Gratiolet, 1
THE PENULTIMATE DESCENDANT of the building’s original owner lives with his daughter on the seventh floor, in two former maid’s rooms converted into a small but comfortable dwelling.
Olivier Gratiolet sits reading at a collapsible table covered with a green cloth. His daughter Isabelle, aged thirteen, is kneeling on the parquet floor: she is building a house of cards as fragile as it is ambitious. Opposite them, on a television screen which neither is watching, a female announcer, set against a hideous science-fiction background – shiny metal panels adorned with jingoistic insignia – and sheathed in something intended to suggest a space suit, points out the evening’s programmes written on a signboard whose hexagonal outline is supposed to represent the bounds of the French Republic: at eight thirty, Yellow Thread, a detective fantasy by Stewart Venter: at the beginning of the century, a bold jewel-thief takes refuge on a timber-raft floating down the Yellow River, and at ten o’clock, This Golden Serp in the Field of Stars, a chamber opera by Philoxanthe Schapska, adapted from Victor Hugo’s Booz endormi, world premiere inaugurating the Besançon Festival.
The book Olivier Gratiolet is reading is a history of anatomy, an outsize volume open flat on the table at a full-page reproduction of a plate by Zorzi da Castelfranco, a disciple of Mondino di Luzzi, with the description on the facing page which François Béroalde de Verville made of it a century and a half later in his Tableau des riches inventions couvertes du voile des feintes amoureuses qui sont représentées dans l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:
The corpse has not been reduced to a skeleton but the remaining flesh is impregnated with soil which forms a dry and, as it were, cardboard-like magma. nonetheless in some places bones are partially extant: sternum, collarbones, kneecaps, tibias. overall complexion is yellow brown on the front side, the back side is blackish and dark grey, humid and full of worms. head leaning to left shoulder, skull covered in white hair impregnated with soil and fragments of winding sheet. eyebrows hairless; the lower jaw presents two teeth, yellow and semi-transparent. brain and cephalic fluid occupy approximately two thirds of the skull cavity but it is no longer possible to identify the various organs comprising the encephalum. Dura mater is extant as a membrane of bluish colour; as if it were in almost a normal condition. there is no spine marrow left. Cervical vertebræ are visible though partly covered by a thin ochre layer. the saponified soft internal parts of the larynx can be found at the level of the sixth vertebrum. The two sides of the chest seem empty except for containing a little soil and some small flies. They are blackish, smoky and carbonised. the abdomen is collapsed, covered in soil and chrysalids; the abdominal organs have shrunk and are not identifiable; the genital organs are destroyed to the point that sex cannot be established. The upper limbs have been placed on the sides of the body in such a way as to put arms and forearms and hands together. The left hand seems whole, grey mixed with brown. The right hand is darker and several of its bones have already separated. Lower limbs are apparently intact. the short bones are no spongier than in normal state but are drier on the inside.
Olivier owes his first name to his grandfather Gérard’s twin brother who was killed on 26 September 1914 at Perthes-lès-Hurlus, in the Champagne region, in rearguard action following the first Battle of the Marne.
Of the four Gratiolet children. Gérard was the one who inherited the farms in Berry; he sold off almost half of them, just as his brother Emile sold off the building bit by bit, in attempting to rescue his other brother Ferdinand and, a little later, Ferdinand’s widow. Gérard had two sons, the younger of whom, Henri, remained a bachelor. On his father’s death in 1934 he took over the farm. He tried to modernise his equipment and his methods, mortgaged himself to buy machinery, and on his death in 1938 – he died from a horse-kick – left so many debts that his elder brother Louis, Olivier’s father, preferred simply to refuse the inheritance rather than lumber himself with a business which would take years to become profitable.
Louis had been to college at Vierzon and at Tours and had entered the Woods & Water Department. As soon as war broke out, and although he was only twenty-one, he was put in charge of the Saint-Trojan nature reserve on the Isle of Oléron, one of the first such projects in France, in which, as on the Sept-Iles Archipelago off Perros-Guirec where a reserve had been established in 1912, every possible measure was to be taken to protect and preserve local fauna and flora. Louis thus settled on Oléron, where he married France Lidron, the daughter of a craftsman blacksmith, a bizarre old character who had begun to swamp the island with consistently hideous wrought-iron railings and decorative gilded bronze, and whose fortunes never flagged thereafter. Olivier was born in 1920 and grew up on beaches that were in those days usually deserted, and went to board at the Rochefort Lycée when he was ten. He hated boarding and he hated school, and spent all week at the back of the class in deepest gloom, dreaming of riding his horse on Sunday. He had to repeat fourth year and failed his school certificate four times before his father gave up trying to get him through and resigned himself to seeing his son get a job as a stable lad at a breeder’s near Saint-Jean-d’Angély. He liked the work and might have made his way in it, but less than two years later war broke out: Olivier was called up, taken prisoner at Arras in May 1940, and sent to a stalag at Hof, in Franconia. He spent two years there. On 18 April 1942, Marc, the son of Ferdinand, who had passed the agrégation in philosophy in the same year that his father went bankrupt and absconded, and who had since then worked in branches of the France-Germany Committee, was appointed to the staff of Fernand de Brinon, the new Secretary of State in the second Laval administration of Vichy France. Louis wrote to him asking for his help, and one month later obtained without difficulty the release of Marc’s uncle’s son from captivity.
