Paris at the End of the World Read online

  The second category of foreigners exiled in Paris had little money, but they didn’t feel they needed it. Anyone willing to subsist, cold and hungry, in a bug-infested garret while learning to write, paint, or compose could do so for longer in Paris than in any civilized city on Earth. In America or Australia, a person who preferred art to business was regarded with suspicion. But the French tolerated, even treasured, their bohemians. Nobody urged them to find respectable work; quite the reverse. In 1899, describing young painters studying at the many private art schools, an American wrote:

  Students are the pets of Paris. They lend to the city a picturesqueness that no other city enjoys. So long as they avoid riots aimed at a government that may now and then offend their sense of right, their ways of living, their escapades, their noisy and joyous manifestations of healthy young animal life are good-naturedly overlooked.

  In Puccini’s opera La Bohème, inspired by Henry Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the students are so poor that Rodolfo, a novelist, has to burn the manuscript of a novel to keep warm. Mimi, the model with whom he falls in love, is dying of tuberculosis, a disease epidemic in the tenements where they lived. But at night they meet at Café Momus, where Musetta, a model who has hooked a rich lover, struts her good fortune. Hundreds of such students subsisted in Paris on a trickle of dollars, rubles, or yen sent from home—a situation that would rebound on them in 1914.

  Between the rich and poor, but overlapping both, a third group chose Paris because it permitted them to enjoy pleasures which, back home, were illegal or disreputable.

  Sex was everywhere. Prostitutes loitered along the boulevards and congregated in certain cafés and bars, the addresses of which were listed, along with the ladies’ specialties, in the booklets called guides roses.

  Wealthier sensualists patronized brothels. At Le Chabanais, the most select and expensive whorehouse in France, if not the world, you could indulge your fantasies in opulently decorated rooms that imitated a tent in the Sahara or an Arctic igloo. The owners, a syndicate of wealthy sportsmen, most of them members of the snobbish Jockey Club, took pride in their establishment. They bought entire rooms from Paris’s frequent exhibitions of exotic furniture and decoration and transferred them intact to the mansion on rue Chabanais. Toulouse-Lautrec decorated one room with images of centaurs.

  Regular clients included Queen Victoria’s portly son, Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. In contrast to his saintly ancestor, Edward the Confessor, Bertie was known as “Edward the Caresser.” He liked to relax at Le Chabanais with his cronies as a girl splashed in a gilded bath filled with champagne. Periodically the men dipped out a glass and raised the kind of loyal toast never heard at Buckingham Palace.

  Paris’s permissive moral climate was just as encouraging to women. In Manhattan or Melbourne, lesbians had to hide their nature, but in Paris Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein lived openly with their companions and socialized at 20 rue Jacob, the home of railroad heiress Nathalie Clifford Barney. She even built a columned temple on the grounds, where she and her friends gathered in Greek robes to recite the poems of Sappho and make love, free of moral or legal restraints.

  If you preferred pharmaceutical sensations, the “green fairy” of absinthe, flavored with wormwood, had a devoted following. Its drinkers shrugged off the threat of brain damage from impurities in the brewing process, a small price to pay for the “artificial paradises” celebrated in the poems of Charles Baudelaire.

  Intellectuals and socialites preferred hashish from the cannabis plantations of France’s North African colonies. No opium was more fragrant than that from the poppies of Annam and Tonkin, and Paris’s fumeries competed to offer the most opulent décor in which to savor it. Ladies favored the drug dissolved in spiced alcohol as laudanum—the Prozac of the belle époque.

  If you fancied a change, the more refined heroin and—the modish favorite—morphine, were freely available. Socialites carried their own hypodermics, ready to shoot up at supper parties in the hotels across the Place de l’Opéra. The most fashionable syringe, the Pravaz, could be made to order in platinum or gold and inlaid with precious stones as a gift for lover or wife.

