Fin de Cyclé

 

 

I. Humors in Uniform

 

A. Gentlemen, Start Your Stilts!

 

THERE WAS CLANKING AND SINGING as the company came back from maneuvers.

Pa-chinka Pa-chinka, a familiar and comforting sound. The first of the two scouts came into view five meters in the air atop the new steam stilts. He storked his way into the battalion area, then paused.

Behind him came the second scout, then the cyclists in columns of three. They rode high-wheeled ordinaries, dusty now from the day’s ride. Their officer rode before them on one of the new safety bicycles, dwarfed by those who followed behind.

At the headquarters he stopped, jumped off his cycle.

“Company! . . .” he yelled, and the order was passed back along by NCOs, “ . . . company . . . company . . . company! . . .”

“Halt!” Again the order ran back. The cyclists put on their spoon-brakes, reached out and grabbed the handlebars of the man to the side. The high-wheelers stood immobile in place, 210 of them, with the two scouts standing to the fore, steam slowly escaping from the legs of their stilts.

“Company . . .” again the call and echoes, “Dis—” at the command, the leftward soldier placed his left foot on the step halfway down the spine of the bicycle above its small back wheel. The others shifted their weight backwards, still holding to the other man’s handlebars.

“—mount!” The left-hand soldier dropped back to the ground, reached through to grab the spine of the ordinary next to him; the rider of that repeated the first man’s motions, until all three men were on the ground beside their high-wheels.

At the same time the two scouts pulled the levers beside the knees of their metal stilts. The columns began to telescope down into themselves with a hiss of steam until the men were close enough to the ground to step off and back.

“Company C, 3rd Battalion, 11th Bicycle Infantry, Attention!” said the lieutenant. As he did so, the major appeared on the headquarters’ porch. Like the others, he was dressed in the red baggy pants, blue coat and black cap with a white kepi on the back. Unlike them, he wore white gloves, sword, and pistol.

“Another mission well done,” he said. “Tomorrow—a training half-holiday, for day after tomorrow, Bastille Day, the ninety-ninth of the Republic—we ride to Paris and then we roll smartly down the Champs-Élysées, to the general appreciation of the civilians and the wonder of the children.”

A low groan went through the bicycle infantrymen.

“Ah, I see you are filled with enthusiasm! Remember—you are the finest Army in France—the Bicycle Infantry! A short ride of seventy kilometers holds no terrors for you! A mere ten kilometers within the city. An invigorating seventy kilometers back! Where else can a man get such exercise? And such meals! And be paid besides? Ah, were I a younger man, I should never have become an officer, but joined as a private and spent a life of earnest bodybuilding upon two fine wheels!”

Most of the 11th were conscripts doing their one year of service, so the finer points of his speech were lost on them.

A bugle sounded somewhere off in the fort. “Gentlemen: Retreat.”

Two clerks came out of headquarters and went to the flagpole.

From left and right bands struck up the Retreat. All came to attention facing the flagpole, as the few sparse notes echoed through the quadrangles of the garrison.

From the corner of his eye the major saw Private Jarry, already placed on Permanent Latrine Orderly, come from out of the far row of toilets set halfway out toward the drill course. The major could tell Private Jarry was disheveled from this far away—even with such a job one should be neat. His coat was buttoned sideways by the wrong buttons, one pants leg in his boots, one out. His hat was on front-to-back with the kepi tied up above his forehead.

He had his toilet brush in his hand.

The back of the major’s neck reddened.

Then the bands struck up “To the Colors”—the company area was filled with the sound of salutes snapping against cap brims.

The clerks brought the tricolor down its lanyard.

Private Jarry saluted the flag with his toilet brush.

The major almost exploded; stood shaking, hand frozen in salute.

The notes went on; the major calmed himself. This man is a loser. He does not belong in the Army; he doesn’t deserve the Army! Conscription is a privilege. Nothing I can do to this man will ever be enough; you cannot kill a man for being a bad soldier; you can only inconvenience him; make him miserable in his resolve; the result will be the same. You will both go through one year of hell; at the end you will still be a major, and he will become a civilian again, though with a bad discharge. His kind never amount to anything. Calm yourself—he is not worth a stroke—he is not insulting France, he is insulting you. And he is beneath your notice.

At the last note the major turned on his heel with a nod to the lieutenant and went back inside, followed by the clerks with the folded tricolors.

The lieutenant called off odd numbers for cycle-washing detail; evens were put to work cleaning personal equipment and rifles.

Private Jarry turned with military smartness and went back in to his world of strong disinfectant soap and merde.

 

* * *

 

After chow that evening, Private Jarry retired behind the bicycle shop and injected more picric acid beneath the skin of his arms and legs.

In three more months, only five after being drafted, he would be released, with a medical discharge, for “chronic jaundice.”

 

B. Cannons in the Rain

Cadet Marcel Proust walked into the company orderly room. He had been putting together his belongings; today was his last full day in the Artillery. Tomorrow he would leave active duty after a year at Orleans.

“Attention,” shouted the corporal clerk as he came in. “At ease,” said Marcel, nodding to the enlisted men who copied orders by hand at their desks. He went to the commanding officer’s door, knocked. “Entre.” said a voice and he went in.

“Cadet Proust reporting, mon capitaine,” said Marcel, saluting.

“Oh, there’s really no need to salute in here, Proust,” said Captain Dreyfus.

“Perhaps, sir, it will be my last.”

“Yes, yes,” said Captain Dreyfus. “Tea? Sugar?” The captain indicated the kettle. “Serve yourself.” He looked through some papers absent-mindedly. “Sorry to bring you in on your last day—sure we cannot talk you into joining the officers corps? France has need of bright young men like you!—No, I thought not. Cookies? Over there; Madame Dreyfus baked them this morning.” Marcel retrieved a couple, while stirring the hot tea in his cup.

“Sit, sit. Please!” Dreyfus indicated the chair. Marcel slouched into it.

“You were saying?” he asked.

“Ah! Yes. Inspections coming up, records, all that,” said the captain. “You remember, some three months ago, August 19th to be exact, we were moving files from the old headquarters across the two quadrangles to this building? You were staff duty officer that day?”

“I remember the move, mon capitaine. That was the day we received the Maxim gun tricycles, also. It was—yes—a day of unseasonable rain.”

“Oh? Yes?” said Dreyfus. “That is correct. Do you remember, perhaps, the clerks having to take an alternate route here, until we procured canvas to protect the records?”

“They took several. Or am I confusing that with the day we exchanged barracks with the 91st Artillery? That also was rainy. What is the matter?”

“Some records evidently did not make it here. Nothing important, but they must be in the files for the inspection, else we shall get a very black mark indeed.”

Marcel thought. Some of the men used the corridors of the instruction rooms carrying files, some went through the repair shops. There were four groups of three clerks to each set of cabinets. . . .

“Which files?”

“Gunnery practice, instruction records. The boxes which used to be—”

“—on top of the second set of wooden files,” said Marcel. “I remember them there. I do not remember seeing them here. . . . I am at a total loss as to how they could not have made it to the orderly room, mon capitaine.”

“They were checked off as leaving, in your hand, but evidently, we have never seen them again.”

Proust racked his brain. The stables? The instruction corridor; surely they would have been found by now. . . .

“Oh, we’ll just have to search and search, get the 91st involved. They’re probably in their files. This army runs on paperwork—soon clerks will outnumber the generals, eh, Proust?”

Marcel laughed. He drank at his tea—it was lemon tea, pleasant but slightly weak. He dipped one of the cookies—the kind called a madeline—in it and took a bite.

Instantly a chill and an aching familiarity came over him—he saw his Grandmother’s house in Balbec, an identical cookie, the same kind of tea, the room cluttered with furniture, the sound of his brother coughing upstairs, the feel of the wrought iron dinner table chair against the back of his bare leg, his father looking out the far kitchen window into the rain, the man putting down the burden, heard his mother hum a tune, a raincoat falling, felt the patter of raindrops on the tool-shed roof, smelled the tea and cookie in a second overpowering rush, saw a scab on the back of his hand from eleven years before. . . .

“Mon capitaine!” said Marcel, rocking forward, slapping his hand against his forehead. “Now I remember where the box was left!”

 

 

II. Both Hands

R OUSSEAU WAS PAINTING A TIGER.

It was not just any tiger. It was the essence of tiger, the apotheosis of felis horribilis. It looked out from the canvas with yellow-green eyes through which a cold emerald light shone. Its face was beginning to curve into a snarl. Individual quills of whiskers stood out from the black and gold jaws in rippling lines. The edge of the tongue showed around lips with a faint edge of white. A single flower, its stem bent, was the only thing between the face of the tiger and the viewer.

