There are dances—various animal puppets leaping up and down in time—at regular intervals, even when some necessary question of the play has yet to be resolved. The line to the seventeenth-century theater—for Moliere too is full of arbitrary dances—is real. The puppet shows are real puppet shows. They use puppets, the kind you hold with your hand from beneath. They’re big puppets, with overlarge, papier-mache heads and long arms, but no legs.
The no-legness of the puppets puzzles and discourages Luke. Far from seeming to him an invisible artistic convention, I think that he believes it to be a notable, disturbing piece of amputation. He thinks not Well, their legs are represented by sheets of fabric but, rather, Their legs have been cut off, and they have been forced to perform in a theater! In every show the hero is always Guignol, a kind of Puck or Trickster puppet, with a long Chinese braid. It is alarming to see his face, since it is obviously modeled on that of M. Desarthis himself—or, even scarier, on that of his father, who, from his portrait on the side of the building, seems to have had more or less the same features. They have passed themselves, it seems, into Guignol, who is, interestingly, amoral. Guignol takes the splinters out of the paws of wounded tigers (“Le pauvre,” he soothes) but is in business for himself, and mocks and bedevils the well-meaning admirals and librarians and magistrates he always seem to encounter. (Many of these, interestingly enough, have British accents.)
So far we have seen Les Tresors du Sultan (first a mixup on a ship and then a second act on a desert island, including, oddly, a tiger with a thorn in its paw and that noisy, impressively snapping crocodile. Also highly Semitic caricatures of the pirates and the sultan), Minochet (a cat in a Paris garret), Le Cirque en Folie (the Mad Circus, many animals, including, again oddly enough, a tiger and a crocodile), Le Rossignol et I’Empereur de Chine (adapted, the sign says honorably, from the comte of Hans Christian Andersen, although, interestingly, a tiger and a crocodile have been added), and, of course, those pigs.
As in any vast dramatic corpus, the puppet plays are of varying styles, ranging from the classic heigh-ho heartiness of Pigs and Tresors (as they are known to scholars) to the darker, more static style of Minochet and Le Vieux Chateau—the problem puppet shows, as they are known. (Le Vieux Chateau begins with a long, endless sequence in a scholar’s library, and Minochet with an act, half Celine and half Beckett, about the poor cat, Minochet, trying to have her little supper while a mad butcher searches for her to turn her into cat sausage.) All of course are in French, using recorded voices that must have also been registered sometime in the late thirties—you can practically see the Pathe rooster on the side of the box that the records are kept in—and since the language is idiomatic and jokey, it is often hard for me to follow. Luke, whose French, despite his going to a French school, is in and out—as Hemingway’s friends said about him, you never know if he knows a lot or a little—kneels up on the seat beside me and demands translations. (“What’s he saying?” “That they’re going to kidnap the princess… no, now he’s saying something else”… etc.)
That first performance, though, the epochal Pigs, was so overwhelming that he couldn’t sleep, and so we tried a usually reliable soporific: walking him down to the Seine in his poussette to watch the boats from the ponts des Arts. Usually, almost always, he falls asleep on the walk back. This night, though—a wonderful May night, chestnuts in blossom, a month later than the song advertises—he couldn’t sleep, and his troubled, obsessive mind kept returning to the puppet show, to the struggle between damnation and impassioned papier-mache.
We wandered through the Sixth, taking what I still think is the most beautiful walk in the world: up the rue de Seine and then right through the little, unprepossessing-looking arch—a hole punched in a wall—that gives no promise at all that it opens right onto the esplanade of the greatest of grand siecle buildings, the Institut de France, Mazarin’s great curved library topped by its perfect dome. Passing through the tiny, poussette-wide arch onto the curved esplanade is like walking backstage through a flat and onto a great set.
There are no guards, no guardrails—nothing between you and the great building. It’s all just there, and you can push a child’s poussette back and forth in front of the institute entrance and even lean on the door to rest, though it is the center of French civilization. It is one of those odd Parisian absences that are as strange as the pervasive presences elsewhere. (There are enough policemen in the Luxembourg Gardens for each to be assigned one child each, but not a single guard anywhere here.)
Luke all the while was keeping up a running, troubled commentary on Les Trois Petits Cochons. “Why there were two wolves?” he would spring up, sleepy, from his poussette, to demand. (Actually there was just one, but he would appear, with sinister effect, on either side of the proscenium.) “Why he wants to eat the pigs?” “Why that man knock him?” “Why that crocodile bite?” Why why, why… the question the pigs ask the wolf, that the wolf asks the hunter, that the hunter asks God—and the answer, as it comes at midnight, after all the other, patient parental answers (“Well, you see, wolves generally like to eat pigs, though that’s just in the story.” “Well, hunters, a long time ago, would go hunting for wolves with guns when they were a danger to people”), the final, exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer, wheeling the poussette down the quai Voltaire, is the only answer there is, the Bible’s answer to Job: because that’s the way the puppet master chose to do it, because that’s the way the guy who works the puppets likes to see it done.
Wednesday afternoons, Luke and I take our local bus, the 63, which runs down the boulevard Saint-Germain toward his school and the Seventh Arrondissement, back up toward the Jardin des Plantes and the Fifth, to visit the dinosaur museum. Luke has been following a course in Picasso and dinosaurs in his maternelle. I had already taken him round the Picasso museum, which Luke liked, and the dinosaurs were an even bigger hit. He talks knowingly, familiarly, of the brachiosaurus and pterodactyl. I have told him that dinosaurs were defeated by an alliance of daddies, that only daddies can defeat dinosaurs. Look around, I ask, are there dinosaurs? (No.) Are there daddies? (Yes.) Well, then… He sees the flaw in this argument more quickly than I expected. Daddies came long after dinosaurs; daddies claimed the terrain of power only after dinosaurs had already abandoned it. That’s the way the dinosaurs tell it, I say. Long discussions. Long pause. Finally: “Here’s one dinosaur you can never defeat [dramatic pause]… T rex!” He needs an undefeatable dinosaur, a dinosaur beyond the reach of a dad.