THE TRAVELLERS WERE MET AT THE GARE DU NORD by the cholo Mendoza—yellow gloves, gardenia in buttonhole, and grey spats as usual, although it was summer; he had been notified by aerogram sent off on the high seas, and had hastily returned from Vichy, where he was combining the water cure in the daytime with nocturnal cures in the bar, and this intelligent alternation of spring water with bourbon had given him the appearance of a twenty-year-old. The other embassy officials were on holiday with their children, at Trouville or Arcachon. And Ofelia was in Salzburg, where the Mozart Festival was opening that very day with Così fan Tutte. The diplomat’s expression showed his alarm when he saw that the Head of State had his inert right arm in a sling made from a cashmere shawl. A tiresome affliction, but not serious, Doctor Peralta explained. The doctors over here would put it right with their up-to-date scientific methods. Besides, the atmosphere, movement, gaiety, and civilised way of life …
Merely by breathing the air here—thus: breathe in, breathe out, expand the chest—one felt better. And it was well known that morale affects the physical state, since pain gets so much worse when we concentrate on the idea of pain, because, in fact, modern psychologists had agreed with Epicurus that etc., etc.; but one couldn’t talk in all this noise from trains, whistling engines, bustling porters, and perhaps you’d better go on ahead with the luggage, Cholo, while Peralta and I take a little walk, as our legs are numb with sitting for so long.
And the Head of State, followed by his secretary, entered a well-known bistro, rather Flemish in style, with a dartboard and a statuette of the Manneken-Pis, where one could drink Hoegaarde bitter, or another beer the colour of cherry juice, or strong Lambic—“branded” with a red-hot nail dipped in the froth—all of them good to start off a day that should be full of health-giving savour. Everything seemed pleasant today—people sitting outside cafés, soldiers’ red trousers, the zouaves’ skullcaps, the burning carrot advertising Le Brazza, the buses with their placards advertising the Opéra, République, Bastille, Parc Monceau, and tours of the Napoleonic sights. The returned travellers renewed their old habits of taking idle strolls according to whim, from the Chope du Panthéon to the tulip bulbs of the Quai de la Mégisserie; from Chaponac’s occult and Rosicrucian bookshop (fortune-telling cards, initiatory leaflets, the works of Estanislao de Guaite) to a gymnasium where they still practised the noble art of all-in wrestling; from the sky-blue shop selling religious objects close to Notre-Dame-des-Victoires to Aux Glaces, at 25 Rue Sainte-Apolline, where in the mornings an ample blonde was often on duty who was particularly skilled at manipulation à la Duc d’Aumale—which gave an air of somewhat aristocratic raffishness to the cavalry barracks nearby. Everything above and behind the zinc bar counters spoke the language of smells and taste: brioches in their paper cases; madeleines, fluted like scallop shells from Compostela, in square glass containers; Dubonnet’s cat, the bersagliere on the Cinzano bottles, the gleaming pottery of the flasks of Dutch gin, the wooden ladders enclosed in bottles of marc brandy; the aroma of Amer Picón—something between orange peel and tar.
“We’re better off here than in the Mummies’ Cave,” murmured the Head of State. And finally they hailed an open car and were driven to the Rue de Tilsitt.
“Paris will always be Paris,” opined the secretary when, between the horses of Marly, the Arc de Triomphe appeared in the distance, useless and magnificent.
And now, installing himself, sinking into his leather armchair, the Head of State felt something approaching an organic need to re-establish relations with the city. He put through a telephone call to the house on the Quai Conti where delightful concerts often took place: Madame was not at home. He rang up the violinist Morel, who congratulated him on his return in the hasty and evasive tone of someone who wants to end the conversation quickly. Next he telephoned Louisa de Mornand, whose housekeeper kept him waiting longer than she should and then told him that the beautiful lady was away for a few days. He rang Brichot, professor at the Sorbonne.
