Robert Wernick

2008-06-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

The Tragedy of Camille Claudel
From Wuthering Heights to the Madhouse

The great Rodin lay, old and infirm, in a sickbed in his great house in Meudon just outside Paris. He muttered that he wanted to see his wife. She is right here, they said, and they brought to his side Rose Beuret, his faithful model, mistress and housekeeper for 50 years, whom he was to marry shortly afterward, two weeks before her death, and ten months before his own. “No, no,” he said fretfully. “Not her. The other one.”

The “other one” was at that moment 400 miles away in a madhouse in Avignon, eating only raw eggs and potatoes she boiled in their skins for fear of being poisoned by Rodin and his henchmen.

She was Camille Claudel ,who for fifteen tumultuous years before the turn of the century had shared Rodin’s artistic and emotional life as pupil, model, collaborator, lover. A major sculptor in her own right, her career and her sanity had both passed under a stifling black cloud. She was to live in darkness for a quarter century after Rodin’s death, remembered if at all as a mere footnote to the life of the giant who inaugurated modern sculpture. It would take another forty years before a revival of interest, created largely by the arduous researches of her great-niece Reine-Marie Paris, brought the world face to face with the strength and many-faceted splendor of her work, and the full tragedy of her destiny.

“Tragedy” is only rarely a word that properly fits the life of artists, in the sense she used the word when in their childhood she told her brother Paul that he must not be content with aspiring to be a famous playwright, he must write tragedies like the ones which Aeschylus and Shakespeare wrote. Our books are full of tormented and unhappy poets, painters, sculptors, composers who loved unwisely, who died of drink or syphilis, who blew their brains out, degraded themselves, betrayed their talents, sold out to Hollywood, suffered from poverty and incomprehension and ingratitude, wore themselves out wrestling with intractable materials in the studio, searching for patrons and publicity to keep their names alive and their rent paid. .This is the wearisome condition of humanity. But tragedy, for Aeschylus and Shakespeare as for Camille Claudel, demands more, it demands a dramatic concentration: the protagonist must march step by inevitable step, knowingly or unknowingly, upward toward the heights and downward to doom.

Paul Claudel never did write a Shakespearean tragedy, for he never seems to have acquired much knowledge of human beings. His plays are about states of the soul, surrealistic (he despised the surrealists) plays through which images float or explode with the erratic intensity of dreams. The image of his sister Camille floats through all of them – through his early heroine La Jeune Fille Violaine, polluted by a leper’s kiss, as through his later heroine Dona Prohèze in The Satin Slipper who goes into a chapel to toss one of her shoes into the lap of statue of the Virgin Mary so that if she takes the road to Hell she will go with a limp. (Camille had been born with one leg slightly shorter than the other, the only defect in her glorious body.)

But he never succeeded in bringing her as a living character on the stage.

The true tragedy of Camille Claudel had to be acted out in her own life. Like the commander of Kafka’s penal colony, it was decreed that her sentence should be written out on her own body.

She was born in 1864 in the little town of Fère-en-Tardenois in a grim windswept corner of the Champagne country. Her brother Paul called their home Wuthering Heights, less because of the winds howling over the surrounding moors than of the storms of contention that raged through the family.

The father, Louis-Prosper, was an upper-level civil servant, an opinionated free-thinker with, said Paul, “an antisocial and fierce disposition...He made the family into a closed circle inside which we fought from morning to night.” The mother was a conventionally narrow-minded product of the local gentry who claimed descent from the mad 14th-century king of France Charles VI. She hated her daughter Camille for not being the boy she wanted to replace, her firstborn, who had died in infancy. She hated her too, and encouraged her sister Louise to hate her, for being bright and wilful and irreverent and proud. Warring sisters would be a recurring theme in Paul’s plays. (A=a stage direction in La Jeune Fille Violaine: “she throws the hot ashes into her sister’s eyes.”)

Her father adored her for the very independence her mother abhorred, and when she showed a gift for working in clay, he gave her the best room in the house to use as a studio.

She soon had an impressive series of portrait busts to show – she characteristically began with Bismarck and Napoleon - of a surprising technical competence. The earliest surviving authenticated work is a portrait of her beloved little brother Paul, aged 13, an amazingly cool, sensitive, straightforward work for a self-taught girl in a country village.

She was still a school-girl when her work was noticed and actively encouraged by Alfred Boucher, a well-known sculptor who lived in the town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where some bureaucratic whim had temporarily transferred Louis-Prosper. And at the age if 17 she bullied her not-unwilling father into moving to Paris so that she could study and work in an artistic center befitting her talents. She was by all accounts incredibly beautiful as well as incredibly talented. Paul in his old age could not help recalling her as she was in 1881, “in the full glow of her youth and her genius, her splendid forehead overhanging magnificent deep-blue eyes, her mouth more proud than sensual, that mighty tuft of auburn hair falling to her hips. An impressive air of courage, of frankness, of superiority, of gaiety – the air of someone who has received much.”

It might well have seemed to her in the flush of 17-year-old pride that she had received the world, the world which recognizes genius and deifies it. She was producing powerful works in art school, robust dynamic works with the stamp of an original personality. Her instructor stared one day in amazement at the clay figure she was working on. “You must have been studying,” he said, “with Monsieur Rodin”. It was the first time she had heard the name.

And then there was Monsieur Rodin in the flesh striding into the classroom to fill in for the instructor, who had won a prize which enabled him to take a trip to Rome. His near-sighted eyes peered at Mademoiselle Claudel and her work, and life would never be the same again for either of them.

Rodin was more than twice her age, a rough-hewn, hard-drinking, snorting sensualist. “A myopic wild boar,” Paul called him. “Monsieur Rodin,” said the 14-year-old girl who delivered art supplies to him, “pokes his beard everywhere.”

He was also, for all the young artists of Paris, the greatest sculptor in the world.

Soon Camille was working in his studio, soon they were working together in rare harmony. Soon they were lovers.

Their affair naturally enough soon became the subject of brisk and witty discussion in the salons of Paris among people who, if we can believe Proust's lengthy descriptions of them, did not have a single decent bone in them. Yet oddly enough, hardly a single detail of all that discussion has been preserved in print. Something kept the scandal-mongers from going public with their juicy material. There was nothing in the gossipy press, nothing in the spicy memoirs of celebrities of what the French like to call the Belle Époque. Early biographers of Rodin speak tantalizingly of a “great love” in his life without deigning to provide a name.

There was a large enveloped marked “Camille” in Rodin’s desk, but when they opened it after his death it was empty.

Only a few scraps of anecdote have survived. It is known that they worked together every day. They went out at night to parties and dinners where Camille was always a center of attention with her grave quiet beauty, her sudden bursts of laughter, her lively throaty country-girl way of talking. They never lived together in Paris, though they often went together for long trips in the country. She always called him in public, Monsieur Rodin. He called her Mademoiselle Claudel. She wrote him continual love letters of which a few gay girlish lines have been discovered: “I sleep naked to give me the impression that you are with me. But when I wake up, it is not the same thing.”

Theirs was not the traditional all-consuming grand passion of stage and opera, they were no Tristan and Isolde; their great love was not only daily ecstasies but also daily work, daily cooperative endeavor. I do not think that there is another example in the history of the arts of two first-rate talents, richly endowed with all the temperamental excesses that are often associated with first-rate talent, combining a harmonious sexual relationship with a harmonious creative career over such an extended period of time. Fifteen years. Verlaine and Rimbaud provide the nearest approach that comes to mind. But they never so far as I know collaborated on a single poem, and their affair lasted only a few months till it was ended in a police court with Verlaine charged for shooting Rimbaud.

We know little more of the details of their artistic collaboration than we do of their private life. Everyone agrees that this was the most fruitful, the most triumphant period in Rodin’s career, during which he produced immense works like the Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais which established his reputation for all time. Camille was a more skilled craftsman than Rodin – she could carve marble which he never did. It is said that he relied on her to do the most technically difficult parts of his figures, like the hands and feet. Exactly how much she may have contributed in the way of conception and execution to any particular piece of sculpture has to be a matter of conjecture. It stands to reason that two powerful characters like these working together must have had an enormous influence on each other. Sometimes their signed work is so similar, as in the case of Rodin’s Galatée and Claudel’s Jeune Fille à la Gerbe, that it is impossible to say which came first. The comparative tranquility of the composition might argue that it was Camille who had the original conception.

It seems fair to say that being with Claudel helped to humanize the “wild boar ” His capacity for feeling deepened and broadened. The strength and ferocity of his early work, his savage delight in human muscle and sinew, which made him into what may be called the greatest animal artist of all time gave way to a new softness and grace. There were now some spiritual horizons beyond the pervasive presence of the flesh. You have only to compare his most famous single figure, the Brobdignagian Le Penseur with his muscles like lava flows, a thinker whose thoughts do not appear to go much beyond his next football match, with La Pensée, with its tender delicacy, its veiled sadness, which he did a few years later and which is a portrait of Camille.

Camille eventually came to think that Rodin had stolen everything from her, but by that time she was hardly responsible for what she was thinking or saying. Like all the Old Masters work in our museums, Rodin’s sculptures were a collective production, an industrial enterprise in which a dozen or more pairs of hands may have taken part. Much traditional art scholarship is taken up with questions of distinguishing the brush-stroke or chisel-stroke of the master from those of his students and apprentices. Rodin as Master naturally took full credit for and signed the works on which Camille and others helped him, but he was always happy to recognize her talent, and his judgment of her was nobly generous: “I told her where to find the gold. But the gold she mined was her own.”

In the glorious days of the 1880's and 90.s, there was no time and no need to portion out credit. The two were in love, and they were producing great art. Nothing else counted.

But the world is the world, and other things did count. There were cankers in this rose.

There were fundamental differences between the lovers which in the end were fatal to their love. Rodin had become very famous and was on the way to becoming very rich, but he remained very much a man of the people, coarse-grained, awkward in refined society, still haunted by memories of the poverty and hardship he was bred in. Camille who had had her wilful way all her young life came from immeasurably higher in the social scale. She could read Latin and Greek while he had never learned to spell French correctly. There was often a certain amount of mockery in her attitude toward him, she could produce ferocious caricatures of him as well as the nobly vigorous bust which was Rodin’s favorite portrait of himself. Sometimes her wayward sense of fun could take an unpleasant turn. It must have seemed like a great lark to take Rodin and his faithful old mistress-housekeeper-slave Rose Beuret to the stuffy bourgeois Claudel home and present them as Monsieur Rodin, you know mother, the world-famous sculptor and his wife. It was a heartless gesture as far as Rose Beuret was concerned, and it turned out to be blindly self-destructive as well. For when her mother found out the facts, as she was bound to do sooner or later, her rage was boundless, and so, it turned out, was her capacity to hurt her daughter.

Rose Beuret was the rock on which the Rodin-Claudel relationship foundered. She had been the companion of Rodin’s youth, she had shared the same background of empty purses and empty stomachs, she had shared the desperate days when there was no money to pay for heating the studio and she had to stay awake through desperate nights moistening his clay to keep it from freezing so that he could continue working on it when he got up in the morning. She had given him a son, a good-for-nothing drunkard but still his son. She kept house for him after a fashion, but the notion that she was the practical woman of the sort which unworldly geniuses need to get them through the petty necessities of daily life does not correspond very well to the facts of their life. When they went to London with a dozen trunks just as the guns were starting to boom at the start of World War I and they were preparing for what was obviously going to be a long stay, it was Rodin who opened the trunks on their arrival and discovered they were all empty because Rose had simply forgotten to put anything in them.

He must have found her impossible most of the time. She was uncouth and uneducated, he could never dream of taking her out to the literary-artistic salons and the formal dinner-parties where he was in increasing demand. Still, she had her uses. Her liked her docile acceptance of his often outrageous behavior, she asked no questions when he announced that he and Mademoiselle Claudel had to go off for a few weeks or so to the Loire country to soak up the local color for his monument to Balzac. Despite all his wild boar ways, he had a yearning for the kind of unbuttoned domesticity Rose provided. Besides, he liked her cooking. He would no doubt have preferred to go on indefinitely with both women at his side, catering to the different sides of his nature, while he tended the fires of his genius, and he was honestly distressed when Camille wouldn’t see it that way.

He must have been terrified at times by Camille’s single-minded self-absorption. For her, life was just what it had appeared when she and Paul had wandered through the moors and forests around Wuthering Heights and stopped to dream superhuman dreams in front of the giant grotesque rock formations they discovered there. For her, it was all or nothing. She was a great sculptor,. and she wanted fame and glory, and she wanted Rodin. She would lose them all.

The details of the breakup with Rodin are obscure, like almost everything else in their life together. No one knows for sure whether she had an affair with Debussy, whose music Rodin detested and who kept a cast of Camille’s La Valse on his desk till he died. All that is certain is that Monsieur Rodin one day felt bound to make it clear that he had no intention of marrying Mademoiselle Claudel, and that after 1898 she would not let him inside her door. (Though according to one source, she used to sneak out to his house in Meudon and hide in the bushes outside to get a glimpse of him when he returned home in the evening.)