Henri Rousseau put down his brush. He stepped back from the huge canvas. To left and right, birds flew in fright from the charging tiger. The back end of a water buffalo disappeared through the rank jungle at the rear of the canvas. Blobs of gray and tan indicated where the rhinoceros and impala would be painted in later. A huge patch of bamboo was just a swatch of green-gold; a neutral tan stood in for the unstarted blue sky.

A pearl-disk of pure white canvas, with tree limbs silhouetted before it would later be a red-ocher sun.

At the far back edge of the sky, partially eclipsed by a yellow riot of bananas, rose the newly completed Eiffel Tower.

Rousseau wiped his hand against his Rembrandt beret. His eyes above his graying spade beard and mustache moved back and forth, taking in the wet paint.

Pinned to one leg of the easel was a yellowed newspaper clipping he kept there (its duplicate lay in a thick scrapbook at the corner of the room in the clutter away from the north light). He no longer read it; he knew the words by heart. It was from a review of the showing at the Salon des Refusés two years before.

“The canvases of Monsieur Rousseau are something to be seen (then again, they’re not!). One viewer was so bold to wonder with which hand the artist had painted this scene, and someone else was heard to reply: ‘Both, sir! Both hands! And both feet!’ ”

Rousseau walked back to the painting, gobbed his brush three times across the palette, and made a two-centimeter dot on the face of the tiger.

Now the broken flower seemed to bend from the foul breath of the animal; it swayed in the hot mammal wind.

Rousseau moved on to another section of the painting.

The tiger was done.

 

 

III. Supper for Four

T HREE YOUNG MEN WALKED QUICKLY through the traffic of Paris on streets aclank with the sound of pedals, sprockets, and chains. They talked excitedly. Quadricycles and tricycles passed, ridden by women, older men, couples having quiet conversations as they pedaled.

High above them all, their heads three meters in the air, came young men bent over their gigantic wheels. They sailed placidly along, each pump of their legs covering six meters of ground, their trailing wheels like afterthoughts. They were aloof and intent; the act of riding was their life.

Occasionally a horse and wagon came by the three young men, awash in a sea of cyclists. A teamster kept pace with a postman on a hens-and-chickens pentacycle for a few meters, then fell behind.

There was a ringing of bells ahead and the traffic parted to each side; pedaling furiously came a police tricycle, a man to the front on the seat ringing the bell, another to the rear standing on the back pedals. Between them an abject-looking individual was strapped to the reclining seat, handcuffed and foot-manacled to the tricycle frame.

The ringing died away behind them, and the three young men turned a corner down toward the Seine. At a certain address they turned in, climbed to the third landing-and-a-half, and knocked loudly on the door.

“Enter Our Royal Chasublerie!” came the answer.

Blinking, the three tumbled into the dark room. The walls were covered with paintings and prints, woodcuts, stuffed weasels and hawks, books, papers, fishing gear and bottles. It was an apartment built from half a landing. Their heads scraped the ceiling. A huge ordinary lay on its side, taking up the whole center of the room.

“Alfred,” said one of the young men. “Great news of Pierre and Jean-Paul!”

“They arrived in the Middle Orient on their world tour!” said the second.

“They’ve been sighted in Gaza and bombed in Gilead!” said the third.

“More bulletins soon!” said the first. “We have brought a bottle of wine to celebrate their joyous voyage.”

The meter-and-a-quarter-tall Jarry brushed his butt-length hair back from his face. When they had knocked, he had just finished a bottle of absinthe.

“Then we must furnish a royal feast—that will be four in all for supper?” he asked. “Excuse our royal pardon.”

He put on his bicycling cap with an emblem from the far-off League of American Wheelmen. He walked to the mantelpiece, where he took down a glass of water in which he had earlier placed 200 drops of laudanum, and ate the remains of a hashish cookie. Then he picked up his fly rod and fish basket and left, sticking his head back in to say, “Pray give us a few moments.”

Two of the students began teasing one of Jarry’s chameleons, putting it through an astonishing array of clashing color schemes, and then tossing one of his stuffed owls around like a football while the living one jumped back and forth from one side of its perch to the other, hooting wildly.

The second student watched through the single window.

This is what the student saw:

Jarry went through the traffic of bicycles and wheeled conveyances on the street, disappeared down the steps to the river, rigged up and made four casts—Bip bap bim bom—came up with a fish on each one—a tench, a gudgeon, a pickerel, and a trout, threw them in the basket, and walked back across the street, waving as he came.

 

* * *

 

What Jarry saw:

He was carrying a coffin as he left the dungeon and went into the roadway filled with elephants, and pigs on stilts. A bicycle ridden by a skeleton rose into the sky, the bony cyclist laughing, the sound echoing off itself, getting louder the further away it got.

He took a week getting down the twenty-seven-kilometer abyss of the steps, each step a block of antediluvian marble a hundred meters wide.

Overhead, the sun was alternate bands of green and brown, moving like a newly electric-powered barbershop sign. The words “raspberry jam teapot” whispered themselves over and over somewhere just behind his right ear.

He looked into the thousand-kilometer width of the river of boiling ether. The fumes were staggering—sweet and nausea-producing at the same time. A bird with the head of a Pekingese lapdog flew by the now purple and black orb of the sun.

Jarry pulled out his whip-coach made of pure silver with its lapis-lazuli guides and its skull of a reel. The line was an anchor chain of pure gold. He had a bitch of a time getting the links of chain through the eye of his fly. It was a two-meter-long, four-winged stained glass and pewter dragonfly made by Alphonse Mucha.

Jarry false-cast into the ether, lost sight of his fly in the roiling fumes, saw a geyser of water rise slowly into the golden air. The tug pulled his arm from its socket. He set the hook.

Good! He had hooked a kraken. Arms writhing, parrot beak clacking, it fought for an hour before he regained line and pulled it to the cobbles, smashing it and its ugly eyes and arms beneath his foot. Getting it into the steamer trunk behind him, he cast again.

There were so many geysers exploding into the sky he wasn’t sure which one was his. He set the hook anyway and was rewarded with a Breughel monster; human head and frog arms with flippers, it turned into a jug halfway back and ended in a horse. As he fought it he tried to remember which painting it was from; The Temptation of St. Anthony, most likely.

The landing accomplished, he cast again just as the planet Saturn, orange and bloated like a pumpkin, its rings whirring and making a noise like a mill-saw, fell and flattened everything from Notre Dame to the Champ de Mars. Luckily, no one was killed.

Another strike. For a second, the river became a river, the fly rod a fly rod, and he pulled in a fish, a pickerel. Only this one had hands, and every time he tried to unhook it, it grabbed the hook and stuck it back in its own jaw, pulling itself toward Jarry with plaintive mewling sounds.

“Merde!” he said, taking out his fishing knife and cutting away the hands. More grew back. He cut them away, too, and tossed the fish into the mausoleum behind him.

Better. The ether-river was back. His cast was long. It made no sound as it disappeared. There was the gentlest tug of something taking the dragonfly—Jarry struck like a man possessed.

Something huge, brown and smoking stood up in the ether fumes, bent down and stared at Jarry. It had shoulders and legs. It was the Colossus of Rhodes. A fire burned through vents in the top of its head, the flames shone out the eyes. It could have reached from bank to bank; its first stride would take it to Montmartre.

Alfred gave another huge tug. The chain going from his rod to the lip of the Colossus pulled taut. There was a pause and a groan, the sound of a ship on a reef. With a boom and rattle, the bronze man tottered, tried to regain its balance, then fell, shattering itself on the bridges and quays, the fires turning to steam. The tidal wave engulfed the Île de la Cité and would no doubt wipe out everything all the way to the sea.

Painfully, Jarry gathered up the tons of bronze shards and put them in the wheelless stagecoach and dragged it up the attic stairs to the roadway.

The bicyclists and wolverines seemed unconcerned. Saturn had buried itself below its equator. Its rings still ran, but much more slowly; they would stop by nightfall. Pieces of the bronze Colossus were strewn all over the cityscape.

Jarry looked toward the Walls of Troy before him as he struggled with the sarcophagus. At one portal he saw his friends Hannibal, Hamilcar, and Odoacer waiting for him. If the meal weren’t to their satisfaction, they were to kill and eat him. He put up his hand in acknowledgement of doom.

The sky was pink and hummed a phrase from Wagner, a bad phrase. The Eiffel Tower swayed to its own music, a gavotte of some kind. Jarry got behind the broken-down asphalt wagon and pushed it toward the drawbridge of despair that was the door of his building.

He hoped he could find the matches and cook supper without burning down the whole fucking city.

 

 

IV. Artfully Arranged Scenes

G EORGES MÉLIÈS ROSE AT DAWN in Montreuil, bathed, breakfasted, and went out to his home-office. By messenger, last night’s accounts from the Théâtre Robert-Houdin would have arrived. He would look over those, take care of correspondence, and then go back to the greenhouse glass building that was his Star Films studio.

