CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Plassaert, 1
THE PLASSAERTS’ FLAT consists of three rooms under the eaves on the top floor. A fourth room, the one that Morellet occupied until he was interned, is in process of conversion.
The room we are now in is a bedroom with a woodblock floor; there is a divan that can be turned into a bed and a folding table of the sort used for bridge, the two items so placed that, given the smallness of the room, the divan-bed cannot be folded out unless the table is folded up, and vice versa. On the walls there is a light-blue wallpaper with a regularly spaced pattern of four-pointed stars; on the table, a game of dominoes is set out alongside a porcelain ashtray in the shape of a ferocious-looking bulldog head with a studded collar, and a bouquet of pretty-by-night in a parallelepipedal vase made of that special substance called azure stone or lapis lazuli and which owes its colour to an oxide of cobalt.
Lying flat out in the divan, dressed in a brown pullover and black short trousers, with espadrilles on his feet, is a twelve-year-old boy, Rémi, the Plassaerts’ son; he is sorting his collection of promotional blotters; for the most part they are medical prospectuses, distributed in specialist journals such as Medical Press, The Medical Gazette, The Medical Tribune, Medical Weekly, Hospital Weekly, The Doctor’s Week, The Doctor’s Journal, The Doctor’s Daily, The Family Practitioner, Aesculape, Caduceus, etc. – with which Dr Dinteville is regularly inundated and which he sends down without even opening to Madame Nochère, who gives them to students making wastepaper collections, but not before taking the trouble to share out the blotters between the children in the building: Isabelle Gratiolet and Rémi Plassaert are the main beneficiaries of this operation, since Gilbert Berger collects stamps and is not interested in blotters; Mahmoud, Madame Orlowska’s son, and Octave Réol are still a bit too young; as for the other girls in the house, they are already too grown up for this kind of thing.
Using criteria known only unto himself, Rémi Plassaert has sorted his blotters into eight piles topped respectively by:
– a singing toreador (Diamond Enamel toothpaste)
– a seventeenth-century Oriental rug from a Transylvanian basilica (Kalium-Sedaph, a soluble propionate of potassium)
– The Fox and the Slork [sic], a print by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Marquaise Stationery, Stencils, Reprographics)
– a sheet entirely covered in gold ink (Sargenor, for physical and mental fatigue, insomnia. Sarget Laboratories)
– a toucan (Ramphastos vitellinus) (Gévéor series of Animals of the World)
– a few gold coins (Courlandish and Toruń rixdollars) shown head-side, enlarged (Gémier Laboratories)
– the huge open maw of a hippopotamus (Bristol Laboratories Diclocil [dicloxacillin])
– The Four Musketeers of Tennis (Cochet, Borotra, Lacoste, and Brugnon) (Aspro series of Great Champions of the Past)
In front of these eight piles the oldest of these blotters lies on its own; it is the one which started the whole collection off; it was produced by Ricqlès – the mint with bite that makes you feel all right – and reproduces a very pretty drawing by Henry Gerbault illustrating the children’s nursery song “Papa les p’tits bateaux”: the “papa” is a little boy in a grey cloak with a black collar and equipped with top hat, eye glasses, gloves, walking stick, blue trousers, and white spats; the child is a baby in a big red hat, a large lace neck-ruff, a red-belted jacket, and beige spats; in his left hand he holds a hoop, in his right hand a stick with which he points to a little circular pond on which three toy boats sail; a sparrow sits on the rim of the pond; another one flutters inside the rectangle in which the rhyme is printed.
The Plassaerts found this blotter behind the radiator when they took possession of the room.