Across the sea in Norway, an interested observer was hearing all the gossip about Rodin and Camille from a painter friend in Paris. Henrik Ibsen never met either of them, but their story provided the major theme of his last play, When We Dead Awaken. The hero of this drama is a Professor Rubek, a world-famous sculptor who since the creation of one great master work some years before has been dragging on through an increasingly sterile life, turning out busts of society people. At a summer resort in the mountains he runs into Irene, a deranged woman whom he recognizes as the model for his great statue, the woman who had shared his years of creative ecstasy. In long impassioned dialogues they reveal to each other that since they parted, their lives have meant nothing, they are dead souls.

Ibsen, who believed in dramatic logic, kills off Rubek and Irene with an avalanche at the moment of their tragic awareness. Real life would not be so kind to either Rodin or Camille..

Rodin took the break-up very hard. He wept over all his friends, and though his last twenty years were a pageant of honors and glory – he was showered with decorations and awards, high-society ladies threw themselves into his arms, poets like Rilke chanted his genius, he was photographed in tails and top hat as he was received by kings and popes and millionaires – he could never forget the happiness he had abandoned. Years later he could not look at one of Camille’s bronzes without running his hands over it and breaking into hoarse sobs.

Camille took it much harder. She disintegrated..

She lived alone, in increasing poverty and distress, for almost 15 years. She did not stop working, indeed her finest works date from this period. She experimented with new forms, new materials, and achieved highly powerful and highly original effects. In the onyx-and-bronze La Vague (The Wave), the enormous ominous wave, derived from a Japanese print, stands just at the breaking point over the heads of four naked figures dancing in the shallows below.

She could shift easily from small works, small enough to hold in your hand, like Les Causeuses, (the Gossips), those four naked women wrapped in the frivolities and mysteries of their daily chatter as they crouch in a corner formed by broken marble walls, to lifesize intensely dramatic works like L’Age Mûr (“Maturity”) in which a limp passive aging man, no doubt Rodin, slumps into the arms of an ancient comforter or destroyer while a young woman, naked and desperate, on her knees, reaches out her lovely arms to implore him to return to his youth, his talent, to Camille.

L’Age Mûr is almost painfully autobiographical. And almost all her work can be related somehow to episodes in her life or the changing states of her mind. Even the lovely head of La Petite Châtelaine has been interpreted as a portrait of the child of Rodin’s she lost forever when she had an abortion during a trip to the Loire. But though it is easy to make links to her life, it is not necessary to do it. With some ingenuity, the biography can be read into the works, but the works themselves are quite independent of the biography, they have their own power fo excite or move or puzzle us without reference to any specific events that may have called them forth. Clotho the goddess of Fate, entangled in the threads of human destiny she is required to weave, could stand for any miserable life. Perseus and the Gorgon, one of her most ambitious if not most successful works, would be profoundly disquieting even if we did not know that the severed head of the Gorgon from which the slayer averts his eyes bears the face of Camille herself, Camille at the age of forty, prematurely middle-aged, her features thickened by disappointment and by alcohol, her eyes that once flashed so brightly now dead.

For Camille’s life and her career had sunk into all the miseries of loneliness and failure. Doctrinaire feminists have blamed the failure on the male-chauvinist tissue of the art world of her time. But if you had to be a woman making a career in the arts, late nineteenth-century Paris was as good a place as had ever existed in human history. A painter like Berthe Morisot, a novelist liked Colette, could be brilliantly successful. But Camille had an added handicap: her craft demanded a considerable capital to pay for the fine marble and bronze casting necessary for serious sculpture in those days, and though she found favor with a limited circle of buyers and dealers, it was never enough, and without continual contributions from her father she would have starved. She might, in the light of certain sparkling paintings by her which have recently been dug out of old collections, have made a good living as a portrait painter, for she understood color as well as she understood form. But she was Camille Claudel who had chosen her path back in Wuthering Heights. She was not meant to be a good painter like Manet or Degas, she was shaped by destiny to be a great sculptor like Phidias or Michelangelo..

Now she was living and sculpting alone, in two cramped and increasingly tawdry rooms on the Ile St Louis. Her neighbors complained about that filthy ground-floor apartment overrun with squawling cats, and warned their children not to have anything to do with the shabby old lady who slipped out in the evening to pick up some scraps of food. She was losing contact with the world she had known. She stopped seeing her friends because, she said, “I can’t afford new clothes and my shoes are all worn out,” but sometimes, when she received a commission and got her hands on some money, she would round up people off the street and have them in all night for a drinking bout.

She spent whole days making quick sketches of people in the streets and then making little figurines, “and they are clothed,” she boasted, to mark how she was getting away from Rodin’s compulsive fascination with nudity. Her drawers and cupboards were full of these little figures, which must have offered a unique re-creation of Parisian life in all its variety at the turn of the century. But we will never know what she looked like, for she destroyed them all.

She destroyed almost all the works of her last years of liberty, hacking up in summer what she had labored all winter to create.

In her brooding solitude, Rodin became a malevolent presence, enveloping her, trying to choke her. He was persecuting her, she said, he was sending out agents to assault her and rob her. He was putting his own name on works she had created and he was selling them for hundreds of thousands of francs while she was being dunned for the cost of plaster. Once, she said, a maid put a sleeping powder in her coffee and stole her latest work, for Rodin to sell for a small fortune as his own.

Her lithe youthful body thickened, her face at 35 was that of an elderly woman.

Her brother Paul was abroad during most of these critical years, in the diplomatic service. On one of his leaves, in 1905, he took her on a trip to the Pyrenees, and she made a remarkable plaster bust of him, the distinguished man of letters and diplomat into which the proud bright-eyed boy of her 1881 bronze had grown. When he came back in 1909 he was appalled. “In Paris,” he wrote in his journal, “Camille insane, enormous, with a soiled face, speaking incessantly in a monotonous metallic voice.”

On the second of March 1913 her father Louis-Prosper died. Three days later, Paul Claudel asked for a medical certificate permitting Camille’s internment. Five days after that two burly hospital orderlies broke into the apartment on the Quai de Bourbon where she sat cringing among her cats and the accumulated filth of years, and carried her out to an ambulance which took her to the asylum of Ville-Evrard near Paris. When war broke out the next year, and the German armies were approaching Paris, the patients at Ville-Evrard were evacuated to the asylum of Montdevergues near Avignon. When after a year of war it became evident that the Germans were not going to take Paris and an order was sent to bring the inmates back to Ville-Evrard, her mother used her family connections (after all, she had the blood of an insane King of France in her veings) to keep Camille where she was, as far as possible from a family whose tranquillity might be disturbed by having a slovenly madwoman a few miles away.

She would remain at Montdevergues for 29 years.

“Madhouses,” she wrote once to her brother, “are houses made on purpose to cause suffering...I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures.”

There were many at the time, and still more afterwards, who asked if it was really necessary to take her away at all. And if they did, why did it have to be a miserable place like Montdevergues, a second-rate institution even by the backward standards of the time, the kind of place where it was routine for the staff to steal from the packages sent by relatives to the inmates so that they would not go hungry themselves? Some of her friends claimed she had never been crazy at all. Yes, she was paranoid, the doctors at the asylum never wavered in their diagnosis that she had a persecution mania, but the woods are full of people with persecution manias who go about their daily business in streets and shops and studios more or less satisfactorily.. As a childhood friend said, “Still and all, it isn’t a crime to live alone and to love cats. If it was, half the village would be locked up.”

Paranoia by itself involves no impairment of the mental processes. Camille always understood what was going on around her, and was capable of writing long lucid letters, page after rational page until Rodin popped up in her train of thought and then she would rave on for page after page till she was exhausted. But she never turned violent and clearly represented no danger to any one. The doctors tried to get her interested in working again, they offered her modeling clay, but she thrust it away angrily. On at least two occasions they recommended that she should be released. But where could she be released to? Without the remittances that her father used to send her, she could not possibly support herself. She wrote pleading letters to her mother offering to abandon her share of the inheritance, asking only for a tiny room in the family house that she could creep into. The mother was adamant: she was an old woman, she said, past 75, and could not bear at any price to take back someone who had caused her so much grief and would only cause her more. “She has every vice,” she wrote to the director of the asylum, “I do not want to see her again.” She was willing to send her cookies and coffee and pay for her dentist’s bills, but she also enjoyed getting back at her for slights and injuries of the past, for “that ignoble comedy that you acted out on me. Imagine me being naive enough to invite the ‘great man’ to Villeneuve, with Madame Rodin, the concubine! And you, all sugar, you were living with him, his kept woman. I don’t dare even write the words that come to my mind.”

Her dear little brother Paul was now negotiating treaties with Brazil or representing the French Republic as ambassador in Tokyo and Washington, and he could hardly take a dotty old lady around with him on his travels. Nor did he have money to spare, he only became rich from his plays after Camille was dead. For whatever reason, he did nothing to help her except write to her and send his children on occasional visits to her. (The only other visitor she had in all those years was her old English schoolmate Jessie Lipscomb and she came only once.) A friend would later say that Paul Claudel never talked of his sister without the word “remorse” coming to his lips. A short while before he died, he noted in his diary, “Always the same taste of ashes in my mouth when I think of her.”: .

Abandoned by all, she clung to memories, even fabricated memories, of her family, it was all she had left. In 1939 when it was her turn to be 75 years old he wrote to Paul: “At this holiday season I think ever of our dear mamma. I have never seen her since the day you took the fatal decision of sending me off to an insane asylum. I think of the beautiful portrait I did of her in the shade of our lovely garden. The large eyes in which you could read a secret pain, the spirit of resignation which reigned over her whole face, her hands folded on her knees in compete abnegation, everything spoke of modesty, a sense of duty pushed to an excess, that was our poor mother. I have never seen the portrait again (any more than I have seen her).” And then the festering old wounds open again, the old paranoia comes bubbling up, and the tone turns shrill: “I do not think that the odious person of whom I speak to you so often has had the audacity to attribute it to himself, as he has done my other works, it would be just too much, the portrait of my mother!”

To an old friend who had popped out of the past to write her in 1935, when she had been locked up 22 years, she wrote: “I live in a world that is so curious, so strange. Of the dream which was my life, this is the nightmare.” The nightmare would not end till she was an old, quite mad, woman, quite cut off from communication with the world outside. Paul’s children, her nephews and nieces, remember visits to the asylum to see a little old lady sitting motionless in her hospital gown and staring silently at the floor.

As for Rodin, he had died in the grim wartime November of 1917 when everything was in short supply All his money could not buy enough coal to heat the large rooms of the huge house he lived in, and he got a chill which turned into pneumonia.

Camille died in the dark winter days of another war, in another huge unheated house where there was never enough to eat.. Hospital records give the cause of death as an apoplectic stroke.

When Paul visited her a month before, all she said to him was, “Mon petit Paul.” He asked that her body be taken to the family vault in Villeneuve-sur-Fère, but because of wartime restrictions on transport, his request was never acted on. In 1955, after Paul’s death and in accordance with his will, his family attempted to have her remains transferred to the vault. But her body had long since been moved to a communal grave and no one knew where to find her bones.

An earlier version of this text appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, September 1985 .

2008-06-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

THE CAMBRONNE PICNIC

i. Alberto Giacometti and the End of the World

Paris, June 13 1940, 10 AM

Rolande has washed the breakfast dishes and carefully put them away in
the proper cupboard. Our bicycles with their neatly packed baskets
front and rear are leaning against the wall by the entrance door. We
open the door and bring the bicycles out
The lady in the apartment on the other side of the corridor, the one
who owns a hole-in-a-corner beauty salon in the next block, opens her
door a bit but keeps it chained, she has always been afraid of
burglars. She is haggard, disheveled, after many sleepless nights she
is unsteady on her feet, but her voice is quite flat and
matter-of-fact. "The Germans are fifty kilometers from Paris," she
says. "It is the end of the world,". She slams her door shut, locks
it, bolts it, and goes back to her regular post at the telephone.
We turn for a last look at our own little apartment, to make sure we
have overlooked nothing. Rolande never overlooks anything, her little
birdseyes are never still, but she also believes in last-minute
checkups, and she has the example of our downstairs neighbors, who
have a name that sounds like Champignon, the ones who own a drygoods
store, to warn her against careless haste. They had noisily packed a
pile of suitcases, with violent disputes as to what could or could not
be left behind,, at the very start of the panic, a month ago, when the
German offensive was only a few days old, and last Satuday they they
had run down the stairs with all their and suitcases and some boxes
and their children and the mattress to put on top of their car, and
they kept remembering things they had forgotten, and they were
continuously running around and looking up apprehensively at the sky
for dive bombers and bumping into Madame Cécile, of the fourth floor,
the mistress it was said of a prominent official (he was the one who
had called up to say the war was lost while the papers were still
talking of a triumphant Allied advance through Belgium), who had even
more baggage than they did, which she threw helter-skelter into her
sports car and shot off into the rue Cambronne leaning on her horn.
Traffic was quite normal on that day, all the roads leading out of
Paris were open. She must have been a mile away, going south or
southwest or west before the Champignons discovered that she had gone
off with one of their suitcases, the one full of clothes and toys for
the children, leaving behind for them one of her own, full of beauty
products and indecent underwear. And they spent three quarters of an
hour, with their motor running, shouting imprecations at each other
for not keeping their eyes open and at their children for getting in
the way and at the departed whore Cécile who represented all that was
wrong with poor France.

