Submission (4 page)

‘I’m really, really sorry to see you like this, François,’ she said to me in the hallway. She already had her coat on. ‘I’d like to help, but I don’t know how. You won’t even give me a chance.’ We kissed cheeks again. I didn’t see what else we could do.

The sushi showed up a few minutes after she left. There was a lot of it.

After Myriam left, I kept to myself for more than a week. For the first time since I’d been made a professor, I didn’t even feel up to teaching my Wednesday classes. The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten years ago. Intellectual summits? Summits, full stop. In those days, at least, I’d felt
justified
. Since then I hadn’t produced anything except a few short articles for the
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies
, plus a couple for
The Literary Review
, when some new book touched on my field of expertise. My articles were clear, incisive and brilliant. They were generally well received, especially since I never missed a deadline. But was that enough to justify a life? And why did a life need to be justified? Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it. If only as a Huysmanist, I felt obliged to do a little better.

When doctoral students are planning to write their dissertation on a certain author and ask me in what order they should approach his works, I always tell them to privilege chronology. Not because the life has any real importance, but because, taken in order, an author’s books make up a sort of intellectual biography with a logic of its own. In the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the obvious problem was what to do with
À rebours
. Once you’ve written a book of such powerful originality, unrivalled even today in all of literature, how do you go on writing?

The obvious answer is: with great difficulty. Indeed,
En rade
, which follows
À rebours
, is a disappointing book. How could it not be? And yet if its faults, its air of stagnation and slow decline, never quite overcome our pleasure in reading it, this is thanks to a stroke of genius on Huysmans’ part: to recount, in a book bound to be disappointing, the story of a disappointment. The coherence between subject and treatment makes an aesthetic whole. It gets pretty boring, yes, but you keep reading, because you can feel that the characters aren’t the only ones stranded in their country retreat: Huysmans is stranded there, too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to Naturalism – the sordid Naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more abject and greedy even than Parisians – if not for the dream sequences, which interrupt and ultimately hobble the story, and make it so impossible to classify.

In his next book Huysmans finally finds a way out, using a tried-and-true strategy: he adopts a main character, an authorial stand-in, whose development we follow over several books. These are all things I managed to explain clearly enough in my dissertation. The trouble was what came next, because the whole point of Durtal’s development (and of Huysmans’) – from the first pages of
Là-bas
, with its farewell to Naturalism, through
En route
and
La cathédrale
and ending with
L’oblat
– is his conversion to Catholicism.

Obviously, it’s not easy for an atheist to talk about a series of books whose main subject is religious conversion. In the same way, it’s hard to imagine someone who has never been in love, someone to whom love is completely alien, taking an interest in a novel all about that particular passion. In the absence of any real emotional identification, what an atheist slowly comes to feel when confronted with Durtal’s spiritual adventures – with the series of spiritual retreats, followed by eruptions of divine grace, that make up Huysmans’ last three books – is, unfortunately, boredom.

It was at this moment in my reflections (I’d just got up and was having my coffee, waiting for the sun to rise) that I had an extremely unpleasant thought: just as
À rebours
was the summit of Huysmans’ life as a writer, Myriam was undoubtedly the summit of my love life. How would I ever get over her? The only realistic answer was I wouldn’t.

While I was waiting to die, I still had the
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies
. Its next meeting was in less than a week. Also, election day was coming up. Many men take an interest in politics and war, but these diversions never appealed to me. I was about as political as a bath towel. No doubt it was my loss. To be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the ‘political offerings’ was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of
democratic change
, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.

Over the years, the rise of the far right had made things a little more interesting. It gave the debates a long-lost frisson of fascism. Still, it wasn’t until 2017, and the presidential run-off, that things really started to heat up. The foreign press looked on, bewildered, as a leftist president was reelected in a country that was more and more openly right wing: the spectacle was shameful but mathematically inevitable. Over the next few weeks a strange, oppressive mood settled over France, a kind of suffocating despair, all-encompassing, but shot through with glints of insurrection. People even chose to leave the country. Then, a month after the elections, Mohammed Ben Abbes announced the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. There had already been one attempt to form an Islamic party, the French Muslim Party, but it soon fell apart over the embarrassing anti-Semitism of its leader – so extreme that it drove him into an alliance with the far right. The Muslim Brotherhood learned its lesson and was careful to take a moderate line. It soft-pedalled its support of the Palestinians and kept up good relations with the Jewish religious authorities. As with Muslim Brotherhood parties in the Arab world – and the French Communists before them – the real political action was carried out through a network of youth groups, cultural institutions and charities. In a country gripped by ever more widespread unemployment, the strategy broadened the Brotherhood’s reach far beyond strictly observant Muslims. Its rise was nothing short of meteoric. After less than five years, it was now polling just behind the Socialists: at 21 versus 23 per cent. As for the traditional right, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) had plateaued at 14 per cent. The National Front, with 32 per cent, remained far and away the leading party of France.

