Torture Garden Page 6

  Madame G … had a reputation for playing an important role in Society and State. Amid the endless posing of Parisian life, the influence she was attributed with was not so ludicrous. Lesser chroniclers of the minor details of those days seriously recounted, establishing brilliant parallels with the past, that her salon was the place political careers and literary reputations were both established and consecrated, and was consequently the rendezvous for the young and ambitious as well as the old. If they were to be believed, that was where contemporary history was made: the fall or establishment of cabinets was plotted and, amid brilliant schemes and delightful chatter (for this was a salon where people did gossip), foreign pacts or academic appointments were discussed. It was said that M. Sadi Carnot himself – who at that time held sway over French hearts – was responsible for adroit arrangements in regard to this formidable power, and to keep in its good books he tactfully sent, in the absence of a smile, the most beautiful flowers in the Elysées gardens and city green-houses. Having known, during her – or their – youth (Mme G … was not particularly concerned about such chronology), M. Thiers and M. Guizot, Cavour and old Metternich, she was enough of the old school to retain the sort of prestige with which the Republic loved to be adorned, along with traditional elegance, and her salon gained posthumous renown from such illustrious names (which were continually being evoked), which served to remind people how circumscribed the reality of the present day was.

  In any event people entered this select salon as they did a trades’ fair and I’ve never seen (and there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen) a stranger social mix or more ridiculous fashionable masquerade. She welcomed every outcast from politics, journalism, cosmopolitanism, clubs, society, theatres, together with suitable women. No one was taken in by this chicanery, but they all had ulterior motives for self-glorification, to laud the notoriously ignominious surroundings which for so many of us were the source not only of barely acknowledged resources, but also our only reason to be. Besides, I suspect that most of the famous salons from times gone by, where the useless vanities of literature were enacted, were pretty much like this one … There’s no reason to suppose that it is essentially different from those that have been continually extolled in a zealous lyricism for their exquisite moral attitudes and distinguished exclusivity.

  The truth is that Mme G …, once divested of exaggerated reputations and poetic legends and reduced to the essential character of her worldly individuality, was nothing but a very vulgar old lady who had received a poor upbringing and was extremely vicious. Moreover, no longer being able to cultivate the flower of vice in her own garden, she had to do so elsewhere with calm impudence. It was difficult to know whether it was this that was to be most admired, or her effrontery or her thoughtlessness. Having been forced to renounce professional love affairs, she replaced them with an obsession with forming extramarital unions and separations which it was her joy and her sin to follow, direct, protect and keep on the boil, thereby warming her old wizened heart by proximity to their forbidden fervour. You could always be sure of finding, at this great politician’s home (blessed by M. Thiers and M. Guizot, by Cavour and old Metternich) a few kindred souls, with adultery set up, desires ready to set sail, and passions of all kinds freshly fitted out for the ride, whatever the hour or the month: it was a valuable asset whenever breaks in love and idle evenings threatened.

  Exactly why did I decide to go to Mme G …’s that evening? I don’t know, as I was feeling pretty low and not at all in the mood for amusement. My anger with Eugène had subsided, at least for the moment. It had been replaced with an immense tiredness and disgust – disgust at myself, at others, at the whole world. I had been seriously thinking about my situation since morning and, despite the minister’s promises – from which I was determined not to let him off easily – I could not see an acceptable way out. I realised it was a little difficult for my friend to obtain a stable official position for me, something respectably parasitical and administratively remunerative, which would enable me to end my days in peace as a respectable old man, a civil servant with a sinecure. In the first place I suppose I should have squandered it immediately. And also simultaneous protests would come from all sides in the name of public morality and republican propriety, to which the minister would not have known how to respond when questioned. All he could offer me were temporary and miserable expedients and feeble budgetary sleights of hand to delay the inevitable hour of my downfall. And I couldn’t even count on this minimum of favours forever, any more than Eugène could count on the eternal stupidity of the public. Many dangers were then threatening the Cabinet, and the newspapers, unhappy at their own pay-offs, made more and more direct allusions to several scandals, poisoning my protector’s personal security … Eugène stayed in power only through aggressive attacks on unpopular and defeated parties and a few cash payments which I suspected at the time, and which was later proved, he received from abroad in exchange for a pound of the Homeland’s flesh!

