They were not. Actually they were middle-aged ladies, removing corsets, girdles and suspender-belts like pieces of armour. The younger female inmates of these dwellings – those whose songs would sometimes well forth from the recesses of a kitchen – slept in garrets where they could not be seen.
Loudspeakers spewed forth from their maws in a confused babble strains of music, speeches, lessons, advertisements; every now and then you could hear the screech of a bus at the stop in Rue des Feuillantines; yet there were moments when a kind of vast, marine silence swirled lazily over the reefs of the city.
Rosenthal was speaking. He always spoke a lot, since he had the voice of a prophet and thought its timbre gave him powers of persuasion. His companions, as they listened to him, contemplated the raspberry shimmer of Paris above their heads; but they were thinking confusedly about the women readying themselves for bed and addressing mechanical words to their husbands and lovers – or, perhaps, phrases overflowing with hatred, passion or obscenity.
They were five young men, all at that awkward age between twenty and twenty-four. The future awaiting them was blurred, like a desert filled with mirages, pitfalls and vast lonely spaces. On that particular evening, they gave it little thought: they were merely longing for the advent of the summer vacation and for the examinations to be over.
— All right then, said Laforgue, we’ll manage to publish this journal next term, since philanthropists can be found naive enough to entrust us with funds they’ll not see again. We’ll publish it, and after a certain time it will fold . . .
— Of course, said Rosenthal. Is any one of you so depraved as to imagine we’re working for eternity?
— Journals always fold, said Bloyé. That’s a simple empirical fact.
— If I knew, Rosenthal continued, that any undertaking of mine would involve me for life and pursue me like some kind of ball-and-chain or faithful dog, I’d sooner go and jump in the river. To know what you’re going to be is to live like the dead. Just imagine us forty years from now, with ugly ageing mugs, editing an aged Civil War like Xavier Léon and his Revue de Métaphysique! A splendid life would be one in which architects built houses for the pleasure of knocking them down and writers wrote books only in order to burn them. You’d have to be pure enough, or brave enough, not to require things to last . . .
— You’d have to be freed entirely, said Laforgue, from the fear of death.
— Cut out the romanticism, said Bloyé, and the metaphysical anguish. We’re making plans for a journal, and we’re having high-faluting discussions because we haven’t got either women or money – there’s nothing to get excited about. Anyway, one has to do things, and we’re doing them. It won’t always be journals.
— How about going for a drink, said Pluvinage.
— Let’s go, said Jurien.
They left the gardens to go drinking and had all the cafés that lie between Place du Panthéon and the Jardin des Plantes to choose from. They went down Rue Claude-Bernard then up Avenue des Gobelins till they arrived at the Canon des Gobelins, which still stands at the corner of the Avenue and Boulevard Saint-Marcel. The café’s pavement seats were full of people shattered by work and the heat, who mumbled absurd, truncated conversations or told each other insulting truths, as they waited until it was time to go off and sleep two by two in damp beds hidden away in wretched rooms; there were also a few showy pieces with watchful eleven-o’clock eyes, one of them a rather buxom young woman whose tight curls were faintly repulsive, reminiscent of an armpit or a pubis, but she had handsome knees that gleamed like black stones.
They sat down and looked at the drinkers around them, but it was too hot to get very excited about other people’s existence or even convince oneself very easily that they were anything but images, projections, reflected forms. Laforgue was more interested in the woman with curly hair and eventually she rose from her chair and went inside the café; Laforgue followed her to the cloakroom in the basement. The cloakroom lady said:
— We’ve still got fine weather ahead: the glass is set fair.
— But it’s thundery, said the young woman. I don’t know if you’re like me, Madame Lucienne, but it makes a person all tense. If you ran a hand through my hair, it would crackle like the fur on a cat’s back.
Laforgue asked for a telephone number that did not exist.
— There’s no reply, said the cloakroom lady.
— That doesn’t surprise me, said Laforgue.
The woman had applied powder, rouge and – after spitting on a little brush – mascara. She smiled at Laforgue and started off ahead of him; on the steps of the narrow, winding staircase she asked him:
— Is tonight the night, then?
Laforgue was standing three steps below her and, at the level of his eyes, could see a belly which bulged slightly beneath the black crêpe-de-Chine of her dress.
— That’s just what I was wondering, he replied. But we’d better make it some other day, the weather’s not right, the glass is set too fair.
— It’s a shame, she said, we’d have been good together. You’ll regret it, and as for me, I’ll have been downstairs for nothing.
— You’ll have a drink all the same, won’t you? said Laforgue.
They sat down at a table in the café’s deserted interior: the percolator hissed over the till-lady’s head, the waiter was nodding – they woke him up. Through the open window they could see a row of necks that told a lot about their owners’ faces. The woman drank green peppermint cordial and began talking, and since he had followed her for the sake of one action alone, Laforgue began to caress her knees; then he rose and rejoined his companions.
— You were hitting it off? asked Bloyé.
— As you say, replied Laforgue. She was a woman with a thirst, especially for affection; she was tender; she was just getting round to making plans for the future. One Sunday, she was saying, we might go and see my little daughter, she’s with a wet-nurse near Feucherolles, perhaps you know it, you get out at Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, beyond Marly-le-Roi, you must like children. A fine Sunday was in the making – for someone fond of children, canaries and cats.
When it was almost midnight Rosenthal left, since his home was far away from that neighbourhood, at La Muette, where people live in over-large stone shells, on streets as clean as the avenues in cemeteries where plots are leased in perpetuity.
Rosenthal, as he stood on the platform of the AX carrying him from the Jardin des Plantes towards the Gare de Passy, was thinking furiously about the potent domain of families. Since he had been breathing that La Muette air (no match for the breeze wafting at midnight over the paulownias of Parc Montsouris, but still . . .) for twenty-three years now, he had the wherewithal to fill the time of his homeward journeys with childhood memories: the gatherings of nannies and nurses on the lawns of La Muette, round perambulators drawn up in a circle like the wagons of nomads none too sure about the darkness; the games with the children in the Bois who play in white gloves, who play without disarranging their silken hair; and later, after a day at Janson, the walks in Allée des Acacias or Allée de Longchamp thinking about Odette de Crécy, and the Sunday-morning girls beneath the flowering chestnuts on the avenue in the Bois when everything is redolent of spring, petrol, horses and women.
There is more than one Jewish quarter in Paris. The 16th arrondissement was not the one where Bernard
