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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The only novel of the twentieth century's most acclaimed surrealist painter, a richly visual depiction of a group of eccentric aristocrats in the years preceding the Second World War __________ 'Start the first page and you are in the presence of an old-fashioned baroque novel, intelligent, extravagant, as photographically precise as his paintings' P. J. Kavanagh, Guardian 'So full of visual invention, so witty, so charged with an almost Dickensian energy that it's difficult not to accept the author's own arrogant valuation of himself as a genius' Observer 'What really strikes the reader is the abounding physical detail of objects, light, spaces, and materials' The Times __________ In swirling, surreal prose, the iconic artist Salvador Dalí portrays the intrigues and love affairs of a group of eccentric aristocrats who, in their luxury and extravagance, symbolize decadent Europe in the 1930s. In the shadow of encroaching war, their tangled lives provide a thrilling vehicle for Dalí's uniquely spirited imagination and artistic vision.
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HIDDEN FACES
SALVADOR DALÍ
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY HAAKON CHEVALIER
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
ivv
Cover art for the original edition of Hidden Faces. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí 2023
vi
Le rêve by Salvador Dalí. Reproduced in black and white from colour original. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2023
Contents
ix
Larvatus prodeo
(I advance masked)
descartes
x
Translator’s Foreword
When this book first appeared in the United States nearly thirty years ago, Dali’s admirers and the many who knew him only from having seen his paintings and having heard, perhaps at second hand, of his eccentricities and his antics in the Paris of the twenties and thirties greeted the announcement of its publication with incredulity. He had a prodigious gift, they recognized, when it came to projecting his vision of the world in form and colour. But what impelled him, what qualified him, to venture into the realm of fiction, to build an imaginary world through the medium of words?
The novel was written in 1943 when the world was still plunged in the most destructive and lethal war in history, with battles raging on many fronts, from Russia, across Europe and North Africa to the Far East. It is, in the perspective of Dali’s own development, an epitaph of pre-war Europe and reads like a period piece, its stylized characters reliving scenes that are bathed in an aura of decadent romanticism reminiscent of Barbey d’Aurevilly, of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and of Huysmans, taking the English reader back to Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton and Ouida with its ringing aristocratic names, its men and women of resplendent beauty, its luxury and extravagance. The action of the novel, with the scene shifting from France to North Africa, Malta, United States and back to France, roughly covers the period of the war, anticipating its end with the inclusion of a hallucinatory scene in which we see Hitler, against a background of Wagnerian music, awaiting his imminent doom with mingled fascination and horror.
Dali has always envisaged the world, his art and himself in cosmic terms, with God ever-present, whether as myth or as reality. It is a xiitormented world, with apocalyptic overtones, in which passions, elemental and perverse, strain the human psyche to the limit. This world, with which his paintings have made us familiar, has its own laws, its own monsters, chimeras and myths. It is a world of desolate mineral landscapes, centuries-old ruins and blanched Spanish villages beneath skies of infinite aspiration, peopled with figures caught in expressions and postures of anguish or ecstasy; a world obsessively strewn with fetichistic objects – bedside tables, sometimes cut out of the plump flesh of nurses sitting on the seashore, fried eggs slithering down banisters, dripping telephones, kidneys, beans, limp watches, crutches; a world of metamorphoses in which phenomena are constantly subject to strange deformations, shapes and contours repeating one another in a dynamic imitative interplay. There is in Dali a fascination with magic, necromancy, spells, incantations, superstition, ritual and pageantry. He is haunted by what lies beyond the limit of the conceivable. It is hardly surprising that his fertile genius should have sought to encompass a new dimension in the form of a novel.
The basic theme of Hidden Faces is love-in-death. We here have a treatment in modern dress of the ancient and perennial Tristan and Isolde myth. Nothing gives greater intensity to love than the imminence of death, and nothing gives greater poignancy to death than its irremediable severing of the bonds of love. The motif of death, however, is balanced by its counterpart: resurrection. This secondary but pervasive theme of new life emerging out of decay and destruction runs through the whole novel, and it is symbolized from the first page to the last by the forest of cork-oaks which pushes forth tender yellow-green shoots every spring in the plain of Creux de Libreux.
But perhaps the chief interest of this novel lies in the transposition that the author makes from the values that are paramount in the plastic arts to those that belong to literary creation. For if it is xiiitrue that Dali’s painting is figurative to the point of being photographic, and is in that sense ‘old-fashioned’, his writing is above all visual, although as in his painting the images shown and evoked are enhanced by a stimulation of all the other senses – sound, smell, taste, touch – as well as by adumbrations of the ultra-sensory, the irrational, the spiritual and the other-worldly that are interwoven in the warp and weft of human life as reflected in a hypersensitive consciousness. The story of the tangled lives of the protagonists – Count Hervé de Grandsailles, Solange de Cléda, John Randolph, Veronica Stevens, Betka and the rest – from the February riots in Paris in 1934 to the closing days of the war constitutes a dramatic and highly readable vehicle for the fireworks of Dali’s philosophical and psychological ideas and his verbal images.
Have I succeeded in carrying over the flavour and texture of Dali’s style into our alien English tongue? I cannot claim to have done more than approximate it. I spent several weeks with him and his wife Gala in Franconia, New Hampshire, on the estate of the Marquis de Cuevas, when he was writing Hidden Faces in the late fall of 1943. The leaves of the maple trees on the mountain slopes all around us were turning from yellow to glowing orange to fiery red and then russet, and it was there that I drafted the first hundred or so pages of my translation. Dali speaks a rich, colourful French that is neither too idiomatic nor too correct, full of Spanish spice and thunder. As is usually the case with people who are not primarily writers, the peculiarities of his spoken language tend to become exaggerated in writing, as if to compensate for the absence of vocal modulations, facial expression and gesture. My problem was to temper the native exuberance of his expression and reduce it to written language without losing its essential qualities. Sometimes, exhausted from hours of ploughing through the lush jungle of his prose, I would turn to him in exasperation and say, ‘You never use one word where two xivwill do. You are a master of the mixed metaphor, of the superfluous epithet; you weave elaborate festoons of redundancy round your subject and illuminate it with glittering fireworks of hyperbole….’ To this he would smile with apologetic self-assurance, a diabolical glint would come into his eyes and balance on the waxed tips of his mustache, and with great gentleness he would improvise a little piece on the violence of his Spanish temperament and the volcanic excesses of his imagination.
