Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (24 page)

But Trouville had fallen through, leaving only the near-perfect memory of something that had never taken place.

* THE MIRACULOUS TELEPHONE *

T
HE FOLLOWING SUMMER
(1907), he surprised himself and his servants, who were accustomed to working in artificial light and sleeping in the daytime, by reaching the Channel resort of Cabourg. He chose Cabourg because he had spent some long and unforgotten holidays there with his mother, and because the Grand Hôtel was responsive to his needs. He wrote to a friend from his suite on the top floor: ‘I have just spent an entire year in bed.’ Then, after a brief calculation, he corrected himself: ‘This year, I have left my bed five times.’

This was slightly inaccurate. In March, he had visited a friend in Paris who had been poisoned by oysters. In April, whilst enjoying a respite from the cacophonous installation of his neighbour’s toilet (‘she keeps having the seat changed–widening it, I expect’), he had gone to the balcony and taken the air. He had attended three
soirées
and visited a newspaper office to discuss an article. Including his departure for Cabourg, he had left his bed seven times in all.

For longer trips across Paris, he had only to descend to the street, where, summoned by telephone, his chauffeur would be waiting. But there was always the possibility of getting lost at either end. Two years before–when his mother was alive, listening out for the creaking floorboard that announced the return of her son–he had left the taxi and stepped into the ‘
ascenceur
’ (which he always misspelled), and nearly committed a criminal offence against the General Secretary of the mortgage-lending bank, Crédit Foncier, who lived on the floor above:

Once, he took the
ascenseur
to the street, turned right towards the Byzantine dome of Saint-Augustin, then right and right again towards the cupola of the Printemps department store, and then, after completing a triangular itinerary of one kilometre, found himself so close to his starting point that, despite being unable to identify his own front door, he located it at the third attempt.

The telephone made everything much simpler. Connections with Cabourg were not always reliable, because provincial exchanges often closed at nine o’clock in the evening. But in Paris, his friends could ask for the magic number–29205–and find themselves speaking to his concierge (who would send a messenger up the stairs), or even to Marcel himself, as if in person, provided that the telephone had been connected and that he had heard, from his bed or from the
cabinet
, the spinning-top sound that he preferred to the jangling bell. A telephone conversation was a little play for two or three voices. Sometimes, he transcribed the dialogue for the pleasure of his friends:

On that occasion, the unseen
demoiselle
, who placed distant souls in touch with one another, and whose utterances were always short and sibylline (because she was paid by the number of connections she made), finally delivered an unusually long burst of oracular wisdom: ‘In my opinion, M. de Croisset has disconnected his telephone so that he won’t be disturbed. Monsieur could telephone until two in the morning and would still be wasting his time.’

T
HOUGH HE HAD
yet to descend to the underworld in person, his words, transmitted by copper wires, had crossed subterranean Paris many times; his written messages had traversed all four hundred and fifty kilometres of the pneumatic tube network. The telephone was no less miraculous for having a scientific explanation. Had he been writing a novel, he would certainly have devoted long passages to it–the misunderstandings, the jocular friends who pretended to be somebody else, the total strangers whose voices suddenly entered his apartment. Without the distraction of a face, certain inflections and even aspects of a personality were instantly revealed. He himself had once been mistaken for a woman. Because of the telephone, his letters had become longer, more frequent and less trivial. ‘You only ever send me messages that could have been telephoned,’ he complained to a friend.

The maid, too, was often forced to resort to pen and paper:

Exasperated subscribers wrote to the newspapers, complaining about the inefficiency of the miracle. Unlike them, Marcel was always respectful of the mystery, and patient with wrong numbers and delays. He wrote an article on the subject for the
Figaro
:

Every conversation with a disembodied voice seemed to him a foreshadowing of eternal separation. The lovely expression that had entered daily speech–‘It was nice to hear your voice’–filled him with poignant anxiety. Years before, his mother had chided him for his reluctance to use the telephone. He sometimes heard her voice, crackling but distinct, rising from his memory as though it came to him through the labyrinth of wires:

* THE INDISPENSABLE CHEMIST *

E
VERY MODERN CONVENIENCE
implied its ideal form–the electric switch that was always within reach, the automobile that never broke down, the telephone that never cut short a conversation. Yet when the invention malfunctioned, it could conjure up an unexpected variety of perfection that would never have existed if the convenience had worked as advertised.

The Theatre in the Comfort of One’s Own Home!

Opéra, Opéra-Comique, Variétés, Nouveautés, etc. Apply to THÉ ÂTROPHONE, 23, Rue Louis-le-Grand. Tel. 101–03. For sixty francs a month, three people can hear performances daily.

Trial audition on request
.

The théâtrophone had disappointed him at first. A live performance of
Pelléas et Mélisande
reached him like something precious that had been smashed and sullied by the post. The
Pastoral Symphony
was almost as inaudible as it had been to Beethoven.
Die Meistersinger
was full of interruptions, like an over-literal demonstration of Baudelaire’s dictum, in his essay on Wagner: ‘In music, as in the written word, there is always a gap that is completed by the listener’s imagination.’ Yet without that intermittency, the remote performance would have lost its power: his memory would not have been forced to rush about the orchestra pit, playing every instrument, until the musicians returned from nowhere.

The mind, too, could be made to behave like a faulty contraption. Several chemists in his
quartier
stayed open into the night–the coloured jars gleaming in the gas light, a courteous magician presiding in a white coat–to dispense the precisely measured solace that only science could provide. Drugs helped him to sleep (Veronal, valerian, Trional and heroin, which he had once recommended to his mother), and to stay awake (caffeine, amyl nitrate and pure adrenalin). In certain states of drug-induced half-sleep, when the clatter of tramcars and the street-cries that had survived the advent of department stores reached his ears, muffled and distorted, the telephone operators in his brain started pushing plugs into sockets at random, rousing old memories, giving voice to the creaking floorboards and the ticking clock, initiating party-line conversations in which dozens of people spoke at once, repeating themselves endlessly or whispering things that could never quite be heard.

Certain drugs were best avoided. Of cocaine, he said, contrasting its visible effects with those of a healthy diet and a recent haircut, that ‘time has special express trains bound for premature old age, while return trains run on a parallel line and are almost as fast’. But other drugs, dispensed by a chemist, could send him on circular journeys from one end of his life to the other, after which, when the doors and the furniture had resumed their habitual positions, he was surprised to find himself still in bed on the second floor of an apartment block in the ninth
arrondissement
of Paris.

I
N THE GLOOM
of his soundproofed apartment, he had seen the years slip by. He sat in his nest of pillows and pullovers, writing long letters to friends and elaborate notes to the maid. In the time it had taken him to compose a few articles and reviews, the Métropolitain had become a world in its own right.

By the time he started work on his ‘Parisian novel’ in 1908–fearing that he had left it too late–there were sixty kilometres of tunnels and ninety-six stations. The spread of the Métropolitain was such a normal part of life that newspapers no longer bothered to report the opening of a new line. The original Métro was already a quaint memory. Its sleepers of creosoted beech, which were blamed for breathing difficulties, had been replaced by solid oak. In 1909, the moving staircase at Père-Lachaise, which covered thirty centimetres a second, made the old kind of staircase seem intolerably uncooperative. Hundreds of other escalators followed. The climb out of the depths was now no more arduous than the descent. Lighting was improved, and it became possible to read in the underground. Travellers who were offended by the smell of their fellow passengers could place ten centimes in a slot, hold a handkerchief under a tap, pull the handle and collect a dash of sweet myrrh or ylang-ylang. There were weighing machines, inscribed ‘Know Your Weight–Know Yourself’, and a continually refreshed museum of cheerful pictures: a cow giving milk to a
chocolatier
, a cod offering its liver to a person with anaemia, a mongrel listening to a gramophone.

Fears that Parisians would turn into a mindless herd obsessed with time had proved unfounded. Workers and businessmen in every part of Paris were delighted to be able to spend a few extra minutes in bed every morning. The Métro oiled their social activities and lent itself to their desires with unquestioning efficiency. At the music hall–which he sometimes attended in a box, sitting above the thickest layers of tobacco smoke–it was celebrated in songs: Landry’s ‘La Petite Dame du Métro’, Dranem’s ‘Le Trou de mon quai’. Less than ten years after the opening of Line 1, it was impossible to imagine Paris without the Métro. For tourists and returning natives, it was an inexhaustible source of what would one day be called ‘Proustian moments’.

A patient chemist might have concocted the magic potion: old perspiration reactivated by new; a hint of stagnant water; various industrial lubricants and detergents; cheap scents from a dispensing machine; a selection of hydrocarbons and carboxyls, and, dominating the other smells, pentanoic acid, from brakes and human warmth, which occurs naturally in valerian. It would have surprised him to learn that the infusions of valerian that sent him into the echoing realms of somnolence filled his apartment with an odour that had some of his visitors involuntarily rushing back to the Métropolitain.

* THE CELESTIAL MACHINE *

A
NOTHER DECADE PASSED
, and the great novel was finally nearing completion. The world described in
Àla recherche du temps perdu
was disappearing in the cratered fields of northern France, but the novel, with its gleaming inscrutability, the flawless circuitry of its sentences and its bewildering modes of efficiency, belonged to the new world as much as passenger aeroplanes and the Theory of Relativity.

The author, meanwhile, inhabited a dimension where time moved as imperceptibly as an hour-hand. When he dined at the Ritz, he wore the same stiff white collar; his shoes came from Old England and his dinner jacket from Carnaval de Venise. The thin moustache, waxed by the man who had cut his father’s hair, was the kind of impeccable anachronism that inspired devotion in the waiters. The car waiting outside the hotel was the old Renault, which he had refused to allow the chauffeur to replace with a more modern machine. Apart from a few uniforms at the tables and talk about the lack of coal, the war had barely intruded on the Ritz.