When Evening Falls

A few nights ago at dinner, they were talking about an ardent young feminist. She was good-looking, with long hair, and went around in tight jeans and high calf-leather boots. After a lecture she gave one evening, she announced that she would accept questions only from the women in the audience—men, oppressors of women throughout the centuries, would not be permitted to speak. It didn’t especially matter, since after two questions she abruptly decided that the lecture was over.

She was, at the time, involved in a love affair with a soft-spoken young composer. He happened to remark in company, when the subject somehow came up, that he had occasionally felt himself tempted by his female students. That brought the affair to a sudden end. She rose from the table, exclaiming with disgust that she never wanted to speak to him again, and so far as anyone knew, she never did.

I found myself wondering, among other things, what Jean Renoir might have made of this story; not what he would have thought of it but how it might have been handled in one of his films—as a human foible, probably, passionate and foolish. His great ability, in the thirty-five or so films he made during his lifetime, was to put things into very human terms. I never met Jean Renoir, who died in 1979 at the age of eighty-four, but I feel as if I knew him—he belongs to an order of people and things that I admire. In addition to his films, he wrote three books: a memoir of his father, an autobiography, and one novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, which happens also to be in the form of an autobiography.

It’s about the love affair or, more correctly, the love of a lifetime between a young upper-class soldier and a straightforward, dark—brun, as the French say—somewhat fatalistic prostitute. He first notices her at a party with drunken comrades, one of whom has sex with her while she’s seated on his lap, an act she accepts with indifference, even a trace of amusement—it’s not known yet that she’s a prostitute. Afterward, she calmly straightens her skirt and helps herself to more dessert. The soldier who has made love to her gets sick and leaves, and the narrator begins to talk to her. She has small white teeth in a generous mouth, and suddenly he feels an urge to kiss her, mostly out of curiosity, “the way one is tempted to give a sheet of newspaper to a goat, to see if it will eat it.”

She wasn’t expecting that, is her comment afterward. Didn’t she like it? he asks.

“‘Oh, I don’t mind, but you aren’t the type.’

“‘Is there a type for kissing?’

“‘Like anything else.’”

Her name is Agnes. One soon, like the narrator, falls in love with her. This takes place in a garrison town in France in the year preceding the First World War. Agnes is nineteen and works in the local brothel—there is a single one, as was often the case in small towns in France in those days. She is strong-minded, honest, and to a degree impossible to falsify, entirely herself. At first, she rejects Georges (it’s only later that he becomes an officer), even when he comes to the brothel, although seeing the state he is in and knowing how unhealthy it is to allow it to be unrelieved, she politely takes care of that before he is made to go. Later, in a sudden about-face, she gives herself to him entirely without any illusion of it ever being more than what it is, but what it is, is a happiness greater than any she has ever known, and the same is so for him. It is “Madame Butterfly” in reverse—she is the one who is promised to someone else, a husband, as it happens, who has installed her in a brothel before going off to find the money to fulfill his dream of opening a hardware store someday.

The war steps in and takes Georges away, and though for a time they are reunited, in the end he loses her, as does her husband, and for the rest of his life never knows love like that again; such heights are reached once only.

Despite the banality of the book’s plot, it is the human details that shine through. When she became naked, Georges recalls, letting the thin dressing gown fall away, there was a modesty in it and nothing of pride or the idea that her body was an incomparable gift. “She simply thought, ‘He likes me to be naked and I am happy that it pleases him.’”

The book may be entirely fiction but seems to be based at least in part upon Renoir’s experiences—like Georges, he was a cavalryman and was also wounded in the early days of the war. After recovering, he, like Georges, finished the war as an officer. He married Andrée Heuschling, one of his father’s models, and she became the star of his first films; perhaps he transformed her into Agnes, perhaps Agnes was drawn from someone else. It doesn’t really matter; one believes the book. Renoir is a man whose fiction is more credible than others’ facts. The scenes of garrison life; the brothel, with its cozy atmosphere and odor of talcum, sweat, and cheap perfume; the waiter who ignores the girls because he is married to a “real woman” at home; the pompous little owner, with his moralizing and common sense—it is all done with brevity and style.

Like knowledge of the classical world, which comes to us through ruins and books, there are glimpses of this part of ordinary French life of fifty or a hundred years ago in architecture, painting, and writers’ pages. Many such pages can be found in the two thick volumes of a grand album of French brothel days, Maisons Closes, written under the pseudonym Romi. In the 1930s, the author had been sent by a newspaper to investigate brothels nationwide. He visited a vast number and became their historian. In his book, one finds a provincial town on a river in the student days of 1926–27, described by Jean Loubes—14,000 inhabitants and one maison publique with four girls, a quartet, good-natured, not unintelligent, obliging and indiscreet. Through them, one could learn some absorbing things about the town’s best citizens as well as the physical imperfections and desires of their wives. The beer was a bit expensive but good, and from rooms on the second floor as evening fell there was a view of the entire town, its roofs and enterprises, streets and quays. In these rooms, all cares and sadness fell away.

Les bordels, of which Aragon sang. Le Havre—Rue des Gallons, another writer remembers, the smell of women, urine, sour milk, the sea. Nothing, he says, can give an idea of the peace, the feeling of family life in a provincial brothel. One talked, laughed, gossiped, drank, discussed elections, played belote, which was to that world what bridge was to society, and on Sunday everyone went to Mass. When I become old, tired of the noise of Paris, of literary quarrels, news, salons, snobs, poets, and travel, I will bury myself in a provincial brothel . . . equivalent of the chamber of commerce. It carried, I know, along with the listings, advertisements for knee-high boots of supple leather, shoulder-length gloves, schoolgirl uniforms incomplete in certain places and suitable for reenactments of coming home from school. The Guide had no price on it. It was not for sale, though it was easy enough to get a copy.

It’s uncertain when it was published for the last time, 1939 or perhaps 1945. Any need for it ended in 1946, with the law that closed all brothels, not abruptly but with an admirable compassion that permitted a grace period of one month for towns of 5,000 or less, three months for those of up to 20,000, and six months for those larger. It allowed men and women to prepare themselves for the end of what the government now realized to have been a social plague.

I remember when I was twenty, exiled to faded airfields and towns on the Texas border where the most important figures were the bank president and the Coca-Cola bottler, whose daughters, if any, strolled in a world separate from ours. The weekends were endless, with long, burning afternoons. We went across to Mexico, to the restaurants and the cheap bars. There were usually women in back or in a nearby house and always someone to take you to them. I remember, in Mexico City, a girl from Havana with unforgettable white teeth. It was a little like Jean Renoir’s novel or what it might have been if written by someone without the humanity and style.

“Je comprends la vie”—“I understand life”—Madame Anaïs consolingly said to Séverine, the young married woman nervously presenting herself for occasional service in Belle de Jour. That is the phrase that remains. There are some things that demand to take place one way or another; it may be better to face them frankly. It is not love, after all, that is the raison d’être of brothels; it is desire and dreams.

Generally speaking, saints are less interesting than sinners, which is what many of them were to begin with. Life has its turnabouts, but there must be something to act against, a too-easy something, a sensual life. Moderation is admirable, but when evening falls there is the call of the boulevards, the lights, shapely legs. There is Henry Miller on his arrival in Paris, “bewildered” and “poverty-stricken”: “A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.” He compared himself to a ghost at a banquet, but before long he was able to sit down to the table himself.

I never found a copy of the rose-colored Guide. In an odd way, the longer I looked for it, the less I needed to find it; I already knew it quite well. In the end, I decided to let the one destined for me stay hidden on an upper bookshelf or in the attic where it had been for so long. Some things are better imagined than seen, especially in the light of day.

GQ

February 1992