Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years

  'My dear marquis,' I said, 'do you realize that so far we have been moving in mid-air and have not discussed any of the facts or the hundred difficulties that would have to be reckoned with?'

  'You're right,' he replied. 'Above all, you're right to remind me that I have to telephone again. I must explain to Zaza that I can't come home right away because I'm involved in a conversation that is vital to our happiness. Excuse me.'

  And he left again — to remain away longer than before. Darkness had fallen over Paris, and for some time now the roof garden had been bathed in the white light of the arc lamps. It was completely empty at this hour and would probably not come to life again until the theatres closed. In my pocket I felt the unused opera ticket, without paying much attention to it, although at another time the incident would have pained me. Thoughts whirled through my mind, but reason, I may say, held them in check, imposing a kind of caution and forbidding them to indulge in drunken riot. I was happy to be left alone for a while so that I could appraise the situation and consider in advance a number of points that still had to be discussed. This by-path, this happy digression from the thoroughfare my godfather had opened for me — while pointing out just such a possibility — presented itself so startlingly and in so enticing a form that reason found it tedious to examine it and determine whether it might not be a cul-de-sac that was tempting me. Reason insisted I would be setting forth on a dangerous road, a road that would require cautious treading. Reason repeated this with emphasis and only succeeded in enhancing the charm of the adventure in my eyes, an adventure that would call upon all my talents. It is useless to warn the courageous against some action on the ground that it requires courage. I do not hesitate to admit that long before my companion returned I had decided to embark on the adventure, had indeed so decided at the moment when I told him that no one could release him from his promise. And I was less concerned about the practical difficulties we would have to face than about the danger of appearing to him in an ambiguous light because of the skill with which I could meet those difficulties.

  Yet he already saw me in a sufficiently ambiguous light; the words he had used to describe my way of life — 'intriguing', 'mysterious', 'fantastic' — proved that. I was under no illusion that he would have made his proposal to any cavalier, and the fact that he had made it to me, though it was an honour, was nevertheless an ambiguous one. And yet I could not forget the warmth of the hand-clasp with which he had assured me that it would be 'not unpleasant' to wander up and down the world in my person; and I said to myself that if we were about to engage in a schoolboy prank, it was he, with his eagerness to deceive his parents, who had the greater stake in it, though I was to play the more active part. As he returned from his telephone conversation I could see quite clearly that he was to a considerable extent excited and enthusiastic about the idea for its own sake — that is, simply as a prank. The colour in his boyish cheeks was high and not from wine alone; there was a sly glitter in his little eyes. No doubt he still heard Zaza's silvery laughter as he outlined our plans to her.

  'My dear Kroull,' he said, sitting down again at my table, 'we have always been on good terms, but who would have thought a short while ago that we would come so close — to the point of interchangeability! We have thought out something so amusing now — or, if we haven't quite thought it out, we have at least outlined it — that my heart laughs in my breast. And you? Don't look so solemn! I appeal to your sense of humour, to your taste for a good joke — for a joke so good that it would repay every effort to work it out for its own sake, quite apart from its importance to a pair of lovers. And you, the third person, will you deny that there is profit in it for you, too? There is a lot of profit, the whole joke is profitable to you. Do you deny it?'

  'It's not my custom, my dear marquis, to take life as a joke. Frivolity is not my style, especially in the matter of jokes; for certain jokes are pointless if they are not taken seriously. A good joke does not come off unless one approaches it with complete seriousness.'

  'Very good. That's what we'll do. You spoke of problems, difficulties. What are the ones you see first off?'

  'It would be better, marquis, if you let me put a few questions to you. Where is this prescribed tour to take you?'

  'Ah, my good Papa in his concern for me has laid out a very nice itinerary, most attractive for anyone but me: both Americas, the islands of the South Seas and Japan, followed by an interesting voyage to Egypt, Constantinople, Greece, Italy, and so forth. An educational journey by the book; I could not wish anything better for myself if it weren't for Zaza. Now it is you I must congratulate on the trip.'

  'Your Papa will pay the expenses?'

