Stéphane’s father was Mérien, François Mérien, owner of Le Soir, more than a million copies sold daily. Six months ago, in September, he’d said to Max:
‘I’m sending you to cover these shenanigans because I want the real behind-the-scenes story, what they’re saying about Europe, their thinking, their politics, all their discussions, what’s behind it all, cash? Power? Treason? A conspiracy? They’ll talk about values, that’s good, I like values, I want every man jack of them stripped bare! You’ll be staying with them at the Waldhaus, all expenses paid, keep the bar bill down, off you go, and make the most of it.’
That was the boss for you, short-fuse, but he was very fond of Max, Max had written to him immediately with an account of Stéphane’s death, without frills, death of a hero, Mérien had been grateful to Max, he’d never tried to check what was hidden behind what he had written and, as the years passed, he, who was obsessed with clarity, assuaged his fatherly grief with the myth of a bullet in the head on the field of honour that he would never have entertained for one moment if it had been someone else.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ Mérien had asked Max at the very start of their relationship, when he took Max to lunch so he could hear him talk about his son.
It was just after what had been called the Victory. Max had not answered, he was drifting; before the war, he’d wanted to be a writer, he’d given that idea up. One day, Mérien had pressed him and the only thing Max could think of to say was:
‘I’d like to be a Nosy Parker.’
Mérien had given him a job and turned him into a reporter:
‘From this day henceforth, subject, verb, object. For adjectives, see me first!’
He’d also ordered him not to write any sentence more than fifteen words long, then he’d loosened the reins. Max had become one of his best reporters.
As the years passed, Max had come to like François Mérien very much. His boss had a reputation for being a coarse man, but Max knew that he set aside one hour every day to translate Pindar or Tacitus, he had known Mallarmé, Jules Renard, Gabriel Fauré, and at least once a day he would go into the editorial room and shout:
‘Make Wendy feel weepy and Andy feel randy! And let’s do it with style!’
He had interests in a company that made a vitamin-enriched cordial, he handed out bottles of the stuff to politicians terrorised by his paper and its two and a half million readership, an ambiguous gift, some ministers tried to find out through Max whether the cordial was a friendly gesture or if it meant Mérien considered that they were finished.
Even Poincaré had been scared the day Max asked him for his opinion of the cordiaclass="underline"
‘Tell your employer that I partake regularly. And that I never felt better in my life.’
Another minister had offered to make the cordial part of the weekly rations given to colonial troops, Mérien had refused and laughingly told Max:
‘That would be like something out of Feydeau. It’s best if all this stays between him and me.’
And Max never did discover if Mérien seriously believed in the effectiveness of his cordial.
In the train, too late now to go back to sleep, too early for breakfast, Max tries to think, morning is his best time for ideas, before midday you can still put one thought with another and shake them up with a stub of pencil and a notebook, a number 2 lead pencil, not too bold but soft enough to keep up with your thoughts, a 2B. After lunch, all Max is good for is living.
He shuts his eyes, opens them again, it’s daylight, the frost has gone from the window, slopes now figure much more prominently in the landscape, Max muses, remembers, lets his mind wander, abandons his memories, stops tapping a pointless rhythm with his pencil, these European conferences, find a subject for a real think-piece, with more punch than usual, make it dramatic, deep down it’s all theatre, difficult, when they’re on stage the characters refuse to play down their personalities, or rather Max himself finds it difficult to keep his distance, you feel much too much at home with these people, money, power, you were a pawn in the game, not insignificant but a pawn nonetheless, surplus to requirements.
Max never completed his studies after the war was over, a writerly vocation, I’d have been better off becoming a respectable solicitor, with wife, in some market-town, then I wouldn’t be hearing someone like Wendel saying you know, a job like mine, pure fluke, and if I stay it’s because I don’t really have a choice, no one else would do it.
All these people want to spend time with Max, they need him, he is the intermediary between them and the hoi polloi they all want to nobble, organise, direct, control, and above all be loved by.
‘Single-minded about collective action’: a phrase that goes into the notebook, Max is not entirely happy with it, come back to it later, big people convinced they are right to bully the little people they rule and become even more authoritarian and inflexible, make this clearer, find an image, a parable, newspaper readers like a parable, a story:
‘Max! find me a story!’ Mérien would say sometimes when one of his pieces seemed too abstract.
A life spent as a famous reporter, you drink champagne with Van Ryssel who owns a fifth of all the steelworks in Europe, you lunch as the guest of Duissard whose bank holds a large percentage of Van Ryssel’s shares, and you even bought a hat with Merken, at Freiburg, as if you could care less, Merken put one hand on your shoulder saying good choice I’ll get one too, Merkel copied you, a dark-grey bowler, we have the same tastes, true, but it’s not you who goes home, picks up a pen and writes What is Metaphysics? No, you go back to the paper to churn out copy and you never made anything of that meeting, you were taught for two years by Bergson and you never made anything of that either, at least Merken got a hat out of it, Max also likes Willi Münzenberg, one of the men Moscow never fails to send to congresses like this, and there’s also Hans who doubts everything and is the only really new writer to have emerged since the war, Max even recalls the beauty spot on the thigh of Madame de Valréas, their common muse, whose strength of will is the driving force behind these conferences, everyone here likes Max and wants to be liked by him.
Throughout his entire youth, Max sought to win them over, I am becoming the finest writer of my generation, all doors are open to me, wonderful pages you put in the waste-paper basket without even rereading them, and it’s only when you can no longer be bothered to write any more pages wonderful or otherwise that people start swarming all over you asking for articles for newspapers, parties at the Valréases, highly enjoyable, until the day Mérien yelled at you:
‘No fancy literary stuff! An article is only something you’ve got time to read in the bog!’
Max knows all that, he forgets, the dream of writing that will endure, he pulls himself together, keep at the daily task, he learns to forget just enough to allow him to cling to his dream, to make the most of it, like a good cigar or a liqueur, reread Maupassant, Turgenev fast enough for you to come away with the impression that you could do as well.
Madame de Valréas! Universal muse to the fine assembled company, a Baroness, and there is no shortage of Baronesses in these circles, but she has a genuine ancestry, money, the talents which go with money, good legs, teeth extremely suitable for smiling with, has a certain je ne sais quoi, as they used to say before the war, Max has slept with her, just once, at the close of the Belle Époque, a fine house, the property of a banker, in Brittany, with a wheat field which sloped directly down to the beach, the gold of the sand, the green of the ears of corn dotted with bright red freckles, ribbons, parasols, and all of it whipped by squally showers and blustering winds combined with whatever the cloud-factory threw up at the sun, the gleam of molten metal, the flap of flags, the tumults of opium, sandstorms, blowing with a strength which lent an aura of bravery to the little dolls in their Sunday best who had come to the beach to kill their germs in the foaming brine and uttered coltish shrieks of terror each time a wave nibbled a crinoline hem or a shoe, in May 1914, the good times.