Planus (25 page)

I felt for her, because of her son and, a few minutes later, when she upset the salt-cellar at table, I felt still more sorry, because of the superstition. Everyone knows it is unlucky to upset salt, and writers are the salt of the earth.

Berthe, the ticket-collector at the Trocadero metro, made no bones about it. All day long she sat on her padded seat, comfortably tucked into a corner behind the automatic gate, her feet resting on a hassock (feet deformed by bunions and bursting out of boots she could not fasten up during the day because of her swollen ankles), a long grey overcoat buttoned up to the neck, a forage-cap rammed on top of her grey hair, which she wore tied back with a ribbon, a stub of indelible pencil in the corner of her mouth, the photograph of her deceased husband set in a brooch and pinned to her bosom, her body like a vast sack of sawdust bulging before and behind; and this heavy-jowled, moustachioed woman from the Auvergne, this absent-minded puncher of tickets, spent all her hours on duty reading; even at rush-hour, this Metro employee managed to keep one eye on the novel she was reading, and would pencil-mark all the most exciting passages with a hand that trembled with emotion.

'Nothing seems to disturb you, Madame,' I said to her one day, 'what are you reading there?'

She raised her eyes to my face, eyes from which the colour had faded, and which came back to reality from God knows where.

'I don't know,' she replied, 'it's a novel. But don't say that nothing disturbs me, Monsieur, it's not true, I'm very upset about my little sister. Can you imagine, I brought Josette up from the country, specially to find her a job on the Metro, and in spite of all my contacts, and all the strings I've pulled, I can't get her an underground station. You see, here, thirty metres below the surface, you're well off, sheltered from draughts, it's warm and peaceful, and nobody stops me reading. And to think my poor little Josette is at Cambronne! You don't happen to know anyone who could get her a transfer, do you? You know, she's only a youngster, and she's got her school-leaving certificate. It's a shame! . .

   A train drew into the station, I jumped into a carriage and got out at Cambronne.

At the end of the platform blasts of air, blowing up and down, automatically turned over the pages of the book a young person was holding in her hand; the draught would have blown her skirts up, if they had not been held down by a piece of elastic, just above the bony, adolescent knees.

'Good morning, Mademoiselle Josette,' I said to her, 'I have just seen your sister at the Trocadero.'

'Ah! Have you brought me my transfer?'

She was a stuck-up little miss, long and lean, with plucked eyebrows, colourless eyes, cropped hair, a scrap of rabbit's fur round her neck, her forage-cap over one ear, cheap glass rings on every one of her manicured fingers, the nails almond-shaped and bright red; she used them to make a mark beside the most captivating passages in the novel she was reading, for, like Berthe in the Trocadero, the ticket-collector at Cambronne spent all her time reading, letting half the passengers slip by, now and then deigning to hold out the ticket-punch, with the tips of her fingers, which, by the end of the day, were blackened by the nickel punch and the damp ink on the tickets.

'It's a disgrace! Sticking me up here, in the open air, as if I was a goose-girl. And this is Paris! Ah, if only I'd known! And to think I made myself a nervous wreck, studying hard so that I could pass my exams and get away from the village. ..

'And what do you read all day long, Mademoiselle?'

'I don't know. Novels.. .

I made some inquiries on her behalf, but in vain, for the child was known to be absent-minded at work, and besides, she was a novice, she had to serve her time in whatever station was available, for the underground stations are very much sought after, as they explained to me at the Staff Office of the Metro. I wonder why? Is it some deeply rooted atavistic urge? All these country people who abandon the land to become white-collar workers in the city, who lead a precarious existence and flock to the cinema in the evenings, feel lost in the capital, they huddle together like sheep during their leisure hours and like to feel secure and sheltered during the hours when they are busy with new jobs for which they are unsuited, so they instinctively take refuge underground, hoping to escape unnoticed, like the men of the earliest agricultural tribes, who would lie doggo in their caves at the least sign of danger outside, chattering and arguing non-stop, with their arms folded across their chests. Be that as it may, whether the world of the Metro with its employees and travellers, its men and women who haunt the benches in the underground, the beggars and tramps hanging about in the station entrances, represents a new age of manners or a return to the distant past, during my all too brief stays in Paris, I supplied my two ladies from Auvergne with novels, getting them to read Mauriac, Maurois, Montherlant and Morand — the four Ms — Marcel Proust, the proteges published by Grasset and the
Nouvelle Revue Frangaise,
all the candidates for the Prix Goncourt or the Deux-Magots, who gave me their review copies, tons of literature done up in small parcels. I spent half my life down the Metro.