“I’m almost blind,” he answered, “but I have the newspapers read aloud to me.” And he hung up. “As irritable as ever,” thought the Head of State, rather surprised by this strange response and looking up another number in his diary. He rang, rang, rang, first one friend then another, always—except when it was his tailor or hairdresser—being answered by voices that had apparently changed their tone and style. Then he thought of D’Annunzio; perhaps he would be in Paris. After a maid had told him that her master had just left for Italy, he heard the poet’s own voice giving the lie to what she said, and launching a terrific invective against the creditors who were literally besieging him in his house. Yes, besieging was the word: suggesting a tribe of Erinyes, of Eumenides, of Furies; of Hecate’s hellhounds, there at all hours, stationed in the bistro opposite, in the tabac at the corner, in the neighbouring bakeries, with their eyes on his door, waiting for him to go out so that they could hurl themselves on him, destroy and tear him with their savage demands for money.
“Ah, what wouldn’t I do to have the power of a Latin American tyrant, and be able to cleanse the Rue Geoffroy l’Asnier of rogues and scoundrels as our brave friend who was talking just now did in Nueva Córdoba.”
Realizing that the blow was about to fall—and it wouldn’t be the first—the Head of State struck the mouthpiece with his fountain pen, saying: “Ne coupez pas, Mademoiselle!… Ne coupez pas,” and then hung up the receiver in the middle of a sentence from his interlocutor, to make him think they had been cut off. But he felt uneasy and disconcerted. He didn’t know how to take this talk of a “tyrant” even though the poet habitually used “imaginific” and ambiguous language, but as to Nueva Córdoba, he wasn’t aware that D’Annunzio even knew the name of the town. Something was up. Perhaps it would be a good idea to ring up Reynaldo Hahn, his amiable and pleasant “compatriot” from Puerto Cabello. The composer came to the telephone, speaking in his agreeable Spanish with a Venezuelan accent, curiously interspersed—a habit he couldn’t explain himself—with occasional turns of speech obviously coming from the River Plate. After the usual greetings, Reynaldo informed him, in his characteristically mild, slow, and rather lazy tones, as if he were talking about something different, that Le Matin had published a series of savage reports on the events over there in which his “compatriot” was described as “The Butcher of Nueva Córdoba.” All of Monsieur Garcin’s photographs had appeared, occupying three or four columns, and showing corpses lying in the streets, mutilated corpses, corpses being dragged along, corpses hanging by their armpits, by their chins, by their ribs, from the meat hooks in the Municipal Slaughterhouse, and pierced with pikes, tridents, and knives. And female defenders of the town being forced to run naked through the streets of with bayonets in their backs. And others raped after taking refuge in the church. And other women thrown into cattle pens. And the miners shot down with machine guns en masse in front of the cemetery wall with military bands and cheerful bugles playing. All this, accompanied by portraits of the Head of State in battle dress, in profile, half-face, or sometimes back view, but always identifiable by his corpulent frame giving the order for the artillery to fire on the National Sanctuary of the Divine Shepherdess (“It wasn’t me, it was Hoffmann,” he protested), that marvel of baroque architecture—la Notre-Dame du Nouveau Monde as the newspaper called it. And the unkindest cut of all perhaps was that when his son Marcus Antonius was questioned by a reporter two days ago on the beach at the Lido, where he was staying with an Arsinoe from the Comédie Française, instead of defending his father, he declared: “Je n’ai que faire de ces embrouillements sudamericains.”
At last, the appalled listener understood the reason for so many excuses and ancillary rebuffs; now Louisa de Mornand’s fictitious absence and Brichot’s strange reply were explained.