Whether or not Dali paints as effectively with words as he does with brush and paint, those who have been fascinated by his pictorial creations cannot fail to find his venture into this new medium absorbing.
haakon chevalier
xv
I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of my certainties…. To Gala, who by her nobility of soul has inspired me and served as a mirror reflecting the purest geometries of the aesthetic of the emotions that has guided my work.xvi
Author’s Foreword
Sooner or later everyone is bound to come to me! Some, untouched by my painting, concede that I draw like Leonardo. Others, who quarrel with my aesthetics, agree in considering my autobiography one of the ‘human documents’ of the period. Still others, questioning the ‘authenticity’ of my Secret Life, have discovered in me literary gifts superior to the skill which I reveal in my pictures, and to what they call the mystification of my confessions. But as far back as in 1922 the great poet Garcia Lorca had predicted that I was destined for a literary career and had suggested that my future lay precisely in the ‘pure novel’. Also, those who detest my painting, my drawings, my literature, my jewels, my surrealist objects, etc., etc., proclaim that I do have a unique gift for the theatre and that my last setting was one of the most exciting that had ever been seen on the Metropolitan stage…. Thus it is difficult to avoid coming under my sway in one way or another.
Yet all this has much less merit than it seems to have, for one of the chief reasons for my success is even simpler than that of my multiform magic: namely, that I am probably the most hard-working artist of our day. After having spent four months in retirement in the mountains of New Hampshire near the Canadian border, writing fourteen implacable hours a day and thus completing Hidden Faces ‘according to plan’ – but without ever retreating! – I came back to New York and again met some friends at El Morocco. Their lives had remained exactly at the same point, as though I had left them but the day before. The following morning I visited studios where artists had for four months been patiently waiting for the moment xviiiof their inspiration…. A new painting had just been begun. How many things had happened in my brain during that time! How many characters, images, architectural projects and realizations of desires had been born, lived, died and been resuscitated, architectonized! The pages of my novel form only a part of my latest dream. Inspiration or force is something one possesses by violence and by the hard and bitter labour of every day.
Why did I write this novel?
First, because I have time to do everything I want to do, and I wanted to write it.
Second, because contemporary history offers a unique framework for a novel dealing with the development and the conflicts of great human passions, and because the story of the war, and more particularly of the poignant post-war period, had inevitably to be written.
Third, because if I had not written it another would have done it in my place, and would have done it badly.
Fourth, because it is more interesting, instead of ‘copying history’, to anticipate it and let it try to imitate as best it can what you have invented…. Because I have lived intimately, day by day, with the protagonists of the pre-war drama in Europe; I have followed them in that of the emigration to America, and it has thus been easy for me to imagine that of their return…. Because since the eighteenth century the passional trilogy inaugurated by the divine Marquis de Sade had remained Incomplete: Sadism, Masochism…. It was necessary to invent the third term of the problem, that of synthesis and sublimation: Clédalism, derived from the name of the protagonist of my novel, Solange de Cléda. Sadism may be defined as pleasure experienced through pain inflicted on the object; Masochism, as pleasure experienced through pain submitted to by the object. Clédalism is pleasure and pain sublimated in an all-transcending identification with the object. Solange de Cléda re-establishes true xixnormal passion: a profane Saint Teresa; Epicurus and Plato burning in a single flame of eternal feminine mysticism.
In our day people are afflicted with the madness of speed, which is but the ephemeral and quickly dissipated mirage of the ‘humorous foreshortening’. I have wished to react against this by writing a long and boring ‘true novel’. But nothing ever bores me. So much the worse for those who are moulded of boredom. Already I wish to approach the new times of intellectual responsibility which we will enter upon with the end of this war…. A true novel of climate, of introspection and of revolution and architectonization of passions must be (as it always has been) exactly the contrary of a five-minute Mickey Mouse film or the dizzy sensation of a parachute-jump. One must, as in a slow travel by cart in the epoch of Stendhal, be able to discover gradually the beauty of the landscapes of the soul through which one passes, each new cupola of passion must gradually become visible in due time, so that each reader’s spirit may have the leisure to ‘savour’ it…. Before I had finished my book it was claimed that I was writing a Balzacian or a Huysmansian novel. It is on the contrary a strictly Dalinian book and those who have read my Secret Life attentively will readily discover beneath the novel’s structure the continual and vigorous familiar presence of the essential myths of my own life and of my mythology.
In 1927, sitting one day in the spring sunshine on the terrace of the café-bar Regina in Madrid, the greatly lamented poet Federico Garcia Lorca and I planned a highly original opera together. Opera was indeed one of our common passions, for only in this medium can all existing lyrical genera be amalgamated in a perfect and triumphant unity, in their maximum of grandeur and of required stridency, which was to permit us to express all the ideological, colossal, sticky, viscous and sublime confusion of our epoch. The day when I received news in London of the death of Lorca, who xxhad been a victim of blind history. I said to myself that I would have to do our opera alone. I have continued since in my firm decision to bring this project to realization some day, at the moment of my life’s maturity, and my public knows and is always confident that I do approximately everything that I say and promise.
I shall therefore make ‘our’ opera…. But not immediately, for as soon as I have finished this novel, I shall retire again for a whole consecutive year to California, where I want to devote myself again exclusively to painting and put my latest aesthetic ideas into execution with a technical fervour unprecedented in my profession. After which I shall immediately begin patiently to take music lessons. To master harmony thoroughly, two years is all I shall need – have I not indeed felt it flowing through my veins for two thousand years? In this opera I plan to do everything – libretto, music, settings, costumes – and moreover I shall direct it.
