Planus (23 page)

And she would strike up her favourite song :

Bang, bang, bang, who's that knocking at my door?

I do believe it is my husband ...

And the bargees would take up the refrain :

. . . Yes it's him, yes, yes, yes!

Yes it's him, no, no, no!

The boys came from the north and from the Pas-de-Calais. Fat Felicie was from Dunkirk. They all sang in chorus and made a racket fit to raise the dead, and I joined in happily, banging bottles on the table to keep time, as they did. The neighbours complained. So then we would close the shutters and bolt the shop door, even if it was in the middle of the day, and go off on the spree in some distant suburb, dancing, boozing, whooping it up in the riverside
estaminets,
dives frequented only by watermen, abandoned mills like the one at Ballancourt, which are lovers' meeting-places and where the men come to lie up after days and days of boring trips on board their barges. The taxis (the taxis of the Marne!) brought us there in less than an hour. Often the bistro on the quay remained closed for a day or two and, at the height of summer, even for a week or two, when Felicie took it into her head to take a trip on one of the launches that go up the canals to the north, for, like all the daughters of Flanders, the irrepressible bistro-keeper, who scandalized all the law-abiding shopkeepers in the neighbourhood of quai des Gran,ds-Augustins by her outrageous behaviour, suffered from homesickness. My love of books and reading, far from turning me against Felicie and her gang of wisecrackers, made me treasure her as a pearl among women and join in the binges of these carefree characters with frenzy, although I was weaned by a book being put into my hand, and I have never lost the appetite. It is true that it was my mother who taught me to read and, for this purpose, she used to take me on her lap. That was all she gave me. Her heart was elsewhere. And then . . . like fat Felicie, I love life and I am thirsty, always thirsty. . . . Printers' ink will never quench this thirst. First, one must live. If today I am in a hurry to write, it is because I want to do it while there is still fire in my blood, for old age approaches and I want to be delivered of the two or three heavy books I still carry within me and which I have been nursing forever, like Charles Baudelaire and his
Mon coeur mis a nu,
which he never wrote, and that was the basis of all his misfortunes. I have said that I believe I have enough to keep me going for another ten years. I am convinced that during these ten years the world will have cast off its old skin, and I would like to be here to see it. I come from a long-lived family. The roots are solid. I think about my old age and I shall be a happy man if I can go to my death at the appointed time and place, disappearing anonymously, without any regrets for life, there at the very source of life, on the Sargasso Sea, where, for the first time life manifested itself, spurting up from the depths of the ocean and the sun.

Si Deus quizer, amanha
... as the Portuguese explorers, who were the first to navigate these lonely regions, inscribed in their log-books. Yes,
if God wills, tomorrow
. . . tomorrow we shall reach the new world; already the waves have changed colour, birds fly out to meet us and the current flowing from the west brings us the detritus of an unknown vegetation, amongst it an old tree-trunk, hollowed out perhaps by the fire of Heaven, but which some believe to be the handiwork of man, claiming that it is a pirogue. In vain we tried to fish it out of the sea. Night was coming on. We changed tack for the first time since we had settled into the south-east trade wind. We took advantage of it to come about and try to find a cape of this unknown land, still invisible, wrapped in heavy clouds and wafting towards us a warm, strongly spiced breeze. Was it an island or the continent of Cathay? We argued about it for a long time; some claimed they had seen moving lights; they were the same men who had said it was a pirogue, so the whole question remained in doubt. . ..

Men.

They were fortunate in discovering new men, simply by setting out on a venture and sailing straight ahead.

I am of no account. Nor are my books. But one will never say enough about the part played by the feminine in writing. At times one would think Plato's psyche was being restored to life, and it is this unforeseen encounter with the sleeping Hermaphrodite or Eros which gives the reader a sensation of plenitude and constitutes the charm and seductiveness of reading, which would explain the terrible passion felt by man, that possessed creature, for the world of the imagination. It is magical. Books, books, so many books! 'Of making many books there is no end,' says Ecclesiastes (xii: 12). There is no book that does not give off a ray of light. Not even the worst of them. A light under a bushel. And so it is an umbra.

