* THE MAGNIFICENT MÉTROPOLITAIN *
IN THE STIFLING HEAT of the early afternoon of Thursday, 19 July 1900, a hundred people of all ages, shapes and sizes were standing in front of the little kiosk that had recently appeared on the pavement of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. Some, acutely aware of their place in history, were looking at their watches. Others were there simply because they happened to be passing and had joined the crowd on principle or because they wanted to find out why so many people were all waiting to use the same toilet.
At exactly one o’clock, the glazed doors swung open and a heady smell of pine forest escaped into the Paris air. The crowd passed under the glass umbrella and clattered down the wooden steps to an illuminated newsstand where banknotes could be changed, and a counter where a pretty face was waiting with a ticket and a smile. They were delighted to find the underworld pleasantly cool. Someone exclaimed, ‘I could spend my holidays down here!’, and everyone agreed.
They bought their tickets – rectangles of pink or cream card, with a background design that might have been a cathedral or a power station – then they hurried down another flight of steps, and a blast of Arctic air had them clutching at their throats. Despite the cold, the stench of creosote was overpowering. As their pupils dilated, they were able to distinguish, by the aquarium light of the electric lamps, an asphalt pavement stretching away into the darkness. On either side of the pavement were two cement-lined trenches and, at the bottom of each trench, an elevated bar of shiny metal. Men in black sweaters with red piping and the letter ‘M’ embroidered on the collar emerged from the gloom, announcing that anyone who touched the shiny rail would die in an instant. Impressed, the crowd drew back, and three wooden crates the colour of ceramic bricks, scintillant in the electric light, positioned themselves in front of the passengers.
Second-class passengers shared the front carriage with the Westinghouse motors; then came first class with red leather seats; then first and second class together. Everything looked neat and clean. On the outside, the varnished coat-of-arms of Paris in blue and red adorned the painted panels. At the front of the train, two men standing behind glass windows looked like animated statues in a museum: one had his hand on the regulator, the other held the brake. Another train would come along in five minutes, but the crowd was in no mood to wait and surged into the carriages. The women admired the fluted wood furniture and the polished wooden decking. The men quickly occupied the seats in order to have the pleasure of giving them up to ladies.
In the front carriage, one of the employees tried to make himself heard above the hubbub. ‘One hundred and twenty-five horsepower – times two, equals two hundred and fifty horsepower! Direct current of six hundred volts! Three-phase current of five thousand volts! Supplied by the factory on the Quai de la Rapée!’ The train began to move, and, as it entered the tunnel, the passengers saw huge blue sparks leaping through the darkness like ghostly dolphins escorting a ship.
‘The cold is relative to the heat above ground,’ said the employee. ‘Mademoiselle has nothing to fear for her chest!’ A dozen pairs of eyes fastened themselves on the object of concern. ‘We shall shortly be pursuing the audacious curve that will place us on the line of the Champs-Élysées!’ With that, the employee opened a door and vanished into the next carriage.
It was hard to tell how fast the train was moving until a dimly lit cavern appeared and disappeared in a flash. One of the passengers began to read from a folded piece of paper as though he were reciting a prayer: ‘PORTE MAILLOT – OBLIGADO – ÉTOILE – ALMA – MARBEUF. The first station should be Obligado…’ Two minutes later, another illuminated cavern passed the windows, and the train seemed to be gathering speed. A young man claimed to have caught sight of a word on a tiny plaque, too short to be ‘Obligado’, but possibly ‘Alma’ or ‘Étoile’. ‘It’s too soon for Obligado,’ someone said, ‘we won’t be there for a while.’
A multi-coloured blur clattered past in the opposite direction. The train slowed down and stopped in a glittering nave full of people rushing about. A voice outside shouted the name of the station and the girl in the low-cut dress screamed, ‘Champs-Élysées!’ ‘Eight minutes from Porte Maillot,’ said her neighbour. ‘That’s no time at all!’ said the young woman. ‘It’s so fast!’ The man on the other side of her leaned over and said, mysteriously, ‘Nothing in life is ever fast enough, Mademoiselle.’
