Paris: The Novel (120 page)

“But there’s a difference, surely,” Max had objected. “People aren’t saying that the Jews should be attacked.”

“I believe you’re missing the point.”

“Which is?”

“As long as they don’t see it, Max, they don’t care. If a Jew is mistreated they think: Well, he probably asked for it. If a Jewish community were to say that women and children had been rounded up and shot, those same people will say: ‘These Jews are probably lying.’ They may think Hitler and his Nazis are extreme, but at the end of the day, they don’t want to know.”

“And if he says he’ll conquer Europe?”

“He’s against the communists. That’s his attraction to them. It’s the ancient principle: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The bourgeoisie of Europe fear communist Russia. Hitler is a buffer between Russia and the West. They think he’s defending them.”

“Until he attacks us.”

“They don’t believe he will.”

“Why—when he says he’s going to?”

“Because they don’t want to. They can’t bear to think it. The memory of the Great War is so terrible that no one wants to believe it could ever happen again. So if Hitler prepares for war but says he wants peace, they tell themselves it must be true.” His father had shrugged. “The bourgeoisie will always choose comfort over reality.”

Max reminded his father of that conversation now.

“Stalin’s no bourgeois, Father. He sees Hitler for the threat he is. Look at what happened this spring. Hitler marched into the Rhineland. Admittedly the demilitarized zone, but he was still breaking the German treaty with the Allies after the last war. Nobody seemed to think it mattered, but the message is clear. Hitler can’t be trusted, and he means war. Stalin knows that to protect Russia from Hitler, he needs strong allies in the West. So for the time being, at least, Russia needs bourgeois friends. That’s why the party doesn’t want a revolution here. We need to reassure the bourgeoisie, here and in other countries.”

“But if the workers form committees in every factory, we can push straight through to a Marxist state. Then Russia will have a true, Marxist regime in France as her ally, instead of a bunch of timorous bourgeois.”

“I know, Father. That’s what Trotsky is saying. But he’s wrong. It’s too risky.”

“Revolution is about taking risks.”

“Yes. But Russia is the only Marxist state at present. We have to protect her.”

“And we’re to betray the workers for this?”

“Blum is offering them almost everything they want. It will completely transform employment conditions in France. That’s revolutionary.”

“But it’s not revolution. They’re prepared to stay out on strike. Believe me, I know. They want complete change.”

“Yes, but they can’t have revolution. Not yet. The union leaders are going to tell them to take the deal, and go back to work. All the Communist Party boys are being mobilized to back the union leaders up.”

“I haven’t heard this.”

“It’s only just been decided.”

“Where? By whom? Why don’t I know?”

It was time to break it to him.

“They knew what you’d say, so they didn’t ask you.”

“It seems that you knew about this,” his father said quietly.

“I work for
L’Humanité
. That’s how I heard.”

“You may find,” his father said coldly, “that some of the workers refuse to obey orders.”

Max looked down at the floor, and said nothing. His father stared at him for a little while.

“So what else haven’t you told me?” Jacques said at last.

The unkindest cut of all. But it couldn’t be avoided. Max took a deep breath.

“Blum has troops gathering outside the city.” Max paused. “I’m sure they won’t be needed. But just in case …”

He saw his father’s head fall. The tall man’s body seemed to shrink.

“Troops. Against our own people …”

“It’s only a precaution.”

Jacques Le Sourd did not speak for a little while. He stared up toward the domes of Sacré Coeur high on the hill above them, but whether he even saw the basilica’s pale form it was impossible to say.

So it had come to this. Full circle. It seemed to Le Sourd that his entire life had suddenly become an illusion, an irony, an evaporation into the blue sky.

At last he spoke.

“Sixty-five years ago,” he said quietly, “in the Commune of Paris, we began the rule of the people. And it was actually working. But the government sent the army into the city, and they were too well armed for the ordinary Parisians, and the Communards were smashed.” He nodded to himself. “My father was a Communard. In the last, terrible weeks, a great many Communards were shot. Many were shot up there on the hill of Montmartre. My father—your grandfather—was shot in Père Lachaise. I vowed to revenge myself on the family of the man who did it, and when I had the chance, I failed.” He shrugged. “So much for me. But I have dedicated my life to completing my father’s work.” He paused. “The men who smashed the Commune, our enemies, had at least this in their favor. However mistakenly, they believed they were right. The man who shot my father probably thought he was fighting for God and the honor of France. His son, whom I failed to kill, was an aristocrat and a bourgeois lackey, and history should have swept him aside and thrown him into the fire. But he was brave, and proud, and honest, and he had a son he loved. That’s why I didn’t shoot him.”

