LOUIS-FERDINAND

CÉLINE¹ 
 
 

BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE

 
 
 
 

SOLUS 
 
 
 

——————————————————————————— 
 
 
 

LITTLE NOTHINGS FOR A MASSACRE² 
 
 
 

Translator: Gordon LeCompte Bolmer

 

 
 
 
 
 

EDITIONS DENOËL 

19, RUE AMÉLIE, 19 

PARIS 
 
 

All rights reserved in all countries. 

Copyright by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1937. 

———————————————————————————————————— 

The “massacre,” in the thinking of the author, which he foresaw in 1937, is evidently that which transpired upon the outbreak of the Second World War. 

Contrary to rumor, the pamphlets³ are not forbidden by law, regulation or tribunal. They have not been reissued by reputable publishing houses because the author, having returned to France, wanted to retain the authority on the reissue of the books which he had written, in order to gain his subsistence.⁴ This measure of opportunity is no longer a consideration, following the passing away of the author in 1961. No one has the right to impede the legitimate curiosity of subsequent generations, concerning he who was the incandescent nexus of French literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century. 

The text reproduced here is probably from a pirate edition. Would the possessors of an authentic edition be so good as to notify us of any subsequent discrepencies. 
 

 

TO EUGÈNE DABIT 

TO MY PALS AT THE “THÉATRE EN TOILE” 
 
 

“He is wicked, and shall not enter into Paradise, 

he who dies without having settled all of his accounts.”  

—Almanach des Bons-Enfants 
 

[1]⁵ 

The world is full of people who call themselves refined but are not, I declare, the least little bit refined. I, your servant, fully believe that I myself am refined. So it is! Genuinely refined. I was reluctant to admit it until recently…I resisted… And then one day I gave in… Too bad!… I am all the same a little embarrassed by my refinement… What is one going to say? Pretend? Insinuate? 

A valid man of refinement, refined in terms of rectitude, of dress, of social station, ordinarily must write at least as do M. Gide, M. Vanderem, M. Benda, M. Duhamel, Mme. Colette, Mme. Fémina, Mme. Valéry, the “French Theater”…to delight in nuance…Mallarmé, Bergson, Alain…to ass-ream the adjective…to Goncourtize⁶…shit! to ass-ream a gnat, to wax hysterical over Insignificance, to babble-on while dressed in royal purple, to pose for the gallery, to crow into the microphones… To reveal my “favorite records”…my conference projects… 

I would be able, I myself would easily be able to become a veritable stylist, a “relevant” academic. It’s a matter of effort, over the course of months…maybe years… It would be accomplished…as the Spanish proverb goes: “With a great deal of Vaseline, and even more patience, The elephant ass-reamed the ant.” 

Yet all the same I am too well-traveled, too advanced, too jaded along the ill-advised route of natural refinement…to turn back now, after a hard career as “a hard man amongst hard men”! and then proceed to apply for the examination in doily-making! It is not possible! And therein lies tragedy. How I was bound-up with emotion…through my own refinement? Here are the facts, the circumstances… 

I recently poured my heart out to a little buddy of mine, a worthy young doctor in my own specialty, to wit, one Léo Gutman, whose tastes are extremely vivacious, pronounced, virulent, I would even say absolutely despotic, when he talks to me about dancers… I asked him his opinion… What was going to become of me? me, with a family to support! I confided everything about my all-consuming passion to him… 

 

“In the leg of a dancer the whole world, its waves, and all of its rhythms, its irrationalities, its aspects are inscribed!… Not simply jotted-down!… The most nuanced poem in the world! …moving! Gutman! Everything! That ineffable poem, warm and delicate which is a dancer’s leg in balanced movement is in touch, Gutman my friend, with the soundings of the very greatest mystery, which is God. Which is God himself! Quite simply! That’s the gist of what I’ve been thinking! Beginning next week, Gutman, after the end of the term, I no longer want to work save for the dancers… Everything for dance! Nothing outside of dance! Life has laid hold of them, pure…has taken them away…given the least impetus, I would go off to lose myself amongst them…for the rest of my life…scintillating…undulating…Gutman! They are calling me!… I am no longer myself… I give in… I don’t want to be tossed away unto eternity!… but unto the source of everything…of all the waves… The reason for the world is there… nowhere else…

To die by dancer!… I am old, I am going to die soon… I want to crumble away, keel over, dissolve, evaporate, turn into a cloud…in arabesques…in the void…in the fountains of the mirage… I deserve to perish in the most beautiful way… I want her to whisper upon my heart… It will cease to beat… I promise you! See to it Gutman that I am close to the dancers!… I want to pass away well, as does everyone, you know…but not in a chamber pot…but by a wave…by a beautiful wave…the most dancing…the most touching…” 

I well knew the person to whom I was speaking, Léo Gutman could understand me… A well-born colleague, Gutman! …endowed with a clientele that few others could match…rubbing shoulders with all of Parisian high society…what connections! …subtle, optimistic, insinuating, knowing, fine as amber, a ladies’ man, knowing more about female disorders, venereal diseases, and baronesses to great detail, as well as alkaline drugs, acidic drugs, famous assassinations, false ailments, false breasts, specious ulcers, and little-known glands, than twenty notaries, five Lacassagnes, eighteen police commissioners, fifteen confessors. In addition to that and all by himself, he had more libido than thirty-six cops, which didn’t spoil anything, and facilitated enormously his comprehension of things. 

“Ah!” he said in reply, “Ferdinand, you have a new vice there! you want to ogle the chicks? at your age! that’s a fatal inclination!… You don’t have much money… Considering that you will prove to be somewhat repulsive…in view of your physique… I regard you as being poorly put together… Considering that you are not distinguished… Considering that your books are so grotesque, so dirty, that that will surely work against you, and that it would be best not to show them, even more so than your face… I will begin by presenting you incognito… How does that strike you?” 

“Ah!” I protest, “but Gutman, I thoroughly agree! I embarrass myself enormously! I want to be completely clear… I myself prefer to remain in the sentry box… To espy those lovelies, shielded by a heavy curtain… I don’t at all intend to reveal myself personally… I only wish to observe the darlings ‘at the bar’ in the utmost secretiveness…to admire them in their exercises as one would the religious objects in a church…from a good distance… Not everyone receives the Communion!…” 

[G.:] “That’s it… That’s it all the same! don’t show yourself! You’ve always had the head of a satyr… Dancers are very skittish…very easily frightened. They are like birds…” 

[F.:] “Do you think so?… Do you think so?…” 

[G.:] “The whole world knows that.” 

 

Gutman was overflowing with ideas. Here’s a convenient intermediary… He thought it over… 

“You aren’t some sort of poet, so to speak? by chance?” …he asked me point-blank.  

“You’ve taken me unprepared…” (I’d never even asked myself that question.) “Poet? what can I say… A poet?… A poet like M. Mallarmé? Tristan Derème, Valéry, the Exposition? Victor Hugo? Guernesey? Waterloo? Les Gorges du Gard? Saint-Malo? M. Lifar?… Like the entire Spanish Popular Front? Like M. Bloch? Maurice Rostand? In a word a poet?…” 

[G.:] “Yes! In a word a poet!” 

[F.:] “Hmm… Hmm… That’s very difficult to answer… But in all candor, I think not… Such would be seen as… The critics would tell me…” 

[G.:] “The critics have said that?…” 

[F.:] “Eh! Not at all!… They have said that as a treasury of shit one couldn’t do any better…in either hemisphere, in the whole round world…than Ferdinand’s fat books… Which are truly veritable dogs… ‘Mad, terse, and hard, they have all been written, out of a most willfully obstinate desire to create a verbal scandal… Monsieur Céline disgusts us, tires us, without astonishing us… A sub-Zola without flight… A poor imbecile with a mania for gratuitous vulgarity…a flat and funereal grotesqueness… M. Céline is a plagiarist of outhouse graffiti…nothing is more contrived, more vain than his perpetual research in the ignoble…even a madman would tire of it… M. Céline isn’t even a madman… This hysteric is a mountebank… He counts upon the silliness, the naïveté of aesthetes…as forced and as warped as possible, his style is an out-flushing, a perversion, extravagantly distressing and gloomy. There’s no sort of light in this sewer! …not the least let-up…not the least poetic flower… One only has to be a snob “of bronze quality” in order to find two pages of this mad reading distasteful… One must pity with all one’s heart, those unfortunate mail carriers who are obliged (out of professional duty!) to pass through, with some effort! such scattered garbage!… Readers! Readers!… Keep yourselves well away from buying a single book by this pig! You have been forewarned! You would have everything to lose! Your money! Your time!…, and then an extraordinary disgust, perhaps decidedly for all literature!… To but one of M. Céline’s books at this moment when so many of our authors, of great, vigorous and honest talents, superabundantly gifted, who honor to our language (the most beautiful of all) fully in their possession of their most excellent mastery, would suffer, would despair over such a cruel short-selling!’ (that, they know something about). ‘To commit this most vile act would be to encourage that most dull-witted, that degrading of all “snobbisms,” the cult of straight-out garbage, “Célinomania”… It would be a stab in the back, at this moment so grave for all of our Arts, and our fine French Literature! (the very finest of all!)’” 

[G.:] “The critics have said all that? I hadn’t read it all, I don’t receive the Argus.” 

[F.:] “Ah! But they give it away, so to speak! Aren’t they all Jews? Who are your critics?…” 

 

[G.:] “Only all of the great French critics!… The finest flower of criticism!… Those who decide upon the Grand Prizes!… ‘Monsieur, you are a great critic’… ‘A young critic of great talent!…’” 

[F.:] “They’re a bunch of stupid bastards! All a bunch of stupid bastards, those Jews! All of them are losers, suckers, oddities! each one of them is responsible for the killing of at least fifteen works… They exert their vengeance… They crush… They evoke spite… Poxy types!…” 

[G.:] “Ah! If only I were a royalist newsboy…a ventriloquist…a Stalinist…a rabbinical Célineman…how amicable they would find me… If only I were to sell-out, quite simply…the table and the bar are available… The critics are always inevitably wrong… Error is their natural element… That’s the only thing that they have ever done throughout the course of known history: to be in error… Through stupidity? Through jealousy?… The only two drive-wheels motivating these judges. Criticism is a well-known indulgence granted to the Jews… The great revenge of the impotent, of the megalomaniacal, in all ages of decadence… They cadaverize… Tyranny without risk, without effort… These are the most rank of losers, who decree the fashion of the day!… He who doesn’t know how to do a damn thing, and fails in all of his endeavors still possesses one marvelous recourse: Criticism!… An incredible development of modern times, for which no further explanation can be given. The critics reveal only their own effrontery, those dirty little guardians of the very shittiest sewers… Completely in the shadows, drooling, toxic, trashy, scrambling…”  

[F.:] “Only one has found you to be somewhat interesting…” 

[G.:] “Yes?” 

[F.:] “Marsan.” 

[G.:] “He died for it.” 

[F.:] “Fernandez…” 

[G.:] “He’s a friend.” 

[F.:] “And then there’s Sabord.” 

[G.:] “I fear for his life! my patron!” 

[F.:] “And there’s Strowsky…”⁷ 

[G.:] “He isn’t going to be doing it any more.” 

[F.:] “And Daudet?”⁸ 

[G.:] “He’ll spit you out!” 

[F.:] “Would he happen to be a Jew?” 

[G.:] “Everything is going badly!” 

 

That which Gutman had told me, spontaneously, extemporaneously, overwhelmed me from head to toe… 

“Gutman! Gutman! I have offended you my poor fellow! I have confused particular ‘Jews’ …with ‘Jews’ in general…” 

“Nothing on your part has offended me… Nothing hurts me Ferdinand! Now answer my question…are you a poet, yes or shit?” 

