Submission (5 page)

‘So I’ve heard. You work on Bloy, don’t you?’

‘François has always detested Bloy,’ Alice interrupted brightly. ‘As a Huysmanist, naturally, he’s in the other camp.’

Lempereur gave me a surprisingly warm smile and said quickly, ‘I know who you are, of course. I’m a great admirer of your work on Huysmans.’ Then he paused, as if choosing his words, without once dropping his gaze. His eyes were so intense that I thought he must be wearing make-up – at the very least that had to be mascara on his eyelashes – and I had the feeling that he was about to say something important. Alice watched us with the affectionate, slightly mocking look that women get when they witness a conversation between men – that odd ritual, that is neither buggery nor duel, but something inbetween. Over our heads the linden branches stirred in the breeze. Just then, in the distance, I heard a soft, muffled noise like an explosion.

‘It’s curious,’ Lempereur said finally, ‘that we remain so close to the chosen authors of our youth. One might think, after a century or two, that such passions should have faded, that as academics we might accede to a kind of literary objectivity, et cetera. And yet, not at all. Huysmans, Zola, Barbey, Bloy – they all knew one another, were on good terms or bad, formed allegiances, quarrelled among themselves. Their interpersonal history is the history of French literature, and more than a century later, we keep re-enacting it. We remain loyal to our old heroes. We’ll always be ready to love for their sake, to quarrel, to battle it out in opposing scholarly articles.’

‘Yes, but that’s a good thing. At least, it proves that literature is serious.’

‘Nobody ever quarrelled with poor Nerval,’ Alice interjected, but Lempereur didn’t even seem to hear her. He kept staring into my eyes, as if carried away by his own eloquence.

‘You were never anything but serious,’ he went on. ‘I’ve read all of your articles in the
Journal
. It wasn’t quite that way with me. I became fascinated with Bloy when I was twenty, fascinated by his intransigence, his violence, his virtuosic gift for scorn and insult – but it was all very much of the moment. Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic “engagement”, its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political play-acting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all. So, now I’m twenty-five. I still don’t like Sartre, or Camus, or anything to do with the nouveau roman, and yet Bloy’s virtuosity seems oppressive to me, and I confess that all his blather about the spiritual and the sacred leaves me cold. Nowadays I would rather reread Maupassant or Flaubert – or even Zola, at least certain pages. And also, of course, the inimitable Huysmans …’

As an
intellectual of the right
, I was thinking, he was seductive enough. He’d stand out in the department, in a minor way. You can let people talk for a long time, they’re always interested in what they have to say, but every now and then you’re supposed to contribute. I looked over at Alice, but without much hope: as a true Frühromantik, she couldn’t have cared less about the fin de siècle. ‘You’re what,’ I asked, ‘Catholic? Fascist? A little of both?’ It just popped out. I was out of practice with intellectuals of the right – I couldn’t remember how to behave. All at once, in the distance, we heard a kind of sustained crackling. ‘What was that, do you think?’ asked Alice. ‘It sounded like shooting,’ she added, hesitantly. We fell silent, and I realised that everyone in the garden had fallen silent, too. Again I noticed the rustle of wind in the leaves, and discreet footfalls on the gravel. A few guests left the hall where the party was being held and walked out quietly under the trees, waiting. Two teachers from the University of Montpellier were standing near me. They had turned on their smartphones and were holding them strangely, the screens horizontal like sorcerers’ wands. ‘It’s nothing,’ one of them whispered anxiously. ‘They’re still discussing the G20.’ If they thought the networks were going to cover the event, any more than they’d covered Montfermeil, they were kidding themselves. The blackout was complete.

‘That’s the first fighting we’ve had in Paris,’ Lempereur remarked, in a neutral tone. Just then we heard a new round of gunfire, this time quite distinct, as if nearby, and a much louder explosion. All the guests turned towards the sound. A column of smoke was rising into the sky above the buildings. It must have been coming from somewhere near Place de Clichy.

‘Well, it looks as if our little soirée is breaking up,’ Alice said. Indeed, many of the guests were trying to use their phones, and some had begun to move towards the exit, but slowly, one step at a time, as if to show that they were in control and would under no circumstances take part in a stampede.

