75 The curio dealer’s son in red leather on his Guzzi motorbike
76 The principal destroying the secrets of the German scientist
77 The historian, turned down 46 times, burning his 1200-pp. MS
78 A Jap who turned a quartz watch Co into a gigantic syndicate
79 The Swedish diplomat trying madly to avenge his son and wife
80 The delayed voyager begging to have her green beans returned
81 The star seeking admission by meditating a recipe for afters
82 The lady who was interested in hoarding clockwork mechanisms
83 The magician guessing answers with digits selected at random
84 The Russian prince presenting a mahogany sofa shaped in an S
85 The superfluous driver playing cardgames to use up his hours
86 A medic, hoping to make a mark on gastronomy with crab salad
87 An optimistic engineer liquidating his exotic hides business
88 The Japanese sage initiating in great anguish Three Free Men
89 A selftaught old man again going over his sanatorium stories
90 A relative twice removed, obliged to auction his inheritance
91 Customs & Excise men unpacking the raging princess’s samovar
92 The trader in Indian cotton goods doing up a flat on the 8th
93 French-style overtures brought to the Hamburg Opera by a Hun
94 Marguerite, restoring things seen through a magnifying glass
95 The puzzlemaker with his ginger cat taking the name of Chéri
96 The nightclub waiter, legging up on stage to start a cabaret
97 The rich amateur leaving his musical collection to a library
98 A housing and estate agency woman looking at that empty flat
99 The lady doing the Englishman’s black cardboard puzzle boxes
100 The critic committing 4 crimes for 1 of Percival’s seascapes
101 The Praetor ordering 30000 Lusitanians to be killed in a day
102 A student in a long coat staring at a map of the Paris metro
103 The building manager, trying to solve his cash-flow problems
104 The girl studying the craftsman’s rings to sell in her store
105 Nationalists fighting the Damascene publisher who was French
106 A little girl gnawing at the edges of her shortbread cookies
107 The maid, imagining she’d seen the evil eye in an undertaker
108 A painstaking scientist examining rats’ reactions to poisons
109 The pranking student who put beef stock in vegetarians’ soup
110 A workman gazing at his letter, as he leaves with two others
111 The aged gentleman’s gentleman recomputing his nth factorial
112 The staggered priest offering help to a Frenchman lost in NY
113 The druggist spending his fortune on the Holy Vase of Joseph
114 The jigsaw glue being perfected by a head of a chemistry lab
115 That gent in a black cloak donning new, tight-fitting gloves
116 Old Guyomard cutting Bellmer’s sheet in 2 through the middle
117 Original fine champagne proffered to Colbert by Dom Pérignon
118 A gay waltz being written by an old friend of Liszt & Chopin
119 Agreeably drowsy after lunch, M. Riri sitting at his counter
120 Gallant Amerigo learning a continent was to be named America
121 Mark Twain reading his obituary long before he’d intended to
122 The woman polishing a dagger that was Kléber’s murder weapon
123 The college endowed by its ex-rector, an expert in philology
124 The single mother reading Pirandello’s story of Daddi, Romeo
125 The historian who used pseudonyms to publish rubbishy novels
126 The librarian collecting proof that Hitler continues to live
127 A blind man tuning a Russian prima donna’s grand piano-forte
128 A decorator making the most of the young pig’s crimson bones
129 The agent trading cowries believing he’d make millions at it
130 The disappointed customer who in dyeing her hair lost it all
131 The assistant librarian using red pencil to ring opera crits
132 The lovelorn coachman who thought he’d heard a rodent mewing
133 The kitchen-lads bringing up hot tasty snacks for a grand do
134 The nurse’s milk jug spilt on the carpet by two naughty cats
135 A Tommy and his bride-to-be stuck between floors in the lift
136 The bookdealer who found three of Victor Hugo’s original MSS
137 The English “au pair” reading an epistle from her boy-friend
138 The ordnance general who was shot in the lounge of his hotel
139 The doctor whom loaded fire-arms forced to carry out surgery