“Ah! Léo, Léo my little djibouk, in order to get to the dancers… I will be a poet!… It’s agreed! …in order to attain to that divine game of love, I shall make of this Earth, of this cadaver beneath the depths of the clouds, a star of the first magnitude! I reculate before no sort of miracle…” 

“Then do it! say no more! do the dirty deed! take up your plume… Slap a pretty ballet together for me, something neat and lively… I will take it myself…to the Opera… I myself!… M. Rouché is my friend!…” 

“Ah! Ah! I’m still amazed… Really? Truly?…” 

“It’s official!… He’ll do whatever I ask of him…” 

“Ah! Léo…” (I throw myself on my knees) “Gutman! Gutman! my old prepuce! You have exalted me! I am seeing Heaven! The Dance is Paradise!…”

“Yes but pay close attention… One poem!⁹… Dancers are difficult…impressionable…sensitive…” 

“A charade of the Jews!… Impostors!… I protest!… Advertising!… Have the valets become the masters?… What sort of epoch is this? This is the great pity! Gold has soiled everything! The golden calves! The Jews are at the Opera!… Théophile Gautier!¹⁰ quivering! dirty longhair. You would have been thrown out under Gisèle!… He wasn’t a Jew… I’m kidding.” 

“You are speaking too much rot…” 

“I promise! I won’t say any more! so long as my ballet succeeds!”

“You boast like a Jew, Ferdinand!… But beware! no garbage! Any pretext would prove useful in order to eliminate you! Your reputation is execrable…you are venal…perfidious, false, stinking, perverted, vulgar, oblivious and scandal-mongering!… Anti-Semitism now makes everything complete! That tops it off!… The Opera! The Temple of Music! the Tradition! …some Precautions!… A lot of delicacy! of flight certainly! but no more violence! …no more of those repugnant muddles… The Director, Mr. Rouché, is a man of perfect taste… Take care to subtend the exaltedness of the melodies within the Temple… He would never forgive me for having recommended to him some sort of blithering…for having drawn his venerable attention to the jackasseries of a hod carrier… Ferdinand! Sense and measure!… Charm…sentiment…tradition…melody…the true poems come at this price…the dancers!”  

The fever came over me… I gave in to it… Here it is: 

 

THE BIRTH OF A FAIRY 

Ballet in several acts 
 

Epoch: Louis XV¹¹ 

Place: Wherever you would like. 

Setting: A clearing in a woods, some boulders, a river in the background. 

Action: Upon the rising of the curtain, the little spirits of the forest are dancing, leaping, twirling about… It’s the world of the imps, the goblins, and the elves… Their chief is an imp wearing a crown, the King of the Imps, nimble, agile, and always on the lookout… They are playing…leap-frog… With them, in this joyous circle…a frail and timid doe…their little companion… And also a large companion, the great owl… He also dances, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right…but quietly, always somewhat retiringly… He is the little band’s counselor, its sage…always a bit of a stick-in-the-mud… The little rabbit is there as well…with his drum… The shoutings of a joyous band can be heard… Young fellows and young ladies…who are approaching the clearing…the foremost of these young ladies appears between the bushes: Evelyne… A very beautiful, very joyous, very gay, very scintillating young lady. She happens to catch sight of the very last of the little imps…who flee upon her approach…being afraid of humans… 

The imps disappear into the woods… Evelyne beckons to her friends, to rejoin her quickly, in the clearing… Quickly! Quickly!… She gestures that she has seen imps dancing in the clearing… The others laugh…incredulous… They are numerous, young, and handsome…boys and girls… They in turn dance in the clearing… Games… Blindman’s-bluff… Teasing… Playing hard-to-get… One of the boys in particular is most pressing… He is ardently courting Evelyne… It’s the Poet… He is dressed in “poet” garb… Grayish-green jacket, tight-fitting shirt… Blond and wavy hair… A scroll of poems under his arm… He is Evelyne’s fiancé… Still more dances… Dances forever joyous!… 

2^nd Tableau: 

In front of the village inn… It’s the opening day of the Fair… Groups of people are bustling, busy…parti-colored… Jugglers, peasants, animals, etc. Under the great porch of the inn, old hag Karalik squats, telling the fortunes of peasants, merchants, etc. Mother Karalik is a nasty old gypsy woman…an envious witch… She knows how to read the future in the lines on the palm of the hand… The villagers arrive… To the right…to the left…the acrobats do their stunts… Organs…musicians…animal trainers…etc. 

Evelyne and the poet, followed by the entire band of joyous young folk, now spill out into the marketplace… Their laughter…their boisterousness drive away the old Karalik woman’s clients… Her stand is knocked over…old Karalik hexes their farandole. She swears…she curses…she threatens…the young people joke and make fun of her… And then there’s a bit of reconciliation… The young ladies go up to her… The Poet also… But the hag doesn’t want to read their palms… She’s angry…

 

upset… Still more arguments… The hag then seizes Evelyne’s hand… Everyone else mocks the hag…makes faces at her… The hag gives the evil eye to Evelyne…and to the Poet… At this moment a storm rumbles…rain falls… The crowd disperses…the scenario dissolves… Young people and villagers flee…they go back home…the old woman remains alone in the vast marketplace…she is all alone under the storm…she cackles…she does the dance of “evil spells”… She mocks the young people…she mimics their little mannerisms…their coquetries… Their lovers’ games… She dances the “witches’ dance” with a limp… The nasty old thing…all over the stage…criss-crossed with flashes of lightning and the roll of thunder… 

3^rd Tableau: 

The same location, still before the inn… It’s another day of the fair… A crowd… Jugglers, etc. Some large decorative panels have been mounted upon the walls of the inn…various soothsayers are recounting some tall histories to the peasants…flattering them and selling them medications…sales pitches. 

In one part of that crowd… A large sedan wagon (with eight horses) is trying to make its way down the road… Heavily loaded… The crowd seeks to impede the sedan’s passage…its progress… Bunches of street urchins hang from the doors…and from the baggage… The great sedan lists and then collapses to one side… An axle has happened to break… The happy crowd is completely amused by the accident… (This accident transpires directly in front of the inn.) The coachman of this sedan quickly comes down from his seat… He’s an extremely swarthy, extremely petulant little man, his face dark under his great three-cornered hat, and with eyebrows and mustaches à la Mephisto… (Take care! in reality, this is indeed the Devil himself, in disguise!) 

Immediately he encounters the fat hotel keeper, who has just popped across the threshold of his door, attracted by the great commotion… Very hearty and reciprocal salutations… At the doors of the sedan…appear twenty very charming heads, mischievously giggling pretty faces…curly-topped…twenty young ladies on a trip… Animated faces…sparkling, naughty… They want to debark no matter what… The little coachman says no…he forbids it completely… There’s something of a mix-up… The crowd takes their side and calls out… “Come on down!… Come on down!…” The crowd gathers around, begins to mill about… The sedan opens… “Come on down!” The twenty young ladies (each with a floppy hat, a little traveling case, a little parasol…etc….) leap gracefully to the ground. No sooner do they hit the ground, than they furtively slip away…rebellious… The little coachman Mephisto is overwhelmed… He swears… He goes hither and yon… He catches up with them in the crowd… Finally, he is able to regather his troupe…but the heavy sedan is no longer able to roll… Broken down!… 

“We must press on, My demoiselles!… We must press on!”… Having with great effort finally regathered, reunited his wacky escort, he lectures the young ladies!… He explains to the fat hotel keeper as well, that it is he himself who is the one in charge!… That it is he who is the master! That it is he who must be obeyed!… The “Master of the Royal Ballet”! He is to lead his rebellious troupe to a neighboring castle for the Prince’s wedding celebration!… The Ballet Corps! These little ladies are up to a thousand pranks… They are completely happy with the turn of affairs… A great hubbub…a calf…a pig…traverse the stage… The Ballet Master “Mephisto-Coachman”…finally regroups his dancers; he has them pass through the porch of the inn together as a group…guiding with his whip… He recloses the heavy door behind himself… “Enough! enough!” The crowd is amused by his anger and his cosmic disarray… Ah! He’s a crafty one all the same!… He is cunning!… He pretends to the contrary… The door closed, the dissatisfied crowd begins to disperse… The wives drag along their husbands…reluctant… Evelyne

 

drags along her poet… The young ladies are obliged to tug just a bit upon their suitors…who are now hoping to be able to meet the dancers… 

As it so happens the men don’t stay away for very long… For several seconds at most… They return upon the stage one by one (the men only) …they try to guess what is going on inside the inn… They knock at the door… There’s no answer… They try to open the door… Their eyes are glued to the shutters… They all return to there… The poet, the fat magistrate, the notary, the doctor, the professor, the greengrocer, the blacksmith, the gendarme, the general, all of the distinguished citizens, the workers, and even the undertaker… Dance music is heard…coming from inside the inn… The curious ones peep through the holes… They mimic that which they are observing, in cadence and in petits pas… The young ladies of the Ballet are in the process of rehearsing a number, inside the Inn…  

4^th Tableau: 

At the outset all is dark…during which all of the notables exit the stage… The outside wall of the inn is raised out of view…thus one now sees the interior of the great hall of the inn…converted under the circumstances into a dance studio… The little ballet master won’t put up with any slackers. He presses his students. He has had the chairs drawn back along the wall…as well as the tables… He orders them to put on their ballet outfits… They undress…very…slowly… They are now ready for the lesson… He draws his little violin from its pouch… Barre… Positions… Entrechats… Ensembles… Badines! …Variations… He castigates, he directs the dance… 

During this time it can be seen, thanks to a sidelight to the right, that the fat notables have returned in order to spy…from the outside… They are getting an eyeful¹²… They become excited… The affair of the wives trying to wrench them away from the shutters. The notables jig about, and hop in place on one foot… They crush up against the windows… But one of them, the fat magistrate, is the first to happen upon a little-known door left ajar… He slides inside the inn. Now he’s to be seen inside the room completely enraptured…completely filled with wonder!… The little ladies are taken aback… The Devil reassures them… “Enter…enter then…” he so invites the magistrate… He places him into an armchair very conveniently next to the wall…so that he might not miss a single detail of this beautiful lesson. The doctor slips in through the same door… To the same welcome…the postman, the notary, the general… Soon they have all filtered in, one by one… They are emplaced…under the spell of the dance and the dancers… The “representatives of all callings both high and low…and the notables are hypnotized by the lesson… They mimic the movements, the stances, the arabesques...the variations... The Devil is delighted… The poet is finally the last to arrive… He soon becomes the most enraptured of all! He has forgotten all about his Evelyne… He makes his burning declaration to the prima ballerina… He wants never to leave her… He thereupon dedicates a magnificent poem unto her… 

[11]

5^th Tableau: 

Once again in front of the inn… The carriage has now been repaired… It has been drawn up before the door… Everything is ready for the departure… The fat hotel keeper bids adieu to the devil-coachman-ballet master. It is he who precedes his hale and chirping troupe… Their baggage is carried… The crowd again forms around the heavy sedan. They’ve come to see its departure!… The dancers are

 

in the car!… But the notables…judge, poet, doctor, etc….cannot bring themselves to quit the dancers… They have all been bewitched…neither more nor less!… Their wives meanwhile are contributing to the great uproar… They also mount an assault upon the car… The scandal is at its peak! Nothing of the sort has ever been seen! All of the husbands, at a single stroke! have forgotten all about their vows!… For shame!… The wives try to pull their husbands back… But in vain… The wives grab onto the baggage! the doors! the straps! …anything at all!… The husbands climb onto the roof of the sedan…scaling…the heavy car… It begins moving off… The poet pulls himself free from the arms of Evelyne… He runs after the car…after the “Star”… 

The car is already far off…great anger, much spite among the wives… Hatreds! …vindictiveness! …clenched fists…anathemas!… The old witch Karalik stirs up and leads the fury… And then all of the wives exit the stage… Evelyne remains alone on stage, in a half-shadow… She has in her turn become completely saddened… She’s overwhelmed…chagrined. She isn’t cursing anybody…she is going to commit suicide…she can put up with it no longer! 