“I know there’s a lot of exaggeration in it all, compatriot. They do extraordinary things nowadays in the way of trick photography … You wouldn’t be capable … Of course it’s all false.” But he couldn’t dine with him at Larue that night. Nor tomorrow, as he had a date with Gabriel Fauré. A lot of work on hand, also: a project for an opera on Moratin’s El si las niñas, a concerto for piano and orchestra. He was extremely sorry …
Overwhelmed, the Head of State fell into the hammock, swinging diagonally from the rings that he had ordered to be fixed to two corners of his bedroom, months ago. He wasn’t even cross with the cholo Mendoza, who could well have warned him. But he knew very well that the only French papers his diplomats read were Le Rire, Fantasio, and La Vie Parisienne, and they were always the last to know what was being written about their country. He gazed at the moulded plaster on the ceiling with the bitterest feelings he had perhaps ever known. It would have upset him very little to be treated as a “butcher,” a barbarian, a savage, or whatever else, in places he had never been attached to, and which he had for that reason spoken about slightingly. In his view, Berlin was a city that had every right to its primitive name of “place of bears,” with the architectonic heaviness of the Brandenburg Gate, like some granite locomotive, its walled-in temple of Pergamum and Unter-den-Linden: Vienna, in spite of its reputation for elegance and voluptuousness derived from its operettas and waltzes, was really terribly provincial, with its little officials from the dyeworks, its ten or twelve restaurants anxious to be like those of this city, besides its café-au-lait-coloured Danube, which looked blue only on an occasional February 29 of leap year; Berne was a boring town with its heraldic statues in the middle of streets that were one vast shop window of watches and barometers; in Rome, every square, every street corner was a scene from an opera, and whatever the passers-by wore or talked about, they always had the air of the chorus in La forza del destino or Un ballo in maschera, whereas there was a certain smallness about Madrid, with its kiosks selling mineral water, sweets and aguardiente, its night watchmen with key rings at their belts, and its social gatherings in cafés where the dawn rose on a provincial panorama of last night’s cups of chocolate and yesterday’s toast, some people just going off to bed while others were starting the day early with fritters and tobacco. On the other hand, Paris was an Earthly Paradise, the Promised Land, the Shrine of Intelligence, the Metropolis of Savoir-vivre, the Source of All Culture, and anyone fortunate enough to live here found that its dailies, weeklies, reviews, and books, year after year, praised Rubén Dario, Gómez Carrillo, Amado Nervo, and many other Latin American writers who had, each in his own way, contributed to make the Great City into a City of the Gods.
Slowly, overcoming reserve, observing strict rules of polite behaviour, always carefully dressed according to hours, days, and seasons, giving valuable but never ostentatious presents, sending flowers at odd times, showing generosity to charity sales and tombolas for good causes, befriending artists and writers who were not eccentric bohemians, and attending important concerts, fashionable meetings, and theatrical and musical first nights—thereby showing that our countries also knew how to live—he had opened a way for himself, which without elevating him to the peaks of Gotha had nevertheless three times admitted him to Madame Verdurin’s musical evenings—not such a bad beginning. When he was tired of all the agitations and crowds of over there, he intended to retire and await death in the house that every journey made more pleasant to him. But now everything had collapsed. Forever shut against him would be the doors of the great houses he had dreamed of entering when as a provincial journalist he had walked the steep streets of Surgidero de la Verónica, reciting poems in which Rubén Dario sang of “the times of King Louis of France, a sun with a court of stars on a blue field, when the splendid and majestic Pompadour filled his palaces with fragrance.” Or when, sitting in some tavern in the port, in the steam of prawns on the grill, his nose buried in reviews from over there, he used to come across works by the most famous painters in the world, showing him the gold and crimson of the foyer of the Opéra, the whiteness of sylphides and wilies, the aristocratic confidence of horsewomen at a gymkhana, the greyness of cathedrals in the rain (“il pleut dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville”), and the iridescence of women whose portraits showed them as birds of paradise, symphonies of jewels, unimaginable beings, suddenly blazing out from the pages of L’Illustration—as he sat there, between the siren of a Danish cargo boat and the squeaking of the crane as it loosed a torrent of coal on to a dirty quay close by.