‘We could continue our conversation at my house, if you like,’ Lempereur offered. ‘I live just round the corner, in the rue Cardinal Mercier.’

‘I have a class tomorrow in Lyon, and my train’s at six,’ Alice said. ‘I’d better head home.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. It’s odd, I’m not the least bit afraid.’

I looked at her, wondering whether I should insist, but strangely I wasn’t afraid, either. Somehow, I don’t know why, I was convinced the fighting would go no farther than the boulevard de Clichy.

Alice’s Twingo was parked at the corner of the rue Blanche. ‘I’m not sure this is such a great idea,’ I told her, after we’d said our goodbyes. ‘Will you at least call me when you get home?’ She said she would, and drove away. ‘What a remarkable woman,’ said Lempereur. I agreed, even as it occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about her. Apart from titles and promotions, sexual indiscretions were pretty much the only things my colleagues and I ever talked about, and yet I’d never heard so much as a whisper about Alice. She was smart, stylish, pretty – how old could she be? My age, more or less, early forties, and as far as I could tell she lived alone. She was too young to give up, I thought. Then I remembered that I’d just given up the day before. ‘Remarkable,’ I echoed, and tried to put the idea out of my mind.

The shooting had stopped. As we turned at the rue Ballu, which was deserted at this hour, we stepped back into the precise era of our favourite writers, a fact I pointed out to Lempereur. Nearly all the buildings dated from the Second Empire or the start of the Third Republic and were unusually well preserved. ‘It’s true,’ he answered. ‘Even Mallarmé’s Tuesday evenings took place just over there, in the rue de Rome. Where do you live?’

‘Avenue de Choisy. Vintage 1970s – an era less well known for its writers, obviously.’

‘That’s Chinatown, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly. Right in the heart of Chinatown.’

He seemed to give this some thought. ‘That may turn out to have been an intelligent choice,’ he said. We had reached the corner of the rue de Clichy. I stopped, transfixed. A hundred metres north of us, Place de Clichy was completely enveloped in flames; we could see the burned-out husks of cars and a bus. The statue of Maréchal Moncey, black and imposing, stood out in the middle of the blaze. There was no one in sight and no sound but the repetitive wail of a siren.

‘How much do you know about the career of Maréchal Moncey?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘He served under Napoleon. He won distinction defending the Clichy barrier against the Russians in 1814 … You know,’ Lempereur continued in the same tone, ‘if the ethnic fighting spreads within Paris itself, the Chinese will stay out of it. Chinatown may become one of the last safe neighbourhoods in the city.’

‘You think that could actually happen?’

He shrugged. At that moment I was amazed to see two riot police in Kevlar, machine guns slung over their shoulders, walking calmly down the rue de Clichy towards Gare Saint-Lazare. They were chatting away, and didn’t give us so much as a glance.

‘They …’ I was dumbstruck. ‘They’re acting as if nothing’s going on.’

‘Indeed.’ Lempereur had stopped and was thoughtfully stroking his chin. ‘At this point, it’s hard to say what is, or isn’t, possible. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a fool or a liar. I don’t think anyone has any idea what the next few weeks will bring. Well …’ he said, after another pause, ‘my place is up this way. I hope your friend is all right.’

Quiet and deserted, the rue du Cardinal Mercier led to a fountain surrounded by colonnades. On either side stood massive entrances, mounted with surveillance cameras and, behind them, courtyards planted with trees. Lempereur touched his finger to a small aluminium plaque, which must have been a biometric reader: a metal grate rolled open before us. At the end of the courtyard, behind the plane trees, I could just make out a small
hôtel particulier
, typically Second Empire, cosy and elegant. There was no way he lived here on a teacher’s salary. How did he do it?

For some reason, I’d pictured my young colleague in pared-down, minimalist surroundings, with lots of white. On the contrary, the furniture matched the building exactly. The living room was full of comfortable chairs upholstered in silk and velvet, the tables elaborately inlaid with marquetry and mother-of-pearl. A large, imposing painting, likely an original Bouguereau, hung over an ornate mantelpiece. I sat on a narrow ottoman with bottle-green stripes and was given a glass of pear brandy.