I cannot guarantee that this fragment of a dream will be well received. But one thing is certain: with the sum total of my phenomenal and polymorphous activity I shall have left in the hard skin of the bent and lazy ‘artistic back’ of my epoch the unmistakable mark, the anagram sealed in the fire of my personality and in the blood of Gala, of all the fertilizing generosity of my ‘poetic inventions’. How many there are already who are spiritually nourished by my work! Therefore let him who has done ‘as much’ cast the first stone.
salvador dali
PART ONE
2The Illuminated Plain
1
The Friends of Count Hervé de Grandsailles
For a long time the Count of Grandsailles had been sitting with his head resting on his hand, under the spell of an obsessing reverie. He looked up and let his gaze roam over the plain of Creux de Libreux. This plain meant more to him than anything in the world. There was beauty in its landscape, prosperity in its tilled fields. And of these fields the best was the earth, of this earth the most precious was the humidity, and of this humidity the rarest product was a certain mud…. His notary and most devoted friend, Maître Pierre Girardin, who had a weakness for literary language, liked to say of Grandsailles, ‘The Count is the living incarnation of one of those rare phenomena of the soil that elude the skill and the resources of agronomy – a soil moulded of earth and blood of an untraceable source, a magic clay of which the spirit of our native land is formed.’
When the Count went down toward the sluice-gates with a new visitor on a tour of the property he would invariably stoop to the ground to pick up a muddy clod and as he showed it, modelling it with his aristocratic fingers, he would repeat for the hundredth time in a tone of sudden improvisation, ‘My dear fellow, it is undoubtedly the somewhat rough ductility of our soil that accounts for the miracle of this region, for not only is our wine unique, but also and above all we possess the truffle, the mystery and treasure of this earth, on 4whose surface glide the largest snails in the whole of France, vying with that other oddity, the crayfish! And all this framed by the most noble and generous vegetation, the cork-oak, which treats us to its own skin!’
And in passing he would tear off a handful of cork-oak leaves from a low branch, squeeze them tightly and roll them in the hollow of his hand, enjoying the sensation against his fine skin of the prickly resistance of their spiny contact whose touch alone sufficed to isolate the Count from the rest of the world. For of all the continents of the globe Grandsailles esteemed only Europe, of all Europe he loved only France, of France he worshipped only Vaucluse, and of Vaucluse the chosen spot of the gods was precisely the one where was located the Château de Lamotte where he was born.
In the Château de Lamotte the best situation was that of his room, and in this room there was a spot from which the view was unique. This spot was exactly limited by four great rectangular lozenges in the black-and-white tiled floor, on whose four outer angles were exactly placed the four slightly contracted paws of a svelte Louis XVI work-desk signed by Jacob, the cabinet-maker. It was at this desk that the Count of Grandsailles was seated, looking through the great Regency balcony at the plain of Creux de Libreux illuminated by the already setting sun.
There was nothing that could so lyrically arouse the fervour of Grandsailles’ patriotic feelings as the unwearying sight constantly offered him by the changing aspect of this fertile plain of Creux de Libreux. Nevertheless one thing egregiously marred for him the perennial harmony of its landscape. This was a section about three hundred metres square where the trees had been cut away, leaving a peeled and earthen baldness which disagreeably broke the melodic and flowing line of a great wood of dark cork-oaks. Up to the time of the death of Grandsailles’ father this wood had remained 5intact, affording to the vast panorama a homogeneous foreground composed of the dark, undulating and horizontal line of oaks, setting off the luminous distances of the valley, likewise horizontal and gently modulated.
But since the death of the elder Grandsailles the property, burdened with heavy debts and mortgages, had had to be subdivided into three sections. Two of these had fallen into the hands of a great landed proprietor of Breton origin, Rochefort, who immediately became one of the Count’s bitterest political enemies. One of the first things Rochefort did on entering into possession of his new property was to cut down the three hundred square metres of cork-oaks which fell to his title and which had lost their productive value by being separated from the rest of the great wood. They had been replaced by a planting of vines which grew poorly in the exhausted and excessively stony soil. These three hundred square metres of uprooted cork-oaks in the very heart of the family wood of Grandsailles not only bore witness to the dismemberment of the Count’s domains but also this gap had brought completely into view the Moulin des Sources, now inhabited by Rochefort – a place keenly missed, for it was the key to the irrigation and the fertility of the greater part of Grandsailles’ cultivated lands. The Moulin des Sources had formerly been completely hidden by the wood, and only the weather-vanes of the mill tower, emerging between two low oaks, had been visible from the Count’s room.
Next to his devotion to the land, his sense of beauty was certainly one of the most exclusive passions that dominated Grandsailles. He knew himself to have little imagination, but he had a deeply rooted consciousness of his own good taste, and it was thus a fact that the mutilation of his wood was extremely offensive to his aesthetic sense. Indeed since his last electoral defeat five years previously the Count of Grandsailles, with the intransigence that characterized all 6his decisions, had abandoned politics, to await the moment when events would take a critical turn. This did not imply a disgust with politics. The Count, like every true Frenchman, was a born politician. He was fond of repeating Clausewitz’s maxim, ‘War is only the continuation of politics by other means.’ He was sure that the approaching war with Germany was inevitable and that its coming was mathematically demonstrable. Grandsailles was waiting for this moment to enter into politics again, sincerely wishing that it might come as quickly as possible, for he felt his country day by day growing weaker and more corrupt. What, then, could the anecdotic incidents of the local politics of the plain matter to him?
And while he was impatiently waiting for war to break out, the Count of Grandsailles was thinking of giving a grand ball….
No, it was not only the proximity of his political enemy that oppressed him at the sight of the Moulin des Sources. In the course of these five years, during which the heroic and unswerving devotion of Maître Girardin had succeeded in stabilizing his fortune and in organizing the productivity of his lands, the last wounds that the division of his property had inflicted upon his pride and his interests seemed slowly and definitely to have healed. It should be added that if Grandsailles had been relatively indifferent to the dwindling of his former domains, he had never despaired of buying back the properties that had been taken from him and this idea, dimly nursed in the depths of his plans, helped provisionally to make him feel even more detached from his ancestral estates.
On the other hand he could never become accustomed to the mutilation of his forest, and each new day he suffered more acutely at the sight of that desolate square on which the wind-broken grapevines of a moribund vineyard pitifully wrung their twisted arms at geometrically distributed intervals, an irreparable profanation on the horizon of his first memories – the horizon and stability of his 7childhood – with its three superimposed fringes, so lovingly blended by the light: the dark forest of the foreground, the illuminated plain and the sky!
