Life: A User's Manual (6 page)

It was a little over two and a half years since they had landed at Aden. What they didn’t know – and how in God’s name could they have known! – was that, at the very time they got to Aden, another Frenchman, called Schlendrian, was leaving Cameroon after flooding it with coin-cowries obtained in Zanzibar; he had brought about an irreversible depreciation of the currency throughout Western and Central Africa. Rorschach’s and his partner’s cowries had not just become unnegotiable, they had become a dangerous liability: the French colonial administration reckoned, quite rightly, that putting seven hundred million shells in circulation – more than thirty per cent of the global mass of cowries used for trade in the whole of French West Africa – would provoke an unprecedented economic catastrophe (the mere rumour sent the prices of colonial goods into a seesaw, an upset viewed by some economists as a prime factor in the causes of the Wall Street crash): the cowries were therefore impounded; Rorschach and his companion were courteously, but firmly, requested to catch the first steamer leaving for France.

Rorschach would have done anything to take his revenge on Schlendrian, but he never managed to track him down. All he managed to learn was that in the war of 1870 there had indeed been a General Schlendrian. But he’d died long before and didn’t seem to have left any descendants.

Exactly how Rorschach got through the following years remains obscure. In his memoirs he is very discreet on this point. In the early 1930s he wrote a novel largely based on his African adventure. The novel appeared in 1932, under the title
African Gold
, published by Les Editions du Tonneau. The one critic who reviewed it compared it to
Journey to the End of the Night
, which had appeared at about the same time.

The novel was not much read, but it allowed Rorschach to get into literary society. A few months later he founded a review which he entitled, rather bizarrely,
Prejudices
, thereby wishing no doubt to signify that the review had none. It appeared at a rhythm of four issues a year up until the war. It published several pieces by some authors who subsequently established themselves. Though Rorschach is very close with precise details on this point, it seems probable that it was a vanity-publishing enterprise. In any case, of all his pre-war projects it is the only one he does not describe as a total failure.

Some say that he spent his war with the Free French Army, and that he was entrusted with several missions of a diplomatic nature. Others assert, to the contrary, that he collaborated with the Axis powers and that after the war he had to flee to Spain. What’s certain is that he returned to France, rich and flourishing, and even married, in the early sixties. It was at a time when, as he recalls jokingly, all you had to do to be a producer was to set up in one of the innumerable empty offices in the
Maison de la Radio
, and he began to work for television. It was also at this time that he bought from Olivier Gratiolet the last two apartments in the building still owned by him, apart from the little flat he lived in himself. Rorschach had them knocked into a single, prestigious duplex which was photographed many times for
La Maison Française, Maison et Jardin, Forum, Art et Architecture Aujourd’hui
, and other specialist reviews.

Valène can still remember the first time he saw him. It was one of those days when (so as not to cause a surprise) the lift was out of order. He had come out of his flat and was on his way downstairs to see Winckler, and passed in front of the newcomer’s door. It was wide open. Workmen were coming and going, and in the lobby Rorschach was scratching his head as he listened to the advice of his interior designer. At that time he’d gone for the American look, with floral shirts, neckerchiefs, and wristbands. Later he went in for the weary lion look, the old loner who’s seen it all, happier with desert Bedouins than in the drawing rooms of Paris: canvas rubbers, leather jerkins, grey linen shirts.

Today he is an ill old man, forced to spend most of his time in nursing homes or in long-drawn-out convalescence. His misanthropy remains as proverbial as ever, but has a diminishing field for expression.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dinteville, 1

DR DINTEVILLE’S CONSULTING room: an examining couch, a metal desk, almost bare, with only a telephone, an anglepoise lamp, a prescription pad, a matt-finished steel pen in the groove of a marble inkstand; a small yellow leather divan, above which hangs a large reproduction of a Vasarely, two broad and sprouting succulents rising out of plaited raffia pot-holders, one on each side of the window; a set of freestanding shelves, the top shelf supporting a number of instruments, a stethoscope, a chrome-plated cotton-wool dispenser, a small bottle of medicinal alcohol; and along the whole right-hand wall, shining metal panels concealing various pieces of medical apparatus and the cupboards where the doctor keeps his instruments, his records, and his pharmaceutical stores.