And so we take that last lingering look at the apartment where we have
spent six delirious weeks, and which we can not be sure of ever seeing
again. Everything in it is charged with sentiment, everything is as
usual, neat and tidy and scrubbed clean. The water and the gas have
been turned off The furniture looks suitably domestic, rather grand
furniture for a working-girl, but she had once had a boyfriend she
called Coco Déménageur [the Mover], who worked for Grospiron the big
moving company and had worked his way up to the post of making
inventories of the furniture being moved out of upper-class homes,
often after funerals when the bereaved were too emotional to be able
to notice slight discrepancies in the number of Louis XV chairs or
Second-Empire mirrors being recorded on the lists they were
countersigning.

We check our watches, we have a good half an hour to make it to our
rendezvous at the Café de Flore with the Giacometti brothers.
Rendezvous for the end of the world.

We check over once again everything we are taking with us to make sure
that what we are taking is just the compact necessities we will need
for survival and a minimum of comfort pedaling for an unknown number
of days over unknown roads and sleeping in unknown fields: sleeping
bags, blankets, changes of underwear, toilet articles, toilet paper,
canned food and a can opener, tampax, a first-aid kit, some bananas
and oranges, some bottles of water, some bottles of wine, Michelin
road maps, matches, a wrench, a corkscrew, identity papers, a
sentimental memento or two, a knife, a flashlight, tire-repair
equipment, money.

We lock and double-lock the door, we go downstairs with the bicycles
and their baggage, and we mount and take off in the bright spring
sunshine. The air is dry and clear -- Hitler weather, they call it,
because it makes things so much easier for the panzer divisions which
the military experts had been sure would sooner or later get stuck in
the mud if they didn't run out of gas first. The sky is a warm tent, a
uniform cobalt blue broken only by some puffs of smoke from burning
fuel dumps down the river, replacing the puffs of the previous days
which had come from the bonfires of secret documents in the courtyards
of the Interior Ministry and the Defence Ministry and Ministry of
Foreign Affairs.

We are out in the middle of the rue Cambronne, and there is not a car
to be seen either up or down it, not a window which is not shuttered,
not a soul on the sidewalks if you don't count some stray pussycats
and puppydogs, left behind because they would be a nuisance in
overloaded automobiles.

No, as we pedal down, we see that the rue Cambronne is not quite empty
after all. Where it begins, across from the elevated railway, there is
a corner bistro where the owner is pulling down his blinds and pulling
in his chairs. He cannot pull them all in because there is a policeman
having his ritual coffee and calvados at one of them, and since he is
on active duty looking for German parachutists disguised as nuns, and
for ordinary civilians who might be fifth-column saboteurs, it would
not be wise to break his routine and provoke him into keeping the
place open another hour by asking passing cyclists for their identity
papers and an explanation of where they are going with all that
baggage. Diego Giacometti, we couldn't help remembering, was briefly
incarcerated a few days ago because a cop, perhaps this very cop,
found the cigarette burns in his rumpled old raincoat suspicious, they
might have been caused by bullets.

For when the world ends, government employees are among the last to
get the message. At some point the French government had issued a
decree proclaiming that since mass movements of refugees had clogged
the national highway system and were interfering with movement of
troops, policemen, letter carriers, meter-readers and other civil
servants, it was henceforth forbidden for civilians to pass from one
département to another without presenting a valid identify paper
stamped by the proper authorities, such stamping only available to
people who could present documentary proof that their presence in
another département had been made necessary by some official demand or
personal emergency. With hundreds of thousands, soon to become
millions, of people already on the roads, it seemed unlikely that this
decree would have any more effect than the other decrees being put out
daily by government officials when they could spare time from packing
their own bags for getting out in time. But out of sheer curiosity one
afternoon we had cycled over to the address on the Boulevard Exelmans
which was the stamping office for the million or so inhabitants of the
Seine département. There were a few dozen people milling around on the
sidewalk quarreling about who had gotten there first, but we managed
to maneuver through them to a point where we could peek inside. There
was a small row of desks lined up, and behind each of them sat a sober
pinched-faced civil-servant with a pinched civil-servant mustache and
a great volume opened to a page neately divided into columns before
him. As each aspirant refugee turned up, he or she would produce his
or her identity paper and a document attesting that his or her
presence was necessary at a funeral in Bordeaux or a board of
directors meeting in Toulouse. The man behind the desk would look over
these papers, write down the name and address of the applicant in
Column One and then he would either write Approuvé in Column Two and
stamp the card and hand back the papers, or he would write Refusé and
hand back the virgin papers without a word and stretch ouf his hand
for the papers of the next applicant.

As we made our way back, a rumor began spreading through the crowd.
Everything is OK: the Russians and the Rumanians have joined the war
on our side. Every one began getting momentarily cheerful and excited,
but one little man refused to give way to irrational emotion. Que
voulez-vous, he said, c'est le balance. Balance is the law of life,
everything works out all right in the end, and there is no need to get
excited about anything.

But soon the cheering people had figured out that if the Russians and
Rumanians had really stabbed Hitler in the back it would be shouted on
the radio and not whispered on the streets, so they all quieted down
and resumed their muttering places in the lines waiting for the stamp.

As we pedal past the stolid cop who does not raise his eyes from his
coffee and calva, the owner waves and shouts to us, "The Germans are
forty kilometers from Paris." No need to ask where he got his
information. The telephone system is still working, like the traffic
lights. And any stray passerby can bring a bulletin.

People have long ceased paying any attention to the military
communiqués on the radio, or in the newspapers, though some editors
had figured out a way of outwitting the censors. When they were forced
to blank out the names of the localities where fierce fighting was
reported because it would be bad for morale to know where those
localities were, they simply printed a map without any arrows or
captions which would tell any one who had seen the map in yesterday's
paper that the fighting front, such as it was, had moved more in the
last twenty-four hours than it had in four years in the first World
War. But the papers had ceased coming out for the last couple of
days, and the last map we had seen in print was of a region at least a
hundred kilometers from Paris.

W are now cycling at moderate speed through street after empty street,
the solid stolid bourgeois structures of Paris, all with their windows
shuttered, stray bits of paper and garbage in the gutters, a few
frittered posters on blank walls with a map of the world showing in
some bright color, I forget which, the immense range of the French and
British Empires spread over every continent and sea, surrounding a
small patch of black, like some crouching spider which was the Third
German Empire, and at the bottom in bold letters NOUS VAINCRONS PARCE
QUE NOUS SOMMES LES PLUS FORTS. We will beat them because we are
bigger.

What would Cambronne, the general who had given his name to the street
that had been so briefly our home, have made of it all? He was, as
all French-speakers know, a general at Waterloo who, when the
English shouted to him to give up like the more sensible of his
comrades, replied with the single word MERDE meaning SHIT, ever since
known as le mot de Cambronne among polite people who teach their
children that what the general really said was, The Old Guard may die
but it never surrenders.

Cambronne meant his mot as one of defiance, but it could equally well
serve as one of disgust at the utter futility of all things. It might
well have meant, So this is what the end of the world is like! An
uncoordinated mass of little stupidities! So that is all there is to
it! His own world had really come to an end that day in Waterloo, with
the army and the Empire to which he had devoted his life gone like a
wisp of smoke, with the Emperor to whom he had sworn total allegiance
slinking off in plebeian disguise to catch a boat for America. Of
course it was not the end of everybody else's world, nor even of his
own life: he was badly wounded, but he survived, he was taken prisoner
and taken to England, lived on for another seventeen years, and he
died in his bed.

And so it has been with all the other ends of the world that have
taken place regularly since our first ancestors began to be aware that
there was such a thing as a world around them.

Alberto Giacometti, whom we were due to meet in what was by now
sixteen minutes' time, had put it in one of his usual tart nutshells
in one of those long nocturnal conversations at the Flore in which we
were accustomed to shine a bright light on the state of the arts, and
the sexual activities of the artists, and the state of the world.
There can be no such thing as an end of the world, he said on this
occasion, because if there was, there would be by definition no one
left to know that any such thing had taken place, much less know
whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. There was some kind of
crackpot painter with us that night, and he insisted on proving out of
a combination of Rosicrucian and cabalistic texts that the day of our
doom was fixed, and was fixed in our own year, the year 1940. "It's
down in black and white," he said, "the end of everything, and we are
almost half way through the year." "If that is so," said Alberto
quietly but firmly,, "kindly take this pen and write me a check for
twenty thousand francs and date it January 1 1941. Go on, don't
hesitate, if you are right you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to
lose." The man hesitated, he might be a mystical dreamer, he remained
a Frenchman too. "But what do I have to gain?" he finally asked. "My
respect for you," said Alberto, "as a man with the courage of his
convictions."

Of course, we all had to agree that Alberto was right. Though his
favorite generalizaion was, "All generalizations are wrong." When all
of us talk about the end of the world, we do not mean the world, we
mean our world, the mass of things we live with and by and for. The
Bible tells us that . there will be an apocalypse any day, in which
everything will be destroyed, everything except the New Jerusalem
where those of us who are members of the right church will go on
living happily forever in a setting of pearls and gold and jasper ,
saphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl,
topaz, chrysoprasus, jacinth and amethyst, a consumer society in
excelsis. The scientists tell us that around the year 4,000,000,000 AD
our whole solar system will implode into a black hole. But uncounted
numbers of subatomic particles will escape, they say, to go carousing
through space and perhaps link up with others to form a new earth even
more unsatisfactory than this one.

But there were more important things to talk about that evening. Once
he had disposed of the tarot-card man, Alberto launched into one of
his rapid-fire epigrammatic discourses to the little group of
painters, writers, admirers, who circled around him, warning them to
wax their ears against the siren songs of the abstractionists who were
then drowning out all other tunes in the playground of the arts. Art,
he reminded us, is a triangular affair. Messages, pulsions, emotional
and intellectual throbs are being flashed back and forth between the
artist's eyes and the material the artists is working on – canvas,
marble block, whatever – and the world out there, what the artist sees
with his eyes. Take out one of the three elements, and the work of art
collapses. Take any abstract object, he said, a beautiful one, a
Brancusi, a racing-car motor, and break it in pieces with a
sledge-hammer, and you have a pile of junk. But dig up out of the
desert a Sumerian sculpture of which only four fragments remain, and
you have four masterpieces.

Why Sumerian? I wondered.

Perhaps in his mischievous Swiss way, he was suggesting that there was
an end of the world in the air after all.
The world had ended one day for those Sumerian sculptors, they had
disappeared leaving nothing behind but a few fragments of stone and
clay. Modern scholars can make only educated guesses about what those
sculptures meant to the sculptors who made them or the kings and
priests and functionaries who ordered them. They have no social
context for us, they live alone in their eternally private space in
little niches in our museums.

Alberto might have been one of those sculptors himself when I used to
drop in at his studio in the rue Hipplyte-Maindron, a dark dusty
little place off a courtyard lined with reproductions of Parthenon
friezes and watch him at work, a grizzled gnome stamping and fretting
and mumbling curses around his sculptors stand, yellow glints coming
out of his eyes as he reached out with nicotine-stained hands to stab
or scratch at the little plaster head there which may have started out
life-sized, and was now hand-sized, on its way to being
fingernail-sized or to total extinction, stopping only to dip a cloth
in wet plaster or to throw a cigarette stub in his asthtray on the
floor which was the hollow belly of his famous surrealist bronze of a
woman with her throat cut.

It was all a matter of getting the exact relations right, of ear to
chin, of eye to nose. The day he did that he would be able to make his
statues any size he wanted. For now, it was the little things that
counted.

One day he asked –he would ask anyone – what I thought of the tiny
object he was working on. I said it looked like a very large object
seen at a very great distance. He nodded approvingly and went on to
tell me of a great day in his youth when he was in a famous museum in
Italy looking at the sculptures in the vast halls. Up to that time he
had been working in a traditional vein, "Donatello et tout ça." but at
that moment he saw an Egyptian statue at the end of a long corridor.
He would learn later that it was the work of what is now considered an
inferior dynasty, but at that moment it was a revelation for him: a
statue all to itself, in its own space, with no connection to the life
or the ideas floating around it. And that was just what he was trying
to do now.

His sculptures were indeed blood kin to the characters in the books of
his friend and fellow Flore habitué Samuel Beckett. They were created
in what Beckett called our "next-to-the-last times," to be left in the
desert after the end of the world. Not survivors. Leftovers.
Alberto was considered by most people in the art world of 1940
something of a leftover himself. His career which had started so
brilliantly a decade and a half ago had come to what everyone agreed –
except for our little handful of disciples and admirers – was a dead
end.

