Friends” came as a result of this advice, and was followed by seventeen others, written by an anonymous, progressive Pascal. Which leads me—straddling seven leagues in a single stride, and this time allowing Pascal to catch up to Perrault—to compare and mix together, as a mortar for my verbal construction site, five-shilling coaches and char-à-bancs.
In this letter, Blaise Pascal, with the help of his childhood friend Artus de Roannez and some others, conceives the democratic vision of a Parisian omnibus, even though he, like everyone else, had always ridden on coaches, the bus rides of the Grand Siècle that covered the expanses of land and water between Clermont and Paris—Pascal, who is unable to extinguish his ambition and inventiveness, who accuses Aristotle and the prophets of double standards in the vast yet confined space where he may contradict authority, who is unmatched as he discovers and fires and forges the sentences of his logical proofs, so many of which have entered into the French language (there are times when it’s appropriate to call Pascal Pascal, and others where it’s more fitting to call him the Master Wordsmith), and to such a degree that he doesn’t know how to finish The Apology under the weight of his own specious reasoning. It’s possible that Pascal’s tendency toward incompletion isn’t as involuntary as I would have thought at first, as the pascal, a noun that represents a unit of pressure in physics, is better than the adjective attached to the lamb of God, anyway this Pascal is for everyone, favoring the transportation of individuals without, theoretically, considering rank (omnibus means everyone’s bus, from the king to the poor miller’s youngster), but the royal privilege excludes “soldiers, pages, lackeys, and other liveries or individuals in uniform, as well as unskilled workers and laborers,” an exclusion of rights already established by the five-shilling fare. It’s clearly stipulated in the Letters Patent that each passenger should pay for a seat at a fixed price, five shillings and never more, whether the vehicle be full or almost empty. Hence on the 21st of March, 1662, Madame Périer, Blaise Pascal’s sister, shares the good news about the success of the coaches with Arnauld de Pomponne: “The thing hath beheld so great a success, that as early as the first morning we witnessed full coaches and even the presence of some ladies [ . . . ] .”
Elsewhere, the noun carabas is documented (Littré, along with Trésor de la Langue Française and Larousse, still recognize the spelling “carrabat”) as a possible distortion of “char-à-banc,” an open-topped public transportation wagon with bench seats, like the wagon that was used during the Age of Enlightenment to load twenty people in Paris and bring them on a four-and-a-half-hour-long trip to Versailles.
In turn, the Parisian Regional Transportation Authority (RATP) circulated an advertising leaflet in 1986 to promote its late-night buses, using the slogan, “After midnight, don’t go home in a pumpkin anymore.” Anyway, hop on!
Pshshshsh . . .
For Basile, “on time” always means early. He’s always itching to know what time it is. Managing time is his purpose in life. That schedule to follow. Those kilometers to cover while staying focused on the minutes: to not be late, or too early. Ever since his first days in the driver’s seat, he has always seen the steering wheel as a clock: “Hold the steering wheel with your hands at a quarter past nine or at 10:10.” His arms have become the hour and the minute hand.
On the dashboard, no bobble-head dolls slide around, no pin-up or dried flower hangs from the rearview mirror, no family photo, no Saint Christopher medallion or any other miraculous coin. I see Basile as a sober sentimentalist who keeps his affections secret and who has never felt hatred.
The world is at his feet and unfurls beneath them. Floating, Basile slurps up the ribbon of the road. In the rearview mirror, he gazes at the road gone by in the same way you might contemplate faraway stars on a clear night: the image seen is ancient. It goes by too quickly, or not quickly enough. The good-bye to his wife standing in their little yard where she cares for the roses—too quickly. Not quickly enough—the newly plowed plains where nothing grows yet, at least to the naked eye. If he wanted to, he could, on demand, relive the best days of his life. It wouldn’t take long to add them up.
Basile isn’t an unhappy man. He’s conscious of his fragility. To force the contrast of an exception, like tossing a stone in calm water to make things out more clearly, I presume that he carries an old wound, a small preoccupation that pulls at him like a void—might it be taking him over?—a wound he himself has patiently invented a method for coping with.
The engine warms up. The bus is ready. Basile backs it slowly out of the garage. He makes his way across the sleeping town, squeezing through the narrow streets. Oh, the mill is quiet! In a series of delicate maneuvers and turns whose geometry he knows by heart, he brushes by heavy stone façades and shutters that are still closed. Here and there, a kitchen timidly chooses the right moment to light up.
Everything is dark, cold, and hungry.
Basile parks his bus at the little square. The cafe is lit up. Three regulars have already started their day, sitting like pillars, hunched over with their elbows glued to the bar.
Pshhhh . . .
While Basile goes in to sip a large black coffee and eat a slice of toast, the bus’s engine continues to warm up. The passenger door is left open for air circulation, in the front, on the right. Anyone could hop on.
And so we hopped on, aspiring to act as a witness, wanting to sit back and observe. We, being of royal blood, but disguised as a commoner again, as a clandestine passenger of the bus, have decided to get on for amusement, with the purpose of experiencing, without an intermediary, those we represent, calmly and harmlessly observing, giving in to the archetype of the story-book prince who doesn’t know how to rule and so takes to the streets, the souk, the marketplace, dressed like one of his subjects. The royal we, meaning I, and may it also mean you, bus specter, I hollowed out from a true I, if it’s true that in the tutelary shadow of Julio Cortázar’s Cosmoroute and in Gu Menda (Lino Ventura)’s trip down to Marseille in Le Deuxième Souffle [The Second Breath] by Jean-Pierre Melville,4 I linked Embrun and Varengeville-sur-Mer alone by bus in nine days, from the 11th to the 19th of November, 1988, of course it was an intentional stroll, but I never succumbed to the clichéd role of the wanderer, approximately 1200 kilometers, only the points of departure and arrival were explicitly set, the stops in between being determined by the caprices of exhaust pipes, but nevertheless subject to my rule of no trains, no taxis, no hitchhiking, and no car rentals: Gap, Grenoble, Valence, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Le Puy-en-Velay, La Chaise-Dieu, Arlanc, Vichy, Monluçon, Châteauroux, Blois, Orléans, Dreux to Saint-André-de-l’Eure was an exception (twenty-five km on foot), Évreux, Rouen, Saint-Valery-en-Caux, Varengeville-sur-Mer, all for a total of 685.20 francs in bus fares, room and board, some other standard knickknacks, and nothing really special to say about it all. It was a trip without surprises. Nothing happened. There was nothing to do except stick to the rule and try to observe, which made the trip an ordinary one. What disappointment, then, must be hiding behind the title, My Beautiful Bus! Unless a thousand things already seen and considered silently fuse with the storeroom of accumulated scenes separate from the trip. For the organized trip doesn’t rule out the unexpected. Instead it reaps the false unexpected, the exotic unexpected, the sort that you find in twenty different guidebooks whose same twenty lines compete to predict the unexpected, including the level of surprise and admiration that’s required of you, if you are worthy. The organized trip shifts perspective only slightly. Which isn’t to say, however, that I will resign myself to merely describing this shift.
We, I, who am certainly Carabas deep down, Carabas lured by his homonym noun, this simple peasant Carabas having become a fat and languid king—happiness isn’t as beautiful as the pursuit of happiness—adorned with all the ridiculousness that the proverbial meaning of the largely obsolete noun conjures: a carabas is a fake nobleman, a pretentious arriviste who quickly becomes infatuated with his title . . . Carabas, having
