Years ago I lived for a while at number 145, Boulevard Saint-Michel, in Paris, right at the end, where it meets the L’Observatoire, Montparnasse and Port-Royal boulevards. This crossroads is an ugly part of the city, bleak and sprawling in winter, though it has the advantage of being close to wonderful places, like the horse-chestnut-lined avenue of L’Observatoire, in my view one of the most beautiful in Paris, and Le Jardin du Luxembourg, which is uniquely delightful, despite its drawbacks, and slightly further afield, Le Jardin des Plantes.
There is a famous café at this crossroads, La Closerie des Lilas, opposite which stands a statue of Maréschal Ney flourishing his sword. Opposite is the famous Bal Bullier, where so many carnivals were held, renowned in the era when students lived on fresh air and young ladies of limited means loved them for free. L’Observatoire, the scientific establishment that gives the avenue its name, stands at the far end, crowned by domes as round as white turtle eggs. Near the Bal Bullier, at 145 Boulevard Saint-Michel, there once was a restaurant by the name of Chez Émile, with a small front terrace fenced off by a few plants, and it was a fine restaurant in my day. It no longer exists. It’s all gone downhill.
The owner, Monsieur Émile Hasenbolher, was a striking presence: fair-haired, pale complexion, small blue eyes, and little in the way of hair. He was so astonishingly voluminous that when he donned his chef’s apron and hat and stood in the doorway, people stopped and stared at the spectacle. Day in, day out one sees signs of anxiety or pain on almost anyone’s face. In his case it was impossible. His face was so compacted with flab the state of his soul could never surface: it was solid, motionless, impermeable flab. He was good-hearted, with a cheery gift of the gab, and driven by one costly vice: he bet obsessively on races at Auteuil and Longchamps. Like so many people mad about horses, he liked to say he’d had a tip, that it was a sure bet, that his sources were firsthand. The truth was his finances were rocky. His cold, cunning, ambitious wife was constantly annoyed by her husband’s mania. This meant her interests were rarely in harmony with those of the restaurant’s customers or humanity in general. However, that didn’t stop Chez Émile always having stupendous foie gras from Strasbourg on the menu, or a kirsch difficult to find elsewhere in the neighborhood.
A courtyard behind the restaurant led to a rather gloomy stairway up to the building’s interior apartments. Monsieur Émile rented a first-floor apartment and sublet individual rooms in order to have a pot of money that, added to his earnings from the restaurant, helped him withstand the savage inroads the horses made into his finances. It was a picturesque courtyard, and rest home to all the items the restaurant spewed out: bottles, demijohns, boxes and cardboard packaging. At night it wasn’t unusual to stumble over one thing or another.
One of the rooms was let to Mademoiselle Ivonne Dubreil, who devoted her time to amorous passions in a gray, unassuming, oblique manner. Another was the residence of a mustachioed citizen, Henri Gide, who was an employee in the Porte d’Orléans toll house, the octroi, namely, a dues collector at the said Paris gate. This kind of employment still existed at the time. The dues collector was married to Marianne Monnanteil, who was very courteous and always bowed deferentially. I lived in the room in between these two. Monsieur Émile had himself suggested I did so at a very reasonable price, presumably because I had praised his restaurant’s kirsch and Alsatian cuisine to the skies.
It was a small apartment. Apart from the three bedrooms there was a pleasantly grimy, somber inactive kitchen with a tap that worked and three boxes of coal. I must mention these boxes of coal because, as we were extremely poor, they led to conflicts generated by our way of life that was in turn occasioned by our breadline existence. The first belonged to Mlle Dubreil, the second to citizen Gide, and the third was mine – per modo di dire – to phrase it Italian style. The dues collector always thought I was pinching his coal, I always thought Mademoiselle Ivonne was pinching mine, and Mlle Ivonne had no doubts as to the pinching proclivities of the dues collector. If it had gone to court there would have been a nil outcome in terms of compensation for the parties in dispute. The fact is I always had very little coal, so my room was freezing cold throughout that winter. Mlle Ivonne lit a “Petit Parisien” in her stove when she had a male visitor, no doubt to create an impression of well-being based on pure illusion. It was dues collector Gide who burnt the most, because like all good state employees he was accustomed to living in the warm at everyone else’s expense. Considering that Mlle Dubreil and I very occasionally had a minute amount of coal, reality genuinely afforded us the objective proof to deduce that the dues collector was the thief. Those arguments meant we got to know each other. They brought us together. It turned out that all in all we were paid-up members of the bourgeoisie committed to the defense of private property.
The walls separating our rooms were on the thin side. We could hear but not see each other. Moreover, I was positioned centrally. In the usual conventional language one could not claim in this case that the center was a responsible place to be. One can say, however, that I did need a degree of discretion and patience to survive there.