Once he had been the darling of the surrealists, they had loved his
hallucinogenic hypersexual constructions like his Unpleasant Object, a
knobbed limp humanoid penis, a genuinely unpleasant object compared to
which the boisterous visions of Dali and Max Ernst were good clean
fun. They loved the quick barbed wit with which he played le Jeu de la
vérité, the truth game, in which, every one asked his neighbor the
most unsettling question he could think and he shot back with the most
disturbing answer. (On one celebrated occasion one of the players
committed suicide later in the evening.)

But then when André Breton, the Pope or Ayatollah of the surrealists,
heard that Alberto was doing heads, recognizable illusionistic heads,
he pronounced ex cathedra, "Every one knows what a head is," and
excommunicated the backslider. And the collectors dutifully ceased
from collecting, and Alberto to survive had to start, in collaboration
with his brother Diego, making sturdily spindly pieces of furniture
and decorative objects for the dealer Jean-Michel Frank [who, as we
were to learn later, had a little schoolgirl niece named Anne in
Amsterdam who one day would be more famous than all the art dealers of
Paris combined].

Peggy Guggenheim when she was sweeping through France in the spring of
1940 to snap up works of art at bargain prices, took one look at what
Alberto had in his studio and decided it had no place in the gallery
she was going to call Art of This Century; she reached for the most
scornful adjective in her vocabulary to spit out, "Greek!" and snapped
shut her pocketbook.

Alberto had his own adjective for her that night at the Flore.: "The
stupidest woman I have ever met." [But he always retained a kind of
schoolboy loyalty to Breton. When once I dared to suggest that the
Pope of Surrealistm might be a fumiste meaning phony, he called me a
salaud meaning son of a bitch.]

But it is now 10.25 a.m. and the deadly Sumerian silence of the streets is giving way to a distant noise, a kind of subterranean ill-tempered rumble. We know
what we are about to get into, the greatest traffic jam in human
history up to that point, half the population of France trying to
squeeze itself through the leafy boulevards of Paris.
And we have made our careful plans to be part of it.

It must have been that very Peggy Guggenheim evening that we held a
kind of meeting and came up with the conclusion that whatever it was
the world was up to, we could no longer just sit in the Flore and
watch it, we had to do something.

It was in many respects a typical evening at the Flore, the familiar
faces, the regular waiters, the steady buzz of chatter about the
latest books, the latest news bulletins telephoned in from friends
working in topsecret government agencies, the sexual pecadillos of
famous artsts, the formulation of aesthetic principles. The beautiful
Sonia was telling again the story of how she went, clad only in a fur
coat, to dinner at a fashionable restaurant with a prominent literary
critic, and how at critical moments she would pull the coat open, long
enough to create consternation in her partner's eyes and shut it
tight before waiters or other diners could react. Isabelle Delmer,
Alberto's titular girlfriend (he could only, as he liked to confide to
his friends, achieve anything like adequate sexual performance in the
luxury whorehouse The Sphinx) was loudly twitting a young artist we
called Basil because he apparently modeled himself on an Evelyn Waugh
character, who spent all his days drinking at the Flore when he wasn't
experimenting with a new sculptural medium, crumpled paper; she was
twitting him on being all alone now because the other two members of
the holy trinity they had formed when they left the university,
swearing never to give up their traditional homosexual pattern of life
when they went out into the great world, had both broken their oath
and both recently gotten married, one of them was now a war
correspondent and the other a prim stiff-collared sub-secretary at the
British Embassy [ who, it would not be known till many years later,
was copying secret documents at the Embassy and delivering them to the
Soviet secret service].

But there had been a change in the habitual pattern. When you entered
the café and looked around, it was no longer to see if there was any
new face in the familiar throng, it was to see which familiar face was
missing, since last night or since breakfast. One by one they had been
slipping away, in overcrowded automobiles or trains automobiles,
headed for the south, for Lisbon, for America.

And the newspapers you got when you ordered de quoi lire were not much
bigger than pocket notebooks because there was no more woodpulp for
paper coming from Scandinavia since Hitler had scooped up Norway and
Denmark. Nor could the café any longer provide reams of paper, de quoi
écrire, if you wanted to spend the day sipping brandy while writing
love letters or love poems or philosophical novels.

Sam Beckett had gone off to the country to try to cheer up James Joyce
who liked to say that he had been trying all his life to wake up from
the nightmare of History. And now History was dropping from the
daylight sky to pound on his door.

On all our doors. And what exactly are we going to do about it? The
Germans are a few days or hours away, and we have to get out. But how,
and where do we get out to? A Sam Beckett character might know how to
sum up our dilemma: nowhere to go, no way of getting there, must go.
We are not totally impractical. We have all acquired bicycles, that
was the thing to do. With a bicycle you had a certain liberty unknown
those who entrusted themselves to trains or autos, you could twist and
dodge and maneuver through or around the solid mass of vehicles which
then occupied the highways of France.

Can Alberto ride a bicycle? Of course he can. He might always walk
with a slight limp and with a cane in his hand, ever since he had been
knocked down by a drunken female American driver in the front of the
statue of Joan of Arc a couple of years previously, but the cane is as
much for show as for anything else.

In between snatches of art talk, we make up lists of necessary
supplies, we schedule a rendezvous, on the terrace of the Flore, we
sketch out the route of our odyssey.

I have a stack of Michelin Tire maps which Frank Parker and I had used
the previous summer on our excursion out of and back into Paris when
every one was expecting a German invasion which instead ran off into
Poland. Now it is France's turn, and a glance at the history books
will tell us that while the Germans may well take Paris this time,
they will have to run out of steam at some point, the way they did in
1914. There will then be a stalemate, say on the river Loire, as on
the Aisne in 1915, and sooner or later, Russia and America will get
into the war, and there will be a victory as there was in 1918. [In
the light of what happened shortly afterwards, this might seem
hopelessly naive and uninformed; but it is almost exactly what Winston
Churchill is telling the demoralized French statesmen and generals at
almost exactly the same time.] But in the meanwhile it was best to get
as far behind the fighting front as possible, and I suggest that St
Jean-de-Luz, on the Bay of Biscay just short of the Spanish border is
the logical place to be, in summer time, and if the worst comes to the
worst and the French government has to flee to North Africa the way
the Dutch and Norwegian governments have fled to London, we will be
able to slip out via Lisbon and see what will happen next.

As many as a dozen people may be taking part, more or less seriously,
in these planning sessions any one time. But, as the nights and the
days go on, and every day brings a new defeat and the Germans got
closer and closer to Paris, some grow impatient and walk out, and
find, and find some other method of transportation, or at least they
are seen no more at the Flore.

Basil the Crumpler complains of his own lack of foresight in not
acquiring a bicycle before every bicycle shop in Paris was stripped
bare of its wares. Rolande, ever practical, suggests he try the Trois
Quartiers. Whatever for? he demands; what would a posh department
store be doing with something as lowclass as bicycles? That's just it,
she says, no one would think of going there for a bicycle, but their
advertisements say that whatever it is you need, they have at least
two of it. And sure enough, when Basil went there the next day, they
did have a shiny hew bicycle down in a sub-basement when he went there
the next day, and he showed it to us, and promised to do a version of
it in crumpled paper one of these days.

In the end, there are only seven us who finally agree to leave
together at eleven o'clock on the morning of June 13. Rolande and I
would will meet Alberto and Diego and Diego's friend Nelly, on the
sidewalk in front of the Flore at 11, and then we will pedal down the
rue de Rennes and the avenue du Maine and pick up Francis Tailleux, a
young painter who was one of Alberto' s acolytes, and his American
friend Eileen Forbes; they are going to get married at about that time
in the church of St. Pierre de Montrouge, strategically located at the
crossroads out of which branch the two avenues still open out of
Paris, the one leading to the Porte d'Orléans, the other to the Porte
de Chatillon.

10.30 a.m.

And now here we are, we have come through the constanttly swelling
noise of motors, horns, crashings, scrapings, shouts, curses, a rumble
of frustration and impatience and sheer disgust, one long-drawn-out
multi-decibeled mot de Cambronne echoing down the boulevard, and we
are part of it, we are under a canopy of green leaves on the boulevard
Saint Germain, part of the great stream of vehicles -- cars packed
with children and steamer trunks, cars with mattresses on their roofs,
buses, trucks loaded with factory machines and factory workers,
horse-drawn farm-wagons, motorcycles, wheelbarrows, baby carriages,
bicycles, dogged foot-plodders, filling the street from curb to curb,
all headed in one direction, out of the city.

The day before yesterday everyone in the endless parade fitted more or
less easily into the patterns and routines that make up modern urban
life. They all in their separate ways cleaned their kitchens, opened
their mail, took the subway to work, listened to the radio, cheated on
taxes, went to school, dreamed of adulteries, lit candles in church,
ate too much at lunch, had three of four drinks too many at night
But now they are all alike, all in unison, interchangeable: every pair
of eyes, every thought, concentrated on one practical question, the
question that comes stage front whenever you find yourself in an
end-of-the-world situation: how do I get out of this mess, how can I
take advantage of the car up there which has broken down or run out of
gas, to wriggle out of line and gain a few yards, get a little closer
to the city limits, pick up a little information on what to do, where
to go, where to find food, shelter, the latest bad news?.
Weaving in and out on our bicycles, either riding on them or, more
often, walking with them, our rate of advance is slow, but there is no
trouble in getting the latest information. We are back to the birth of
information, to word of mouth, gossip. We learn quickly that the
Germans are twenty kilometers from Paris. The Germans are eighteen
kilometers from Paris. They will be marching in tomorrow. The
government has declared Paris an open city, meaning it is not worth
fighting for. The government is in Tours. ("A hundred kilometers
away." mutters one disgruntled man trying to inflate a flat tire. "An
easy afternoon excursion for a slow tank.") The government is in
Bordeaux. No one cares where the government is, All eyes in all those
vehicles are staring straight ahead, calculating how long it will take
to get to the right turn southward at the rue de Rennes and then
starlight on to the Gare Montparnasse and then around it, and then
down the avenue du Maine. and then – no one is quite sure. There are
still those two gateways open out of Paris, the Porte d'Orléans and
the Porte de Chatillon. The Germans are fifteen kilometers from Paris.

We squirm and skirt our way through the lava flow of traffic. We pass
a right-wing book-store with a display in its window featuring copies
of a book called Du Mariage by Léon Blum, written many years before he
became Prime Minister of France, in which he advocated what was known
in Anglo-Saxon countries as companionate marriage. On a strip of
cardboard below the books is written in bold capitals LISEZ LA
POURRITURE DU SALE JUIF, read the slime of the dirty Jew.

The right-wing intellectuals whom I occasionally ran into in those
days at the Flore must be going through some uncomfortable moments.
They have been brought up to believe that international Jewry and the
republican form of government were evils which had to be eradicated,
but they have also been brought up to believe that the root of all
evil, the everlasting enemy of France, was Germany, the pagan
barbarian jack-booted Boches. Now the Boches are fourteen kilometers
from Paris, and the right-wing intellectuals must be uneasily aware
that they will have to spend at least the next few years licking those
jack-boots, with or without mental reservations. They will go all the
more stridently denouncing the Jews and the rotten Third Republic,
they have nicknamed la Gueuse, the Harlot.

Things were no easier for the left-wing intellectuals, some of whom
are no doubt examining the situation over their breakfast coffee at
this very moment at the Flore, from which we are now only a few
minutes away. For years they have been demonstrating against war and
then against war and fascism, and now there is a war on and fascists
at the door, and all they can do is scratch their heads and wonder how
it could happen, as I could imagine the archeologists of the fourth
millennium, digging all this up and scratching their heads to find an
explanation of what made all the inhabitants of what must have been
the most luxurious city of all time decamp overnight leaving their
spacious homes and their elegant furniture intact and a billion wine
bottles aging in their cellars.

There is only one road open out of Paris, through the Porte de Chatillon.

10.59 a.m.

Just as called for in our plan, we worm our way through a tangle of
stalled cars, and arrive with a minute to spare in front of the Cafè
de Flore, where we find a tree we can lean our bicycles against.
And just that moment, as if planned as well, the whole chaotic scene
turns quiet, there has been a big traffic accident somewhere way
ahead, near the Montparnasse railway station no doubt, no one knows
how long it will take to do anything about it, and meanwhile the
drivers have nothing to do but turn off their motors and and save the
gasoline which they hope against hope will take them somewhere before
nightfall. The sky is cloudless, not a leaf flutters in the trees, for
that one moment no one is screaming in frustration, or bawling out
another motorist or a spouse, or offering a carton of cigarettes for a
can of gasoline, or singing a drunken song, or praying. At the foot of
the massively tranquil twelfth-century tower of the church of St
Germain des Près, all is peaceful, all is frozen.

Only at the curb in front of the café there is suddenly a single
flutter of motion, a string of curses. It is Alberto, he is trying to
pump some air into the flat rear wheel of his bicycle.
Diego and Nelly are leaning against another tree, along with their
tandem bike, silent, like the two or three customers sitting on the
terrace, like Pascal the waiter standing at the front door, like the
tower of St German des Prés.

"I don't know what is the matter with this fucking machine," growls
Alberto, "I do not understand." And he jams down the handle of the
pump again, and again. And he stamps his feet and his face swells and
reddens, and he curses in Italian and German. But the tire will not
budge.