Now he thought he read scorn and mute accusation in the eyes of everyone who looked at him: his manservant Sylvestre was rather evasive; the cook, whose gesture of wiping her hands on her apron when she saw him could have various different interpretations; the concierge, reserved and cold, seemingly uninterested in his arm in its sling—or else not thinking it discreet to allude to it; the familiar old Bois-Charbons, where he had the half-fearful curiosity to go that same evening to drink a bottle of Beaujolais with Doctor Peralta. Monsieur Musard seemed to be in a bad mood. His wife didn’t come out to greet him. And, to judge by their glances, those two men in caps at the other end of the bar were talking about him. In all the cafés the waiters had strange expressions on their faces. In the end, in order to soothe his nerves and after taking Peralta’s advice, he turned up without warning at the house of the Distinguished Academician, who owed him so many favours. There, in an apartment full of shadows and with views over the Seine, surrounded by old books, Hokusai prints, portraits of Sainte-Beuve, Verlaine, Lecontede-L’Isle, and Léon Dierx, the President received an affectionate welcome, understanding, and lucidity, which touched him. Power entailed terrible obligations, his friend declared. “When kings carry out their promises it is terrible, and when they don’t carry them out it’s just as terrible,” he said, perhaps quoting Oscar Wilde. No leader of men, no great monarch or captain, had had clean hands. Dramatic and comforting pictures passed before the President’s eyes, pictures of the destruction of Carthage, of the siege of Numantia, of the fall of Byzantium. Sudden images arose, confusedly shuffled at random by his memory, of Philip and the Duke of Alba, Saladin, and Peter the Great obliged by reasons of state to exterminate the Naryshkins in a courtyard of the Kremlin. Besides … who had ever been able to control the frenzied excesses and cruelties—lamentable but repeated throughout history—of a brutal soldiery, drunk with victory? And worse still when a rebellion of Indians and negroes had to be crushed. In fact, to speak frankly, that affair had been the result of a mob of Indians and negroes running amok.
His strength of mind restored, and his mood made more aggressive by the conversation, the Head of State suddenly discarded his rather careful French, with its attention to pronunciation and choice of the right word, and impetuously triggered a deluge of Creole insults, which his astonished friend received like a verbal invasion of ideograms outside the scope of his understanding. Indians and negroes, yes; but “zambos, cholos, pelados, atorrantes, rotos, guajiros, léperos, jijos de la chingada, chusma, y morralla” (Doctor Peralta tried to translate this into a language learnt at Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, as propres-à-rien, pignoufs, galvadeux, jeanfoutre, salopards, poivrots, caves, voyous, escarpes, racaille, pègre, merde) and above all—now the President returned to French—socialists, socialists affiliated with the Second International, anarchists, men who foretold an impossible levelling of classes, who fomented hatred in the illiterate masses, who exploited for their own advantage the conceit of uneducated people who had refused the schooling offered them, people crazed by practising witchcraft and unimaginable superstitions, and devoted to saints somewhat like our saints but who were not our saints, since these illiterate people, hostile to the three Rs, called the Beautiful God of Amiens Elegná, Velásquez’s Crucified Christ Obatalá, and Michelangelo’s Pietà Ochum. They didn’t understand that over here.
“More than you think,” observed the Distinguished Academician, growing more indulgent and convinced all the time. Everything could be explained (and he returned to Philip II and the Duke of Alba, passing on to the America of Cortés and Pizarro) by Spanish blood, the inheritance of the Spanish temperament, the Spanish Inquisition, bullfights, banderillas, cape and sword, horses being disembowelled among sequins and pasodobles. “L’Afrique commence aux Pyrénées.” We had been born with that blood in our veins; it was fate. Men of over there were not like those over here, although of course they didn’t lack certain qualities, because there had been, after all, Cervantes, El Greco—who had, by the way, been revealed to the world by the genius of Théophile Gautier.
At this moment, that schoolteacher Doctor Peralta sprang up from his chair in a rage and shouted: “Je vous emmerde avec le sang espagnol.” And, in an irreverent outburst, he paraded before the amazed eyes of the Distinguished Academician, as in pictures from a magic lantern, Simon de Montfort’s crimes and the Crusade against the Albigenses; Robert Guiscard (the hero of his own play, the manuscript of which, bought by our National Library, told how the Norman condottiere had gone through the middle of Rome knife in hand); the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, that universal synonym of horror; the pursuit of the camisards, the massacres of Lyons, the noyades of Nantes, the White Terror after Thermidor, and above all, above all (by skilful handling of analogies), the last days of the Commune. Then, the most intelligent and civilised men in the world hadn’t hesitated to conquer revolutionary resistance by exterminating more than 16,000 men. The ambulance of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice—“Oh! fuyez, douce image!”—had become a scaffold in the hands of the people of Versailles. And Monsieur Thiers, after his first walk through Paris in the days of punitive measures, had said, in the most ordinary way: “The streets are full of corpses; this horrible spectacle will be a lesson.” The periodicals of that time—those of Versailles, of course—were preaching the holy bourgeois crusade of murder and extermination. And recently … what about the victims of the Fourmies strike? And more recently still? Did the great Clemenceau show any mercy to the strikers of Draveil or of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges? Eh?
