CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

Basement, 5

CELLARS. The Marquiseaux’ cellar.

In the foreground can be seen a sectioned stack made of metal angle pieces containing cases of champagne with coloured stick-on labels depicting an old man holding out a narrow flûte to a nobleman in seventeenth-century dress followed by a large retinue: a tiny caption specifies that he is Dom Pérignon, cellarer at the abbey of Hautvillers, near Epernay, who, having discovered a way of making the wine of the Champagne region effervescent, is giving the result of his invention to Colbert to taste. Above these are cases of Stanley’s Delight whisky: the label shows an explorer of white race, wearing a pith helmet but dressed in Scottish national dress: a predominantly yellow and red kilt, a broad tartan over his shoulder, a studded leather belt supporting a fringed sporran, and a small dirk slipped into his sock-top; he strides at the head of a column of 9 blacks each carrying on his head a case of Stanley’s Delight with a label depicting the same scene.

In the background, to the rear, various objects and pieces of furniture that had belonged to the Echard parents: a rusty birdcage, a collapsible bidet, an old handbag with a chased clip incrusted with a topaz, a low table, and a jute sack spilling over with school exercise books, homework on squared paper, filing cards, file paper, spiral notebooks, kraft-paper dustcovers, press cuttings stuck on loose sheets, postcards (one showing the German Consulate at Melbourne), letters, and sixty-odd copies of a slim cyclostyled brochure entitled

CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF SOURCES RELATING TO THE

DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER

IN HIS BUNKER

ON APRIL 30, 1945

**

first part: France

*

by

Marcelin ECHARD

sometime Head of Stack

at the Central Library, XVIIIth arrdt., Paris

Of all Marcelin Echard’s monumental labours over the last fifteen years of his life, only this brochure was ever published. In it, the author subjects to harsh scrutiny every press announcement, statement, communiqué, book, etc. in the French language referring to Hitler’s suicide, and demonstrates that they all derive from an implicit belief based on dispatches of unknown origin. The following six brochures, which got no further than card-index form, were to comb in the same critical spirit all the English, American, Russian, German, Italian, and other sources. After thus proving that it was not proven that Adolf Hitler (and Eva Braun) had died in their bunker on the thirtieth of April 1945, the author would have compiled a subsequent bibliography, as exhaustive as the first one, listing all the documentary evidence suggesting that Hitler had survived. Then, in a final work to be called Hitler’s Punishment. A Philosophical, Political, and Ideological Analysis, Echard, shedding the strict objectivity of the bibliographer to ride the faster steed of the historian, would have got down to a study of the decisive impact of this survival on world history from 1945 to the present, in which he would have demonstrated how the infiltration of the highest echelons of national and supranational governmental spheres by individuals attached to Nazi ideals and manipulated by Hitler (John Foster Dulles, Cabot Lodge, Gromyko, Trygve Lie, Singhman Rhee, Attlee, Tito, Beria, Sir Stafford Cripps, Bao Daï, MacArthur, Coude du Foresto, Schuman, Bernadotte, Evita Perón, Gary Davis, Einstein, Humphrey, and Maurice Thorez, to mention only a few) had allowed the conciliatory and pacifist spirit laid out at the Yalta Conference to be sabotaged and had fomented an international crisis, a run-up to the Third World War which only the sang-froid of the Four Powers had managed to avert in February 1951.

Cellars. Madame Marcia’s cellar.

An unbelievable tangle of furniture, objects, and trinkets, a jumble even more inextricable, it would appear, than the muddle reigning in the back room of her store.

Here and there a few more identifiable objects can be made out amongst the bric-a-brac: a goniometer, a type of articulated wooden protractor, said to have belonged to the astronomer Nicolas Kratzer; a marinette (the mariner’s mate), a magnetised needle pointing to the north and supported by two straws floating on water in a half-full phial, a primitive instrument from which the compass proper, equipped with dial, did not emerge until three centuries later; a ship’s desk, of English make, fully collapsible, presenting a whole assortment of drawers and flaps; a page from an old herbarium with several specimens of hawkweed (lobed hawkweed, Hieracium pilosella, Hieracium aurantiacum, etc.) under a glass plate; an old peanut dispenser, still half-full, with a glass case inscribed with “EXTRA DELICIOUS GOURMET BRAND”; several coffee grinders; seventeen small gold fish with Sanskrit inscriptions; a whole stock of walking sticks and umbrellas; siphons; a weathervane topped by a pretty rusty rooster, a metal washhouse sign, an old tobacconist’s carrot-shaped sign; several rectangular, painted biscuit tins: one has an imitation of Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche; on another, a Venetian fiesta: masked figures dressed as marquises and marchionesses standing on a floodlit palazzo terrace cheer a brilliantly decorated gondola; in the foreground, perched on one of those painted wooden posts at which watercraft tie up, a little monkey looks on; on a third tin, entitled Rêverie, you can see a young couple sitting on a stone bench in a landscape of great trees and lawns; the young woman wears a white dress and a large pink hat and leans her head on the shoulder of her companion, a melancholy young man dressed in a fieldmouse-grey tuxedo and a frilly shirt; finally, on the shelving, there is a whole stack of old toys: children’s musical instruments, saxophone, vibraphone, a tympani set consisting of a tom-tom drum and high-hat cymbals; building blocks, ludo, Pope Joan, petits-chevaux, and a dolls’ bakery with a tin counter and cast-iron display cases with minuscule ring, round, and stick loaves. The baker’s wife stands behind the counter, giving change to a lady with a little girl munching a croissant. To the left you can see the baker and his lad shovelling kneaded dough into the mouth of an oven whence painted flames emerge.