Rolande steps up in her practical way, leans down without a word and
unscrews the valve in the inner rim of the tire. Alberto keeps on
pumping, and this time he is rewarded, the tire puffs up, Rolande
detaches the pump and screws the valve shut, Alberto without a word,
restores the pump to its proper place, casts a last look to check if
all is place in his baskets, including the cigar box in which he has
said he would pack all that is worth saving of his production in the
past year, he mounts his bike, Diego and Nelly mount theirs, Rolande
and I mount ours, and we are off into the river of traffic, which is
starting to budge slightly again, round into the rue de Rennes headed
for the Porte de Chatillon.

11.30 a.m

We work our way through one more traffic jam in front of the church of
St. Pierre de Montrouge.

The same rumble and crackle of frustration over all.
Diego looks up at the sky, the soft cloudless springtime sky, and
remarks in his matter-of-fact way, "A great day for a picnic."
Alberto replies by spitting out the mot de Cambronne. He is an
impatient man when he has something to do, and he sees no reason to
waste precious time while the world is falling apart for something so
insignficant as a wedding "Tell them to get it over quick," he shouts
at us as we push our bicycles through the doors of the church.
My mind runs back to a moment in a Marx Brothers movie, where some
one says, Let's have a picnic, and Groucho says, We can't have a
picnic, we don't have any red ants, and Chico says, I know a Indian
he's got-a two red aunts.

Here we are, scurrying like two red aunts out of the sunlight into a
darkened church, with that unceasing noise behind us..
Shall we call it a Cambronne picnic?

ii. Picnic Notes

Under its grave gray neoclassical arches, the nave of the church is
almost empty, almost silent, A few candles flicker, a few elderly
ladies are kneeling before a statue of St. Rita de Cascia surrounded
by plaques expressing gratitude for saving lives, curing deadly
illnesses and solving family problems. Another plaque records the
rededication of the church to the Virgin Mary in gratitude for saving
the church from German bombs in the dark days of 1918.

There is a sound of benediction coming from a chapel down by the
altar, and there we find Francis and Eileen at the moment of being
bound in holy matrimony, The priest is racing through the ceremony, he
barely has time for his last blessing before he is running, his skirts
flapping, for his own bicycle which is propped against a pillar in
the nave.

We take a minute out for embracing bride and groom, then we all head
for our own bicycles and out of the church into the universal growl of
the jolting and jerking parade of traffic turning on a right diagonal
off the avenue du Maine and into the avenue de Chatillon.

No sign of the Giacomettis, Alberto's patience had been stretched too thin.
Perhaps we will catch up with then in Saint Jean de Luz. .Perhaps they
have looked at a map and decided that Switzerland is closer to Paris
and if they must face the end of the world they might as well do it
in their native land.

There are four of us now, threading our way through the endless stream
of vehicles down to and past the Porte de Chatillon, down through the
tree-lined boulevards and shuttered windows of the Paris suburbs, down
through the tree-lined highway heading south.

There are stretches where everything is moving steadily, slowly.
Periodically there are accidents, pile-ups. panicky screams, then the
slow steady rumble resumes, the slow steady crescendo of the mot de
Cambronne through the haystack-studded fields, the church towers and
chateau gates and village streets of the lovely French countryside
under a lovely June sun..

After a couple of hours, suddenly there is a colossal pile-up ahead,
no one seems to know what caused it, a flat tire on an oil truck, or
an enemy bomb or an ordinary driver who had fallen asleep or gone mad.
The road is a tangle of wrecked cars, with their doors hanging open,
people are scurrying around through the scatterings of broken glass
and undergarments spilled out of suitcases to search for survivors or
to salvage or steal lost property or to clear away the wreckage that
is holding them up. There is nothing we can do but offer water to a
woman who has fainted, help her round up her children, maneuver
somehow through the smoke and the screams, the ditches and the
brambles, and by the time we come out on open road again there is no
sign of the Tailleux, Perhaps we will catch up with them somewhere on
the road, or in St Jean de Luz. Perhaps they have thought it over and
decided that, since Eileen's family owns some property in
Aix-en-Provemce that once belonged to Cezanne, they will feel more at
home there.

At all events, we are alone now, two more anonymous ants in the
chaotic picnic-ground, scurrying southward amid what are now the
familiar noises of motors three or four abreast on the roadway, a
gentle wind in the trees, a gentle sound of chirping birds, not a
cloud or a plane in the sky.
\
Except that there is a new noise now. the plaintive wails of cows,
abandoned by their owners who have fled, and are now stumbling
painfully through the stubble of the hayfields with their huge swollen
udders, swollen with the milk of which no mouth or fingers will
relieve them.

Except for one good soul, a woman we come across who has gone out into
the fields, rounded up some cows and relieved them of their burden,
spurting most of it into the ground but some of it into a pail she has
picked up somewhere, and she sits by the roadside, flagging down
motorists with children so that she can offer them some fresh milk.

*

It is the most beautiful month of June in living memory. Saint Joan of
Arc has spurned the anticlerical government leaders who turned up last
week at her statue on the rue de Rivoli (the very spot where Alberto
was maimed) to pray for the rain that might get the German tanks stuck
in the mud. Warm cloudless days have been followed relentlessly by
clear windless nights, and the tanks of the Wehrmacht have never run
out of fuel because, it is said, when their gas tanks are low they
have only to fill them up at abandoned gas stations.

The beginning of the last German offensive, the one that brought them
Paris. coincided with the beginning of mowing time, and the fields we
pass are dotted with towering golden haystacks.
As night falls, what is now being spoken of as the Exodus comes to a
stop, no one in his right mind is going to go racing on unlit roads
among unlit cars. We all head for the haystacks, our legs aching, we
all carry our baggage of worry and uncertainty, what, we ask
ourselves, waits for us tomorrow?

But the night is warm, ancient gods are re-aroused, the hay is soft
and crackles uncomplainingly

*

Our Michelin maps live up to their reputation, they show us side
roads, roads we can meander through, run up extra miles but save
precious hours. A few hundred yards off the frantic highway there are
villages where there is no sign that there is a war on, you can stop
in a café for a coffee and calvados, listen to the latest catalogue of
calamity on the radio -- the Germans are in Paris, the government is
in crisis, Mussolini has stabbed us in the back, the government has
fallen, the Germans have made a breach in the Maginot Line – pick up
tips on which roads are open, which bridges have not been blown, where
you can find gas stations which are closed but if you are a driver
whose tank is low and you have plenty of hundred-franc bills in your
pocket, the owner or his brother can tell you were to turn off and
cross a little bridge and you will find a fellow who has thriftily
stocked down a little road under the third tree on the left a quantity
of cans of gasoline in the expectation of days like these.

*
"In days like these," says a man we run across, at a turn-off beside a
cemetery, "you have to be a débrouillard." That is to say, a fixer, an
arranger, someone who knows his way around anywhere, who knows how to
get what he wants done, inside or outside the law makes no difference.
This man is a lieutenant in the French army, he has been through some
harrowing days, fighting on the Aisne till the final breakthrough,
running ever since. "But not running like rabbits," he insists, though
he admits that It has been quite a while since he has had any contact
with his regimental headquarters. He still has a few men left in his
unit, they are camping in the wood s over there, he has no orders to
take them anywhere, but he knows that if he keeps going south he will
come to the Loire, and there maybe they can hold that line. They are
blowing up the bridges over the Loire, but he has heard they are
keeping one open, at Gien.

"Why am I telling you this?" he says. "Why am I worrying about Gien?
Every road to Gien will be jammed tight. Refugees. Refugees. Screwing
up everything. What do you think you're doing on all these roads, all
you fucking refugees? You haven't been bombed, have you?"
No.

"What did you expect? The Boches are intelligent, you have to give
them credit for that. They can see what is happening, and they say to
themselves, why should we waste a valuable bomb on all this scum, all
these refugees? Why should they worry about you when you're doing
their work for them? How can we move our own troops around when you're
blocking all the roads?

"Look at me. Wandering around with ten men and no equipment, hoping to
get to Gien, get to the Loire where can stop them. A week ago we were
stopping them, they were throwing everything they had at us,
dive-bombers, tanks, everything. But my men were ready for them, we
were holding our ground, one day, two days, we have them stopped cold.
Then a message comes. There is a crisis a few kilometers to our left.
Our men are being pounded badly there. They need some fresh troops and
fresh equipment, and my unit can provide them. We load up a few trucks
and take off. There is a straight little road leading right to where
we are wanted, a narrow little country road, it runs through some
woods where we can't be seen by their planes. We can be where they
need us in half an hour. The only trouble is, our road crosses a
highway at one point, and when we get to that point what do you think
is there? A crazy driver or two crazy drivers, or two hundred crazy
drivers, have plowed into each other, there at the crossroads, so what
we run into is one solid heap of twisted car bodies and human bodies,
and exploding engines, and smoke and screaming women, burning women,
and who do you think they are? They are the inmates of two big
whorehouses, refugees, running away to the south in two or three
trucks that have all come apart, and of course nobody with an idea of
what to do, just screaming, and it takes us two hours, two hours,
before we get our vehicles through all that mess, and by the time we
get to where we were going, there is no more where to it, the line is
broken, the Germans are pouring through, there is nothing between them
and Paris.

"I tell you, I am a history teacher in real life, and I always liked
to tell my students that it's the little things that count in history,
like the flock of geese that honked one night and woke up the Romans
just in time to save Rome. Now, if there is still a school standing
for me to teach in, I will be telling my students how a flock of
whores from Amiens lost Paris."

*

It is the first bomb ever directed specifically at me. We have been
grimly pushing on, and suddenly the word spreads down the line that
this time it is for real, that those planes we have heard off in the
distance to our left are headed our way, headed for us, getting louder
and louder. And we all abandon our vehicles to tumble into the
shallow grass-lined ditches on the roadsides, to lie or crouch and
wait.

We have a second or so to wonder if this is just another false alarm.
And then the whistle starts.

We have been told in the newspapers that the Nazi stukas have whistles
attached to their bombs to make them more terrifying as they fall.
And before I know it, there is this bomb, with this whistle, getting
louder and louder as it heads straight for a spot halfway between my
shoulder blades.

A frozen second of eternity, and then a big bang, just like in the
newsreels, but rather reassuring. For the whistle has come to an end,
just like in the newsreels, and here we still are, face down in the
grass and the dirt.

Then there is another whistle. a little louder but aimed at the same
spot halfway between my shoulder blades.
And another.

Then total silence. And after another long second, the normal world
returns, we are all scrambling up and brushing ourselves off and
babbling to reassure ourselves that we are still alive and leaping to
our proper seats, and the wheels turn and the picnic can go on.
In roadside gossip sessions along the way we learn that none of the
bombs came near the road, but exploded more or less harmlessly, in
fields or woods. It is the general opinion that these bombs must have
been dropped by incompetent pilots, they could not have been Germans,
they must have been Italian planes.

France may face her doom with the expressionless face of shock, but
she can call up one look of scorn for what she chooses to call her
sorella latrina.

*

It is a little town south of the Loire where everyone grouped around
open windows to listen to the radio. There is the tired cracked voice
of Marshal Petain announcing that France has fallen. The war is over.
Or will soon be over.

Everyone listens with wooden faces.
Then everyone goes back to looking for a place to spend the night.
There is a man who says he must get right back to Paris. He sells
antique furniture in the Flea Market at the Porte de Clignancourt, and
he knows some very reliable German collectors.
*

"Hello there. Is this the way to Bayonne?"
We are on a sidewalk chatting with an old friend of Rolande's who left
Paris a while a good while ago to stay with a distant relative in this
little town. But the bicycle bearing down on us carries a refugee of
more recent date.

It is Basil, our old friend from the Flore, on his Trois Quartiers
bike, which looked somewhat the worse for wear. He has tales to tell.
"I got up that morning with a terrible hangover, and I staggered down
to get on my bicycle and waver my way to the terrace of the Flore. I
ordered my usual, and Pascal served it to me just the right way There
weren't more than three customers in the place, and everything was
quiet, the streets were empty. This is eerie, I said to myself, what
has become of all the millions of people who were right here yesterday
on the boulevard. And then all of a sudden there is a blast of bugles,
and drums, and clack clack clack, boots marching smartly in my
direction. Those aren't French boots, I said to myself, the French
don't know how to march. Can they be English? Have the English turned
the war around and come to save Paris? Can all this tragedy have a
happy ending?

"And then I look up the boulevard, and there were soldiers marching,
and by God they were goose-stepping. They were Germans, bloody
Germans. And I say to myself, my boy you are now an enemy alien, and
you'd better get yourself out of here. And I jump on my bike, I can't
thank you enough for having steered me to it, and I was half way down
the rue de Rennes by the time they turned into it, and the streets
were empty, and here I am."