Dr Dinteville sits at his table writing a prescription with a look of complete indifference. He is a man of about forty, almost bald, with an egg-shaped head. His patient is an old woman. She is about to get down from the examining couch where she has been lying, and is adjusting the brooch which holds her blouse together: a metal lozenge inscribed with a stylised fish.

A third person is seated on the divan; he is a man of mature years, wearing a leather jacket and a wide check scarf with fringed edging.

The Dintevilles are descended from a Post Master knighted by Louis XIII for the help he gave Luynes and Vitry at the time of Concini’s murder. Cadignan has left us this striking portrait of a character who seems to have been an uncommonly rough old trooper:

D’Inteville was of middling stature, neither too big nor too small, and his nose was somewhat aquiline, the shape of a razor handle. At that time he was thirty-five or thereabouts, and about as fit for gilding as a lead dagger. He was a very proper-looking fellow, but for the fact that he was a bit of a lecher and naturally subject to a malady that was called at that time “the lack of money, pain incomparable!” However he had sixty-three ways of finding it at a pinch, the commonest and most honest of which was by means of cunningly perpetrated larceny. He was a mischievous rogue, a cheat, a boozer, a roysterer, and a vagabond if there ever was one in Paris, but otherwise the best fellow in the world; and he was always preparing some trick against the sergeants and the watch.

His descendants were generally less wild and gave France a dozen or score of bishops and cardinals, as well as various other remarkable characters, of whom the following are particularly worthy of note:

Gilbert de Dinteville (1774–1796): a fervent Republican, he enlisted at the age of seventeen and rose to be a colonel in three years. He led his battalion in the attack on Montenotte. This heroic gesture cost him his life but ensured the successful outcome of the battle.

Emmanuel de Dinteville (1810–1849): a friend of Liszt and Chopin, known particularly as the composer of a waltz, fittingly entitled
The Spinning Top
.

François de Dinteville (1814–1867): came top in the final examination at the Ecole Polytechnique at the age of seventeen, spurned the brilliant career he could have had in engineering or in industry, and devoted himself to research. In 1840 he believed he had discovered the secret of making diamonds from coal. On the basis of what he dubbed “crystal duplication theory”, he succeeded in making a carbon-saturated solution crystallise by cooling. The Academy of Sciences, to which he submitted his samples, declared his experiment interesting, but inconclusive, since the diamonds obtained were dull, brittle, easily scored by a fingernail, and sometimes even friable. This refutation didn’t deter Dinteville from patenting his method, nor from publishing, between 1840 and his death, thirty-four original articles and technical reports on the subject. Ernest Renan mentions his case in one of his chronicles (
Miscellany, 47, passim
): “
Had Dinteville truly manufactured diamond, he would thereby no doubt have pandered, in some measure, to that crude materialism which must now be reckoned with evermore by any man who makes so bold as to concern himself with the business of humanity; to souls aspiring to the ideal, he would have given nary a molecule of that exquisite spirituality upon which we have lived so long, and do still
.”

Laurelle de Dinteville (1842–1861) was one of the unfortunate victims and probably the cause of one of the most horrible news stories of the Second Empire. During a reception given by the Duke of Crécy-Couvé, whom she was to have married a few weeks later, the young lady drank a toast to her future in-laws, emptying her champagne glass in a single draught, and then flung the glass in the air. Fate determined that she should be standing immediately beneath a gigantic chandelier, which came from the famous workshop of Baucis at Murano. The chandelier snapped and caused the deaths of eight people, including Laurelle and the Duke’s father, old Marshal Crécy-Couvé, who’d had three horses shot under him during the Russian Campaign. Foul play could not be suspected. François de Dinteville, Laurelle’s uncle, who was present at the reception, put forward the theory of “pendular amplification produced by the conflicting vibratory frequencies of the crystal glass and the chandelier” but no one took this explanation seriously.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Servants’ Quarters, 5

Smautf

UNDER THE EAVES, between Hutting’s studio and Jane Sutton’s room, the room of Mortimer Smautf, Bartlebooth’s aged butler.

The room is empty. With eyes half-closed, with its front legs tucked in a sphynx-like posture, a white-furred cat drowses on the orange bedspread. Beside the bed, on a small bedside table, lie a cut-glass ashtray of triangular shape, with the word “Guinness” engraved on it, and a detective story entitled
The Seven Crimes of Azincourt
.

