All the same, he now made several attempts to earn his living in a reasonable way. He applied for the post of a teacher at one of the innumerable language institutes in the city. Although the war still muttered outside the borders of France, the Berlitzes and kindred organizations were already doing a thriving trade: there were plenty of foreign soldiers anxious to learn French to take the place of peacetime tourists.
He was interviewed by a dapper thin man in a frock coat which smelled very faintly of mothballs. “I’m afraid,” he said at length, “your accent is not good enough.”
“Not good enough!” Charlot exclaimed.
“Not good enough for this institute. We exact a very high standard. Our teachers must have the best, the very best, of Parisian accents. I am sorry, monsieur.” He enunciated himself with terrible clarity, as though he was used to speaking only to foreigners, and he used only the simplest phrases-he was trained in the direct method. His eyes dwelt ruminatively on Charlot’s battered shoes. Charlot went.
Perhaps something about the man reminded him of Lenotre. It occurred to him immediately after he had left the institute that he might earn a reasonably good living as a clerk: his knowledge of law would be useful, and he could explain it by saying that at one time he had hoped to be called to the bar, but his money had given out…
He answered an advertisement in Figaro: the address was on the third floor of a high gray building off the Boulevard Haussmann. The office into which he found his way gave the impression of having been just cleaned up after enemy occupation: dust and straw had been swept against the walls and the furniture looked as though it had been recently uncrated from the boxes in which it had been stored away ages ago. When a war ends one forgets how much older oneself and the world have become: it needs something like a piece of furniture or a woman’s hat to waken the sense of time. This furniture was all of tubular steel, giving the room the appearance of an engine room in a ship, but this was a ship which had been beached for years-the tubes were tarnished. Out of fashion in 1939, in 1944 they had the air of period pieces. An old man greeted Charlot: when the furniture was new he must have been young enough to have an eye for the fashionable, the chic, for appearances. He sat down among the steel chairs at random as though he was in a public waiting room and said sadly, “I suppose like everyone else you have forgotten everything?”
“Oh,” Charlot said, “I remember enough.”
“We can’t pay much here at present,” the old man said, “but when things get back to normal… there was always a great demand for our product…”
“I would begin,” Charlot said, “at a low salary…”
“The great thing,” the old man said, “is enthusiasm, to believe in what we are selling. After all, our product has proved itself. Before the war our figures were very good, very good indeed. Of course, there was a season, but in Paris there are always foreign visitors. And even the provinces bought our product. I’d show you our figures, only our books are lost.” From his manner you would have thought he was attracting an investor rather than interviewing a would-be employee.
“Yes,” Charlot said, “yes.”
“We’ve got to make our product known again. When once it’s known, it can’t fail to be as popular as before. Craftsmanship tells.”
“I expect you are right.”
“So you see,” the old man said, “we’ve all got to put our backs into it… a cooperative enterprise… the sense of loyalty… your savings will be quite safe.” He waved his hand above the wilderness of tubular chairs. “I promise you that.”
Charlot never learned what the product was, but on the landing below a wooden crate had been opened and standing in the straw was a table lamp about three feet high built hideously in steel in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. The wire ran down the lift shaft like the rope of an ancient hotel lift, and the bulb screwed in on the top floor. Perhaps it was the only table lamp the old man had been able to obtain in Paris: perhaps-who knows?—it may have been the product itself…
Three hundred francs wouldn’t last long in Paris.
Charlot answered one more advertisement, but the employer demanded proper papers. He was not impressed by the prison dossier. “You can buy any number of those,” he said, “for a hundred francs,” and he refused to be persuaded by the elaborate measurements of the German authorities. “It’s not my job to measure your skull,” he said, “or feel your bumps. Go off to the city hall and get proper papers. You seem a capable fellow. I’ll keep the job open until noon tomorrow…” But Charlot did not return.
He hadn’t eaten more than a couple of rolls for thirty-six hours: it suddenly occurred to him that he was back exactly where he had started. He leaned against a wall in the late afternoon sun and imagined that he heard the ticking of the mayor’s watch. He had come a long way and taken a deal of trouble and was back at the end of the cinder track with his back against the wall. He was going to die and he might just as well have died rich and saved everybody trouble. He began to walk toward the Seine.
Presently he couldn’t hear the mayor’s watch any more: instead there was a shuffle and pad whichever way he turned. He heard it just as he had heard the mayor’s watch and he half realized that both were delusions. At the end of a long empty street the river shone. He found that he was out of breath and he leaned against a urinal and waited for a while with his head hanging down because the river dazzled his eyes. The shuffle and pad came softly up behind him and stopped. Well, the watch had stopped too. He refused to pay attention to delusion.
“Pidot,” a voice said, “Pidot!” He looked sharply up, but there was no one there.
“It is Pidot, surely?” the voice said.
“Where are you?” Charlot asked.
“Here, of course.” There was a pause and then the voice said like conscience almost in his ear, “You look all in, finished. I hardly recognized you. Tell me, is anyone coming?”
“No.” In childhood, in the country, in the woods behind Brinac one had believed that voices might suddenly speak out of the horns of flowers or from the roots of trees, but in the city when one had reached the age of death one couldn’t believe in voices from paving stones. He asked again, “Where are you?” and then realized his own dull-wittedness-he could see the legs from the shins downward under the green cape of the urinal. They were black pinstriped trousers, the trousers of a lawyer or a doctor or even a deputy, but the shoes hadn’t been cleaned for some days.
“It’s Monsieur Carosse, Pidot.”
“Yes?”
“You know how it is. One’s misunderstood.”
“Yes.”
“What could I have done? After all, I had to keep the show going. My behavior was strictly correct-and distant. No one knows better than you, poor Pidot. I suppose they are holding things against you too?”
“I’m finished.”
“Courage, Pidot. Never say die. A second cousin of mine who was in London is doing his best to put things right. Surely you know one of them?”
“Why don’t you come out from there and let me see you?”
“Better not, Pidot. Separately we might pass muster, but together… it’s too risky.” The pinstriped trousers moved uneasily. “Anyone coming, Pidot?”
“No one.”
“Listen, Pidot. I want you to take a message to Madame
Carosse. Tell her I’m welclass="underline" I’ve gone south. I shall try to get into Switzerland till it all blows over. Poor Pidot, you could do with a couple of hundred francs, couldn’t you?”