He had been hit by anti-aircraft fire: there some German planes
cruising harmlessly in the sky, and a gun had opened up on them
without any effect, but some fragments rained down on and had dented
his handle bar and one of the fragments had torn his trousers and he
was convinced it was lodged in his left buttock, and he knew a surgeon
in London who would cut it out one day, being careful to preserve a
few fragments of flesh attached to it, and it could be exhibited at
the Tate and it would be the start of a new movement in art.

"And there was this town they actually bombed, and when I came down
the main street there were still some buildings burning, and bodies
hanging over window-sills, and then there was a shop with it whole
front wall gone, and it was a Wine and Liquor shop and I was naturally
drawn to it, there was broken glass everywhere and such a smell you
couldn't walk through it without having visions, and I picked up a
dozen untouched bottles of quality cognac."

Which he would be glad to share with us over a leisurely dinner, but
he is in a hurry, he has to keep pedaling traveling day and night if
he expects to get to Bayonne in time: he has picked up the latest news
and he knows that the French have starting kicking the Royal Navy our
of what ports they have left, but the Royal Navy is still using
Bayonne to pick up any struggling troops or others who need to get to
London.

And he speeds off into the night, singing..

*

[And as I learned when I saw him in London years later, he actually
made it to Bayonne, and there was a destroyer taking on passengers,
mostly Polish soldiers, and he stepped up to board it with his
remaining bottles, but they said there was no room for any kind of
baggage, so he sat on the dock drinking till the last call was made
and he jumped on board.

He would be decorated for valor in serving on a fireboat in the Thames
during the bombardments of London later in the year.]

*

Roadside chatter:
"So now we will be working for the Germans. Well, there are worse
things that could happen. The Germans are socialists – national
socialists. The working man gets paid vacations. Of course, if they
decide to ram their Gestapo down our throats, it won't be so
pleasant."

"They'll have trains to take us back to Paris." "What are you going to
do with your car?" "I'm gong no hide it in the woods back of my cousin
Marcel's pace, till the English give up. Then there will be gas
again."

*

It is summer now in the vineyards of Bordeaux, they say that if there
is not rain soon it will be a bad ear for the wine.
The summer sun shines on empty roads. We are alone in the scenic southwest.
The act of surrender has been signed in the very railroad car where
the Germans surrendered in 1918.

The Exodus is over, we are in a new biblical book, the book of
Numbers. The Germans have taken two million French and British
prisoners. The Germans will the occupying seventy percent of France.
Twenty thousand people have returned to Paris, where life is slowly
returning to normal.

*

We are pedaling at a normal speed, we come across a roadside café. It
is a little early, but we will stop for lunch.
A lady has finished laying out the tables, she is writing the day's
menu on a slate. She wonders what the world has come to. "The English
have sunk our ships at Oran, can you imagine it, our allies. And the
Germans are coming, they will be here soon. We must be polite to them.
But not too polite. There were some girls in the village, you know
what girls are like these days, they were expecting the Germans to
come early this morning and they were out to greet them, with
flowers. Happily, they did not come when they were expected, and some
of us grown-ups had time to get together and give those girls a
talking-to, and they won't try it again. I can tell you that,."
Hardly have we sat down and ordered our aperitifs then there is a
noise up the road, and the Germans are indeed coming, a dozen
motorcycles, they stop in front of us with a squeal of brakes.
They are cheerful, talkative young men, settling comfortably into
chairs, they are SS men of the Totenkopf, the Death's-head Division,
they might be noisy young picnickers anywhere, welcoming a few days of
well-earned unbuttoned leisure after long hard days of work. They
speak no word of French, though one of them has studied the language
in school and learned a song by heart there (Il était un petit navire
Qui n'avait dja dja djamais navigué) which he chants several times
over by popular demand. Our hostess speaks not a word of German. They
try not too successfully to communicate by sign language, though they
get across the idea of beer, they are stumped by the food they are
dying to order, one of those famous French meals. They are clearly
under orders to be correct, to treat the conquered enemy politely They
pull rolls of paper out of their pockets, which are occupation
currency, to show that they have not come to loot but to pay their
correct and friendly way.

Since I have a few words of schoolbook German, I offer to translate,
and help them order the dish of the day which, when it arrives, they
recognize instantly as frankfurters.
They are under the command of a noncommissioned officer, a
Rottenführer, who seems to be something of a political commissar as
well, who sees to it that they will obey orders, make the right
impression, to put the proper emphasis and significance of every word
and gesture. He explains at some length that the German people has no
quarrel with the French people, nor indeed with any other people of
Europe except, for the time being, the English. The Russians, for
example, are a good people, good friends. Without the Germans they are
nothing, but with loyal German support they can play a productive role
in the New Europe. It is sad that hired propagandists have poisoned so
many minds, have done their best to spread lies and slanders about the
German Volk. The German Volk is not at all what the hired
propagandists of the Jewish press say it is. Wir sind keine Barbaren,
he says emphatically. We are not barbarians, as you have been falsely
told. Die Neger sind BarBarbaren – referring to the Senegalese troops
in the French army with whom they had a bloody skirmish early in the
campaign. The German Volk, he insists, is a good Volk, not a böse
(bad, mean) one. "We are not böse with any people in Europe, we want
to be friends, building together a New Europe. Only with the Jews are
we böse, for they desire the destruction of Germany."
"Including the children?" I interject, a little rashly.
"They will grow up to be Jews like the others." he explains patiently.
"To them we must be böse, to them we will be böse."

As they are leaving, after wolfing down their frankfurters the
Rottenführer offers me a copy of the little illustrated magazine which
is passed out to soldiers of the Wehrmacht. There are pictures of dive
bombers and of columns of tanks and trucks and motorcycles passing
through the empty streets of French villages. There are soldiers
gaping at the Eiffel Tower. There is a snapshot of a scene which had
often struck me as we were roaming about Paris, a sign in front of a
building on the Rond-Pont des Champs-Elysées reading A vendre
bourgeoisement, meaning only, I suppose, that it is to be sold as
private residence and not turned into offices, but to foreign eyes it
certainly looks a little strange, and the editors of the magazine have
a good time with it, this is what we are getting rid of, they say, no
more nasty bourgeois looking down their noses at us, we are the Volk
and we are going to win this war and change the world..

Off go the Deathshead men, grinning and shouting at each other as
their motorcycles sputter into motion. They are straining to get their
first look at the Atlantic Ocean.

*
In the towns they are putting up posters with a picture of a young
soldier of the Wehrmacht helping a bewildered old lady to cross a
crowded street, with a caption reading ABANDONED POPULATIONS, PUT YOU
TRUST IN THE GERMAN SOLDIER.
*

In Bayonne, we pass a German soldier guiding an old lady through a
tangle of cars and bicycles and pushcart and wheelbarrows on the main
street.

*

In Biarritz, the local paper reports splendid beach weather, but warns
against high seas. Seven visitors were reported drowned over the
weekend.
These "visitors" are German soldiers who have shown they were able to
brush off anything the French and British and Dutch and Belgians could
throw against them, but nothing in their training had prepared them
for ocean waves.

*

Now we are in Saint-Jean-de-Luz at the height of the summer season.
We have found a room with a kitchen to rent from an old lady who had
seen bad times before, and knew how you had to deal with them. She
knew how a Basque farm woman who would come down regularly from the
hills with eggs of chickens and she was still coming down, no matter
which way the war went, and she was selling them, because she spoke no
French, at the same regular peacetime prices, so that we can feast
ourselves daily for a few pennies.
The movie houses are open, the bars are open, it is perfect beach
weather though the waves are high.
None of our promised fellow-exiles has turned up, but there is a
familiar face every so often in the streets, someone we might have
said hello to in Paris, and is now full of stories of adventures on
the way down and speculation on how they are every going to get back.
There are even a couple of Americans, last holdovers of the Lost
Generation, who are headed for the border at Hendaye where it is said
the Germans, anxious to preserve American neutrality, will let anyone
with an American passport on into Spain and eventually Greenwich
Village.

We are on the terrace of the Bar Basque, the local equivalent of the
Flore, from which Hemingway and the others had covered the opening
days of the Spanish civil war, and a familiar face appears on the
sidewalk. "Gerassi!' cries Rolande, and it is indeed our friend
Fernando Gerassi the painter, and a momentary panic marks his face,
which he quickly suppresses, and he comes over to join us for a
cordial dink. He has something to be panicky about, for though he has
a passport, it is not such as would stand up to rigorous examination.
It is one of those handed out by the young playboy and seducer of
millionairesses who has a job in the Embassy of the Dominican Republic
in Paris and has with rare generosity handed them out to people in
desperate need of a document.

Fernando's need is desperate enough, he was an officer in the
International Brigades which had fought on the losing side of the
Civil War, if the Germans took him in for questioning might not go
well for him.

To continue reading THE CAMBRONNE PICNIC visit http://www.robertwernick.com/

2007-07-12T06:05:00.000-07:00

We were having drinks on the terrace of a café on the right bank of the Amstel facing the Magere Brug, the Skinny Bridge, named for two emaciated sisters who used to row back and forth continually across the canal to visit each other in the days when bridges were few in Amsterdam. The kindly elderly gentleman at the next table had a story to tell and insisted on sharing it with us.

He had come from the Dutch Antilles to visit the home country, and he and his brother had gone for a walk along the Amstel and the canals, and dropped into a cigar store to buy a lottery ticket. The owner, a misshapen gloomy old man, told them he had sold all his tickets, but he had kept a handful for himself in a hat, and if they had their hearts set on this gamble, he pulled one out for them. Or of they preferred, they could pick one out of the hat. They chose the one in his hand, paid their two euros, went home, eventually went to sleep, woke up the next morning and went for a walk along the Amstel and the canals, bought a newspaper and sat down at a terrace table, unfolded the paper and learned that they had won a million euros. Thinking it over, they thought that they really owed something to that sad old man who had sold them the ticket, and walked over the Skinny Bridge to the store prepared to present him with fifty euros.

When they made clear the object of their visit, he began to scream and roar and thrash and stamp and curse and hobbled out the door and down the bicycle path alongside the canal, and disappeared. They waited for twenty minutes, but he did not come back,, and for all they know he is still stamping alongside the Amstel and the canals sputtering out his rage against God or Fate or visitors from the Dutch Antilles.

2006-07-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

Sciolist: a person with a great deal of superficial knowledge. Yeats once said there were only 100 people, who could understand his plays; the rest were all sciolists, pickpockets or opinionated bitches.

Bob Wernick in his Montparnasse atelier in April, 2006.

FOUR CHEERS FOR DAME GOSSIP

The Grandmother of Us All

by Robert Wernick

Cheer I: "One to Me is Shame and Fame"

i. The Illustrious Lineage and Bad Name of Dame Gossip

"There are some elements in the universe," said William James a century ago, "which make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements and can only be conceived as so much dirt."

Such elements abound in the world of modern physics, where, while uncounted subatomic particles - fermions and such -- hop and swirl in well-regulated patterns to keep galaxies rotating in the sky and e-mail arriving on earth, there are separate and perhaps equal particles, of uncertain identity and no known function, scattering at apparent random around them. After a century of stupendous discoveries which have brought physicists to the very edges of the universe, these outlaw particles remain in circulation, bosonic ghosts as they have been called, gross chunks of James's dirt, with no apparent regard for the laws of gravity and motion and logic which hold in their iron grip all of us visible objects. Recently, with the help of an amiable theory called SUSY (for Super-Symmetry) ingenious mathematical physicists are trying to discover some underlying order even in this last refuge of chaos, and they are pursuing this tasks with such determined enthusiasm and such assurance of ultimate success that one Nobel-Prize winner has predicted that our time will one day be known as the Age of Dirt.

No such enthusiasm is aroused by the equivalent of these bosonic ghosts in the micro-universe of human society tucked away in the little clump of dust that is the planet Earth. This is Gossip, which can be found hopping and scattering wherever human beings concentrate but which, except for a handful of pallid academic studies, is either politely ignored by serious people or spoken of with curt disdain and distaste.

Yet gossip is something which every one does and everyone enjoys. It is, outside of eating and drinking and sex, the most universal of all conscious human activities. With a little searching, you can find otherwise ordinary people living ordinary human lives who have never prayed to any god or any devil, never committed one act of murder or adultery, never hunted or fished or farmed or voted or traveled to the next county or combed their hair or lied to a grand jury or seen a movie or broken a mother's heart. But you will have to look very far to find anyone who has learned to speak a language and who has never gossiped.

Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool has collated dozens of learned studies indicating that with remarkable uniformity human beings, male or female, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, saint or sinner, when they gather in small groups and are left to their own devices, when their subjects of conversation are not programmed by office or school or church or army or lawcourt or talkshow host, spend from forty to sixty percent of their time gossiping. And though there are no learned studies to back up the conclusion, it is difficult not to assume that this statistic has remained constant since the dawn of human life on this planet.

Gossip is older than religion, law, science, government, money, war, competitive sports, indeed any other human institution you can think of except the family, and possibly slavery and cannibalism. And while these last two have virtually disappeared from the modern civilized world, and even the family is popularly supposed to be on its last legs, gossip flourishes as actively today as it did in the caves and forest clearings of prehistory.

