As we went out into a beautiful, soft morning of pine-filtered sunlight, driving through Dijon’s picturesque streets, a cheerful Santucci described the new car he meant to buy as soon as it came on the market. An electric racer, he said. Citroën were developing it. We drove now through thinly forested hills, vivid yellow crops of mustard. Occasionally we passed an old chateau, a distant brown stone village, a farm. Passive livestock grazed in the fields, adding to that sense of timeless permanence so characteristic of rural Ukraine before the Revolution. Might my Ukraine one day return to her former perfection? Surely, I thought, the corpses and the broken gun carriages must soon sink into the cornfields and be forgotten. How could I know? How could I anticipate Stalin’s capacity for cruelty and hatred? He placed a sentence of death upon an entire country. The Bolsheviks starved the granary of Russia! They mined meadows, forests, whole villages to blow up the population, together with any invader. As I have observed many times, people grow so used to conflict and terror and death they cling to them as certainties, in the way the more fortunate cling to old, peaceful rituals. Why do most human beings resist any change, when change usually means their continuing survival? Santucci asked me my opinion of the Citroën Electric. I told him some of my own ideas for cars. These, too, would not be dependent upon benzine. They might be powered by rockets or beam wireless. I even had plans in my case for a car driven by tiny charges of dynamite.
Naturally, he liked this notion best. ‘Dynamite! There’s your answer, Signor Cornelius. From dynamite our New Europe will arise like a phoenix. All this’ - He waved a magnificently gauntleted hand at the little hills and streams - ‘must be blown away. The job was only half done when they called it off to arrange that miserable Armistice.’
I could see little reason for such destruction. ‘There’s room for everything in my future.’ I was somewhat pious.
‘To produce a genuinely different world one must wipe out every memory, every sign, every clue to the past. History must go!’ He was laughing. We took a humpbacked bridge and flew for a few seconds before returning to the road. The long bonnet of the Cunningham glittered in the sun like the barrel of a Krupps cannon. He even pointed the machine as if it were a gun. He took joy from his control.
‘You’re a Bolshevik, then!’ I shouted over the engine. ‘You should visit Russia. Go soon. They’re already putting your theories into action!’
He took this in good part, shaking his head and grinning. ‘But with so little style, my friend. If a thing is to be done properly, it must be done with grace! Any Frenchman would tell you that much.’
I had met such dandified nihilists in Peter. Most of them had died or been imprisoned in the first days of Lenin’s triumph. Not only did I refuse to take Santucci seriously, I felt a certain pity for him. If he ever experienced real revolution he must surely become an early victim. He was far more a bad poet than a bad politician, however, and one can always forgive bad poets. Power is the last thing they want. They are usually too frightened by the responsibility involved. Sometimes this does not happen: then a ferocious combination is achieved. Our good-humoured driver however was in every way amusing and entertaining. His charm remained as potent as ever. I wished he would decide to go on to London or Berlin. While one moves one does not ‘stew’. The Escape of Motoring is best when one has no true idea of one’s destination.
Yet when Paris eventually appeared, my uncertainty vanished. We approached through suburbs, sometimes on a slight hill, sometimes in a shallow valley. I had never expected to see the Eiffel Tower so soon. It dominated the city: a wonderful pyramid of steel and cast-iron: the nineteenth century’s salute to us, the inhabitants of her future. Here was the city of Jules Verne, who had been chiefly responsible for my decision to express myself through the medium of science and technology. Here the engravings from my Pearson’s Magazines came to life, while elsewhere the monumental tributes to Napoleon, his arches, tombs and museums, and the glorious palaces of the great French kings, almost unearthly cathedrals and churches, were ordered like the model of a pure, eighteenth-century mind: a little too rational, perhaps, a little cool, but with a superb and almost simple tidiness. We drove through suburban streets in the evening mist, with the sun red and huge above, this sense of orderliness countered to a degree by slums, buildings in poor repair, featureless apartment blocks, narrow alleys and busy, chaotic traffic quite different to Rome’s, yet moving at the terrifying pace common to old Petersburg’s. Paris at twilight began to bloom with electricity. She was a city of light. A city of delicate glass and fine traceries of stone. Her gas lamps were a vibrant yellow. Flaring charcoal from her street stoves glowed the deepest possible red. I thought I could hear music, hear her heart pounding as Santucci drove his monstrous Cunningham deeper and deeper towards the centre. Paris smelled of rosewater, coffee and fresh bread. She smelled of motor exhausts and garlic, of chocolate and wine. I looked towards Esmé and saw there were tears in her eyes. She was now truly looking upon Heaven.
