Metro Stop Paris Read online

But in England he was now persona non grata. Montgomery spent several weeks negotiating with the French ambassador the right to live in Normandy. Then he returned to Jersey, where, with the help of his pirates, he amassed enough money and arms to seize Normandy. In early spring 1574 he almost succeeded. "We hold the whole country in subjection," he boasted on 24 March to his old friend Lord Burghley as Sir William Cecil was now known.

  Catherine sent reinforcements to Montgomery's erstwhile foe, the Comte de Matignon, who began a huge pincer movement into the bocages, or bosky country, of rebellious western Normandy. By a series of zig-zag manoeuvres Montgomery managed to get away each time Matignon thought he had cornered his prey He got away until he reached the medieval fortress of Domfront, where, because of an argument he had with the Huguenot captain who held it, Ambroise Le Hérice, the "Scarface," he was delayed a fatal twenty-four hours.

  TRAVELLER OF THE Paris métro, if you have the chance, take an excursion to Domfront in "Norman Switzerland." It is one of the most impressive medieval citadels in France, though the fort itself was blown up by gunpowder in 1610 on the orders of Henri IV's minister, the Due de Sully. The town was the site of Allied aerial bombing during Hitler's Mortain offensive in August 1944, but the medieval quarter survived. The cafés serve poiré, the local pear cider; the remaining walls and turrets, often shrouded in mist, inspire thoughts of medieval legend and terror— the parapets were designed for pouring burning oil on the attackers; you get a grand view across the Norman bocages; and a stroll along the surrounding defences and the steep cliffs will give you an idea of the drama of Sieur de Montgomery's last stand.

  Matignon's first troops arrived early on a Sunday, 9 May 1574. Within hours they controlled all roads of access and by afternoon his pioneers were felling the trees on the south side of the fort, in preparation for a massive bombardment. Montgomery attempted a sortie the following morning at dawn, but Captain Mouy de Riberprey's royal cavaliers put an end to that within yards of the portcullis.

  The largest cannon available in Normandy were dragged in by horse and hauled up the surrounding heights—a feat worthy of the Pharaohs. From the artillery park of Caen, Matignon had transported a five-yard long, thirty-three-inch calibre monster called "Mad Marguerite," possibly after Henri de Navarre's Queen. It was placed on the summit of Le Tertre Grisiere. On the hills of La Rouge Mothe there were six culverins, each one of them over fifty hundredweight and ready to fire after mass was sung on Sunday, 23 May. At seven o'clock that morning Mad Marguerite crashed out at the curtained fortifications of the main castle; the cannon of La Rouge Mothe strafed the battlements. Matignon had under his command six thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. There were just seventy Huguenots inside Domfront; they sang psalms as they went into action.

  In the old castle fortress of Vincennes, just outside Paris on the east side of the Bastille, King Charles IX was dying. He was not yet twenty-four. "I can give death, but you can give immortality," he had whispered to the court poet Pierre de Ronsard. Tormented by his role in the Saint Bartholomew massacre, torn between loyalty to his mother and a will to be free, he lay sweating and coughing in blood-stained sheets. Catherine could be heard singing in a nearby chamber—for she had heard that the regicide had been cornered. When the news was announced to Charles he replied, "Human things no longer mean anything to me." Yet he revived to sit up and announce, "My cure will come with the capture of Domfront and the surrender of Montgomery."

  The steep river valleys around Domfront echoed to the sounds of bombardment and crumbling walls that Sunday, 23 May. Around midday two gaping holes had been blasted out of the curtain defences on the south side of the citadel and in the wall of the castle itself. Matignon's infantry clambered up the southern bluffs only to be met by Huguenots wielding their swords and sabres; Montgomery himself appeared in a white doublet braided in silver, as if dressed for a banquet, except for the axe in his right hand. His foe of yesterday, "Scar-face," fought by his side. With the sun disappearing over the horizon, Matignon ordered a retreat. He had lost over two hundred men. Montgomery had won a brief respite.

  Monday and Tuesday were limited to further bombardment. On Wednesday night Matignon sent in a messenger, the Baron de Vassé— one of Montgomery's own relatives—but he was peremptorily dismissed. Yet only fifteen men were left in the castle; they had no water, no food, no powder. De Vassé returned three times on Thursday. The situation was clearly hopeless. Between one and two o'clock Friday morning, 28 May, Matignon himself accompanied de Vassé to summon the surrender. Montgomery appeared in the reception hall, this time dressed "in a high hat and a short leather doublet." He received all the honours of his rank; he kept his sword and his dagger. He was even promised his life.

  King Charles IX lived just long enough to receive news of the capture; it arrived at Vincennes on Saturday. On Sunday, 30 May, he lost consciousness. Queen Catherine sat at his side, holding his hand. Then suddenly he exclaimed, in a voice so clear that it could be heard by all in the room, "Adieu ma mère! Eh, ma mère!"—and died.

  Montgomery was escorted to Paris where he arrived on 16 June. He was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. On 26June the Paris Parlement sentenced him to "be decapitated and his body to be cut into fourteen quarters." The sentence was carried out on the Place de Grève the same afternoon. "Quandsongerey à moi" concludes the ballad, — do not ever, even in play, set yourself against your master.

  jugez, seriez vous vrai

  qui vous donne à cognoistre

  qu'il ne faut point vouer

  encore moins se jouer

  jamais contre son maitre

  In his lovely essay Homo Ludens, "Man the Player," written on the eve of the Second World War, the medievalist Johan Huizinga argued that there had always been a play element in war. "Young dogs and small boys 'fight' for fun, with rules limiting the degree of violence," he commented, and then noted that the level of acceptable violence in war games did not necessarily stop at the spilling of blood or even killing; he gave the example of jousting. Sieur de Montgomery of Normandy was a player to the end.

  12

  PÉFLE LACHAISE

  IDEALLY, A Trip to the last of the métro stops, Père Lachaise, should be undertaken on a chill, clear autumn morning, when the golden leaves of the maple and the sycamore are falling, when the sky is an empty, radiant blue, when the horn of a distant car sings in the air like a bugle. They named Père Lachaise, the largest of the city's cemeteries, after Louis XIV's staunchly anti-Protestant Jesuit confessor, Francois d'Aix, Seigneur de La Chaise, who established a retirement home for his brotherhood on the hillside of Mont Louis, as Belleville was then known; the cemetery expanded rapidly during his own lifetime.

  It has always enchanted visitors. In autumn your footsteps on the cobbled pathways echo against the ornate tombstones that tower to either side; some of the avenues at Père Lachaise seem like Lilliputian versions of Paris's boulevards. The atmosphere is always reverent. Twice in November—on All Souls' Day and Armistice Day—pilgrims from Paris carry carnations and everlasting flowers, yellow and dark blue, to the graves. Their faces reflect the season's melancholy But there is often a glimpse of hope in their eyes: one soul may be gone, but another is always born. Balzac painted that foretelling little smile into his Père Goriot. An ambitious student, Eugène de Rastignac, comes to the cemetery one sad, wet evening to attend the funeral of Père Goriot. He stares down into the grave and "buries there his last tear as a young man"; then he raises his head up to notice the whole of Paris stretching out before him just as the lights in the web of streets below flicker into life with the approaching night: "Between the two of us now!" Rastignac exclaims—and Balzac's drama takes off.

  Over a million men and women have been buried here since Père La Chaise opened the land to the dead. A full day is needed to wander around these tombs. Héloise finally joined her lover, Pierre Abelard, in a grave that was laid not far from the main entrance. "The love which united their spirits during their lives,"
one reads in the inscription of 1701, "united their bodies in this tomb." There are not many grave robbers around today; but poor Bizet lost his head in December 2006 to what was believed to be a gang working for an art collector; the busts of several other dead celebrities disappeared at the same time.

  People of every age visit Père Lachaise. In one of the alleys you may well run into a group of giggling girls, rings in their ears and noses, their hair tinted yellow, orange and blue—like the flowers. "Monsieur, Monsieur," they cheerily salute you, "pouvezvous nous dire où se trouve la division six?" You know exactly where they are heading: after he was found dead from a drug overdose in his Hotel bathtub, Jim Morrison of the Doors ended up under a flat marble stone in the northern corner of Division Six. Strange night-time rites have taken place in Division Six; a security guard who hides behind the neighbouring high tomb will tell you with a grin that at least the graffiti have gone.*

  The most extraordinary tomb in Père Lachaise is occupied by one of Britain's writers who died in poverty in a small Paris Hotel at the turn of the last century. There are always people milling around it, about a hundred yards south of the Colombarium, as the local crematorium is known. The square-cut stone is one of the earliest pieces by Sir Jacob Epstein, the American-born British Expressionist; it clearly shows the influence of Antoine Bourdelle. But there is one little difference: the lipstick—the lower half of the monument is covered with red lipstick kisses. Love letters are stuffed in its interstices. The graffiti, written in every colour of the rainbow, are kind and gentle. 'Ah there he is," sighs a new visitor after clambering up the whole side of the hill. Yes, there he is: beneath the stone and the lipstick Îie the remains of Oscar WUde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

  Paris, and the world, is having a love affair with Oscar Wilde: "I love you," "Lucile and Elena love you," "To you," "Libertad siempre," "Keep charming." There is nothing that shocks in the popular slogans written on Wilde's tomb. Every two years or so the stone is given a scrubbing; then the slogans and the kisses start up all over again. The flowers are always fresh. No security guard stands by The tomb at first sight puts one in mind of some pleasing pointilliste abstraction under the sun; the marks of the Ups look like rose petals or shiny coloured stones in a mosaic fantasy As you gaze upon all the kisses this stone has received, it is worth recalling that Wilde's own favourite in his first published collection of poems was "Charmides," in which a young man is caught making love to a statue of the goddess Athena. It earned Wide the censure of the Oxford Student Union. Nobody, on the other hand, wants to restrain the young who make love to Oscar Wilde's stone. Just compare the lovely atmosphere you find around this tomb to that of Victor Noir's, a few paces from here. Noir was a radical journalist shot dead at the age of twenty-two by Napoleon Ill's cousin; the reclining figure on his tomb represents the youth as he was in death, his shirt torn open and his trousers undone. For over a century women seeking aid in love and fertility have performed so many lewd acts on the tomb that Noir's lips, nose and the protuberance in the genital area have been reduced to smooth shining bronze. In contrast, there is nothing faintly lewd in the popular worship that takes place at Wilde's grave: all is gentleness.

  Perhaps the charm lies in the "libertad siempre" scrawled in ink under his name. Wilde was a part of that two-pronged struggle for freedom that developed in the last years of the nineteenth century; one prong untangled us from the prejudice of race, the other from mad taboos concerning sex. It is a remarkable fact that the Dreyfus Affair—the false accusation of a Jewish captain in the French Army and his imprisonment on Devil's Island—coincided exactly with the conviction of Oscar Wilde for "indecent acts" and his imprisonment in London. Paris and London were rocked by these two infamous legal battles. Paris had its racial scandal, London its sex scandal. It is another tale of two cities.

  IN LONDON WILDE was an outsider or, at least, that is what he thought himself. Paris presented more than a haven for Wilde; it influenced his whole artistic enterprise, turning it—and, many would argue, Wilde himself—in a very dangerous direction. In London, Wilde had identified himself with an "English Renaissance," the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelites, the craftsmanship of William Morris, the art history of Walter Pater. When Wilde first moved to Paris, in January 1883, all that changed. He discovered poets and writers who had taken a step away from the acceptable norms of behaviour into "decadence." Wilde no longer spoke of a "Renaissance" after that date. He developed a fascination for the kingdom of the wicked.

  And then it happened. Wilde was hoist with his own petard. Why he should have been attracted to as nasty a creature as Lord Alfred Douglas, when there were so many more talented and less temperamental young men about him, has always been something of a mystery It could only have been his good looks —the alabaster face and blond hair, which seemed to be drawn directly out of Dorian Gray. It was Douglas who forced Wilde to take his father, the eighth Marquess of Queensberry to court for criminal libel. Queensberry turned the tables on Wilde. Blackmailers and male prostitutes were dragged through the courts; chambermaids provided foul testimony.

  It was almost as if Wilde wanted to be in the pillory Wilde, not a vindictive man, could easily have avoided the trials and his imprisonment by simply not initiating the case against Queensberry—over a childish insult written on a visiting card. He was drawn into the case because of the jeers of a squirt, Lord Alfred Douglas, "Bosie." The self-destructive urge in Wilde did the rest. Wilde was found guilty of "indecent acts" and condemned on 25 May 1895 to two years of imprisonment and hard labour.

