stone bacchante. My sister stood on the other side, leaning on the handrail, her gaze lost in the warm mist of the steppes.
Charlotte's voice was lyrical as the lines demanded:
There is a tune, for which I'd gladly part With all Rossini, Weber, and Mozart, An ancient air, whose languid melody Has secret charms that speak only to me…
The magic of this poem by Nerval conjured up out of the evening shadows a castle of the time of Louis XIII and the chatelaine, 'Fair with dark eyes, in robe of ancient style.'…
It was then that my sister's voice roused me from my poetic reverie: 'And Felix Faure, what became of him?'
She was still standing there, at the corner of the balcony, leaning lightly over the handrail. With absentminded gestures from time to time she plucked at a faded morning glory bloom and tossed it away, watching its gyrations in the nocturnal air. Lost in her young girl's dreams, she had not listened to the reading of the poem. It was the summer of her fifteenth year… Why had she thought about the president? Probably this handsome and imposing man with an elegant mustache and great calm eyes suddenly became a focus, through some capricious play of her amorous daydreams, for her pictured reality of a man's presence. And she asked in Russian – as if better to express the disturbing mystery of this secretly desired presence – 'And Felix Faure, what became of him?'
Charlotte threw me a rapid glance with a hint of a smile. Then she closed the book she was holding in her lap, sighed softly, and looked into the distance, toward that horizon where the previous year we had seen Atlantis emerging.
'Some years after the visit of Nicholas II to Paris, the president died…' There was a brief hesitation, an involuntary pause, which only served to increase our attentiveness. 'He died suddenly, at the Elysee Palace. In the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil…'
It was this sentence that sounded the death knell for my childhood. 'He died in the arms of his mistress…'
I was overwhelmed by the tragic beauty of these words. A whole new world swept over me.
What struck me above all about this revelation was the setting: this scene of love and death had been played out at the Elysee! At the presidential palace! At the pinnacle of that pyramid of power, of glory, of world fame… I pictured a sumptuous room with tapestries, gilt, rows of mirrors. In the midst of this luxury – a man (the president of the Republic!) and a woman, united in an ardent embrace…
Dumbfounded, I began unconsciously to translate the scene into Russian. That is, to replace the French protagonists with their national equivalents. A series of phantoms, looking cramped in their black suits, appeared before my eyes. Secretaries of the Politburo, masters of the Kremlin: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. Four very different characters, loved or detested by the population, each of whom had put his stamp on a whole epoch in the history of the empire. Yet they all had one quality in common: at their sides a feminine presence, let alone an amorous one, was inconceivable. It was far easier for us to imagine Stalin in the company of someone like Churchill at Yalta, or with Mao in Moscow, than to picture him with the mother of his children…
'The president died at the Elysee Palace, in the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil…' This sentence seemed like a coded message coming from another planetary system.
Charlotte went to the Siberian suitcase to look for some of the newspapers of the period, hoping to be able to show us a photo of Madame Steinheil. While I, embroiled in my erotic Franco- Russian translation, recalled a remark that I had heard one evening on the lips of a gangling dunce, a fellow pupil. We were walking along the dark corridors at school after a session of weight lifting, the only subject at which he excelled. Passing the portrait of Lenin, my companion had given a low whistle in a most disrespectful manner and had observed, 'You know old Lenin. He didn't have any children, did he? 'Cause he just didn't know how to make love…'
He had used an extremely coarse verb to refer to the sexual activity in which, according to him, Lenin was deficient. A verb I should never have dared to use and which, applied to Vladimir Ilyich, became a monstrous obscenity. Taken aback, I heard the echo of this iconoclastic verb resounding in the long empty corridor…
'Felix Faure… the president of the Republic… in the arms of his mistress…' More than ever Atlantis-France seemed to me a terra incognita where our Russian notions no longer had any currency.
The death of Felix Faure made me aware of my age: I was thirteen; I guessed what 'dying in the arms of a woman' meant, and from now on I could be spoken to on such subjects. Furthermore, the courage and total absence of hypocrisy in Charlotte's story demonstrated what I already knew: she was not a grandmother like the others. No Russian babushka would have ventured on such a discussion with her grandson. In this freedom of expression I sensed an unaccustomed perception of the body, of love, of relationships between man and woman – a mysterious 'French outlook.'
Next morning I went out onto the steppe to brood alone on the fabulous transmutation effected in my life by the death of the president. To my great surprise, rerun in Russian, the scene no longer made a good story. In fact it was impossible to tell! Censored by an inexplicable modesty of words, revised, all of a sudden, by a strange offended morality, when finally told, it swung between pathological obscenity and euphemisms that transformed the pair of lovers into characters in a badly translated sentimental novel.
'No,' I said to myself, stretched out in the rippling grass under the warm wind, 'it is only in French that he could die in the arms of Marguerite Steinheil…'
Thanks to the lovers of the Elysee Palace, I now grasped the mystery of that young serving maid who, surprised in the bath by her master, gave herself to him with all the terror and fever of a dream finally realized. Yes, before that there had been this bizarre trio I had come across in a novel by Maupassant that I had read in the spring. Throughout the book a Parisian dandy desired the inaccessible love of a female creature, an amalgam of decadent refinements. He sought to gain entry to the heart of this cerebral, indolent courtesan, who was like a fragile orchid, and who always left him to hope in vain. And alongside them – the serving maid, the young woman in her bath with her robust and healthy body. At first reading all I could see was this triangle, which seemed to me artificial and lifeless: for how could the two women even consider one another as rivals…?
From now on I beheld the Parisian trio with new eyes. They became concrete, flesh, palpable – they were alive! I now recognized the blissful dread that caused the young servant maid to shiver when snatched from the bath and carried, all wet, to a bed. I sensed the tickling of the drops meandering over her full breasts, the weight of her haunches in the arms of the man; I even saw the rhythmic stirring of the water in the bath from which her body had just been lifted. Gradually the water grew calm… And the other, the inaccessible
The fatal love that had caused the heart of the president to burst reshaped the France that I carried inside me. This came mainly from storybooks. But on that memorable evening the literary characters who rubbed shoulders on its highways seemed to be awakening after a long sleep. Before that – however much they had waved their swords, climbed rope ladders, swallowed arsenic, declared their love, traveled in carriages while holding the severed head of their beloved on their knees – they never escaped from their world of fiction. Exotic, brilliant, comic perhaps, they did not move me. Like that cure in Flaubert, the country priest to whom Emma Bovary confessed her torments, I had not been able to understand the woman either: 'But what more can she desire, she who has a beautiful house, an industrious husband, and the respect of her neighbors…?'
The Elysee lovers helped me to understand
