The Belly of Paris (41 page)

“That boy” he said, “cannot manage two political ideas at the same time. He would be more suited to teach writing at a girls' boarding school. It would be a disaster if he succeeded because we would have to look after all the damned workers with whom he locked arms in his foolish social daydreams. Don't you see, that's how we will lose. There's no room for whiners, humanitarian poets, people who are going to throw their arms around each other at the slightest scratch … But he won't succeed. He'll end up in a coffin, that's all.”

Logre and the wine merchant said nothing. They let Charvet go on.

“He would have been in his coffin a long time ago if he were as dangerous as he thinks he is,” Charvet continued. “His pathetic pretenses about escaping from Cayenne. I'm sure the police knew all about it the day he arrived back in Paris. He was left alone because they couldn't care less.”

Logre shuddered slightly.

“They've been trailing me now for fifteen years,” he added proudly. “But I'm not going to scream about it to the rooftops. I'm not going to get involved in this fracas of his. I won't play the fool. He may have half a dozen informants trailing him, ready to grab him by the collar the second the prefecture wants him.”

“Oh, no! What an idea,” said Monsieur Lebigre, who normally didn't speak at all. He was a little pale and cast a glance at Logre, who was rubbing his hump against the glass partition.

“This is speculation,” the hunchback muttered.

“Call it speculation if you like,” answered the tutor. “I know how the police operate. In any case, the police aren't going to get me this time either. Let the others do what they want. But if you listen to me, especially you, Monsieur Lebigre, you won't want to put your business at risk. Because they'll shut you down.”

Logre could not help but smile. Several times Charvet had spoken to them in this way. He must have thought he could separate
the two of them from Florent by scaring them. He was always surprised by their calm and confidence. Nevertheless, he still came regularly in the evening with Clémence. The big brunette was no longer a clerk in the fish market. Monsieur Manoury had fired her.

“Those agents are all bastards,” grumbled Logre.

Clémence leaned her chair back against the partition, rolling a cigarette in her long, thin fingers, and answered in her crisp voice, “It's a fair fight. We don't have the same politics, you see. That Manoury, who brings in moneybags as fat as he is, licks the emperor's boots. If I had a business, I would keep him on my staff twenty-four hours a day.”

The truth was, it was her offbeat sense of humor that had caused the trouble. One day she had thought it would be funny to write on the sales boards, right next to the dabs and skates and mackerel, the names of the best-known ladies and gentlemen of the court. The fishy nicknames given to highly placed dignitaries—countesses and barons for sale at thirty sous apiece—had deeply shocked Monsieur Manoury. Gavard was still laughing about it.

“Don't worry about it,” he said, patting Clémence on the arm. “You're a real man.”

Clémence had found a new way of mixing grog. First she filled the glass with hot water. Then, after adding sugar, she poured in the rum, one drop at a time, on a floating slice of lemon, so that the rum did not mix with the water. Then she lit it and watched it burn with great earnestness, slowly smoking, her face lit green by the licks of the flame. But it was an expensive drink, and she'd had to drop it when she lost her job. Charvet would comment with biting laughter that she wasn't rich anymore.

She earned a little money giving French lessons to a young woman at the head of rue Miromesnil who was secretly polishing her education and hiding it from her maid. So this evening Clémence ordered nothing more than a beer, which she drank, accepting her fate philosophically.

Evenings in the glassed-in room were not as tumultuous as they once had been. Charvet, pale and in an icy rage, had fits of silence when they ignored him to listen to his rival. The thought that he
had once ruled there, that before the other man came he had been a despot lording over the group, had planted in his heart the cancer of a deposed king. If he continued going there, it was only his nostalgia for this crowded little corner where he recalled lovely hours of tyranny over Robine and Gavard. It was a time when he owned not only Logre's hunchback but the meaty arms of Alexandre and the somber face of Lacaille. With one word he could bend them, stuff his opinion down their throats, and hold his scepter above their shoulders. But nowadays it was too painful, and he stopped talking entirely, stiffening his back, whistling a casual tune, and considering it beneath him to bother refuting the stupidities he was hearing. What most upset him was the way he had been pushed away little by little, so gradually that he had failed to notice. He could not understand how Florent had dominated. He would often say, after listening to his soft voice and seeing his sad demeanor during the endless hours he was speaking, “Why, that boy is a priest. He's only lacking the skullcap.”

But the others seemed to drink up his every word. Charvet, faced with Florent's clothes hanging from every hook, would pretend not to know where he could hang his hat without getting it dirty. He shoved back the papers that were scattered around and said that they could no longer feel at home there since “this ‘monsieur’ has taken over everything here.” He even complained to the wine merchant, asking him if the room was for everyone or just one customer. This invasion of his domain was the final blow. Men were just dumb animals, after all. It gave him tremendous contempt for the human race to watch Logre and Monsieur Lebigre with their eyes fixed on Florent. Gavard exasperated him with his revolver. Robine, who remained silent behind his mug of beer, seemed to him the most solid one of the group. No doubt he judged men by their true value and not their words. As for Lacaille and Alexandre, they confirmed his belief that people are too stupid and need to live under a revolutionary dictatorship for at least ten years to learn how to act.

Logre confirmed that all the sections would soon be completely organized. Florent began to give out assignments. Then one night,
after a final discussion in which he again came out the loser, Charvet got up, grabbed his hat, and said, “Good night to you all. Go get your heads beaten in, if that's what you want. But I won't be there, you understand? I have never worked for anyone's personal ambition.”

Clémence, who was putting on her scarf, added coldly, “The plan is inept.”

And since Robine was watching them with a gentle look, Charvet asked if he was coming with them. Robine, who still had three fingers of beer left in his mug, thought it would be enough to offer a handshake. The couple never came back. Lacaille learned one day that Charvet and Clémence had started frequenting a brasserie on rue Serpente. He had seen them through the window gesticulating a great deal, surrounded by an attentive group of very young people.

Florent was never able to enlist Claude. There was a moment when he fantasized about indoctrinating Claude with his political ideas, making him a disciple who could help him in the work of his revolution. With this in mind, one evening he took him to Monsieur Lebigre's. But Claude spent the evening doing a sketch of Robine, with his hat and his brown coat, his beard resting on the knob of his cane.

Leaving with Florent, he said, “No, you see, all those things you were talking about in there are of no interest to me. Maybe it's brilliant, but it goes right by me. You have that outstanding fellow there, Robine. He's deep as a well, that one. I'm coming back, but not for the politics. I want to sketch Logre and do another of Gavard, to put them with Robine into a fantastic painting that came to me while you were discussing the question of—how was it you put it—the question of the two chambers, wasn't that it? Can't you picture it, Gavard, Logre, and Robine talking politics from behind their beer mugs? It would be the hit of the Salon, my good friend, a tremendous success, true modern painting.”

Florent was saddened by Claude's skepticism about politics. He made him come up to his room, and they talked until two in the morning on the narrow balcony facing the blue vastness of Les
Halles. He questioned and instructed, gave him a catechism, telling him he was less than a man if he was indifferent to the well-being of his country.

The painter shook his head and answered, “You may be right, I am selfish. I can't even say that I paint for my country, in the first place because everyone who looks at my paintings is horrified, and in the second place because when I am working on a painting, I think only of pleasing myself. It is as though I tickle myself when I paint. It makes my whole body laugh. What do you want? It's just the way I'm built. I'm not going to throw myself in the river over it. Also, France does not need me, as my aunt Lisa is always pointing out. And if you will excuse me for being frank … the reason I like you is that you approach politics exactly the way I approach painting. You like to tickle yourself with it, my friend.”

When Florent tried to deny it, Claude continued, “Wait a minute. You're an artist in your own field. You dream politics. I imagine you spend entire evenings here, gazing at the stars, interpreting them as infinity's ballots. Then you tickle yourself with your ideas of justice and truth. It's also true that your ideas, like my paintings, strike terrible fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie. And furthermore, just between you and me, do you think I would have any fun being your friend if you were Robine? Ah, no, great poet that you are.”

Then Claude started joking around, saying that politics didn't bother him anymore, that he had gotten used to them in the brasseries and the studios. While on the subject, he told Florent of a café on rue Vauvilliers, the café on the ground floor of the building where La Sarriette lived. That smoky room had booths upholstered in worn velour and marble tables yellowed by coffee spills mixed with rum. It was the usual place for the modern young people of the neighborhood to meet. There Monsieur Jules reigned over a crowd of porters, shop boys, and the white shirt and velvet cap crowd.
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At either temple a curl was glued to his cheek. Every Saturday he had his neck shaved to keep it white at a barber's on rue des Deux-Ecus, where he paid by the month. He set the tone, playing billiards with a studied grace, employing his hips, bending
his arms and legs, nearly lying over the edge in a position to best use his loins. When the game ended, it was time for talk. The crowd was very reactionary and very materialistic.

Jules read the fluffy newspapers. He knew the people in the small theater world, talked with familiarity about the celebrities of the day, and always knew which plays had bombed and which had been cheered in the previous night's openings. But he had a weakness for politics. His ideal was Morny
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as he liked to call the duc de Morny. He read the annals of the sessions of the Corps Législatif and laughed merrily at Morny's most trivial comments. Morny ridiculed those dumb republicans. Then he would go on to say that only the scum of society hated the emperor, because the emperor cared for the well-being of all respectable people.

“Sometimes I go to their café,” Claude told Florent. “That bunch is very funny too with their pipes, talking about balls at court as though they were ever invited. That little fellow who goes around with La Sarriette, you know, he made fun of poor old Gavard the other night. He calls him ‘uncle.’ When La Sarriette came downstairs looking for him, she had to pay his bill because he had lost all his money between drinks and billiards. Pretty girl, that Sarriette, isn't she?”

“Ah, what a nice life you lead,” said Florent, smiling. “Between Cadine, La Sarriette, and all the others.”

The painter shrugged. “You see, that's where you are mistaken. I don't want women. They upset everything too much. I wouldn't even know what to do with a woman. I've always been afraid to find out … Good night, sleep well. If you ever become a government minister, I would like to give you a few ideas for the beautification of Paris.”

Florent had to give up on his plan to make Claude a disciple. That saddened him because despite his fanatic's blindness, he was beginning to sense a growing hostility around him. Even at the Méhudins' he was received a little more coldly. The old woman was cackling under her breath. Muche no longer listened to him. The Beautiful Norman treated him with curt impatience when she
moved her chair close to him and he wouldn't respond. Once she said that he acted as though he were displeased with her, and when he only managed to respond with an embarrassed smile she angrily moved over to the other side of the table. And he had lost the friendship of Auguste. When the boy went up to bed, he never stopped in Florent's room anymore. Auguste was very frightened by the stories circulating about this man with whom he had spent so much time late at night. Augustine made him swear not to be so foolish anymore. But Lisa managed to end the friendship completely when she asked them to delay their marriage until the cousin had relinquished his upstairs room. She didn't want to put the new shopgirl into the tiny room on the first floor.

From that moment Auguste longed for “the expulsion of the jailbird.” He had found his dream charcuterie not in Plaisance but a little farther away in Montrouge. Smoked pork products had become profitable items, and Augustine had said that she was ready, laughing in that chubby-girl way she had. Every night Auguste would lurch out of sleep at the slightest sound, feeling a surge of false hope, thinking the police had come for Florent.

At the Quenu-Gradelles' no comment was ever made about these things. The staff of the charcuterie had a tacit understanding to shroud Quenu in silence. Quenu, saddened by the rift between his brother and his wife, consoled himself by stringing his sausages and salting his strips of pork fat. He sometimes went to the doorway of the shop to air his thick ruddy skin, which laughingly bulged out of the tight white apron stretched across his belly. He never realized how his appearance at the door always stirred up the Les Halles gossip mill. People sighed for him. People found that he was losing weight, overlooking the fact that he was enormously fat. On the other hand, there were those who accused him of being too fat, considering the shame he should be feeling for having a brother such as his.