In recent years David Pujadas had graduated from news anchor to national icon. Not only had he joined the ‘select club’ of political journalists (Cotta, Elkabbach, Duhamel, a few others) who alone, in the history of the media, had been deemed worthy to moderate a presidential debate between the general election and the run-off, but he had outshone all his predecessors when it came to courtesy, firmness and calm. He knew how to shrug off an insult, how to settle a fight when it started turning into a brawl, and how to give the whole proceeding a dignified, democratic veneer. The National Front and the Muslim Brotherhood agreed to have him as their moderator, and certainly no primary debate had ever been more eagerly awaited: the Muslim Brotherhood candidate had been rising in the polls since the beginning of his campaign. If he managed to take the lead from the Socialists, the run-off would be historic, and very hard to predict. The left, despite repeated and increasingly dire calls from their own dailies and weeklies, refused to back a Muslim. The right, whose numbers continued to grow, seemed ready, despite their leaders’ very firm proclamations, to cross over and support a ‘national unity’ candidate. So Ben Abbes was playing for high stakes – no doubt the highest stakes of his life.

The debate took place on a Wednesday, which wasn’t ideal: the day before, I’d bought an assortment of microwave Indian dinners and three bottles of red wine. A high-pressure system had settled over Hungary and Poland, which prevented the low-pressure system over England from moving south; across continental Europe, the weather was unseasonably cold and dry. My doctoral students had been annoying the hell out of me with their lazy questions, mainly about why minor poets (Moréas, Corbière, etc.) were considered minor, and who said they couldn’t be considered major (like Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarmé, then Breton). Their questions were not disinterested, far from it. They were bad students with bad attitudes – one wanted to do his dissertation on Cros, the other on Corbière – but today I could see their hearts weren’t really in it, they just wanted to hear me give the establishment line. I punted, and recommended Laforgue as a compromise.

As soon as the debate started, I was fucked. Or rather, my microwave was fucked. It started doing something new (spinning round and emitting an almost inaudible hum, but without heating the food), which meant I ended up having to cook my Indian dinners on the hob and missed the opening speeches. Still, as far as I could tell the whole thing was almost excessively polite. The two candidates for the highest office in the land showered each other with tokens of mutual respect, took turns expressing their immense love of France, and agreed about more or less everything. And yet, at the same time, clashes broke out in Montfermeil between right-wing extremists and a group of young Africans of no declared political affiliation. There had been fighting all week following the desecration of a local mosque. The next day a nativist website claimed that these last riots had been extremely violent, with several fatalities, a claim immediately disputed by the Ministry of the Interior. As always, the leaders of the National Front and Muslim Brotherhood published statements vigorously condemning any criminal acts. Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less. They’d become old news. For years now, probably decades,
Le Monde
and all the other centre-left newspapers, which is to say every newspaper, had been denouncing the ‘Cassandras’ who predicted civil war between Muslim immigrants and the indigenous populations of Western Europe. The way it was explained to me by a colleague in the classics department, this was an odd allusion to make. In Greek mythology, Cassandra is a very beautiful young maiden (‘like the golden Aphrodite’, Homer writes). Apollo, having fallen in love with her, offers her the gift of prophecy in exchange for her favours. Cassandra accepts his gift, only to refuse the god’s advances. Enraged, Apollo spits in her mouth, meaning that no one will ever understand or believe anything she says. She goes on to predict the rape of Helen by Paris, then the Trojan War, and she alerts her fellow Trojans to the ruse of the Greeks (the famous ‘Trojan Horse’) that allows them to capture the city. She winds up assassinated by Clytemnestra, but not before predicting her own murder and that of Agamemnon, who refuses to believe her. In short, Cassandra offered an example of worst-case predictions that always came true. In hindsight, the journalists of the centre-left seemed only to have repeated the blindness of the Trojans. History is full of such blindness: we see it among the intellectuals, politicians and journalists of the 1930s, all of whom were convinced that Hitler would ‘come to see reason’. It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

But in fact, the media’s attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots any more. That was all passed over in silence. They’d even stopped denouncing the ‘Cassandras’. In the end the Cassandras had gone silent, too. People were sick of the subject, and the kind of people I knew had got sick of it before everyone else. ‘What has to happen will happen’ seemed to be the general feeling. The next evening, when I went to the spring launch of the
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies
, I knew the riots in Montfermeil would be talked about less than the presidential debates, and much less than recent university appointments. The party was being held in the rue Chaptal, at the Museum of the Romantics, which had been hired for the occasion.

I’d always loved Place Saint-Georges, with its charming belle époque facades, and I stopped for a moment in front of the bust of Gavarni before I walked up the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, then the rue Chaptal. At number 16 I found the short, tree-lined alley that led to the museum.

It was a mild evening, and the double doors to the back garden had been left open. I helped myself to a glass of champagne, and as I stepped out under the linden trees, I spotted Alice, a lecturer at the University of Lyon III who worked on Nerval. Her delicate dress, printed with bright flowers, must have been what’s called a cocktail dress. The truth is, I’ve never quite grasped the difference between a cocktail dress and an evening dress, but I knew Alice would always wear the appropriate thing and, more generally, act the appropriate way. She was easy company, and I hurried over to say hello even though she was talking to a young man with angular features and very pale skin. He wore jeans, a blue blazer, a PSG T-shirt and bright red trainers. The effect was strangely elegant. He introduced himself as Godefroy Lempereur.

‘I’m one of your new colleagues,’ he said, turning in my direction. I saw he was drinking neat whisky. ‘I was just hired at Paris Trois.’