Under this frontal attack the Academician turned to look at the Head of State: “Tout cela est vrai. Tristement vrai. Mais il y a un nuance, Messieurs.”
And then, after a rather solemn introductory pause, raising his voice with each name, he reminded his listeners that France had given the world Montaigne, Descartes, Louis XIV, Molière, Rousseau, and Pasteur. The President had a mind to reply that though it had had a shorter history, his own continent had already produced great men and saints, heroes and martyrs, thinkers and even poets, who had transformed the literary language of Spain, but he reflected that the names he wanted to mention would fall into the void of a culture that knew nothing of them. Meanwhile, Peralta was encircling the Academician with awkward questions: just because it was here that Racine’s alexandrines were first heard and the Discourse on Method was so famous, certain barbarities were all the more inexcusable. It was deplorable that Monsieur Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, illustrious historian of the Revolution, Consulate, and Empire, should have given orders for the massacres of the Commune, the shootings at Père Lachaise, and the deportations to New Caledonia; it was less grievous that Walter Hoffmann, grandson of a half-breed and an emigrant from Hamburg, a bogus Prussian and tenor of military messrooms, should have carried out—since he had been responsible for the whole thing—the repressive action at Nueva Córdoba.
“La culture oblige, autant que la noblesse, Monsieur l’Académicien.”
Seeing that his eminent friend’s forehead was dark and frowning, the President silenced his secretary with an expression of fatigue and buried himself between the arms of his chair in an attitude of mute despair. He looked at objects in the room without seeing them—the portraits, the old books, an engraving by Granville. The Academician, on the other hand, behaved as if unaware of Peralta’s presence, blundering into him as he passed—“Pardon!” (treading on one of his feet) “I didn’t hurt you, I hope?”—and walked from one end of the room to the other with the expression of someone reflecting deeply. “On peut essayer! Peut-être?”
He put through a telephone call to the editor in chief of Le Matin. Monsieur Garcin’s photos—that damned Frenchman of Nueva Córdoba—had been carried off by some students, refugees from over there, who were now in Paris, talking and agitating in the cafés of the Latin Quarter—all of them followers of Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez. The newspaper couldn’t recant, nor yet cancel publication of forthcoming articles already announced. People would say that it had sold itself to someone known to possess enormous wealth. The best it could do was suppress from tomorrow’s issue a photo of the Head of State standing beside a corpse placed on a bodega counter, under a calendar advertising Phosphatine Fallière, whereon the date of the massacre could be clearly read. “That’s completely buggered us,” said the President, overwhelmed. And if only there had been—goodness knows what—something to distract the attention of the public: a big liner sunk like the Titanic, the appearance of Halley’s Comet announcing the End of the World, another eruption of Mont-Pelée, an earthquake in San Francisco, some lovely murder like that of Gaston Calmette by Madame Caillaux … But there was nothing. In this bastard of a summer nothing happened. And in the sole place in the universe where other people’s opinion had some importance to him, everyone was giving him the cold shoulder. Seeing him sunk into a state of despair expressed by his hunched back and vacant gaze, the Distinguished Academician offered him the warmth of his friendship with a long press of his left hand, and began talking in a low and, as it were, confidential voice about a possible counter-offensive. The French press—sad though he felt to have to admit it—was tremendously venal. Of course he wasn’t referring to Le Temps, connected as it was with the Quai d’Orsay, nor was its editor, Adrien Hébrard, a man who would entertain a certain sort of transaction. No more could one think of L’Echo de Paris, to which his friend Maurice Barrès contributed, nor that splenetic Arthur Meyer’s Le Gaulois. But behind these leading papers were others, which on condition there were funds available (the Head of State nodded) would—well, you understand. Everything depended on doing things diplomatically.