An institution so old, so deeply rooted, so integral a part of our life, should almost by definition be a venerable figure. But gossip is nowhere venerated. The more we indulge in it, the more we despise it and denigrate it.

God abhors it, according to the Book of Leviticus [xix, 16]: "Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people." And man is quick to approve that commandment. The very people who indulge most in the talebearing practice are the ones most anxious to disassociate themselves from it. "This is no gossip I'm giving you, that's for damn sure," said a man to me once in a bar in Winnemucca, Nevada, "this is the straight goods. I got it from my cousin, who has known the fellow all his life. He saw them put his wife into that saucer thing they had, and they had long green ears. It's no gossip, I'm telling you, it's fact."

Even those who make a living out of it treat it as a leper. An editor of one of the world's leading gossip magazines has been quoted as saying that his publication has nothing to do with gossip, a word which he says "carries connotations of untruthfulness. If I were asked to describe what we're doing, we prefer to call it 'personality journalism' or 'intimate reporting'"

The history of the word is a history of its degradation. Etymologically, it is derived from the Anglo-Saxon god-sib, meaning a person who has become a close relation through some religious ceremony like baptism. Godfather and godmother, words which came into being in the same distant past, are still with us, and when used in their literal sense, outside the criminal and political worlds, they are quite respectable words.. God-sib on the other hand, slurred by the laziness of custom to gossip, began early on to see its meaning slide downward. First, it came to mean "acquaintance, chum, friend," as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, anyone to whom we feel close and familiar. Then it came to mean the close and familiar talk we hold with such people, spontaneous talk not dictated by our economic or social or political or theological or other obligations. Then it was broadened to apply to any informal unrehearsed exchange of information with friend or stranger.. Finally, it came to mean so much dirt - idle chatter, childish prattle, old wives' tales, talking to be talking, a misuse of time that could be better spent making a living or changing the world or acquiring self-esteem.

Why should such a widespread and clearly enjoyable activity have acquired such an ill repute?

An easy answer would be that it has always been associated with women, the brainless uneducated women who, until the day before yesterday, were expected to stay perpetually at home spinning and cooking and wiping babies' bottoms and chattering about anything that came into their disorderly minds while their menfolk were out purposefully in the world making war on the heathen, making the wilderness bloom, creating religions, creating civilizations, or innocently shooting the breeze. In the days when every abstract idea or general notion was personified, no one ever talked of Sir Gossip or My Lord Gossip, it was always Dame Gossip, a slovenly creature habitually poking her nose into corners which propriety would have suggested leaving in peace. In our days of feminism triumphant, such notions are properly regarded as patriarchal hogwash, but people tend to go on considering gossiping a feminine trait, and they do not mean it as a compliment. If they try to visualize a typical gossip session, they might think of something like Camille Claudel's lovely little statue of Les Causeuses, four naked women huddling comfortably in a corner, prattling through the daily round of ingrown toe-nails and unwanted pregnancies and roving-eyed boyfriends. Listen to four naked chief executive officers of great corporations in the steam-room of their country club discussing the sexual peculiarities of some of the younger female members, and ask them what they are gossiping about, they will respond with indignation: "What do you mean, gossip? This is man-to-man talk."

The hostility to the very name of gossip, however, goes deeper than mere gender.

Gossip can be creative, it can be stimulating, it can like Housman's ale do more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. Yet there is also something lurkingly subversive about it. It defies all man's (or God's or SUSY's) best efforts to reduce the monstrous chaotic bulk of the universe to order.

No human society, and no component part of human society, can exist without some set of norms and standards to which its members are enjoined to conform as best they can, or face the consequences.. If you are a samurai or a senator or a hippie, you must act dress think and talk like a samurai or a senator or a hippie, you must follow your code. But Dame Gossip has no code. Though she may pay lip service to current standards of morality ("Isn't it terrible what the preacher did to those little boys?" "Can you believe a President of the United`States would do such a thing in the Oval Office?") she will never let standards of morality get in the way of giving us every eye-popping hormone-inflating detail of what happened to those little boys or to Monica Lewinsky. Her talk is often vulgar, always personal, undignified, disorderly. She is irreverent, irresponsible, irrepressible. Like the unpresentable grandmother who can cook a great dinner and keep onlookers in stitches with tales of her party days, she may be described as a great old girl who had better be kept shut up in the attic when respectable guests arrive.

The trouble is, she will not stay quiet in the attic. She will turn up uninvited in the midst of the most serious business, at moments when the fate of men or nations is being decided, and prattle away in defiance of good taste, good morals and common sense. Here are three samples I have plucked at random off my library shelves:

1) In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a novel which is also an astute sociological study of contemporary Massachusetts, we find a man engaged in a deadly serious business, he is hiring a Boston bartender to commit a murder. He is in the process of explaining that the head of the Mafia in Providence is personally interested in getting the job done right because he wants to avenge the betrayal and death of a young hoodlum to whom he was deeply attached. "The man," he says, "treated him like he was his son, which some people say he was." Which some people say he was -- it is a bit of gossip, of quite gratuitous gossip, which might well prove to be a suicidal piece of gossip to pass out to an audience that could see some profit in getting it back in garbled form to Providence. But the habit -- perhaps the habit of showing off his superior knowledge of the inner workings of the mighty, or simply the habit of showing off -- is so deeply ingrained in this man, worldly-wise and street-wise as he may be, that he can not resist indulging in it. Experience should have taught him as it teaches us all that the person who listens to gossip is more apt to profit by it than the person who spreads it. But we, like this friend of Eddie Coyle, go on chattering anyway till a decree comes from Providence and all our talk stops forever.

2) In Pumbeditha in Babylonia in the fifth century AD, a college of learned rabbis is putting together the definitive Midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Genesis which will be studied in schools and help conform the minds of men (minds of women do not count in this context) to wisdom till the coming of the Messiah. They are debating the deeper meanings that must be hidden behind every single simple word in God's account of the most important event in human history, the eating of the forbidden fruit in Paradise. How, asks one of these scholars, when they get to Chapter 3, verse 1, could the serpent arrange a private conversation with Eve so soon after her creation? Abba Halfon ben Koriah is ready with an answer: Adam, he says, "had engaged in his natural functions and then fallen asleep."

So easily does gossip slip in and out of human discourse and the minds of even the wisest of us, that not one of the scholars present in Pumbeditha, ordinarily so remorselessly attentive to every possible significance or ambiguity of every single word and letter in holy scripture, seems to have thought of asking where Abba Halfon had picked up this interesting but quite private piece of information. Certainly neither Adam nor Eve could have had any motive for spreading the story to their children and grand-children, and rabbis are not supposed to believe stories told by snakes.

Yet there you are. To the cynical secular eye of a later generation, it seems obvious that Abba Halfon had picked up a stray piece of gossip somewhere, perhaps from some other rabbi who had been overindulging in sacramental wine or from some woman he had no legitimate business with, and he accepted it without asking for its source or making the slightest attempt at critical or historical analysis, simply because he liked the sound of it, it was the kind of good decorously off-color story a man likes to hear, likes to spread in the board-room or the mens' room or the mess-hall. And as soon as an occasion popped up, he spread it in his normal sober tones. It fitted so naturally into the sober atmosphere of that solemn conclave that it was immediately written down it is now part of the official record, it is wisdom. Who knows what profound symbolic resonances are being detected in it by a bright young rabbinical student at this very moment?.

3) Field Marshal the Viscount Alanbrooke, K.G., O.M., is recounting in his memoirs the meeting of the Allied high commands at Casablanca in 1943, and is anxious to make it clear that it was only the acceptance of his own strategic concept and plans for an all-out Mediterranean offensive which made possible the final victory over the Germans in Europe two years later, regarded by himself and others as the most important event shaping the history of the twentieth century. The future of the world is at stake there in Casablanca, and the Field Marshal never wants his readers to forget it, but he cannot avoid wandering off into personal matters totally unconnected with grand strategy or the future of mankind, matters such as the odd behavior of Admiral Ernest King, commander of the U. S. Pacific Fleet who "got nicely lit up at the end of the evening. As a result, he got more and more pompous, and with a thick voice and many gesticulations, he explained to the President the best way to set up the political French organization for control of North Africa. This led to many arguments with [Churchill] who failed to appreciate fully the condition King was in."

No wonder serious people disapprove of Dame Gossip, even when she is telling them things they want to hear. They cannot forgive her fundamental disorder, If someone could replace the word Gossip with a new neutral term without any connotation of gender or untruthfulness, this term would soon acquire all the unfortunate connotations and the bad name of Gossip.

It can be a very bad name indeed. Professor Patricia Meyer Spacks in her valuable study Gossip (University of Chicago Press, 1985) reels off a doleful litany of denunciation and distrust beginning in the Middle Ages and rising to a 20th century climax with such epithets being hurled at Gossip as "surreptitious aggression" (Samuel Heilman), "murder by language," (Roland Barthes), and "unconscious wish for father-murder" (Jean B. Rosenbaum and Meyer Subrin in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 11, p. 829).

The condemnation is most thoroughgoing in works of the philosophers and poets of what may be called the Infantilist schools. who hold that all gossip or indeed all the language of grown-up people is deliberately designed to conceal, obfuscate or destroy the true apprehension of reality. For Infantilists, who rule the roost in many spheres of intellectual activity these days, our so-called civilization is a sham which does nothing but clip the wings and blinker the eyes of the free spirit which remains free in small children, madmen and selected sages and savages, but is elsewhere smothered by toilet training, incest taboos, dress codes, and schoolbook rules of etiquette and grammar.

Heidegger, the godfather of Existentialism, which until recently was the most fashionable of these philosophies in the western world, posited a primal reality he called Dasein (Being-there) which is inevitably distorted and corrupted in the normal channels of human discourse. "Because this discoursing has lost the primary relationship of being," he says in his distinctive style, "toward the entity talked about, it does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner, but communicates rather by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along....Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along -- a procedure in which its initial lack of grounds to stand on (Bodenständigkeit) is aggravated to complete groundlessness (Bodenlösigkeit)."

Heidegger was a Nazi, and it may be supposed that his ideal form of appropriating entity in a primordial manner would be a column of blond muscular young men chanting Sieg heil! as they goose-step off to break some non-Aryan skulls or burn some politically-incorrect books. Or in an opposing camp, it might be Allen Ginsberg leading a crowd of apprentice revolutionaries in chanting OM OM OM as they work themselves up to disrupt a national party convention in Chicago.

Life is not as simple as it appears to the Infantilist thinkers. All those handsome young people in Heidelberg or Chicago were taking part in what has to be called political action, and political action is unthinkable without politics, which necessarily involves the sophisticated use of gossip-ridden language to whip it into action. To get those masses with their primal insights assembled in the first place, in Heidelberg or Chicago, and to get them into the proper frame of mind or mindlessness for the correct action must have involved a truly colossal amount of Bodenständigkeit and Bodenlösigkeit.

Even Heidegger came to admit in his later years that Hitler had not been as close to Dasein as he once thought. Ginsberg, I believe, died unrepentant.

Not all Infantilists express themselves in a prose as muscle-bound as Heidegger's. Sometimes they write with real charm and wit and passion, like those Russians of whom Conrad said that, "as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can't defend one's self from the suspicion that they really understand what they say." The trouble remains that any human life in society, or any human life whatever, depends on an accepted vocabulary, on words organized into a conventional language, and while we may all agree (with Conrad again) that "words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality," or with Wallace Stevens that "the words of things entangle and confuse," we should be aware that these were professional writers who needed to put eleven and seven words respectively grammatical order to get across their conviction that words are worthless.

The relation of language to reality is a bone on which philosophers have been breaking their teeth for centuries. Dame Gossip does not give a hoot for philosophical speculations, she knows that any philosopher who for any good or bad reason has a desperate need to know what is going on inside the house down the street where the blinds are always drawn or what a potential bedmate has been up to in recent months will find her a better guide than Plato or Wittgenstein. The Platos and Wittgensteins will go on bad-mouthing her just the same.

One consequence of all the savage assaults on gossip is that the word has quite lost every connotation of warmth and intimacy it once had, and in modern usage tends to become a term of abuse applied only to the kinds of gossip we disapprove of. Your neighbor gossips maliciously about you. You tell only the unvarnished truth about him..He sneaks and pries in the darkness. You bring the truth-bearing light that will make us free. He stoops, out of sheer petty spite, to rank garbagy gossip about the private life of public officials. You, with calm professional confidence, conduct investigative reporting.

Mr. Green, hearing some one report that his son has put a cat in a well dismisses it testily as mere gossip. Mr. Stout, hearing from the same source that his son has rescued her, trumpets it abroad as living evidence of the survival of the traditional values that have made this country great.