  Hard drug use wasn’t confined to France. Although aspirin, as a synthetic, was available only on prescription, “natural” drugs such as cocaine, heroin, or opium could be bought legally at any pharmacy in the form of pills, gels, syrups, even teas. Harrods, London’s most select department store, possessors of the royal warrant to supply goods to the royal family, sold vials of heroin gel, and a drug kit containing cocaine, morphine, syringes, and needles which it recommended to “sweethearts and mothers” as “a Welcome Present for Friends at the Front.” The British government only restricted its sale when commanders complained of officers too stoned to go “over the top.”

  Though Paris encouraged those diversions known to other cultures as vices, in a city founded on fashion they seldom lasted longer than a season. No dismissal was more damning than the label vieux jeux—old games. As summer vacations ended in 1914 and people wandered back to Paris, its jeunesse dorée, gilded youth, looked around languidly for the next diversion.

  But autumn 1914 brought no caravan from the Americas or Asia with an exciting cargo of new styles and ideas. Nothing would arrive to equal Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which had sent ripples across the surface of painting, music, and couture in 1909. The great scandal of 1913, the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, would not be repeated. Instead, “old games” would continue to be played until their pleasure soured and staled. “Like a fruit,” wrote Cocteau, “a short war might have grown and dropped from the tree, whilst a war prolonged for exceptional reasons, firmly attached to the branch, went on growing, ever presenting new problems and new lessons to be learnt.”

  11

  Meeting at Plane Corner

  Chance furnishes me with what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles; my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.

  JAMES JOYCE, on writing Finnegans Wake

  Stories take on their own lives, drawing you along, often oblivious, in their wake. So when I accepted an invitation to a lunchtime lecture on antipodean food at the Australian embassy, I wasn’t thinking about my grandfather’s presence in Paris.

  The lecture by a respected food historian was followed by a coctel, with canapés proposed by her and cooked by the ambassador’s own chef.

  “There’ll be meat pies,” she confided, “and lamingtons. And even Iced VoVos.”

  Iced VoVos! Offering Proust a madeleine from Combray would have had just as electric an effect. These pink-frosted cookies were one of my childhood’s treasured treats: islands of sweetness in the sludgy swamp of Australian cuisine.

  As for the rest, I was in no hurry to be reintroduced to either meat pies or the lamington, a confection made by dipping stale cake in chocolate sauce and rolling it in desiccated coconut. Instead I drifted away from the post-lecture crowd into the exhibition area next door, where, by chance, two collections of photographs from World War I were on show.

  One image immediately caught my eye. It showed an Australian and three French poilus excavating a pit in which to bury a bloated and stinking dead horse. Though one can’t photograph a stench, the distaste on their faces and the fact that one man wore a gas mask told the story all too well. In the background, a leafless tree incongruously supported the skeleton of an aircraft. On that account, explained a caption, the troops called this Plane Corner.

  The photograph captured one of those moments when war ceases to be a matter of brute forces in opposition, and becomes, if only by accident, art. The man made anonymous by the gas mask, another’s jaunty slouch hat, the bulk of the dead animal, the aircraft in a tree, gave to the image a quality of collage, as if someone had cut details from other photographs and juxtaposed them in a Max Ernst–like pastiche. André Breton conceived of surrealism while treating psychiatric casualties whose nightmares were more real than any
thing in the observable world. But sometimes, as in this photograph, daily existence achieved the strangeness of those tormented dreams. . . .

  “John Baxter?” someone said at my elbow.

  The man only came to my shoulder. His pale face, gray tweed jacket, and neatly pressed flannel trousers made him seem monochrome, a figure from one of these photographs. One could imagine him strolling along the rutted clay of the road to Plane Corner, glancing at the soldiers burying the horse, then stepping down into the room to join me.

  “Peter van Diemen,” he prompted.

  “Of course.” I took the thin hand. “It’s been a long time.”

  The skin of his face, stretched tight across the skull, erased wrinkles and made his mouth look lipless. It twitched at the corners. Was that a smile or a grimace?

