I can still see him under the neon lights of the Café Rabe, coming toward us with his broken gait. Is it only by chance that I came across this letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, which reminds me of him? “I honestly think that all the prizefighters, actors, writers who live by their own personal performances ought to have managers in their best years. The ephemeral part of the talent seems, when it is in hiding so apart from one, so ‘otherwise,’ that it seems it ought to have some better custodian than the poor individual with whom it lodges and who is left with the bill.”
Which he will settle at the Café Rabe.
I had met Jacqueline one Sunday evening, in Paris, in the sixteenth. A curious arrondissement. Claude Bernard, for instance, whose police file I’d like to peruse to learn more about the man I met at nineteen, often dined at restaurants in that quarter. The members of the Rue Lauriston gang as well. Pagnon lived in a deluxe furnished apartment at 48-bis Rue des Belles-Feuilles. He frequented the riding club in Neuilly and even the grounds of the Cercle de l’Etrier in the Bois de Boulogne, which he had requisitioned one afternoon through “Henri” so that his mistress could go horseback riding all on her own, without being bothered by anyone …
Rack my brains as I might for memories of the sixteenth arrondissement, I find only empty apartments, as if everything has been repossessed — like in Simone Cordier’s living room.
That Sunday evening, it was raining. It was in October or November. Claude Bernard had arranged to meet me for dinner in a restaurant on Rue de la Tour. The day before, I’d sold him the complete works of Balzac — the Veuve Houssiaux edition. I arrived first. The only customer. I waited in a small room with light wood paneling. Photos of jockeys and riding instructors, most of them inscribed, decorated the walls.
Three people made a noisy entrance: a blond man of about fifty, tall and well built, wearing a hunting jacket and an ascot; a dark-haired man who was much younger and shorter than the first; and a girl about my age, with chestnut hair and light-colored eyes, wrapped in a fur coat. The restaurant owner made a beeline toward them, a smile on his face.
“What’s new?”
Short-and-dark gave him a smug up-and-down look.
“Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road … Averaged a hundred miles an hour … These two were scared witless.”
He nodded toward the girl and the blond man in the riding jacket. The latter shrugged.
“He thinks he’s a racing driver. He forgets I was racing with Wimille and Sommer when I was twenty …”
The three men burst out laughing. As for the girl, she seemed to be sulking. The owner showed them to a table facing mine. He hadn’t noticed my presence. The dark-haired man had his back to me. The other one was seated next to the girl, on the bench. She hadn’t removed her fur. The telephone rang. The phone was on the bar, to my right.
“It’s for you, Monsieur …”
The owner held out the receiver to me. I got up. The eyes of all three of them were on me. The dark-haired one had even turned around. Claude Bernard apologized for not being able to join me. He was “stuck”—he said — in his house on the Ile des Loups “owing to an unexpected visit.” He asked if I had enough on me to pay for dinner. Fortunately, I’d kept the three thousand francs from the sale of the Balzac in the inner pocket of my jacket. When I hung up, my eyes met the girl’s. I didn’t dare leave the restaurant without ordering, as I would have had to ask for my coat, which a waiter had put in the cloakroom at the back of the restaurant.
I returned to that place several times. With Claude Bernard, or else alone. Claude Bernard was surprised at my constancy in going to Rue de la Tour. I wanted to know more about that girl who didn’t take off her fur coat and who always looked sullen.
Every Sunday evening, they made their entrance at around nine-thirty. They were in a group of four or five, sometimes more. They were loud, and the owner treated them with affable deference. The girl sat at their table, very stiff, and always next to the blond in the riding jacket. She never said a word. She seemed absent. Her fur coat clashed with the youthfulness of her face.
“Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road …” The echo of those words, which I’d heard that first Sunday, is now so faint that I have to strain my ears. The years have covered them over with static. Vierzon … They were returning from Sologne, where the blond in the hunting jacket owned a chateau and property. He bore the title of marquis. Later, I learned his name, which conjured up the wasp-waisted pages of the Valois court and Morgane le Fay, from which his family claimed to descend.
But I had in front of me only a man with a heavyset face and coarse voice. I felt an unease similar to the one that gripped me a few years later, when I overheard a conversation between forwarding agents and meatpacking truckers at an inn near Paris: they were talking about the poachers who supplied them with deer and venison, about clandestine slaughters and nocturnal deliveries to horse butchers’ shops; the places where they operated were the ones whose graceful names had been sung by Gérard de Nervaclass="underline" Crépy-en-Valois, Mortefontaine, Loisy, La Chapelle-en-Serval …
So they were returning from Sologne. The marquis was master of the hounds for a hunting rally that “unleashed”—I had caught that word from their mouths — in the Vierzon forest. The rally was called the “Sologne — Menehou Pond.” And I imagined that pond at the end of a forest path, at sunset. In the distance, a fanfare of hunting horns tugged at my heart. I couldn’t take my eyes off the still waters with their reddish reflections, the water lilies, the bulrushes. Little by little, the surface of the water turned black, and I saw that girl, as a child, at the edge of the pond in Menehou …
After several Sundays, the restaurant owner began to recognize me. I had taken advantage of a moment when the others hadn’t yet arrived for dinner, and I’d asked him who that girl in the fur coat was, with regard to the marquis whom she always seemed to be with and who always sat next to her. “A poor relation,” he’d said with a shrug.
A poor relation, certainly born, like the marquis, into a very old, aristocratic family whose origins were lost in the mists of time and in the depths of the forests of the Ile de France and Sologne … I was certain she’d spent her childhood in a boarding school in Bourges, with the Ursuline sisters. She was the only descendant of one of those extinct families with no male heirs, the kind that people called “overseas half-breeds,” who remained in Constantinople, Greece, and Sicily for centuries after the Crusades. Much later, one of her ancestors had returned to Sologne, their native land, to discover a ruined castle on the banks of the Menehou pond, and linden trees, in whose shade, in summer, large butterflies gently swirled.
One Sunday evening, she was being even sulkier than usual, in her fur coat. From my table I watched the marquis’s attempts to cheer her up: he tickled her chin with his index finger, but she turned her head away sharply, as if she’d been startled by the touch of something viscous. I shared her disgust: the marquis’s hands were thick and ruddy, the hands of a strangler that called to mind the title of a documentary, The Blood of Beasts. That memory joins with the memory of the conversation overheard between agents and meat shippers who crisscrossed the country of Nerval. How dare that hulking blond in his hunting jacket soil such a delicate face with his hand? Claude Bernard, who one Sunday had noticed my interest in the girl, had kindly remarked, “She looks like Joan Fontaine, my favorite actress …”