Only a detailed study of the very special topography of this region, however, could satisfactorily make clear why these three elements of the landscape, so linked and constant, achieved such a poignant emotional and elegiac effect of luminous contrast in this plain of Libreux. From early afternoon the descending shadows of the mountains behind the Château would begin progressively to invade the wood of cork-oaks, plunging it suddenly into a kind of premature and pre-twilight darkness, and while the very foreground of the landscape lay obscured by a velvet and uniform shadow, the sun, beginning to set in the centre of a deep depression in the terrain, would pour its fire across the plain, its slanting rays giving an increasing objectivity to the tiniest geological details and accidents – an objectivity which was heightened even more paroxysmally by the proverbial limpidity of the atmosphere. It was as though one could have taken the entire plain of Libreux in the hollow of one’s hand, as though one might have distinguished a slumbering lizard in the old wall of a house situated several miles away. It was only at the very end of twilight and almost on the threshold of night that the last residues of the reflections of the setting sun regretfully relaxed their grip on the ultimate empurpled heights, thus seeming to attempt, in defiance of the laws of nature, to perpetuate a chimerical survival of day. When it was almost nightfall the plain of Creux de Libreux still appeared illuminated. And it was perhaps because of this exceptional receptivity to light that, each time the Count of Grandsailles experienced one of his painful lapses of depression, when his soul darkened with the moral shadows of melancholy, he would see the ancestral hope of perennial and fertile life rising from the deep black forest of the spiny cork-oaks of his grief – the plain of Creux 8de Libreux bathed in warm sunlight, the illuminated plain! How many times, after long periods spent in Paris, when Grandsailles’ spirit would sink into the idle scepticism of his emotional life, the mere memory of a fugitive glimpse of his plain would revive in him a new and sparkling love of life!
This time Grandsailles had found Paris so absorbed by political problems that his stay in town had been extremely brief. He had returned to his Château de Lamotte without even having had time to be affected by the progressive disenchantment eventually produced by a too continual indulgence in relationships based exclusively on the tense drama of social prestige; this time on the contrary, the Count had come back to his domains with an unquenched craving for sociability, which induced him to invite his closest friends, as he once used to do, to come and spend weekends with him.
It was two weeks now since Grandsailles had been back and dined as usual on snails or crayfish in the company of his notary, Pierre Girardin. These were meals over which they held interminable low-voiced conversations, served on tiptoe by Prince, the old family servant.
Maître Girardin, as has been noted, concealed turbulent literary leanings beneath the strict and modest severity of his profession, just as his everyday laconic and objective phraseology concealed a succulent, metaphoric and grandiloquent verve, a modest expansiveness to which he gave free rein only in the presence of intimate and trusted friends, among whom the Count of Grandsailles was the first to be privileged.
Grandsailles took a voluptuous delight in his notary’s long tirades, full of images and often touched with grandeur. And not only did he savour them, but he also put them to good use. For if it is true that the Count possessed a remarkably eloquent style and spoke the French language with a wholly personal elegance, it was no less 9true that he was incapable of inventing those unexpected images that came so naturally to Girardin, images of a slightly acid and cynical fancifulness that had the peculiar faculty of effectively penetrating the vulnerable zone of seduction and of dream in the suggestible and chimerical minds of women of refinement. Grandsailles would note Girardin’s lyrical inventions and bizarre ideas in his memory and often, not trusting his memory, would jot them down in a tiny social engagement book in handwriting fine as a gold thread. On such occasions Grandsailles would often beg Maître Girardin to repeat the end of a sentence, and the latter then experienced the moments of his greatest pride and was forced, in spite of himself, to display the double row of very white teeth in an almost painful smile wrenched from the severe contraction of modesty. Maître Girardin would lower his head, respectfully waiting for the Count to finish his fine scrawl, and on his bowed forehead blue-tinged veins, normally quite visible and prominent, would swell even more and reach that swollen and shiny hardness characteristic of arteriosclerosis.
In Pierre Girardin’s set and embarrassed expression there was not only pride compressed by the humble willingness to keep his distance, but also there was a shade of uneasiness, barely perceptible yet impossible to dissimulate. Yes, Maître Girardin was embarrassed, he was ashamed of Grandsailles, for he knew exactly the use the latter made of his notations, which was simply to enable him to shine in society, and it was in truth thanks to the occult inspiration of his notary that the Count had acquired his unique reputation as an original conversationalist. He availed himself of these jotted notes also and more especially to seduce women, and above all to keep alive that latent and consuming passion, composed of idle talk and artificiality, which by the growing addiction to its slow and fatal power linked him to Madame Solange de Cléda. 10
In fact Grandsailles, who had a poor memory, would go so far as to study the course of his meetings with Madame de Cléda in advance, and his conversations were always woven around three or four lyrical and flashing themes that had usually developed in the course of the long evenings spent in the company of his notary. It is true, to do justice to the Count, that with his natural gift of speech and his mastery of the art of social intercourse, he would often achieve real gems of style, while with the restraint of his rare good taste he developed and polished the excessive, succulent and picturesque elements which had sprung from his notary’s somewhat plebeian lips but which, if he had presented them without modification in an ultra-Parisian salon, might have seemed pretentious, ridiculous or out of place, if not all three at once. Grandsailles, who had had Pierre Girardin as a playmate at the Château during his whole boyhood, had also gained from his notary an immediate, trenchant and elementary understanding of human relationships, which only a person sprung from the most authentic stock of the common people, like Girardin, could have given him. Thus each time it was said of the Count that he was a great realist in spirit, it was in large part to the logical virtues of his notary that people unwittingly alluded.
