The Elegance of the Hedgehog (4 page)

I
n the collective imagination, the couple formed by married concierges—a close-knit pair consisting of two entities so insignificant that only their union can make them apparent—will in all likelihood be the owners of a poodle. As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by petit bourgeois retirees, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection upon their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy loges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, they are particularly inclined to do so when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all.

Thus the concierge couple, as served by the metaphor of their totemic poodle, seems to be utterly devoid of such passions as love and desire and, like their totem, destined to remain ugly, stupid, submissive and boastful. If, in certain novels, princes fall in love with working-class lasses, and princesses with galley slaves, between two concierges, even of the opposite sex, there is never any romance of the type that others experience and that might someday make a worthy story.

Not only were we never the owners of a poodle, but I believe I can fairly assert that our marriage was a success. With my husband, I was myself. I think back on our little Sunday mornings with nostalgia, mornings blessed with restfulness where, in the silent kitchen, he would drink his coffee while I read.

I married him at the age of seventeen following a swift but proper courtship. He worked at the factory, as did my older brothers, and stopped in many an evening on his way home to drink a coffee and a drop of something stronger. Alas, I was ugly. And yet that would not have played the slightest role had I been ugly the way others are ugly. But I bore the cruelty of my affliction alone: this ugliness that deprived me of any freshness, although I was not yet a woman, and caused me at the age of fifteen to resemble the woman I would be at the age of fifty. My stooped back, thick waist, short legs, widespread feet, abundant hair, and lumpy features—well, features lacking any shapeliness or grace—might have been overlooked for the sake of the youthful charm granted to even the most unprepossessing amongst us—but no, at the age of twenty I already qualified as an old biddy.

Thus, when the intentions of my future husband became clear and it was no longer possible for me to ignore them, I opened my heart to him, speaking frankly for the first time to someone other than my own self, and I confessed to him how astonished I was that he might conceive of wanting to marry me.

I was sincere. I had for many years accustomed myself to the prospect of a solitary life. To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent, condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things—some sort of balancing of the scales offered by nature to those less favored among her children—no, it is a superfluous plaything that exists only to enhance the value of the jewel. As for ugliness, it is guilty from the start, and I was doomed by my tragic destiny to suffer all the more, for I was hardly stupid.

“Renée,” he replied, with as much gravity as he could muster, showing himself to be more loquacious during the long disquisition to come than he would ever be again, “Renée, I don’t want my wife to be one of those giddy young things who run wild and have no more brain than a sparrow beneath their pretty face. I want a woman who’s loyal, a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper. I want a calm and steady companion who’ll stay by my side and support me. In exchange, you can expect me to be a serious worker, a calm man at home and a tender husband at the right moment. I’m not a bad sort, and I’ll do my best.”

And he did.

Small and dry like the stump of an elm tree, he had nevertheless a pleasant face and usually wore a smile. He did not drink, smoke, chew tobacco, or gamble. At home, when work was done, he’d watch television, browse through fishing magazines or play cards with his friends from the factory. He was very sociable and often invited people over. On Sundays he went fishing. As for me, I looked after the housekeeping, because he didn’t like the idea of me doing it for other people.

He was not lacking in intelligence, although his particular intelligence was not of the sort that an industrious society values. While his skills were confined to manual work, he displayed a talent that did not stem solely from mere mechanical aptitude and, however uneducated he might be, he approached everything with a spirit of ingeniousness, something which, where small tasks are concerned, distinguishes the artists from the mere laborers and, in conversation, shows that knowledge is not everything. Having been resigned from an early age to the prospect of the life of a nun, I felt therefore that it was benign indeed of the heavens to have placed between my young bride’s hands a companion with such agreeable manners and who, while not an intellectual, was no less clever for it.

I might have ended up with the likes of Grelier.

Bernard Grelier is one of the rare souls at 7, rue de Grenelle in whose presence I have no fear of betraying myself. Whether I say to him: “
War and Peace
is the staging of a determinist vision of history” or “You’d do well to oil the hinges in the garbage room,” he will not find that one is any more significant than the other. It even seems miraculous that the latter phrase manages to fire him into action. How can one do something one does not understand? No doubt this type of proposition does not require any rational processing and, like those stimuli that move in a loop through our bone marrow and set off a reflex without calling on the brain, perhaps the summons to apply oil is merely of a mechanical nature and sets in motion a reaction in one’s limbs without inviting the mind to participate.

Bernard Grelier is the husband of Violette Grelier, who is the “housekeeper” for the Arthens. She began working for them thirty years ago as a simple maid, and she rose through the ranks as they in turn became wealthier, and once she was a housekeeper she found herself reigning over a laughable kingdom whose subjects were the cleaning lady (Manuela), the part-time butler (an Englishman), and the factotum (her husband); she is as scornful of the lower classes as are her high and mighty upper-class employers. All day long she jabbers like a magpie, busily rushing here and there, acting important, reprimanding her menial subalterns as if this were Versailles in better days, and exhausting Manuela with pontificating speeches about the love of a job well done and the decline of good manners.

“She hasn’t read Marx,” said Manuela to me one day.

