Chapter 19

We now felt much better and for a whole month were happy. Graeme at once left the New York Herald, while I stopped typing manuscripts and wrote my first published book, Contes en Crinoline. This work was a sequence of historical sketches with a unifying transvestite motif, in which a young man was reincarnated in different varieties of female dress. It was written in French, and all the details of farthingales, plackets, shifts, conical hats and corsets were taken from an illustrated history of costume I had picked up on the quays. The Contes were brought out by Elias Gaucher, a fly-by-night publisher on the rue des Saints-Péres, to whom I had been introduced by a surrealist poet. Gaucher specialized in books dealing with shoes, fans and ladies’ underlinen, and thought Octave Uzanne the greatest writer in France.

‘This is a very amusing manuscript you have turned out,’ he told me, while his fingers worried a rubber band, ‘although it is inaccurate in places. In the convent episode your hero is wearing closed drawers in the year 1750. They did not exist until almost fifty years later.’

He raised his stubby eyebrows. ‘But of course. Penilliére says they were not in use until after the public assault on Théroigne de Méricourt in May 1793, and he is the Bible on the subject.’

He looked at me pityingly. ‘My dear young man, Liane de Lauris was the pseudonym of that poor hack Louis Laurens whose only distinction was that he was a friend of Balzac’s. His L’écrin du rubis is absolutely unreliable. Moreover, you appear not to have read the work of the greatest travesti of all time, Monsieur l’Abbé de Choisy.’

‘Indeed I have. I have read La Comtesse des Barres, but I regard it as too sacred a text even to steal from.’

His eyes lit up, he snapped the rubber band vivaciously. ‘A young man after my heart! Anyone who loves and admires the great Choisy is acceptable on those grounds alone. I will give you 2,000 francs outright for the copyright of your little book of tales. Agreed?’

Eighty dollars, I thought. It was less than I expected; but as usual I was in no position to hold out. ‘For cash, yes.’

‘Of course. Now, for a pseudonym. Anything you like, provided it has an aristocratic ring.’

‘Impossible, sir. You must be a de. All my authors adopt the noble particle. Where were you born, if I may ask?’

‘Canada!’ he exclaimed with delight. ‘Well, who would have thought it? I have a Canadian author: my very first. What do you say, then, to Philippe de Montréal? It sounds well, eh? Archaic.’

‘Excuse me, it sounds more like a criminal alias. And why Philippe? Can’t I even keep my first name?’

‘Hmm-mm. Jean de Montréal. Not bad, not bad. But not quite right either: it has not the feudal connotation. Let me see—what street were you born on?’

‘Ah, now we have it. Jean de Saint-Luc! Perfect. Contes en Crinoline by Jean de Saint-Luc. That is it! Absolutely! It has the fine medieval ring, and the vowels combine with great sonority. Come now, let us sign the little contract. One copy for you and one for me, eh?’

The contract was six lines of typescript in which I conveyed outright ownership of the book to him, together with all rights of translation, for 2,000 francs, of which I acknowledged receipt by these presents, and five copies of the published book itself.

‘Here is my cheque on the Crédit Lyonnais, boulevard Saint-Germain branch. Just around the corner.’

‘In that case, you won’t mind my adding the words “by cheque” to my receipt. Only a formality, of course.’

He grinned, snapping the rubber band. ‘Certainly. I like to deal with a businessman. “by cheque”, naturally.’

We then both signed the contract, which was already witnessed by someone else whose signature was illegible. Jean de Saint-Luc, I thought, this is your passport to a mild erotic fame. This absurd little book—I wonder if it will have an illustrated cover.

When I presented M. Gaucher’s cheque at the Crédit Lyonnais next day it was refused for lack of funds.

All the following week I tried to find him but he had disappeared; the little office in the rue des Saints-Péres was locked. I asked the advice of the surrealist poet, who told me to wait. ‘He has taken his new mistress to Chartres,’ he said. ‘She loves religious architecture and may insist on his going still further afield so she can take some rubbings of tombs. But you can generally find him at the Restaurant Petit Saint-Benoît. You must be bold with him since he is a physical craven. Your original mistake was in taking his cheque. There is no use appealing to his mistress, as she is worse than he.’