There was one man who was not disturbed by the racket we sometimes kicked up at Felicie's, and that was the next-door neighbour, Chadenat, king of booksellers, who would have been distracted from his passionate absorption by nothing less than the arrival of the fire brigade. Chadenat was no ordinary bookseller, he read his books, and I have often wondered whether he kept a bookshop not in order to sell books but to buy them, so that he would never be short of reading matter, to buy them all, all the time, older and even older books, rare and impossible to find, unique editions which you could not come across even in the greatest libraries in the world, and he collected them not like a miser hoarding a priceless treasure, but simply to read them, to read them over and over again from morning to night and from night to morning. He might have been a character out of Balzac.

Le Figaro,
of 13th November, 1947, announced amongst the auction sales at the Hotel Drouot, in a catalogue signed by Andre Fage:

Chadenat was ageless. He had never enjoyed very good health. As long as I had known him he had been ailing, and he was constantly spitting. His bladder also plagued him a good deal. Like Montaigne, he suffered from stones. He must have weighed about nine and a half stone and he took no care of himself at all, eating whatever came to hand and sleeping God knows where. He was a somewhat melancholy man and lamented the fact that he had no heir to follow in his footsteps, since his son and his son-in-law had no love for books; one of them was a clerk in Bercy and the other had a wholesale wine business, I believe, and they were both determined to put the library up for auction after his death, and Chadenat gnashed his teeth to think of the sorry fate that awaited his books, how they would all be scattered about, and some risked falling into the wrong hands, that is to say into the hands of people to whom he had disdained to sell them during his lifetime, and there was no lack of book lovers from all countries of the world, including Maggs Brothers, the famous London booksellers, specialists in large-scale public auctions, who were ready to grab the whole lot, whatever the price; the very mention of their name made Chadenat skip with rage, their firm was his
bete noire,
for he detested the English, holding them responsible for the decadence of France, since they had engineered all her misfortunes from the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake to the recent reverses at Charleroi. The English, our hereditary enemies ...

That day he was bristling with rage, stamping up and down his shop, raising clouds of dust. It was the day on which their Britannic Majesties visited Paris, in June 1938.

'If they're here,' he said, 'it means there'll definitely be a war. Only this time they're afraid they'll get the brunt of it. But once again it will be France that gets it in the neck, because they're cunning, those English intriguers. . . . Poor little Frenchmen! I had thought of renting a house at Cabourg, so as to store my books in a safe place — with these damned aeroplanes one can't be too careful — but it's on the way to England and I'd rather stay in Paris. When I think that they're already evacuating the Louvre! It's shameful. Poor people, they no longer have any faith in their destiny, and they don't want to take any risks. . . . We shall be defeated, miserably defeated. . . .'

Hatred of England was the key to Chadenat's character. But this feeling for our hereditary enmity is far livelier amongst the English regarding France, for the French are much more forgetful of the great events in their history, they have shrugged them off, and the total hatred of a man like Chadenat, far from being typical, is exceptional in France, shared by no one but a handful of sailors who remember, a military clique with a strong tradition and a few proud-necked, sulking country squires, relegated to their manor houses and no longer taking part in anything of importance, nor holding any rank. The most eminent amongst these distinguished looking gentlemen is the last scion of the Biron family, one of whose ancestors was beheaded by the King of France, another by the King of England; he loathes and detests the Republic and no longer lives in his feudal chateau (which is one of the loveliest and most splendid in France, set in an incomparable site in Perigord, at the highest point of the waters, between the Garonne and the Dordogne), but in a little middle-class boarding-house on the avenue des Sycomores, in Geneva. What an end for a line that goes back to Eudes d'Aquitaine, who bore the title of
Rex Francorum
according to the inscription, dated 710, that was discovered at the time of the invention of the relics of Mary Magdalen at the Abbey of Saint Maximin, the day when the sarcophagus of Saint Sidonie was opened, on 12 th September, 1279!

