‘You really are a bugger!’ Jean said.
‘Yes, and your life’s too much of a mess. You should be admiring my tact. I’m saving you from any remorse.’
Jean had little choice but to hear him out.
‘It’s fairly childish, and to be honest I doubted if it would contain anything valuable anyway, but I wanted to know the final recipient: an interesting character, rarely discussed, except by the brothel owners whose names were on the list in the first envelope.’
‘So who is it?’ Jean asked impatiently.
‘You know him.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. It’s Longuet, whose charming son Gontran you had a fight with and who took Chantal de Malemort from you. Yesterday in the Journal Officiel I saw that henceforth he has the right to call himself Longuet de La Sauveté. Soon it will be just Monsieur de La Sauveté, which will be a fine monicker for his little Gontran. I rather foresee another baron in the French peerage. What’s most interesting is discovering how powerful this person is. Yet again we find the mafia of the white slave trade deeply mixed up with politics and the police. Here, take your letter, dear boy. It could be useful to you one day. And go and shave. You’ve spent the night with your Claude and it does you no good, ever.’
We shall not linger on Jean’s life in his new capacity. It would be pointless to be any more interested in it than he is himself. There is too much passing trade, faces coming and going whose outlines and voices are immediately forgotten, so that Jean numbers them to remember them more easily. Paris at the close of 1941 is far more captivating. After months of despondency, courage has returned, though events are scarcely conducive to optimism. Who is lying, who telling the truth? No one knows that the Wehrmacht, having become bogged down in the autumn mud, is now freezing at the gates of Moscow. Paris has resumed its role as the fun-loving and intellectual capital of Europe. The theatres have never been fuller, there have never been so many books read, and the film industry, so in the doldrums before the war, is basking in a new golden era. No thanks to Duzan specifically: he is content to follow in others’ footsteps, to jump on bandwagons and benefit from the gap in the market left by the dearth of Anglo-Saxon films. Nelly Tristan’s star is rising, she has been signed for three films that she will eventually not make. She will make others later, when the war is over, all equally bad until the day she finally meets a proper director.
But Duzan was vain enough to like having her under contract and, from time to time, to warm his bed. It was a vanity that came at a price: Nelly had a gift for exposing it in public by treating him like a doormat. Humiliated, he complained to Jean, who wondered whether the producer wasn’t employing him to be sure of keeping Nelly. He would storm unannounced into Jean’s office.
‘Do you know what she’s just done to me?’
‘No.’
There followed a tale of some joyful prank of which he had been the wretched victim.
‘She’s impossible. Yesterday evening, at the end of shooting, she was drunk, completely drunk—’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘When you’re there she doesn’t drink.’
‘I can’t be there all the time.’
Jean felt contempt for Duzan. How could a crook such as he was be so feeble and snivelling as soon as a fragile woman came on the scene? Not for a second did he imagine that Duzan was in love and that, however embarrassing his love for Nelly might be, it was nevertheless an emotion that deserved sympathy. He thought Duzan old — over forty! — mean and stupid. The only things that mattered to him were a passion for money rapidly earned and the misplaced pride of being a producer. And what was he looking for when he came to Jean, if not the trace of Nelly’s perfume and the magic formula of the man to whom she gave herself for nothing?
‘Yes,’ Duzan said, ‘I know everything. I forgive her. She had an unhappy childhood. She tries to forget …’
Jean, unkindly, decided to give him something to think about.
‘You forgive her because she’s the devil.’
‘The devil?’
Visibly more anxious than privileged to have been sought out by the devil, Duzan left his office and did not return for three days. Nelly considered Jean’s idea excellent. Wasn’t everything permitted to the devil?
‘Now and then, Jules-who, you’re a genius. Here I am, cleared of guilt, forgiven, and seduction itself. And somehow you’ve flattered that idiot. The devil doesn’t go out of his way for just anyone.’
She lived near Place Saint-Sulpice in a studio apartment filled with books, set models and signed photographs from her friends in the theatre. That was how he learnt she had won first prize for comedy from the Conservatoire for a scene from The Widow.
‘The Widow? Who?’
‘I love it when you say “who”, you scrumptious little Jules-who. Whose widow? Pierre Corneille’s. Listen to Clarice:
‘Dear confidant of all of my desires
Beautiful place, secret witness to my disquietude,
No longer is it with my sighing fires
That I come to abuse your solitude;
Past are my sufferings
Granted are my longings
Words to joy give way!
My fate has changed its law from harsh to fine
And the object I possess in a word to say,
My Philiste is all mine …’
Jean was discovering that this careless and chaotic woman possessed a feeling for poetry that was genuinely harmonious. She truly loved the music of words, and Palfy had not been exaggerating when he declared that she could have made an entire auditorium weep by reciting the telephone directory. She was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde rolled into one, or at least with such a brief interlude between the two that it was frightening. Absorbed in La Jeune Parque while the lighting was being readied on set, she would awake from her reverie and, seeing Duzan hiding behind a camera, yell, ‘Get him out of here!’
‘Nelly, he’s the boss!’ the studio manager would implore her.
‘The boss is an arse … Everyone repeat after me: The boss is an arse… the boss is an arse …’
Duzan left, pursued from the studio by the shouts of the technicians and the actors. When the scene had been shot, was in the can, and on its way to the lab, Nelly called him.
‘I’m waiting for you! You and your bicycle-taxi bum! You surely don’t think I’m going home by Métro?’
Duzan ran to her. He felt like weeping, but instead took her out to dinner in a restaurant where he hoped everyone would recognise her.
‘It’s Nelly Tristan!’
And his assurance would return as she recounted her day to him, her tiffs with the other actors, or complained at length about the screenplay’s excessive vulgarity. Then, if he was too high-handed with the waiters, she would summon the head waiter or the restaurant’s owner.
‘Pay no attention. He’s very spoilt. He’s just playing at the producer-taking-his-star-out-to-dinner.’
To Jean, when she saw him the next day, she admitted, ‘He’s never loved me as much as he has since I’ve been cheating on him with you. I need to cheat on him much more. What a bore! Because then you’ll start getting jealous.’
‘No. Not a chance!’
‘Oh well …’
She was not at all put out. She knew Jean had another love.
‘Is she kind to you?’ she asked.
‘Very.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Claude.’
‘Is that a woman or a man?’