Twenty people boarded the carriage, which was already full, but no one alighted, and the temperature rose to a comfortable level. The employee reappeared. ‘We’re missing out all the stations!’ said the man with the paper. ‘Eighteen stations,’ said the employee. ‘Eight already open. Ten to open before the first of September. Next stop: PALAIS-ROYAL!’
Now that they could visualize the route – down the Champs-
Élysées, across the Place de la Concorde and along the Tuileries Gardens – it seemed all the more miraculous. At Palais-Royal, the passengers on the platform had to wait for the next train. Then came Louvre – which was hard to imagine – Châtelet and Hôtel-de-Ville, where they stopped for half a minute. A darkened station that must have been Saint-Paul flicked past, then the wheels gave a horrible screech, daylight flooded the carriage and, blinking as though at some amazing novelty, they saw the snail-like traffic on the Place de la Bastille.
A respectable-looking woman began to shake with helpless laughter as the train gave a jolt and plunged back into the tunnel. GARE DE LYON – REUILLY – NATION – PORTE DE VINCENNES. ‘Tout le monde descend!’
The crowd spilled out, their faces radiant with satisfaction. They placed their tickets, marked ‘À la sortie jeter dans la Boîte’, in a wooden collection box, while the empty train slid away behind a large rotunda. They climbed the steps, passed under the glass umbrella, and found themselves in a suburban landscape of dirty little houses and dusty grey trees blasted by a scorching wind. They stopped on the edge of the street, looked at one another, and said, in a single voice, ‘Let’s go back to the Métropolitain!’
By the time they had bought their tickets from the smiling face behind the counter, the train had completed the return loop and was standing at the other platform, waiting to take them back to the other side of Paris in twenty-seven minutes. Everyone agreed that, from now on, they would take the Métropolitain whenever they could.
* THE ADMIRABLE CONVENIENCE *
MARCEL PROUST, former man-about-town, writer of occasional elegant articles in the newspapers and collector of rare aesthetic sensations, often sat for a long time in the iris-scented room like a sphinx, with the door (in case someone rang) and the window left open, despite the smell of laundry and the pollen of the chestnut trees on the boulevard, remembering the views from other cabinets – the ruined tower of Roussainville-le-Pin, the glistening white walls of the trellised pavilion on the Champs-Élysées, the skylight in his mother’s toilet, which, seen in the mirror, might have been a cloud-reflecting pool. The days of perilous journeys from kitchen to cabinet, with all the risks of tripping up and spilling, were long past. In well-appointed apartments, the water was already waiting in the bowl: a smart tug on a nickel-plated bronze and ivory handle emptied it in a flash and filled it with two fresh litres of water from a reservoir mounted on the wall.
It was the only room in the apartment in which the outside world was audible. Anywhere else, the noise would have been a distraction, but here, it plunged him into a pleasant state of half-conscious meditation. The parping of automobiles was a simple melody for which his mind automatically supplied the words: ‘Get up! Go to the country! Take a picnic!’ Petrol fumes gusting up from the street suggested the shade of willows and a brook singing duets with the softly puttering Panhard-Levassor.
The room was arranged, like his table at the Ritz, for special, daily occasions. He ate once every twenty-four hours, the same meal whenever possible: one roast chicken wing, two œufs à la crème, three croissants (always from the same boulangerie), a plate of fried potatoes, some grapes, a cup of coffee and a bottle of beer, followed, nine or ten hours later, by an almost empty glass of Vichy water. He rarely visited the cabinet for anything else. When the convoluted journey was over, the rest was taken care of by English engineering. (These days, nearly all the household gods spoke English: Maple & Co. on the Place de l’Opéra and Liberty on the Boulevard des Capucines for modern-style furniture, the Société Française du Vacuum Cleaner – ‘nettoyage par le vide’ – for the fitted carpets, Remington for the typewriter, the Aeolian Company for the pianola.)