At ten, the workmen would arrive. They and Méliès would finish the sets, painting scenery in shades of gray, black, and white, each scene of which bore, at some place, the Star Films trademark to discourage film footage piracy. The mechanics would rig the stage machinery, which was Méliès’ forte.

At eleven the actors would appear, usually from the Folies Bergére, and Méliès would discuss with them the film to be made, block out the movements, and with them improvise the stage business. Then there would be a jolly lunch, and a free time while Méliès and his technicians prepared the huge camera.

It was fixed on a track perpendicular to the stage, and could be moved from a position, at its nearest point, which would show the actors full-length upon the screen, back into the T-shaped section of the greenhouse to give a view encompassing the entire acting area. Today, the camera was to be moved and then locked down for use twice during the filming.

At two, filming began after the actors were costumed. The film was a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. The first scene, of the girl’s house, was rolled in, accessory wings and flies dropped, and the establishing scene filmed. The actresses playing the girl and her mother were exceptionally fine. Then the next scene, of the forest path, was dropped down; the camera moved back and locked in place.

The scene opened with fairies and forest animals dancing; then the Wolf (a tumbler from the Folies) came on in a very hideous costume, and hid behind a painted tree.

The forest creatures try to warn the approaching girl, who walks on the path toward the camera, then leave. She and the Wolf converse. The Wolf leaves.

The second scene requires eleven takes, minor annoyances growing into larger ones as filming progresses. A trap door needed for a later scene comes open at one point while the animals romp, causing a painted stump to fall into it.

The camera is moved once more, and the scenery for the grandmother’s house is put in place, the house interior with an open window at the back. The Wolf comes in, chases the grandmother away, in continuous action, goes to the wardrobe, dresses, climbs in bed. Only then is the action stopped.

When filming begins again, with the same camera location, Red Riding Hood enters. The action is filmed continuously from this point to when the Wolf jumps from the bed. Then the Wolf chases the girl around the room, a passing hunter appears at the window, watches the action a second, runs in the door, shoots the Wolf (there is a flash powder explosion and the Wolf-actor drops through the trap door).

The grandmother appears at the window, comes in; she, the hunter, and Red Riding Hood embrace. Fin.

Méliès thanks the actors and pays them. The last of the film is unloaded from the camera (for such a bulky object it only holds sixteen meters of film per magazine) and taken to the laboratory building to be developed, then viewed and assembled by Méliès tomorrow morning.

Now 5:00 P.M., Méliès returns to the house, has early supper with his wife and children. Then he reads to them, and at 7:00 P.M. performs for them the magic tricks he is trying out, shows new magic lantern transition-transfigurations to be incorporated into his stage act, gives them a puppet show or some other entertainment. He bids goodnight to his children, then returns to the parlor where he and his wife talk for an hour, perhaps while they talk he sketches her, or doodles scene designs for his films. He tells her amusing stories of the day’s filming, perhaps jokes or anecdotes from the Folies the actors have told him at lunch.

He accompanies his wife upstairs, undresses her, opens the coverlet, inviting her in. She climbs into bed.

He kisses her sweetly goodnight.

Then he goes downstairs, puts on his hat, and goes to the home of his mistress.

 

 

V. We Grow Bored

T HE BANQUET WAS IN HONOR OF LUGNÉ -POE, the manager of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.

Jarry, in his red canvas suit and paper shirt with a fish painted on it for a tie, was late. The soup was already being served.

There were three hundred people, all male, attending. Alfred went to his seat; a bowl of soup, swimming with fish eyes, was placed before him. He finished it at once, as he had forgotten to eat for the last two days.

He looked left and right; to the right was a man known vaguely to him as a pederast and a frotteur, but whose social station was such that he would rather have swallowed the national tricolor, base, standard, and spike, than to have spoken to Jarry. To the left was a shabby man, with large spade beard and mustache, wearing an artist’s beret and workman’s clothes. He slowly spooned his soup while deftly putting all the bread and condiments within reach into the pockets of his worn jacket.

Then Jarry looked across the table and found himself staring into the eyes of a journalist for one of the right-wing nationalist Catholic cycling weeklies.

“Are you not Jarry?” asked the man, with narrowed eyes.

“We are,” said Alfred. “Unfortunately, our royal personage does not converse with those who have forsaken the One True Means of Transportation.”

“Ha. A recidivist!” said the reporter. “It is we who are of the future, while you remain behind in the lost past.”

“Our conversation is finished,” said Jarry. “You and Monsieur Norpois have lost our true salvation of the Wheel.”

“Bi-cycle means two wheels,” said the journalist. “When you and your kind realize that true speed, true meaning, and true patriotism depend on equal size and mighty gearing, this degenerate country will become strong once more.”

The man to Jarry’s left was looking back and forth from one to the other; he had stopped eating, but his left hand brought another roll to his pocket.

“Does not the First Citizen of our Royal Lands and Possessions to the East, the Lord Amida Buddha himself, speak of the Greater and Lesser Wheels?” asked Jarry. “Put that in your ghost-benighted, superstition-ridden censer and try to smoke it. Our Royal Patience becomes stretched. We have nothing against those grown weary, old, effete who go to three, four wheels or more; they have given up. Those, however, with equal wheels, riders of crocodiles and spiders, with false mechanical aids, we deem repugnant, unworthy; one would almost say, but would never, ever, that they have given in to . . . German ideas.”

The conversation at the long table stopped dead. The man to Jarry’s left put down his spoon and eased his chair back from the table ever so slightly.

The face of the reporter across the table went through so many color changes that Jarry’s chameleon, at the height of mating season, would be shamed. The journalist reached under the table, lifted his heavy-headed cane, pushed it up through the fingers of his right hand with his left, caught it by the tip.

“Prepare yourself for a caning,” said the turnip-faced man. No challenge to the field of honor, no further exchange of unpleasantries. He lifted his cane back, pushing back his sleeve.

“Monsieur,” said Jarry, turning to the man on his left, “do us the honor of standing us upon our throne, here.” He indicated his chair.

The man scooted back, picked up the one-and-a-quarter-meter-high Jarry and stood him on the seat of his chair in a very smooth motion. Then the man grabbed his soup bowl and stood away.

“I will hammer you down much farther before I am done,” said the reporter, looking Jarry up and down. People from the banquet committee rushed toward them; Lugné-Poe was yelling who was the asshole who made the seating arrangements?

“By your red suit I take you for an anarchist. Very well, no rules,” said the reporter. The cane whistled.

“By our Red Suit you should take us for a man whose Magenta Suit is being cleaned,” said Jarry. “This grows tedious. We grow bored.” He pulled his Navy Colt Model .41 from his waistband, cocked it and fired a great roaring blank which caught the reporter’s pomaded hair on fire. The man went down yelling and rolling while others helpfully poured pitchers of water on him.

The committee members had stopped at the gun’s report. Jarry held up his finger to the nearest waiter. “Check, please!” he said.

He left the hall out the front door as the reporter, swearing great oaths of vengeance and destruction, was carried back into the kitchen for butter to be applied to his burns.

Jarry felt a hand on his shoulder, swung his arm up, came around with the Colt out again. It was the man who had stood him on the chair.

“You talk with the accent of Laval,” said the man.

“Bred, born, raised, and bored merdeless there,” said Jarry.

“I, too,” said the man.

“We find Laval an excellent place to be from, if you get our royal meaning,” said Jarry.

“Mr. Henri-Jules Rousseau,” said the man.

“Mr. Alfred-Henri Jarry.” They shook hands.

“I paint,” said Rousseau.

“We set people’s hair afire,” said Jarry.

“You must look me up; my studio is on the Boulevard du Port-Royal.”

“We will be happy if a fellow Lavalese accompanies us immediately to drink, do drugs, visit the brothels, and become fast friends for life.”

“Are you kidding?” said Rousseau. “They’re getting ready to serve the cabbage back in there. Do look me up, though,” he said, heading back in toward the banquet hall and putting his napkin back under his chin.

“We shall,” said Jarry, and mounted his high-wheeler and was gone into the darkness.

 

 

VI. News from All Over

 

January 14, 1895 Le Cycliste Français

TRAITOR ON THE GENERAL STAFF!
ARREST AND TRIAL OF THE JEW CAPTAIN DREYFUS
DEGRADATION AND STRIPPING OF RANK
DEPORTATION TO GUIANA FOR LIFE

 

“S ECRETS VITAL TO THE NATION,” says a General, “from which our Enemy will profit and France never recover. It is only the new lenient Jew-inspired law which kept the Tribunal from sentencing the human rat to Death!”

