‘The top joint of the right forefinger,’ said an archaeologist, ‘gives us the hand of a writer.’
Remnants of hand-knitted undergarments. A terrific find for an amateur archaeologist.
‘But Michel Algrain,’ commented the Association of the Friends of Jacques Rivière and Alain-Fournier in 1992, ‘went too far. What do these German documents prove? What is the point of stories about some German field dressing-station which he went grubbing around for across the Rhine? Monsieur Algrain should remind himself that no one who goes looking in enemy territory for evidence with which to charge our own side with crimes they did not commit can ever claim to be innocent.’
On 10 November 1992, Algrain will be excluded from the ceremony when the remains are re-interred.
During the winter which preceded the war, Henri had written to Pauline:
‘Somewhere there’s a frozen pond where we would at this moment be skating, a white garden where I’d lead you by the hand, a road where we would go for a long, long walk before it got dark and a room where we would at this moment be sitting together by the fireside.’
A lovers’ dream. The frozen pond, Henri and Pauline executing serene arabesques on the ice, in proper families they would be termed an unlawful couple. They dream of firesides.
Or then again they only speak in their letters of firesides and walks because it is not done in letters to speak of the predatory advances which are made in a bedroom in Paris as the evening gathers, the man talks like this to please the woman, or else he’s the one who dreams he is in the white garden and offers her his dreams, and maybe both of them truly yearn for a happiness constituted by a white garden and a fireside, because nothing else is within their reach, no, what they really like is the dusk and the dark, persistent smells laden with oil fumes which fill the room whenever they have to heat it, but that is the one treat they can neither have nor write about, so they treat each other instead to a white garden, a log fire, chestnuts crackling, she seated in the armchair by the window, momentarily in repose, turned towards the landscape, the window blameless, the breast observed in profile, the snow has consumed everything, the only thing that stirs, faintly on the fence, is the black, white and blue stain of a magpie which had just landed.
At Monfaubert, the dragoons charge, that is, those who have not yet fallen to the rhythm of the noise which is for all the world like the sound of a very large sewing-machine, a Spandau no different from the thousands in service in the German army, manufactured under licence from the British and modified Prussian style.
‘The target must not merely be pierced,’ declared the Emperor, ‘but riddled.’
The dragoons charge in a dream and what they take aim at with the point of their swords, of their lances, of their dreams, are other men’s dreams.
If they’d been faced by ordinary troops, they would not have charged.
Facing them are dreams the colour of doves which have surfaced from the remote mists of time. And if it were not for these dove-grey dreams, there would have been no German victory against the Russians less than a month ago at Tannenberg, dreams which emerged from a labyrinth as old as the act of dreaming itself, but barely make it into the light of day.
At first, Max did not understand Calmette’s death there in the offices of Le Figaro, the reasons for it, not Henriette Caillaux’s reasons, a woman whose letters someone intends to publish is fully entitled to shoot the swine who would do such a thing, no, what Max did not understand at first were Calmette’s reasons, such a serious-minded man, with no interest in scandal, he had just noted in his diary that The Rite of Spring was an offence against morality and that Nijinsky displayed ‘gross indecency’ in certain of his choreographed movements.
So why publish private letters? It was the sort of thing sensation-seeking newspapers did. And in Le Figaro! The same Figaro that went so far as to denounce the tango for obscenity, a so-called ‘society’ dance which, let it not be forgotten, requires the man to thrust one leg between those of his partner. Calmette had not dared write these details down in full, but he had spelled the message out to the men on the presses in the print-room: ‘I will not allow such filth to corrupt the Family!’
And Max, ten years after the war, will be told that Calmette, normally so prudish and sober-sided, had a very good reason for turning his worthy Figaro into a rag filled with scandal and purloined letters, not a political reason, but rather a madness, because Calmette was mad and madly in love with another woman, a woman of letters whom Caillaux also loved to the point of wanting to divorce Henriette. Let’s summarise.
Monsieur Caillaux, Madame Caillaux, Monsieur Calmette, and bringing up the rear, a woman of letters. Calmette, madly in love and jealous of this woman of letters, had unearthed Caillaux’s old letters to his wife Henriette and was about to publish them. When she read the letters written to Henriette Caillaux, the woman of letters would lose interest in Caillaux. So Calmette decided to put an end to Caillaux, his policies and the designs he was said to have on a woman of letters who had the nerve to hesitate between a politician and the editor of Le Figaro.
A formidable lady, this woman of letters, all caustic and cream, a great name, a voice of her own, poison and poems, ‘you have strength and I have guile; your strength is to be the one I love’. An ambassador, very much an admirer of the lusty male form, is about to sit down facing her. There is a hat on the chair, no point in sitting down, the hat’s quite soft. A literary lady with genuine poems to her credit, ‘even in my heart where your blood beats’, then later the mistress of a married man, the man dies, the literary lady turns up at the funeral, very dignified, stays in the background, and when the mourners file past the open grave she throws her cloak into it.
The tango, the Holy Office decides, is an infernal dance, one final demonstration of this impious dance is given in the presence of Pius X by a couple of young Roman aristocrats, a brother and sister of irreproachable moral rectitude, who nevertheless wish to defend the tango, which tango did they dance? for the Pope commiserated with them on having to perform these ‘very tiresome movements’, nevertheless the tango is forbidden by the Vatican, and at least three of the shots fired in Calmette’s office turn Calmette into a corpse, Henriette into a tragic heroine whom it is henceforth impossible for him to divorce even to marry a woman of letters, Calmette into political flotsam, and peace into a cause amputated of all leaders save Jaurès — whose voice Péguy would dearly love to drown out beneath the drums of the guillotine — who is a habitué of the Café du Croissant, with its carved wood façade and gold lettering.
He was young and good-looking, he said ‘I love you, Lena’, he put a lot of feeling into the way he looked at me, we were on a mountain, he didn’t know where to begin, the back of his neck was soft, it made me want to drag him into my room, I did it, it felt good, I managed to say Liebchen and Hansele but it wasn’t love, it was the mountain, I might have started to fall in love with him later on, when Marie-Thérèse…