‘The home, Erich, of one of your natural subjects. A minor specimen. Guillotin. Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin. He congratulated himself, sincerely and, I judge, correctly, on his recipe to cure intolerable and needless pain.’
Returning, he said little. I, too, was thoughtful, my optimism chastened. Yet, after all, so much was stable and reassuring. The poplars rustled unchanged, a fountain purled as it might have done for Lully and Racine, a girl in a green hat, perennial gamine, thinking herself unobserved, put out her tongue at the sky, a tramp with drunken dignity rebuked a commissionaire braided and tasselled as an Italian admiral, the copper beech glistened immemorially against gold-tipped gates. Feudal and classical emblems emblazoning porticoes were imperturbable. My misgivings had already shifted to desire, not for political enlightenment but for girls, Calypsos from ‘Ogygia’ with men at their finger-tips.
Wilfrid, I knew, was deliberately warning me, not against girls but the deceptions of peace.Witty café repartee, volatile students, a Tati film, the songs of Greco and Piaf could induce tourist coma, catch me off-guard, for, though Paris was not Meinnenberg, I had been mistaken in thinking it only Hugo’s City of Light. A Resistance plaque, bullet holes in opulent Hôtel Crillon, anti-Semitic and Stalinist scrawls in a pissoir were running reminders of what had destroyed Mother, Father, the Herr General. I should be more watchful. A dark blue June sky recalled the eyes of the Gutter King.
Certain words had lost holiday innocence: Camp, Comrade, Cattle Truck, Shed, Fence were short-cuts to horror, as, long ago, had been Rope, Cross, Tumbrel. Certain words also were immovable: Jazz, Rose, Corot.
The Red Cross was never to discover my parents’ fates, save that Mother had died in Berlin in 1943, ‘in unfavourable circumstances’. Wilfrid’s legal acquaintances eventually divulged that some financial inheritance was secured for me in a London bank, not large but sufficient to allow me independence, a labyrinth preserving me against that never quite credible sha.
Much remained wavering, uncertain. I had a dream of Mother, incredulous, weeping, desolate, being knifed by the Herr General.
Journalists now listed him amongst those arraigned at Kiev as a war criminal. Should he have escaped with his life, he would be in some far-north slave camp. About his actual crimes they were silent. Dogged by old loyalties, I did not speak of him to Wilfrid until I joined him in Paris. ‘By your account,’ he said, ‘a gentleman of some irony, rather less of compassion.’
Loyalties matter, despite my Goethean pretensions of being the temperate, objective European. British and Germans must have perished in the war, all deeming themselves righteous.
Loyal, of course, to Wilfrid, I often, possibly too often, shrank from straining his patience, to over-impose. He had too many plausible identities – patrician factotum, cool philanthropist, wily ringmaster – for me to completely surrender to his kindness. His dislike of physical contacts, even handshaking – another Robespierre trait – could be forbidding. His activities were presumably charitable: he was reported amongst some prominent figures intervening for homosexuals rescued from the camps yet still interned, the Nazi sexual prohibitions inscrutably retained by the Allied administrators. I never enquired: friends, like inferior novelists, could know too much.
He was often absent, abroad for several weeks, returning without notice, greeting us as if he had never left. Such intervals were difficult, for Marc-Henri was unflaggingly peevish and aloof, jostling his hair, ungracious, hurriedly disappearing after meals. Virtually silent, I overheard him mutter, ‘I can do it. Myself.’ Wilfrid scrupulously kept balance between us, taking him to expensive restaurants, the Folies, bowling alleys, but failed to appease.
No matter. I had my labyrinth, winding back into other Paris summers. History was everywhere visible, so vibrant that it hurt. The streets paraded more than the wounds of Resistance and Collaboration. Abruptly confronting me, on the site of his home in the vanished rue des Cordeliers, reared an apparition, one arm upflung, the other protecting a child, a leg thrust forward, a rough, atrocious, defiant face, Danton’s statue. L’Audace. On Pont Neuf at sundown he had exclaimed, ‘Look! All that blood! The waters are turning scarlet!’ Later, instigator of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he had added that he sometimes felt chased by shades of the dead. In Musée Carnavelet, startling as Show Trial or Pact, was exhibited a long table glimmering with worn baize, at which the Committee of General Security had decreed lists for the string-haired Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, whom Lenin admired and, in a manner, Uncle Joe had employed. But I was only obeying orders. On that table, agonized in his last hours, Robespierre had been dumped like rubbish.
I stood pilgrim in place de la Concorde, where another voyeur had watched the King’s execution, tasted the blood dripping from the scaffold and pronounced it vilely salt. Alongside rue Cassette was the Carmes convent, still revering a pile of skulls, where the September Massacres had gathered pace.
One afternoon, sultry and overcast, was appropriate décor for a particular mission, in which Marc-Henri would have choked in haste to lose interest. Mist distorted the Sainte-Chapelle almost to crookedness: then the vast blur of Notre Dame, looming as if supernaturally detached from moorings and about to drift down river. Outside, Templars had screamed in the fires of a monstrous frame-up.
I crossed quai de l’Horloge, past an optician’s exécution rapide, to a glistening heap of old, turreted buildings, to present a card signed by a grandee friend of Wilfrid. This procured reluctant admission to one of those black pockets of history lurking in all great cities, scraps from a séance. I was now within the Conciergerie, its crepuscular heights and depths overcharged with the dusty, inquisitorial stillness, sunless as if stricken by winter. No one escorted me, none was about, though a lesson from Meinnenberg was that I was never unwatched. Those who had suffered here – Corday, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, Chénier, Brissot – were no longer quite real, messy colours drifting into the blind.
Near by, off a grand staircase, would have been an apartment with sumptuous Gobelins carpets and that long green table, now at the Carnavalet, at which, in another Great Wrath, forerunners of Polit-Bureaux had legislated and argued for the Perfect Society. One ponderous arch opened on to a courtyard, cold, hemmed in by walls looking incomplete in the hanging mist, desolate as Nineveh. From a rusty tap Lucile Desmoulins and the Queen must have drunk. Buried near this chilled, sooty maze was the Tribunal Hall where Fouquier-Tinville had signed away lives. In my most humourless reaches I moved through a miasma of Gothic slabs, narrow steps twisting up to doors iron and padlocked, stone panels, grilled cells, sodden, almost fungoid oubliettes, cobwebbed tunnels lit only from slits. I heard, or thought I heard, a footfall, in a paralysis of time deranged as the Girondins’ last night.
My trail was not yet finished, so, on another day, in rue Saint-Honoré, between a hairdresser’s and bakery, with crisp, pungent smells, three youths joking over a photograph, I penetrated a drab passage to a yard faintly thickened by liquor and shadowed by old, two-storied houses. Ahead, from behind a faded green door throbbed orientalized jazz, high wails above measured drums. Visible through dirty rectangular glass, dark heads and shoulders of Algerians were ranked at a bar, the establishment bereft of the name that had once spread across Europe. Waiters in soiled white coats were crossing, re-crossing with tall glasses, from the radio the wails were prolonged, then collapsing into fragments of memory, always unresolved, beneath the apartment once owned by a sober, respected cabinet-maker, proud of his lodger, Maximilien Maria Isidore de Robespierre, whose gaze, like a searchlight, had once paralysed a deputy. ‘He’ll be suspecting I am thinking of something.’