 

 

VII. Like the Spokes of a Luminous Wheel

T HE REPORTER NORPOIS RODE A CROCODILE VELOCIPEDE of singular aspect. Its frame was low and elongated. The seat was at the absolute center of the bicycle’s length, making it appear as if its rider were disincorporated.

Though extremely modern in that respect, its wheels were anachronisms, heavily spoked and rimmed to the uncaring eye. On a close examination it was revealed the spokes were ironwork, eight to each wheel, and over them were wrought two overlapping semicircles, one of a happy, the other of a sad, aspect of the human face.

In unison, front and back, the wheels first smiled, then frowned at the world around them as they whirled their rider along the newly macadamized roads and streets.

In his sporty cap and black knickers, Norpois seemed almost to lean between the wheels of strife and fortune. Other bicyclists paused to watch him go spoking silently by, with an almost inaudible whisper of iron rim on asphalt. The crocodile frame seemed far too graceful and quiet for the heavy wheels on which it rode.

Norpois worked for Le Cycliste Français. His assignments took him to many arrondissements and the outlying parts of the city.

He was returning from interviewing a retired general before sunset one evening, when, preparatory to stopping to light his carbide handlebar-lamp, he felt a tickle of heat at his face, then a dull throbbing at his right temple. To his left, the coming sunset seemed preternaturally bright, and he turned his head to look at it.

His next conscious thought was of picking himself and his velocipede up from the side of the road where he had evidently fallen. He noticed he was several dozen meters down the road from where he had turned to look at the sunset. His heart hammered in his chest. The knees of his knickers were dusty, his left hand was scraped, with two small pieces of gravel embedded in the skin, and he had bitten his lip, which was beginning to swell. He absently dug the gravel from his hand. He had no time for small aches and pains. He had to talk to someone.

 

* * *

 

“Jules,” he said to the reporter who shared the three-room apartment with him. As he spoke he filled a large glass with half a bottle of cognac and began sipping at it between his sentences. “I must tell you what life will be like in twenty years.”

“You, Robida, and every other frustrated engineer,” said Jules, putting down his evening paper.

“Tonight I have had an authentic vision of the next century. It came to me not at first as a visual illusion, a pattern on my eyes, some ecstatic vision. It came to me first through my nose, Jules. An overpowering, oppressive odor. Do you know what the coming years smell like, Jules? They smell of burning flesh. It was the first thing to come to me, and the last to leave. Think of the worst fire you ever covered. Remember the charred bodies, the popped bones? Multiply it by a city, a nation, a hemisphere! It was like that.

“The smell came; then I saw in the reddened clouds a line of ditches, miles, kilometers upon thousands of kilometers of ditches in churned earth, men like troglodytes killing each other as far as the eye could see, smoke everywhere, the sky raining death, the sky filled with aerial machines dropping explosives; detonations coming and going like giant brown trees which sprout, leaf, and die in an instant. Death everywhere, from the air, from guns, shells falling on all beneath them, the aerial machines pausing in their rain of death below only to shoot each other down. Patterns above the ditches, like vines, curling vines covered with thorns—over all a pattern formed on my retina—always the incessant chatter of machinery, screams, fire, death-agonies, men stomping each other in mud and earth. I could see it all, hear it all, above all else, smell it all, Jules, and . . .”

“Yes?”

“Jules, it was the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced.” He stared at his roommate.

“There’s some cold mutton on the table,” said Jules. “And half a bottle of beer. He looked back down at his paper. After a few minutes he looked up. Norpois stood, looking out the window at the last glow of twilight, still smiling.

 

 

VIII. One Ordinary Day, with Anarchists

A LFRED JARRY SAILED ALONG THE BOULEVARD, passing people and other cyclists right and left. Two and a half meters up, he bent over his handlebars, his cap at a rakish angle, his hair a black flame behind his head. He was the very essence of speed and grace, no longer a dwarfish man of slight build. A novice rider on a safety bicycle took a spill ahead of him. Jarry used his spoon-brake to stop a few centimeters short of the wide-eyed man who feared broken ribs, death, a mangled vehicle.

Then Jarry jumped up and down on his seat, his feet on the locked pedals, jerking the ordinary in small jumps a meter to the left until his path was clear; then he was gone down the road as if nothing had happened.

Riders who drew even with him dropped back—Jarry had a carbine slung across his back, carried bandoliers of cartridges for it on his chest, had two Colt pistols sticking from the waistband of his pants, the legs of which were tucked into his socks, knicker-fashion. Jarry was fond of saying firearms, openly displayed, were signs of peaceableness and good intentions, and wholly legal. He turned down a side street and did not hear the noise from the Chamber of Deputies.

 

* * *

 

A man named Vaillant, out of work, with a wife and children, at the end of his tether, had gone to the Chamber carrying with him a huge sandwich made from a whole loaf of bread. He sat quietly watching a debate on taxes, opened the sandwich to reveal a device made of five sticks of the new dynamite, a fuse and blasting cap, covered with one and a half kilos of #4 nails. He lit it in one smooth motion, jumped to the edge of the gallery balcony and tossed it high into the air.

It arced, stopped, and fell directly toward the center of the Chamber. Some heard the commotion, some saw it; Dreyfussards sensed it and ducked.

It exploded six meters in the air.

Three people were killed, forty-seven injured badly, more than seventy less so. Desks were demolished; the speaker’s rostrum was turned to wood lace.

Vaillant was grabbed by alert security guards.

The first thing that happened, while people moaned and crawled out from under their splintered desks, was that the eight elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the Anarchist ticket, some of them having to pull nails from their hands and cheeks to do so, stood and began to applaud loudly. “Bravo!” they yelled, “Bravo! Encore!”

 

 

IX. The Kid from Spain

H IS NAME WAS PABLO, and he was a big-nosed, big-eyed Spanish kid who had first come to Paris with his mother two years before at the age of thirteen; now he was back on his own as an art student.

On this trip, the first thing he learned to do was fuck; the second was to learn to paint.

One day a neighbor pointed out to him the figure of Jarry tearing down the street. Pablo thought the tiny man on the huge bicycle, covered with guns and bullets, was the most romantic thing he had ever seen in his life. Pablo immediately went out and bought a pistol, a .22 single-shot, and took to wearing it in his belt.

He was sketching the River one morning when the shadow of a huge wheel fell on the ground beside him. Pablo looked up. It was Jarry, studying the sketch over his shoulder.

Pablo didn’t know what to do or say, so he took out his gun and showed it to Jarry.

Jarry looked embarrassed. “We are touched,” he said, laying his hand on Pablo’s shoulder. “Take one of ours,” he said, handing him a .38 Webley. Then he was up on his ordinary and gone.

Pablo did not remember anything until it was getting dark and he was standing on a street, sketchbook in one hand, pistol still held by the barrel in the other. He must have walked the streets all day that way, a seeming madman.

He was outside a brothel. He checked his pockets for money, smiled, and went in.

 

 

X. More Beans, Please

“G EORGES MÉLIÈS,” SAID ROUSSEAU, “Alfred Jarry.”

“Pleased.”

“We are honored.”

“Erik Satie,” said Méliès, “Henri Rousseau.”

“Charmed.”

“At last!”

“This is Pablo,” said Satie. “Marcel Proust.”

“’Lo.”

“Delighted.”

“Gentlemen,” said Rousseau, “Mme. Méliès.”

“Dinner is served,” she said.

 

* * *

 

“But of course,” said Marcel, “Everyone knows evidence was introduced in secret at the first trial, evidence the defense was not allowed to see.”

“Ah, but that’s the military mind for you!” said Rousseau. “It was the same when I played piccolo for my country between 1864 and 1871. What matters is not the evidence, but that the charge has been brought against you in the first place. It proves you guilty.”

“Out of my complete way of thinking,” said Satie, taking another helping of calamari in aspic, “having been unfortunate enough to be a civilian all my life. . . .”

“Hear, hear!” they all said.

“ . . . but is it not true that they asked him to copy the bordereau, the list found in the trash at the German Embassy and introduced that at the court-martial, rather than the original outline of our defenses?”

“More beans, please,” said Pablo.

“That is one theory,” said Marcel. “The list, of course, leaves off halfway down, because Dreyfus realized what was going to happen as they were questioning him back in December of ’94.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Rousseau. “There are too many theories, and of course, none of this will be introduced at the Court of Cassation next month. Nothing but the original evidence, and of course, the allegations brought up by Colonel Picquart, whose own trial for insubordination is scheduled month after next.”