Mademoiselle Ivonne was a specter: she was a mystic soul driven by the wondrous, the magical and the mysterious. If she was walking along a street and met a street-seller manipulating some strange device – for example, making a doll dance above the sidewalk – she simply had to stop and gape in awe at the performance. I had bumped into her several times doing just this on the Rue Gay-Lussac. She was even more transported when at a fair – like the one at the beginning of summer on the Rue du Maine – she watched a stern-faced, hieratically posed artisan making mysterious gestures with one hand, as if wanting to conjure up some magic. Ivonne’s spirit felt riveted by the strange gestures and she looked entranced. Sometimes, he’d roll a cigarette in front of her and drop the leftover paper on the ground. Her hypnotized eyes followed the paper as it fell and stared at the small white blotch on the ground. After a while when she looked up, we felt she was struggling to cast off the dense haze enveloping her.
This primitive soul, when in her normal state – that is when she was hungry – had a refreshing, pleasant side. She had often confessed to me that voluptuous sensuality was frankly what least interested her. She brought everything back to family life, to the austere nature of family life. She merely aspired to a small farmstead on the outskirts of Paris and marriage to a man who could repair bicycles. That young woman sought no more from life. She was a sincere, discreet, positive individual.
She felt so indifferent towards her profession – that, by the way, was perfectly legal – she could only refer to it in jest. She deeply regretted that the activity of her trade, as projected into the room I occupied, might lead me to waste time I should be dedicating to work. We reached an agreement: whenever a noisy, affectionate, thrusting gentleman came up to her room – un monsieur tapageur – she’d tap on the wall to indicate the nature of her situation so I could act accordingly. One tactic might be, for example, to leave my room. If her customer was quieter and more considerate, she’d tap twice to suggest that the outcome would be less disruptive. If love climbed those stairs – something that rarely happened – she said nothing. Then tolerance was in order.
When I was busy working, I sometimes heard a tap on the wall.
“Well, well! The show’s on its way …!” I’d say, gathering up my papers and preparing to join the flow on the street for a short or long time. The interruptions that sabotage the consolidation of culture, the hazards confronting serious study, are permanent and systematic.
If love was coursing, I’d hear innocent words being whispered.
“Oh, Marcel, buy me a canary!” Ivonne would say, alternating whimpers with a ray of hope.
“I’ll buy you a canary later. Of course, it will be a chirpy canary. Now I must buy you a hot-water bottle, because it is freezing and coughs are not a good idea at our age.”
Nevertheless, I never saw Ivonne become the owner of a canary, whether it was chirpy or apathetic.
“Are you all happy at home?” asked the young woman.
“Very happy, thank you.”
One day a gentleman fond of poetry visited, who turned out to be a poet, as I later discovered. I expect he was a poet from the provinces.
“Do you like Victor Hugo?” asked the visitor meaningfully
“Who is Victor Hugo? His name’s buzzing round the back of my head …”
“Of course … the Victor Hugo!”
“Yes, yes, the Victor Hugo! Of course …”
“Who else could it be … I mentioned him because I’ve written some verse.”
“The long sort?”
“Oh … on the long side …”
“I’ll be frank. Don’t be angry. You know how much I love you. Long verse …”
“No! They’re not as long as you imagine. Long verse isn’t the thing nowadays. They’re old-fashioned.”
And the good gentleman began to declaim …
It was at 145, Boulevard Saint-Michel that I started to become aware of the significance and boundless range of human vanity.
Henri Gide’s mind was more devious, distorted as it was by conventional social attitudes. He was a typical product of his times. He got up at five o’clock. He caught the first bus. He started work punctually at six at the Porte d’Orléans octroi. It amounted to giving a green ticket to all owners of carriages, of whatever type, who came through that gate up to three P.M. Another man – his worst enemy – collected the money the people in the carriages handed over when they surrendered their green tickets. Both officials believed they were indispensable and were convinced the octroi ticketing system was a pillar of civilization. A matter of hierarchy separated them. Gide thought he had a higher status than his colleague because he held the tickets. The other fellow, as he was the one collecting the money, thought he was above him in the pecking order.
“I love you …” Madame Gide said early at night between the matrimonial sheets (they didn’t go to bed late).
“Meaning what?” asked her husband unpleasantly.
“Why do you say ‘meaning what’…?”
“It’s a mystery to me …”
“You’ll always be a worrier.”
Generally General Cambronne’s mot abruptly curtailed this cordial family exchange.
Monsieur Henri was an orderly man like most men with his temperament, and unbearably grumpy. On the outside he was a good-natured, easy-going, well-balanced, and reasonable man. In reality he was violent. A frightened Marianne told me as much one day.
“My poor small upstanding hubby is intolerable … He has it in him to kill me if he was to get up and not find his small cup of coffee waiting for him, just as he likes it.”
Marianne was fond of using the adjective “small.” This mania for adjectives made her sound very French. She’d talk about small income, small savings, a small coffee, a small supper, a small trip, a small dress. She described everything as petit.
“Donne-moi une petite goutte, mon petit chéri,” she’d say when her husband was dunking a sugar lump in his glass of cognac.
In our country everybody inflates, ups the ante. That lady championed the diminutive. Initially, accustomed as I was to our macro manner, I thought she was suffering from a shortsightedness that brought with it petty, rampant selfishness – selfishness that would provoke cruelty if her small pleasures and well-being were ever threatened. However, later, when I’d thought things through, I realized that everyone defends things that are infinitely small, even if they describe them as large, as they do in our country. In our neck of the woods people speak of this or that as being big, because things are smaller than anywhere else. That’s perfectly understandable.
