Life: A User's Manual

  They quickly developed rules for their game. As it turned out, the main thing was for one of them to commit some theft that had been set up in advance, and to do it within the other’s sight. A whole system of forfeits, generally of an erotic kind, rewarded or punished the thief according to his or her success or failure.

  The Danglars entertained a great deal and were invited out just as much, and they therefore selected their victims in the drawing rooms of embassies and at the great gatherings of Parisian high society. For example, Berthe challenged her husband to bring home the mink stole worn that evening by the Duchess of Beaufour, and Maximilien, picking up the challenge, demanded that his wife, in return, should get the Fernand Cormon cartoon (The Auroch Hunt) which hung on one of their host’s walls. Depending on the ease or difficulty of access to the desired object, the candidate was granted extensions of time or, in some more complex instances, could even call on the complicity or protection of his or her partner.

  Of the forty-four challenges they set each other, thirty-three were met. They stole amongst other things a large silver samovar from the Countess of Melan, a Perugino sketch from the Papal nuntio, the Hainault Bank’s managing director’s tiepin, and the almost complete manuscript of the Mémoires sur la vie de Jean Racine by his son Louis, which came from the home of a permanent secretary at the Ministry of Education.

  Anybody else would have been spotted and arrested at once, but the Danglars, even when they happened to be caught in the act, were able to exculpate themselves with hardly any trouble at all: it seemed so impossible for a high-court official and his wife to be suspected of burglary that witnesses preferred to disbelieve their own eyes rather than accept the guilt of a judge.

  So when he was caught on the staircase of the art dealer d’Olivet’s town house carrying off three lettres de cachet signed by Louis XVI and dealing with the Marquis de Sade’s sentences at Vincennes and the Bastille, Maximilien Danglars explained with all the calm in the world that he had just requested permission to borrow them for forty-eight hours from a man he had taken to be his host, a completely indefensible excuse which d’Olivet nonetheless accepted without a murmur.

  Such virtual impunity made them crazily audacious, as witnessed in particular by the affair that resulted in their downfall. At a ball given by Timothy Clawbonny – of the merchant bankers Marcuart, Marcuart, Clawbonny, and Shandon – a precious, oily, aged English pederast, dressed up as a bespectacled Confucius in a long mandarin robe, Berthe Danglars filched a Scythian tiara. The theft was discovered in the course of the evening. The police were called immediately, and they searched all the guests, finding the jewel in the fake bagpipe of the judge’s wife, who was disguised as a Highland chieftainness.

  Berthe Danglars confessed with equanimity that she had forced open the display case in which the tiara was locked because her husband had told her to; with equal equanimity Maximilien confirmed the truth of this confession and produced on the spot a letter from the governor of the Santé prison begging him – in strictest confidence – not to let out of his sight a certain golden crown which one of his informers had told him was to be purloined during this fancy-dress ball by Boris the Baritone: that was the name given to a bold burglar who had committed his first felony at the Opera, during a performance of Boris Godunov; in fact, Boris the Baritone remained a mythical thief for ever; it was later realised that eighteen of the thirty-three swipes ascribed to him had been done by the Danglars.

  On this occasion, yet again, the explanation, for all its apparent implausibility, was accepted by everyone, including the police. Nonetheless, as he walked back to headquarters on Quai des Orfèvres, deep in thought, a young inspector, Roland Blanchet, decided to have his men bring up the files on all the cases of theft that had taken place in Paris at society events and which remained unsolved; he felt a shiver go through him when he ascertained that the Danglars were on twenty-nine of the thirty-three guest lists. In his view, that constituted overwhelming proof; but the Police Chief, whom he told of his suspicions, and whom he asked to take on the case, viewed it as pure coincidence. And, after referring out of caution to the Ministry of Justice, which expressed indignation at a policeman doubting the word and the honour of a judge highly respected by all his colleagues, the chief forbade his inspector to concern himself with the investigation and, when the latter insisted on doing so, threatened to have him transferred to Algeria.

  Mad with anger, Blanchet resigned, and swore he would find proof of the Danglars’s guilt.