On the day the Paris Métro had opened, he had found himself in Venice, lying in a gondola on the Grand Canal, from which he waved to his mother as she stood in the window of the Hotel Danieli. He returned to his parents’ new apartment at 45, Rue de Courcelles, which, even after the opening of the Étoile–Anvers segment in October 1902, was as far as one could be in central Paris from a Métro station. In August 1903, when eighty-four passengers were held up at Couronnes station by a smouldering train in the tunnel, and refused to leave until their fifteen centimes were refunded, and were asphyxiated and trampled to death, thus becoming the first consumer martyrs, he was preparing to join his mother at Évian and, daringly for him, to take the funicular to the Mer de Glace. In 1906, when both his father and his mother were dead, he moved to an apartment at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, which was noisy, dusty and new, but the only apartment on the market that his mother had seen. ‘I could not bring myself to move to a house that maman never knew.’ This placed him less than three hundred yards from the Saint-Lazare Métro station, which had opened only two years before.
Without the hammering of his neighbours’ electricians, plumbers and carpet-fitters, he would have heard the excavations on the boulevard for lines A and B, which were managed by a separate company called Nord-Sud.
The Nord-Sud was to the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris what Maple’s was to Au Bon Marché, or the Ritz to a shelter for the homeless. It used Thomson motors, fed by a pantograph that continually caressed an aerial wire. First-class carriages were bright yellow and red; second class were aquamarine and electric blue. In the connecting corridors of Saint-Lazare, a customer of the CMP passed into an enchanted world in which transportation was a pretext and every decorative detail a compliment to good taste: the mosaic lettering of the station’s name, the delicately lavatorial entrances of wrought-iron and ceramics. Saint-Lazare’s famous ticket-hall of multi-coloured columns and tiled, ventricular vaults bore a remarkable resemblance to the abbey of Fontevrault, and made it possible to imagine that Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lion-heart and the other sepulchral effigies had risen up and assumed the garb of modern Parisians, and were setting off for a monastic herb garden or a Saracen stronghold on the other side of Paris.
In 1906, at the age of thirty-five, when his literary baggage was extremely light, he was already acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one’s immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship. The Métropolitain, whose rumble was perceptible to the spiders on the ceiling, might as well have been a fantasy of H. G. Wells. This, combined with an inability to leave his apartment, explains why, when very few Parisians had never taken the Métro, and when more kilometres were travelled every day in Paris than on the entire rail network, Marcel Proust had yet to descend to the Métropolitain. He had never, as far as we know, even written the word; nor had any of his friends ever mentioned it. In August, he had tried to reach the Père-Lachaise cemetery in order to attend his uncle’s funeral, but had spent two hours wheezing in the Saint-Lazare railway station, galvanizing his asthmatic lungs with coffee before returning to his apartment. In September, imagining the marvels that might correspond to the exotic syllables ‘Perros-Guirec’ and ‘Ploërmel’, he had left for Brittany. The journey had ended at Versailles, where he took a room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. He was still there in December when he wrote to an old friend:
I have been at Versailles for four months, but am I really at Versailles? I often wonder whether the place in which I am living – hermetically sealed and electrically lit – is somewhere other than Versailles, of which I have seen not a single dead leaf fluttering over a single solitary fountain.
That year, he had planned a trip to Normandy. He had pored over guide books and gazetteers, and pestered his correspondents for information on rented accommodation. He had promised himself a quiet holiday somewhere near Trouville, if the ideal house could be found, with varied relaxations and occasional tours in a covered automobile.
Nice and dry, not in the trees…electricity if possible, reasonably new, neither dusty (modern style is exactly what I need for easy breathing) nor damp. I need only my master bedroom, two servants’ rooms, a dining-room and a kitchen. A bathroom is not indispensable though very agreeable. Drawing-room pointless. As many WCs as possible.
But Trouville had fallen through, leaving only the near-perfect memory of something that had never taken place.