I still remember the outcry that went up in this couple’s room the day Monsieur Henri opened a socialist newspaper for the first time in the presence of his good lady, L’Humanité, to be precise. Socialism had been dancing around the dues collector’s head for some time – supposing that socialism could ever dance one way or the other – but he’d never dared open his daily paper before in the presence of Marianne. In the course of my conversations with him, I noticed that he was familiar with the vocabulary of socialist dialectics. On the day of that row I heard him say to his wife in a gruff, churlish voice: “You are a contradictory, paradoxical cell …”
“Talk plainly …!”
“One must accept scientific terminology. If not, one immediately risks appearing to be ridiculous …”
“You’ll lose your post, Henri!” she replied sobbing. “Don’t you appreciate what it is to possess an octroi in Paris? We’ll be thrown into poverty …”
“Will you be so good as to shut up? You are not familiar with the experimental method.”
“Think of your family, Henri!”
“Don’t worship false idols, Marianne!”
The result was completely obtuse in respect to the conversation I just noted. On the excuse that socialism might have brought him bad luck, he surrendered to an orgy of order, anxiety over punctuality and a bacchanalian doing of his duties – and needless to say fulfillment from duty done. The moment came when he had to restrain his efforts, because his superiors found them obscene. Socialism led him to be excessively zealous.
Living so close to such diverse people often made me think about myself and my own make up. After thinking so much about others, it is only reasonable to try to discover how one stands oneself. Whenever I’ve engaged in this exercise – that is often – I’ve found that an impulse has intervened between my mental system and inner self to stop me delving further. When I am observing others, my system performs more or less correctly. When I observe myself, the logic guiding my mechanisms for introspection immediately veer away from central issues to focus on peripheral matters often located far from the center. As soon as I examine, for example, a particular tendency of mine, some rationale will surface to block my self-scrutiny. They are two inseparable, interconnected movements, locked in a devilish game that prevents any kind of enlightenment. These rationales that surface automatically when we attempt to elucidate or clarify any act we commit are always persuasive, plausible, and sufficient unto the day. The logic driving our self-scrutiny, that cold analytical detachment, is immediately erased by the plausibility of these rationales, however vague and symbolic they may be. In the face of this mental turmoil people always appeal to their instinct for self-preservation. The latter is more powerful and efficient in people’s mental lives than in their merely physical activities. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to form a clear idea of oneself. Life unravels in the mental confusion caused by the instinct for self-preservation. Within the natural limits of our imagination and the imperfection that life always brings, we can succeed in getting to know someone else. Self-knowledge is extremely difficult. Analytical detachment is for others. We cannot apply it to ourselves.
We are hugely susceptible to the opinions of others and they bolster our instinct for self-preservation. When Mlle Georgette said the other day, at an intimate moment – it was summer, the heat was stifling, the barometer in the nearby pharmacy swung low and the first lightning in a dramatic electric storm flashed across the sky – that I seemed to be an upstanding fellow in terms of her experience of life, I immediately thought she was right. Or rather: while Mlle Georgette was delivering her judgment, I was convinced that she was mistaken, that she wasn’t right. However my mental system was immediately swamped by so many arguments and rationales to justify the remark I’d just heard, that within seconds of it being uttered it rang completely true. When one coldly dissects the sentence, its lack of substance, its puerility, hits you between the eyes. To say that someone has a hint of this or that is to say very little. But it makes no difference. Cold detachment is futile, isn’t profitable. We see ourselves enthusiastically, warmly. The rest is of no interest.
What would have happened if she’d given her words the opposite meaning? If she had formulated her sentence in these terms: “You are a worthless two-timer”? We wouldn’t have believed them, and, if we’d wanted Mlle Georgette to express a more favorable opinion of ourselves, we’d have pleaded, “Mademoiselle, I would really like your opinion of me to be closer to reality. Hear me out, I beg you …” And we would have made our confession. Naturally, many factors would have influenced the authenticity of this piece of rhetoric – the weather and many others. I don’t wish to deny, a priori, that a genuine confession isn’t possible. I am simply saying that every confession also forms part of our instinct for self-preservation – one of the key ingredients of which is self-esteem – and that every confession is shaped by a burden of watertight, plausible excuses. Thus we are very accepting of the opinions of others, provided they are ones we approve of. If they are not, our level of acceptance is nil and we reject them wholesale.
Our mental confusion is dense and dark. Life is a black hole. To judge by the efforts we make to cling to the wall, we should agree that we find obscurity amusing. Other people are subject to change, but amusing. The distractions one provides oneself are perhaps less interesting, and often of no interest at all. We go through life, not knowing who we are – and that must be why there are so many surprises. Other people, in contrast, are a mine, a mine that proves so inexhaustible we often can’t stand one another. The walls of 145 Boulevard Saint Michel were too thin – thin as a cat’s ear, naturally.