  'Of course. In his desire for me to travel in proper style he has set aside no less than twenty thousand francs — not including the fare to Lisbon and my ticket to Argentina, where I am to go first. Papa bought those himself and reserved a cabin for me on the Cap Arcona. He deposited the twenty thousand francs in the Banque de France, and they are now mine in the form of a so-called circular letter of credit on banks in the principal ports of call on my route.'

  I waited.

  'I shall, of course, turn the letter of credit over to you,' he added.

  I remained silent.

  He went on: 'As well as the tickets that have already been bought.'

  'And what,' I asked, 'will you live on while I am spending your money in your name?'

  'What will I — oh, yes! You put me in a quandary. But you don't ask the question as though it were your intention to leave me in perplexity. Yes, dear Kroull, what shall we do about that? I am really not at all used to thinking about what I shall live on during the coming year.'

  'I just wanted to call your attention to the fact that it's not so simple to lend one's personality to someone else. But let's postpone that problem. I don't want to be hurried into solving it, for that would mean presupposing something like cunning in me, and where cunning is concerned, I am quite useless. Cunning is not gentlemanly.'

  'I thought it just possible, dear friend, that you might have succeeded in transferring a certain amount of cunning from your other existence into your life as a gentleman.'

  'Something much more respectable links my two existences. It is some little bourgeois savings, a small bank account -'

  'Which I can in no circumstances touch!'

  'Nevertheless, we'll have to include it in our calculations somehow. By the way, have you anything to write with?'

  He quickly felt his pockets. 'Yes, my fountain pen. But no paper.'

  'Here's some.' And I tore a page from my notebook. 'It would interest me to see your signature.'

  'Why? ... As you like.' With the pen inclined steeply to the left, he wrote his signature and pushed it across to me. Even seen upside down, it was very droll-looking. Dispensing with a flourish at the end, it began with one instead. The artistically elaborated L swept off to the right in a wide loop which returned and crossed the stem of the initial from the left; it proceeded from there in a tight back-hand script within the oval thus described as Louis Marquis de Venosta. I could not repress a smile, but nodded to him approvingly.

  'Inherited or invented?' I asked, taking the fountain pen.

  'Inherited,' he said. 'Papa does it just that way. Only not so well,' he added.

  'And so you have over-reached him.' I spoke mechanically, for I was engaged in my first attempted imitation, which turned out very well. 'Thank goodness I don't have to do it better than you. As a matter of fact that would be a mistake.' Meanwhile I had finished the second copy, less satisfactory than the first. The third, however, was flawless. I struck out the first two and handed the paper to him. He was astounded.

  'Incredible!' he cried. 'My writing as though it were photographed! And you pretend to know nothing about cunning! But I am not so lacking in cunning as you think, and I understand perfectly well why you are practising. You will need my signature to draw against the letter of credit.'

  'How do you sign yourse
lf when you write to your parents?'

  He was taken aback and exclaimed:

  'Of course, I'll at least have to send the old folk a few postcards from some of the places where I stay. My friend, you think of everything: I am called Loulou at home because that was what I used to call myself as a child. This is how I do it.'

  He did it in the same way as his full name; he drew an ornate L, extended it into an oval, crossed the arabesque from the left, and then continued in a stiff back-hand within the loop as oulou.

  'All right,' I said, 'we can do that. Have you a page of your handwriting with you?'

  He said he was sorry he had none.

  'Then write this, if you please.' I handed him a fresh piece of paper: 'Write: "Mon cher Papa, dearest Mama, from this fascinating city, one of the high points of my journey, I send you my thanks and best wishes. I am brimming with new impressions which drive from my mind much that seemed essential before. Your Loulou." Something like that.'

  'No, exactly like that! That's marvellous, Kroull, vous êtes admirable! The way you shake these things out of your sleeve -' And he wrote my sentences with his hand twisted to the left, in stiff letters that were just as jammed together as my late father's had been widely spaced, but were not a bit harder to imitate. I put this model in my pocket and inquired about the names of the servants in his castle — the cook, who was called Ferblantier, and the coachman, who was called Klosmann, and the marquis's valet, a shaky man in his late sixties called Radicule, and the marquise's maid, named Adelaide. I even inquired in detail about the domestic animals, the riding-horses, Fripon the wolf-hound, the marquise's Maltese lap-dog, Minime, a creature who suffered a great deal from diarrhoea. Our hilarity increased the longer the meeting lasted, but Loulou's activity of mind and powers of discrimination seemed to diminish with the passage of time. I expressed surprise that he was not going to England, to London. The reason was that he already knew the country, had actually spent two years-there in a public school. 'Nevertheless,' he said, 'it would be a very good thing if London were included in the itinerary. How easy it would be for me to trick the old folk and hurry back here to Paris and Zaza in the middle of my tour!'