The Count of Grandsailles not only usurped his poetic images, his profound remarks and his almost brutal sense of reality from Maître Girardin, but he had even imitated the latter’s way of limping. Five years previously in an automobile collision during the tragi-comic events of the electoral campaign, the Count and his notary had both suffered a similar injury in one leg. Maître Girardin was completely cured in three weeks, but the Count, whose leg was badly set, retained a limp. He had nevertheless time to observe the way his notary walked during his convalescence, and immediately took to imitating his limp, which struck him as having an impressive dignity. Indeed, by giving a slower and more serene inflection to the 11rhythm of his defective walk Grandsailles only added to his perfectly proportioned and manly physique a note of melancholy and refined distinction. The Count also kept from this accident a long and very thin scar, which extended in a straight vertical line from the left temple to the middle of the cheek. Now this cut, which was very deep, was barely visible, but like a barometer it would appear sharp and purplish on days of storm, and at such times it would itch violently, forcing the Count who did not want to scratch himself to bring his hand sharply to his cheeks, to which he would hold it pressed with all his might. This was the only incomprehensible tic among all his gestures and movements, which were so deliberate as to touch the fringe of affectation.
The Count of Grandsailles was giving, that evening, a dinner by candle-light to twenty-five of his closest friends who, having all arrived in the course of the afternoon, were now in the midst of ‘primping’ before going down into the reception room at half-past eight. Grandsailles was all dressed an hour ahead of time, and as in the case of his love-trysts, his evenings in society or even a meeting with an intimate friend, he liked to sip without haste a long, slightly and delightfully anguishing wait, during which he had time to prepare himself for the kind of effect and the situations he would like to bring about. He had a horror of anything that betrayed the barbarous love of improvisation, and on this particular evening, ready even earlier than usual for the reception, the Count sat down to wait at the desk in his room. Pulling his little engagement book out of the drawer, he began to consult the notes taken in the course of these last two weeks by means of which he expected to give brilliancy to his talk. He neglected the first three pages, written confusedly and with little conviction, and containing phrases and themes intended for general conversation, then smiled as he came upon a page full of surprises exemplifying clever ways of breaking into a discussion, and finally 12stopped at a page on which was written only the phrase, ‘Notes for tête-à-tête with Solange’.
He remained for a long time absorbed in the contemplation of this page, and a kind of invincible indolence prevented him from proceeding, at the same time urging him irresistibly to follow the confused and agreeable course of a seductive reverie.
It was a bizarre passion that united Hervé de Grandsailles and Solange de Cléda. For five years they had played at a merciless war of mutual seduction, more and more anxious and irritating, having as yet crystallized only to the point of exacerbating a growing impulse of rivalry and self-assertion which the slightest sentimental avowal or weakness would seriously have threatened with disillusionment. Each time the Count had felt Solange’s passion yield to calms of tenderness he had come forward eagerly with new pretexts to wound her vanity and re-establish the wild and rearing aggressive attitude which is that of unsatisfied desire when, whip in hand, one obliges it to overcome more and more insurmountable obstacles of pride.
It is for these reasons that after their long sessions carried on in the semi-languorous tone of a light idyll sprinkled with feigned indifference and delicate play of wit, while both of them were in reality stubbornly hiding from themselves the frenzied gallop of their passions. Grandsailles was always tempted to tap Solange on the buttocks and give her a piece of sugar, as one does to a thoroughbred horse prancing up with the supple elegance of his movements to place his boundless energy at your disposal. For the Count regarded all this with the same good-nature as a horseman covered with dust and bruises who has been thrown several times during a spirited ride. Nothing is more fatiguing than a passion of this kind, based on an integral coquetry on both sides. Grandsailles was telling himself this when he heard the clock in the drawing-room strike half-past eight. He raised his head which he had held for a long time bowed, leaning 13on his hand, and looked for a few moments at the plain of Creux de Libreux, which because of its special topographical configuration still held the reflections of the last gleams of day in spite of the reigning semi-darkness.
Casting a last glance at the plain the Count of Grandsailles promptly got up from his desk and, limping in his characteristic fashion, crossed the corridor that led to the reception room.
He walked with that free, calm elegance so well set off by a last nervous touching of the hand to one’s hair, a final clumsy straightening of one’s tie or a suspicious and casual passing glance at a mirror, characteristic of the most highly bred Anglo-Saxon timidity. The Count advanced to the middle of the room where he encountered the Duke and Duchess of Saintonges, who had entered through the opposite door at the same moment, and gave them each in turn a kiss on both cheeks. The Duke looked extremely moved, but before he had time to open his mouth there was heard the approaching sound of a violent discussion which suddenly ceased at the threshold. The young Marquis of Royancourt, with his head swathed in bandages, appeared, flanked by Edouard Cordier and Monsieur Fauceret, and all three came rushing over to Grandsailles, trying to outdistance one another. Seizing and softly pressing the Count’s hand, Camille Fauceret exclaimed, ‘Fine messes your protégé, the Marquis of Royancourt, gets himself into! On the very evening of the day when he becomes a King’s Henchman he fights side by side with the communists to overthrow the only government that knew what it wanted and that had the guts to impose it, a government of order!’
‘Damn it!’ the Marquis de Royancourt broke out jovially, touching with his finger a fresh patch of blood that had just appeared through his bandages. ‘It’s bleeding again. I’ll run up and change the dressing. It will only take me ten minutes, and I leave it to these gentlemen, my dear Count, to tell you everything that happened. 14By the time I get back all the spade work will have been done, and I will only have to add the truth.’
In a few seconds the room was almost completely full and Grandsailles, while he was busy receiving his guests, began through fragments of conversation coming to him in a jumble from all directions at once to learn the tragic events of the day before. It was the Sixth of February, as it was already being called, which had just brought about the resignation of the Daladier cabinet.
The Count of Grandsailles had an invincible antipathy for the radio – indeed did not own one – and having spent the day without reading the newspapers, he now listened with a kind of voluptuous intoxication to the avalanche of sensational news to which the names of almost all his acquaintances were closely linked. He would interrupt from time to time to have some detail clarified, but before the person had had time to explain, his attention would already be drawn by the surprise of fresh revelations. The Count of Grandsailles limped back and forth from group to group, his head thrown back, his face slightly turned to the left, lending an equally attentive ear to everyone and with his glance fixed on some indeterminate point in the ceiling. By this detached and superior manner he wished to show that while interested in these events in a general way, not only was he not astonished at them but refused to be drawn into the feverish atmosphere of the conversations which only the decorum of the place prevented from becoming acrimonious.