* THE MIRACULOUS TELEPHONE *
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER (1907), he surprised himself and his servants, who were accustomed to working in artificial light and sleeping in the daytime, by reaching the Channel resort of Cabourg. He chose Cabourg because he had spent some long and unforgotten holidays there with his mother, and because the Grand Hôtel was responsive to his needs. He wrote to a friend from his suite on the top floor: ‘I have just spent an entire year in bed.’ Then, after a brief calculation, he corrected himself: ‘This year, I have left my bed five times.’
This was slightly inaccurate. In March, he had visited a friend in Paris who had been poisoned by oysters. In April, whilst enjoying a respite from the cacophonous installation of his neighbour’s toilet (‘she keeps having the seat changed – widening it, I expect’), he had gone to the balcony and taken the air. He had attended three soirées and visited a newspaper office to discuss an article. Including his departure for Cabourg, he had left his bed seven times in all.
For longer trips across Paris, he had only to descend to the street, where, summoned by telephone, his chauffeur would be waiting. But there was always the possibility of getting lost at either end. Two years before – when his mother was alive, listening out for the creaking floorboard that announced the return of her son – he had left the taxi and stepped into the ‘ascenceur’ (which he always misspelled), and nearly committed a criminal offence against the General Secretary of the mortgage-lending bank, Crédit Foncier, who lived on the floor above:
I absent-mindedly took the lift to the fourth floor. Then I tried to go back down, but it was impossible to reach the first floor. All I could do then was to take the lift back up to the fourth floor, from where I walked down, but to the wrong floor, where I tried to force the lock of M. Touchard’s door.
Once, he took the ascenseur to the street, turned right towards the Byzantine dome of Saint-Augustin, then right and right again towards the cupola of the Printemps department store, and then, after completing a triangular itinerary of one kilometre, found himself so close to his starting point that, despite being unable to identify his own front door, he located it at the third attempt.
The telephone made everything much simpler. Connections with Cabourg were not always reliable, because provincial exchanges often closed at nine o’clock in the evening. But in Paris, his friends could ask for the magic number – 29205 – and find themselves speaking to his concierge (who would send a messenger up the stairs), or even to Marcel himself, as if in person, provided that the telephone had been connected and that he had heard, from his bed or from the cabinet, the spinning-top sound that he preferred to the jangling bell. A telephone conversation was a little play for two or three voices. Sometimes, he transcribed the dialogue for the pleasure of his friends:
Someone comes hurrying up from the concierge: you want to talk to me. I rush to the telephone. ‘Hello, hello?’ (Nobody there.) I call back…nothing. I ask for number 56565. They ring: it’s engaged. – I insist. They ring again: it’s engaged. Just then, there’s a call from you: ‘M. de Croisset would like to know whether this evening…’. I expect that, at that exact moment, you signalled to your secretary to indicate that some more agreeable invitation had caused you to change your mind. Whatever the case, silence ensues, and the person hangs up. I ring again; they give me a wrong number. And so it goes on.
On that occasion, the unseen demoiselle, who placed distant souls in touch with one another, and whose utterances were always short and sibylline (because she was paid by the number of connections she made), finally delivered an unusually long burst of oracular wisdom: ‘In my opinion, M. de Croisset has disconnected his telephone so that he won’t be disturbed. Monsieur could telephone until two in the morning and would still be wasting his time.’
THOUGH HE HAD yet to descend to the underworld in person, his words, transmitted by copper wires, had crossed subterranean Paris many times; his written messages had traversed all four hundred and fifty kilometres of the pneumatic tube network. The telephone was no less miraculous for having a scientific explanation. Had he been writing a novel, he would certainly have devoted long passages to it – the misunderstandings, the jocular friends who pretended to be somebody else, the total strangers whose voices suddenly entered his apartment. Without the distraction of a face, certain inflections and even aspects of a personality were instantly revealed. He himself had once been mistaken for a woman. Because of the telephone, his letters had become longer, more frequent and less trivial. ‘You only ever send me messages that could have been telephoned,’ he complained to a friend.
The maid, too, was often forced to resort to pen and paper:
Having been asked by Monsieur Proust to place a telephone call to Madame la Princesse which I was unable to do successfully because no one answered me I am taking the liberty of writing down this telephone message because Monsieur Proust was extremely anxious to learn whether the mouthful of soufflé had indisposed Madame la Princesse.