  “You live here now?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. More than ten years. And you for longer, I think. Almost twenty?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  He knew more about me than I did about him. But one expected no less. Peter van Diemen attracted information the way iron filings cling to a magnet. “The facts are out there,” he told me once. “You just have to let them in.” He would have made a perfect spy. How did I know he wasn’t?

  “My grandfather was here in 1916.” I nodded toward the photograph. “He could easily have been one of these men.”

  “What was his regiment?”

  “I don’t know. In fact, I hardly know anything about his war service.”

  “Really?” Air sensing a vacuum could not have been more eager. “Well, if there is anything I can do . . .” He handed me a business card. “I’m retired, but still . . .” Again, that twitch of the lips. “The old fire horse, you know?”

  Outside, I looked at the card. Just his name, with an address in the fourteenth arrondissement. Near the Santé Prison.

  “So how was it?” Marie-Dominique asked when I got home.

  “Oh, the lecture? Very good. But you’ll never guess who I met. Peter van Diemen.”

  “The publisher from London?”

  “Yes. We got talking about some World War I photos. He offered to help if I wanted to find out more about Archie. Military research was always his field. I’m quite tempted, actually.”

  Marie-Do closed one eye and scrunched up her face, as if looking at something in the middle distance and puzzling over its significance. I knew the expression. It indicated skepticism.

  “Always remembering he’s a murderer, of course,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Always remembering that.”

  12

  Master of War

  I knew a man once did a girl in

  Any man might do a girl in

  Any man has to, needs to, wants to

  Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.

  T. S. ELIOT, Sweeney Agonistes

  Peter and I went back a long way—to my first months in England. With my girlfriend of the time, I had rented a cottage in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt. Twice a week, I took the train to London and did the rounds of publishers, hoping one would commission the book I wanted to write about movie stuntmen.

  Progress was slow, but, in time, one editor, though not enthusiastic himself, thought it might interest a colleague.

  “Peter’s our militaria man,” he said. “I’ll take you along.”

  Militaria? I couldn’t see the connection, but I let myself be led to a tiny cluttered office at the end of a long corridor.

  “John, meet Peter van Diemen.”

  Peter hadn’t changed much since that first meeting. The face had been less masklike and the twitch of the lips more benign. But my first impressions were sidetracked by the state of his office. Even for a publisher, it was chaotic. Manuscripts and long sheets of galley proofs competed for space with books into which torn scraps of paper had been sandwiched to mark a place.

  Framed photographs covered the walls. Most showed men in uniform, behind whom, in the middle distance, something smoked: a wrecked aircraft, a tank, a town. A common weary slouch conveyed wordlessly that they’d survived an ordeal. They eyed me warily, as if across a ravine that, however narrow, could never be traversed. It was the same look as on the faces of those young soldiers in the photographs displayed at the embassy. This is how fighting men always regard those who have not shared their experience. Though sometimes contemptuous, the look could also be kindly. Be sorry you weren’t here, it seemed to say, but be grateful too.

  Peter and I felt an instant rapport. For the rest of that first afternoon, we talked—or, rather, he talked and I listened. Too young for World War II and too old for Vietnam, he’d satisfied his taste for battlefield glory by becoming the most meticulous of military historians. A worldwide network of contacts gave him access to intelligence at the highest level. He could discourse on Erwin Rommel’s admiration for von Clausewitz or the folly of Jeb Stuart at Gettysburg, then switch in a moment to an insider’s view of the role of mercenaries in such African pestholes as Angola. Whatever the subject, however, his dryly ironic tone made war appear both the noblest of callings and the most futile.

  As the light faded, he unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out a gun. With a lurch of the heart, I recognized that most glamorously menacing of automatic pistols, the Luger P08.

  He checked the magazine and worked the action to satisfy himself it was unloaded, then held it out, butt first.