  For weeks Blanchet followed the Danglars or had them followed, and broke into the office which Maximilien enjoyed the use of at the Law Courts, but to no avail. The proof he was after, if it existed, was definitely not at the office, and Blanchet’s only chance was if the Danglars had kept some of the stolen articles in their flat. On Christmas Eve, 1925, knowing that the Danglars were dining out, that the Honorés were in bed, and that the young chambermaid was celebrating with three friends (Serge Valène, François Gratiolet, and Flora Champigny) at Fresnel’s restaurant, Blanchet finally managed to slip into the flat on the third floor left. He did not find Fanny Mosca’s sapphire-encrusted fan, nor the portrait of Ambroise Vollard by Félix Vallotton which had been spirited away from Lord Summerhill the day after he had finally purchased it, but he did find a pearl necklace which was maybe the one that had been stolen from Princess Rzewuska shortly after the armistice, and a Fabergé egg which fitted fairly well the description of one swiped from Madame de Guitaut. But Blanchet laid his hands on an exhibit for the prosecution which was far more dangerous for the Danglars than the other evidence whose authenticity his ex-masters could have gone on doubting: a foolscap notebook with ruled lines containing succinct but accurate descriptions of each of the thefts the Danglars had committed or attempted to commit, accompanied on the facing page by a list of the consequential forfeits the couple had inflicted on each other.

  Blanchet was about to leave with the notebook of revelations when he heard the front door of the flat opening at the other end of the corridor: it was Célia Crespi, who had forgotten to light the fire in Madame’s boudoir as Honoré had asked her to before he had gone up to bed, returning to fulfil her duty belatedly and to take advantage of so doing to offer her Christmas party companions a drop of liqueur and a taste of the marvellous candied sweet chestnuts Monsieur had been sent by a grateful offender. Hiding behind a curtain, Blanchet glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly one in the morning. The Danglars were not expected back until late, no doubt, but every minute brought the risk of an awkward confrontation nearer, and Blanchet could not get out without passing the big glass door of the dining room where Célia was treating her guests to a feast. Catching sight of a bouquet of artificial flowers gave him the idea of setting off a fire before going to hide in the Danglars’s bedroom. The fire spread with crazy speed, and Blanchet was beginning to wonder if he was going to be caught in his own trap, when Célia Crespi and the others finally noticed that the whole rear end of the flat was in flames. The alarm was given, and from then on it was easy for the ex-policeman to flee amongst the crowds of rescuers and neighbours.

  Blanchet lay low for some days, cruelly prompting the Danglars to believe that the notebook which proved their guilt – and which they had searched for high and low on returning to their half-burnt-out flat – had been consumed by the fire which destroyed all the other objects in the boudoir. Then the former inspector rang Danglars: the triumph of justice and truth was no longer his sole motive; if his demands had been more reasonable, it is likely that the affair would never have become public and that the deputy chairman of the Court of Appeal and his wife would have gone on freely indulging their thieving libidos for many more years. But the amount Blanchet demanded – five hundred thousand francs – was beyond the Danglars’s financial means. “Steal it,” Blanchet retorted wryly before hanging up. The Danglars felt quite unable to steal for money, and, preferring to go for broke, they fled.

  The Law does not look
kindly on its supposed pillars when they mock it, and the jury dealt with them sternly: thirty years’ penal servitude for Berthe Danglars, hard labour for life for Maximilien, who was deported to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where he died shortly after.

  A few years ago, Mademoiselle Crespi, out walking in Paris one day, recognised her former mistress: a toothless beggar sitting on a bench in Rue de la Folie-Régnault, dressed in a filthy brown dressing gown, pushing a pram full of odd belongings, who answered to the nickname of “The Baroness”.