For the next two nights Graeme and I dined at the Petit Saint-Benoît. It was one of the smallest, cheapest and best restaurants of its kind in Paris. I had never eaten such sweetbreads: sliced very thin, coated with egg-white and breadcrumbs, fried in brown butter and served with a wedge of lemon, they were quite different from the great squishy things that are generally boiled and served in a dull Mornay sauce. Here Graeme and I also met the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, a charming ugly man who wore a wide-brimmed purple fur-felt hat that made him look like a mushroom.

‘There are only three great names in sculpture in the western world,’ he said. ‘Michelangelo, Rodin and myself. We are the only visionaries of plastic form.’

‘Will you tell me,’ said Graeme, ‘whether sculpture is not in danger of succumbing to a bloodless abstractionism—as painting appears to be doing?’

‘No danger of that,’ he said. ‘Sculpture will be saved by its three dimensions. Look at this water carafe.’ He picked it up. ‘Trite and inexpressive as it is, it cannot be reduced to a system of lines and colours. The logical development of painting is of course towards a square canvas entirely rendered in dull black and entitled anything you like: Hell, Death, The Void, Memory, Madame Untel—whatever the artist’s wit or his dealer’s venality can suggest. In sculpture, however, we are tied to the object, the thing, and we have also the irrefragable mediums of stone, wood, marble, brass to keep us from such sterility.’

‘But Brancusi’s Golden Bird and his Fish,’ I said, ‘aren’t they moving towards a three-dimensional abstraction? The soaring emotion of his bird could be refined and streamlined with very little trouble into the meaningless suavity of a cigar.’

‘Exactly. Constantin does not know where he is going. But I do, and I have told him. He will not listen. He is enamoured of the idea of smoothness, which he confuses with simplicity. Now I, on the other hand, find the ultimate plastic expression to be the rendition of strife and tortuosity such as you can find in the contours and crenellations of a baked potato.’

‘Then there is no danger of sculpture being reduced to the simplest three-dimensional forms of the sphere and the cube? The exhibition, say, of a cannonball or a child’s building block?’

‘Not if I have any say in the matter,’ he said grimly. ‘I am the sworn foe of those geometrical Dutchmen and De Stijl. The real villain, of course, is Father Euclid. We must escape that terrible logic of his if we are to remain human. Art must not be fitted to his bed, or be lopped or stretched for that infernal Greek whose axioms don’t even make sense. There are no straight lines anywhere, fortunately: lines only waver, weave, cross and tangle. Geometrical forms are a pernicious nonsense. I object to the full moon, for instance, as a sterile, stupid circle.’

The third time we were at the Petit Saint-Benoît I saw M. Gaucher coming in with a big fair-haired girl. When I went to his table he introduced me with great formality and asked me to sit down and take an aperitif. I excused myself, saying I was with a friend, and after begging his pardon for broaching a matter of business showed him his dishonoured cheque.

‘I knew it, I knew it,’ he cried, striking his forehead. ‘As soon as you left I consulted my bank balance and realized there was not enough to cover that cheque. I offer you a thousand apologies. If you will come to my office tomorrow we will arrange this matter in a twinkling. Shall we say at three o’clock?’

The next day his office was again closed all afternoon. I understood he did not mean to pay anything. It was obvious that direct action was the only course.

After waiting three whole afternoons in a little wine-shop opposite his office, we at last saw him enter. I was already boiling with rage, and Graeme insisted we wait five minutes. ‘If the worst comes to worst,’ he said, ‘we’ll take him from both sides.’

We entered his office without knocking. He looked up from his desk and turned pale. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please sit down. I have the money here.’ He rummaged in a drawer and pulled out his cheque book.

‘No more of your cheques,’ I said, moving forward. ‘I have come for the money you owe me—in cash, as we agreed.’

‘My friend,’ said Graeme, advancing on the other side, ‘has waited long enough. He wants his 2,500 francs.’

‘Five hundred francs for collection charges,’ said Graeme. We moved behind the desk. ‘Come now, sir, you must pay your legal debts.’

The colour came back to M. Gaucher’s cheeks. ‘This is not a legal debt,’ he hissed.

‘What contract? Oho, you know as little of business as you do of ladies’ underwear, my young Canadian. In France no contract is binding unless it has the government stamps. You are wasting your time.’

‘We’re not leaving before you pay,’ Graeme said, sitting down calmly on the desk. ‘Even if we have to stay here all night.’

‘Excrements! Gangsters!’ M. Gaucher pulled out his wallet and threw its contents on his desk. ‘That is all I have. Take it.’

Graeme picked up the pile of small bills. We walked out and up the rue des Saints-Péres to the rue Jacob while I was counting the money.

‘Then we don’t have to eat at the Cent Colonnes for a while. And another thing, your book’s bound to be printed now. He’s got to recover his costs. If we hadn’t squeezed this out of him I’ll bet he’d have put your manuscript away in a drawer.’

‘I know. If I were you I wouldn’t write anything more in French. You see what happens. Get back to your memoirs. And I’ve been conceiving another book myself. Much better than The Flying Carpet. The great Canadian novel. I’m starting in on it tomorrow. It will be a best-seller. I’ll be famous and we’ll have all the money in the world.’

But the next day he received a telegram saying his father was dying and not expected to live out the summer: it was accompanied by a wired draft for $100 on the Bank of Montreal. ‘How can I get home on a hundred dollars?’ he said. His hands had been trembling ever since the news. His filial feelings were of a somewhat different order than mine.

‘We can get you a steerage passage with the money we’ve got now,’ I said. ‘As far as Halifax anyway.’

‘No, I’ve thought of something better. I’ll go back as a Distressed Canadian, all the way to Montreal, and leave you the hundred dollars. I’ll get into some rags and go to the embassy now.’

‘Yes, thank God I didn’t throw them out. Damn it all, why did I shave yesterday?’

‘A good thing you did. You’ll look destitute and respectable at the same time. One of the deserving poor. You can even say you’re a Bachelor of Arts.’

We took a taxi to the Avenue Montaigne. I watched Graeme as he went in wearing his tattered trousers; he had even assumed a convincing limp. There were no benches in the avenue and I sat on the curb and studied the ghastly architecture of the big houses. There was a certain forbidding, timorous squatness in the whole street that smelled of wealth, fatigue and ineptitude. A few beautiful melancholy children walked by, escorted by their nannies. The sun was unbearably hot, the plane-trees rustled drily. At last Graeme came out.

‘The attaché was very helpful,’ he said. ‘A nice little man from the sticks somewhere near Ottawa. I’m all fixed up to sail in two weeks. I didn’t have to commit perjury. They even gave me five hundred francs out of some kind of i.o.d.e. fund for stranded citizens. You’ve got to hand it to the Dominion.’

Once again we were rich. But the shadow of parting had robbed the fact of all savour. We took the bus back to Montparnasse and visited all the bars, where everything seemed dead and we found no one we knew. I drank three Pernods without feeling any effect; we had dinner and went home early for the first time since coming back to Paris.

The next two weeks dragged to an end. We were both glad when they were up; it was a relief to say goodbye at the Gare Saint-Lazare. ‘Don’t get too tired,’ he said. ‘Try to work on your memoirs. I’ll make some money and return in two or three months. D.V.’

Coming back into the glare of the Place Saint-Lazare I felt immensely alone, and the heat was so stifling I almost fainted. I could not face the prospect of going back alone to the rue Daguerre and wandered around the Right Bank, ending up by walking across the Pont des Arts and up the rue de Seine to the boulevard Saint-Germain. My feet and head both seemed on fire. I remembered hearing that the Brasserie Lipp served the best gin fizz in town and I went inside and ordered one.