  That pillory proved terrible. "We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow," wrote Wilde from his cell in the early months of 1897, "have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering . . . is the means by which we exist." Prison offered no sanctuary "Sorrow after sorrow has come beating at the prison doors in search of me." Wilde's friend Robert Sherard, who lived near the Wandsworth gaol, visited him on 26 August 1895 and noticed how his hands, clasping the bars, were disfigured, the nails broken and bleeding, his hair was unkempt and a small straggly beard had begun to grow on his thin jowls; he was "greatly depressed" and on the verge of tears. In October one of his former lovers, Robert Ross, wrote to a friend reporting that Wilde "hoped to die very soon. Indeed he only spoke calmly about death, every other subject caused him to break down."

  "HAPPY THE DEAD!" wrote Captain Alfred Dreyfus in his prison diary that very same autumn. "How much would death be preferable to this slow agony, to this martyrdom suffered at every instant." He could not sleep, he could not eat, he was overcome by waves of shivering and fever. "He won't live through this," recorded Chief Warder Lebars after Dreyfos's first three months of confinement on a tropical island a thousand yards long and two hundred yards wide at its narrowest point; "his voice is broken with sobs and he then weeps abundantly for periods of about a quarter of an hour." Devil's Island, off the coast of the small French South American colony of Cayenne, was the smallest of three volcanic protuberances in the Atlantic, known ironically as the Isles of Salvation. On Devil's Island life was worse than sparse; only mosquitoes, brushwood and a few palm trees survived on it. The victors of Thermidor, in July 1794, were the first to use the island for deported prisoners, virtually all of whom died within a year. Bonaparte kept up the tradition. It was abandoned under the Restoration, but revived again with the Second Empire—of the 7,000 prisoners sent out to Cayenne in 1856 (Zola's fictitious hero Florent was set among them), 2,500 were dead by the end of the year. The Third Republic would have nothing to do with Devil's Island until Captain Dreyfus was convicted of treason in December 1894; a special law had to be voted in parliament, on 31 January 1895, to prepare the solitary stone hut that would house him for over three years—sixteen months longer than Wilde's imprisonment.

  It is remarkable how similar the symptoms of suffering were in the two men—the weeping, the sleeplessness, the fou
l indigestion and an almost religious sense of martyrdom—although it is clear that Dreyfus went through more than Wilde. In his "Journal of My Sad and Appalling Life," Dreyfus describes in detail the twelve-foot square hut, the miserable food, the irons into which he was clamped every night for two months. It is a relentless, monotonous text which repeats, from one end to the other, the same obsessive thought: "My body must not yield until honour has been rendered to me." "I speak to you as if from a tomb," he wrote to his wife, Lucie, on 29 October 1896, "from an eternal silence that pushes me down and down below everything." Dreyfus lived beneath Hell—a theme one can find in Wilde's prison writing.

  The grounds of conviction were, of course, utterly different, though the cultural origins of both injustices lay in that very Parisian, fin-de-siècle movement which so influenced Wilde's thought: la décadence. Many of the Parisian decadents were openly homosexual; and unhappily several of them—as one may note among some of Debussy's friends—were rabid anti-Semites. All this formed an integral part of Parisian culture in the 1890s. It would not be inaccurate to describe it as a culture of hatreds. A common sight in the streets of Paris at that time, at the horse races of Auteuil, in the theatres and even in the Chamber of Deputies, were men sporting blue carnations in their jacket lapels, the blue carnations of the anti-Semites.

  Both the Dreyfus Affair and the Wilde trials occurred at a time of spreading war rumours; in the autumn of 1898 France nearly went to war, not with Germany but with Britain, over disputed territory at Fashoda in the southern Sudan. France, defeated by Prussia in 1870, was a land consumed by jealousies, rivalries and the search for revenge; it was a place where traitors, spies and scallywags seemed to lurk in every café, whorehouse and army barracks. An archivist working for the Army's artillery section was condemned to five years' imprisonment in 1890 for corresponding with the German military attaché in Paris; at the same time, five men in the Ministry of the Marine were condemned to up to twenty years' hard labour for espionage. But hypersensitive documents, like the maps outlining the emplacements of frontier artillery, continued to disappear. The press called for action. The Army's commanders were embarrassed. The General Staff became touchy and defensive; any doubt cast on the word of the generals was considered a threat to their capacity to defend the country, a challenge to the honour of the Army Candour and truth were not nourished in such an atmosphere.