  I actually considered preparing for my comrade’s downfall, whilst shrewdly getting into the good books of a possible government leader so as to recover, in the shade of a new protector, a kind of social virginity. My nature and my interests, as well as that sharply flavoured pleasure of revenge, all impelled me to do so. It wasn’t simply the uncertainties and dangers surrounding this plan, but also the thought of another experiment, or of starting similar stratagems again that was beyond my strength of will … I’d burned my candle at both ends. And I was sick of risky and precarious adventures which had led me … where? I was suffering from intellectual fatigue and paralysis of any urge to act. My faculties were weakening in their prime, debilitated by neurasthenia. Ah! how I regretted not having followed the straight and narrow! At that moment I genuinely wished nothing better than mediocre joys and bourgeois respectability, and I no longer wanted and could no longer bear these sudden jolts of fortune, and the choices between different forms of wretchedness which did not leave me a moment’s respite, making my existence a perpetual and tormenting anxiety. What then would I become? … The future seemed sadder and more desperate than winter twilight falling over the sick patient’s bedroom. And what new infamy would the wretched minister propose after dinner? How much deeper did he want to plunge me into the mire from which one did not return, causing me to vanish forever?

  I caught sight of him among the crowd. He was flitting around the women. Nothing about his brow, nor his shoulders, indicated that he bore the heavy burden of his crimes. He was happy-go-lucky and cheerful. Seeing him like that my rage against him increased at the feeling of mutual impotence – he was unable to save me shame and I was unable to bring it down on him. Yes indeed! To bring it down on him!

  Overwhelmed by these manifold and nagging preoccupations, it was hardly surprising that I had lost my spirit and that the beautiful creatures chosen and placed on display by Mme G … for her guests’ pleasure meant nothing to me … I behaved quite abominably during dinner, and hardly spoke to my neighbours whose beautiful bosoms were resplendent amid jewels and flowers. It was assumed that my electoral failure had caused this sombre mood in someone who was generally joyous and courteous.

  “Buck up!” they told me. “For God’s sake, you’re still young! You need the stomach for a political career. You’ll have better luck next time.”

  I obstinately replied to these words of banal consolation, to these winning smiles and proffered breasts like this: “No … no … Don’t talk to me about politics … It’s revolting! Don’t talk to me about universal suffrage … It’s idiotic! I’m sick of it. I don’t want to hear another word about it!”

  And the flowers, feathers and lace of Mme G … suddenly loomed up in front of me in multicoloured and scented waves, from which came a whispering into my ear, with the swooning affectation and clammy advances of an old procuress: “You see, love is all there is … There’s nothing but love! Try it! For instance, this very evening, there’s a young Romanian girl … passionate … a poet
ess, dear boy … and also a countess! I’m sure she’s mad about you. All women are mad about you, you know … I’ll introduce you …”

  I evaded the crudely set up opportunity and held out to the end of that interminable evening in sullen and irritable silence.

  Eugène was constantly monopolised and could not join me until very much later. We took advantage of the fact that most people were engrossed for a moment with a well-known singer to take refuge in a kind of smoking-room lit by the discreet glow of a lamp whose tall shaft was draped in pink crepe. The Minister sat down on the settee and lit a cigarette as I inelegantly straddled a chair opposite him, my arms resting on the back. He spoke gravely:

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot these past few days.”

