Honest Things

Eleanor Clark, on the Oysterman's Cooperative building in Brittany, where "there is just about everything there you could ever need in oystering, from women's dark blue canvas pants and the beautiful fishermen's blouses up to the heaviest cable":

A lovely store, in which nothing has been advertised, nothing is packaged, no patronage is solicited, no brainwashing is done, no profit is to be made and therefore it is most unlikely that anything bought will break or otherwise go to pieces the first time it is used. Oh, the long-lost delight of this decency! For the general American public there is nothing left that begins to approach it but the small-town hardware store, where a nail is still a nail and had better be a good one, and there is apt to be a good deal of junk and vanity even there. Besides, in this place with its crude heavy counters and air of a warehouse, the aura of the single trade, of the beau métier with all its sea-depths and adventure, hangs around every item, for not a bolt or rope or pair of gloves there is meant for any other purpose, and it is remarkable what beauty it casts over everything. Beauty depends after all on what you come from, what you are being cleansed and relieved of, and in the pass we are in nowadays an American lady of the buying type might be tempted to come away from this place with a batch of pulleys, the way her grandmother acquired a little replica of the Venus de Milo.

But no, that wouldn't do, would it? The beauty of all these honest things, aside from their fine conjunction of textures, is in their being together and being there, not somewhere else, in the above-mentioned association, in the simple appropriateness of it all. It is not to be bought; the poor lady will have to go back to the square, with its tasteless souvenirs.

Clark was writing in the early 1960s, and no doubt many things are different now. Except for The Oysters of Locmariaquer and Rome and a Villa, her books seem to have gone out of print. She moved in Trotskyite circles for a time and apparently knew the man himself, if briefly, in his Mexican years; later she married Robert Penn Warren. The Vassar Encyclopedia has what seems to be the best summary of her life and work.

Family reunion

Four years ago I posted the above image, dated 1887, of a young French woman named Alexandra Marie Fulton de Lipowski. Thanks to a message from a Lipowski descendant I can now post the following photo, which shows her older sister Marie.

The photographs were taken at the same studio, Photographie Prost in Meaux, and in all likelihood they were taken on the same day, as the clothing and pose are nearly identical except for the sisters' pins. Marie's photograph has remained with the family, but Alexandra's somehow wandered across the Atlantic, where I found it in an antique shop. The reverse of the photo is shown below.

Both of the sisters lived long lives. Alexandra, who was married at least twice, died in 1971 at the age of 97. Her sister Marie had died the previous year at 98.

Thanks JH for the information. Alexandra's photograph has now rejoined the family in France.

The Fear

Ruth Otis Sawtell & Ida Treat:

Our greatest adventure we found at Mérigon. Mérigon, with its face to the sunny roadside and its back to the dark gorge where the Volp rushes past the Plantaurel, has been the haunt of something wild and sinister. The peasants called it la Peur, the Fear. All one summer it blasted the valley. Crops drooped, cattle died. There were cries in the night, whirring of wings where no birds flew. At last the men of Mérigon set out to hunt la Peur. Guns in hand they scoured the fields, the river, the rocks, until some one—with a silver bullet—shot it down. He brought back no trophy, only the vague word of having killed "something like a bird," but from that moment the blight was lifted from the countryside. To-day you can not find a man in Mérigon who will admit participating in that hunt. But there is something in the atmosphere of the valley suggesting that if la Peur should rise again, there would still be men to hear the flutter of its wings.

—Primitive Hearths in the Pyrenees

Hero or grifter? (II)

There are two detailed primary sources, as well as a number of supporting documents, on the prosecution of Ernest de Lipowski (see previous post); all are available online, for the curious, in a folder in the Base Leonore.

The two main sources are a report bearing the letterhead of the Mairie de la Ville de Bordeaux, dated December 1873, and an article in the Journal de Bordeaux, dated 19 October of the same year, which coyly refers to the suspect as "le général X."

According to the Journal, the whole affair — "the most vulgar swindle one could dream of" — had to do with three barrels of white lead pigment and two boxes of window-glass. On September 16, 1873, two construction workers named Fargeon and Lhoste presented themselves before a Bordeaux merchant, M. Sainthérand, and asked if he could furnish a quantity of building materials for the restoration of a château in the domaine of La Tresne belonging to the général comte de X, that is, to de Lipowsky. After Sainthérand requested to see the owner, de Lipowsky appeared, a price was agreed on (to be paid on credit), and the materials were loaded onto a carriage. Once out of sight of the merchant, the goods were sold, at a steep loss but for cash, and the two workmen were given a "commission" for their efforts, de Lipowski pocketing the rest. A few hours later Sainthérand became suspicious, made inquiries, and, discovering that the château was fictional, had all three arrested.

