‘It can’t be said that he was happy.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t want to make films any more. I’m going back to the theatre. Oh, not to see his face ever again!’
‘Love doesn’t move you?’
‘Mine does, of course. Not others’.’
She leant towards Jean and kissed him on the forehead.
‘Go and shave,’ she said. ‘We’ll go for a walk. I’m giving myself a holiday.’
‘We have to have lunch at Madeleine’s,’ Jean said timidly.
‘Oh God, eating, always eating! That’s all we’ll remember about this occupation. Why don’t we go into the country instead and see your friend, the great Jesús?’
*
What they did that day is of little importance. Did they go to see Jesús or did they have lunch at Madeleine’s with the aforementioned Pole, who was actually hardly a Pole at all and more a stateless Jew like the already famous Joanovici and, like him, a supplier to the Germans, plundering France in their name and amassing a fabulous fortune? Yes, it hardly matters, because what matters, as the reader will have guessed, is that Jean has tripped up and in doing so renewed, after long abstinence, his acquaintance with the pleasure women offer and begun a period in which the vanity of an affair, even a chaotic one, does not transcend his self-disgust and remorse at being unfaithful to Claude and seeing her suffer. He does not even need to lie. She knows, yet when he misses an evening with her and returns the next day without an excuse, hardly a shadow is visible on her face.
Nelly could be delightfully provocative. That is to say, she possessed many ways to please. Jean discovered her talent, of which he had so far had only glimpses through a fog of alcohol. When she was not swearing at the imbeciles who surrounded and exploited her, she could awaken a lover by reciting softly in his ear:
‘Our weapons are not like enough
For my soul to welcome you in,
All you are is naive male stuff,
But I’m the Eternal Feminine
My object’s lost amid the starry trail!
It’s I who am the Great Isis!
No one has yet peeled back my veil
You should think only of my oasis …
If my song offers you any echoes,
You’d be quite wrong to hesitate
I murmur it to you as no pose
People know me: this is my womanly state’
Jean listened to the voice, which spoke only to him. Nelly, naked, opened the window wide and exclaimed, ‘What are we doing, always fucking when there’s life outside, just waiting for us?’
‘Who’s that by?’
‘By me.’
‘No. Before.’
‘By Jules.’
‘Jules who?’
She shrugged her shoulders and skipped into her bathroom, where he followed to see her covered in soapy foam.
‘You don’t know anything. You make me feel like an old woman who’s teaching a schoolboy a thing or two.’
‘Jules who?’
‘Jules Laforgue.’
She splashed him with foam. Ten minutes later, fully dressed, she left for the studio where Émile Duzan was waiting for her, having rapidly abandoned her vague resolutions to quit the cinema. Between scenes she telephoned Jean, whom she now called Jules-who, and if she reached him it was always to beg him, ‘Please come, Jules-who. I really cannot cope with these pricks any more. I love only you.’
He did not believe a word of it. She still occasionally slept with Duzan, who endured torments, hated Jean, and offered him a job in his studio, in public relations. Palfy urged Jean to accept.
‘It’s an ideal job for you. You get out. No being stuck in an office. In six months you’ll know everybody.’
‘And every morning I’ll see Duzan’s ugly mug! No thanks!’
‘He’s not a bad person. His being in love and being bashful about it proves it. Anyhow, he likes to suffer; it gives him the feeling he exists. He just wants to keep his executioner close.’
Faced with the difficulty of finding anything else, Jean eventually said yes. He earned double what La Garenne had once begrudged him. And in any case a catastrophe had befallen the gallery on Place du Tertre, to which Blanche had beseeched him in vain to return. One afternoon two inspectors had arrived and introduced themselves, asking politely, but brooking no refusal, for the director to open his flies and show them his member. Terrorised and struck dumb, La Garenne had complied. Faced with this graceless object, the inspectors had nodded and requested La Garenne to follow them. Blanche had been nonplussed. She had run to Palfy, and from him had an explanation. Since June they had been taking a census of Jews, and anonymous letters had been flooding in to the Préfecture and the Kommandantur. Apparently the former Léonard Twenty-Sous was not called La Garenne but something much less sonorous, despite its being one of the most celebrated tribes of Israel, to which the Virgin Mary had belonged. Several telephone calls established that Louis-Edmond was being held pending confirmation of his identity. Once he was released, he would no longer have the right to run a business. Blanche still could not understand what had aroused the suspicion of the inspectors. Palfy tactfully explained to her the mysteries of circumcision. Blanche, who had never known another organ besides La Garenne’s, discovered how far the parents of an otherwise worldly girl might neglect her education, in the name of outdated modesty. She burst into sobs.
‘He’s broken my heart! And he claimed to be the descendant of a crusader! Why did he lie to me? I would have put up with everything from him. He’s a man of quality.’
Palfy, uncomfortable at this paean of lyricism, took her out to lunch, where she drank more than she was used to, which had the unexpected merit of bringing her back to her senses.
‘With the gallery closed and Louis-Edmond in prison, I’ll be on the street.’
‘No, I think I may have just the job for you.’
‘I don’t know how to do anything. Without him, I’m nothing.’
‘The important thing, as I repeat endlessly to Jean, is not to know how to do anything. You’re the ideal person.’
So Blanche became Madeleine’s companion, warmly recommended by Palfy and Rudolf von Rocroy — but before finding her in that role, let us not forget in passing Mercedes del Loreto. It was three days after Louis-Edmond’s arrest that Jean remembered the investigation carried out by Marceline Michette. Louis-Edmond had not even been allowed to go to Rue de la Gaîté to collect a toothbrush, which in any case he did not possess. What had happened to the poor bedridden old lady, whose sea-lion shrieks regularly shook the building? He dashed to Montparnasse with Marceline. Madame Berthe, the dresser, was propping up the bar of the café-tabac where the waiter was pouring her third glass of lunchtime medium-dry Anjou. Madame Michette took matters in hand, displaying a sudden authority that months of Palfy’s petty ultra-secret missions had been stifling.
‘Madame Berthe? Do you recognise me?’
‘Ah, the journalist. How are you? You’ll have a glass with me, won’t you? Is this your son?’
‘No, a friend.’
Madame Berthe winked.
‘Perhaps you’re in the press too? Photographer?’
‘No,’ Jean said. ‘In films …’
‘Films! Pouah!’
‘We’d like to know if there’s any news of Mercedes del Loreto.’
‘It’s funny you should mention that: this morning I was just saying to myself that it’s been a good two days since I last heard the old lady’s “Arrh, arrh… oowowoowow …”’
*
The police station gave them the address of a locksmith, and a policeman went with them to the top floor of the building.