6^th Tableau: 

The same clearing as in the first tableau… Evelyne enters by herself, increasingly morose and disheartened… She moves across gently…toward the river. She thinks about Death… Enter the Angels of Death…in black veils… The Dance of Death…the angels surround Evelyne…cradling her… She tries to dance… She no longer can… She fails… Slow movements of sorrow and surrender…by the water’s edge… 

Death also enters…she herself dances…she fascinates Evelyne, and obliges her to dance… 

At this moment a man, a hunter, goes across the entire stage… He is goes looking about…he rustles through the copse… The Angels of Death fly away on his approach… Evelyne remains alone on her rock, overwhelmed… The hunter goes past again…several hunters… Then a doe quickly crosses… The amiable doe…companion of the little spirits of the forest… She is being followed by the hunters… She passes again…she is hit…an arrow in her side…some blood…she collapses right at the feet of Evelyne… Evelyne leans over the doe…she carries her away…hides her behind the boulder, on a bed of moss… 

The hunter retraces his steps…and asks Evelyne whether she’d seen anything? …a wounded doe?… No!… She hadn’t seen anything… The hunters head off… Evelyne moistens her veil in the fresh water…and dresses the doe’s wound… 

The little spirits of the forest emerge from the woods…they celebrate and embrace Evelyne, who has just saved their little friend the doe… Recognition… But Evelyne is not at all in the mood for rejoicing… She tells them of her despair… The Poet’s abandonment… She can no longer live…she no longer wants to live… The lamentable solution! …to jump into the river… The little spirits rise up…decry…protest… She? Die?… But no!… She must remain with her little friends… Why such woe?… She explains…that the poet had run off after a marvelous dancer…seduced…and in future…defenseless… Evelyne didn’t know how to retain him… How could she have rivaled the dancer? It’s all too much!… “Is that the only thing that you’re needing? To dance?…” the little spirits laughed aloud… “To dance?… But we’ll teach you how! We will!… And you are going to dance better than any other dancer on earth!… Say there!… Do you want us to show you how?… Do you want to learn the Great Secrets of Dance?…” The little king of the spirits called, invoked, and commanded the spirits of the

 

Dance… The first of all is the “Leaf in the Wind”… The Dance of the Leaf in the Wind… Evelyne dances each time with the invoked spirit…better and better… The “Whirlpool of Leaves!… “The Autumn” …the “Will-o’-the-Wisp”… “Zephyr” himself…the “Undulating Fogs” …the “Morning Breeze” …the “Foxfire” …etc. Evelyne’s dancing goes from good to even better!…    

Finally one of the spirits gives Evelyne the gift of a “Golden Reed” which he had gathered up on the mountain; the magic reed!… Evelyne fixed the pretty golden reed upon herself as her corsage… She now danced divinely… Perfectly… All of the little spirits of the forest rushed up to admire her… Ah! now she could return to her life!… She need no longer fear a rival… Fond farewells, highly emotional, touching displays… Evelyne leaves her little friends in order to rejoin her fickle fiancé… She leaves the clearing on pointes… From a distance her little friends blow her a thousand kisses and all of their wishes for much happiness!¹³… 

7^th Tableau: 

Once more before the inn… 

Evelyne is all the same a little disconcerted with her “golden reed”… How was she to find her fiancé once again?… She doesn’t know which way to go… Where could he be?… She searches…she asks around… Nobody knows… And then a diabolical cycle goes into motion, as she goes to hear from the old witch Karalik, so nasty, so venomous… She would certainly know!… In confidence, Evelyne explains to her…all of what has just happened… And that now her dancing is a marvel… “Really? …truly? …let me see!…” Evelyne dances a few steps… It’s perfect!… Karalik is astonished… Quickly she stirs up all of her tribe of gypsies… The women as well as the peasants…they surround Evelyne…how she dances! how she’s admired!… Evelyne dances… The charm is infinitely powerful… Irresistible! Immediate!… All of the men are soon seduced… The gypsies most of all… One of them comes out from his group… He tries to dance with Evelyne… Touches her lightly… He is bewitched… Meanwhile, the hag Karalik eggs-on the jealousy of the women in the crowd… “You see!… You see!… She now possesses the ‘charm’… The Great Secret of the Dance!… She’s going to take your husband!… Gypsy defend yourself!…” She presses a dagger into the hand of one of the wives, the wife of the gypsy who is at the moment dancing with Evelyne… Evelyne is not on her guard… She is stabbed square in the back… Evelyne collapses…the crowd disperses… Horrible! Evelyne’s body remains on stage… Dead! A narrow shaft of light upon the cadaver… The stage all black… A little intermezzo then flows forth…soft music… And then softly…one sees emerging from the shadow…one…two…three little spirits of the forest… Three…four…the doe…the gazelle…the elves…, the will-o’-the-wisp…the great owl… An alarmed confabulation…devastated…the mourning of the little spirits of the forest… They pull the great knife from the wound… They try to revive poor Evelyne… Nothing can be done!…  

The little King of the Elves is more distraught than all of the other little “spirits” put together… He talks things over with the great owl…he who is the sage of the tribe… Evelyne is quite dead… It is on account of the “golden reed”… She danced too well for the living…too well…to possess such a charm is bound to make you greatly hated by the living!… To give rise to too much envy will certainly get you killed!… What could be done?… The great owl had an idea…

 

In the Legend it is written… (in the Legend of the Forest) that if one pours three drops of Moonlight onto the forehead of a maiden who died for love, this same maiden could be brought back to life in the form of a fairy… 

These drops of Moonlight are drops of nocturnal dew which form along the leaf-edges of certain nettles…, and which have been subjected to irradiation by certain phases of the Moon… In the forest Owl once met a certain “weaving” spider who collects droplets of this most rare Lunar vintage in her web… 

He goes off to look for the spider… The dance of hope around the cadaver by the little spirits of the forest… The owl returns with the spider who in a fold of her thorax carries a minuscule vial full of “Moon Drops”… She pours three drops onto the forehead of Evelyne, who gently returns to consciousness. The joy of the little spirits… 

“Where am I?… Who am I?” asks Evelyne. 

“You are our little fairy Evelyne!…” 

“But am I not quite among the living?…” 

“No…you can no longer return amongst the living… You shall remain with us from now on… You have become a Fairy…” 

“Oh! How light I am!… As light as a sigh… And how I can dance now! Even better!…” 

The dance with the little spirits…plus the Spider as well… But despite everything Evelyne is still in the grip of sorrow… She cannot completely forget about her poet…the unfaithful one… 

Her little friends are most perplexed…to see her still somewhat sad… She would like to see her poet again… To deliver him from the regrets which must now be tormenting him… To save him from the hold of the Devil and his demons…to give him at last that final proof of affection… “So be it!… Very well!… We shall all be going together to see your poet… You have to see things for yourself…” the little spirits said to her in answer… “Let us take the nasty Karalik along with us as well… She knows all of the ways of vice…all of the itineraries of the Devil… She could be useful to us.”  

They depart in single file… The cortege of the little spirits, Evelyne and Karalik, crosses through brush, field and thicket, in search of the Devil’s Castle… They pass before the front curtain…dancing in Indian file… Fears, pranks…frights…etc….  

8^th Tableau: 

Inside the Devil’s Castle… 

A lot of gold…some flames…some very vivid colors…the little devil-coachman-ballet master is here, at his home, dressed “naturally” as an actual demon… He presides over a sumptuously set table… Enormous strawberries…giant pears…chickens as big as beefers… All of the notables from the village at the table… The judge, the notary, the general, the

 

doctor… The greengrocer also, and the professor. Between each of the damned is a dancer… That is to say, now an actual demoness… The orgy is at its height! …an enormous Lucifer, himself all of gold…at his table, with its golden table service…by himself eats some souls, raw… He tears them up by the mouthful… The souls are the cryings-out as he does so… He swallows some jewels as well… He sugars the hearts with diamond powder… He drinks tears…etc…. The Poet is chained to a little table… He also is taking lunch…but he is chained… The “prima ballerina” demoness…dances before him…for him…bewitching him. But he can never touch her…nor reach her. He tries… He is in despair… Lucifer, up above, is taking a tremendous delight in all of this infamous spectacle… He wants more of it… He finds it entertaining… He orders the little ballet master to make all of the damned dance…to the whip. All then dance as best they can…each with his own kind… The Judge with his convicts… The Judge very rotund, the convicts very skinny, with their balls-and-chains…their wives bearing ransoms… The old Miser dances with the bailiffs, and the ruined borrowers… The General with his dead soldiers, stiffs fresh from the war, with skeletons and the mutilated by war, all bloody… The Professor with his snotty students, his rascals with fingers up their noses, and the ears of donkeys… The fat Procurer with his whores and his skanks and his chicks… The Greengrocer with his fleeced customers…his false weights…his false balances… The Notary with the ruined widows…his swindled clients… The Curé with the assuredly unfaithful nuns and the pederastic minor clerics…etc. 

At that moment, Karalik cracks open the door…she goes in…behind her, Evelyne and the little spirits of the forest… The surprise of the demons… Lucifer is not happy… He rumbles… He thunders… Lightning… He demands that these intruders explain themselves… Evelyne makes a face of wanting to liberate the chained poet… “No! No! No!…” Lucifer protests… “have Evelyne dance!…” The demonesses are jealous… Karalik shows Lucifer that Evelyne possesses the charm of Dancing… The golden reed!… A demon tries to wrench it away from her… 

Evelyne then makes a movement…a single one…and the entire castle collapses! …and all of its diabolatry is dispersed…by a mighty storm… Profound night… 

We find ourselves again in the same clearing as at the beginning… Evelyne has freed the Poet…his chains are broken…they are at the feet of Evelyne… He begs her forgiveness… Evelyne forgives him. He begs her never to leave him…that she never go away ever again… But she can no longer remain with him… She is now a fairy… She belongs with her little friends of the forest… She is no longer human… He kisses her… He wants to elicits her emotion… But she remains insensible…cold to carnal approaches… She is no longer anything but a dream…spirit…desire… She has become a fairy… The Poet is disappointed…but always in love… Forever in love…thenceforth…forevermore…with his Evelyne who’d become a fairy… Evelyne very softly takes her leave, pulled along by her little friends… She disappears…dissolves away…chiffon sheets…increasingly dense towards the depths of the scene…she becomes more and more unreal…ghostly…diaphanous… She disappears…absorbed by the vagueness of the background…chiffon sheets… The Poet is now all alone… The hag Karalik is changed into a toad! leaping, hopping, forever after to be accompanied by the graceful swarm of mocking spirits of the forest… 

 

The Poet upon his rock…by the water’s edge…heartbroken…unrolls his lengthy scroll… He begins to sing…he will always sing of his loves, ideal, poetic…impossible… Forever…forever… Curtain. 