Once in court, much of the initial discussion focused on whether de Lipowski had a right to the several titles he claimed to bear. Confronted with the alleged swindle, he stated that he and his wife had (formerly) possessed large sums of money, and that if he had done what he did, it was with the intention of repaying the merchant, on credit. He was, he explained, simply a bit hard up for ready cash. His attorney emphasized de Lipowski's service to France, denied any intention to defraud, and declared that, as to his habit of running into debt, this was due to the luxurious habits he had acquired after his marriage had brought him a considerable dowry. "He has paid such a debt to the country," he concluded, "that the country ought to pay him one in return." The court may have taken de Lipowski's war record into account, but it nevertheless sentenced him to a month in jail and a fine of 50 francs.

The handwritten report on the letterhead of the Mairie of Bordeaux is rambling and hard to decipher in spots, but it gives the impression that de Lipowski was involved in not one but multiple instances of chicanery, in which he tried to leverage his rank and his wife's supposed fortune in order to obtain goods or services from local merchants. When pressed to pay his debts, he would fly into a fury and plead his offended dignity as a general.

As a consequence of his conviction, de Lipowski was removed from the rolls of the Légion d'honneur. He does not, however, appear to have ceased to "habitually wear the insignia of a chevalier," as correspondence between the police and the Chancellor of the Légion noted in 1877. By September 1880, the point would become moot; an official decree indicates that he was awarded the title of officier (a higher title than chevalier) in the Légion, by virtue of being "commandant of the 41st regiment of the infantry of the Austrian army." (The same decree, which was issued in conjunction with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, awarded similar titles to a number of foreign military officers).

Had de Lipowsky, burdened by chronic debt and jealous of his social standing, become a kind of roving military consultant, trading on his family connections across several European countries and offering his expertise to whatever nation would pay his bills? His travels were not yet over; he would later enter the service of the Tsar of Russia, though he would, in the end, die in Paris in 1904.

Hero or grifter? (I)

Here's as much as I've been able to piece together of the story of Ernest de Lipowski, the father of the young girl whose 1887 photographic portrait was the subject of an earlier post.

Joseph Antoine Ernest, Comte de Lipowski (one source includes the additional given name of Raoul) was born in Strasbourg in 1843; his parents were Pierre Nicolas Joseph Albert de Lipowski, a Spanish-born descendant of Polish nobility, and Marguerite Sophie Laroche. He was married twice, with both weddings occurring on English soil. His first wife, Marie Eggerickx (the name may be Flemish), whom he married in 1870, died within a few years, and in 1876 he married Marianne Eastwood, who reportedly brought him a substantial dowry. Although there are Jewish families surnamed Lipowski, he was presumably a Roman Catholic, as one or two members of the family, according to his death notice, evidently became nuns.

After attending the French military academy of Saint-Cyr, de Lipowski embarked on a career as an officer, but he resigned his commission in June 1870 due to a series of financial embarrassments. A note in his dossier states dryly that "M. Lipowski's colleagues no longer have the regard for him that is always indispensable to good comradeship." In 1870, however, during the Franco-Prussian War, he was named captain of a corps of franc-tireurs, and rapidly rose to the rank of général de brigade in the armée auxiliare. The highlight of his service, which earned him the title of chevalier in the Légion d'honneur, was the Battle of Châteaudun. He was sidelined during the Paris Commune of 1871, reportedly because of his friendship with Gen. Napoléon La Cécilia, a commander on the Communard side, who had also served at Châteaudun.

So far so good. Look ahead to his death and we see subsequent service in the Austrian army and under the Tsar of Russia, and (from 1880) the higher rank of officiér in the Légion d'honneur. But in 1873, his name had in fact been expunged from the rolls of the Légion as a consequence of his conviction for the crime of escroquerie — a type of fraud.

A prelude to the affair took place in Geneva in September 1871. Evidently there were again some issues of unpaid bills, and de Lipowski seems to have claimed immunity from Swiss prosecution on the grounds that he was a citizen of France and thus protected by treaty between the two countries. According to a later report, "he claimed to be married to a very rich woman — but many people doubted this marriage." There was also some suspicion (unfounded, as it happened) that he might be a certain escaped convict posing under a false name. It was noted that he displayed medals he claimed to have received from one M. Walewski (possibly Alexandre Colonna-Walewski, a noted diplomat and reputed illegitimate son of Napoleon Bonaparte); that claim, if he made it, may well have been true, but it would not be the last time that de Lipowski would lean on his titles and honors.