  'But you will be with Zaza all the time!'

  'Right you are!' he cried. 'That's the real trick. I was thinking of a false trick that won't compare with the real one. Pardon. I hope you will excuse me. The trick is that I shall be brimming with new impressions while I stay with Zaza. You know, I shall have to be on my guard not to inquire about Radicule, Fripon, and Minime when I am writing from here and you are perhaps doing the same from Zanzibar. Those are things, of course, that can't coincide, although a coincidence of persons — even though at a great distance — must take place.... Listen, this situation requires that we stop speaking formally to one another! Do you object? When I speak to myself I don't use a formal manner of address. Is that agreed? Let's drink to it! To your health, Armand — I mean Félix — I mean Loulou. Remember that you must not inquire about Klosmann and Adelaide from Paris, but only from Zanzibar. Besides, so far as I know, I am not going to Zanzibar and neither are you. But no matter — wherever I happen to be, during the time I stay here I must in any case vanish from Paris. There, you see how clever I am! Zaza and I have to make ourselves scarce, to use a schoolboy's expression. Don't schoolboys say "make yourself scarce"? But how should you, a gentleman and now a young man of family, know about that? I must give notice that I am going to give up my apartment and so must Zaza. We will move together into a suburb, a pretty suburb, either Boulogne or Sèvres, and what's left to me — it will be enough, for it will be with Zaza — would do well perhaps to assume another name — logic seems to me to demand that I should call myself Kroull — to be sure, I would have to learn to imitate your signature, but I hope my cunning is sufficient for that. So there in Versailles or farther out — while I'm on my travels — I'll provide a love-nest for Zaza and me. ... But, Armand, I mean cher Louis,' and he opened his little eyes as wide as he could, 'answer me this if you can: what are we going to live on?'

  I replied that we had solved that problem as soon as it arose. I possessed a bank account of twelve thousand francs, which would stand at his disposal in return for his letter of credit.

  He was touched to the point of tears. 'A gentleman!' he exclaimed. 'A nobleman from top to toe! If you do not have the right to send greeting to Minime and Radicule, who should have? Our parents will send back the warmest greetings in their name. A last glass to the gentleman who is us!"

  Our meeting had lasted through the quiet theatre hours; as we left, the roof garden was beginning to fill again in the mild night. Over my protest he paid for both dinners and the four bottles of Lafite. He was much confused both by joy and by wine. 'All of it, all of it together!' he instructed the head waiter, who brought the check. 'We are one and the same. Armand de Kroullosta is our name.'

  'Very good,' the latter replied with a patient smile which must have come easily to him, for his tip was enormous.

  Venosta took me back to my place in a fiacre and let me out there. On the way we agreed to another meeting at which I would transfer my bank account to him and he would give me his letter of credit and the tickets.

  'Bonne nuit, à tantôt, monsieur le marquis,' he said with drunken grandezza as he shook my hand. For the first time I heard from his lips this style of address, and I shivered with joy at the thought of the equality of seeming and being which life was granting me, of the appearance it was now appropriately adding to the substance.

  CHAPTER 5

  How inventive life is! Lending substance to airy nothings, it brings our childhood dreams to pass. Had not I in boyhood tasted in imagination those delights of incognito I fully savoured now, as I continued to go about my menial occupations for a while, keeping my new estate as secret as my princedom once had been? Then it had been a merry and delightful game, now it had become reality — at least to this extent: for the space of a year, beyond which period I did not care to look, I had, as it were, a margrave's patent of nobility in my pocket. Awareness of this delicious fact filled my mind from the moment of waking, just as it had before, and accompanied me all day long in the establishment where I played my liveried role, without my associates being a scrap the wiser.