*…*…* 

They can always say whatever they want about whatever it is that they are placing before you… There’s no such thing as Criticism in and of itself… That criticism in and of itself exists, is a farce. There exist only a well-meaning criticism and then the other, poisonous. All shit or all nougat. It’s a question of partiality. As for myself, I find this tragicomic fantasy entertaining, and most timely. It satisfies me, and I have better taste, all by myself, than do all of the poopy-pantsed and butt-faced critics put together. I have thus decided, arriving ahead of all criticism, that my ballet was worth well more, surpassing by far all of the old themes…all of the old hobbyhorses of the repertoire…the cavalry of the Opera… Gisèle… Bagatelles… Little Nothings… The Lakes… Sylvia… Nothing trendy! nothing imitative!… Examine the arrangement of all of these marvels a little bit further… Regard each article a little more closely… It’s a consummate work…absolutely authentic…everything within is linked together…in terms of multifariousness, of charm…it becomes disturbed…it refinds its balance… Variations…resumptions…everything is interlaced¹⁴…in its multifariousness…it lances forward¹⁵…it escapes again… It wants to be danced!… 

My first and foremost critic, beginning today, is I myself. And that is enough. Magnificent… I must organize my defense without cessation… I must arrive ahead of the Jews! …all the Jews! racist, sly, limited, frenzied, evil… Nothing without them…everything for them!… Everywhere and always! I could already see Gutman… Léo, attention!… Shut-up!… No discussion! Go and take it! He would remain dazed by it!  

“Never! I would never have believed it, Ferdinand…” He would remain quite the dreamer, confounded! He’ll have read the poem aloud two times! He would have revealed the poet at last!… A poet like M. Galeries! a poet like M. Barbès! …and Tino Rossi!… Like M. Dupanloup! …and the coin machine!… Like the little birds! …the Western Railroad… I’ll have been a poet in their eyes! We embrace one another… He’d have put himself into that run-around… I lie down. 

I waited for him like that for a day…then two days…three…ten… I was already beginning to feel a little chagrined… On the twelfth day he returned…perturbed. “M. Rouché thinks that your item isn’t bad, but he asks for the music…at the same time… They do not want even to consider a ballet, by itself, without music!… A musician who is acceptable within official circles…” 

Now there was something that would complicate things… Acceptable within official circles? Acceptable within official circles? My heart jumped… But…

“But it’s only the Jews, who are acceptable within official circles!… Explain yourself clearly…” 

“You’ll have to go see them yourself…” 

I don’t much like having to pull strings, as I have already done an enormous amount of “housekeeping,” in many parts of Paris, in order to situate all sorts of things in their proper places¹⁶… Eh! I no longer have much get-up-and-go… Well screw it then! more’s the pity! I’ll just have to run my rounds! I’ll just have to run myself ragged, nom de Dieu!…, in order to get closer to the dancers… I was ready to do anything whatever!… For Dance! I would suffer two, three deaths in succession… I could see myself already, admirably placed I must say… To put it quite bluntly, I had placed Evelyne, my

 

fairy, there…in such a manner! imagine it!… I’m anticipating it!… I’m anticipating it!… Eh! it was nothing but an ephemeral dream… What a low-down slap in the face! Foutre d’azur!… Take heart! Take heart! Gutman was blowing his trumpet…he nasalized, whenever he became animated… 

Thus I began to pay my visit, one after another, to all of the great Jewish musicians…as they were to be found everywhere… They were all quite fraternal…completely cordial…as flattering as possible…except that at the time they happened to be…preoccupied…overloaded…by this and by that…in the end rather discouraging…evasive. They paid me a thousand compliments… My poem could certainly be seen as worthy… But it was a little long however! …too short perhaps? too mild? …too onerous? …too classical? In the end it was all a bunch of jabbering just in order to lose one’s shirt…a damned misfortune… I began to go broke… Upon my return, to my tower, I most curiously made out the face of Léo Gutman… He was waiting for me on the landing.  

[F.:] “You wouldn’t be trying to Judaize me, so to speak, by chance?… You haven’t been crossing me up among the Hymies? Your mafia? …and a completely supercilious one at that…” 

“Ah! Ferdinand, that would be very poorly received…” 

[F.:] “Nothing to do with the Opera…” 

[G.:] “Listen, I have another idea…” (he was never brief…) 

[F.:] “For the Exposition? …of ’37?… They are going to put on some ballets?” 

[G.:] “Really?” 

[F.:] “It’s official!…” 

[G.:] “Some ballets from Paris?…” 

I began breathing again on hearing those words… 

[F.:] “Ah! That rubs me wonderfully the wrong way, so to speak, my Léon… I was born in Courbevoie!… And then I grew up within the shadow of the bell-tower…in the Passage Choiseul…(that’s the best that I’ve ever done) Thus you have to grant me a little consideration! do I know the capital?… I wasn’t a twenty-year-old new to Paris¹⁷… I was a six-week-old new to Paris, without exaggeration… I haven’t just arrived from Cantal to dizzy myself on the Great Ferris Wheel!… I had been inhaling all of the spittle of the most populated neighborhoods downtown (everybody came down by the Passage to spit) while the great womanizing ‘writers of Paris’ were still running behind their birds of paradise… In order to be from Paris… I did the real thing!… I can count all of that to my credit… My father is Flemish, my mother Breton… Her family name is Guillou, his Destouches…” 

[G.:] “Hide all that! hide all that!… It won’t do to recount those horrors… You will do us terrible harm… I am going to tell you something, Ferdinand. The Exposition of the ‘Arts and Technologies’ is the Jewish Exposition of 1937… The Great Jewbierama ’37. Everyone exhibiting there is Jewish…at least everyone who counts…who is in authority… Not the staffers, the gardeners, the janitors, the waiters, the ironworkers, the handicapped veterans, the doormen… No! the cigarette butt picker-uppers…the restroom attendants finally…the hawkers…the muscle-men… No! But everyone who gives orders…who makes decisions…who makes money…architects, my

 

friend, the major engineers, contractors, directors, are all Yids…full-blooded, half, or quarter, Yids…or at least Freemasons!… It is necessary that the entirety of France come to admire the Jewish genius…to prostrate itself…trussed-up… Jewish! …to drink Jewish! …to pay Jewish! This is going to be the most expensive Exhibition that has ever been seen… France is to be drawn to just die over anything by and for the Jews…and to do so with enthusiasm! with a full heart…to full measure!…” 

Gutman was saying all of this jocularly, in the process of tweaking me…somewhat mockingly… He was taking after me… The Farmer and the Farmer’s Wife… 

[F.:] “It’ll do…it’ll do! …don’t strain yourself…just tell me what you want… I’m giving you this one last chance…in lieu of quarreling…or blood hatred…” 

“Ferdinand, you are going to do as I was instructed, and do a real job for me, a short ballet…absolutely appropriate for the splendor of the Exhibition Hall…” 

“Grab at ye! …what I am going to do, Gutman, is to take you on your word, by your word… I am not going to let you leave! I’m going to shit the whole pile for you! my poem…in its entirety! on the marble-top!… You will be able to deliver it straight-away…” (We were in a café) 

“Waiter! some ink and a pen!…” 

I was no longer able to restrain myself…as I had done for the other fantasy…and in so doing wind-up with a blob… I would trowel it down right there in three shakes…my little project… I had the theme all worked-out… I gave him the manuscript in longhand, hot…and I sent him out with this order: 

“Gutman! Hop to it! But I’m warning you…against being a deceitful dyke!¹⁸ Pay attention! Don’t return to me again empty-handed!… You would irritate me horribly…” 

 

PAUL THE ROGUE, VIRGINIA THE FAIR 

Ballet Mime 

Brief Prologue. 

“Paul and Virginia,” a romantic tableau, is illustrated along the top of the curtain. Paul and Virginia are gaily gamboling about in a lawn bordered by high tropical palms…they take shelter beneath the large leaf of a banana tree. Music… 

At this moment, at one edge of the stage, a very lovely, sprightly, and charming fairy godmother appears, in tutu and with a dainty wand in hand… She advances to center stage on pointes…very softly, accompanied by muted music… She very graciously forewarns the audience… “Certainly! many rumors about Paul and Virginia have been circulating… The truth? oh! be advised!… All has not been told… They did not die, neither the one nor the other…they escaped drowning only narrowly…in the course of that terrible shipwreck… They were gathered up to the shore… You are going to see exactly how and why… Saved in essence by a miracle… It’s a fact! they seem to be always embracing…always in love…but they had better wake up… As it has lately become known to us…” 

 

Upon these words…and always with music and on pointes, the fairy godmother goes off into the wings… 

And now the curtain rises… 

1^st Tableau: 

A shoreline…sand…some vegetation… In the background, some palm trees, some orange trees. A thousand brilliant flowers. A tropical landscape… A tribe of savages is in the middle of the celebration of a feast…music…a tom-tom…furious dancing…lascivious…and then in fits and starts…exasperated… The witch doctor of the tribe, off in a corner, maintains a sort of counter: amulets, vials, charms, and powders, next to the tom-tom… In a saraband…she runs among the rows of dancers…women, children, men…all ages mixed together… She has them drink…obliges them to drink several drops of her potion…each time that they appear to be flagging…exhausted…she quickly goes to perk them back up with her brew…she circulates about…leaping from line to line with her vial and her amulets…then she excites…she super-excites the tom-tom. She pushes the women towards the men…the maidens towards the males…the little girls…etc.… She is the tribal demon… 

Meanwhile these scenes are transpiring…in the distance a small [31] sail can be seen against the horizon…it grows…the howling of the storm can be heard… The wind… The niggers’ saraband quickens…a bacchanal…to the same tempo as the gusts of the wind… The ship approaches… It breaks up on the reefs… A great to-do amongst the savages… They go looking for their spears…their hatchets…preparing for the pillage… The entire tribe descends upon the site of the shipwreck… They soon return with the booty: barrels…coffers…various boxes…and then two intertwined bodies…which they deposit upon the sand…next to the fire… Two inanimate bodies… Paul and Virginia…forever embracing… 

These savages are some of the good savages…they attempt to reanimate Paul and Virginia… They won’t return to life… The witch doctor moves the crowd aside… She knows of a potion… She pours her brew upon them…between the lips… Paul and Virginia return to consciousness…little by little. Paul quickly recoups all of his senses… Virginia is a little slower in coming back to… The emotion…the anguish…of Paul… Paul asks for a little more of the brew… He is avid… The witch doctor herself warns him: “This brew is of an extreme ardor…” He retrieves his senses…unto delirium! Paul gets up… He takes several steps along the beach… He already feels better. His eyes are filled with wonder… he is no longer looking at Virginia…he seems no longer to be in love with her… But Virginia recovers as well…the embrace… She is getting better… They dance together… The circle of good savages surrounds them…everyone is happy for having saved these lovers! Paul still wants to drink more of that brew…but Virginia is mistrustful…she is afraid of that brew… She is not the least bit pleased with the least bit pleased with the way in which Paul is now flirting with the little savagesses… Paul has become annoyed by this reserve…this affectation of prudery. Virginia sulks… Paul lets her know that she is beginning to bore him…all while dancing, frenetically!… Virginia goes off to pout by herself a bit… The first squabble!… In spite of Virginia, Paul becomes wilder and wilder, leading in an impassioned farandole with all of the savages generally, and conducting himself like a cad… He drinks freely of the love potion. More! …and more!… Already Virginia no longer recognizes him… 

 

2^nd Prologue (same curtain). 

The same charming fairy godmother advances on pointes up to the middle of the curtain: she announces: “Those who are absent are absent are not always wrong… It is necessary! and quite often!… You are going to see that Aunt Odile, melancholic, is always thinking about her beloved niece, the touching Virginia… She has read, and reread well a hundred times already, has good Aunt Odile, each page of a large novel…of a marvelous story both tender and terrible… But it has now been nearly three years since the Saint-Géran went down… This doesn’t make us feel any younger… Sadness is heavy for young people…and yet each spring must flower!… I hereby announce to you the engagement of Mirella, the cousin of Virginia, to the spirited Oscar!… Here you see Mirella, mischievous, delicate and tender, a fresh rose of benevolent fortune… You are seeing Mirella, the queen for the day, in the parlor of Aunt Odile!… In the home of Aunt Odile! in Le Havre! …June 1830!¹⁹ You will come to hear of still more great news… I’ll leave it to you to guess what it is… The Semaphore Station can be seen from Aunt Odile’s window… Look closely!… If a blue flag has appeared… It’s a ship! I swear to you!… The ship!… This is between us! Shh!… Shh!…” 

And the fairy godmother disappears on pointes… 

2^nd Tableau (The curtain rises). 