Not long after, de Lipowski arrived in Bordeaux, where he made frequent changes of address, but soon fell afoul of the local authorities.

(To be continued.)

Notes for a commonplace book (17)

Luc Sante:

The game may not be over, but its rules have irrevocably changed. The small has been consumed by the big, the poor have been evicted by the rich, the drifters are behind glass in museums. Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into representation. If the game is ever to resume, it will have to take on hitherto unimagined forms. It will have much larger walls to undermine, will be able to thrive only in the cracks that form in the ordered surfaces of the future. It is to be hoped, of course, that the surface is shattered by buffoonery and overreaching rather than war or disease, but there can be no guarantee. It may be that whatever escape routes the future offers will be shadowed by imminent extinction. Life, in any case, will flourish under threat. Utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all. There will never be a time when the wish for security does not lead to unconditional surrender. The history of Paris teaches us that beauty is a by-product of danger, that liberty is at best a consequence of neglect, that wisdom is entwined with decay. Any Paris of the future that is neither a frozen artifact nor an inhabited holding company will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin, and accident. It will entail the continual experience of uncertainty, because the only certainty is death.

The Other Paris (2016)

Notes for a commonplace book (16)

Luc Sante:

The occult forces in the city are always at work, indifferent to rationality, scornful of politics, resentful of urban planning, only intermittently sympathetic to the wishes of the living. They operate with a glacial slowness that renders their processes imperceptible to the mortal eye, so that the results appear uncanny. But much like the way stalagmites and stalactites grow in caves, such forces are actually the result of long passages of time, of buildup and wear-down so gradual no time-lapse camera could ever record them, but also so incrementally powerful they could never be duplicated by technology or any other human intent. Over the course of time they have worn grooves like fingerprints in the fabric of the city, so that ghostly impressions can remain even of streets and corners and cul-de-sacs obliterated by bureaucrats, and they have created zones of affinity that are independent of administrative divisions and cannot always be explained by ordinary means.

The Other Paris (2016)

Leonard Lopate's radio interview with Luc Sante is available here, and below is a representative chanson by Damia (Marie-Louise Damien), mentioned in the book.

Alexandra

Note: This post has been updated (September 2019) based on new information from the family. See new post for a photo of Alexandra's sister Marie. Thanks, JH.

According to the inscription below the image, the subject of this carte de visite was named Alexandra Marie Fulton de Lipowski. The photograph was taken in 1887 by the studio of Photographie Prost, also known as Bruant, in Meaux, a bit east of Paris.

The young woman can fairly safely be identified as the daughter of Gen. Ernest de Lipowski (1843-1904), a French military officer who served with distinction in the Franco-Prussian War. His daughter Alexandra was born on May 28th, 1874, and thus would have been twelve or thirteen at the time this photograph was taken. Her mother, Marie Eggerickx, died in 1875, and her father remarried a year later, to an English woman named Marianne Eastwood. Alexandra Marie (she also went by Alexandra Mary) eventually married a prominent French architect, Charles Blondel (not to be confused with the more famous psychologist of the same name), who died in 1912, and then married one François Geanty five years later. She died in 1971.

Ernest de Lipowski (more fully Joseph Antoine Ernest, Comte de Lipowski) was a French-born descendant of Polish aristocracy, though one document suggests that his parents had at some point resided in Spain. In October 1870, he commanded a unit of French francs-tireurs that temporarily held off a much larger force of German infantry at Châteaudun, and for his service he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. Towards the end of his life he served in the Russian Army.

De Lipowski's career was evidently distinguished, but it wasn't entirely without stain. In 1873 or 1874 he was fined and sentenced to a month in prison for escroquerie — a type of fraud. The gist of the accusation seems to be that he traded on his laurels (and perhaps on assurances of a fortune he did not in fact possess) to run up debts he didn't intend to pay off.