Faithless creatures, we forgot Rome at once. Paris instantly became our new love. Santucci’s letting forth with a piece of Rossini did not disturb us. Bells pealed from Notre Dame. Boats hooted on the Seine as we negotiated the bridges of the Isle de la Cité. Paris was herself a symphony of ordered movement and colour. The scarlet and gold sails of the Moulin Rouge were the spokes of a cosmic wheel. The Cunningham boomed along Rue Pigalle and turned back along Boulevard Magenta towards Place de la République, with Santucci swearing he could never get to grips with the streets of Paris, until we pulled up suddenly just beyond the green, gold and purple doors of Cirque d’Hiver, the little amphitheatre housing the Winter Circus in Boulevard du Temple. Children playing on the pavement around the plane-trees gathered as always to Santucci, staring at the huge car. It might have been a vision of the Madonna. Their silence was broken by his salute, a squeeze of his horn, then all let forth with their questions. He sent one boy into the little hotel, whose sign was illuminated by a single purple bulb. Out came the plump porter. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand which could easily have been a penguin’s wing. Waddling up to us, nodding, swaying, he was delighted to see Santucci. Our friend called him ‘sergeant’, shook hands and spoke of the trenches. Santucci seemed to exist in a network of relationships, some business, some personal, some filial. He never dealt with a stranger. Even the man who filled his petrol tank knew him as M’sieu Santucci, mentioning a common back complaint and the new cure he had read about in Le Figaro. Now I listened while the porter asked after his cousins in America and the weather in Naples. He was introduced to Esmé and myself and we might have been Santucci’s blood relatives, judging by the ceremony with which he presented us. We, too, shook hands. He said he was at our service. Would we require supper? Santucci said we had an appointment to dine elsewhere. The porter blew a whistle. Out came another boy to guard the car while we were shown to our accommodation. Our room contained an old double bed, a washstand, a couple of chairs and little else, but it was perfectly adequate. After the luggage arrived we washed and changed, but soon Annibale Santucci knocked on our door to beg us to hurry. Back we went to the limousine. With horn blaring we drove faster than ever through the glamorous streets, back towards Notre Dame where the massive cathedral shone in golden glory over the black water. Across the bridge again and along Saint-Michel, into a narrow backstreet near Saint-Germain. Parking the Cunningham half on the pavement, half in the road, Santucci told us we had arrived. Disembarking, we entered a discreetly illuminated restaurant whose windows were curtained from the street, whose interior, lit by gas, was warm as yellow ivory. White linen and silver, potted palms, hushed air, revealed this place to be a temple of food, one of thousands, I was to discover, in the city. From the far end, in a curtained alcove, a thin, elderly man rose to hold out a hand, delicate as a dying orchid. The hair of his head and his moustache had the appearance of a fine mould. He smelled like a flower past its prime. His small, sad smile made me think him more priest than soldier. Feebly he gestured for us to sit with him, though he seemed upset at our presence. We were cousins, Santucci told him, from England. We would eat with them, but the business could be discussed later. The old man accepted this gracefully enough, though plainly the arrangement was not much to his taste. Folding his fingers before him in a gesture of disciplined patience he bowed again to us. His skin was probably painted here and there; it had a parched brown quality to it where it was not unnaturally pink. His hair was sparse. Only his English tweed suit, his excellent tie, did not look worn out. Indeed they seemed unnaturally new. He wore them like a borrowed carapace. He was never introduced by name, though I had the impression he was an aristocrat, a high ranking general. Any curiosity I had about him was dispelled by the quality of the meal. It was superb. We had oeuf en meruerte to begin, a cassoulet as our main course, some Neufchatel cheese and crème brûlée. While Esmé and I sat drunkenly at the table, too full to speak, capable only of grinning stupidly. Santucci and his client moved away to the bar where they ordered their cognac. The business took hardly any time at all. When it was over the soldier did not rejoin us at the table, but slipped away. Santucci returned, insisting we have some Armagnac ‘to celebrate’. ‘All settled,’ he said. ‘And, as you see, I did not have to inspect the army personally. No money changed hands. Yet everyone is satisfied. That is the essence of international finance.’