Méliès sighed. “The problem, of course, is that we shall suffer one trial after another; the generals are all covering ass now. First they convict an innocent man on fabricated evidence. Finding the spying has not stopped with the wrongful imprisonment of Dreyfus, they listen to Colonel Picquart, no friend of anyone, who tells them it’s the Alsatian Esterhazy, but Esterhazy’s under the protection of someone in the War Ministry, so they send Picquart off to Fort Zinderneuf, hoping he will be killed by the Rifs; when he returns covered with scars and medals, they throw him in jail on trumped-up charges of daring to question the findings of the court-martial. Meanwhile the public outcry becomes so great that the only way things can be kept at status quo is to say questioning Dreyfus’ guilt is to question France itself. We can all hope, but of course, there can probably be only one verdict of the court of review.”

“More turkey, please,” said Pablo.

“The problem, of course,” said Satie, “is that France needs to be questioned if it breeds such monsters of arrogance and vanity.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Satie,” said Madame Méliès, speaking for the first time in an hour. “The problem, of course, is that Dreyfus is a Jew.”

She had said the thing none of the others had yet said, the thing at base, root, and crown of the Affair.

“And being so,” said Jarry, “we are sure, Madame, if through our actions this wronged man is freed, he will be so thankful as to allow Our Royal Person to put him upon the nearest cross, with three nails, for whatever period we deem appropriate.”

“Pass the wine, please,” said Pablo.

 

* * *

 

“It is a rough time for us,” said Jarry, “what with our play to go into production soon, but we shall give whatever service we can to this project.”

“Agreed by all, then!” said Méliès. “Star Films takes the unprecedented step of collaborating with others! I shall set aside an entire week, that of Tuesday next, for the production of The Dreyfus Affair. Bring your pens, your brushes, your ideas! Mr. Satie, our piano at Théâtre Robert-Houdin is at your disposal for practice and for the première; begin your plans now. And so, having decided the fate of France, let us visit the production facilities at the rear of the property, then return to the parlor for cigars and port!”

 

* * *

 

They sat in comfortable chairs. Satie played a medley of popular songs, those he knew by heart from his days as the relief piano player at the Black Cat; Méliès, who had a very good voice, joined Pablo and Rousseau (who was sorry he had not brought his violin) in a rousing rendition of “The Tired Workman’s Song.”

Jarry and Proust sat with unlit cigars in their mouths.

“Is it true you studied with Professor Bergson, at the Lycée Henri IV?” asked Marcel. “I was class of ’91.”

“We are found out,” said Alfred. “We were class of all the early 1890s, and consider ourselves his devoted pupil still.”

“Is it his views on time, on duration? His idea that character comes in instants of perception and memory? Is it his notion of memory as a flux of points in the mind that keeps you under his spell?” asked Proust.

“He makes us laugh,” said Jarry.

 

* * *

 

They spent the rest of the evening—after meeting and bidding goodnight to the Méliès children, and after Madame Méliès rejoined them—playing charades, doing a quick round of Dreyfus Parcheesi, and viewing pornographic stereopticon cards, of which Georges had a truly wonderful collection.

 

* * *

 

They said their goodbyes at the front gate of the Montreuil house. Pablo had already gone, having a hot date with anyone at a certain street address, on his kangaroo bicycle; Rousseau walked the two blocks to catch an omnibus; Satie, as was his wont, strode off into the night at a brisk pace whistling an Aristide Bruant tune; he sometimes walked twenty kilometers to buy a piece of sheet music without a second thought.

Marcel’s coachman waited. Jarry stood atop the Méliès wall, ready to step onto his ordinary. Georges and Madame had already gone back up the walkway.

Then Marcel made a Proposal to Alfred, which, if acted upon, would take much physical activity and some few hours of their time.

“We are touched by many things lately,” said Jarry. “We fear we grow sentimental. Thank you for your kind attention, Our Dear Marcel, but we must visit the theater, later to meet with Pablo to paint scenery, and our Royal Drug Larder runs low. We thank you, though, from the bottom of our heart, graciously.”

And he was gone, silently, a blur under each gas lamp he passed.

For some reason, during the ride back to Faubourg Ste.-Germain, Marcel was not depressed as he usually was when turned down. He too, hummed a Bruant song. The coachman joined in.

Very well, very well, thought Proust. We shall give them a Dreyfus they will never forget.

 

 

XI. The Enraged Umbrella

I N THE PARK, TWO DAYS LATER, Marcel thought he was seeing a runaway carousel.

“Stop!” he yelled to the cabriolet driver. The brake squealed. Marcel leapt out, holding his top hat in his hand. “Wait!” he called back over his shoulder.

There was a medium-sized crowd, laborers, fashionable people out for a stroll, several tricycles and velocipedes parked nearby. Attention was all directed toward an object in the center of the crowd. There was a wagon nearby, with small machines all around it.

What Marcel had at first taken for a merry-go-round was not. It was round, and it did go.

The most notable feature looked like a ten-meter-in-diameter Japanese parasol made of, Marcel guessed, fine wire struts and glued paper. Coming down from the center of this, four meters long, was a central pipe, at its bottom was a base shaped like a plumb bob. Above this base, a seat, pedals and set of levers faced the central column. Above the seat, halfway down the pipe, parallel to the umbrella mechanism, was what appeared to be a weathervane, at the front end of which, instead of an arrow was a spiral, two-bladed airscrew. At its back, where the iron fletching would be, was a half-circle structure, containing within it a round panel made of the same stuff as the parasol. Marcel saw that it was rotatable on two axes, obviously a steering mechanism of some sort.

Three men in coveralls worked at the base; two holding the machine vertical while the third tightened bolts with a wrench, occasionally giving the pedal mechanism a turn, which caused the giant umbrella above to spin slowly.

Obviously the machine was very lightweight—what appeared to be iron must be aluminum or some other alloy, the strutwork must be very fine, possibly piano wire.

The workman yelled. He ran the pedal around with his hand. The paper-wire umbrella moved very fast indeed.

At the call, a man in full morning suit, like Marcel’s, came out from behind the wagon. He walked very solemnly to the machine, handed his walking stick to a bystander, and sat down on the seat. He produced two bicyclist’s garters from his coat and applied them to the legs of his trousers above his spats and patent-leather shoes.

He moved a couple of levers with his hands and began to pedal, slowly at first, then faster. The moving parasol became a flat disk, then began to strobe, appearing to move backwards. The small airscrew began a lazy revolution.

There was a soft growing purr in the air. Marcel felt gentle wind on his cheek.

The man nodded to the mechanics, who had been holding the machine steady and upright. They let go. The machine stood of its own accord. The grass beneath it waved and shook in a streamered disk of wind.

The man doffed his top hat to the crowd. Then he threw another lever. The machine, with no strengthening of sound or extra effort from its rider, rose three meters into the air.

The crowds gasped and cheered. “Vive la France!” they yelled. Marcel, caught up in the moment, had a terrible desire to applaud.

Looking to right and left beneath him, the aeronaut moved a lever slightly. The lazy twirling propeller on the weathervane became a corkscrewing blur. With a very polite nod of his head, the man pedaled a little faster.

Men threw their hats in the air; women waved their four-meter-long scarves at him.

The machine, with a sound like the slow shaking-out of a rug, turned and moved slowly off toward the Boulevard Haussmann, the crowd, and children who had been running in from all directions, following it.

While one watched, the other two mechanics loaded gear into the wagon. Then all three mounted, turned the horses, and started off at a slow roll in the direction of the heart of the city.

Marcel’s last glimpse of the flying machine was of it disappearing gracefully down the line of an avenue above the treetops, as if an especially interesting woman, twirling her parasol, had just left a pleasant garden party.

Proust and the cabriolet driver were the only persons left on the field. Marcel climbed back in, nodded. The driver applied the whip to the air.

It was, Marcel would read later, the third heavier-than-air machine to fly that week, the forty-ninth since the first of the year, the one-hundred-twelfth since man had entered what the weeklies referred to as the Age of the Air late year-before-last.

 

 

XII. The Persistence of Vision

T HE SOUND OF HAMMERING AND SAWING filled the workshop. Rousseau painted stripes on a life-sized tiger puppet. Pablo worked on the silhouette jungle foliage Henri had sketched. Jarry went back and forth between helping them and going to the desk to consult with Proust on the scenario. (Proust had brought in closely written pages, copied in a fine hand, that he had done at home the first two days; after Jarry and Méliès drew circles and arrows all over them, causing Marcel visible anguish, he had taken to bringing in only hastily worded notes. The writers were trying something new—both scenario and title cards were to be written by them.)

“Gentlemen,” said Satie, from his piano in the corner. “The music for the degradation scene!” His left hand played heavy bass notes, spare, foreboding. His right hit every other note from “La Marseillaise.”

“Marvelous,” they said. “Wonderful!”

They went back to their paintpots. The Star Films workmen threw themselves into the spirit wholeheartedly, taking directions from Rousseau or Proust as if they were Méliès himself. They also made suggestions, explaining the mechanisms which would, or could, be used in the filming.