The whole affair strikes me, frankly, as a bit odd. Légion d'honneur archives preserved in the Base Léonore contain various documents related to the matter, most of them written longhand and with elaborate formality by various functionaries of the French government. Several of the documents suggest that de Lipowski was at least temporarily stripped of his title in the Légion d'honneur (and perhaps of his pension as well) as a result of his conviction, yet by 1880 he had ascended to the higher rank of officier in the Légion. Whatever it was all about, it appears to have eventually blown over. There is a bust of de Lipowski surmounting his tomb in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Below: From the Base Léonore, the 1873 judgment against Ernest de Lipowski, his death notice from 1904, and a mention of Alexandra's marriage in 1901.

Demain dès l'aube (Victor Hugo)

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

.

Tomorrow, at dawn, the moment the countryside is whitened,
I will leave. You see, I know that you wait for me.
I will go through the forest, I will go across the mountains.
I cannot stay far from you any longer.

I will trudge on, my eyes fixed on my thoughts,
Without seeing what is outside, without hearing a single sound,
Alone, unknown, back bent, hands crossed,
Sad, and the day for me will be like the night.

I will not look upon the gold of nightfall,
Nor the sails from afar that descend on Harfleur,
And when I arrive, I will place on your grave
A bouquet of green holly and heather in bloom.

(Uncredited translation from Wikipedia; photo via Cachivaches.)

Oracles

Rabelais:

Bacbuc threw something into the fountain, and suddenly the water began to boil fiercely, as the great cauldron at Bourgueil does when there is a high feast there. Panurge was listening in silence with one ear, and Bacbuc was still kneeling beside him, when there issued from the sacred Bottle a noise such as bees make that are bred in the flesh of a young bull slain and dressed according to the skillful method of Aristaeus, or such as is made by a bolt when a cross-bow is fired, or by a sharp shower of rain suddenly falling in summer. Then this one word was heard: Trink.

'By God almighty,' cried Panurge, 'it's broken or cracked, I'll swear. That is the sound that glass bottles make in our country when they burst beside the fire.'

Then Bacbuc arose and, putting her hands gently behind Panurge's arms, said to him: 'Give thanks to heaven, my friend. You have good reason to. For you have most speedily received the verdict of the divine Bottle; and it is the most joyous, the most divine, and the most certain answer that I have heard from it yet, in all the time I have ministered to this most sacred Oracle.'

Translation by J. M. Cohen (1955).

Harry Mathews:

Consulting his watch, he continued: "The hour is right, you won't have to wait. Here's what you do: take the boot off your right foot, and your sock if you're wearing one, and stick your leg in up to the knee. Keep it there for a minute plus eight seconds, which I'll time for you; then remove it quickly. The prophecy will follow."

I did as I was told, although I could not believe we had reached the bog. It was nearly dark.

Supporting me by my left elbow, the Count said, "Ready? Now," and I stepped forward. My foot sank slowly into heavy mud still warm from the sun.

A minute passed. Renée counted the final seconds: "...seven, eight," and I extracted my leg from the mire.

Following the Count's example, I knelt down. In a moment there was perhaps a liquid murmur or rumble and out of the ooze, as if a capacious ball of sound had forced its passage to the air, a voice distinctly gasped,

"Tlooth."

The mud recovered its smoothness. After a pause, the Count shook his head and said, "Aha! Rather enigmatic. But there won't be more. And," he chuckled, "you can't try again for another year."

I've found only passing mention of the possible influence of Rabelais on Harry Mathews (truth to tell, there isn't all that much critical literature on the latter), but here the inspiration seems clear enough. Since I've been reading Mathews for decades but Rabelais only recently, this gives his novels an interesting new light — as does the description of the intricately contrived, magnetically opened temple in Chapter 37 of Le cinquième livre de Pantagruel, wherein is engraved the motto "All Things Move to their End." Readers of the last chapter of The Conversions will no doubt know what I mean.

N. B. J. M. Cohen regarded the chapters describing the Temple of the Bottle as "so dull that it would be charitable to ascribe them to another hand." Without weighing in on the debate over the authorship of parts of the cinquième livre, I can't quite agree. They're certainly bizarre, but maybe they just were ahead of their time.

Paris

'So you come from Paris,' said Pantagruel. 'And how do you spend your time, you gentlemen students at this same Paris?'

'We transfretate the Sequana at the dilucule and crepuscule; we deambulate through the compites and quadrives of the urb; we despumate the Latin verbocination and, as verisimile amorabunds, we captate the benevolence of the omnijugal, omniform, and omnigenous feminine sex. At certain intervals we invisitate the lupanars, and in venerean ecstasy we inculcate our veretres into the penitissim recesses of the pudenda of these amicabilissime meretricules. Then do we cauponizate, in the meritory taverns of the Pineapple, the Castle, the Magdalen, and the Slipper, goodly vervecine spatules, perforaminated with petrosil. And if by fort fortune there is rarity or penury of pecune in our marsupies, and they are exhausted of ferruginous metal, for the scot we dimit our codices and vestments oppignerated, prestolating the tabellaries to come from the penates and patriotic lares.'

Translation by J. M. Cohen (1955).

"This was someone"

Via R.B.

Loss of faith

This 1913 novel by Roger Martin du Gard may come across today as a somewhat curious project, a book that is not only a "novel of ideas" in the sense of being about ideas or structured around ideas but which in fact is largely composed of discussions of those ideas. The period is the late 1890s and early 1900s, a time of open conflict in France between the forces of traditional authority, both clerical and secular, and a vigorous positivism bolstered by scientific advances and by the undermining of religious faith by scholarly criticism. The book consists in large part of responses to that conflict, particularly as viewed through the life of the title character, who inherits both the scientific outlook of his physician father and the pious Catholicism of his mother. In the course of his own intellectual development, the young Jean comes to question and eventually to wholeheartedly reject Catholic teachings; his militant public atheism provokes a breach with his wife, Cécile, with whom he separates brutally shortly after the birth of their daughter. Barois becomes the editor of a prominent freethinking journal, Le Semeur, and is caught up in the Dreyfus Affair, during which he vigorously denounces the decisions of the military courts; later, as his health declines, he is overcome with existential horror at the thought of death and finally relapses into Catholicism. His daughter, whom he does not see again until she turns eighteen, becomes a nun, in part, it is suggested, to ransom her father's soul.

Martin du Gard was not religious, but for the most part he is too scrupulous both as a scholar and as a novelist to openly take sides. A broad range of views are put forward, each of them plausibly articulated, from the uncompromising materialism of Barois's middle years to his daughter's unshakable piety in the face of objections posed by science and reason ("Mais, père, si ma certitude était à la merci des objections ce ne serait plus une certitude..."). Ironies and subtleties abound. Barois, devastated by illness and personal estrangements, reverts to Catholicism; a steadfast friend and collaborator, Marc-Élie Luce, dies serenely an atheist, surrounded by his large and loving family. The priest who guides Barois in his return to faith, secretly troubled in his own convictions, is a longtime admiring reader of Le Semeur who, at the end of the novel, stands by as Cécile burns a document, penned years earlier, in which Barois, foreseeing the possibility of a deathbed conversion, had explicitly denounced it in advance. As the pages burn, the priest thinks of the Church, which had eased Barois's last days, and to which, he concludes uneasily, this sacrifice is due "— peut-être."

Jean Barois looks back at the Dreyfus era, but also prophetically ahead to the debacles of twentieth-century Europe. Before his final return to faith, Barois, like his allies, looks confidently forward to an age in which scientific progress would solve not only medical and technical problems but social ones as well. Martin du Gard foresaw that even as the disappointment of those expectations would lead some, like Barois, to reach for the familiar emotional comforts of faith, it would lead others — notably two young Catholic nationalists who debate with Barois near the end of the book — to an irrational politics that arguably prefigures Fascism. Some, like Luce, face the void bravely and with eyes open; others spiral into despair. One hundred years later the terms of the debate are very different, but the stakes remain the same.

Why have they killed Jaurès?

Today is the 99th anniversary of the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader and parliamentarian who had struggled, valiantly but vainly, to keep his country from plunging into the infernal stupidity of what would become known as "the Great War." Dining in a Paris restaurant, Jaurès was shot by a French nationalist who was later acquitted of the murder. A fictionalized version of the event is included in Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibault.

This version of Jacques Brel's "Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?" was recorded by Erik Marchand.

Ils étaient usés à quinze ans
Ils finissaient en débutant
Les douze mois s'appelaient décembre
Quelle vie ont eu nos grand-parents
Entre l'absinthe et les grand-messes
Ils étaient vieux avant que d´être
Quinze heures par jour le corps en laisse
Laissent au visage un teint de cendres
Oui notre Monsieur, oui notre bon Maître

Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?
Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?

On ne peut pas dire qu'ils furent esclaves
De là à dire qu'ils ont vécu
Lorsque l'on part aussi vaincu
C´est dur de sortir de l'enclave
Et pourtant l'espoir fleurissait
Dans les rêves qui montaient aux cieux
Des quelques ceux qui refusaient
De ramper jusqu'à la vieillesse
Oui notre bon Maître, oui notre Monsieur

Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?
Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?