Olivier settled in Paris. François, his father’s other cousin, who, together with his wife Marthe, still owned about half the flats in the building and was manager of the co-ownership association, got him a three-roomed flat, underneath the one he lived in himself (the one where the Grifalconis would live in years to come). Olivier spent the rest of the war years there, going down to the cellar to listen to Des Français parlent aux Français on the BBC and producing and distributing, with the help of Marthe and François, a news sheet for several resistance groups, a kind of daily letter giving news from London and coded messages.
Olivier’s father Louis died in 1943, of brucellosis. The following year Marc was assassinated in obscure circumstances. Hélène Brodin, the last of Juste’s children, died in 1947. When Marthe and François perished in the fire at the Rueil Palace cinema, Olivier became the last surviving Gratiolet.
Olivier took his role of landlord and trustee very seriously, but a few years later war once again pursued him: called up again and sent to Algeria in 1956, a landmine exploded under him and his leg had to be amputated above the knee. At the military hospital at Chambéry, where he was treated, he fell in love with his nurse, Arlette Criolat, and, although she was ten years his junior, married her. They went to live with the young woman’s father, who was a horse trader: Olivier took over his accounting and found once again his old vocation.
His convalescence was long and costly. He was given an experimental prototype of an entire artificial limb, a veritable anatomophysiological model of a leg, incorporating all the latest developments in muscular neurophysiology and fitted with servo systems allowing self-reciprocating contractions and extensions. After many months of practice, Olivier succeeded in mastering his contraption sufficiently to walk without a stick and even, on one occasion, with tears in his eyes, to ride a horse.
Even if he was forced to sell off his inherited apartments one by one, leaving himself in the end with only two maid’s rooms, those were certainly the best years of his life, a quiet life in which short return trips to the capital were interspersed with long stays on his father-in-law’s farm, in the middle of waterlogged meadows, in a low, well-lit house full of flowers and the smell of dubbin. It was there that Isabelle was born, in 1962, and her earliest memory has her riding with her father in a trap drawn by a little grey-dappled white horse.
On Christmas Eve, 1965, in a sudden fit of dementia, Arlette’s father strangled his daughter and hanged himself. The next day Olivier came to settle in Paris with Isabelle. He didn’t look for work, found ways of managing on his war-wounded pension, devoted himself to Isabelle, cooking her meals, mending her clothes, teaching her to read and do sums.
Today it is Isabelle’s turn to care for her father, who is now often sick. She does the shopping, beats the eggs for the omelettes, scours the pots, keeps house. She is a thin little girl with a sad face and gloomy eyes who spends hours in front of her mirror whispering frightful stories to herself.
Olivier hardly moves anymore. His leg hurts him now, and he can’t afford to have its complex machinery adjusted. He spends most of his time sitting in his wing chair, dressed in pyjama trousers and an old check bed jacket, sipping little glasses of liqueur all day long, despite Dr Dinteville’s formal prohibition. In an attempt to increase his meagre income ever so slightly he draws (atrocious) picture puzzles which he sends in to a sort of weekly magazine specialising in what is pompously called mental gymnastics; they pay him generously – when they take his pieces – at a rate of fifteen francs per item. The last one shows a river; on the prow of a boat is a seated woman lavishly clad and surrounded by sacks of gold and half-open chests spilling over with jewels; in place of her head is the letter “S”; standing at the stern, a male figure wearing a count’s coronet is the ferryman; on his cape the letters “ENTEMENT” are embroidered. The solution: “Contentment passe richesse”, a French proverb meaning “Happiness is worth more than money”.
This fifty-five-year-old widower and invalid, whose shabby fate has been forged by wars, is obsessed with two grandiose and illusory projects.
The first is of a fictional nature: Gratiolet would like to invent a proper hero, a true romantic hero; not some pot-bellied king of Poland absurdly obsessed with sausages and slaughter, but a true paladin, a doughty knight, a defender of women and orphans, a righter of wrongs, a parfit gentleman and a noble lord, a brilliant strategist, a man of elegance, courage, wealth, and wit; dozens of times has he thought up a face for him, with a determined chin, a broad forehead, teeth showing in a hearty smile, and a twinkle in the eyes; dozens of times has he clad him in impeccably tailored outfits with pale-yellow gloves, ruby cuff links, tiepins tipped with priceless pearls, a monocle, a gold-handled crop, but he still hasn’t managed to find him fitting first and second names.
The second project is in the field of metaphysics: with the aim of showing that, in the words of Professor H. M. Tooten, “evolution is a hoax”, Olivier Gratiolet has undertaken an exhaustive inventory of all the imperfections and inadequacies to which the human organism is heir: vertical posture, for example, gives man only a precarious balance: muscular tension alone keeps him upright, thus causing constant fatigue and discomfort in the spinal column, which, although sixteen times stronger than it would have been were it straight, does not allow man to carry a meaningful weight on his back; feet ought to be broader, more spread out, more specifically suited to locomotion, whereas what he has are only atrophied hands deprived of prehensile ability; legs are not sturdy enough to bear the body’s weight, which makes them bend, and moreover they are a strain on the heart, which has to pump blood about three feet up, whence come swollen feet, varicose veins, etc.; hip joints are fragile and constantly prone to arthrosis or serious fractures; arms are atrophied and too slender; hands are frail, especially the little finger, which has no use, the stomach has no protection whatsoever, no more than the genitals do; the neck is rigid and limits rotation of the head, the teeth do not allow food to be grasped from the sides, the sense of smell is virtually nil, night vision is less than mediocre, hearing is very inadequate; man’s hairless and unfurred body affords no protection against cold, and, in sum, of all the animals of creation, man, who is generally considered the ultimate fruit of evolution, is the most naked of all.