  I took it in awe. I’d never before handled that chic, efficient implement of death.

  “It’s heavier than I expected,” I said, weighing it.

  “Good tools often are.”

  Reluctant to hand it back, I curled my hand around the butt. For the first time, the hunger it aroused in collectors became understandable to me.

  The Luger P08 pistol

  Before I left, and almost as an afterthought, he agreed to publish my book. Maybe, he said, readers who liked stories about men being blown up would enjoy hearing about the men who blew them up, if only for the movies. But we both recognized that the reluctance with which I’d relinquished the Luger had tipped the scales. On some fundamental level, it revealed we were two of a kind.

  When I returned a few weeks later to sign the contracts, however, Peter wasn’t there.

  “As it turns out, I’ll be handling your book,” said the editor who’d introduced us. “Just initial the bottom of each page.”

  “What about Mr. van Diemen?”

  “Peter isn’t . . . um . . . well, he won’t be around for a while.”

  “Is he ill?”

  “Not exactly . . .”

  Over a plowman’s lunch at the pub, the story emerged.

  Peter lived with a particularly ill-tempered companion: wife or mistress, nobody knew exactly. But she often turned up at the office for visits that ended with embarrassingly loud arguments. The managing editor called Peter into his office for A Quiet Word, and the scenes ceased. The reason emerged a few weeks after Peter and I first met. Golfers on a remote suburban course found a corpse. Dissected, polyethylene-wrapped, and buried in a dense patch of rough, it might have remained undiscovered had inquisitive foxes not dug it up. Reassembled, the pieces were identified as Peter’s lady friend.

  Owning up without embarrassment to the police, Peter described her death as an accident: a wild punch at the culmination of yet another row. Since nobody had a good word to say about the victim, a sympathetic jury gave him the benefit of the doubt and five years for manslaughter. He served three.

  He wrote me a courteous note when the stuntman book was published, and after his release, we shared a lunch. How, I asked, was life outside prison?

  “A bit lonely. I miss having a girlfriend, but I’m out of touch. It’s difficult, finding women.”

  They had trouble finding your last one, I thought, but, diplomatic for once, said nothing.

  13

  Why a War?

  War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

  GEORGES CLEMENCEAU, Fr
ench prime minister

  Every historian has a different explanation for World War I, but all agree that vanity, incompetence, and sheer bad timing all played a part.

  By 1914, many politicians suspected that only a war could settle the festering feuds and clear the bad blood that troubled Europe.

  Germany, whose sixteen states had united in 1871 under the most warlike of them, Prussia, was itching to prove itself. Flexing its military and industrial muscles, it stared around belligerently at the neighbors crowding its frontiers.

  Staring back was France, still furious about the loss of Alsace.

  Germans watched the maneuvers and exercises of France’s military with as much alarm as they saw Britain expanding its fleet and Russia creating an enormous land army on its eastern border. Not unreasonably, Kaiser Wilhelm II believed these three nations, united by treaty, plotted to encircle Germany and limit its expansion, if not dismantle it entirely. Given the efficiency with which the British navy blockaded German ports in 1914, cutting off its imports, those fears were justified.

  In anticipation, the German high command expanded its fleet and extended the national rail network. If war came, the planners in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse wanted troops to arrive at the front in hours, not days, and fresh rather than exhausted by marching. Meanwhile, factories such as Krupp and I. G. Farben developed weapons of mass destruction: canisters of poison gas and guns so massive their shells arced briefly into space before plunging to earth at a speed faster than sound. These cannon could fire a projective forty miles. The maximum range of the French 75 mm was six.

  The French might be excused for failing to foresee the power of long-range artillery, since it had never been an area of French expertise. In aviation, however, France led the world. Its pilots were the first to cross the English Channel and the Mediterranean, and while the Germans led in airship design, France pioneered fast-pursuit aircraft. It should have entered the war with a powerful air force. Instead, like the British, it struggled to catch up with Germany.