Smautf has been in Bartlebooth’s service for more than fifty years. Although he calls himself a butler, his services have been more those of gentleman’s gentleman or secretary; or, to be even more precise, both at the same time: in fact, he was above all his master’s travelling companion, his factotum, and if not his Sancho Panza at least his Passepartout (for there was indeed a touch of Phineas Fogg in Bartlebooth), in turns porter, clothes valet, barber, driver, guide, treasurer, travel agent, and umbrella holder.

Bartlebooth’s, and therefore Smautf’s, travels lasted twenty years, from 1935 to 1954, and took them in a sometimes fanciful way all around the world. From 1930 Smautf began to prepare for the journey, getting hold of all the papers necessary for obtaining visas, reading up on the formalities currently used in the different countries they would pass through, opening properly funded accounts in various appropriate places, collecting guidebooks, maps, timetables and fares lists, booking hotel rooms and steamer tickets. Bartlebooth’s idea was to go and paint five hundred seascapes in five hundred different ports. The ports were chosen more or less at random by Bartlebooth, who thumbed through atlases, geography books, travellers’ tales, and tourist brochures and ticked off the places that appealed to him. Smautf then studied how to get there and find accommodation.

The first port, in the first fortnight of January 1935, was Gijon, in the Bay of Biscay, not far from where the unfortunate Beaumont was carrying on trying to find the last remains of an improbable Arab capital of Spain. The last was Brouwershaven, in Zeeland, at the estuary of the Scheldt, in the second fortnight of December nineteen fifty-four. In between, there had been the little harbour of Muckanaghederdauhaulia, not far from Costelloe, in Ireland’s Camus Bay, and die even tinier port of U in the Caroline Islands; there were Baltic ports and Latvian ports, Chinese ports and Malagasy ports, Chilean ports and Texan ports; tiny harbours of two fishing boats and three nets, huge ports with several miles of breakwaters, with docks and quaysides, with hundreds of fixed and travelling cranes; ports cloaked in fog, sweltering ports, and ports locked in ice; deserted harbours, silted harbours, yachting harbours, with artificial beaches, transplanted palms and grand hotels and gaming halls fronting the waterside; infernal dockyards building liberty ships by the thousand; ports devastated by bombing; quiet ports where naked girls sprayed each other beside the sampans; ports for canoes and ports for gondolas; naval harbours, creeks, dry-dock basins, roads, cambers, channels, moles; piles of barrels, rope, and sponges; heaps of redwood trees, mountains of fertiliser, phosphates, and minerals; cages crawling with lobsters and crabs; stalls of gurnard, brill, lasher, bream, whiting, mackerel, skate, tuna fish, cuttlefish, and lampreys; ports stinking of soap or chlorine; ports tossed by storms and deserted ports crushed by heat; battleships repaired in the dark by thousands of blow lamps; festive liners surrounded by fire-tenders pumping jets of water in the air amidst a hubbub of hooting sirens and ringing bells.

Bartlebooth allowed two weeks for each port, inclusive of travelling time, which usually gave him five or six days on site. The first two days he spent walking on the sea front, looking at boats, chatting with the fishermen if they spoke one of Bartlebooth’s five languages – English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese – and sometimes going to sea with them. On the third day he would choose his place, and sketch a few drafts which he tore up straight away. On the penultimate day he would paint his watercolour, usually towards the end of the morning, unless he sought or expected some special effect – sunrise, sunset, the build-up to a storm, drizzle, high or low tide, a flight of birds, fishing boats leaving, a ship arriving, women washing clothes, etc. He painted extremely fast, and never corrected himself. Scarcely was the watercolour dry than he tore the sheet of Whatman paper from the pad and gave it to Smautf. (Smautf was free to wander as he pleased for the rest of the time, to visit the souks, temples, brothels, and dives, but he had to be there when Bartlebooth was painting and to stand behind him holding steady the large parasol which protected the painter and his fragile easel from rain, sun, and wind.) Smautf wrapped the seascape in tissue paper, slipped it into a stiffened envelope, and packed the parcel in kraft paper with string and sealing wax. That same evening, or at the latest next day, if there were no post office nearby, the parcel was dispatched to: