Because of his involuntary occupation Captain Solomin was nursing a powerful grudge against the French as the personification of all the attributes diametrically opposed to the “generous Russian spirit.”
By force of longtime habit the captain – though having exchanged his driver’s uniform for a cavalier’s tights – had not ceased to rate people by how they tipped. This was in no way symptomatic of any kind of solidarity with the class of pariahs whose ranks he had only just left, but rather one of those grooves of accustomed behavior that had been dug in his mind, into which thoughts flowed automatically, like tears down the lines of a furrowed face.
For the first time he was walking the streets of this district a free, full-fledged pedestrian, looking down from the heights of his golden epaulettes onto the people passing by. One might say that along with his officer's uniform he had put on a new pair of glasses, and the city so unbearable from behind the steering wheel was now seen for the first time, and from the sidewalks suddenly seemed friendly, attractive, and not entirely lacking in a peculiar charm.
He paused in contemplation before the display window of a great restaurant, swimming into the depths of a tunnel of mirrors and a shady solarium, exotic and bizarre, where slender fans of palm trees swayed above the whiteness of tablecloths, scattered about like snowflakes.
He used to hurry past these places, and only occasionally, when he happened to be dropping tuxedoed guests off in front of the glassy tunnels, did he surreptitiously cast an angry, jealous glance inside. This was a foreign, closed, permanently inaccessible world, a city within a city, walled off from the rest by only a thick plate of glass: visible, yet off-limits. You only got in by slipping on a tuxedo, much as one did scuba gear for diving into the depths of the sea.
Frozen in front of the window, Captain Solomin was suddenly struck by a capital idea. Indeed, who was there to stop him from going inside if that was what he desired, who would stop him from sitting in the shade of the exotic palms, amid those black gentlemen in their fine suits, popping out from the ice floes of the tablecloths like trained seals, absent-mindedly ordering something, and thus compelling the tuxedoed waiters to orbit around him, obsequious grins stitched to their faces?
This flash came so suddenly that Captain Solomin found it hard to act out a small comedy of nonchalance.
As if the whole city were watching him at that moment (the street was entirely empty), Captain Solomin casually pulled out a thick gold watch. As if noticing only now that it was already mealtime, he made an indefinable but clear gesture that would have led someone to understand that, as long as a restaurant was here at hand, then some lunch wouldn’t hurt, and with the indifferent, bored expression of a man of the world, he pushed open the massive mirrored doors.
He was swathed in the pleasant chill of starched tablecloths, air splashed with the atomizer of a fountain, the sickly international smell of comfort. Over the small altars of the tables, people bent in pious concentration accepted the Host of veal and lamb cutlets, to the prayerful clatter of the plates held by the anointed choirboys – the waiters.
With the absent expression of an old regular who prefers an out-of-the-way table in his own discreet corner, Captain Solomin found a cramped place behind a pillar, which gave onto the entire room like the view from a theater box, and seating himself comfortably, he studied the menu.
The appearance of a guest in an exotic uniform did not go unnoticed, and feeling himself the focal point of many stares, Captain Solomin nodded to a waiter, showing the murderous nonchalance and coolness that distinguishes a real regular from the novice, and began to order a long and complex lunch, asking about the wine list with the air of a connoisseur. Having selected a range of dishes with the most sophisticated and solemn names, he struck a relaxed and photogenic posture on the armrest of the ottoman, his apathetic gaze wandering around the room.
The room was practically empty at this time of day. The gentlemen scattered here and there at only a few tables had long stopped paying any attention to the exotic guest and were now entirely absorbed in their food and conversations.
Three clean-shaven gentlemen sitting behind the pillar at the next table were sipping black coffee and having an animated discussion. With only the pillar between them, Captain Solomin was unintentionally privy to their conversation, observing them unnoticed.
The talk was dominated by a man with a pince-nez:
“But surely, gentlemen, you will admit,” he said in a voice filled with grief and bitterness, “that the events we are witnessing must have a dispiriting effect on every sincere democrat. In the violent and unforeseen clash of powers taking place before our eyes, the French democracy has shown itself to be a quantité négligeable. We are observing a phenomenon that would recently have been considered improbable and unseemly – the restoration of the monarchy – and even worse, we are forced to admit that it has taken place without a single shot being fired, without visible opposition from the wide ranks of our bourgeoisie. I trust you will agree this is a highly embarrassing turn of events.”
“I don't share your pessimism,” retorted a staid gentleman, whose perfect bald patch made it impossible to establish his age. “Times of general anxiety, like the present, lead us to exaggerate and generalize sporadic and exceptional events. We are forgetting that outside the sphere of Paris, which is undergoing a contagious fever full of hallucinations and oddities, there exists all of France proper, sincerely democratic and bourgeois. All it will take is for the epidemic in Paris to be eradicated, and feverish delusions like the Bourbon monarchy and Soviet republics will vanish in turn. The first division of the French Republic’s army that crosses into Paris will set things back on track.”
“I beg your pardon,” the man with the pince-nez excitedly objected, “but by following your conclusions, we would wander into the thickets of sheer metaphysics. Judging by the statistics to date, it would be irrational to suppose that any of the current residents of Paris will live to see the moment you describe. Everything seems to indicate that the reality in which we are living is and will remain the sole reality that will be given to us. For us Parisians, citizens of a plague-infested city, the borders of France have shrunk to the city limits. To speak of the existence of this France, this Europe, or a world beyond the limits of this city, which we might only leave in a coffin, is tantamount, at present, to speaking of the reality of life after death.
“You say that France and Europe really do exist, although we cannot confirm this for the time being with the faculties of our senses. You say that we saw them with our own eyes not long ago, that we receive radio broadcasts from them? But do the mystics not speak of the origins of an existence before time, which we encounter through pure recollection, and do the spiritualists not receive communications from the spirit world just as freely? And yet, perhaps you'll agree, the afterlife does not therefore cease to be a question of faith, and a sociologist who bases his sociological concepts on the fact that such an afterlife does indeed exist would at best be called a mystic, and a statesman who built the politics of his nation on the hopes of aid from the world beyond would simply be thrown into a madhouse. Is the belief that the Republic’s armies will come and restore Paris to its old order really any different, then, from waiting for relief to drop down from the heavens?
“I reiterate: for us the world, Europe, and France have, like a scrap of wet cloth, shrunken to the city limits, to the outskirts of Paris. The issues of our social and political life have remained the same, only their dimensions have changed. We have to solve them now on another, reduced scale. But as we do so, we mustn't deny that we are witnesses to the formal partition of France, and that in the face of this partition French democracy has proven itself worthless in the moral sense. Up till now, only inertia has kept the French democracy on course, having long squandered its moral capital. The instant they began to reorganize the various estates, when communism and that shoddy monarchy made their bids – without a second’s pause or any kind of struggle, French democracy relinquished the place it had occupied since the Great Revolution at a bargain price, and to the darkest reactionaries for the crown, just to maintain its annuities in all their inviolability.”