Planus (24 page)

While it is true that all these subjects made up a splendid library, they were also enough to cast a spell of gloom, and a less resilient spirit would have succumbed, especially since, to all these books about war, history, secret or underhand diplomacy, were added, step by step, and by dint of readings which multiplied themselves according to a geometrical system of progression, everything that has been written about each of these regions of the globe, accounts of the French missionaries, monks and nuns settled amongst the Eskimos of the extreme north, as well as in the leper colonies of the South Seas, scientific works written by the most modern explorers and geographers, as well as the chronicles, memoirs, letters, log-books and confessions of the most obscure and ancient seamen and adventurers, economic publications, ethnographic studies, bulletins, reviews, financial reports, statistics, grammar books, treatises on language, dictionaries, encyclopedias, works on comparative religion, philosophical considerations of the origin of the human race, atlases, prints, engravings of costumes and manners, photographs and even picture postcards; everything was grist to the mill of his hatred, and Chadenat knew how to turn the most insignificant document to account as long as it would feed the fire he was forever stoking and fanning into flames, his hatred for England, the fire that devoured him, his passion, and it was far more pathetic than Don Quixote tilting at the windmills, for he was a fanatic, his mind was warped by the noble deeds described in the chivalrous romances, whereas Chadenat had to battle with thousands and dozens of thousands of old books, searching for them all over the world, having them sent at great expense, buying them out of his own pocket and feverishly turning the pages, snorting with rage, desperate to prove his point, and the more lucid and convincing each one was, the more his heart and mind grieved. Once having got his teeth into the thing, he never let go. He was of a gloomy temperament. A dog's tongue lolling out of a pile of books, that was the universe this pessimist lived in, and it was the tongue of a mad dog. Oh, what irony! Chadenat was a real bulldog. In short, worthy to be an Englishman. . ..

When I was working like a slave at the Mazarine library, copying out the thick volumes of chivalrous romances by hand (in my dreadful scrawl!) for a new collected edition of the
Bibliotheque Bleue,
modernizing the spelling (I, who have never had the faintest idea how to spell!) of the old prose of the Round Table stories, standardizing the punctuation (I, who in my most recent poems had totally abandoned punctuation!) of King Arthur's book of spells, sending my copy
in extenso
to Guillaume Apollinaire, who restricted himself to making some drastic cuts (which infuriated me!), signing his name at the bottom of the text (which left me utterly indifferent, since the famous saga of the quest for the Holy Grail was not his work, in any case, any more than
Parsifal
is German and the work of Richard Wagner!) and taking it, in his turn, to Pierre-Paul Plan, a scholar (Hmm, well yes, his
Rabelais . . .
but what a pathetic man!), who also signed it and assumed responsibility for the collection in regard to the slave-driver who generously paid him four hundred francs a month, a sum which Pierre-Paul Plan shared honestly, or so I fondly hope, with Apollinaire, and Guillaume shared, equally honestly I hope, fifty-fifty with me (what a cockeyed school in which to make one's literary debut!). Of course, the publisher knew nothing of all this, and he might quite well have disapproved and stopped payment. All I got out of it was one transparent banknote for a hundred francs, my monthly salary for an engrossing task that took up several months for each volume; and I might well have been in despair over it if the assistant librarian had not brought me, every day, to my regular seat at the 'Reserved List5 table, an incunabulum which I invariably opened at the same bookmark and was able, thanks to this wretched hundred-franc note, to waste my time prodigally, gazing at a full- page wood-engraving that represented 'Fortunatus on horseback, with his wallet and hat', and imagining myself once more riding with my boss, Rogovine, through the mountains of Armenias Major and Minor, bartering our tawdry rubbish for antiques: gramophones, timepieces, cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest, alarm clocks with musical-boxes or chimes, watches, artificial jewellery from Pforzheim, knick-knacks from Paris in exchange for ewers and dishes of embossed silver, cloisonne vases, goblets set with cabo- chons, priceless carpets, enamels, gold plate, erotic Persian miniatures, damascened daggers, weapons, pistols, long rifles encrusted with silver and mother of pearl, horses' bits, spurs, stirrups, helmets of bronze, brass, gold alloy, or silver-blue antimony, harness and trappings enriched with moonstones, topaz and turquoise, fabrics, gossamer veils from Bokhara, essence of jasmine and rose — and smuggled pearls in a hollow cane! It was a thrilling trade, fascinating and sometimes amusing, which demanded my full attention, as well as an alert and calculating mind, ready to take decisions, to snatch a fleeting opportunity, to run risks if necessary, and I had to know how to keep cool, calm and collected when someone was cheating me, even while I was planning my revenge, and that was often a hazardous business and led to some hair-raising adventures. I used to ride about with an open textbook in my hand, preparing my
baccalaureat
and my entrance examinations for the Faculty of Medicine (which I had chosen to confound my father, who wanted me to go into his office!) and besides, since my earliest childhood, ever since Mother taught me to read, I have always needed my drug, my daily dose, and it doesn't matter what it is as long as it's the printed word! I am what I call an incurable reader, but there are others, of an entirely different type, indeed there is an infinite variety, for the ravages wrought by book-fever in our contemporary society are prodigious and catastrophic, and what I most admire in assiduous readers is not their learning, nor their devotion and endless patience, nor the privations they choose to undergo, but their gift for illusion, which they all share, and which marks every one of them with a distinctive sign (I almost said stigma), whether he is a hair-splitting scholar specializing in some obscure and erudite subject or a sentimental shopgirl whose heart beats faster with each instalment of the interminable sixpenny romances that continue to flood the market, as if the world, turning on its axis, were nothing but a great rotary printing press.