  Sympathetic reader! I was very happy. In my own eyes I was priceless, and I loved myself — in the way that is really socially useful, self-love turned outward as amiability. A fool might have been tempted by the secret I possessed into a show of arrogance, into effrontery and disobedience toward those above and uncomradely disdain toward those below. Not I; my courtesy toward the guests in the dining-room had never been more winning, the voice in which I addressed them had never held a gentler deference, my attitude toward those who thought themselves my equals, my fellow waiters and my room-mates in the garret, had never been merrier or more cordial than during those days. My secret was perhaps reflected in the hint of a smile, but this served to hide rather than reveal. Concealment was wise, at any rate at first, for I could not be absolutely sure that the bearer of what was now my real name might not, on the very morning after our meeting, have had sober second thoughts and be preparing to rescind our agreement. I was prudent enough not to resign my livelihood over-night; essentially, however, I was sure of my man. Venosta had been too overjoyed at the solution (which I had hit on before he did), and Zaza's magnetism stood surety for his good faith.

  I had not deceived myself. Our great compact had been reached on the evening of July 10, and I would not be free for the next and conclusive meeting until the 24th. On the 17th or 18th, however, I saw him again, for on one of these evenings he dined with us in company with his petite amie and on this occasion revealed his own constancy by appealing to mine. 'Nous persistons, n'est-ce pas?' he whispered to me as I was serving him. To which I replied with a decisive and discreet 'C'est entendu.' I served him with a deference that was really deference toward myself, and more than once I addressed Zaza, who was indulging in roguish winks and
covert glances, as 'madame la marquise' — a simple tribute of gratitude.

  After this there was nothing frivolous in informing Monsieur Machatschek that family circumstances would compel me to leave my post in the Saint James and Albany on August 1. He would not hear of it, he said I had not given the required notice, that I was indispensable, that after this desertion I would never find another job, that he would withhold my salary for the current month, and so forth. He accomplished nothing by this. I simply bowed in pretended compliance and determined to leave the place before the 1st — in fact, at once. For if the time seemed long before I might enter on my new and higher existence, in reality it was all too short to prepare for my travels and to assemble the wardrobe I owed my new position in life. I knew that my ship, the Cap Arcona, was to leave Lisbon on August 15th and I thought I ought to be there a week ahead. And so one can see how little time there was for the necessary arrangements and purchases.

  I discussed this matter with the stay-at-home traveller on the occasion when I left my private refuge to call on him in his attractive three-room apartment in the rue Croix des Petits Champs, after having withdrawn my funds — that is, after transferring them to him. I had left the hotel silently in the early morning, disdainfully leaving my livery behind and relinquishing my month's salary with indifference. It cost me some effort to give my old, shopworn, and already odious name to the servant who opened the door to me at Venosta's, and I only succeeded by reflecting that I was using it for the last time. Louis received me with excited cordiality and could hardly wait to hand over to me the all-important letter of credit for our journey. It was a double document, one part of it containing the bank's authorization for the traveller to make withdrawals up to the total amount, and the other a list of the correspondent banks in the cities where visits were planned. On the inside of this booklet was a place for the owner's signature as a means of identification, and Loulou had inscribed his there in the manner already so familiar to me. After this he not only handed over the railway ticket to the Portuguese capital and the steamship ticket to Buenos Aires, but the kind young man presented me with a number of very attractive going-away presents: a flat gold monogrammed watch, a fine platinum chain, a black silk chatelaine for evening wear, also bearing the initials L. de V. in gold, one of those gold chains which run under the waistcoat to the back trouser pocket, and on which in those days men liked to carry their lighters, knives, and pencils, and a thin gold cigarette case. All this was delightful enough, but there was a certain solemnity in the moment when he put on my finger an exact copy of his seal ring which he had wisely had made, a ring with the family coat-of-arms in malachite — a castle gate flanked by towers and guarded by griffins. This action, which was accompanied by a pantomimed 'Be as I', awakened so many memories of stories heard in childhood, tales of disguise and recognition, that I was filled with strange and profound emotions. Loulou's little laughing eyes, however, were more roguish than ever and clearly revealed that he was determined not to neglect any detail of the hoax and that, quite apart from its purpose, it gave him enormous fun.