Si par malheur ils survivaient
C'était pour partir à la guerre
C'était pour finir à la guerre
Aux ordres de quelque sabreur
Qui exigeait du bout des lèvres
Qu'ils aillent ouvrir au champ d'horreur
Leurs vingt ans qui n'avaient pu naître
Et ils mouraient à pleine peur
Tout miséreux oui notre bon Maître
Couverts de prèles oui notre Monsieur
Demandez-vous belle jeunesse
Le temps de l'ombre d'un souvenir
Le temps de souffle d'un soupir

Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?
Pourquoi ont-ils tué Jaurès?

Streets of the Spectacle

It's February 1848, and Frédéric Moreau, the idle young hero of Flaubert's Sentimental Education, paces up and down the sidewalk, nervously awaiting a rendez-vous with another man's wife. The two have been engaged in a passionate but unconsummated love affair, and Frederick has at last persuaded her to stroll arm-in-arm with him, in public view, along the streets of Paris. (What Madame Arnoux doesn't know is that he is secretly scheming to whisk her up into a room he has previously rented just for that purpose.) But, inexplicably, his date hasn't shown, and Frederick is left cooling his heels. Here's how Flaubert describes him:

He considered the cracks in the paving-stones, the mouths of the gutters, the candelabras, the numbers above the doors. The most trivial objects became his companions, or rather ironic spectators, and the regular façades of the houses seemed pitiless to him. He felt himself dissolve from despondency. The reverberation of his footsteps shook his brain.

When his watch read four o'clock, he felt a wave of something like vertigo, like horror. He tried to repeat some lines of poetry, to perform some mental calculation, to concoct a story. Impossible! The image of Madame Arnoux obsessed him. He wanted to run to her. But which route would he take to avoid passing her?

What gives this rather silly scene an extra pungency is what is happening all around it, because an uprising is in the process of breaking out, the early stages of which Frédéric has personally witnessed, and the reign of Louis-Philippe is about to come to a sudden, violent end. Only after some time has passed does it dawn on him that it might be the fighting in the streets that has prevented her from appearing — in fact this is not the case, as she has been detained because her son is ill — and eventually he gives up and consoles himself, even as the battle rages, by chasing after another woman, whom he succeeds in leading up to the same rented room he had prepared for Madame Arnoux. The next morning he leaves her, goes out, and is on hand during some of the fighting, which fascinates him even as he remains emotionally detached from it:

The wounded who fell, the corpses stretched out, didn't seem like real wounded, like real corpses. It seemed to him like being present at a spectacle.

At one point Frederick will tread on something soft and realize that it's the hand of a dead man, but even this has no real effect on him.

The whole episode, and the entire novel, are heavily tinged with irony, a self-mocking irony given that the character of Frédéric is regarded as being modeled on the author, who, like Frédéric, supported the 1848 revolution but was largely indifferent to politics. Inevitably, it recalls the writings of the Situationist Guy Debord, who declared (as translated by Ken Knabb):

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. (The Society of the Spectacle)

It's likely no coincidence that the events that Flaubert chose to describe coincided with the earliest years of photography. Far more so than a painting, a photograph is an image that acquires a life independent of its creator. Photography is an art form, to be sure, and is eminently susceptible to being manipulated, but a photographic image eludes the control of the photographer in a way that a painted one, whose every brushstroke has been consciously placed, can not. The image at the top of this post, captured by Daguerre himself in 1838, bears details and resonances that the photographer himself may or may not have noticed; most importantly, it doesn't matter if he noticed them. Frédéric, the epitome of the Paris flâneur, is strolling through a spectacular world, that is, a world made up of just such images, not necessarily photographs themselves (though they are a part of it) but a whole universe of things that appear not to have been consciously created, by God or by man, but rather to simply exist on their own.

The Daguerrotype shown, which is said to be the earliest datable photographic representation of the human form (a bootblack and his customer at lower left), depicts the Boulevard du Temple. Flaubert later lived on the same street.

Echoes of war

Coincidence or fate put an advance copy of Jean Echenoz's fine, slender novel about French soldiers in the Great War into my hands just as I was reading the last few pages of Les Thibault, Roger Martin du Gard's anything but slender roman fleuve, the latter sections of which span the war years. (Spoilers ahead, so be advised.)

As it turns out, the books have some curious similarities. Some of these, like the scenes narrating the mobilization of the French army at the outset of the war and the loss of one limb by a major character in the course of it, might be plausibly dismissed as inevitable given the nature of the subject. On the other hand, the fact that both novels are primarily concerned with two men, and that in the course of each narrative one of those two men will die in the crash of the two-seater aircraft in which he is a passenger (and leave behind a pregnant girlfriend) may be a coincidence or may be a sly hommage on Echenoz's part, a hommage that would not be out of character given that the opening pages of 1914 feature a pointed allusion to Victor Hugo's novel of the 1793 Vendée uprising, entitled Ninety-Three. (The French title of Echenoz's novel, by the way, is not 1914 but a simple 14, and it also begins in the Vendée.)

Be that as it may, the novels have little in common in tone, with Martin du Gard's being (for the most part) earnest and analytical, and the newer book more graphic in its depiction of warfare but also leavened with a bit of playful postmodernism. As a case in point, we only find out about halfway through 1914 that its two chief characters, two men named Anthime and Charles who have been strangely circling around each other for several chapters, seemingly both attracted and repelled by some connection whose nature is unclear, are in fact brothers, as are, of course, Jacques and Antoine Thibault in Martin du Gard's novel.

Jean Echenoz's 1914 will be published by the New Press early next year, and will doubtless be one of many new books released in conjunction with the centenary of the beginning of the war.

Rereading Martin du Gard (IX): Night raid

It is springtime in Paris, 1918. The youngest of the Thibaults, Jacques, has been dead since the beginning of the war; his older brother, Antoine, a medical officer in the French army, has inhaled mustard gas while conducting an inspection tour aimed, ironically, at determining why so many members of the medical corps have been gassed. He survives, but with aftereffects that sap his energy, leave him short of breath, and make it difficult for him to speak. He has been recuperating — if that is the accurate word — in a hospital in southern France, but has obtained leave for a few days to return to Paris in order to attend the funeral of an old family retainer. While in the city, he consults with a senior colleague, Dr. Philip. As the two doctors go over the details of Antoine's case, he reads in his old mentor's eyes what at bottom he has already known but refused to admit to himself: that the course of his "recovery" is in fact a downward spiral of remission and relapse that must, inexorably, lead to his death within a matter of months.

For Antoine, who has taken great pride — that stubborn Thibault pride, the family crest — in his own skill and drive, in his scientific knowledge, in the bright future that lay ahead of him, this death sentence produces a paroxysm of horror. Naturally he has known all along — and he is not a religious man — that his life would one day end, but he has always been confident that his death would come only after a long life filled with accomplishments and laurels; there would be a sense of satisfaction, a legacy to leave behind. Abruptly, confronted with his own annihilation, he realizes that it will all come to nought.

The chapter that narrates Antoine's return home that evening is one of the briefest and most extraordinary in the book. Reeling, he first takes the boulevard Malesherbes to the rue Boissy-d'Anglas, "passing so close to the façades that his elbows at times struck the walls."

He found himself under the trees of the Champs-Élysées. Before him, through the trunks, barely illuminated but visible under the nocturnal light of that beautiful spring night, stretched the Place de la Concorde, crisscrossed by silent automobiles which appeared like beasts with phosphorescent eyes and then vanished into the darkness. He saw a bench and approached it. Before sitting down, out of habit, he told himself "Don't catch cold." (And at once he thought, "What does it matter, now?") The blinding verdict that he had read in Philip's face had taken posssession of his spirit, and not only his spirit but his body, like an enormous parasite, a devouring tumor that would crowd out everything else in order to bloom monstrously and occupy his entire being.

The lyricism at just this point in the narrative, this nocturnal urban sublime in the face of the abyss, is remarkable, but it is about to become more so. He hears a distant howling noise in the night. At first he is barely aware of it; then:

Two shadows, two female forms, emerged at a run from beneath the trees, and, almost at the same time, all the warning sirens began to scream at once. The sparse points of lights that blinked feebly around the Place de la Concorde were instantly extinguished.

It is a night raid by German bombers, and the city is quickly blacked out. He hears distant detonations, the sounds of anti-aircraft guns, and rises from his bench.

Above Paris, an astonishing sky came to life. Emanating from every part of the horizon, luminous beams swept the vault of the night, their milky trails moving off and intersecting, scrutinizing the jumble of stars like a face, brutal, swift, or at times hesitating, stopping suddenly to examine a suspect spot, then recommencing their gliding investigation.

