The Map and the Territory (20 page)

“William Morris was close to the Pre-Raphaelites,” his father went on, “to Gabriel Dante Rossetti at the beginning, and to Burne-Jones right until the end. The fundamental idea of the Pre-Raphaelites was that art had begun to degenerate just after the Middle Ages, that from the start of the Renaissance it had cut itself off from any spirituality, any authenticity, to become a purely industrial and commercial activity, and that the so-called
great masters
of the Renaissance—be they Botticelli, Rembrandt, or Leonardo da Vinci—behaved in fact exclusively as the heads of commercial enterprises. Exactly like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst today, with an iron hand the so-called
great masters
of the Renaissance ruled workshops of fifty, even a hundred assistants, who chain-produced paintings, sculptures, and frescoes. They just gave general
guidelines, signed the finished work, and above all devoted themselves to public relations with the patrons of the moment—princes or popes. For the Pre-Raphaelites, as for William Morris, the distinction between art and the worker, between design and execution, had to be abolished. Any man, at his own level, could be a producer of beauty—be it in the making of a painting, a piece of clothing, or furniture—and he also had the right, in his daily life, to be surrounded by beautiful objects. He allied this conviction with a socialist activism that led him to become more and more involved in movements for the emancipation of the proletariat; he wanted simply to put an end to the system of industrial production.

“What’s curious is that Gropius, when he founded Bauhaus, was on exactly the same wavelength—maybe less political, with more spiritual preoccupations, although he too was a socialist. In the Bauhaus Proclamation of 1919, he declares that he wants to go beyond the opposition between art and industry, and proclaims the right to beauty for all: exactly the aim of William Morris. But gradually, the closer Bauhaus moved to industry, the more functionalist and productivist it became; Kandinsky and Klee were marginalized within the teaching establishment, and when the institute was closed by Göring it had anyway been passed over entirely to the service of capitalist production.

“We ourselves weren’t really political, but the thought of William Morris helped us to free ourselves from the taboo that Le Corbusier had placed on any form of ornamentation. I remember that Combas had a few reservations at the start—the Pre-Raphaelite painters weren’t really his universe—but he came to agree that the wallpaper motifs designed by William Morris were very beautiful, and when he really understood what it was all about he became completely enthusiastic. Nothing could’ve given him more pleasure than to design motifs for furniture covers, wallpaper, or external friezes, used in a whole group of buildings. They were, however, quite isolated at the time, the people in free figuration; the minimalist current remained dominant, and the graffiti didn’t yet exist—or at least it wasn’t spoken about. So we put together some dossiers for all the more or less interesting projects that were up for competition, and we waited …”

His father stopped again, as if suspended in his memories, then seemed to shrink, diminish, and Jed then became aware of the élan, the enthusiasm with which he’d spoken for the last several minutes. He’d never heard him speak like this, even as a child—and never again, he immediately thought, would he ever hear him speak like this. His father had just relived, for the last time, the hopes and failures that formed the story of his life. It doesn’t amount to much, generally speaking, a human life; it can be summed up in a small number of events, and this time Jed had well and truly understood the bitterness and the wasted years, the cancer and the stress, as well as the suicide of his mother.

“The functionalists dominated all the juries,” his father concluded in a soft voice. “I banged my head against a window; we all banged our heads against a window. Combas and Di Rosa didn’t drop us immediately; in fact they phoned me for years to find out if things were freeing up … Then, seeing that nothing was coming, they concentrated on their work as painters. As for me, I ended up having to accept normal commissions. The first was Port-Ambarès—and then it built up, especially the construction of seaside resorts. I packed away my projects, they’re still in a cupboard in my office in Raincy, you can go and have a look …” He kept himself from adding “when I’m dead,” but Jed had understood completely.

“It’s late,” he said, getting up from his chair. Jed glanced at his watch: four in the morning. His father went to the toilet, then came back to put on his coat. For the two to three minutes this took, Jed had the fleeting, contradictory impression that they either had just started a new stage in their relationship, or would never see each other again. As his father finally stood in front of him with an expectant look, he said: “I’m going to call you a taxi.”

When he woke up on the morning of 25 December, Paris was covered with snow; on the boulevard Vincent-Auriol, he passed a beggar with a thick, hairy beard and skin almost brown with filth. He put two euros in his bowl, then, turning back, added a ten-euro note. The beggar groaned in surprise. Jed was now a rich man, and the metal arches of the overground Métro stood above a softened but lethal landscape. During the day, the snow was going to melt and it would all turn into mud and dirty water; then life would start again, at quite a slow pace. Between these two high points of relational and commercial intensity that are Christmas and New Year’s Eve, an interminable week passes, which is basically downtime, until activity restarts, violently and explosively, early in the evening on the 31st.

Back home, he looked at Olga’s business card:
Director of Programs, Michelin TV, avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie
. She too had made it on the professional level, without particularly striving for it; but she hadn’t married, and that thought made him uncomfortable. Without thinking much about it, all those years, he’d always imagined that she’d found love, or at least a
family life
, somewhere in Russia.

He called late the following morning, expecting everyone to be on holiday, though that wasn’t the case: after five minutes, a stressed secretary
told him that Olga was in a meeting, but that she would tell her he had phoned.