So it was certainly not for his picturesque charm nor his diversity that the whole world flowed through Chadenat's library and reconstituted itself, continent by continent, in his bookshop, but because the irascible bookseller, in thrall to his obsession, scourged the English, pleaded his cause and constituted a veritable dossier on the long Anglo-French rivalry for the domination of the world! for this reason, he had added to the section of books dealing with the privateer wars of the pirates and buccaneers in the Caribbean and along the coasts of Central America, from Campeche to Darien, all the books dealing with the discovery of Canada by the French, their gradual penetration, of the country, the peaceful conquest, the eventual loss, after many throws of the dice, the to and fro of armies and alliances (the capital was originally called Ville-Marie- en-l'isle, as I learned from Chadenat, who had read everything and knew everything, and he told me that, when the first church was founded on the island of Montreal, there was no oil to light the lamp of the tabernacle and so, according to an anonymous life of Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of Saint-Sulpice and cousin of Chancellor Seguier, who took a lively interest in Canada,
'fireflies were collected and trapped inside a little chandelier encased in fine wire mesh'
to announce to the first colonial settlers the joyous arrival and presence of the Holy Sacrament, etc. etc.); also, books relating the thoughtless loss, later regretted by the contrite French, of Virginia and the mouths of the Mississippi, Louisiana with its capital, New Orleans (and it was my turn, having just returned from there, to tell him how alive the French influence still was in that city, in spite of the Yankees, and I was going to quote hundreds of popular texts in support of my argument, but Chadenat had read everything and knew everything, and he gave me an album to leaf through, an album of prints depicting the carnivals and feast days in New Orleans, etc. etc.); and how the bravest officers of the King's Navy lost the Indies and the islands of Mauritius, and His Most Christian Majesty abandoned the dissemination of the Faith in China, forgetting his promise and no longer keeping up the good work done by the Jesuits, and the prestige of the Roi-Soleil diminished in Siam, as well as in the trading ports of the Levant and in the Antilles, due to the pressure of internal troubles springing from religious differences; the sporadic efforts, not followed through from Versailles, of the colonials and the Navy in Oceania, and in the large royal island of Madagascar, that distant outpost on the route to India which blocked the approaches to the Cape in the same way that the floating artillery of the Prince of Nassau, one-time lover of La Clairon, that cherubic courtesan who kept the whole of Versailles amused by her accounts of her lover's cannons and artillery, had once held the Rock of Gibraltar under fire; the conquest and division into spheres of influence, which often proved illusory and still more often disappointing, of the Dark Continent (and we would spend the whole night chatting about the trade in 'ebony', the slave trade, that had founded vast fortunes in England and had been responsible for the development of Liverpool as a port, but Chadenat had read everything and knew everything, even the quality of Negro insisted upon by the planters in the New World, and which races were at a premium in the slave markets of Bahia, Jamaica, Galveston, etc. etc., deportees whose places of origin, ports of embarkation an,d disembarkation I had studied on the spot and seen with my own eyes, etc. etc.); the loss of Suez and Panama, on account of the de Lesseps, among them Baron Jean-Baptiste- Barthelemy, who circumnavigated the world with Laperouse and returned to court bearing the news of the success of the epoch- making voyage, which beat all records, setting off from Kamchatka (the fortress of Petropavlovsk) and arriving at the lie de France (the Trianon farm), of the manumission by the City of London of the first canal and the presence of the English in Egypt and the Sudan, the financial scandal of the second canal, whose strings were cunningly and knowingly pulled in London; naturally, of Napoleon's fall and the secret part played by the Scottish Lodge in Paris during the Revolution; of the antarctic or equinoctial France which Brazil once was, the seven years during which the capital was occupied (seven years of misfortunes!) by Villegaignon, who was without resources, abandoned by the administration who had no sense of continuity, sacrificed to ministerial intrigues without a word; of the littoral of Chile, the last beach (Ultima Speranza, which I visited with Lieutenant Errazuriz y Errazuriz, aboard his coastguards' gunboat. 'Many thanks for the trip, Eugenio!'), where the last of our whale-hunters, the Basques from the province of Labourd, who enjoyed secular rights, died of hunger, cold and scurvy; of Mexico and the disastrous expeditions by the future Marshals of France, there and in the Crimea, of Napoleon Ill's short-sighted policy that led to Sedan, of the abdication of the Third Republic in the face of British imperialism at Khartoum and the humiliation of Mar- chand and his heroic platoon before Kitchener, when the tricolour was once and for all lowered to half-mast, or rather removed altogether.