The people here were quite different from the Montparnasse types—older, better dressed, with an air of affluence and raffishness. The men were florid, distinguished looking and vaguely rapacious; the women had the air of being kept. But no one looked happy or carefree. I found the atmosphere curiously refreshing and watched a stout iron-grey-haired gentleman with the rosette of the Legion of Honour, who was sitting with a chic, haggard-looking woman, as he guzzled a plateful of langoustines and a bottle of white wine in an ice-bucket. His hands, between cracking the shells, dabbling the bodies in mayonnaise, stuffing them into his mouth, splitting and sucking the claws, wiping his lips, breaking bread, and pouring and drinking wine, were never still—yet the economy of their motion was marvellously organized: there was not a single wasted movement. The performance was underlined by the fact that he never stopped talking to his companion for a moment—and, as far as I could gather, with ease and wit, for she smiled with an amusement that was clearly not assumed.

How wonderful, I thought, to be so distinguished looking, so deft, so self-satisfied, to have such a fine appetite and so smart a mistress; this man is obviously the product of at least three generations of polish, sagacity and indulgence. I watched him as he dished his crayfish and raised his napkin to his lips to smother a slight belch. Already feeling better myself, I was ordering another gin fizz when I saw Daphne Berners coming towards me. Before I had time to rise, she pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘What are you doing in this galley?’ she said. She was looking sadder and more striking than ever; her thin ash-grey suit was beautifully pressed, her soft white shirt, four-in-hand tie and felt hat gave her an air of elegance that was somehow heightened by the fact that, as usual, she carried no handbag.

Daphne looked at me impassively for a minute. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you don’t belong in a dull place like this. You’re much too young.’

I had the impression she didn’t belong there either and wondered why she had come. The men were looking at her with a kind of quizzical salacity, the women with fascination and hatred.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘The place is getting on my nerves.’

We left. ‘Do you mind my asking what in the world you were doing in that place?’ I said as we walked past the Deux Magots.

‘If you must know, it’s where I met Angela. Would you like to go for a walk?’

We walked to the boulevard Saint-Michel, turned down towards the river, and then went along the quais to the rue des Deux-Ponts. Notre Dame looked incredibly beautiful.

We stopped and leaned on the stone embankment. ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘It’s a great comfort. I wonder why.’

‘Mainly because it’s so big, I think. And it’s been here so long. It makes us feel small and transitory, and that includes our sorrows. It’s not really beautiful at all.’

‘The front is nice. I don’t like looking at the body of it, where Claude Frollo fell off.’

‘Don’t be literary. Anyway that horny priest got just what was coming to him. Come on, this isn’t the best perspective. We’ll go down to the tow-path.’

We went down the stairs to the cobbled walk and sat on the riverside. There was no one there and we were surrounded by the cliffs of honey-coloured stone straddling the grey-green river; the sound of traffic was muffled, and the great twin-towered cathedral seemed to be right on top of us, sailing along like a ship in the fading light. We sat looking at it for a while.

She took my arm. ‘Do you know any poetry? Something in French, if possible.’

‘Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d’automne

Ou les belles, pendant rêveuses à nos bras,

Dirent alors des mots si speciaux tout bas

Que depuis ce temps notre coeur tremble et s’étonne.’

The softness of her mouth was a revelation. This was without passion or demand, full of affection, sadness, and comfort. I felt her tears pouring around our lips.

‘Daphne, Daphne,’ I said to myself, wanting this moment to last forever. I felt as if transported out of my own sex and into a region where everything was allowed and where I wanted nothing but this endless salty kiss. I opened my eyes and saw Daphne’s enormous grey ones, blind and ecstatic in her pale face, and beyond them the towers of Notre Dame.

I followed her back up the stairs to the street and into the roar of the evening traffic over the Pont Neuf. We had dinner on the quai des Grands Augustins, hardly exchanging a word as we looked out at the river. Then we walked all the way back to the rue Broca. The studio looked just the same as when I had left it a year before.

‘Tall, thin, guardsman’s tie and a panama. The suave type. He seemed to have plenty of money.’