Chadenat, that redoubtable reader, had a fantastic memory. It was enough to give him the name of an author or a title and he would reel off a complete bibliography : the publisher, printers, year of publication, format, the number of pages and other particulars of no matter what book, and all this without consulting files, index- cards or catalogues. When I left for Washington, to do some research for a Life of John Paul Jones, founder of the American Navy, Chadenat not only gave me the names of a whole range of books to consult but even the shelf-mark in the celebrated Library of Congress where these could be found, and this simply from having once had in his hands a catalogue of the archives! On my return from the United States I made him a present of the log-book of the
Bonhomme Richard,
the famous mariner's frigate, an exceedingly rare little volume of which neither the Bibliotheque Nationale nor the Marine possesses a copy, and which Chadenat himself had never been able to obtain during his long career as a bookseller. Immediately, seizing hold of a ladder, he climbed up to one of the top shelves in his shop and found a book which he presented to me, knowing how much pleasure it would give me. It was the
Theorie Complete de la Construction et de la Manoeuvre des Vaisseaux,
the original Paris edition of 1776, by my great-grand-uncle, Leonard Euler, a book that was impossible to find anywhere. And then I was emboldened to ask him the question I had been dying to ask for years, every time I crossed the threshold of his shop: 'Tell me, Chadenat, how do you find your way around in this muddle? Doesn't anyone ever steal your books?'

Yes, it's happened three times and each time I realized it at once, I felt it like a blow to the heart,' Chadenat replied. 'However, it wasn't very serious, it was quite innocent really, just some kleptomaniacs, as they say nowadays, or, in other words, idiots! But I must confess, I am bound to each one of my books as if by an umbilical cord. . .

Ambroise Vollard said much the same thing to me one day. He was a generous host and invited his guests to dine amongst the clutter of his paintings; he, too, was the victim of a theft by one of his friends.

'It was past midnight. I had driven my guests home in the car and had left Mme de J. . . at her door, in Montmartre. "When I came home, I was just about to put the key into the lock when I felt a blow to the heart. I jumped into the car and drove straight back to Mme de J. . ,'s house. "My dear friend," I shouted through the door, which she was very slow in opening, and which I was pounding with my fists in my impatience, "it's me! Open up! Listen,, a joke's a joke, but this is going too far. Give me back my. ..." I was not mistaken. Mme de J. . . opened the door a crack and laughingly held out to me a little canvas she had carried off hidden in her bodice. . . . "And what was it?" "Oh, nothing much, a small Renoir, a bouquet of roses."

'But how could you know, Vollard, that amongst all your thousands of paintings this lady had made off with precisely that one?'

'I must admit, Cendrars, that I'm bound to each one of my pictures as if by an umbilical cord.'

'Did you ever see your thief again?'

'She wasn't a thief. . . . Mme de J. . . came to see me next day and explained that she had been dying for a fur coat for a long time and simply didn't know how to persuade me to buy her one. Hence the outrageous trick she played on me, counting on my gratitude.'

'And did you give her the money for a fur coat?'

'There and then, the moment I recovered my Renoir. But in any case, dressed up or not, Mme de J. . . was an ugly old trout. . . .'

Like Chadenat, Guillaume Apollinaire had a phenomenal memory for bibliography, but I never saw him read a book — that is to say, not what you could call reading. He would pick up a book like a conjurer, flick through the pages with his thumb and index finger like a Greek shuffling a pack of marked cards, not even troubling to glance through it, put it down in front of him on the little bleached wood table in his kitchen where he liked to write, rest his hands on it and, after a few minutes of this, he was ready to give you a recension of the text and to write about it, going so far as to quote complete passages from the book in his article and to criticize it knowledgeably. For Apollinaire, writing was a holiday (I know a woman who possesses over five hundred letters from Guillaume!) and he took a childish delight in reading and rereading what he had written. Just like a kid, he was proud to see his name in print at the bottom of a page, and he rediscovered every one of his own, utterances with the same surprise and reread it with the same childish pride, the same joy, the same happiness, as if it were a Sunday treat.