140 Safari-buffs with their native guide – posing for the camera
141 The French prof, getting pupils’ vacation assignments marked
142 A beautiful Polish woman and her wee son dreaming of Tunisia
143 The judge’s spouse whose pearls had cooked black in the fire
144 The cyclist struggling for recognition for his 1–hour record
145 A conscript startled on seeing his old physics schoolteacher
146 The ex-landlord dreaming of a “hero” of the traditional kind
147 A conductor rehearsing his band for 9 weeks, again and again
148 A gifted numerate, aspiring to construct a massive radiomast
149 Antipodean fans giving their idol a present of 71 white mice
150 The Spanish ex-concierge not too keen to unjam the lift door
151 Listening to an enormous phonogram, a smoker of an 89c cigar
152 A choreographer, returning to torment the loveless ballerina
153 The man who delivered wine on a trike doing the hall mirrors
154 An obviously pornographic old man waiting at the school gate
155 The botanist hoping an ivory Epiphyllum would carry his name
156 The so-called Russian who solved every brainteaser published
157 The infant Mozart, performing for Louis and Marie-Antoinette
158 A sword-swallower who on medication threw up a load of nails
159 A man who made religious articles dying of cold in the woods
160 Blind horses, deep down in the mine, hauling railway waggons
161 A urologist musing on the arguments of Galen and Asclepiades
162 A handsome pilot looking for the castle at Corbenic on a map
163 The carpenter’s workman warming his hands at a woodchip fire
164 Visitors to the Orient trying to solve the magic ring puzzle
165 A ballet maestro beaten to death in the U.S.A. by 3 hoodlums
166 A princess, who said prayers at her regal granddad’s bedside
167 The tenant (for 6 wks) insisting on full checks on all pipes
168 A manager who managed to be away for four months in the year
169 A lady who owned a curio shop fishing for a malosol cucumber
170 The man who saw his own death warrant in a newspaper cutting
171 The emperor thinking of the “Eagle” to attack the Royal Navy
172 Famous works improved by a celebrated artist’s layer of haze
173 Eugene of Savoy having a list made of the relics of Golgotha
174 In a polka-dot dress, a woman who knitted beside the seaside
175 The Tommies enjoying girls’ gym practices on a Pacific beach
176 Gedeon Spilett locating the last match in his trouser pocket
177 A young trapeze artist refusing to climb down from his perch
178 Woodworms’ hollow honeycombs solidified by an Italian artist
179 Lonely Valène putting every bit of the block onto his canvas
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Plassaert, 2
ONE OF THE rooms in the Plassaerts’ flat:
the first one they moved into, a little over thirteen years ago, a year before their child was born. A few years later Troyan died, and they bought his attic from the manager. Then they bought the room at the bottom of the corridor from the Marquiseaux: it was occupied by an old man called Troquet who eked out a living by collecting empty glass bottles; he would reclaim the deposit on them but kept some for himself, into which he would fit little figures made of cork representing drinkers, boxers, sailors, Maurice Chevalier, General de Gaulle, etc., which he would sell to Sunday strollers on the Champs-Elysées. The Plassaerts immediately started proceedings to obtain an eviction order because Troquet didn’t pay his rent regularly, and, as Troquet was halfway to being a tramp, they won easily.
In the first of the two bedrooms there had once lived for two years a curious young man by the name of Grégoire Simpson. He was a history student. He worked for a time as assistant sub-librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra. His work was far from fascinating: a wealthy amateur, Henri Astrat, had bequeathed to the library a collection of documents he had spent forty years of his life assembling. He was passionately keen on opera and had practically not missed a single first night since nineteen ten, thinking nothing of crossing the Channel or even the Atlantic a couple of times to hear Fürtwangler conducting the Ring, Tebaldi singing Desdemona, or Callas playing Norma.
