Rudolf had sufficient good manners to recognise the young salesman from the Montmartre gallery whom Blanche had told him about: ‘He’s a very honest and intelligent boy. He’ll do well.’ We shall spare the reader the details of the menu. They will have already guessed that in this den of initiates the cuisine was considerably above the usual Paris standard for the time. Louis, a former café owner, and his wife, a skinny, raw-looking woman from the Auvergne, cooked for a select clientele: foie gras from the Landes, petit salé with lentils, cheese and nègres en chemise.18 A proper wartime menu, with champagne to go with the foie gras, a 1929 Bonnes-Mares for the petit salé, and a modest Anjou with the dessert. Seated between Marceline Michette and Nelly Tristan, Jean would have had a boring evening if it had not been for Nelly deciding, several glasses into the petit salé, to pick a fight with Rudolf von Rocroy. Émile Duzan cringed in shame and fear. Rudolf thought she was teasing him and laughed heartily at her insults, not understanding them. Palfy scribbled a note and had it passed to Jean. ‘She says everything I think about him. Isn’t she divine?’
Divine? Jean found it hard to see her in that light. The summer had brought no change to Nelly’s almost sickly pallor, her black, glistening eyes and mouth of an exquisite natural pink that opened to reveal perfect teeth. Innocence was the only possible word to characterise her features, framed in her medallion-like face. But then the face spoke and became animated, and her lips, designed to eat cherries or nibble shyly at a shoulder, poured out a string of obscenities. It was a gripping performance, and one could understand why Émile Duzan waited anxiously each time to see what she would come up with. Despite her producer’s mute pleadings, she laid down her knife and fork, clasped her pretty hands under her chin, and said to Rudolf with an angelic smile, ‘Let’s play the truth game. Do you know it?’
‘Yes! Viss great pleasure.’
‘All right. I would like to know whether all of you Teutonic warriors, Prussian squires, Baltic barons and Austrian bastards aren’t really, I mean deep down, secretly poofs.’
The German would rather have been cut into little pieces than admit that he did not understand a word in French. What should he make of ‘poof’? Should he not be reassured by Nelly’s smile that it could only be a very positive epithet?
‘Ach, let us not exacherate. There are some who are, more or less.’
‘I think, dear Rudolf,’ Nelly said, leaning her head on Jean’s shoulder despite the furious stare of Émile Duzan, ‘I think, dear, handsome Rudolf, that it’s all a question of stoicism. The first time one is sodomised, it is really very painful.’
‘Fery painful,’ he agreed.
‘Afterwards it becomes quite pleasant.’
‘Fery pleasant!’
Madeleine interrupted.
‘Nelly darling, I’m not sure this is a terribly nice conversation. I much prefer it when you recite something. You’re so different … so … how shall I put it … possessed by what you’re saying, you make me shiver.’
‘What do you want? Some Valéry?’
‘I don’t know. Everything you do is so lovely.’
Nelly put her hands up to her face and, in a transformed voice that was hardly audible, recited ‘The Steps’.
‘Your steps, offspring of my quietness.
Placed so slowly, and so saintly,
Towards the bed of my sleeplessness
Proceed, stonily and faintly.
Purest one, shadow divine
With what restrained, soft footfalls you with me meet
Gods! … all the gifts you have made mine
Come towards me on those bare feet …’
Nelly stopped, took her hands away from her face, and poured herself a glass of wine.
‘The rest next time,’ she said. ‘So, handsome Rudolf, do we like French poetry?’
Jean observed with pleasure that the young woman’s poise and versatility had such an impact on the German that they robbed him of his facility and his fatuous air of a man of the world. Rudolf assured her that he adored Paul Valéry and read him every day. But it turned out that Nelly had not done with her previous subject, and she began to go into detail. Madame Michette frowned and interrupted.
‘At my establishment such matters are never spoken of,’ she said with barely controlled indignation. ‘If a customer wants that sort of thing, we make him pay extra!’
Palfy puffed on his cigar and blew smoke rings. Jean understood that he was at his absolute happiest, savouring with profound relish the disarray being produced in the wake of this euphoric dinner. Louis brought out a bottle of Armagnac, as a welcome diversion. Nelly’s leg was pressed against Jean’s, and he thought about Claude: she was having dinner at her mother’s with Cyrille tonight. She would be coming back to Quai Saint-Michel by the last Métro. They had parted that morning, unhappy, indecisive, hesitant about seeing each other again, yet certain that they could not avoid doing so. He liked Nelly’s perfume and he liked the refinement and grace of her profile and her shirt open to reveal her braless breasts. She was a devil, and he had made no sacrifices to the devil for too long.
When Émile Duzan told her the bicycle-taxi was waiting, Nelly refused to go with him.
‘I really can’t bear to see another single one of those tandemists with his fat bum aimed at me. Who’ll see me home?’
Rudolf, Palfy and Madeleine all offered. Each of them had a car. She chose Palfy indirectly, taking Jean’s arm. Duzan tried to display his authority.
‘I’ll wait for you to ring the bell. You don’t have a key.’
In the commotion it was difficult to hear her ungracious response, inviting Émile to stick the key in an unnameable place. The reader will be aware that he was not about to comply and he took such offence that he declared it was all over between them. Nelly gave a deep sigh.
‘At last!’
Rudolf kissed her hand and promised to telephone her.
‘But please do, dear Rudolf.’
Sitting between Palfy and Jean in the back of the Light 11 as they drove down Rue de Rivoli, she yawned.
‘Where shall we have our last drink?’
‘At my place,’ Palfy said.
‘What about my little Jean?’
‘He lives with me. From now on we shall never be parted.’
‘You’re not poofs by any chance, are you?’
‘Nelly darling, it’s becoming an obsession with you.’
Since the beginning of June Palfy had been living in Rue de Presbourg, in a superb apartment furnished with as much taste as Julius’s. The owner was in Spain, awaiting better times. He was fortunate that his objets d’art would not find their way into the public domain. As for Jean living there, it was true. He had wanted to go back to Rue Lepic, but the key was no longer under the doormat, where it had always been. Palfy claimed to know what had happened: slowly but surely, Fräulein Laura Bruckett had got her claws into Jean’s friend Jesús. He had softened and, now sharing the rations of his rapt German admirer, was currently thought to be in the Chevreuse valley, where he and Laura had been on a honeymoon for the past fortnight in a small farm filled with butter, cream and smoked hams. She was stuffing him with cakes. His waistline was expanding. How fast everything changed! In two months at most. At the Galerie du Tertre, La Garenne did not know what to do: no more paintings, no more drawings. Fortunately Alberto had been freed and resumed his photographic business. Blanche had gone to find Palfy to beg him to bring Jean back …