Life: A User's Manual (23 page)
By getting the exclusive European and North African rights for this timid and unstable creature, Philippe Marquiseaux has certainly pulled off the best deal in his as yet brief career; not because of “Hortense” herself, who, with her unending escapades, her breaches of contract, suicide attempts, depressions, court cases, sex parties and orgies, her convalescences and miscellaneous manias, costs him at least as much as he earns out of her, but because all those who aspire to making their name in music hall are now determined to belong to the same agency as “Hortense”.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
On the Stairs, 6
TWO MEN MEET on the fourth-floor landing, both over fifty, both with square-framed glasses, both dressed in the same black suit, trousers, jacket, waistcoat, a little oversized, shod in black shoes, black tie on white shirt with an untapered collar, black bowler hat. But the one seen from behind has a printed cashmere-type scarf, whilst the other has a pink scarf with violet stripes.
They are two doorstep salesmen. The first is selling a
New Key to Your Dreams
, allegedly based on the Teachings of a Yaqui sorcerer collected at the end of the seventeenth century by an English traveller named Henry Barrett, but actually composed a few weeks earlier by a botany student at Madrid University. Apart from the anachronisms without which this key to dreams would obviously unlock nothing at all, and the ornamentations with which the Spaniard’s imagination had sought to embellish this tiresome enumeration by emphasising its chronological and geographical exoticism, several of the suggested associations turn out to be surprisingly rich:
| BEAR | = | CLOCK |
| WIG | = | ARMCHAIR |
| HERRING | = | CLIFF |
| HAMMER | = | DESERT |
| SNOW | = | HAT |
| MOON | = | SHOE |
| FOG | = | ASH |
| COPPER | = | TELEPHONE |
| HAM | = | SINGLE PERSON |
The second door-to-door man is selling a newspaper called
The Watchtower!
, the organ of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In each issue there are some longer articles – “What is Human Happiness?”, “The 67 Truths of the Bible”, “Was Beethoven Really Deaf?”, “The Magic and the Mystery of Cats”, “Learn to Love the Prickly Pear” – and some pieces of general news: “Do Before you Die!”, “Did Life Begin by Chance?”, “Fewer Marriages in Switzerland” and a few old saws of the likes of
Statura justa et aequa sint pondere
. Secretly slipped in between the pages are advertisements for articles of hygiene, offering mailing under plain wrappers.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Foulerot, 2
A ROOM ON the fifth floor right. It was Paul Hébert’s room, until his arrest, a student’s room with a woollen carpet spotted with cigarette burns, greenish wallpaper, and a cosy-corner covered with striped cloth.
The perpetrators of the outrage on Boulevard Saint-Germain on the seventh of October 1943, which cost three German officers their lives, were arrested the same day towards evening. They were two former serving Army officers who belonged to a “Davout Action Group”, and it soon became apparent that they were its only members; their gesture was intended to restore their lost Dignity to the French: they were arrested as they were preparing to hand out a leaflet beginning: “That splendid sturdy fellow the Boche soldier is strong and healthy and thinks only of the greatness of his country,
Deutschland über alles!
Whereas we are hopelessly sunk in dilettantism!”
All those picked up in the raids made within sixty minutes of the explosion were released the following afternoon after identity checks, except for five students whose situations were not regular and about whom the authorities required further information. Paul Hébert was one of them: his papers were in order, but the inspector who interrogated him was surprised that he had been picked up at the Odéon crossroads at three p.m. on a Thursday when he should have been at the Civil Engineering College, 152 Avenue de Wagram, studying for the entrance examination to the Ecole Supérieure de Chimie. The thing in itself was not important, but the explanations Paul Hébrt gave were not at all convincing.
The grandson of a druggist with a shop at 48 Rue de Madrid, Paul Hébert took abundant advantage of his doting and generous grandfather by relieving him of phials of paregoric elixir which he traded for forty to fifty francs each to the young addicts of the Latin Quarter; he had made his monthly delivery that day and was on his way to the Champs-Elysées to spend the five hundred francs he’d just made when he was arrested. But instead of flatly saying that he’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Course in Organic Chemistry
, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned
Course
. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to fhe’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Course in Organic Chemistry
, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned
Course
. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to fhe’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Course in Organic Chemistry
, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned
Course
. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to fhe’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Course in Organic Chemistry
, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned
Course
. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to fhe’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Course in Organic Chemistry
, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned
Course
. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to fhe’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Course in Organic Chemistry
, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned
Course
. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to fhe’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see
Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire
or
It Happened at the Inn
, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s
Table of Contents
Six: Breidel (Servants’ Quarters, 1)
Seven: Morellet (Servants’ Quarters, 2)
Nine: Nieto and Rogers (Servants’ Quarters, 3)
Ten: Jane Sutton (Servants’ Quarters, 4)
Fifteen: Smautf (Servants’ Quarters, 5)
Sixteen: Célia Crespi (Servants’ Quarters, 6)
Twenty-One: In the Boiler Room, 1