One of the great charms of travelling is not so much the movement through space as the movement through time, finding yourself, perhaps, by the mere chance of a mechanical breakdown, amongst the cannibals, or, at the turning of a track through a desert, suddenly transported back to the Middle Ages. I believe much the same applies to reading, except that it is readily available to all, without any immediate physical dangers, accessible even to invalids, and has an even greater scope for reaching into the past and the future, to which one must add its incredible ability to place you, without much effort, inside the skin of a character. But it is precisely this virtue which so easily leads the mind astray, setting the feet of the inveterate reader on a false path, so that he loses his way and falls into self-deception; it is also this which gives him, when he comes to himself once more amongst his fellow-men, that air of being lost, by which one recognizes men who are slaves to a passion, and escaped prisoners : they never succeed in readjusting themselves, and a life of liberty seems to them alien and strange.

In the Middle Ages a crusader from the west who fell into the hands of a Hungarian janissary and was unable to pay his ransom, a Polish boyar taken as a prisoner of war by a Zaporogian Cossack, a Cossack hetman captured by a Tartar, a Tartar prince taken by a Kirgiz or a Kalmuck, a Kirgiz or Kalmuck Khan taken by a Mongol, or a Mongol brigand chief taken by a Chinese soldier, a son of Heaven, would suffer the same fate: everywhere and in all cases the soldiery would cut the soles of the prisoner's feet and stuff in, just beneath the skin, horsehair chopped up very very finely, then they would stitch up the wounds and let the prisoner go, jeering at him as he hobbled away to fight with the dogs over a scrap of food, for he was now at liberty to wallow in the mud outside the ramparts surrounding the camp, in the village square, in the courtyard of the barracks, and the poor devil, in order to avoid putting his feet flat on the ground, could be seen trying desperately to do the splits and walk on the sides of his feet, with the soles turned uppermost, creeping painfully forward on his ankles to avoid the intolerable pricking of those millions and millions of tiny hairs planted in his swollen flesh, just as today you can see ex-political prisoners with their feet twisted from having dragged the ball and chain too long in the penal camps of Siberia, or foot-shackles in the concentration camps of the Third Reich, or chains in the condemned cells in Fresnes, and who make faces as they walk as if they were undergoing torture, and all of them have that clownish gait that was already a joke to the soldiers of the Emperor, at the height of the Ming period, and which is called 'the Chinese duck waddle', a staggering, uncertain gait common to all those readers who are addicted, be it ever so slightly, to their vice, as if printed matter, chopped up very very finely, had been inserted between
infundibulum
and
hypophysis
and was tickling their brains like a million red ants, for rare indeed is the human being who is strong enough to support the weight of a library on his head without flagging, like a caryatid supporting a delicate but enormous balcony.

Chadenat, for example, was a pure reader, who read for the sake of reading, never faltering, a mental athlete, but his vice was collecting, or it was the occupational disease of a bookseller and he could not live outside his library; Remy de Gourmont, who likewise found it impossible to live outside his library, read in order to create a void, not around him but within himself, as if he were a prey to God knows what moral vertigo that secretly tormented him, turning him over and over like St Lawrence roasting on his grid; t'Serstevens reads and takes notes in order to open his eyes, to compare, understand, learn, avoid being deceived and, well-balanced creature that he is, to laugh and enjoy life to the full, to enrich his senses and his mind, but he too owns a library and cannot bear to be separated from it for long; as for myself, I have already said that I am intoxicated with printers' ink and I must have my daily ration. Although that beast Korzakow relieved me of my library long ago, he did not cure my vice, and I am compelled to read, and that is why, since he sold my crates of books, I roam about the world, dropping in unannounced on my friends (who no doubt wonder what on earth I have come to see them for), shutting myself up all day long in my room, or sneaking off into the woods or the far end of the garden to devour their libraries greedily, especially if they contain memoirs concerning the history of France or the chronicles of the early Portuguese explorers, or the complete works of an author, for I am sadistic and want to devour and exhaust not only everything the writer himself has produced, from A to Z, but also everything that has been written about him!

It is madness. Reading is a pursuit without end. Some people read systematically. Others neglect to live while they are taking scholarly notes, though they do not know what to do with them once they are written, and these, in their turn, will be neglected and forgotten too. Still others live in fiction. We are all living in an imaginary world, and what a comical, lop-sided, limping parade we make, each with a mind unlike the others', but all filing past with that 'Chinese duck waddle' and pecking about in search of Lord alone knows what miserable scrap of brain-food, while the crowd boos and jeers, each one of us proud, nevertheless, of his own particular disease, each standing on his own dignity, liberated captives, prisoners to a noble cause, each clinging to his own idea, his own vision of Life. A book, a distorting mirror, a projection of the ideal. The only reality, or as near as damn it.

As if
... , the springboard of all metaphor, all literature, and I fed the boiler with it, the boiler that fired the central-heating in the Hotel des Wagons-Lits in Peking, and I read the
Mercure
and its publications before I stuffed them into the boiler, and I was still reading the
Mercure de France,
twenty years later, on board the
Almanzora,
for the French section in the library aboard that luxurious English packet-boat contained nothing but the complete collection of the purple review, from the first number to the most recent, and I smiled when I realized that our meeting had, after all, meant something to Remy de Gourmont, since he mentioned me in one or other of his articles, speaking of a man who was able to break all social ties, to disappear without sending any further news of himself, not so much as a picture postcard from the other side of the world, and he even mentioned our visit to the cinema, without giving my name, naturally, since he did not know it, unlike Guillaume Apollinaire who, while knowing my name, did not once quote it, although he dedicated an entire article in
La Vie Anecdotique
to
L'Errant des Bibliotheques
— now, dear Mme Louise Faure-Favier, allow me to inform you that this errant was myself, for you raised the question in your charming little book of memoirs, saying that the article had amused you and you were intrigued by the character. The library on board the
Volturno
contained nothing but the complete works of Goethe, in German, and during the year I spent on that baleful cattle-boat for emigrants, I read only Goethe; and on board another ship I read the whole of Kipling, in English; and aboard yet another Dostoevsky, in Russian, or St John of the Cross, in Spanish, which I translated to keep myself amused; or

Nevertheless, it took a second world war to cut me off definitively from the last of my old books; my country house in Tremblay-sur-