Here one beholds a salon of the period…very opulent…very bourgeois…stuffed furniture…sofas…a piano…two, three large windows…bay windows…looking out upon a cliff…the Semaphore Station…the sea in the distance…very far off… At the beginning of the act, everybody is coming and going in the parlor. A number of young people…joyous…full of life…dance…pairs…quadrilles…etc….cotillions…everything that is wanted for the period…(transcribed into ballet). 

Cousin Mirella (the star) with her fiancé, Oscar…a thousand coquetries are made…other couples form…they spread out around the two…upsetting the parlor just a bit… There’s some leaping through the window… And returning, etc. in leaping, but all of this however…is done in good form!… Elegance…a consciousness of finesse… At the piano…two elderly spinsters, completely caricatural… They are playing four-handed… (at two pianos, or at a piano and a harpsichord if so desired…) Some minor ballet numbers follow…but then a door opens… The dancers interrupt their frolic… An elderly lady makes her entry…she’s very gracious…but reserved…a little apprehensive…self-effacing… She responds very politely…to the respects of the dancers… Mirella and Oscar hug her…as do the others as well… She is surrounded…she is cajoled… She doesn’t want to spoil the party… “Oh! no! …no!’ She gives them the sign to continue…she doesn’t want to interrupt anything…let everybody continue on most gaily… 

Mirella wants Aunt Odile to dance, just one brief step with Oscar!… Aunt Odile gently declines…and slips away… Aunt Odile prefers her armchair by the window… May she be allowed to pass by… Under her arm, she carries her needlework…and also a large book…her dog follows behind… The faithful Priam, who Virginia so loved… It accompanies Aunt Odile to her armchair…before her favorite window… The young couples form up again…the party continues… Just at that moment, however, Mirella feels some sort of malaise…dizziness… A bother…she would prefer to wait just a bit…to lie down…before the next dance… Oscar offers her his arm… The two of them go over to Aunt Odile by the window… Aunt Odile is once again immersed in the reading of that fine novel… Mirella, at her knees…asks her to read the book aloud… Oscar

 

by her side…a charming group… Little by little the dancers begin to languish…they dance only with effort…they gather around Aunt Odile as well… A loose circle forms, of young fellows and young ladies…the music becomes increasingly soft, pensive, sentimental… It is Aunt Odile’s recitation…like unto a song…the daylight wanes…just a bit… It’s sunset… The dream avails itself of this serendipitous assistance… All of the dancers are sitting upon the carpet…upon the floor…mixed into harmonious groups, attentive…listening to Aunt Odile… (soft music…) 

But, at this moment, there is a knock at the door…and it’s kicked open, brutally… Tumult. A messenger boy, a dockside kid…barges in dancing…gamboling…making a face as though announcing great news…across the entire parlor… In an instant…everyone is standing… He has brought message for Aunt Odile… Immediately there is a great upheaval… Excitement!… Rejoicing by everyone!… From the window they look into the distance… The Semaphore Station’s blue flag appears, is drawn up, is raised… Everyone is dancing together from joy!… The aunt has joined into the circle!… The messenger boy…all of the young people… Mirella and her fiancé… Farandole!… Everyone’s off to the port! Hustle and bustle! They hurriedly get ready to go… Coats! …hats! …bonnets! …accessories!… They set off!… Piram also bounds towards the door, yapping! 

Everyone flies through the doors and the windows towards the port… May the best man get there first! Piram is running in all directions… (All of this is to a farandole.) 

3^rd Prologue: 

Upon the curtain, which conceals the set of the Third Tableau, some sort of formidable vehicle is represented, an engine of the autobus-motor coach-tramway-locomotive genre… A colorful diagram of enormous dimensions of this apocalyptic engine, a machine with colossal wheels… A fantastical motor coach…with enormous hubs… A boiler like the pot of a still… A tall, broad chimney…and in front…some terrible copper pistons…valves…gauges of every type…inexplicable utensils…and then in spite of this several coquettish touches… Canopies, garlands, running-boards…a mixture of machinery and romanticistic flub-dubs… And a banner bearing the inscription: “THE FULMICOACH Transport Co., Ltd.” 

(This extraordinary chariot will later emerge from the wings…and roll out onto the stage itself…to the accompaniment of loud and frightful music…of fulminating thunder…at a moment wanting for intrigue.) The same charming fairy godmother…to the same music…gently glides on pointes to center stage…she is carrying a bouquet in hand…of welcome… “Oof…” she makes a face as though she’d hit her head… “I just won’t have that!… Ah! What a surprise!… Did you see the emotion?… What a joyous reunion!… After so many unhappy years…spent in tears… I want to be the very first to kiss them… What joy!… What joy!…” 

At this moment, from the other side of the stage…two…three…four persons enter…some engineers of the period…brooding…curt…disputatious…in frock coats…their aides carrying various tools…surveyors’ instruments…squares…saw-horses… One of the engineers is scratching some figures, some calculations into the dirt… The fairy godmother goes up to him…   

 

“Monsieur!… Monsieur!… What is that?… That enormous horror…would you tell me?… That terror!… We are waiting for Paul, Monsieur, do you know anything about it? …and Virginia?…” 

The engineer doesn’t answer… He is immersed in his calculations…his assistants measure the stage…they measure it again…size it up…estimate…the distances… 

The fairy godmother becomes concerned…she becomes alarmed… Truly not that! …she no longer understands anything… The calculations are finally made… “She’ll pass” the engineer declares decidedly… That’s his conclusion… The others respond in chorus: “She’ll pass!”… The alarm of the fairy godmother… 

She looks at the curtain, at the abominable mechanical monstrosity…the wand falls from her hand… She takes flight…the others, the workers and engineers, mockingly follow her off…the scene is disengaged…  

The curtain rises… 

3^rd Tableau: 

The stage represents the wharves of a port…1830…a lot of activity… In the background are taverns…boutiques…bars…ship chandlers…dance halls…doors which are opening and closing…a brothel… And on the corner of a street…a sign: an arrow pointing out the route: PARIS… 

Children…slovenly rogues…drunken sailors…several bourgeois types…some customs assessors… All of these groups are dancing…a confusion…a crowd… Little groupings…trios…marines…who then meld back into the mass… Various other groups also successively take the principal interest of the ballet for a moment… The crowd seems to organize itself around these latter…and then the groups dissolve away again… Girls of easy virtue…soldiers… Prostitutes in shirtsleeves go about astounded by tall tales²⁰… 

Stevedores…soldiers…stop-overs…sailors…French fry salesmen…barmen…etc. But one more homogeneous group of dancers does stand out… Some stevedores (of the genre of the strongmen at Les Halles) transporting some heavy sacks. They advance in single file…towards the gangway… (to the left, clinging to the side of a large ship)… They struggle forward with great difficulty…as heavy as bears…but always dancing, however, pitching and rolling… They support themselves with thick canes. Bursting forth, at this very moment, from a bar in the background, is a tinny farandole from some player pianos… The farandole of the stevedores… A fantastical scenario… (a dance by the whole group…) They make it up the gangway at last… After a thousand attempts they make it across and disappear into the hold… The crowd returns to its disorder… The crowd is traversed by some passengers who in debarking are preceded by some giant suitcases…trunks, coffers, etc….from every country…each with its characteristic sort of vehicle… A rich Englishman with his butler… A lord in his mail coach…he asks for the route to Paris… It is pointed out to him… He’s happy! Make a leg… He goes in the direction so inscribed: Paris… The entire crowd dances a little movement with him… The gendarmes attempt to reestablish a little calm… The overwhelmed customs assessors swear and threaten… Here you see a Spanish family debarking from the other side of the ship… The solemn mother…daughter…Señoras…a large wagon with benches,²¹ some mules… The route to Paris!…

 

But here’s another bunch of stevedores…these here are rolling some enormous barrels. A dance around the barrels…around…between…atop the barrels… Farandole… Here are the “Birds of the Isles”… Bird merchants…with cages, and fantastic birds…armloads of them…and some perched atop their heads. (And some birds of human size.) Dances… The girls of the port want to pick their plumes…and the birds scatter all about… Once again the police must intervene… A great battle with the stevedores who protect the girls… The plumes of the birds… Clouds of plumes… The Commissioner of the port… He is everywhere at once… He growls, he rages…while the customs assessors are forever ferreting all about. Here are some Russians debarking with their bear and its trainers… The dance of the bear alongside that of the crowd… The drunkards of the port…dance with the bear…greatly amusing… The port’s fishmongers and rogues…still more farandoles…and still other furry beasts… 

Now, a whale arrives…a big one… Some fish are thrown to it… She dances… She offers up Jonas and some Eskimos… She also heads off towards Paris… An occasion for much humor… Here comes a German who is debarking along with his entire family…he also asks for Paris…he’s driving a tandem along with his fat wife… A very rudimentary tandem with a little basket in the back for his numerous children, five or six… Here’s an Arab with his harem upon a dromedary… (dance…) Here’s a maharajah with his sacred elephant… The elephant’s dance… The crowd is amused… The elephant refuses to go to Paris… It is pushed. It resists… There’s a struggle… A great brouhaha… A mad melee… The elephant finally decides… It takes the route… 

And here you see the great gang of towing-women…of the port…in which the team bracing itself against the hawser is preceded by an enormous red-faced “harbor captain”…apoplectic… He is unsparing…in thundering out commands and his abuse…cadenced in order the better to pull… Heave! Ho!… They pull, the towers do…they enter upon the stage little by little as the result of jerking efforts, sticking together on the cable as a team… Immense efforts… They are dressed in rags…terrible shrews…and winos… They pass around the “red,”²² drinking à la “régalade”²³ even while pulling and staggering… All of this is done to the music of “the boatwomen”…  

But the enormous boat resists… The entire team of boatwomen is for an instant, by jumps and starts, pulled out of the scene…into the wings… Then the other people come to their aid… Pretty soon all are throwing themselves into it… Stevedores…ne’er-do-wells…soldiers…sailors…whores… It’s a great piece of cooperation. Always it ebbs and flows… Victories and defeats… The boat however is the stronger…finally… It drags everybody into the wings…the stage is vacant! …that entire crowd is pulled the wrong way around by the ship! …by a sudden jerking of the cable. Little by little some people return…some cabin boys…several stevedores…one or two girls and soldiers… 

But here comes the joyful troupe of Mirella’s friends…along with Aunt Odile and Piram… They arrive at the port completely out of breath… They encounter some passengers who have just debarked…and are now quite ill… These nauseous passengers are still spinning, pitching and rolling…while coming and going upon the wharf… They are greenish and haggard… They are recovering from seasickness… Mirella queries them: “Have you seen Paul? and Virginia?” They don’t know anything at all!… They want to go to Paris…to continue their voyage… They are shown the sign…they head off in that direction staggering along with their mandolins… 

But the “harbor captain” recognizes Aunt Odile… His respects…he’s obliged… He fiddles vigorously with his spyglass… Then examines the horizon… He makes his announcement… Thar’ she is! There’s the ship!… The crowd amasses itself right next to the wharf…cluttering…overwhelming the entire space…

 

The joy!… The joy! …all of Mirella’s friends are carrying bouquets of welcome (in hand), in as touching a moment as possible! 