For each performance Astrat made up a file of press reviews, together with the programme – fulsomely autographed by the conductor and performers – and, depending on the nature of the occasion, various items from the costumes and sets: violet braces worn by Mario del Monaco in the role of Rodolfo (La Bohème, Covent Garden, Neapolitan Opera, 1946), Victor de Sabata’s baton, the score of Lohengrin annotated by Heinz Tietjen for his historic production in Berlin in 1929, the models for the set designed by Emil Preetorius for the same production, the false marble mask which Karl Böhm had Haig Clifford wear for the part of the Commendatore in the production of Don Giovanni he put on at the Urbino Maggio musicale, etc.
Henri Astrat’s bequest came with an income attached to it intended to subsidise the continuation of this specialist archive, the only one of its kind in the world. The Bibliothèque de l’Opéra was therefore able to establish an Astrat Collection consisting of three exhibition and reading rooms, watched over by two guards, and two offices occupied respectively by the curator and a sub-librarian, together with a part-time assistant sub-librarian. The curator – a professor of art history specialising in Renaissance fêtes – received people entitled to consult the archive – researchers, theatre critics, theatre historians, musicologists, directors, designers, musicians, costumiers, actors, etc. – and organised exhibitions (Homage to the Met, One Hundred Years of La Traviata, etc.); the sub-librarian read almost all Paris dailies and a significant number of weeklies, magazines, reviews, and miscellaneous periodicals, ringing in red pencil all articles dealing with opera in general (“Will the Opéra be closed?”, “Plans for the Opéra”, “Where the Opéra is at”, “The ghost of the Opéra: myth and reality”, etc.) or with a particular opera; the part-time assistant sub-librarian cut out the red-ringed articles and put them loose into “provisional clips” (PC) held together by elastic; after an interval of variable length, but generally never longer than six weeks, the press cuttings (also abbreviated to PC) were got out of the PCs, stuck on sheets (21cm × 27cm) of white paper, and inscribed in red ink, at the top, from left to right, with: title of work in upper case with double underlining; genre (opera, light opera, opera-bouffe, dramatic oratorio, vaudeville, operetta, etc.); name of composer; name of conductor; name of producer; place of performance in upper case with single underlining; and date of first public performance; the cuttings thus mounted were then returned to their clips but instead of being held together by elastic they were now tied with flax laces, which made them “Buffer Files” (BF) to be kept in a glass-fronted cupboard in the office of the sub-librarian and part-time assistant sub-librarian (SL2PT); after a few weeks, when it had long been clear that no further articles would be published on the relevant performance, the BF would be transferred to one of the big wire-mesh-fronted cupboards in the exhibition and reading rooms where it finally became a “Shelved File” (SF) of the same status as the rest of the Astrat Collection, viz. “available for consultation on the premises to holders of full reader’s cards or a special authorisation issued by the Curator i/c the Collection” (Summary of Statutes, article XVIII, §3, clause c).
Unfortunately this part-time job was not renewed. An auditor brought in to discover the cause of the inexplicable deficits incurred each year by libraries in general and by the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra in particular opined in his report that two guards for three rooms were too many, and that one hundred and seventy-five francs and eighteen centimes a month for cutting articles out of newspapers was one hundred and seventy-five francs and eighteen centimes wasted, since a single guard with nothing to do but guard could just as easily guard whilst cutting cuttings. The sub-librarian, a shy lady of fifty with sad eyes and a hearing aid, tried to explain that such comings and goings of PCs and BFs between her office and the exhibition and reading rooms would be a constant source of bother likely to do great harm to the SFs – which turned out to be the case – but the curator, only too happy to keep his own job at least, fully shared the auditor’s opinion and, “determined to staunch the chronic financial haemorrhage” of his department, resolved 1) that there would be henceforth one guard only, 2) that there would be henceforth no part-time assistant sub-librarian (SL2PT), 3) that the exhibition and reading rooms would be open to the public henceforth on only three afternoons a week, 4) that the sub-librarian would cut out the articles she considered “most important” herself, and give the remainder to the guard to cut out, and, lastly, 5) that as an economy measure, cuttings would be stuck henceforth on recto and verso sides of the sheets.