So it was that, three days later, Le Journal published the first of a series of articles under the general title of L’Amérique Latine, cette inconnue, wherein, passing from the universal to the local, from general to particular, from Christopher Columbus to Porfirio Díaz (and showing, en passant, how a great country like Mexico had been overtaken by the most atrocious anarchy through not having suppressed a revolution in time), it then turned to our own country, praising its cataracts and volcanoes, its flutes and guitars, the clothes and huts of the Indians, its typical dishes such as tamales and chili stews, with references to the great moments in its history—a history that necessarily led to the period of progress, agricultural development, public works, encouragement of education, good relations with France, etc., etc., due to the Head of State’s wise conduct of affairs. While other young nations of the continent were shipwrecked in disorder, that little country was setting an example, etc., etc., not forgetting that having to deal with populations that were often uncivilised and rebellious and easily seduced by destructive and subversive ideologies (here came opportune references to Ravachol, to Caserio, who killed President Carnot, to Czolgosz, assassin of McKinley, and Mateo Moral, who threw a bomb at the wedding coach of Victoria of Battenberg and Alphonso XIII); having to deal with an infiltration of libertarian and anarchist ideas, an energetic government was obliged to take energetic decisions, without always being able to prevent the much-provoked, angry, and sorely tried soldiery giving way on occasion to deplorable excesses, but, however, nevertheless, as soon as …
“You see? My President!” exclaimed Doctor Peralta, reading and re-reading the articles. “That ought to settle the hash of those filthy students who kick up rows in the Latin Quarter with their meetings without any audience and their leaflets that no one reads.”
Just then a cable arrived telling the Head of State that a case, a prodigiously large case, a magic case, a providential case had been dispatched a short while ago from Puerto Araguato: a case that contained, with all his ornaments, bits of cloth and bones, the Mummy—the Mummy of that night—destined for the Trocadero Museum. Skilfully strengthened with glue and invisible wires, sitting in a new funeral jar open in front—just enough for one to see the whole skeleton—invisibly restored by a Swiss taxidermist, more of a specialist in reptiles and birds, but who had done a masterly job in this case, the Mummy was on its way, was crossing the ocean, and arriving, actually arriving in time to give material to a certain element of the press whose greed and absence of scruples were revealing themselves, and astonishing the President, day by day. For the house in the Rue de Tilsitt was now subjected to a perfect invasion from early morning to night. There were journalists, gossip columnists, editors of periodicals never seen on stalls or kiosks, reporters, échotiers, men in frock coats, in shabby suits, in bowler hats, in caps, with sword sticks and monocles—would-be specialists in foreign politics, who knew nothing about America except the condor of General Grant’s sons, the last of the Mohicans, La Perichole, and an Argentine tango called “El Choclo” that was the rage of the moment. They came at all hours “in search of information,” vaguely menacing, declaring that they were still receiving terrible news from over there, that it was known that students and journalists were being ruthlessly persecuted, many European interests threatened, and above all, above all, there was the extraordinary suicide of Monsieur Garcin—a former inmate of Cayenne it was true, but a Frenchman after all—whose body had been found a little while ago, hanging from a disused excavating machine a few kilometres from Nueva Córdoba. Behind Le Petit Journal, whose sales were diminishing seriously at that time, there loomed representatives of L’Excelsior, insidiously suggesting that pictorial matter was reproduced in its pages unusually clearly; behind Le Cri de Paris stood La Libre Parole, and so from greater to less, from blackmailing dailies to scandalmongering reviews, finally reaching the provincial papers—Basses Pyrénées, Alpes Maritimes, Echoes of the North, Armorican beacons, Marseillaise lampoons—forming a daily procession of treacherous cadgers, who had to be kept quiet by the language of figures, with the splendid help of the Mummy. There it was, photographed from every angle; there was the Ancestor of America, two, three, or four thousand years old, according to the whim of the writer, but in any case the most ancient exhibit from the continent whose history had been sent rocketing vertiginously backwards by the discovery. There was promise for our scientific institutions, and for the Head of State, author of this sensational find; thanks for having made such a valuable present to a Parisian museum. But the Mummy didn’t arrive. Put on board a Swedish cargo boat, to be unloaded at Cherbourg, by some mistake it had got to Gothenburg, whither the cholo Mendoza had been sent to look for it.