“Fellow collaborators!” said Méliès, entering from the yard. “Gaze on our Dreyfus!” He gestured dramatically.

A thin balding man, dressed in cheap overalls entered, cap in hand. They looked at him, each other, shifted from one foot to another.

“Come, come, geniuses of France!” said Méliès. “You’re not using your imaginations!”

He rolled his arm in a magician’s flourish. A blue coat appeared in his hands. The man put it on. Better.

“Avec!” said Méliès, reaching behind his own back, producing a black army cap, placing it on the man’s head. Better still.

“Voilà!” he said, placing a mustache on the man’s lip.

To Proust, it was the man he had served under seven years before, grown a little older and more tired. A tear came to Marcel’s eye; he began to applaud, the others joined in.

The man seemed nervous, did not know what to do with his hands. “Come, come, Mr. Poulvain, get used to applause,” said Méliès. “You’ll soon have to quit your job at the chicken farm to portray Captain Dreyfus on the international stage!” The man nodded and left the studio.

Marcel sat back down and wrote with redoubled fury.

 

* * *

 

“Monsieur Méliès?” asked Rousseau.

“Yes?”

“Something puzzles me.”

“How can I help?”

“Well, I know nothing about the making of cinematographs, but, as I understand, you take the pictures, from beginning to the end of the scenario, in series, then choose the best ones to use after you have developed them?”

“Exactement!” said Georges.

“Well, as I understand (if only Jarry and Proust would quit diddling with the writing), we use the same prison cell both for the early arrest scenes, and for Dreyfus’ cell on Devil’s Island?”

“Yes?”

“Your foreman explained that we would film the early scenes, break the backdrops, shoot other scenes, and some days or hours later reassemble the prison cell again, with suitable changes. Well, it seems to me, to save time and effort, you should film the early scenes, then change the costume and the makeup on the actor, and add the properties which represent Devil’s Island, and put those scenes in their proper place when the scenes are developed. That way, you would be through with both sets, and go on to another.”

Méliès looked at him a moment. The old artist was covered with blobs of gray, white, and black paint. “My dear Rousseau; we have never done it that way, since it cannot be done that way in the theater. But . . .”

Rousseau was pensive. “Also, I noticed that great care must be taken in moving the camera, and that right now the camera is to be moved many times in the filming. Why not also photograph all the scenes where the camera is in one place a certain distance from the stage, then all the others at the next, and so on? It seems more efficient that way, to me.”

“Well,” said Méliès. “That is surely asking too much! But your first suggestion, in the interest of saving time with the scenery. Yes. Yes, we could possibly do that! Thank you . . . as it is going now, the trial may very well be over before we even begin filming—if someone doesn’t shoot Dreyfus as he sits in court since his return from Devil’s Island even before that. Perhaps we shall try your idea . . .”

“Just thinking aloud,” said Rousseau.

 

* * *

 

“Monsieur Director?” said Marcel.

“Yes?”

“Something puzzles me.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve seen few Lumièreoscopes—”

“That name!” said Méliès, clamping his hands over his ears.

“Sorry . . . I’ve seen few films, at any rate. But in each one (and it comes up here in the proposed scenario) that we have Dreyfus sitting in his cell, on one side, the cutaway set of the hut with him therein; then the guard walks up and pounds on the door. Dreyfus gets up, goes to the door, opens it, and the guard walks in and hands him the first letter he is allowed to receive from France.”

“A fine scene!” said Méliès.

“Hmmm. Yes. Another thing I have seen in all Lu—in moving pictures is that the actors are always filmed as if you were watching them on stage, their whole bodies from a distance of a few meters away.”

“That is the only way it is done, my dear Marcel.”

“Perhaps . . . perhaps we could do it another way. We see Dreyfus in his hut, in his chair. We show only his upper body, from waist to head. We could see the ravages of the ordeal upon him, the lines in his face, the circles under his eyes, the gray in his hair.”

“But . . .”

“Hear me, please. Then you show a fist, as if it were in your face, pounding on the door. From inside the hut Dreyfus gets up, turns, walks to the door. Then he is handed the letter. We see the letter itself, the words of comfort and despair . . .”

Méliès was looking at him as if there were pinwheels sticking from his eye sockets.

“ . . . can you imagine the effects on the viewer?” finished Marcel.

“Oh yes!” said Méliès. “They would scream. Where are their legs? Where are their arms? What is this writing doing in my eye?!!!”

“But think of the impact! The drama?”

“Marcel, we are here to plead for justice, not frighten people away from the theater!”

“Think of it! What better way to show the impact on Dreyfus than by putting the impact on the spectator?”

“My head reels, Proust!”

“Well, just a suggestion. Sleep on it.”

“I shall have nightmares,” said Méliès.

 

* * *

 

Pablo continued to paint, eating a sandwich, drinking wine.

 

* * *

 

“Méliès?” said Jarry.

“(Sigh) Yes?”

“Enlighten us.”

“In what manner?”

“Our knowledge of motio-kineto-photograms is small, but one thing is a royal poser to us.”

“Continue.”

“In our wonderful scene of the nightmares . . . we are led to understand that Monsieur Rousseau’s fierce tigers are to be moved by wires, compressed air, and frantic stagehands?”

“Yes.”

“Our mind works overtime. The fierce tigers are wonderful, but such movement will be seen, let us say, like fierce tigers moved by wires, air, and stage-labor.”

“A necessary convention of stage and cinematograph,” said Méliès. “One the spectator accepts.”

“But we are not here to have the viewer accept anything but an intolerable injustice to a man.”

“True, but pity . . .”

“Méliès,” said Jarry. “We understand each click of the camera takes one frame of film. Many of these frames projected at a constant rate leads to the illusion of motion. But each is of itself but a single frame of film.”

“The persistence of vision,” said Méliès.

“We were thinking. What if we took a single click of the camera, taking one picture of our fierce tigers . . .”

“But what would that accomplish?”

“Ah . . . then, Méliès, our royal personage moves the tiger to a slightly different posture, but the next in some action, but only one frame advanced, and took another click of the camera?”

Méliès looked at him. “Then . . .”

“Then the next and the next and the next and so on! The fierce tiger moves, roars, springs, devours! But each frame part of the movement, each frame a still.”

Méliès thought a second. “An actor in the scenes would not be able to move at all. Or he would have to move at the same rate as the tiger. He would have to hold perfectly still (we already do that when stopping the camera to substitute a skeleton for a lady or somesuch) but they would have to do it endlessly. It would take weeks to get any good length of film. Also, the tigers would have to be braced, strutted to support their own weight.”

“This is our idea, Méliès; we are not technicians.”

“I shall take it under advisement.”

Méliès’ head began to hurt. He had a workman go to the chemist’s, and get some of the new Aspirin for him. He took six.

 

* * *

 

The film took three weeks to photograph. Méliès had to turn out three fairy tales in two days besides to keep his salesmen supplied with footage. Every day they worked, the Court of Cassation met to rehear the Dreyfus case, every day brought new evasions, new half-insinuations; Dreyfus’ lawyer was wounded by a gunshot while leaving court. Every day the country was split further and further down the center: There was no middle ground. There was talk of a coup d’état by the right.

At last the footage was done.

“I hope,” said Méliès to his wife that night, “I hope that after this I shall not hear the name of Dreyfus again, for the rest of my life.”

 

 

XIII. The Elephant at the Foot of the Bed

J ARRY WAS ON STAGE, talking in a monotone as he had been for five minutes. The crowd, including women, had come to the Theater of the Work to see what new horrors Lugné-Poe had in store for them.

Alfred sat at a small folding table, which had been brought onstage, and a chair placed behind it, facing the audience. Jarry talked, as someone said, as a nutcracker would speak. The audience had listened but was growing restless—we have come for a play, not for someone dressed as a bicyclist to drone on about nothing in particular.

The last week had been a long agony for Jarry—working on this play, which he had started in his youth, as a puppet play satirizing a pompous teacher—it had grown to encompass all mankind’s foibles, all national and human delusions. Then there had been the work on the Dreyfus film with Pablo and Rousseau and Proust and Méliès—it had been trying and demanding, but it was like pulling teeth, too collaborative, with its own limitations and ideas. Give a man the freedom of the page and boards!

Jarry ran down like a clock. He finished tiredly.

“The play takes place in Poland, which is to say, Nowhere.” He picked up his papers while two stagehands took off the table and chair. Jarry left. The lights dimmed. There were three raps on the floor with Lugné-Poe’s cane, the curtains opened in the darkness as the lights came up.

The walls were painted as a child might have—representing sky, clouds, stars, the sun, moon, elephants, flowers, a clock with no hands, snow falling on a cheery fireplace.