He looks for a taxi,

But the square was now deserted, dark, immense and could only be discerned at moments. Its outline would suddenly appear, rising out of the gloom in the intermittent reflection of the searchlights, with its balustrades, its pale statues, its Obelisk, its fountains, and the funereal columns of its tall lampposts, like a vision in a dream, a city petrified by some enchantment, the vestige of a vanished civilization, a dead city, long buried in the sands.

As the detonations and the sounds of machine gun fire rage on, he skirts the Tuileries and approaches the Pont Royal, watching halos of red flame rise all over the city.

He had forgotten his misery. Beneath that invisible, imprecise menace that hovered like the blind wrath of a god, an artificial excitation spurred his blood; a kind of furious inebriation gave him strength. He quickened his steps, reached the bridge, crossed the river, and plunged into the rue du Bac.

A few moments later he is standing outside the building where he lives, resigned to his fate but dreading the solitude of rooms where he knows that no one awaits him.

These few pages are the last chapter of third-person narration in The Thibaults; the more than one hundred pages that follow are composed of letters and of entries in Antoine's journal, which he continues to the day of his death. It's almost as if Martin du Gard, who generally took a more scientific, matter-of-fact approach to narration, decided to pull out all the stops for a set-piece that would combine existential horror, the nightmare of modern warfare, and the beauty — and unexpected, evocative solitude — of the monuments of Paris into one final dazzling flourish.

[Image above: Yvon, Pont Royal and Quai des Tuileries. The translations are mine rather than Stuart Gilbert's, but in any case they pale beside the original.]

Sloth

Sometime in the 19th century (an Emperor is on the throne of France), a Parisian woman named Anne relocates to a tiny village in the countryside. Though she misses some of the creature comforts of the metropolis, she has as compensation "the unsullied joys of country life" in "this heaven on earth." She writes a series of letters to her old friend Solange (who apparently never answers them). In her second letter she alludes in passing to a curious provincial custom: during the winter months the locals quite literally hibernate, tucking themselves into goatskin bags and suspending themselves from the rafters until spring. "How strange these people are, who do not hesitate to subtract the entire winter from their span of life!" she declares. As the correspondence continues, Anne becomes increasingly alarmed, and at last horrified, when she realizes that not only the peasants, but the servants and even the local gentry will all take part in the practice, leaving her entirely to her own devices. As a last departing hussar waits impatiently to ride off, she pens one final desperate missive to her erstwhile friend:

There are only two minutes left. Understand me well, Solange. I cannot prepare my food, I cannot do anything, there is nothing in the house, I am frightened of the horses, I could not ride them to safety -- even if they too are not asleep. I shall die here if you do not save me, Solange .... Solange, my soul, what can I say to you? Save your wretched

A

Years ago, when I first read the story summarized above, Tomasso Landolfi's brief "Pastoral" (which can be found in the New Directions collection Gogol's Wife and Other Stories) I took it for a bit of Gothic whimsy, a fantastic tale of quasi-vampirism in the provinces. But according to a New York Times op ed piece by the biographer and cultural historian Graham Robb, in the days before electrification many French countryfolk did in fact engage in something approaching hibernation, though not, to be sure, by hanging from the rafters.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. "Seven months of winter, five months of hell," they said in the Alps. When the "hell" of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.

Robb provides more details in his book The Discovery of France:

An official report on the Nièvre in 1944 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-labourer once the harvest was in and the vine stocks had been burned:

After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.

Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies. In Normandy, according to the diary of Jules Renard, "the peasant at home moves little more than the sloth" (1889); "in winter, they pass their lives asleep, corked up like snails" (1908).

Some of these reports should, no doubt, be taken with a grain of salt, nor are they unique to France. (Some reasonable skepticism on the whole topic of "human hibernation" can be found on the blog Not of General Interest.) But even the fact that such reports were believed at the time lends a whole new slant to Landolfi's story. His hapless heroine is now revealed as an obtuse and pampered outsider, who is not only utterly spoiled and unable to fend for herself without the assistance of servants, but who also in her sophistication is unable to see the simple practical value of a good long spell of winter dormancy.

In any case, just something to mull over on the shortest day of the year. By the way, according to New Directions, the photograph on the front of the dust jacket, in which the author's face is almost completely obscured, was the only one Landolfi approved for publication, at least as of 1963 when Gogol's Wife was released. The jacket was designed by David Ford.