Grégoire Simpson completed the academic year by finding various temporary jobs: he showed flats for sale to potential buyers, inviting them to climb on kitchen stools so they could see for themselves that by craning the neck only a little they had a view of the Sacré-Cœur, he had a go at doorstep selling, hawking “artbooks” up staircases, as well as ghastly encyclopaedias prefaced by senescent celebrities, “unlabelled” handbags which were just bad copies of mediocre originals, “young people’s” magazines of the Do You Like Students? kind, and doilies embroidered in orphanages and mats plaited by the blind. And Morellet, his neighbour, who had just had the accident which robbed him of three fingers, entrusted him with finding customers in the quartier for his soaps, his air-fresheners, his fly-killer discs, and his hair and carpet shampoos.
The following year Grégoire Simpson won a scholarship which came to not very much but was at least enough to live on without his being absolutely obliged to find work. But instead of studying hard and completing his degree, he fell into a sort of neurasthenia, a strange lethargy from which nothing, it seemed, could arouse him. Those who had occasion to meet him at this time had the feeling he was in a state of weightlessness, in a kind of sensorial void, a condition of total indifference: indifferent to the weather, to the time of day, to the information which the external world continued to address to him but which he seemed ever less inclined to receive: he began to lead a drab kind of life, wearing the same clothes every day, dining every day at the same hot-dog stall, standing at the counter, eating the same meal: a full-course menu, that is to say steak and French fries, a large glass of red wine, and a coffee, reading Le Monde line by line every evening in the back of a café, spending whole days playing patience or washing three of his four pairs of socks or one of his three shirts in a pink plastic bowl.
Then came the period of his long walks around Paris. He let himself wander, going wherever the whim took him, plunging into the five-o’clock bustle of office workers. He trailed along shopfronts, went into all the art galleries, walked slowly through the arcades in the IXth arrondissement, stopping at every store. He stared with e
qual attention at rustic washstands in furniture stores, bedheads and springs in mattress-makers’ windows, artificial wreaths in undertakers’ shopfronts, curtain rails in haberdasheries, “erotic” playing cards with macromammaried pin-ups in novelty stores (Mann sprich deutsche, English speaken), the yellowing photographs advertising Art Studios: a moon-faced urchin in a vulgarly-cut sailor suit, an ugly boy in a cricket cap, a pug-nosed youth, a rather repellent bulldog type of man by a brand-new car; in a pork-butcher’s, Chartres Cathedral in lard; the humorous visiting cards in a joke-shop window display
the faded visiting cards and letterhead- and announcement-style models in typesetters’ windows
LE PANNEAU METALLISE
S.A.R.L. AU CAPITAL DE
6 810 000 F
Marcel-Emile Burnachs, S.A.
“Tout pour les Tapis”
ASSOCIATION
DES ANCIENS ELEVES
DU COLLEGE GEOFFROY SAINT-HILAIRE
Sometimes he invented ridiculous constraints for himself, such as listing all the Russian restaurants in the XVIIth arrondissement or working out an itinerary which would pass by each one without ever crossing over its own track, but usually he chose a trivial target – the one hundred and forty-seventh bench, the eight thousand two hundred and thirty-seventh step – and he would spend several hours sitting on the green slats of the bench with its cast-iron lion-paw ferrules somewhere near Denfert-Rochereau or Château-Landon, or stand stock still like a statue in front of a shopfitter’s shop showing not only wasp-waisted dummies and display trays displaying only themselves, but also a whole range of advertising streamers, stickers, and shop signs
SALE
Discontinued Styles
BARGAIN ITEM
NEW STOCK
Our Very Latest Creation
EXCLUSIVE
which he would stare at for minutes at a stretch as if he were still endlessly ruminating the logical paradox inherent in these kinds of shop windows.