‘If you like, we can try to find out what’s going on,’ he offered, as he handed me the glass.

‘No, I know there won’t be anything on the networks. Maybe on CNN, if you have a dish.’

‘I’ve been trying. There’s nothing on CNN – or YouTube, either. No surprise there. Sometimes they show a few snippets on RuTube, mobile-phone footage mainly, but it’s very hit-and-miss. It’s been days since I’ve been able to find anything.’

‘But why the blackout? I don’t understand what the government is trying to accomplish.’

‘I think they’re terrified the National Front is going to win the election. Any images of urban violence mean more votes for the National Front. So now the far right is stirring things up even more. Of course the guys in the banlieues retaliate, but you’ll notice that every time things have got out of hand these last few months, it started with an anti-Muslim provocation: somebody desecrating a mosque or forcing a woman to lift her veil, that kind of thing.’

‘And you think the National Front is behind all this?’

‘No, no. They can’t do it themselves, that’s not how it works. There are, shall we say, backchannels.’

He finished his brandy and poured us each another glass in silence. The Bouguereau above the fireplace showed five women in a garden, some in white tunics, others half-nude, surrounding a nude infant with curly hair. One of the nude women hid her breasts with her hands. The other couldn’t – she was holding a bouquet of wild flowers. She had lovely breasts, and the artist had executed her drapery to perfection. It was little more than a century old, and that seemed so long ago that at first I felt bewildered by this incomprehensible object. Slowly, gradually, you could imagine your way into the skin of a nineteenth-century bourgeois, one of the frock-coated grandees who had commissioned the painting; you could feel, as they had, erotic stirrings before these Grecian nudes; but it was a hard, laborious climb back into the past. Maupassant, Zola, even Huysmans were much more immediately accessible. I should probably have spoken of that – of the uncanny power of literature – and yet I chose to go on discussing politics. I wanted to know more, and he seemed to know more. At least, that was the impression he gave.

‘I take it you’ve been part of the nativist movement.’ I hit just the right note – that of an interested, merely curious man of the world. I was benevolently neutral. I was dashing. He gave me a big unguarded grin.

‘I knew they’d been talking in the department. Yes, I belonged to a nativist organisation, years ago, when I was writing my dissertation. These nativists were Catholic, in many cases royalists, nostalgics, romantics at heart – most were drunks. Then everything changed, and we fell out of touch. If I went to a meeting now, I doubt I’d recognise anyone there.’

I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘the so-called nativist bloc was actually anything but. It was divided into various factions, none of which got along with the others. You had Catholics, followers of Bruno Mégret, royalists, neo-pagans, hard-core secularists from the far left … But all that changed when the “Indigenous Europeans” came along. They started out as a direct response to the Indigènes de la République. They had a clear, unifying message: We are the indigenous peoples of Europe, the first occupants of the land. They said, We’re against Muslim occupation – and we’re also against American companies and against the new capitalists from India, China, et cetera, buying up our heritage. They were clever, they quoted Geronimo, Cochise and Sitting Bull. Above all, their website was state of the art. It was really well designed, with catchy music. It brought in new members, younger members.’

‘You think they actually want to start a civil war?’

‘Think? I know. Here, I’ll show you something they put online …’

He got up and went into the other room. Ever since we’d sat down in his apartment, there had been no more sounds of shooting – or else we were out of earshot, in the deep calm of that dead-end street.

He came back and handed me a dozen sheets of paper, stapled together and covered in small print. Sure enough, the headline read:
GET READY FOR CIVIL WAR
.

‘The Web is full of this kind of thing, but here’s one of the better overviews, with the most reliable statistics. There are lots of numbers, because the article looks at all twenty-two EU member states, but the conclusion is the same in every case. Basically, they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism – the basis of any “pluralist society” – is doomed. Monotheism is on the rise, especially in the Muslim population – and that’s even before you factor in immigration. European nativists start by admitting that, sooner or later, we’ll see a civil war between the Muslims and everybody else. They conclude that, if they want to have a fighting chance, that war had better come as soon as possible – certainly before 2050, preferably sooner if possible …’