A round figure stood at one side, his face hidden by a pointed hood on which was painted the slitted eyes and mustache of a caricature bourgeoisie. His costume was a white canvas cassock with an immense stomach on which was painted three concentric circles.

The audience tensed, leaned forward. The figure stepped to the center of the stage, looked around.

“Merde!” he said.

The riot could be heard for a kilometer in all directions.

 

 

XIV. What He Really Thinks

 

“T ODAY, FRANCE HAS LEFT THE PAST of Jew-traitors and degeneracy behind.

“Today, she has taken the final step toward greatness, a return to the True Faith, a way out of the German-Jew morass in which she has floundered for a quarter-century.

“With the second conviction of the traitor-spy Dreyfus, she sends a signal to all his rat-like kind that France will no longer tolerate impurities in its body-politic, its armies, its commerce. She has served notice that the Future is written in the French language; Europe, indeed the world, shall one day speak only one tongue, Française.

“The verdict of Guilty!—even with its softening of ‘With extenuating circumstances’—will end this Affair, once and for all, the only way—short of public execution by the most excruciating means, which, unfortunately the law no longer allows—ah! but True Frenchmen are working to change that!—that it could be ended; with the slow passing of this Jew-traitor to rot in the jungle of Devil’s Island—a man who should never have been allowed to don the uniform of this country in the first place.

“Let there be no more talk of injustice! Injustice has already been served by the spectacle of a thoroughly guilty man being given two trials; by a man not worth a sous causing great agitation—surely the work of enemies of the state.

“Let every True Frenchman hold this day sacred until the end of time. Let him turn his eyes eastward at our one Great Enemy, against that day when we shall rise up and gain just vengeance—let him not forget also to look around him, let him not rest until every Christ-murdering Jew, every German-inspired Protestant is driven from the boundaries of this country, or gotten rid of in an equally advantageous way—their property confiscated, their businesses closed, their ‘rights’—usurped rights!—nullified.

“If this decision wakens Frenchmen to that threat, then Dreyfus will have, in all his evil machinations, his total acquiescence to our enemy’s plans, done one good deed: He will have given us the reason not to rest until every one of his kind is gone from the face of the earth; that in the future the only place Hebrew will be spoken is in Hell.”

 

—Robert Norpois

 

 

 

XV. Truth Rises from the Well

E MILE ZOLA STARED AT THE WHITE SHEET of paper with the British watermark.

He dipped his pen in the bottle of Pelikan ink in the well and began to write.

As he wrote, the words became scratchier, more hurried. All his feelings of frustration boiled over in his head and out onto the fine paper. The complete cowardice and stultification of the Army, the anti-Semitism of the rich and the poor, the Church; the utter stupidity of the government, the treason of the writers who refused to come to the aid of an innocent man.

It was done sooner than he thought; six pages of his contempt and utter revulsion with the people of the country he loved more than life itself.

He put on his coat and hat and hailed a pedal cabriolet, ordering it to the offices of L’Aurore. The streets were more empty than usual, the cafés full. The news of the second trial verdict had driven good people to drink. He was sure there were raucous celebrations in every Church, every fort, and the basement drill-halls of every right-wing organization in the city and the country. This was an artist’s quarter—there was no loud talk, no call to action. There would be slow and deliberate drunkenness and oblivion for all against the atrocious verdict.

Zola sat back against the cushion, listening to the clicking pedals of the driver. He wondered if all this would end with the nation, half on one side of some field, half on the other, charging each other in final bloodbath.

He paid the driver, who swerved silently around and headed back the other way. Zola stepped into the Aurora’s office, where Clemenceau waited for him behind his desk. Emile handed him the manuscript.

Clemenceau read the first sentence, wrote, “Page One, 360 point RED TYPE headline—‘J’ACCUSE,’ ” called “Copy boy!”, said to the boy, “I shall be back for a proof in three hours,” put on his coat, and arm in arm he and Zola went off to the Théâtre Robert-Houdin for the first showing of Star Films’ The Dreyfus Affair, saying not a word to each other.

 

 

XVI. Chamber Pots Shall Light Your Way

Z OLA AND CLEMENCEAU, CRYING TEARS of pride and exultation, ran back arm in arm down the Place de l’Opéra, turning into a side street toward the publisher’s office.

Halfway down, they began to sing “La Marseillaise”; people who looked out their windows, not knowing the reason, assumed their elation for that of the verdict of the second trial, flung merde pots at them from second-story windows. “Anti-Dreyfussard scum!” they yelled, shaking their fists. “Wait till I get my fowling piece!”

Emile and Georges ran into the office, astonishing the editors and reporters there.

They went to Clemenceau’s desk, where the page proof of Zola’s article waited, with a separate proof of the red headline.

Zola picked up the proof.

“No need of this, my dear Georges?”

“I think not, my friend Emile.”

Zola shredded it, throwing the strips on the pressman who was waiting in the office for word from Clemenceau.

“Rip off the front page!” Clemenceau yelled out the door of his office. “We print a review of a moving picture there! Get Veyou out of whatever theater watching whatever piece of stage-pap he’s in and hustle him over to the Robert-Houdin for the second showing!”

Emile and Georges looked at each other, remembering.

“The Awful Trip to the Island!”

“The Tigers of the Imagination!”

“First News of Home!” said Emile

“Star Films,” said Clemenceau.

“Méliès,” said Zola.

“Dreyfus!” they said in unison.

 

* * *

 

Three days later, the President overturned the conviction of the second court, pardoned Dreyfus, and returned him to his full rank and privileges. The Ministry of War was reorganized, and the resignations of eleven generals received.

The President was, of course, shot down like a dog on the way home from a cabinet meeting that night. Three days of mourning were declared.

Dreyfus had been released the same night, and went to the country home of his brother Mathieu; he was now a drawn, shaken man whose hair had turned completely white.

 

 

XVII. Three Famous Quotes Which Led to Duels:

 

1. “The baron writes the kind of music a priest can hum while he is raping a choirboy.”
2. “I see you carry the kind of cane which allows you to hit a woman eight or ten times before it breaks.”
3. “Monsieur Jarry,” said Norpois, “I demand satisfaction for your insults to France during the last three years.”

 

“C APTAIN DREYFUS IS PROVED INNOCENT. We have called attention to nothing that was not the action of madmen and cowards.”

“You are a spineless dwarf masturbator with the ideas of a toad!” said Norpois.

“Our posture, stature, and habits are known to every schoolboy in France, Mister Journalist,” said Jarry. “We have come through five years of insult, spittle, and outrage. Nothing you say will make Dreyfus guilty or goad our royal person into a gratuitous display of our unerring marksmanship.”

Jarry turned to walk away with Pablo.

“Then, Monsieur Jarry, your bicycle . . .” said Norpois.

Jarry stopped. “What of Our Royal Vehicle?”

“Your bicycle eats merde sandwiches.”

 

 

XVIII. The Downhill Bicycle Race

 

A. Prelims

 

THE ANEMOMETER BARELY MOVED behind his head. The vane at its top pointed to the south; the windsock swelled and emptied slowly.

Jarry slowly recovered his breath. Below and beyond lay the city of Paris and its environs. The Seine curved like a piece of gray silk below and out to two horizons. It was just after dawn; the sun was a fat red beet to the east.

It was still cool at the weather station atop the Eiffel Tower, 300 meters above the ground.

Jarry leaned against his high-wheeler. He had taken only the least minimum of fortifying substances, and that two hours ago on this, the morning of the duel.

Proust had acted as his second (Jarry would have chosen Pablo—good thing he hadn’t, as the young painter had not shown up with the others this morning, perhaps out of fear of seeing Jarry maimed or killed—but Proust had defended himself many times, with a large variety of weapons, on many fields of honor). Second for Norpois was the journalist whose hair Alfred had set afire at the banquet more than a year ago. As the injured party, Jarry had had choice of place and weapons.

The conditions were thus: weapons, any. Place: the Eiffel Tower. Duelists must be mounted on their bicycles when using their weapons. Jarry would start at the weather station at the top, Norpois at the base. After Jarry was taken to the third platform, using all three sets of elevators on the way up, and the elevator man—since this was a day of mourning, the tower was closed, and the guards paid to look the other way—returned to the ground, the elevators could not be used, only the stairways. Jarry had still had to climb the spiral steps from the third platform to the weather station, from which he was now recovering.

With such an arrangement, Norpois would, of course, be waiting in ambush for him on the second observation platform by the time Jarry reached it. Such was the nature of duels.