'What were you reading, Guillaume, it must have been very absorbing?'

'The
Mercure de France
, my latest article in
La Vie Anecdotique.
Here it is, look. . .

And Lieutenant Apollinaire held out a blood-stained copy of the
Mercure
to me. He had brought it back with him!

Because of the poet's blood spilled on it, I never read this article by Apollinaire. That was in the spring of 1917. Cocteau was doing
Parade
at the Chatelet, Picasso had designed the costumes and painted the decor and the curtain for the Ballets Russes. Cubism was triumphant. Poor Lieutenant, unlucky soldier who was transported to the Italian hospital on the quai d'Orsay, then to the Villa Moliere to be trepanned, once, twice; and Guillaume took up writing again, but not for a long time.

Quite a different type, indeed an unprecedented type of reader, whom I met sometimes on the quays but whose favourite haunt was the flea-market at Saint-Ouen on Sunday mornings, or the Foire- aux-Jambons on boulevard Richard-Lenoir, where he made some of his most felicitous discoveries, was the solicitor from the rue Murillo, the solicitor who handled my divorce case; he collected old dictaphone cylinders, old cylinders no one gave a thought to, but which he listened to religiously every Sunday afternoon as others listen to the sermons of Father Fessard at Notre-Dame or the panegyrics of Father Riquet on the national radio every Sunday morning. And so my solicitor enabled me to listen to the old Mr Michelin (tyres) dictating his mail, or old Mr Duval (restaurants) his menus, all the grand old men of French commerce and business at the Exhibition, and more than one of the so-called Kings of Paris, of about 1900, although they were of provincial origin, the Lebaudys, the Bornibus, etc. etc., who were already very modern, that is to say very chaste, distrusting the allurements of a secretary, which is why they were so successful in business, unlike the following generation, which was more athletic and more industrial, and, contrary to what is always said of them, more enthusiastic, the Citroens and company, for example, who have never known how to do anything but succeed in business, by dint of aping American businessmen, taking the broad view, and compromising themselves, like the Americans, who are the most sentimental people in the world, with a secretary in silks and satins and furs, on the beaches, at the winter sports, in the casinos. These first users of the dictaphone must have been grasping Protestants, whence the solid credit in the bank accounts of all these elderly gentlemen, and their success and their fortunes built up little by little.

Still another type of reader, and likewise a solicitor, was my father's friend, the doyen of Tours. Late in life this very dignified ministerial official acquired a reputation at the Palais de Justice as a Nimrod, since he had acquired a very famous local hunt, a hunt which had been the ruin of each of the previous owners in turn, and all his fellow-lovers of the bag, the pettifogging game-bag, rejoiced. Passing through Blois at the end of the year, I was sufficiently curious to go out of my way, making a detour through Sologne and forging into the woods and marshlands so as to surprise the famous huntsman who generously supplied the members of the legal profession in Tours with woodcock, pheasants, wild duck and haunches of venison, but never invited anyone to his home. The woods were white with hoar-frost and the swamps were frozen solid. Everywhere there were traces of game and tracks in the snow and ducks and waterfowl scuttled about in the rushes. I was driving slowly. My ear was cocked for the sound of hounds baying over the reeking droppings of a wild boar, or distant rifle-shots, and at each turning of the rough road I expected to see a wild beast, but there was nothing to be heard except the chugging of my engine and nothing moved in the wilderness except my car. When I reached my destination, the gate was closed, the house looked deserted and I had to blow my horn for a long time. To right and left of the lodge hundreds and hundreds of pheasants were pecking grain out of feeding-troughs, like chickens in a farmyard, and behind the house, in a paddock, I saw does and a lively buck who pricked up his ears as he looked at me, one hoof in the air, ready to run. I could not believe my eyes. At last a game-warden appeared, wearing gaiters and bundled up in a sheepskin jacket, a cap with ear-flaps knotted under his chin, his conk bright red and his breath smelling of wine.