And here you see climbing, bounding, skipping up the steps of the gangway: Virginia!… Paul!… There’s kissing…there’s hugging!… Triumph!… They are celebrated… They are cajoled… Some presents… Everything that they have brought back from savage lands: carpets…exotic animals…canaries…are borne along by the niggers and little pickaninnies of the tribe which had accompanied them… And then the witch doctor who had not left them… There’s uproarious laughter…there’s jubilation… All of it…very lively…dance and music… Paul proceeds to make his niggers dance…for the welcome-home celebration… Jerky, incoherent, barbarous dances, completely new to Aunt Odile and the others… The tom-tom. The entire crowd observes this strange scene, somewhat worriedly… The young ladies take refuge within the arms of their cavaliers… The savages’ dance develops into something impassioned…sadistic…cruel (with some sabers and spears). Paul is jubilant!… Virginia, snug within the arms of her aunt, does not seem to be very happy over this demonstration… She explains to her aunt that there’s nothing that she can do…that she’s helpless against her Paul’s extravagances. The tribal witch doctor sends the accursed bottle around… Paul seizes the bottle of love potion… He drinks…he is completely reanimated by it… The seamiest, most caddish elements of the crowd, the cutthroats, the drunken sea dogs, go to dance with the niggers…aroused by the spectacle, they intermingle with the tribe…in dancing most immodest. Aunt Odile can no longer hide her indignation… She no longer understands… The young fellows…the young ladies…also go to taste of this liquor…accursed… They beg the witch doctor for some… They then lose all restraint…as soon as the swallow…their dancing becomes extravagant, as the classes, the occupations mingle together… Mixture…chaos… Stevedores…bourgeois types…police…maidens…everyone is in a boiling mass…the entire port… Mirella abandons Oscar, whom she has found to be decidedly too reserved…in his dancing…she latches onto Paul, now a well-season gay blade… Paul is enraptured… The lascivious, provocative duo of Paul and Mirella… Paul finds that Mirella is still overdressed in order to dance in the new style… He pulls off her corsage…her dress…there she is nearly nude…she has lost all modesty… The witch doctor makes them drink more… Aunt Odile is outraged… She tries to reason with Mirella… But the unrestrained young people intervene… Aunt Odile is held back… Virginia sobs in the arms of her aunt… She can no longer do anything for Paul… Paul is accursed… The spirit of evil is within him… All of the young people… Mirella’s friends from the beginning, the very ones who, at Aunt Odile’s, were so finely, graciously reserved and decent, have now gone wild… They in turn tear off their own clothing…contaminated…embracing…mixing themselves in with the rogues…with the prostitutes… They are constantly begging the witch doctor for more liquor… Virginia can put up with it no longer… She goes over to Paul, she tries to separate him from Mirella…to take him back… She makes him ashamed… Paul pushes her away…with her opinions… “You bore me completely… I love Mirella! She dances my way!…” Virginia resolves herself under the insult… “Ah! so this is the genre that you admire?… You must have some lust! …some frenzy! So be it!… You’ll see! what it is! that I can do! when I abandon myself to the fire!…” She brusquely goes over to the witch doctor, she takes hold of the great bottle…the entire potion… She puts it to her lips… One gulp, two gulps…she drinks the whole thing… The entire crowd is now turned towards the modest Virginia…it is now taunting and hostile… The witch doctor tries to restrain her… Nothing doing! Virginia empties the entire bottle… Then the delirium seizes her…rises within her…she tears off her clothes, and she dances with even more passion, more fire, more provocativeness and more lubricity, than that which Mirella had just done… It’s a fury…a dancing fury… Paul had never before seen the like of it… and this pleases him, brings him to heel… He has already quit Mirella and gone back over to

 

Virginia… He intends to dance with her… But Mirella, taunted…revolts… The anger rises within her…she gets carried away…she can no longer restrain herself… Everybody is mocking her… Then Mirella leaps over to a sailor, wrenches his boarding pistol away from him, from his belt, squeezes and kills Virginia… Virginia collapses… General terror… A circle is made around the unfortunate Virginia… Paul is beside himself… Silence… Very softly…some mournful music… 

But now there arises an enormous hullabaloo! …fantastic! …from the right side of the stage… The sound of a locomotive…of pistons…of steam…of bells…of a horn…of chains…of iron-on-iron…all of which is horribly mixed together… The engineers from just a while ago push back the crowd…clearing the way… A hobbledehoy precedes them…with a red flag and a bell which he agitates… Out of the road…out of the road! Make way!… The terrible engine… roaring, wheezing, rumbling…appears little by little upon the stage… It’s the “Fulmicoach,” the phenomenological ancestor of all automotive vehicles… The ancestor of the locomotive, the automobile, the tramway, and of all fulminating machinery… An enormous engine, fantastic, frightful… It has its own music within itself, of the jazz genre… The crowd turns toward the monster…the crowd is already no longer thinking about the dead Virginia…stretched out in the foreground… 

Only Paul is on her knees next to her…crying… Poor Aunt Odile can no longer bear her emotions this time…she goes mad…she jumps from the wharf into the water… She drowns herself… 

The infernal machine gradually advances… A man seated upon high, in front of the chassis, blows the horn (mail coach style), while the crowd’s emotion is at its peak… Its enthusiasm as well… Some velocipedes circle the monster…the cyclists fire their pistols into the air, in a farandole around the monster… Make some noise!… Now all of this enormous utensil which is advancing thunderously and magisterially can be observed… The rumbling monster is celebrated…it elicits enthusiasm… At the very top of the chimney is the American flag… The engine came from America… Some American tourists are heading off towards Paris… The “Fulmicoach” begins its disappearance from the stage… The crowd cannot help but to follow the “Fulmicoach”…fascinated…an extraordinary vehicle…the crowd moves off into the wing…behind the “Fulmicoach”… Only Paul remains, beside Virginia…but not for long… Some young girls, all of them overstimulated, unbridled, bounding, retracing their steps…reproach, entreat Paul, to make him understand that he is wasting his time! …that life is short! …that it’s necessary to find amusement further on…always further on…that it’s necessary to climb into the “Fulmicoach”…that it’s necessary to drink and to forget… They pick him up, oblige him to pick himself back up…and to drink still more from the accursed bottle…forgetful Paul!… 

He is now standing… He staggers… He no longer knows… He follows the maddened crowd… He turns back just a bit… The farandole drags him along… He disappears… 

Only the dead Virginia remains on stage…in a little spotlight…and also Priam, the faithful dog, who is now also alone…the only friend remaining… He goes over to Virginia… He lies down, right by her side… 

That is all. Curtain. 
 

 

Four days later, Gutman returned from the Exposition…his head horribly bowed in shame, from his grimace to his heels. He brought back news only of setbacks. 

“It’s even more Jewish, Ferdinand, than I had imagined!” 

Between sighs, he swore to me that he had everywhere encountered Jews of a Judaism boiling over with a frightful racism, ten in the office and thirty in the hallway. 

[F.:] “That’s all that you’ve found to tell me about? those few crumbs? Then there’s nothing for Frenchmen? Nothing for the children of the soil? Nothing but the guard dogs? and the cloakrooms?” 

I had shaken his composure, I had made him roll his eyes (so globular, so Jewish). 

[F.:] “I will never get any dancers then? I will never get any! you promised. The Kikes get it all! What a mug! traitor!” 

[G.:] “All of the sweeties, Ferdinand, all want to hook up with Yids. The Jews, for them, are their entire future” 

He then hung his head, like a calf without its mother He scratched his huge ears. He found delectation in making me suffer! He was sadistic, unavoidably… 

[F.:] “Do you want to know the effect that you have on me? do you want to know? say. vampire?” 

He didn’t want me to explain it to him. He knew all the same 

[F.:] “I’m going to tell you about it, look, I know a man, I do, a man who is one of the most erudite graduates in philosophy! That’s something! Do you know how he has himself a good time? how he amuses himself? With dogs? 

No, he didn’t know. 

[F.:] “He goes out randomly in the evenings, along the walls of the fortresses. He calls a dog from afar, a big one which he [41] reassures, he pets it first of all, he gets into its confidence…and then he feels its balls…like that…very gently…the glans…and then he polishes it… The dog is all happy, it makes itself available, it puts out…it wags its tongue…and at the precise moment when it is about to come…while it is clenched in his fist… Then, do you know what the man does to it? He wrenches-off its scrotum in one movement, like that, wrack! …in one big dry blow!… And that’s you! look! say it’s so, wrecker! you have done exactly the same thing to me through your charades… You have made me send back my orgasm… You have wrenched-off my balls… You are going to see what it means to have a poem rejected!… You are going to tell me about some new whores! Ah! the thin veil of a worthless turd! Ah! you are going to see that anti-Semitism! Ah! you are going to see whether I tolerate being toyed with for nothing!… Ah! you are going to see a revolt! …an uprising by the natives!… The Irish, for the last hundred years, have been getting up every night in order to strangle a hundred Englishmen who

 

didn’t do to them one quarter of what we have to put up with, from you, the Kikes! It’s official! Chinese! It’s official! 

*…*…*…*…* 

All things considered, it’s not just since today that I’ve come to know the Semites. When I was on the docks in London, I saw plenty of Yids. These weren’t Hymie jewelers, these were vicious lowlifes, they ate rats together²⁴… They were as flat as flounders. They had just left their ghettos, from the depths of Estonia, Croatia, Wallachia, Rumelia, and the sties of Bessarabia… They were given in to intrigue, which was the gist of their mumbling…to work their charm on the hard-nose types…and upon the policemen on duty… They began the seduction in order to work their way into the officers’ Post… I’m talking about the “Dundee” dockyard, for those who are familiar…where bulk items were unloaded, mostly fibers but also marmalade… The “Schmout”²⁵ would crack a smile… Always ever-closer to the policeman…that was their motto… And then let me tell you how they flattered him…how they sweet-talked him… And how the said how strong he was…intelligent! …how admirable he was, the brute!… The cop is inevitably an Irishman²⁶… Which always lends itself to the force of illusion. He’s fatuous like all Aryans…it goes over… Very quickly he softens into a sausage for the Kikes…he takes pity…he invites them in…for a sit by the stove! …a cup of tea… 

The Jews, they now frequent the guardhouse, they are no longer outside… When it comes to crookedness it is they who take first place… All of this takes place under the hydrant! with hoses that are turgid like dicks! beside the yellow waters of the docks…enough to sink all the ships in the world…in a décor fit for phantoms…with a kiss that’ll cut your ass clean open…that’ll turn you inside out… 

The Jew is already hidden-away, while the whites rail away under the deluge… They lash out all about like dogs… They are the ones on the outside, they are the ones howling into the wind… They don’t understand a thing… And now the unloading of ships works like this… The boat announces itself…it comes up to the wharf…it docks… The “second mate” climbs up into the cabin…just like that the hawsers arrive at the heads. The scow bobbles between the “stakes”… There’s a regular hoard of those smart-asses, all packed together down beneath…they’re all grinding against one another, I tell you… They await the “number”…the bell!… They need fifty! it is announced… 

And then it’s a ferocious free-for-all…for the first ones to get there, heave to it! way up there! from the dockside, go the good ones…those who could got closer, and climbed up the rigging… All of the others, all of those who fell back down, they could starve… For them there would be no sausage…no “shilling” and no pint. 