Jarry looked down the long swell of the south leg of the tower—it was gray, smooth, and curved as an elephant’s trunk, plunging down and out into the earth. Tiny dots waited there; Norpois, the journalist, Proust, a few others, perhaps by now Pablo. The Tower cast a long shadow out away from the River. The shadow of the Trocadéro almost reached to the base of the Tower in the morning sun. There was already talk of painting the Tower again, for the coming Exposition of 1900 in a year and a half.

Alfred took a deep breath, calmed himself. He was lightly armed, having only a five-shot .32 revolver in his holster and a poniard in a sheath on his hip. He would have felt almost naked except for the excruciatingly heavy but comforting weapon slung across his shoulders.

It was a double-barreled Greener 4-bore Rhino Express which could fire a 130-gram bullet at 1200 meters per second. Jarry had decided that if he had to kill Norpois, he might as well wipe him off the face of the earth.

He carried four extra rounds in a bandolier; they weighed more than a kilo in all.

He was confident in his weapons, in himself, in his high-wheeler. He had oiled it the night before, polished it until it shone. After all, it was the insulted party, not him, not Dreyfus.

He sighed, then leaned out and dropped the lead-weighted green handkerchief as the signal he was starting down. He had his ordinary over his shoulder opposite the Greener and had his foot on the first step before he heard the weighted handkerchief ricocheting on its way down off the curved leg of the Tower.

 

B. The Duel

He was out of breath before he passed the locked apartment which Gustave Eiffel had built for himself during the last phase of construction of the Tower, and which he sometimes used when aerodynamic experiments were being done on the drop-tube which ran down the exact center of the Tower.

Down around the steps he clanged, his bike brushing against the spiral railing. It was good he was not subject to vertigo. He could imagine Norpois’ easy stroll to the west leg, where he would be casually walking up the broad stairs to the first level platform with four restaurants, arcades and booths, and its entry to the stilled second set of elevators. (Those between the ground and first level were the normal counterweighted kind; hydraulic ones to the second—American Otis had had to set up a dummy French corporation to win the contract—no one in France had the technology, and the charter forbade foreign manufacture; and tracked ones to the third—passengers had to change halfway up, as no elevator could be made to go from roughly 70° to 90° halfway up its rise.)

Panting mightily, Jarry reached the third platform, less than a third of the way down. Only 590 more steps down to sure and certain ambush. The rifle, cartridges, and high-wheeler were grinding weights on his back. Gritting his teeth, he started down the steep steps with landings every few dozen meters.

 

* * *

 

His footsteps rang like gongs on the iron treads. He could see the tops of the booths on the second level, the iron framework of the Tower extending all around him like a huge narrow cage.

Norpois would be waiting at one of the corners, ready to fire at either set of stairs. (Of course, he probably already knew which set Jarry was using, oh devious man, or it was possible he was truly evil and was waiting on the first level. It would be just like a right-wing nationalist Catholic safety-bicycle rider to do that.)

Fifteen steps up from the second level, in one smooth motion, Jarry put the ordinary down, mounted it holding immobile the pedals with his feet, swung the Rhino Express off his shoulder, and rode the last crashing steps down, holding back, then pedaling furiously as his giant wheel hit the floor.

He expected shots at any second as he swerved toward a closed souvenir booth: He swung his back wheel up and around behind him holding still, changing direction, the drainpipe barrels of the 4-bore resting on the handlebars.

Over at the corner of another booth the front wheel and handlebar of Norpois’ bicycle stuck out.

With one motion Jarry brought the Greener to his cheek. We shall shoot the front end off his bicycle—without that he cannot be mounted and fire; ergo, he cannot duel; therefore, we have won; he is disgraced. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Jarry fired one barrel—the recoil sent him skidding backwards two meters. The forks of the crocodile went away—Fortune’s smiling face wavered through the air like the phases of the Moon. The handlebars stuck in the side of another booth six meters away.

Jarry hung onto his fragile balance, waiting for Norpois to tumble forward or stagger bleeding with bicycle shrapnel from behind the booth.

He heard a noise behind him; at the corner of his eye he saw Norpois standing beside one of the planted trees—he had to have been there all along—with a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

Then the grenade landed directly between the great front and small back wheels of Jarry’s bicycle.

 

C. High Above the City

He never felt the explosion, just a wave of heat and a flash that blinded him momentarily. There was a carnival ride sensation, a loopy feeling in his stomach. Something touched his hand; he grabbed it. Something tugged at his leg. He clenched his toes together.

His vision cleared.

He hung by one hand from the guardrail. He dangled over Paris. His rifle was gone. His clothes smelt of powder and burning hair. He looked down. The weight on his legs was his ordinary, looking the worse for wear. The rim of the huge front wheel had caught on the toe of his cycling shoe. He cupped the toe of the other one through the spokes.

His hand was losing its grip.

He reached down with the other for his pistol. The holster was still there, split up the middle, empty.

Norpois’ head appeared above him, looking down, then his gun hand with a large automatic in it, pointing at Jarry’s eyes.

“There are rules, Monsieur,” said Jarry. He was trying to reach up with the other hand but something seemed to be wrong with it.

“Get with the coming century, dwarf,” said Norpois, flipping the pistol into the air, catching it by the barrel. He brought the butt down hard on Jarry’s fingers.

The second time the pain was almost too much. Once more and Alfred knew he would let go, fall, be dead.

“One request. Save our noble vehicle,” said Jarry, looking into the journalist’s eyes. There was a clang off somewhere on the second level.

Norpois’ grin became sardonic. “You die. So does your crummy bike.”

There was a small pop. A thin line of red, like a streak of paint slung off the end of a brush, stood out from Norpois’ nose, went over Jarry’s shoulder.

Norpois raised his automatic, then wavered, let go of it. It bounced off Alfred’s useless arm, clanged once on the way down.

Norpois, still staring into Jarry’s eyes, leaned over the railing and disappeared behind his head. There was silence for a few seconds, then:

Pif-Paf! Quel Bruit!

The sound of the body bouncing off the ironworks went on for longer than seemed possible.

Far away on the second level was the sound of footsteps running downstairs.

Painfully, Jarry got his left arm up next to his right, got the fingers closed, began pulling himself up off the side of the Eiffel Tower, bringing his mangled high-wheeler with him.

 

D. Code Duello

A small crowd had gathered, besides those concerned. Norpois’ second was over by the body, with the police. There would of course be damages to pay for. Jarry carried his ordinary and the Greener, which he had found miraculously lying on the floor of the second level.

Proust came forward to shake Alfred’s hand. Jarry gave him the rifle and ordinary, but continued to walk past him. Several others stepped forward, but Jarry continued on, nodding.

He went to Pablo. Pablo had on a long cloak and was eating an egg sandwich. His eyes would not meet Alfred’s.

Jarry stepped in front of him. Pablo tried to move away without meeting his gaze. Alfred reached inside the cloak, felt around, ignoring the Webley strapped at Pablo’s waist.

He found what he was looking for, pulled it out. It was the single-shot .22. Jarry sniffed the barrel as Pablo tried to turn away, working at his sandwich.

“Asshole,” said Jarry, handing it back.

 

 

XIX. Fin de Cyclé

T HE BELLS WERE STILL RINGING in the New Century.

Satie had given up composing and had gone back to school to learn music at the age of thirty-eight. Rousseau still exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, and was now married for the second time. Proust had locked himself away in a room he'd had lined with cork and was working on a never-ending novel. Méliès was still out at Montreuil, making films about trips to the Moon and the Bureau of Incoherent Geography. Pablo was painting; but so much blue; blue here, blue there, azure, cerulean, Prussian. Dreyfus was now a commandant.

Jarry lived in a shack over the Seine which stood on four supports. He called it Our Suitable Tripod.

There was noise, noise everywhere. There were few bicycles, and all those were safeties. He had not seen another ordinary in months. He looked over where his repaired one stood in the middle of the small room. His owl and one of his crows perched on the handlebars.

The noise was deafening—the sound of bells, of crowds, sharp reports of fireworks. Above all, those of motor-cycles and motor-cars.

He looked back out the window. There was a new sound, a dark flash against the bright moonlit sky. A bat-shape went over, buzzing, trailing laughter and gunshots, the pilot banking over the River. Far up the Seine, the Tower stood, bathed in floodlights, glorying in its blue, red, and white paint for the coming Exposition.

A zeppelin droned overhead, electric lights on the side spelling out the name of a hair pomade. The bat-shaped plane whizzed under it in near-collision.

Someone gunned a motor-cycle beneath his tiny window. Jarry reached back into the room, brought out his fowling piece filled with rock salt and fired a great tongue of flame into the night below. After a scream, the noise of the motor-cycle raced away.

He drank from a glass filled with brandy, ether, and red ink. He took one more look around, buffeted by the noise from all quarters and a motor launch on the River. He said a word to the night before slamming the window and returning to his work on the next Ubu play.

The word was “merde!”