And meanwhile, ever insatiable, ever-threatening reporters kept on arriving at the Rue de Tilsitt “in search of news.”
“I can’t take any more; I can’t take any more,” the Head of State groaned, after receiving a visit from a woman journalist from Lisez-moi Bleu. “These shits will fleece me utterly! They may say what they like, I won’t give them a centime more!” However, he went on handing out and handing out, although now that the Mummy had been photographed, described, and compared with other mummies—in the Louvre and the British Museum—it provided no material for any more articles. Searching for a new approach, Peralta studied cases of the Virgin’s appearance on earth, in order to relate them to our cult of the Divine Shepherdess—perhaps this theme might interest readers of Catholic papers.
And in the middle of all this confusion the pistol shot at Sarajevo rang out, followed by the shots that killed Jaurès in the Café du Croissant.
“Thank God something has happened at last on this bloody continent!” said the Head of State. On August 2 there was general mobilisation, and on August 4 the war began.
“Don’t let another journalist into this house,” said the President to Sylvestre. And to Doctor Peralta, “Now we can have a rest!”
That same night the Head of State began doing his former rounds. He and his secretary went to Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, to Aux Glaces at 25 Rue Sainte-Apolline; to the house of the English schoolgirls and the little Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. Everywhere the talk was the same. Some said that the war would be short and French armies would soon arrive in Berlin: others said it would be a long, agonizing, dreadful war.
“Nonsense,” said the President. “The last war, because it was the last classical war, was the Franco-Prussian in ’70.” An eminent English economist had recently shown (“and you can find his book in Nelson’s Edition”) that no civilised nation was in a position to stand the expense of a prolonged conflict. Modern arms were too dear, no country could face the cost of maintaining armies that now added up to millions of men. Moreover, as the French General Staff had already proclaimed: “Three months, three battles, three victories.”
At this moment Ofelia arrived from Salzburg by way of Switzerland, pregnant by the Papageno in The Magic Flute. They had foolishly embraced one night, when she had drunk so much that she had forgotten to use the diaphragm she always carried in her bag for unforeseen circumstances—and idiotically let herself be fucked in a little house surrounded by pines on the Kapuzinnersberg. She arrived in a fury; furious at having to get rid of it elsewhere, because the stupid doctors here wouldn’t undertake this form of intervention, whatever one paid them; furious at the article in Le Matin, which had been echoed in Germany and Austria, and at a caricature in Munich’s Simplississimus showing the Head of State in a wide Mexican hat, cartridge belt across his chest, with a millionaire’s paunch and a cigar between his fangs, shooting a kneeling peasant woman.
“You’ve ballsed up everything as usual!” cried the Infanta. “The monkey’s frock coat doesn’t hide its tail! If you killed so many people you might at least have included the photographer!”
“They’ve seen to that already!”
“Fine goings-on! When everything was past praying for! They did better when they shot that archduke! Perhaps as things are now they’ll forget your imbecilities! Because everyone is giving us the cold shoulder. We’re sunk. Up to here in shit” (putting a finger on her forehead).
The Head of State took his right arm out of its silk sling. The power to move it was coming back; already the elbow joint had stopped hurting. He could almost feel the butt of his pistol. Leaving Ofelia shouting and stamping (she must have had a few more whiskies than usual in the dining-car), he went out to dinner with Doctor Peralta in a basement near the Gare Saint-Lazare where, sitting at a table covered with pitchers of wine, one could taste eighty varieties of cheese—among them a goat cheese marbled with aromatic herbs whose strong flavour reminded him of the cream cheese of the Andes.