The previous occupant was Troyan, the secondhand bookseller with a shop in Rue Lepic. In his attic room there had indeed been a radiator, and also a bed, a sort of pallet with a completely faded flower-printed cotton bedspread, a straw-seated chair, and a washstand with a chipped pitcher and a bowl and glass that didn’t match, and on which you were more likely to find the remains of a pork chop or an opened bottle of wine than a towel or a sponge or a piece of soap. But most of the space was taken up by heaps of books and miscellaneous things piled up to the ceiling, in which anyone brave enough to rummage could well make interesting discoveries: Olivier Gratiolet found a stiff cardboard panel, perhaps for use by opticians, on which was printed in large letters
YOU ARE REQUESTED TO CLOSE THE EYES
and
YOU ARE REQUESTED TO CLOSE AN EYE
Monsieur Troquet came across a print depicting a prince in armour, riding a winged horse, couching his lance against a monster with a lion’s head and mane, a goat’s body, and a snake’s tail; Monsieur Cinoc unearthed an old postcard portraying a Mormon missionary named William Hitch, a man of tall stature and very dark complexion, with a black moustache, black stockings, black silk hat, black waistcoat, black trousers, white tie, and dog-skin gloves; and Madame Albin discovered a sheet of parchment on which the music and words of a German hymn were printed
Mensch willtu Leben seliglich
Und bei Gott bliben ewiglich
Sollt du halten die zehen Gebot
Die uns gebent unser Gott
which Monsieur Jérôme told her was a choral song by Luther published at Wittenberg in 1524 in Johann Walther’s famous Geystliches Gesangbüchlein.
It was Monsieur Jérôme, in fact, who made the finest discovery: at the bottom of a big carton full of old typewriter ribbons and mouse droppings, he found all folded and lined but otherwise almost intact a large canvas-backed map entitled
The centre of the map showed France, with a plan of the Paris area and a map of Corsica in two inset panels; beneath it, the legend and four scales measured respectively against kilometres, geographical miles [sic], English miles, and German Meilen. In the four corners of the sheet were maps of the French colonies: top left, Guadeloupe and Martinique; top right, Algeria; bottom left, quite damaged, Senegal and New Caledonia with its dependencies; bottom right, French Cochinchina and La Réunion. Along the top of the sheet, a row of coats of arms of twenty cities and twenty portraits of famous men born in them: Marseilles (Thiers), Dijon (Bossuet), Rouen (Géricault), Ajaccio (Napoleon I), Grenoble (Bayard), Bordeaux (Montesquieu), Pau (Henri IV), Albi (La Pérouse), Chartres (Marceau), Besançon (Victor Hugo), Paris (Béranger), Mâcon (Lamartine), Dunkirk (Jean Bart), Montpellier (Cambacérès), Bourges (Jacques Cœur), Caen (Auber), Agen (Bernard Palissy), Clermont-Ferrand (Vercingétorix), La Ferté-Milon (Racine), and Lyons (Jacquard). On the right- and left-hand edges, twenty-four small insets, twelve of them depicting towns, eight showing scenes from French history, and four showing regional dress: on the left: Paris, Rouen, Nancy, Laon, Bordeaux, and Lille; local costumes from Auvergne, Arles, and Nîmes, and those of Normans and Bretons; and the siege of Paris (1871); Daguerre discovering photography (1840); the Capture of Algiers (1830): Denis Papin discovering the motive power of steam (1681); on the right: Lyons, Marseilles, Caen, Nantes, Montpellier, Rennes; local costumes from Rochefort, La Rochelle, and Mâcon, and those of Lorraine, the Vosges, and Annecy; and the Defence of Châteaudun (1870); Montgolfier inventing hot-air balloons (1783), the Storming of the Bastille (1789) and Parmentier presenting Louis XVI with a bouquet of potato flowers (1780).
Troyan had enlisted in the International Brigade and spent almost the whole of the war as a prisoner in the camp at Lurs, from which he succeeded in escaping at the end of 1943 to join the maquis. He returned to Paris in 1944, and, after a few months of intense political activity, became a secondhand book dealer. His shop in Rue Lepic was in fact just a barely converted entrance porch to a building. He sold mostly one-franc books and obscure reviews of undressed girls – with titles like Sensations, Paris by Night, Pin-Up – for gulping schoolboys. Three or four times more interesting items passed through his hands: Victor Hugo’s three letters, for example, but also an 1872 edition of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide, or the Memoirs of Falckenskiold, preceded by an account of his campaigns in the Russian Army against the Turks in 1769 and followed by considerations on the military situation of Denmark and a note by Secrétan.