The women especially appeared really overwhelmed by what had happened, for to the forty killed and several hundred wounded was added the blatant and romantic truculence of the organizations involved. The Croix de Feu, the communists, the Cagoulards, the Acacia conspirators, the Camelots du Roi were such melodramatic names that by themselves alone they were enough to bring goose-flesh to the most delicate skins exposed above the low-necked dresses. 15The Count of Grandsailles observed all his friends, among whom there were in fact Croix de Feu, Cagoulards, Acacia conspirators, King’s Henchmen, members of the resigned cabinet, even communists, and with the indulgence which his vivid love of literature rendered just a little perverse he imperceptibly winked his eyes and, taking in the motley collection of his guests, decided that his salon was ‘quite impressive’.
A little overwhelmed by so much sudden actuality, he ceased to pay attention to his friends’ narrative avalanche, and with his back lightly resting against the marble of the fireplace, the Count began to see rising before him, as in a cinema montage, the disorderly succession of the most striking images of everything that he had just learned. He saw the setting sun disappear behind the Arc de Triomphe while the Croix de Feu demonstrators came down the Champs Elysées in serried ranks of twelve, with unfurled banners in the lead; saw the motionless, black, expectant barrages of the police ordered to hold them back yield one after another at the last moment, without even appreciably slowing the intrepid march of the demonstrators; now the latter were heading straight towards the Pont de la Concorde, cluttered with army trucks and troops protecting the access to the Chamber of Deputies.
Suddenly the chief of the municipal police advances a dozen yards to meet the demonstrators. He parleys with the banner-carriers and then the procession, first hesitating, then changing its direction, heads toward the Madeleine and there is a redoubling of the cries. ‘Daladier to the gallows! Daladier to the gallows!’ In a flash the iron castings that form protective gratings round the trees are torn up, violently hurled on the cobble-stones and broken in pieces, which become fearful weapons; with iron bars the gas conduits of the streetlamps are smashed and, as they begin to burn, project furious whistling flames that rise obliquely like long-contained geysers to a height of ten feet 16toward the sky in which the twilight deepens. Another! Then another! And as if by a destructive contagion bonfires of popular anger form gala festoons, with their fiery plumes, over the seething tide of the crowd. From the sidewalk opposite Maxim’s, rocks are thrown on the Navy Ministry, a leather-gloved hand introduces kerosene-soaked rags through a broken window, a porte cochère opens and the livid face of a vessel-commander appears. ‘I don’t know what you want,’ he says, ‘but I see the tricolor among you and I am sure you will not want to shed the blood of French sailors; Long live the Navy! Long live France!’ And the crowd surges on toward the Madeleine. It now fills the Rue Royale. A chambermaid leaning on a balcony is killed by a stray bullet, and an ample amaranth-coloured dressing-gown that she was holding in her hand drops into the street. Grandsailles sees this sinister piece of fabric flutter over the heads of the crowd, momentarily distracted by such incidents, but immediately caught up again by the unsated frenzy which, like that of rutting dogs, drives it on at a pulsating and uncontrolled pace to pursue the magnetizing and bitter odour of revolt.
All these visions were beginning to follow one another in Grandsaille’s imagination with an accelerated rhythm, without apparent continuity but with such visual acuteness that the animated spectacle of his drawing-room became an indeterminate background of confused murmurs and movements.
He sees a great pool of blood from a horse with its belly ripped open, in which the journalist Lytry, enveloped in his invariable yellow raincoat, has just slipped. The flowershop window of the Madeleine (where the Count used to buy his little yellow lilies with amaranth leopard spots which he sometimes had the audacity to pin in his buttonhole) now reflects in the stalactites of its broken glass the burning hulk of an overturned bus on the corner of the Rue Royale. They are unbuttoning the trousers of Monsieur Cordier’s fat chauffeur, whom 17two friends have just stretched out on a bench; his flesh is very pale, the colour of a fly’s belly, and right beside his navel, ten centimetres away, there is another little hole, without a drop of blood, smaller but darker, just as Monsieur Cordier himself had described it. ‘It looked like two squinting little pig’s eyes.’
The Prince of Orminy, pale as a corpse, goes in through the service-entrance to the Fouquet bar; he has a fine iron rod, fifteen centimetres long, nailed like a small harpoon just below his nose and so solidly anchored in the bone of his upper jaw that even with the full strength of his two hands he is unable to dislodge it, and he falls unconscious into the arms of the manager, the faithful Dominique, crying. ‘Forgive me….’ Then at nightfall, the cafés on the Place Royale crowded with wounded and the last belated recalcitrants driven back toward the far end of the Champs Elysées, closely pursued by the stray bullets of the Garde Mobile sub-machine guns; the deserted Place de la Concorde, with the dripping indifference of the elegant bronzes of its fountains and the residues of passion – guttered lampposts with their jets of flame unfurled in the starry night in a sheaf of aigrettes.
Just at this moment Madame de Cléda entered the drawing-room wearing a sheaf of aigrettes in her hair. Grandsailles gave a start on seeing her appear and, as if abruptly awakening from his waking dream, instantly realized that she was in fact the only person he was waiting for. He stepped forward with unhabitual eagerness to receive her and kissed her on the forehead.
Madame de Cléda, with her sun-tanned complexion, so sculptural and adorned with diamond necklaces and cascades of satin, so completely personified Parisian actuality that it was as if one of the fountains of the Place de la Concorde had just broken into the room.
Madame de Cléda’s entrance was not quite what the Count would have wished. He was uncompromisingly zealous of the ‘tone’ 18of his salon, and although this unwonted disorder, with everyone trying to out-talk his fellow, had intrigued him for a moment, now before Madame de Cléda’s somewhat startled and ironic gaze the din became intolerable to him. He immediately assumed an indulgent and slightly acid smile as if to say, ‘Well, children, we have enjoyed ourselves long enough, now we have to put an end to play.’ Burning with a controlled impatience which cast a shadow of concern over his face, Grandsailles discreetly ordered dinner to be served ten minutes ahead of time, thus hoping to re-establish the fluid course of well-ordered conversations, foreseeing that the ceremonious descent down the broad stairway to the dining-room would canalize the impetuous torrent of budding polemics into a calm river of politeness.