Exasperated subscribers wrote to the newspapers, complaining about the inefficiency of the miracle. Unlike them, Marcel was always respectful of the mystery, and patient with wrong numbers and delays. He wrote an article on the subject for the Figaro:
We fill the columns of the Figaro with our complaints, finding the magic transformations still not fast enough, because sometimes minutes pass before we see at our side, invisible but present, the friend to whom we wished to speak…. Weare like the character of a fairy-tale who, his wish having been granted by a wizard, sees his fiancée, lit by the vivid light of enchantment, leafing through the pages of a book, shedding a tear or gathering flowers, close enough to touch, yet in the place where she then finds herself, very far away.
Every conversation with a disembodied voice seemed to him a foreshadowing of eternal separation. The lovely expression that had entered daily speech – ‘It was nice to hear your voice’ – filled him with poignant anxiety. Years before, his mother had chided him for his reluctance to use the telephone. He sometimes heard her voice, crackling but distinct, rising from his memory as though it came to him through the labyrinth of wires:
The apologies you owe the telephone for your blasphemies in the past! The remorse you should feel for having despised, scorned and rejected such a benefactor! Oh, to hear the voice of my poor little wolf, and the poor little wolf hearing mine!
* THE INDISPENSABLE CHEMIST *
EVERY MODERN CONVENIENCE implied its ideal form – the electric switch that was always within reach, the automobile that never broke down, the telephone that never cut short a conversation. Yet when the invention malfunctioned, it could conjure up an unexpected variety of perfection that would never have existed if the convenience had worked as advertised.
The Theatre in the Comfort of One’s Own Home!
Opéra, Opéra-Comique, Variétés, Nouveautés, etc. Apply to THÉÂTROPHONE, 23, Rue Louis-le-Grand. Tel. 101–03. For sixty francs a month, three people can hear performances daily.
Trial audition on request.
The théâtrophone had disappointed him at first. A live performance of Pelléas et Mélisande reached him like something precious that had been smashed and sullied by the post. The Pastoral Symphony was almost as inaudible as it had been to Beethoven. Die Meistersinger was full of interruptions, like an over-literal demonstration of Baudelaire’s dictum, in his essay on Wagner: ‘In music, as in the written word, there is always a gap that is completed by the listener’s imagination.’ Yet without that intermittency, the remote performance would have lost its power: his memory would not have been forced to rush about the orchestra pit, playing every instrument, until the musicians returned from nowhere.
The mind, too, could be made to behave like a faulty contraption. Several chemists in his quartier stayed open into the night – the coloured jars gleaming in the gas light, a courteous magician presiding in a white coat – to dispense the precisely measured solace that only science could provide. Drugs helped him to sleep (Veronal, valerian, Trional and heroin, which he had once recommended to his mother), and to stay awake (caffeine, amyl nitrate and pure adrenalin). In certain states of drug-induced half-sleep, when the clatter of tramcars and the street-cries that had survived the advent of department stores reached his ears, muffled and distorted, the telephone operators in his brain started pushing plugs into sockets at random, rousing old memories, giving voice to the creaking floorboards and the ticking clock, initiating party-line conversations in which dozens of people spoke at once, repeating themselves endlessly or whispering things that could never quite be heard.
Certain drugs were best avoided. Of cocaine, he said, contrasting its visible effects with those of a healthy diet and a recent haircut, that ‘time has special express trains bound for premature old age, while return trains run on a parallel line and are almost as fast’. But other drugs, dispensed by a chemist, could send him on circular journeys from one end of his life to the other, after which, when the doors and the furniture had resumed their habitual positions, he was surprised to find himself still in bed on the second floor of an apartment block in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.
IN THE GLOOM of his soundproofed apartment, he had seen the years slip by. He sat in his nest of pillows and pullovers, writing long letters to friends and elaborate notes to the maid. In the time it had taken him to compose a few articles and reviews, the Métropolitain had become a world in its own right.
By the time he started work on his ‘Parisian novel’ in 1908 – fearing that he had left it too late – there were sixty kilometres of tunnels and ninety-six stations. The spread of the Métropolitain was such a normal part of life that newspapers no longer bothered to report the opening of a new line. The original Métro was already a quaint memory. Its sleepers of creosoted beech, which were blamed for breathing difficulties, had been replaced by solid oak. In 1909, the moving staircase at Père-Lachaise, which covered thirty centimetres a second, made the old kind of staircase seem intolerably uncooperative. Hundreds of other escalators followed. The climb out of the depths was now no more arduous than the descent. Lighting was improved, and it became possible to read in the underground. Travellers who were offended by the smell of their fellow passengers could place ten centimes in a slot, hold a handkerchief under a tap, pull the handle and collect a dash of sweet myrrh or ylang-ylang. There were weighing machines, inscribed ‘Know Your Weight – Know Yourself’, and a continually refreshed museum of cheerful pictures: a cow giving milk to a chocolatier, a cod offering its liver to a person with anaemia, a mongrel listening to a gramophone.
Fears that Parisians would turn into a mindless herd obsessed with time had proved unfounded. Workers and businessmen in every part of Paris were delighted to be able to spend a few extra minutes in bed every morning. The Métro oiled their social activities and lent itself to their desires with unquestioning efficiency. At the music hall – which he sometimes attended in a box, sitting above the thickest layers of tobacco smoke – it was celebrated in songs: Landry’s ‘La Petite Dame du Métro’, Dranem’s ‘Le Trou de mon quai’. Less than ten years after the opening of Line 1, it was impossible to imagine Paris without the Métro. For tourists and returning natives, it was an inexhaustible source of what would one day be called ‘Proustian moments’.
A patient chemist might have concocted the magic potion: old perspiration reactivated by new; a hint of stagnant water; various industrial lubricants and detergents; cheap scents from a dispensing machine; a selection of hydrocarbons and carboxyls, and, dominating the other smells, pentanoic acid, from brakes and human warmth, which occurs naturally in valerian. It would have surprised him to learn that the infusions of valerian that sent him into the echoing realms of somnolence filled his apartment with an odour that had some of his visitors involuntarily rushing back to the Métropolitain.
* THE CELESTIAL MACHINE *
ANOTHER DECADE PASSED, and the great novel was finally nearing completion. The world described in À la recherche du temps perdu was disappearing in the cratered fields of northern France, but the novel, with its gleaming inscrutability, the flawless circuitry of its sentences and its bewildering modes of efficiency, belonged to the new world as much as passenger aeroplanes and the Theory of Relativity.
The author, meanwhile, inhabited a dimension where time moved as imperceptibly as an hour-hand. When he dined at the Ritz, he wore the same stiff white collar; his shoes came from Old England and his dinner jacket from Carnaval de Venise. The thin moustache, waxed by the man who had cut his father’s hair, was the kind of impeccable anachronism that inspired devotion in the waiters. The car waiting outside the hotel was the old Renault, which he had refused to allow the chauffeur to replace with a more modern machine. Apart from a few uniforms at the tables and talk about the lack of coal, the war had barely intruded on the Ritz.
In July 1917, when the sirens had sounded, he had climbed to the balcony with some of the other diners to see the first German planes over Paris since January 1916. The searchlights from Le Bourget had lit up the celestial dogfight, and he had watched the constellations of stars and planes rise and disintegrate, replicating with breathtaking accuracy the apocalyptic firmament in El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz. He had walked home blissfully in the dark while the Gothas dropped their bombs. One night, the maid had found little splinters of metal in the brim of his hat, and exclaimed, ‘Ah, Monsieur, you didn’t come home in the car!’, and he said, ‘No. Why? It was much too beautiful for that.’
On 30 January 1918, feeling the urge to hear some music unmediated by the théâtrophone, he accepted an invitation from the Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld to attend a private performance at her home in the Rue Murillo of Borodin’s Second String Quartet. At the end of the evening, he was leaving the house when the sirens began their mournful warning. It was half-past eleven. A squadron of Gothas, taking advantage of the unusually clear skies, had flown high over the French defences north of Compiègne and were dropping their bombs on the north-eastern suburbs. His usual chauffeur had been unavailable, and the old man who had replaced him was unable to start the Renault. Since Borodin’s poignant and stately notturno was still playing in his mind, and since he did not wish to repeat the farewell ceremony, he stood by the car while the chauffeur fiddled with the engine. Now and then, people rushed past, heading for the nearest Métro station, which was less than four hundred metres away.
Having hit their targets in the suburbs, the Gothas were now flying over Paris. Some of the explosions were clearly audible, and it was possible to tell on which quartiers the bombs were falling. At last, the engine coughed and rattled. Marcel climbed into the seat, and they set off slowly down the Rue Murillo.
They had crossed the Rue de Monceau and were heading along the Avenue de Messine when the engine stuttered and the car lurched to a halt. They were still close enough to take shelter in the Métropolitain, at Courcelles or at Miromesnil, but the chauffeur was busy with the engine, and Marcel himself had never felt the slightest fear during air-raids, and had never once even visited the basement of his building – and wouldn’t have known how to get there – because of the damp air and the dust.
Fire engines rattled along the boulevard. He thought of Parisians crowded together in the darkness, like Christians in the Catacombs, and of things that certain friends of his had said: that, in the black night of the Métropolitain, when the bombs were falling, men and women satisfied their desires without the preliminaries of etiquette. He had written a passage on the subject for the last volume of his novel:
Some of those Pompeians, as the fire of heaven rained down on them, descended into the corridors of the Métro, knowing that they would not be alone there; and the darkness that irradiates everything like a new element abolishes the first phase of pleasure and offers direct access to a domain of caresses that is normally attained only after a certain length of time.
He had promised himself that, one night or day, he would witness those ‘secret rites’ for himself.
Six or seven streets away, towards Saint-Lazare, he heard the screeching glissando, then the sound of windows imploding and a building rushing to the ground. He waited by the car. The chauffeur turned the crank in vain. A squeak of metal, imitating the interval of E and A sharp, and he might have heard the beautiful notturno as though it had been playing all along and he had only to be silent to hear it. Borodin had composed his second movement as though in anticipation of the telephone, with interruptions and expectant pauses, and the cello that seemed to fade like a distant voice, but then continued on its way. It was the sound of regret and its remedy, a slightly faltering serenity, like that of someone unexpectedly able to breathe in a place of danger and confinement. The bombs were a symphonic accompaniment, a reminder of tribulations overcome. They were a celebration of the knowledge that his life’s work would be completed in time.
The engine roared into life. A few moments later, they were parked in front of his home at 102, Boulevard Haussmann. He climbed out of the car. A bomb exploded barely five hundred yards away in the Rue d’Athènes. He tried to usher the chauffeur into the hall and offered him a bed for the night in the drawing room. But the man, it seemed, was hard of hearing. ‘I’m off back to Grenelle,’ he said. ‘It was just a false alarm. Nothing fell on Paris.’
Next day, in bed, he read in the newspaper that when the sirens had sounded, hundreds of people had rushed out to take shelter in the Métro, but had found the doors closed. The Prefect of Police had decreed that, from now on, during air raids, every station of the Métro would remain open throughout the night.
THE LAST VOLUME of the novel to appear in his lifetime – Sodome et Gomorrhe II – was published in the spring of 1922. He knew that it would take time for his readers to become accustomed to the new idiom: at first, the novel would leave them feeling frayed and disoriented. He had once said that he did not write novels that could be read ‘between one station and the next’. Yet his readers had evidently kept up with modern developments and were eager for innovations. He was more pleased than he would have thought when he learned that from the very day of publication, Parisians were reading À la recherche du temps perdu in buses and trams, and even in the Métro, oblivious to their neighbours and so engrossed in the novel that when they reached the end of a sentence, the station had passed, and they had to cross to the other platform to wait for the train that would take them back to their destination.