Even people who have been induced to put in a tentative good word for gossip will make a point of their determination to separate the good, life-enhancing, kinds of gossip from the bad, life-cheapening ones. As an example of the former, Professor Spacks cites a delightful passage from a letter dashed off by Lady Mary Pierrepont (later to become famous as Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the pioneer of inoculation for smallpox) in the early 18th century:

"Next to the great ball, what makes the most noise is the marriage of an old maid that lives in this street, without a portion to a man of 7000 per annum and they say £40,000 in ready money. Her Equipage and Liverys outshine anybody's in Town. He has presented her with 3000 in Jewels and never was man more smitten with these Charms, that had lain invisible this forty year. But with all this Glory, never Bride had fewer Envyers; the dear Beast of a man is so filthy, frightful, odious and detestable I would turn away such a footman for fear of spoiling my Dinner while he waited at Table. They was marry'd Friday and came to Church on Parade Sunday. I happened to sit in the Pue with them and had the honor of seeing Mrs. Bridge fall fast asleep in the middle of the Sermon and snore very comfortably, which made several women in the Church think the Bridegroom not quite so ugly as they did before. Envious people say 'twas all counterfeited to oblige him, but I believe that's scandal, for she's so devout, I dare swear nothing but downright necessity could make her miss one Word of the Sermon."

Professor Spacks compares this, with all its sparkle, precision of tone, precision of insight, its sheer joy of watching the world and rattling on about it, with some prurient little items culled from People magazine ("Caroline Reed, 18, finds her uncle Oliver surprisingly agile in a pas de deux"). She notes, reasonably enough if ponderously, that gossip like Lady Mary's offers us "reassurance not only about the stability of a continuous self but about the possibility of intimacy, of fruitful human exchange," while "People purveys the same reassurance in debased form, inviting its readers into a brief, unstable alliance . . .a one-night stand rather than an extended relationship."

In more sober language, what this says is that Lady Mary was a sharp observer and a good writer. and she gives us genuine and lasting pleasure by introducing us to some one like Mrs. Bridge whom we would never have heard of otherwise. And she reveals a good deal about her own lively little mind in the process. While in a month or a year, who will give a tinker's damn about the worthies cavorting through this week's People Magazine or the reporter who dissected their mediocre sins?

This is hardly cause for legislating gossip magazines out of existence as some good souls would have us do. There will always be bad writers as well as good writers, and the lives of most of us will always navigate unpredictably between extended relationships and one-night stands. Both Lady Mary and the editors of People share the eternal gossipy interest in the workings of sex and money in human life, and in this sense they, and Professor Spacks, are sisters under their skins.

So it is perhaps time to show a modicum of charity toward Dame Gossip and at least attenuate some of the charges which we are all too eager to throw at her when she gets on our trail.

It is not true for example, that gossip is always malicious. Undoubtedly a touch, or even a good dose, of malice will more often than not make any piece of gossip more interesting, for it is an unfortunate fact of life that evil deeds and calamities generally make for better stories than good deeds and healthy bank accounts. Playwrights and newspaper editors over the ages have found that stories about Dr. Jekyll would be an intolerable bore if he did not turn periodically into Mr. Hyde. Vice sells better than virtue, not necessarily because we are vicious by nature but because we all have bad consciences. We are more or less dimly aware of the evil or improper thoughts lurking in our own minds, not to speak of the evil or improper acts we have succeeded in covering up, so if we hear stories of our neighbors or the President acting them out, our first instinct most likely will be to believe the stories.

It is also true that people who have performed some good deed like making a considerable contribution to a local charity or welcoming back a prodigal son are generally all too happy to spread the word themselves in great detail, obviating the need for others to gossip about it.

Malicious people do gossip, nasty people do spread lies about their neighbors and their political opponents, ordinary people like you and me sometimes deliberately exaggerate the faults of in-laws and fellow-workers, but in the absence of a reliable census, I would guess that the overwhelming majority of items gossiped about on any one day of the year in any Tadjik village or American college campus is at least neutral if not downright benevolent in tone. Most gossip after all is pretty humdrum stuff, it is only rarely that, even in the west of Ireland where tongues wag wild, you will come across someone like Jimmy Farrell in The Playboy of the Western World who knew "a party was kicked in the head by a red mare and he went killing horses a great while till he eat the insides of a clock and died after."

It may make a spicier item on a news program to report that two United States Senators had a lunch with a federal Judge to plot what turned out to be the unfortunate choice of Kenneth Starr to bring down President Clinton. But the account of one of the Senators, that they spent the lunch discussing their respective prostate glands is, statistically speaking, more plausible.

I once knew an assistant professor who had once heard from the lips of Oliver Gogarty, the Malachi Mulligan of James Joyce's Ulysses, that the young Joyce had the habit, in whatever pub or whorehouse he was spending the evening, of repeatedly slipping away to the privy to jot down in the very words of the speaker whatever gossip about dear dirty Dublin he had just heard. My friend, who was living on the meager wages provided by Amherst College, could not afford such a life style, but he thought he could go Joyce one better by subscribing to one of those eight- or sixteen-party lines which telephone companies used in those days to provide in the boondocks. By keeping, through all his waking hours away from the classroom, one ear on the receiver and one hand holding a pencil, he aimed to collect, in the course of an academic year, enough living breathing colloquial gossip to enable him to write half a dozen novels dissecting the beating heart of western Massachusetts. After a couple of weeks, hip-deep in recipes for pound cake, hernia operations, the pranks of naughty children, lost cats, eighty-yard touchdown runs, dishonest insurance agents, needless waits in doctors' offices, a fire in a bakery, a fall from a roof, the plots of twenty-two movies, he was in a state of spiritual despair, a Saint Anthony in the desert who, expecting to be visited by velvet-bellied houris and saber-toothed bats, found nothing but herds of camels drifting aimlessly across a featureless landscape.

Well, Saint Anthony might find it dull, but the men driving the herds might be collecting and storing away enough incidents involving attacks by bandits, serpent-bites, camel-bites, falls off camels, encounters with crazy hermits in the desert, encounters with belly-dancers in the bazaars or with djinns in the sand dunes, to fill an evening with jolly gossip at the next oasis, however dull and inadequate all these incidents might seem to hungry hysterical hermits.

The human race could not have survived this long if we were not genetically wired to be more interested in things happening directly around us and impacting our own lives than in things happening in the next county or on foreign shores. Gossip is parochial because human life is. The telephone subscribers of Amherst were chiefly interested in gossip about things happening in their neighbors' living-rooms and bedrooms, or in the living-rooms and bedrooms of people with whom television had made them familiar, like Jackie Kennedy or Princess Grace. They would only be bored by gossip about the Queen of Tonga or about formative influences on the style of William Faulkner, or whatever else formed the assistant professor's chief zone of interest.

This same parochialism is responsible for the fact that Dame Gossip is, with insignificant exceptions, restricted to the here and now, she has no idea of the great currents of history, she has only the vaguest conception of chronology, she is ignorant of all but the most recent past. This admittedly deprives her of the gravitas which moralistic commentators are always demanding of public figures these days, but there are more things in heaven and earth than the commentators know, and we often can learn more from her than from them about what is going on in the world.

Moralists are always telling us disapprovingly that Dame Gossip is only interested in sex and money. It is only natural that, as the chief driving forces of human behavior, they occupy a very large part of her time. But not all of her time.

When Sir Philip Sidney, the poet-warrior-courtier paragon of the court of Queen Elizabeth, died of wounds he got fighting Papists in the Netherlands, there were two stories of the event passing by word of mouth through England. According to one , "He married the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, whom he loved very much insomuch that having received some shot or wound in the wars in the Low Countries, where he had command, he would not contrary to the injunction of his physicians and surgeons, forebear his carnal knowledge of her, which cost him his life: upon which there were some roguish verses made." The roguish verses may have seemed hilarious to squires and tavern-keepers in sixteenth-century England, but they soon disappeared from common talk because people preferred to pass along another, more seemly version of the gossip, according to which Sidney died because, bleeding on the battlefield under a hot sun, and offered a cup of water by one of his soldiers lying bleeding beside him, he refused it with the immortal words, Thy need is greater than mine.

I had a friend named Frank whose tumultuous amours with all his wife's friends and all his friends' wives once stirred up repeated waves of gossip north of Boston. He in turn had a friend named Bill who was very rich and a little odd. Bill had just completed a private atom-proof bomb shelter in the Berkshires so that he could ride out the nuclear war which every one was expecting in 1946, and one day when he was stuffing this shelter with provisions he received an unannounced visit from General George Patton, who had recently been killed in an automobile crash in Germany. "Bill," said the general, "we are going to get into a war with the Russkies pretty soon, and the bastards are going to beat the shit out of us."

Frank was duly apprised of this incident. At the time he was doing a good deal of riding, and one day he found himself trotting down a country lane in Manchester-by-the-Sea beside one of his neighbors, Mrs. Patton, the general's widow. As they chatted amiably about the current news, the absconding bank president, the philandering bishop, he found bubbling up inside him a less and less resistible urge to inquire if her husband had visited her with the same information that he had provided for Bill, and the bubbling grew so insistent that he could only control it by suddenly crying out that he had seen a fox and taking off at a gallop over a field they were passing by.

There is no sex and only a passing reference to money in this story, and in addition it is perfectly true. But I found years afterwards that it would still serve to brighten up a languid conversation at a lunch table where melodramatic and usually inaccurate accounts of all those ancient and repetitious adulteries would have provoked only a yawn.

Finally, it is not fair to say that Dame Gossip can never keep her mouth shut. It is not only Sicilian criminals and screen-writers accused of following Communist Party discipline who can observe a code of omertà, the most ordinary people are often capable of keeping ripe juicy gossipy information hidden for impressive lengths of time, even carry it with them to the grave.

A particularly impressive real-life example of gossiparian discretion comes from the Paris of a century ago where everyone ("everyone" meaning society people and the members and hangers-on of the various artistic-intellectual groups and coteries) was gossiping about the passionate love affair between the great Rodin and his talented and beautiful pupil Camille Claudel. For years they were transcendentally happy, and in those years he produced much of the work for which he is best known. But it all ran down in the end and came to a brutal stop when Rodin would or could not leave his lifelong companion Rose, who came from a background as mean and impoverished as his own, who had shared years of hardship and obscurity with him, who had got up in the night in their unheated flat to wrap his clay in warm wet cloths to keep it from freezing. Besides, he liked her cooking. And he was always a little uneasy with Camille, who could read Greek and liked to tease him about his mistakes in French grammar and spelling. Rodin took the breakup very hard, he went to all his friends and cried. Camille took it much harder, she disintegrated. Her family eventually put her in a madhouse of the second class, the kind where the nurses made off with the food packages sent to the patients in ordeer either to eat or to sell it, where she survived for twenty-nine lonely abominable years till she died in 1943, probably of exposure to the cold, just as Rodin himself had died in another cold wartime winter, in 1917, when there was no wood to be found for the fireplaces in the huge rooms of his s mansion outside Paris..

Every detail of their story, including Camille's giddy idea of inviting both Rodin and Rose to dinner at the home of her unsuspecting mother, who never forgave her when she found out, was naturally the subject of brisk and witty discussion in the salons of Paris among people who, if we can believe the hundreds of pages Proust spent describing and stripping them bare, did not have a single decent bone between them. Here if ever was a ripe subject for their clever nasty tongues to wag about, all the more because it was not the stereotypical story of artists killing themselves with drink and sexually-transmitted disease; it was a genuine tragedy of Shakespearian proportions, two exceptional individuals defying fate and blindly devising their own doom. Yet not a word of it was uttered to the outside world, not a word got into the scandal-sheets and the tattle-tale books which were as popular then as they are today.

There were only veiled opaque hints in literature. Rodin's first biographer spoke guardedly of a "great love" in the master's life but mentioned no name. Ibsen, who heard all the details in letters from Frits Thaulow, a Norwegian painter living in Paris, used Rodin and Camille as models for the aging sculptor and the model who had been his great passion, the central characters in his last play, When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen believed in dramatic logic and was kinder to the lovers than real life was, he had them buried in an avalanche at the moment they became aware of the wreckage they had made of their lives. Camille's brother Paul used her as the model of Dona Prouhèze, the heroine of his surrealist masterpiece The Satin Slipper, who tosses one of her shoes into the arms of a statue of the Virgin Mary so that if she goes to hell she will be walking with a limp. (Camille had been born with a slightly deformed foot, the only flaw in her glorious body.)

But histories of art came and went on their way obliviously, with no mention of Camille.

A bookworm in the l950's, long after all the actors in the drama were dead, pieced together as much of the story as he could from fragmentary manuscript sources (after Rodin's death they found a big folder in one of his desk drawers labeled Camille, but the folder was empty). By that time of course it had ceased to be gossip, and it promptly became part of the history of art, and a vehicle for ultra-feminist propagandists who like to believe that Rodin stole everything from Camille.

The fact remains that through their lifetimes and well beyond, no one in Paris uttered a public word about this long affair, so rich in the emotions dear to Dame Gossip's heart. Perhaps Proust was wrong after all.

You may think what you like of Dame Gossip. She could hardly care less what you think. She is not interested in what people think, but in what they do. She wanders her unprincipled way through all landscapes in all weathers, gleaning everything in her path, preserving and tossing away what she finds as her whim dictates, tireless, indiscriminate, unaware of disapproval, heedless of criticism. Like Emerson's Brahma, she can say

"One to me is shame and fame."

There ought to be a law against her. But we cannot do without her.

an excerpt from http://www.robertwernick.com