The pertinence of this remark uttered by a Portuguese woman who is in no way well versed in the study of philosophy is striking. No, Violette Grelier has certainly not read any Marx, for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of cleaning products for rich people’s silverware. She has paid the price for this oversight by inheriting a daily routine punctuated with endless catalogues vaunting the qualities of starch and linen dust cloths.

I, therefore, had been well married.

To my husband, moreover, I had very quickly confessed my great sin.

The cat here on earth
Modern totem
And intermittently decorative

I
n any case, this is true at our place. If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer kibble and have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next and leave their fur everywhere, and no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.

My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She’s vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue. It would seem that children believe for a fairly long time that anything that moves has a soul and is endowed with intention. My mother is no longer a child but she apparently has not managed to conceive that Constitution and Parliament possess no more understanding than the vacuum cleaner. I concede that the difference between the vacuum cleaner and the cats is that a cat can experience pain and pleasure. But does that mean it has a greater ability to
communicate
with humans? Not at all. That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects. When I hear my mother say “Constitution is both a very proud and very sensitive little cat” when in fact said cat is sprawled on the sofa because she’s eaten too much, it really makes me want to laugh. But if you think about the hypothesis that a cat’s purpose is to act as a modern totem, a sort of emblematic incarnation, protector of the home, reflecting well upon its owners, then everything becomes clear. My mother makes the cats into what she wishes we were, and which we absolutely are not. You won’t find anyone less proud and sensitive than the three aforementioned members of the Josse family: Papa, Maman, and Colombe. They are utterly spineless and anesthetized, emptied of all emotion.

In short, in my opinion the cat is a modern totem. Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilization and a ton of other “-tion” words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they’re not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over their fate.

I
have read so many books . . .

And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading—and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she’s been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.

This morning, as it happens, I am standing, puzzled, in the kitchen, with a little book set down before me. I am in the midst of one of those moments where the folly of my solitary undertaking takes hold of me and, on the verge of giving up, I fear I have finally found my master.

His name is Husserl, a name not often given to pets or to brands of chocolate, for the simple reason that it evokes something grave, daunting, and vaguely Prussian. But that is of little consolation. I believe that my fate has taught me, better than anyone, to resist the negative influences of world thought. Let me explain: if, thus far, you have imagined that the ugliness of ageing and conciergely widowhood have made a pitiful wretch of me, resigned to the lowliness of her fate—then you are truly lacking in imagination. I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept. I may be indigent in name, position, and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivalled goddess.

Thus Edmund Husserl—and I have concluded that this is a name fit for vacuum cleaner bags—has been threatening the stability of my private Mount Olympus.

“All right, all right, all right,” I say, taking a deep breath, “to every problem there is a solution, no?” I glance at the cat, waiting for a sign of encouragement.

The ungrateful wretch does not respond. He has just devoured a monstrous slice of
rillettes
and, henceforth imbued with great kindliness, has colonized the armchair.

“All right, all right, all right,” I say again like an idiot and, puzzled, I stare at the ridiculous little book.

Cartesian Meditations: Introduction to Phenomenology
. It quickly becomes clear, given both the title and the first few pages, that it is not possible to read Husserl, a phenomenological philosopher, if one has not already read Descartes and Kant. And yet one discovers with equal alacrity that even a solid mastery of Descartes and Kant will not, for all that, open the doors to transcendental phenomenology.

This is a pity. Because I have great admiration for Kant, for a number of reasons: his ideas are an admirable concentration of genius, rigor and madness, and however Spartan the prose might be, I have had no difficulty in penetrating the meaning. Kantian texts are great works of literature, and I would like to prove this by demonstrating their ability to pass, with flying colors, the cherry plum test.

The cherry plum test is extraordinary for its disarming clarity. It derives its power from a universal observation: when man bites into the fruit, at last he understands. What does he understand? Everything. He understands how the human species, given only to survival, slowly matured and arrived one fine day at an intuition of pleasure, the vanity of all the artificial appetites that divert one from one’s initial aspiration toward the virtues of simple and sublime things, the pointlessness of discourse, the slow and terrible degradation of multiple worlds from which no one can escape and, in spite of all that, the wonderful sweetness of the senses when they conspire to teach mankind pleasure and the terrifying beauty of Art.

The cherry plum test is held in my kitchen. I place the fruit and the book on the Formica table, and as I pick up the former to taste it, I also start on the latter. If each resists the powerful onslaught of the other, if the cherry plum fails to make me doubt the text and if the text is unable to spoil the fruit, then I know that I am in the presence of a worthwhile and, why not say it, exceptional undertaking, for there are very few works that have not dissolved—proven both ridiculous and complacent—into the extraordinary succulence of the little golden plums.

“I am truly up the creek,” I say to Leo, because my skills where Kant is concerned do not amount to a hill of beans when I contemplate the abyss of phenomenology.

I am left with no alternative. I will have to enlist the help of the library and attempt to unearth an introduction to the matter at hand. Ordinarily I am very wary of such glosses or short cuts which tend to place the reader in the iron grip of scholastic thought. But the situation is far too grave for me to allow myself the indulgence of equivocation. Phenomenology is beyond my reach and that I cannot bear.