There was to be no mercy, I assure you… It was the penknife that ruled the day…in the end, for the slackers… A stab in the ass… Fztt! and you’d let go of the rope…that bunch fell down into the interstice…between the hull and the wall…into the flotsam, which was even more suffocating… They wound up in the propellers… 

In the depths of the hangar, the agent of that powerful company, the “Dispatcher,”²⁷ waits until everything is ready, until the row is over, taking his time over his lunch, standing, atop an overturned trunk… 

 

I would always see him, with ham…peas…what have you…on a big pewter plate…the peas as big as prunes… He never left off tending to his mug, nor did he quit his house-coat, nor his great “manifest” napkin… He waited until everything had quieted down…until the pugilism was over…he didn’t bat an eyelash… He never pressed things. He’d be feeding his face clear to the end… 

“Ready, Mr. Jones?” he would finally ask…once calm had been reestablished… 

The Second would respond: 

“Ready, Mr. Forms!…” 

After the fracas the Kikes would always come around to reentering into the holds, and infiltrating into the stores, using “papers” and the policeman on duty… They set to business around the winches, and let off the brake… It groaned…it squealed…and then it would roll… And England carried on!… The cranes went up and down. And the most stupid would be found fallen between the freighter and the dockside with a little blade in his ass… 

*…*…*…*…* 
 
 

Let’s talk about something else just a little… 

Towards the end of the summer, I was still at Saint-Malo… I was taking in some fresh air, after a harsh winter… I was walking along the shore ruminating, daydreaming. I was returning from the “Grand-Bé,” that day, in a pensive mood. I was slowly making my way up the road in the shadow of the ramparts, when a voice…cried out my name…giving me a start…a lady was hailing me…from far off…just legs and a head…she takes form…she arrives…a newspaper fluttering in her hand. 

“Ah! say there! …come take a peek!… Take a look at my newspaper! …how they speak of you!… Ah! you still haven’t read it?…” 

She underlined the passage for me with her finger… Ah! how they set you up! She was totally jubilant about it…as happy as possible… 

“You are Céline, aren’t you?…” 

“But yes…but yes… That’s my alias…my nom de guerre!… This is the newspaper of whom? …the newspaper of what? …that you have?…” 

“Read it! what they’ve written first of all! …but it’s Le Journal de Paris! The ‘Journal’ of journals… ‘Renegade!’ …that’s what they’ve dubbed you… Ah! it’s down there in black and white… A renegade! …like André Gide, whom they’ve added…like M. Fontenoy and so many others…” 

Zapped! my heart skipped a beat! I jumped! I flipped!… I’ve been called a thousand different things…but never yet a renegade!… 

“Me a renegade?… I’ve reneged against whom?… I’ve reneged upon what?… I’ve reneged upon nothing!… But I have never reneged against anybody… The outrage is enormous! Who is this turd-face who

 

presumes to take me to task over the issue of Communism?… Someone who goes by the name of Helsey!… But I don’t know him! …where did he come up with such insults?… From whence did he come, this bilious maniac? Isn’t he cheeky, this motley specimen?…” The article was written in bold type in the middle of the page…there was no way that a guy could miss it…the lady was right… 

“The opinions of renegades, of the Gides, the Célines, the Fontenoys, etc., are of no importance, of course… They burn that which they have adored…” He’s a blow-out, this hollow-head, shit!… By what right does he see it fit and proper, this calf’s head, to produce garbage of this sort?… But I have never reneged upon anything at all! And I have never adored anything!… Where had he ever seen that written down?… Never have I climbed upon the platform in order to cry out loud amongst all the echoes, urbi et orbi: “That’s what I am!… I’ll eat the whole thing!… I’ll swallow the whole thing raw!… Let me die of it!…” No! No! No! I have neither nit-picked nor waxed hyperbolic, at any of the meetings!… I adore you my Stalin! my beloved Litvinov! my Comintern!²⁸ I will passionately devour your every word! As for myself, I’ve never voted²⁹ in my life!… My card³⁰ must still be down at the City Hall of the “Second”³¹… I had always known and understood that the idiots were in the majority, and that it has well been predetermined who will win!… Why should I allow myself to be bothered by all of that? It’s all understood in advance… I had never signed their petitions…for the martyrs of this…for the tortured souls of that… You can well rest assured…that it’s always some Jew who is up to something…from some Kikeish or Masonic committee… If it were me, a poor simple “tortured” idiot of an indigenous Frenchman…no one would mourn my departure… No petition would be circulated to save my ass…from one end of the planet to the other… The whole world, to the contrary, would rest quite content…my brothers of the race above all…and then the Jews in unison… “Ah!” they would write, to wit! “They were jolly well justified in bringing the Ferdinand down upon his knees… He was a dirty, vicious old reprobate, a dirty hysterical old bullshitter… He must never be allowed back out of his cage…that damned loudmouth. Would that he’d expire as soon as possible!…” That is what they would say with regard to my head…this manner of grief is time-tested… I myself am well-informed… thus I never belong to anything…neither to the radiscots…nor to the Colonels…nor to the Doriotists…nor to the “Christian Scientists,” nor to the Freemasons, those Boy Scouts of the occult…not to the Children of Garches, nor to the Sons of Pantin, nor to anything whatever!… I belong to myself, to the extent that I can… That’s already hard enough given the present day and age. When one is dealing with Jews, it is they who lay claim to every advantage, all of the pity, all of the charity; it’s their race, they take everything, they return nothing. 

But in speaking again of my voyage, inasmuch as the Journal has provoked me, it is necessary for me to explain myself a little…to provide a few details. I didn’t go to Russia³² as part of a royal entourage!… That is to say, as minister,³³ envoy, pilgrim, buffoon and art critic, I paid for it all on my own hook…with my own little well-earned wad, completely: the hotel, the taxies, the travel, the interpreter, the cooking and the chow… Everything!… I paid out a fortune in rubles…in order to see everything at my leisure… I was not hesitant in making the expenditure… And now it’s the Soviets who are assessing me for still more dough… Or so they think!… As though that were of interest to people. I didn’t assess them one farthing! …not one thank-you! not one cup of coffee!… I paid for it all completely, all of it well more costly than at no matter which “Intourist”³⁴ facility… I was on the take for nothing. I still have the mentality of a worker before the War³⁵… I am not the sort who complains much when he is somewhat in debt… But all the same it is usually the other way around… I am always the creditor…in due and proper form…pursuant to my rights as an author…and without a favorable translation³⁶…let us not be mistaken!… I was always obliged to maintain a deposit of two thousand rubles, that is the exact amount, in my account at their State Publishing House!… Nor did I upon embarking bother to send a telegram to Stalin the Big Dinosaur, felicitating him, and embracing him. And I didn’t go snoring along in a special train, I traveled just like everybody else, albeit much more freely, insofar as I was paying for everything as I went… Between noon and midnight, I was accompanied everywhere by an interpreter (connected with the police). I paid for the whole deal… Her name was Natalie, and she was by the way very well mannered, and by my faith a very pretty blonde, a completely vibrant devotee of Communism, proselytizing you to death, should that be necessary… Completely serious moreover…try not to think of things! …and of being spied upon! nom de Dieu!… 

I stayed at the Hotel Europa, second rate, cockroaches, centipedes on every floor… I am not saying all this simply in order to be dramatic… I have certainly seen worse…but all the same it wasn’t “prestige”…and counting nothing but the room it came out to: the equivalent of two hundred and fifty francs a day! I departed to the Soviets under the commission of no newspaper, no firm, no party, no publisher, no police agency whatever, completely on my own hook, only out of curiosity… Let me repeat that! …as honest as gold!… Natalie used to leave me around midnight or so… And then I was at liberty… I frequently made my rounds at the bars, after her departure, for a little happiness… I followed along behind groups of people…into the curious corners of the city… Through random encounters I was allowed into the homes of a goodly number of people…all completely unknown. With my city map I found myself in little-known neighborhoods…in the wee hours of the morning… No one led me back home… I am not a small child… I am somewhat familiar to the police, all over the world… It would astonish me if they were to have me followed… I can thus speak of myself, as an impartial reporter, a maker of observations… I could also, by running off at the mouth, get twenty people shot… When I say: everything is distasteful in a given disreputable country, I can be believed without reservation… (just as it is true that the Columbie met with some machine-gun fire when passing before Kronshtadt, one fine evening last summer)…

The misery that I saw in Russia³⁷ is scarcely to be imagined, Asiatic, Dostoevskiian, a Gehenna of mildew, pickled herring, cucumbers, and informants… The Judaized Russian is a natural-born jailer, a Chinaman who has missed his calling, a torturer, the perfect master of lackeys. The rejects of Asia, the rejects of Africa… They were just made to marry one another… It’s the most excellent coupling to be sent out to us from the Hells… I am not hesitant to say that after one week of walking about, I had well made-up my opinion… Natalie, as was her duty, had gently tried to indoctrinate me, to make me go back on my words…and then she became angry…when she saw my resistance… It failed to change anything at all… I repeated to everyone around me in Leningrad, to all the tourists, and to all the Russians with whom I spoke, that it was a rough country, and that it was fitting for neither man nor beast to be caught-up in such a mire… Whereupon Natalie began to contradict me, and endeavored to convince me otherwise… I had written to everybody concerning this on postcards, which they could certainly have seen at the Post Office, insofar as they were curious as to what sort of wood I was using to warm myself… Because I myself had nothing to deny!… I have never put on kid gloves… I think what I want, as I can…aloud… 

My indignation is understandable, it is natural, given the fact that I was termed a renegade!… I don’t like that… This Helsey earns his ’tack through the vilification of well-intentioned people… I said so to the person who had me read that echo… Isn’t this feather-duster capable of doing anything else? Today he’s bullshitting on Communism… Tomorrow he’ll be nattering about Tariffs…and the next day about the Stratosphere. Provided that he can pass that turd, he’ll lay it down… It’s a tinkling little bell! …so long as it sells!… That’s his entire technique… But then again it was vacation-time…thus I had some leisure… I said to myself: “Well, I’m going to bullshit ’em right back!” I took up my scintillating plume and wrote one of those editorial letters! to the editor of the Journal…it was a rectification… I assure you… I awaited its insertion… I tried one more time…two more times… There was no more of a rectification that there’s butter in

 

bottles… That’s the rottenness of the Press… You are vilified…it’s gratuitous… I would have sent a lawyer to defend my honor!… He would have told me that it’s so much per word… I would still have been had… How much is it worth to call a Prix de l’Honneur recipient a “Renegade”?… If I were to kill Helsey, with a pistol, It would still be me who would be going to the bank… And perhaps in addition there would be no more Helsey!… Finally…in no way did they tell the truth in the “Journal,” the journal of Paris… I am in the right, and that’s a fact… They gave me some flat excuses… The excuses of people like that are not at all agreeable. 

*…*…*…*…* 
 
 

“Le Seigneur tient ses assises parmi les nations remplies de cadavres, il écrase les

têtes dans les contrées tout autour.” 