He stood up, and looked down sadly at his son.

“But now, when we have the chance again, a better chance by far than we have ever had before, I find that it is not the monarchists and the bourgeois who are bringing in the troops, but the socialists, and the communists—our own side. And having spent my life trying to honor the memory of my father, I find that my own son is with the traitors. So perhaps if I can find some brave men to stand with me, I can defy your troops, and your treachery, and you and your Russian friends can watch them gun me down.”

And with those last bitter words, he turned and walked away. And Max knew that there was nothing he could do but watch his father go, and wonder if, having hurt him so much, he had lost him.

By 1936, L’Invitation au Voyage was a very special establishment. It was named after the famous poem in Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal
, whose refrain expressed everything the place hoped to be.

Order, and beauty, luxury, calm. And sexual pleasure. There were two further things for which the house had gained a reputation: It was spotlessly clean. And it was always changing. In fact, it was a work of remarkable imagination.

The imagination of its owner, Madame Louise.

The French government had a very sensible attitude toward brothels, Louise always thought. It regulated them. The laws went back to the time of the great emperor Napoléon.

Not that regulation had been a new idea in Europe, even then. Back in the Middle Ages, the many brothels along the south bank of London’s River Thames were supervised by their feudal lord, the bishop of Winchester, who drew up the regulations.

In Paris, however, it was not the Church but the civil authorities who licensed the brothels. There were regular inspections and twice-weekly medical checks for all the women employed there. It was pragmatic, logical and responsible.

It was six years now since Louise had opened her brothel.

Perhaps, if she’d been colder, a little more ruthless, Louise could have followed in the wake of Coco Chanel—whose lovers, like the Duke of Westminster, included some of the richest men in Europe. But Louise had been too slow to understand the lesson that a woman’s fortune depended entirely on the circuit in which she moved. On the arm of a man who was very rich, she would meet other equally rich men, who cared very little for the rules of society, because they could make the rules for themselves.

True, in France—where it was well remembered that at the court of Versailles, a royal mistress might have more power and prestige than a queen—a mistress might be a highly fashionable woman, and not a person to be hidden away and looked down upon, as in many other countries. But even so, a well-to-do Parisian was unlikely to give her the social protection or the money she would need to progress beyond a certain point.

So Louise lived quietly, and she did not become rich, but nonetheless, by the time she was thirty, she had been the kept woman of several men
who could afford to be generous, and together with the capital sum from her father when she reached that age, she had enough money to stop being dependent on others and to go into business for herself. That was when she had opened L’Invitation au Voyage.

Luc had helped her find the place. There were many areas where brothels were to be found. Apart from the red-light district of Pigalle near the Moulin Rouge, there was the ancient rue Saint-Denis that ran up the edge of the Second Arrondissement just east of Les Halles. For male homosexuals, there were the bath houses on the Left Bank in the Luxembourg quarter; the best lesbian house was even grander, in a private mansion on the Champs-Élysées. Louise didn’t like the rue Saint-Denis. The girls who walked the street there were prostitutes of the lowest sort. Though she was sorry for them, and for their sad, degraded lives, she wasn’t going to have them on her doorstep. But Luc found a place a little to the east on the edge of the Marais quarter, on the old rue de Montmorency, where Nicolas Flamel, the medieval magician, had owned a neighboring house.

Luc had also been useful at the start in helping her find the girls. And Louise had wondered if he would want her to make him a partner, which she didn’t want to do. But when she offered him a salary instead, for these and other services, he seemed quite content, and she realized that, even in middle age, he was happier with the freedom of the streets than the responsibility of a business. He still supplied cocaine to his large network of clients, and in its first year, he provided more than a dozen valuable customers to the brothel.

But he and Louise had one understanding. None of her girls were allowed to take drugs of any kind, especially cocaine. It was a rule she had made right at the start, and she never deviated from it.

“I’ve seen too much of what cocaine can do,” she told Luc. “I want all the girls to look wholesome. I won’t have them getting skinny and rattled, no mood swings, no girls without septums in their noses, no lying. Girls in other places may be like that, but not here.”

Luc had understood. All the girls were clean.