The Count’s dinner, however, only restored the dialectical equilibrium for a very short time, for almost immediately the burning issue of the bloody events of the Sixth of February again rose to the surface of all the conversations. This time they began to slide down the dangerous slope along which one passed imperceptibly from the descriptive phase of the beginning, to the ideological phase, which would inevitably crown the end of this meal – a meal which, if not historic, was at least dramatically symptomatic of this decisive and crucial period of the history of France.
Madame de Montluçon was seated at Senator Daudier’s right, and at the left of the political commentator, Villers. She was a member of the Croix de Feu because the husband of her lover’s mistress was a communist. She wore a Chanel dress, with a very low neck, edged with roses cut out of three thicknesses of black and beige lace, between which were hidden rather large pearl caterpillars.
Senator Daudier always stood in opposition to every political opinion with which he was confronted and invariably defended the person criticized by whomever he happened to be talking with, and in the last part of a speech he systematically and intentionally tore down 19what he had built up in the first, so that while giving the impression that he had very precise opinions on every subject the unvarying result of what he said was a draw. He delivered a dithyrambic encomium on Madame de Montluçon’s dress concluding, as he turned to her, ‘The neck of your dress, Madame, is quite edible, including the roses, but for my own taste I should have preferred to have the caterpillars served in a separate dish, so that one could just help himself.’
Villers thereupon told about the latest Parisian extravagance – the edible hats exhibited in the surrealist show. Politically, Villers belonged to the Acacia conspirators, for the simple reason that, being a writer, he composed the political speeches of one of the prominent leaders of this faction.
He spoke fawningly to Madame de Montluçon, trying to interest her in his pseudo-philosophic work on contemporary history. Madame de Montluçon, giving up trying to follow him in his frenzied cavalcade of paradoxes, finally exclaimed, ‘But I really can’t make out which side you are on!’
‘Neither can I,’ Villers retorted with a note of melancholy. ‘You see, I am in my way a kind of artist, and my attitude is exactly like that of Leonardo da Vinci, who left his famous equestrian statue unfinished while he waited to see who was going to win. I keep working away on my book and I’m making it a veritable monument; it is grandiose, imposing, finished in its slightest details, but there is no head; I am leaving that till the last moment so that I can give it the head of the conqueror.’
And as a calf’s head trimmed with laurel leaves was just being served at that moment he added, pointing to a leaf with the tip of his fork. ‘As a matter of fact what really counts, you know, is not so much the head as the laurel.’
Monsieur Fauceret and Monsieur Ouvrard, since the beginning of the meal, had been carrying on an acrimonious debate on the 20Paris riots. They were the most antagonistic political adversaries of the moment because, having the same position, the same platform and the same approach to all political questions, they were obliged to perform masterpieces of interpretation in order to give their followers the impression that they were in constant and flagrant disagreement, so as to outdistance each other in the frenzied race of their immediate and daily ambition, which confused their vision and prevented them from seeing their still uncertain goal of power.
Simone Durny who for some moments had furiously and obstinately been devouring her asparagus to the ends, chewing and rechewing their fibrous residues without knowing what she was eating, finally broke hysterically into the conversations that were going on around her. ‘No, I say, No! I would a thousand times rather see a communist France than a France dominated by the Boches!’
Monsieur Fauceret looked at her pityingly for a moment, then peering straight into her eyes said with an air of solemnity, and as if trying to remember, ‘Madame… what is your son’s name, now?’
‘Jean-Louis,’ Simone answered, her lips trembling with anticipation.
‘Well, Madame,’ answered Camille Fauceret gently, ‘with remarks like that you do nothing less than blindly sign your son Jean-Louis’ death warrant!’
Madame Durny sat as if congealed, her face suddenly motionless, and her eyes slowly filled with large tears: she had just swallowed an asparagus the wrong way.
Béatrice de Brantès felt some tenderness for radical-socialism because she had an intuition that it was in the untidiness of the trousers, in the stiff collars and the unkempt moustaches of its leaders that the authentic jesting, ribald spirit of France had found refuge.
She was seated at the right of Monsieur Edouard Cordier, a radical-socialist because he was a Mason, and at the left of the Marquis of Royancourt, a royalist as his very name indicated.21
Béatrice de Brantès, fresh and exuberant, was lightly leaning on Monsieur Cordier’s well-padded shoulder, paying homage to his political affinities by telling him risqué stories; she had so much grace in her diction that she could say anything without losing an iota of her elegance, but contrary to all usage, she would whisper the innocuous passages of her anecdotes and raise her voice just for the most ribald parts, coquettishly trying by this device to attract the attention of the Marquis of Royancourt, whom she felt to be too much absorbed in the general conversation.
‘Imagine,’ said Béatrice to Monsieur Cordier, ‘Madame Deschelette, with her Schiaparelli dress and hat – that monumental hat – mounted on top of a taxi to get a better view of everything that was going on, tapping with her feet and alone against the crowd pouring a torrent of violent insults on the demonstrators.’
And as Monsieur Cordier was listening with great absorption, she went on, ‘Naturally this could last only so long. (She lowered her voice.) A group of the King’s Henchmen seized her by the legs, laid her on the pavement, pulling up her skirts… (raising her voice) and burned her with the tip of a cigarette in one of the most sensitive and delicate parts of her anatomy.’
‘The baptism of fire!’ exclaimed Cordier, apoplectic and with eyes sparkling.
‘Well, no,’ Béatrice answered with a drawling inflection, feigning innocence. ‘It appears on the contrary that it was the cigarette that was baptized – with water.’
‘What water?’ asked Monsieur Cordier in momentary perplexity.
With a lazily astonished and infinitely voluptuous expression, Béatrice answered between her teeth, almost hissing the words, ‘It wasn’t really water….’ And as some very frothy champagne was just being poured into her glass she added, giving even more emphasis to each syllable, ‘Nor was it exactly champagne.’ 22
She looked at Monsieur Cordier with such an air of malice that he remained flabbergasted for a moment.
‘Yes, I assure you, this incredible story is quite true,’ the Marquis of Royancourt broke in, highly amused, and trying to help out Monsieur Cordier in this moment of embarrassment. ‘It was Madame Deschelette herself who told it to me. You can imagine that having been hemmed in by the crowd for two hours she really needed to go – it couldn’t have happened more opportunely.’
‘My dear Marquis,’ said Béatrice, delicately placing her plump hand on his arm, ‘having waited in vain for the homage of your Gallic wit, since you’re submerged in politics, I’m pouring my charms over poor Monsieur Cordier.’
‘You won’t be wasting them, my dear,’ the Marquis responded with liveliness. ‘He could tell you some that would make you blush to the tips of your hair, but you have to get him in his own element. As for me, my dear Béatrice, I apologize for not making love to you, but I’m sure you understand, with such events going on….’
Saying which, he playfully pressed his thigh, hardened by horseback-riding, against Béatrice de Brantès’ soft one, and she accepted the attention with a charming laugh.
Senator Daudier was creating a sensation at his end of the table by expounding a highly original theory.
‘Hitler wants war,’ he said, ‘not in order to win, as most people think, but to lose. He is romantic and an integral masochist, and exactly as in Wagner’s operas it has to end for him, the hero, as tragically as possible. In the depth of his subconscious, the end to which Hitler at heart aspires is to feel his enemy’s boot crushing his face, which for that matter is unmistakably marked by disaster….’ And Daudier concluded, with a note of concern, ‘The trouble is that Hitler is very honest…. He won’t cheat. He is willing to lose, but not to lose on purpose. He insists on playing the game to the 23end according to the rules, and will give up only when he is beaten. That’s why we shall have so much trouble.’
The Count of Grandsailles had at his right the Duchess of Saintonges and at his left Madame Cécile Goudreau. Politically the Duchess of Saintonges was rather leftish, while Madame Cécile Goudreau was definitely rightist. With the leftist ideas of his right-hand partner the Count would mildly bring out the rightist ideas of his left-hand partner, and with the rightist ideas of his left-hand partner, he would moderately develop the leftist ideas of his right-hand partner. This was all executed with the exaggerated opportunistic politeness of the subtle game of balance which distinguished not only the Count’s personal attitude, but also that of the great powers in the European situation at this moment.
Toward the end of the meal the ideological effervescence gathered around the Count de Grandsailles who, resigning himself to listening, had lapsed into silence. With the proselytizing zeal of bellicose charlatans devoid of all conviction, each one brought forward his own political solutions, with which everyone else unanimously disagreed. The Acacia conspirators saw France’s only hope of political health in a Latin bloc, composed of France, Spain and Italy, set off against England and Germany; those who belonged to the Comité France-Allemagne demanded that for once an attempt be made to create a frank and unqualified friendship with the Germans; others wanted an immediate military alliance with Russia, to isolate England and nip the communist organizations of the country in the bud. All these theses were simultaneously investigated in the light of the subtlest legalistic interpretations, to the great delight of Monsieur Ouvrard who kept breaking into the discussions and who observed:
‘France’s situation is indeed grave, but one thing is certain: in spite of the political chaos which we are undergoing, our notions of law and order are becoming more refined and specialized day 24by day. Yes, gentlemen, on this score we continue to lead all other nations and it is impossible not to recognize that the growth of our jurisdictional institutions constitutes the very health of our nation.’
‘In short,’ the Duke of Saintonges sighed, remembering Forain’s famous last words, ‘we are dying – but we shall at least die cured!’
Grandsailles smiled bitterly, puckering up his eyes which became edged with a multitude of tiny and almost invisible wrinkles. He remembered the Hitlerian hordes, the Congress of Nuremberg, on the occasion of his last sojourn in Germany, and from the light of each of the syllables and of the candles that illuminated his table with a fanatically witty and Socratic atmosphere he saw emerging the spectre of the defeat of 1940.
Like Socrates, France was preparing for death by uttering witticisms and discussing law.
Grandsailles brought a last glass of champagne to his lips and swallowed it stoically, as though it had been hemlock, while the oratorical fervour of his guests crystallized in the great bilious eloquence of recrudescent sarcasm as coffee was about to be served. Grandsailles lent a more and more absent ear to what was being said and, drowsy from eating, let himself relax in the absorbed contemplation of the thousand movements that the light of the candles, the gesticulations of the dinner-guests and the ceremonious comings and goings of the servants communicated to the impassive impartiality of the crystals and the silverware. As if hypnotized, the Count looked at the Lilliputian images of his guests reflected in the concavities and convexities of the silver pieces. He observed with fascination the figures and faces of his friends, the most familiar ones becoming unrecognizable, while reassuming by virtue of the fortuitous metamorphoses of their rapid deformations the most unsuspected relationships and the most striking resemblances with the vanished personalities of their ancestors, mercilessly caricatured in the polychrome images 25that adorned the bottoms of the plates in which the dessert had just been served.
Thus in one of these reflections, fleeting daughters of the magic of chance, it was possible to see emerging from the outline of Béatrice de Brantès, vertically draped in a Lelong dress, the corseted and strangled figure of Marie Antoinette, or the infinitely more extended one of a hunted weasel, which the Queen hid in the depth of the destiny of her decapitated royal head. And in the same way the Viscount of Angerville’s rectilinear nose which aspired to Anglo-Saxon dandyism could suddenly swell into the pear-shape of the succulently Gallic nose of his grandfather, which in turn could recede until it became like that of a marmot, covered with hair and earth, lost in the infernal subsoil of its atavistic origins.
Exactly as in the famous series of monstrous faces drawn by Leonardo, one could here observe each of the faces of the guests caught in the ferocious meshes of anamorphosis, twisting, curling, extending, lengthening and transforming their lips into snouts, stretching their jaws, compressing their skulls and flattening their noses to the farthest heraldic and totemic vestiges of their own animality. No one could escape this subtle and cruelly revealing inquisition of optical physics, which by the imperceptible torture of its constraint was able to snatch the avowal of degrading sneers and unavowable grimaces from appearances that were the most dignified and set in nobility. As if in an instantaneous demoniac flash one saw the dazzling teeth of a jackal in the divine face of an angel, and the stupid eye of a chimpanzee would gleam savagely in the serene face of the philosopher.