Over the next few minutes, waiting for her call, his nervousness increased. The painting of Houellebecq was facing him, standing on its easel; he’d withdrawn it from the bank that very morning. The look in the author’s eyes, much too intense, added to his unease. He got up and turned the canvas around. Seven hundred and fifty thousand euros … he thought: that made no sense. Picasso made no sense, either; even less, probably, if you could establish a grading in senselessness.

As he went to the kitchen, the phone rang. He ran to pick it up. Olga’s voice hadn’t changed. People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalized physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.

“Did you pass by the gallery?” he asked, in an attempt to start the conversation on
neutral ground
. He was astonished that in his own view his pictorial work had become
neutral ground
.

“Yes, and I liked it a lot. It’s … original. It looks like nothing I’ve seen before. But I always knew you had talent.”

A heavy silence followed.

“Little Frenchman,” Olga said, her ironic tone failing to disguise her true emotion, and again Jed felt uncomfortable, on the verge of tears. “
Successful
little Frenchman …”

“We could meet,” Jed replied quickly. Someone had to say it first; there, it was him.

“I’ve an enormous amount of work this week.”

“Oh, really? How come?”

“We start our broadcasts on the second of January. There are still lots of things to sort out.” She thought for a few moments. “There’s a party the channel is throwing on the thirty-first. I can invite you.” She stopped again for a few seconds. “It would give me great pleasure if you came.”

That evening, he received an e-mail containing all the details. The party was taking place in the private home of Jean-Pierre Pernaut, who lived
in Neuilly, on the boulevard des Sablons. His theme was, unsurprisingly, “the Provinces of France.”

Jed thought he knew everything about Jean-Pierre Pernaut, but the Wikipedia entry contained a few surprises. Thus he learned the popular host was also the author of many books. Alongside
A Taste of France, Festive France
, and
At the Heart of Our Regions
, he found
The Magnificent Crafts of the Artisans
, in two volumes, all published by Éditions Michel Lafon.

He was also surprised by the laudatory, almost ecstatic tone of the entry. He remembered that Jean-Pierre Pernaut had sometimes been the target of criticism, but all that seemed forgotten now. Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s stroke of genius, the author stressed from the outset, had been to understand that after the “flash your cash” 1980s, the public hungered for ecology, authenticity, and true values. Even if Martin Bouygues could be credited with putting his trust in him, the one o’clock news on TF1 completely bore the imprint of his visionary personality. Taking as his point of departure the current news—violent, rapid, frenetic, and senseless—Jean-Pierre Pernaut carried out a messianic task that consisted of guiding the terrorized and stressed viewer toward the idyllic regions of a protected countryside, where man lived in harmony with nature, with the rhythm of the seasons. More than a mere news program, the one o’clock news on TF1 took on the dimension of a march to the star, ending in a psalm. The author of this entry—though he admitted that he himself was a Catholic—did not, however, hide the fact that if the
Weltanschauung
of Jean-Pierre Pernaut perfectly suited a France both rural and “the eldest daughter of the Church,” it would have gone just as well with a pantheistic, or even epicurean, wisdom.

The following day, at the France Loisirs bookshop in the Italie 2 mall, Jed bought the first volume of
The Magnificent Crafts of the Artisans
. The subdivision of the book was simple, based on the materials used: earth, stone, metal, wood … Reading it (which was quite easy, as it was made up almost uniquely of photos) did not really suggest a particular attachment to the past. By systematically dating the appearance of the different crafts he described, and the major developments made in their practice, Jean-Pierre Pernaut seemed to make himself less an apologist for immobility than one for
gradual progress
. There perhaps were, Jed thought, some points of convergence between Jean-Pierre Pernaut’s
thinking and that of William Morris—socialist commitment apart, of course. If most viewers placed him
rather on the right
, Jean-Pierre Pernaut had always demonstrated, in the daily content of his program, extreme deontological care. He had even avoided appearing to support Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions, a movement founded in 1989—exactly one year after he’d taken control of the one o’clock news on TF1. There had certainly been a shift at the very end of the 1980s, Jed thought, a major historical shift, that at the time went unnoticed, as was almost always the case. He also remembered “Calm Strength,” the slogan invented by Jacques Séguéla that had made possible, against all expectations, the re-election of François Mitterrand in 1988. He could still picture the posters depicting the old Pétainist mummy against a background of church towers and villages. He was thirteen years old, and it was the first time in his life that he paid any attention to a political slogan or a presidential election.

If he constituted the most significant and durable element of this serious ideological shift, Jean-Pierre Pernaut had always refused to reinvest his immense fame in any attempt at a political commitment or career; right to the end, he had wanted to remain in the camp of the
entertainers
. Unlike Noël Mamère, he hadn’t even grown a mustache. And while he probably shared the values of Jean Saint-Josse, the first president of Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions, he’d always refused to support him publicly. Nor had he done so for Frédéric Nihous, his successor.

Born in 1967 in Valenciennes, Frédéric Nihous had received his first rifle at the age of fourteen, a present from his father after gaining the high-school diploma. With a degree in international and European Community law, as well as a degree in national defense and European security, he had taught administrative law at the University of Cambrai; he was also president of the Association of Pigeon and Migrant Bird Hunters in the Nord department. In 1988, he had finished first in a fishing tournament in the Hérault by catching “a nakin carp weighing 7.256 kilograms.” Twenty years later, he would provoke the collapse of the movement he now led by making the mistake of forming an alliance with Catholic right-winger Philippe de Villiers—for which the hunters of the Southwest, traditionally anticlerical and rather radical or socialist, would never forgive him.