  At the time the Honorés were both seventy. He was a pale-faced man from Lyons; he had travelled, had had his adventures, had been a puppeteer at Vuillermé and Laurent Josserand’s, a fakir’s mate, a waiter at the Bal Mabille, a barrel-organ grinder with a pointed bonnet and a monkey on his shoulder, before entering service in bourgeois households where his equanimity, which outdid the English at their own game, quickly made him irreplaceable. She was a sturdy Norman peasant who could do everything and would just as willingly have baked her own bread as stick a piglet had she been asked to. Engaged in Paris at the age of fifteen, in late 1871, she began as scullion in a pension, The Vienna School and Family Hotel, 22 Rue Darcet, near Place Clichy, an establishment ruled over with a rod of iron by a Greek, Madame Cissampelos, a short woman, as thin as a rake, who taught good manners to English girls sporting such fearsome incisors as to make people in those days think it witty to say you could use them for piano keys.

  Thirty years later, Corinne was the cook there, but still only earned twenty-five sous a month. It was about this time that she made the acquaintance of Honoré. They met at the Universal Exhibition, at the Bonshommes Guillaume show, a toy theatre where dolls no more than eighteen inches high pranced and danced on a tiny stage, dressed in the latest fashions. On seeing her bewildered, he explained the technicalities, then took her to see the Crazy House, an old Gothic fortress turned upside-down on its chimneypots, with windows back-to-front and furniture on the ceiling, and the Palace of Light, a wonderland house in which everything, from furniture to wall hangings, from carpets to cut flowers, was made of glass, and whose maker, the master blower Ponsin, had died before seeing it finished; and the Celestial Globe, the Palace of Dress, the Palace of Optics with its big telescope through which you could see the MOON at a distance of ONE yard, the Alpine Climbers’ Diorama, the Transatlantic Panorama, Venice in Paris, and a dozen other exhibition halls.

  What struck them most of all was, for her, the artificial rainbow in the Bosnian pavilion and, for him, the Exhibition of Mining with its six hundred yards of tunnel which you went through on an electric train and then came out of into a goldmine with real Negroes working in it, and Monsieur Fruhinsoliz’s gigantic hogshead, a veritable four-storey building containing no less than fifty-six kiosks serving every kind of drink in the world.

  They dined at The Fair Miller’s Maid beside the colonial pavilions, where they drank unbottled Châblis and ate cabbage soup and a leg of lamb that Corinne thought underdone.

  Honoré had been hired on a one-year contract by Monsieur Danglars senior, a wine-grower with estates in the Gironde, who was president of the Bordeaux section of the Wine Committee, which had moved to Paris for the whole duration of the Exhibition, and who had rented a flat from Juste Gratiolet. On leaving Paris a few weeks later, Monsieur Danglars senior was so pleased with his butler that he made a present of him, and of the flat, to his son Maximilien, who was about to be married and had just been appointed assessor to a magistrate. Shortly after, on the advice of the butler, the young couple hired the cook.

  After the Danglars Affair, the Honorés, too old to think of obtaining another post, got permission from Emile Gratiolet to stay on in their room. They eked out a living from their tiny savings, supplemented now and then by a few odd jobs, such as looking after Ghislain Fresnel when the nannies were busy, or collecting Paul Hébert from school, or making succulent little pies or chocolate-covered candied orange sticks for people in the building who were giving a dinner party. And so they lived on for twenty more years, keeping their attic in meticulous order, waxing the lozenge-tiled floor, measuring out the water they gave to their myrtle in its copper pot. They reached the age of ninety-three, with her ever more wrinkled, and him ever thinner and longer. Then one day in 1949 he fell over when getting up from the table, and died within the hour. She outlived him by only a few weeks.

  As for Célia Crespi, who was in her first job, she was even more bewildered than they were by her employers’ sudden disappearance. She was lucky enough to find another post almost straightaway in the same building, with a tenant who took over the Danglars’s flat for a year, a Latin American businessman whom the concierge and others called the Conquistador, a jovial fat man with a waxed moustache who smoked long Havanas, cleaned his teeth with a gold toothpick, and wore a big diamond as a tiepin; then she was taken on by Madame de Beaumont when she married and moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier. Later, when almost straight after the birth of her daughter the singer left France for a long tour of the United States, Célia Crespi went onto Bartlebooth’s staff as a seamstress, and stayed there until the Englishman went off on his lengthy circumnavigation of the globe. After that, she got a job as a salesgirl at Aux Délices de Louis XV, the most reputable cake- and tea-shop in the neighbourhood, where she stayed until she retired.

  Although she has always been called Mademoiselle Crespi, Célia Crespi had a son. She delivered him discreetly in nineteen thirty-six. Almost no one had noticed she was pregnant. The whole house wondered who the father was, and the name of every member of the masculine sex living in the building aged between fifteen and seventy-five was put forward. The secret was never uncovered. The child, registered at birth as being of father unknown, was brought up out of Paris. No one in the building ever saw him.

  Just a few years ago it was learnt that he had been killed during the battle for the Liberation of Paris whilst helping a German officer load a crate of champagne into his sidecar.

  Mademoiselle Crespi was born in a village in the hills behind Ajaccio. She left Corsica at twelve and has never been back. Sometimes she closes her eyes and can see the landscape that lay beyond the window of the room in which everyone lived: the wall covered with bougainvillaea in flower, the slope on which tufts of spurge grew, the hedge of prickly pear, the caper espalier; but she cannot remember anything else.

  Today Hutting’s bedroom is rarely used. Over the divan-bed with its synthetic fur bedspread and its three dozen multicoloured cushions, a silk prayer mat from Samarkand has been pinned to the wall; it has a faded pink pattern and long black fringes. To the right, a tub chair covered in yellow silk serves as a bedside table: it has on it a brushed-steel alarm clock in die shape of a stubby oblique cylinder, a telephone whose dial has been replaced by a touch-sensitive device, and an issue of the avant-garde review La Bête Noire. There are no pictures on the walls, but, to the left of the bed, mounted on a steel frame on casters which make it a kind of monstrous windbreak, there is a work by the Italian Intellectualist Martiboni: a block of polystyrene, two yards high, one yard wide, five inches thick, in which the artist has submerged old corsets amidst piles of dance invitation cards, dried flowers, silk dresses worn to the thread, mite-infested strips of fur, chewed-up fans looking like ducks’ feet minus the webbing, silver shoes missing soles and heels, party scraps, and two or three stuffed dogs.

  END OF PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  Cinoc, 2

  CINOC’S BEDROOM: A rather dirty room, which feels musty, with stains on the woodblock floor and peeling paint on the walls. On the doorjamb is nailed a mezuzah, a domestic talisman adorned with the three letters

  as well as bearing a few verses from the Torah. Against the rear wall, over the divan-bed draped in a printed material with a triangular leaf motif, books and pamphlets lean against each other on a little hanging shelf, and at the open window stands a high-legged, flimsy folding desk, with a small, thick felt ma
t on the floor beneath it, just large enough to afford standing room. To the right of the shelves, hanging on the wall, is a completely foxed engraving entitled The Somersault: it portrays five naked babes frolicking, over the following sestet:

  A voir leurs soubresauts bouffons

  Qui ne diroit que ces Poupons

  Auroient bon besoin d’Ellebore;

  Leur corps est pourtant bien dressé

  Si, selon que dit Pythagore,

  L’homme est un arbre renversé.

  Beneath the engraving a low table with a green cloth cover holds a water-jug with a glass on top of it and various loose volumes amongst which some titles can be made out:

  From Avvakum’s Raskolniki to the Insurrection of Stenka Razin. Bibliographic Notes to Studies of the Reign of Alexy I, by Hubert Corneylius, Lille, Lime Press, 1954;

  La storia dei Romani, by G. de Sanctis (vol. III);

  Travels in Baltistan, by P.O. Box, Bombay, 1894;

  When I Was a Little Ballerina. Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, by Maria Feodorovna Vyshiskava, Paris, 1948;

  “The Miner” and the Origins of the Labour Party, by Irwin Wall (offprint from the journal Annales);

  Beiträge zur feineren Anatomie des menschlichen Rückenmarks, by Goll, Ghent, 1860;

  three issues of Rustica magazine;

  Sur le clivage pyramidal des albâtres et des gypses, by Mr Otto Lidenbrock, Professor at the Hamburg Johanneum and Curator of the Mineralogical Museum of Mr Struve, Russian Ambassador, an offprint from the Zeitschrift für Mineralogie und Kristallographie, vol. XII, Suppl. 147;