man would politely ask to be raped. This latter method, while exhibiting greater perversity, the rape following the murder, was also more grandiose: the proletariat of all countries were being called upon to settle a family spat. It was recommended that young men insult their father before killing him. Some who made a name for themselves in such literature developed charming expressions. For example: ‘Families, I despise you’ (the son of a French pastor). ‘I’ll fight the next war in a German uniform.’ ‘I shit upon the French army’ (the son of a French préfet de police ). ‘You are a BASTARD’ (the son of a French naval officer). I gripped my father’s arm more tightly. There was nothing to distinguish between us. Isn’t that right, my podgy papa? How could I kill you? I love you.