  He was no doubt expecting a word of thanks, a friendly gesture, or some show of interest or curiosity. I remained unmoved, forcing myself to conserve an air of haughty, almost offensive, indifference with which I was determined to accept my friend’s perfidious overtures, because I had from the start of the evening persistently convinced myself that such overtures could only be perfidious. Insolently, I pretended to be studying the portrait of M. Thiers that occupied the top of the panelling behind Eugène. It was obscured with dark shadows that played over its excessively varnished surface, leaving only his white locks of hair to spring up pear-shaped, and so alone to define the full expression of his vanished features. Muffled by the hanging draperies, the sound of the party came to us as a distant hum. Shaking his head, the Minister continued:

  “Yes, I’ve thought a lot about you. It’s difficult, very difficult.”

  He was once more silent, seemingly reflecting about something profound.

  I took pleasure in protracting the silence to enjoy the embarrassment this mocking dumb-show could not fail to cause my friend … I was going to see him, my dear protector, once again in front of me, ridiculous and unmasked, perhaps beseeching! He remained calm, however, and did not seem the slightest bit worried by my too obviously hostile appearance.

  “Don’t you believe me?” he asked me in a firm and calm tone of voice. “Yes, I suspect that you don’t believe me. You imagine I’m considering making a fool of you, as I do of others. No, my dear fellow, you’re wrong. In any event, if you find the conversation boring … well nothing is easier than to break it off.”

  He was about to get up.

  “I didn’t say that!” I protested, shifting my gaze from M. Thiers’s toupet to the calm face of Eugène. “I haven’t said anything …”

  “Then listen to me … Do you want us to talk once and for all, in all frankness, about our respective positions?”

  “Sure! I’m listening.”

  Faced with his self-assurance, I gradually lost mine. Rather than what I had vaingloriously expected, Eugène recovered all his authority over me. I felt him slipping away from me again. I felt it in his ease of movement, his almost elegant manners, in his firmness of tone and in his complete possession of himself, something he really revealed only when contemplating his most sinister exploits. That was when he had a sort of imperious charm, a magnetic force which it was difficult, even when forewarned, to resist. Even so, I knew him and yet I often had the misfortune to succumb to the effects of this malicious charm which should not have come as a surprise to me … Anyway, all my aggressiveness abandoned me, my hatred relaxed and, despite myself, I let myself recover confidence in him, so completely forgetting the past as to consider this man (whose inexorable and foul soul I had tracked down in its darkest corners) a generous friend and beneficent hero – a saviour, no less.

  At this point I wish I had the ability to express the tone of strength, crime, thoughtlessness and grace he placed on his words as he told me: “You’ve seen enough of political life to know that a degree of power exists where the most shameless man finds himself protected from himself by his own infamy and, even more strongly, from others because of theirs … The only irreparable thing for a statesman is … honesty! Honesty is inactive and sterile; it does not know how to evaluate appetites and ambitions, the only desires in which something durable is found. The proof is that idiot Favrot, the only honest man in the Cabinet, who is also the only one whose political career is, by general consensus, totally and irretrievably lost! That lets you know, my dear fellow, why I feel completely indifferent about the campaign against me.”

  I was about to make a rapid, ambiguous gesture.

  “Yes, yes, I know … They say I’m under sentence of death, that my downfall is nigh … They mention the police … the Mazas prison! ‘Death to thieves!’ Quite so. What don’t they talk about? And what happens? I just have a good laugh! And you, by virtue of thinking you’re entangled in my affairs, about which – let me tell you in passing – you know only one aspect, while claiming that you are in possession (at least that’s what you’ll claim) of a few sketchy papers … Really, my dear fellow, I’m not worried about that!”

  Without interrupting himself, he showed me his extinguished cigarette, before crushing it in the ashtray on a small lacquer table.

  “There you are, you think you can set me up through terror … blackmail me like a shady banker! You’re just a kid! Just consider … My downfall? Tell me who could dare to assume responsibility for such craziness at the moment? Who doesn’t know that it would entail the collapse of too much else, that too many other people who are no more accessible than me would be under penalty of abdication or death? I wouldn’t be the only one to fall … I wouldn’t carry the can alone … It would be the whole government, the whole parliament, the whole Republic. Whatever happens, they’re all tied in with my so-called corruption, extortion and crime. They may think they’ve got me. . but I’m the one who has them! Don’t worry, they’re firmly within my grip.”

