The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (30 page)
Dekobra’s writing style earned the term “dekobrisme” in France, to describe a method of using journalistic components in fiction. While Dekobra’s tone is nearly always light, even in the prison scenes, it’s fascinating how he surveys the political landscape via the emancipation of his female characters. In fact, the story equates a woman’s liberty (in Lady Diana) with the freedom enjoyed by citizens of free countries. The Communist Varichkine says, “With us, the freedom of the press, along with the other sorts of freedom, has not existed since nineteen-eighteen, and it’s a good thing because liberty is as injurious for a race of people as it is for women” (
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). And Madame Mouravieff, despite all of her own sadistic power, also criticizes Lady Diana’s liberty, albeit out of fear that Lady Diana’s lax morals will embolden her to steal her lover away:
“I know them, those emancipated females, whose souls are studded with gems from Cartier’s, and whose bodies are accessible to any sort of voluptuous pleasure. They would eat snobbery out of the hand of a leper and sacrifice their standing to astonish the gallery. Their colossal conceit bulges like a goiter in the center of their otherwise emaciated hearts.… They are above conventions. They laugh at middle-class morals. They prod prejudices with their fingers and they lift their skirts in the face of disconcerted virtue.” (
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)
As Lady Diana’s nemesis, Madame Mouravieff actually steals the novel for several chapters, and she’s an alluring
villain. Although she dresses like a sober suffragette, in a plain gray suit, she holds a potent appeal for Séliman, in her pure foreignness. She might have even reminded readers of the hugely popular film star of the day, Theda Bara, nicknamed “the serpent of the Nile” for her portrayal of Cleopatra, and whose image was crafted around her exotic, dark beauty, her fake foreign parentage. There was a popular song that described Bara’s eyes, which were rimmed with black kohl to emphasize their intensity: “
She got the meanest pair o’ eyes, Theda Bara eyes
.” Madame Mouravieff’s cruel beauty is similarly often communicated through her eyes:
The flash of Madame Mouravieff’s eyes underlined her warning. (
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)
“Madame Mouravieff is not a she-devil and I shall certainly not cancel my passage … just because of the flash in her beautiful eyes.” (
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)
[T]he blue eyes set in the pallid face of that Muscovite cut like knife-blades through my tightly shut lids. (
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)
During the prison passages, her eyes gain an entire chapter title: “A Woman’s Eyes.” Her sadism against Gerard and the other male prisoner (who she forces to undress in front of her before his execution) suggest darker fears about females with power, but, as with any good villain, her cruelty is perversely amusing, especially when the ferocity of her class warfare becomes mixed up with the battle for her love object. Dekobra’s tale is by no means a patent feminist one, and it’s more rich for its contradictions. Madame Mouravieff may be the villain, but there’s no denying Séliman’s fascination for his torturer,
his attraction to her brutal strength. Is it some sexual lack that makes Madame Mouravieff so dangerous? Or has her power somehow taken her beyond sex?
The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars
was one of the first popular spy novels based on international intrigue and sophisticated travel, and the novel’s success did much to increase the legends surrounding the Orient Express. But it’s the women who, literally, make the story move. Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting,
Nude Descending a Staircase
(1913), was controversial because it showed a nude in motion, and because her nudity was made abstract (and therefore ugly to many). It alluded to a science of seeing, rather than to the traditional aesthetic of male desire, which required a nude to lie still. The “French humorist” who gave Lady Diana her nickname, “The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars,” invents a similar ironic pun. As Lady Diana herself states, she is no Madonna, no virgin. And Madonnas, like nudes, are still, static in their sanctity, not moving on a train, not doing whatever it is that happens in a sleeping car. Traveling, after all, as Lady Diana says, is “to change one’s ideas” (
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). Where she goes off to at the end of the novel is anyone’s guess.
What did chance hold in store for her at the journey’s end? A park full of orchids or a corner in a cemetery shaded with cypress trees? A massive golden throne or an operating-table? A lover’s arm or a strangler’s bony fingers? (
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)
It’s the final charm of the book that Dekobra grants Diana her life’s open destiny.
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY
 | AFTER MIDNIGHT by Irmgard Keun | 978-1-935554-41-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE by Ödön von Horvath | 978-1-935554-47-9 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | THE LATE LORD BYRON by Doris Langley Moore | 978-1-935554-48-6 $18.95 / $21.50 CAN |
 | THE TRAIN by Georges Simenon | 978-1-935554-46-2 $14.00 / $16.00 CAN |
 | THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP by W. H. Davies | 978-1-61219-022-8 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | FAITHFUL RUSLAN by Georgi Vladimov | 978-1-935554-67-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | THE PRESIDENT by Georges Simenon | 978-1-935554-62-2 $14.00 / $16.00 CAN |
 | THE WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Čapek | 978-1-61219-023-5 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE by Cheikh Hamidou Kane | 978-1-61219-054-9 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet | 978-1-61219-056-3 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | THE MADONNA OF THE SLEEPING CARS by Maurice Dekobra | 978-1-61219-058-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | THE BOOK OF KHALID by Ameen Rihani | 978-1-61219-087-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN |
 | YOUTH WITHOUT GOD by Ödön von Horváth | 978-1-61219-119-5 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN |