Servants’ Quarters, 7 Monsieur Jérôme
A ROOM ON THE seventh floor which is virtually uninhabited; like many other maid’s rooms, it belongs to the building manager, who has kept it for his own use primarily and secondarily for lending to friends from the provinces spending a few days in Paris for this or that international exhibition or fair. He has furnished it in an utterly impersonal style; panels of hessian on the walls, twin beds separated by a Louis XV-style bedside table with an orange plastic promotional ashtray on the eight sides of which are written, in alternation, four times each, the two words COCA and COLA, and by way of a bedside light, one of those clip-on lamp fixtures of which the bulb is adorned with a little painted metal cone-shaped cowl serving as a shade; a worn floor-rug, a mirrored wardrobe with miscellaneous coat hangers from various hotels, cubic poufs covered in synthetic fur, and a low table with three puny legs ending in gilt metal ferrules and a kidney-shaped coloured formica top, supporting an issue of Jours de France with a cover embellished by a close-up of the singer Claude François, smiling.
It was to this room that Monsieur Jérôme returned, towards the end of the 1950s, to live and die.
Monsieur Jérôme had not always been the bitter and burnt-out old man that he was in the last ten years of his life. In October 1924, when he moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier for the first time – not into this maid’s room but into the flat Gaspard Winckler would occupy after him – he was a young history teacher with the highest qualifications earned at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, sure of himself, full of enthusiasm and ideas. Slim and elegant, fond of American-style white starched collars over pin-striped shirts, he enjoyed the good life, took pleasure in fine food, had a penchant for Havanas and cocktails, went to English bars, mixed in fashionable circles, and held advanced opinions which he propounded with just the right balance of condescension and casualness so as to make his listener feel humiliated for not knowing about them and at the same time flattered at having them explained to him.
For some years he taught at the Lycée Pasteur at Neuilly; then he won a scholarship from the Thiers Foundation to work on his doctoral thesis. He chose for his subject The Spice Road, and analysed with a not entirely humourless subtlety the economic evolution of exchanges between the West and the Far East, setting it in the context of Western culinary habits of the relevant periods. Since he wanted to show that the introduction into Europe of those small dried pimentos called “bird pepper” corresponded to a real transformation in the way game was prepared for cooking, at his examination he did not hesitate to make the three old professors who constituted the board of examiners taste the marinades he had made up himself.
He passed, obviously, with the examiners’ commendation, and a little while after, on his appointment as cultural attaché in Lahore, left Paris.
On two or three occasions Valène heard people speak of him. At the time of the Front populaire, his name appeared several times beneath manifestoes and appeals put out by the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ Vigilance Committee. Another time, on a visit to France, he gave a lecture at the Guimet Museum on Caste Systems in the Punjab and Their Sociocultural Consequences. A little later he published a long article on Gandhi in Vendredi.
He came back to Rue Simon-Crubellier in 1958 or 1959. He was unrecognisable, done in, worn out, done for. He didn’t ask for his old flat back, but only a maid’s room if there was one free. He was no longer a teacher or a cultural attaché; he was working in the library of the Institute for the History of Religions. An “aged scholar” whom he had, apparently, met on a train, was paying him one hundred and fifty francs a month to make a card index of the Spanish clergy. In five years he had made out seven thousand four hundred and sixty-two biographies of churchmen in office in the reigns of Philip III (1598–1621), Philip IV (1621–1665) and Charles II (1665–1700), and had sorted them under twenty-seven different headings (by a marvellous coincidence, he would add with a grin, 27 is precisely the number used, in the universal decimal classification system – better known as Dewey Decimal – for the general history of the Christian Church).
Meanwhile, the “aged scholar” had died. Monsieur Jérôme tried in vain to interest the Ministry of Education, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the VIth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Collège de France, as well as some fifteen other public and private bodies, in the history of the Spanish Church in the seventeenth century – more turbulent than you might think – and tried also, but equally unsuccessfully, to find a publisher. After receiving his forty-sixth absolute and categorical refusal, Monsieur Jérôme took his manuscript – more than twelve hundred pages of incredibly close-spaced handwriting – and went to burn it in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, which incidentally cost him a night in a police station.
These brushes with publishers were not, however, entirely useless. A little later, one of them offered him translation work from English. It concerned children’s books, the kind of little books called “primers” in English-speaking countries and in which you still quite often find things like
Icky licky micky sticky!
I’m a tiny tiny thing
Round and round a ring-a-ring
Long ago I was a king
Now I do this kind of thing
On the wing, on the wing!
Bing!
and they obviously had to be adapted in translation so as to fit the everyday characteristics of French life.
This was the wherewithal which allowed Monsieur Jérôme to eke out an existence until his death. It didn’t take much work, and he spent most of his time in his bedroom, stretched out on an old bottle-green moleskin settee, wearing the same machine-patterned pullover or a greyish flannel undervest, with his head leaning on the only thing he had brought back from his Hindu years: a patch – scarcely bigger than a pocket handkerchief – of a once sumptuous cloth, with a purple field, embroidered with silver thread.
All around him the floor would be strewn with detective novels and Kleenex (he had a constantly dripping nose); he consumed easily two or three detective novels a day and prided himself on having read and being able to remember all one hundred and eighty-three titles in the Fingerprint series and at least two hundred titles in the Mask collection. He liked only detective stories with a mystery to solve, the good old pre-war English and American detective novels with locked rooms and perfect alibis, with a slight preference for mildly incongruous titles: The Ploughman Killer, or The Corpse Will Play for You on the Piano, or The Agnate Will Be Very Angry.
He read extremely fast – habit and a technique he had kept from the Ecole Normale – but never for a long stretch. He would stop often, stay lying down doing nothing, and close his eyes. He would push his thick tortoiseshell spectacles up over his balding forehead; he would put the detective novel at the foot of the settee after marking his page with a postcard depicting a globe whose turned-wood stand made it look like a spinning top. It was one of the first known globes, the one which Johannes Schoener, a cartographer who was a friend of Copernicus, had made at Bamberg in 1520, and which was kept at the library in Nuremberg.
He never told anyone what had happened to him. He practically never talked about his travels. One day, Monsieur Riri asked him what was the most amazing thing he had seen in his life: he replied, a Maharajah sitting at a table all incrusted with ivory, dining with his three lieutenants. No one said anything, and the three fierce men of war seemed, in front of their leader, like little children. Another time, without anyone asking him anything at all, he said that the most beautiful, the most dazzling thing he had seen in the world was a ceiling divided into octagonal sections, decorated in gold and silver, and more exquisitely worked than any jewel.