  And he made a motion of strangling an imaginary throat.

  The expression of his mouth, the corners of which were drooping, became hideous, and purple veins appeared in his eyeballs, giving an implacably murderous import to his gaze. But he quickly recovered his composure, lit another cigarette, and continued:

  “Let them overthrow the cabinet, right! I’ll help. Thanks to honest Favrot, a series of inextricable questions have come up, logical solutions to which are precisely that there aren’t any … A ministerial crisis has become inevitable with a completely fresh programme. Please observe that I am, or at least I appear to be, extraneous to these difficulties … My responsibility is just a parliamentary fiction. In the corridors of the Chamber and in certain sections of the press, I can artfully dissociate myself from my colleagues. So, my personal situation remains clean – politically, I mean. More than that … Supported by groups whose leaders I’ve been able to interest in my career and sustained by the large banks and important companies, I become indispensable to the new scheme of things. I’m President of the newly appointed Council. So, at the very moment my downfall is announced on all sides, I’m actually reaching the summit of my career! Admit that it’s comical, my dear fellow, and that they don’t yet have my hide.”

  Eugène had again become jovial. This idea of there being no intermediate position between two poles: Presidency of the Council or the Mazas prison, enlivened him. He came closer and, tapping my knee as he did in relaxed or cheerful moments, he repeated:

  “Come on, admit it’s funny!”

  “Hilarious!” I confirmed. “And so, where did I fit into all this?”

  “You? Ah well, let’s see! You, my dear chap, you’ll have to go away, to vanish … for a year. Or two … What’s that? You need to become forgotten.”

  I was inclined to protest.

  “But dammit,” cried Eugène, “is it my fault if you have stupidly wasted all the marvellous positions I’ve dropped into your lap? A year … two … it soon passes … You’ll return with your virginity restored and I’ll give you everything you want. In the meantime I can’t do anything. Honestly! I can’t do anything!”

  A residue of fury rumbled within me … But I could only cry out
lamely: “Shit!”

  Eugène smiled. He realised my resistance had ended in that yelp.

  “Come on!” he said good-naturedly. “Don’t be a hothead. Listen to me … I’ve given it a lot of thought. You have to go. Bearing your interests and with your future in mind, it’s the only thing for it. Let’s think! Are you? … How can I put it? … Are you an embryologist?”

  He read my response in my frightened look.

  “No! … You’re not an embryologist. Regrettably! Very regrettably!”

  “Why ask that? Is this a joke?”

  “It’s just that, at present I can obtain considerable parliamentary funds – at least comparatively so – considerable sums, for a scientific mission which I might like to entrust to you.”

  And, without giving me the chance to reply and in droll sentences accompanied with clownish gestures, he explained:

  “It’s a matter of going to the Indies, to Ceylon, I believe, to delve in the sea, in the gulf, to study what the experts call sea slime. Do you understand? Among the gastropod, the coral, the heteropod, the madrepore, the siphonophore, the holothurian, the radiolarian, or whatever, to find the primordial cell … Listen carefully … The protoplasmic initium of organised life … or something of the sort. It’s fascinating, as you can see – and very straightforward.”

  “Very straightforward indeed,” I murmured mechanically.

  “Yes, but that’s it …” concluded this true Statesman … “You’re not an embryologist …”

  And he added with indulgent sadness: “It’s so annoying!”

  My protector considered for a moment … I remained silent, not having had time to get over the stupor into which this unexpected offer had plunged me …

  “My God!” he went on, “actually there’s another commission – we have a lot of commissions at the moment, and we don’t know what to spend the taxpayers’ money on … If I understand correctly, this one entails going to Fiji and Tasmania to study their systems of penal administration, and how they might be applied to our social situation. It’s not so much fun, and I have to warn you that the funds available aren’t so great – there are still cannibals down there, you know … You think I’m joking, that it’s just an opera theme, but my dear chap, all commissions are of that sort … Really!”