(—The Bible, Psalm 110)³⁸ 
 
 

In all candor, it appears to me that all of those who have returned from Russia talk in order to avoid saying anything… They return full of details concerning inconsequential items, while avoiding the essential: they say nothing about the Jew. The Jew is a taboo in all of the books which they present us. Gide, Citrine,³⁹ Dorgelès, Serge, etc., don’t say a word about it… Therefore they babble… They give the impression of having busted-up the violin, of having overturned the dish, but in reality they have broken nothing at all. They cheat, they trace around, they dodge about the essential issue: the Jew. It is the consummate sleight-of-hand, it is bravado…there is a net, one might fall, and not get broken-up. One might get a little sprain…One leaves amongst applause…The roll of drums! You will be forgiven, rest assured!… 

At the present time, the only important thing for the man of affairs, the literary intellectual, the film director, the financier, the industrialist, the politician (for whom this is most important) is not to run afoul of the Jews. The Jews are our masters—here and there, in Russia, in England, in America, everywhere! …Be the clown, the insurgent, the intrepid, the antibourgeois, the fierce righter of wrongs…the Jew doesn’t give a damn! It is entertainment…Gibberings! But don’t touch upon the Jewish question, or you will be quickly put to the fire…Quick as a shot, you will be made to relent, one way or another…The Jew is the King of Gold, at the Bank and in Court…By proxy or in person. He owns everything…the Press…the Theater…the Radio…the Chamber of Deputies…the Senate…the Police…over here, and over there… The great inventors of the Bolshevik tyranny have elicited a thousand cries of horror…that is well understood. They strike terror into the heart, yet are never, ever seen as pointing out the proliferation of Kikes, nor as adding-up to a global conspiracy… An odd blindness… (at the same time it is necessary to bone-up on Hollywood, its secrets, its intentions, its masters, its universal hype, its incredible market of world-wide stupefaction… Hériat has revealed not the least little part of the essential work, of the capital of Jewish Imperialism). Stalin moreover is nothing but an executioner—of enormous scope, of course, thoroughly endowed with conspiratorial virtues, a Bluebeard for a Marshal, a formidable scarecrow, indispensable in Russian folklore… But in the end nothing but a stupid executioner, a human dinosaur for the Russian masses who can be made to kowtow only at that price. But Stalin is only the executor of lowly deeds, and is very obedient, like Roosevelt or Lebrun,⁴⁰ precisely, in cruelty. The Bolshevik

 

Revolution is another story! Infinitely complex! Everything existing as structures within structures, and behind the scenes. And in that backstage are the Jews in command, the absolute masters. Stalin is only a front man, like Lebrun, like Roosevelt, like Clemenceau. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution can be understood, in its long run, only as having been of the Jews, for the Jews, and by the Jews… Kerensky competently prepared the way for Trotsky, who prepared the way for the current Comintern (Jewish), Jews in matter of sect and race, Jewish racists (as they all are), the armed circumcised avengers of the Jewish passion, of Jewish vindictiveness, of Jewish despotism. The Jews egged the wretched of the earth, those stultified by castle and clod, on to the assault on the Romanov citadel…and while they threw the slaves into the assault upon all that perturbed them, with armaments going off and things collapsing here, there and everywhere, those stultified by the clod, the hammer and the sickle, after a moment of drunken jabber, have quickly fallen back under new bosses, new bureaucrats and a new, increasingly Jewish, slavery. That which effectively characterizes “progress” in various societies, over the course of centuries, is the rise of the Jew to power, to all of the powers… All of the revolutions have given him an increasingly important status… The Jew who was less than nothing in the time of Nero, is in the process of becoming everything… In Russia, this miracle has been accomplished… In France, almost… How can it be recruited, and reformed into a Soviet of the USSR? With workers, manual workers (to the second generation, at least) as most enthusiastic Stakhanovites,⁴¹ and then the intellectuals, Jewish bureaucrats, exclusively Jewish… No more white [51] intellectuals! The possibilities for white critics no longer exist!… This is the prime directive implied in every Communist revolution. The Jews can remain in power only on the condition that all of the Party intellectuals be Jews, or at least be furiously Judaized…espoused to Jewesses, half-breeds, half- and quarter-Jews…(these latter are more rabid than the others…). For the sake of good form, various well-enstooged Aryan figures are tolerated, for the parade before foreigners… (genre Tolstoi)⁴² brought into perfect submission by favor and fear. All of the non-Jewish intellectuals, that is to say all of those who must not be communists, Jewish and communist being for me synonymous, have all been hounded to death… They can be seen at Baykal, and at Sakhalin in due season⁴³… Evidently there exist some reprobate Jews in that number, the “Radeks”⁴⁴ … some traitors for the sake of show… such as Serge Victor, a new kind of Judas… They are maltreated a little… A few dozen are shot… They are exiled pro forma…but the ferocious convention of blood continues, I believe… Litvinov, Trotsky, and Braunstein are hated only in our eyes… The rare surviving Aryans, the former official cadres, the ancient families still extant…the rare escapees from the great hecatombs, who continue to vegetate in the government bureaux…the embassies…must give daily proof of their most absolute, most crawling, most extreme submission to the Jewish ideal, that is to say to the supremacy of the Jewish race in every domain: cultural, economic, political… The Jew is a dictator at heart, twenty-five times worse than Mussolini. Democracy is always and above all nothing but the veil of the Jewish Dictatorship. 

Such “liberal” political hobbyhorses are no longer needed in the USSR. Stalin suffices… Frankly Kikeish, he will perhaps become the facile target of anti-Communists around the world, of the rebels against Jewish Imperialism. With Stalin at their head, the Jews are spared. Who is it that is killing everybody in Russia?…who massacres?…who decimates?… Who is this abject assassin? this super-Borgia executioner? Who is this

 

looter? Why, Good Lord! Why, it’s Stalin! It is he who is the scapegoat for all of Russia! …For all the Jews! It is not necessary to be hesitant like a tourist, you can recount whatever you want so long as you don’t mention the Jews… Blast the communist system…curse it! thunder… The Jews mock it fantastically! Their conviction has been made! and strongly made! However nightmarishly disgusting one might find Russia, it nonetheless represents the setting into motion of the world revolution, the prelude to the great completely Jewish night! of Israel’s great triumph! You can sprinkle whatever you want over tons and tons of paper, concerning Soviet horrors, you can issue, wad-up, and strike your pages, but however much your pen attacks and labors with indignation, it will only make them laugh all the more… They will find you increasingly blind and obtuse… When you proceed everywhere to proclaim that the USSR is a hell…you will still be wasting your breath… But it will give them less pleasure when you proceed no longer to pretend, and that it is the Jews who are the devils of the new hell! and that all of the goyim are the damned. But in spite of that effort at reclamation, you can be certain of the massive propaganda…(and the Ural mines are not yet exhausted)… It’s a little more complicated when you sell-out on the party line, the Jewish party line. In the end, it’s a little bit more costly… That’s all… 

*…*…*…*…* 
 
 

“Peuples, soyez attentifs, car l’indignation du Seigneur fondre sur toutes les

nations. Sa fureur sur toutes les armées. Elles meurront de mort sanglante, et ceux qui

auront été tués seront jetés là, une puanteur horrible s’élèvera de leurs corps, et les

montagnes dégoutteront de sang.”

—ISAIAH⁴⁵ 
 
 

The Kikes that rule the Universe, they understand them, those secrets of public opinion. Hidden in the corners, they have all of the wires in their hands. Propaganda, gold, advertising, radio, press, the cinema. From Hollywood the Jewess, to Moscow the Yid, same boutique, same telephone, same agencies, same Kikes manning the lookout, the cash drawer, the business affairs. And then, down beneath, crawling along the ground, are the same masses, pliable and imbecilic, of Aryans of starkly limited potential, of credulous types divided one from the other, fore, aft, all about, and above all… An immensity of drunken flesh, the universal teeming and moaning doormat for Jewish feet. But why be bothered?… How does one stupefy and enchain all of that gloomy flesh? …reinforced by discussion and alcohol? Through radio and the cinema! One creates new gods for them! By the same stroke, more new idols are needed every month! ever increasingly more asinine and vapid! Mr. Fairbanks, Mr. Powell,⁴⁶ would you give the multitudes who give you their adulation immense pleasure, by deigning to appear in person for a brief instant? in all of your overwhelming glory? ultimately fulfilling?  for several eternal seconds? on a massive throne of solid gold? so that that nation which is a fiftieth of the world may finally contemplate God in the flesh!… It is not to consummate artists, to geniuses most sublime that we address our timid prayers…our flaming ardor…it is to the gods, the gods of cattle…the

 

most powerful, the most real of all gods… How, I ask you, do they create the idols which populate the dreams of today’s generation? How can the most wretched idiot, the most disgusting freak, the most pathetic slut, be transformed into gods? …and goddesses? …received by more souls in a day than Jesus Christ over the course of thousand years?… Publicity! For what does the modern crowd ask? It wants to get down on its knees before Gold, and before Shit!… It has a taste for falsehood, for sham, for farcical nonsense, as no crowd ever has from the very darkest depths of antiquity… So at one stroke, the crowd is force-fed, and it just dies for more… And the more unremarkable, the more of a nullity the chosen idol is at the beginning, the greater are her chances to triumph in the hearts of the crowd…the better publicity can fasten on to her nullity, and penetrate, carrying everything on unto idolatry… It’s those surfaces which are smoothest that are the easiest to paint. One erects a Josef Stalin just as one erects a Joan Crawford, the same procedure, the same brazenness, the same swindle, the same effronterous Jews controlling the ropes. Between Hollywood, Paris, New York and Moscow, exists an unbroken circuit of intensive propaganda. Even Charlie Chaplin works for the cause, magnificently, as a great pioneer of Jewish Imperialism. He’s privy to the great secret. Long live the good Jewish whine! Long live the complaint which succeeds! Long live the immense lamentation! It tenderizes all of those good hearts, and along with gold it causes all of those walls which present themselves to tumble down. It renders all of those stupid goyim even more friable, sappy, malleable, supine,⁴⁷ non-prejudiced against this, non-prejudiced against that, all-in-all “humanitarian,” internationalist… While waiting I’ve come to know them well! that they are set into boots! Jewish style! and arranged by little shells of ordinance! Within this fondue of sentiments the Jew trims, hacks, gnaws, erodes, poisons, and prospers. The sorrows of the exploited poor, the forced labor at Citroen,⁴⁸ the banners of protest at Bader, and Chaplin being able to poop billions, all by himself… Long live the excellent Jeremiad! Long live the modern age! Long live the fine Soviets, good Jewbies that they are! Nothing can resist propaganda, it’s all a matter of putting up enough money…and the Jews possess all of the world’s gold…from the Ural Mountains to Alaska! from California unto Persia! from the Klondike to the City!⁴⁹ “The City!” “The Lyonnais!”⁵⁰ …the tellers’ windows where they snag, to the sound of moaning, those sweetmeats from the palms of Aryans! the window of Lamentations! The army of clipped tail-feathers! The gold rush of loans on easy terms! Crying is nourishing! Crying makes things dissolve! Crying is the triumph of the Jews! It succeeds admirably! The world is ours through tears! Twenty million well-trained martyrs constitute a force! The persecuted surge forth, pale and gaunt, from the ages of darkness, from the centuries of torture… Here they are, the phantoms…remorse…suspended to either side of us…Léon Blum… Hayes… Zukor… Litvinov⁵¹… Lévitan… Brunschwig… Bernstein⁵²… Bader… Kerensky…a hundred thousand Levys…the crucified Chaplin…the tragedic Marx Brothers… We have made too many martyrs… How to atone for all of our crimes… We have made them suffer too much… Quickly, we must give them all of our jobs, all of our little wad of dough… Our last little farthings. We must be bled some more…to the end…with two…three…ten well-atrocious wars. All of the frontiers must be beaten down using our vile Aryan flesh… At present, there are too few pogroms…for us, Nom de Dieu! Only for us!… They haven’t organized enough of them. They’re a blessing from Heaven! I will get myself a tattoo of Golgotha, I will, in order to make myself forgiven. 

*…*…*…*…* 

 

“Jehovah created the nations so that they may be immolated as a human

sacrifice for the expiation of the sins of Israel.” 
 
 

I’m climbing upon high, I’m going to see my pal, Popaul.⁵³ It has been quite a while since I’ve last seen him. He resides at the summit of Montmartre. He’s an original Montmatrois, Popaul, he doesn’t come down from his Corrèze, in order to get to know the maquis. Conceived in the gardens of the Galette, one evening on 14 July, he’s a Montmartrois “since he was less than nine months old.” Thus he’s a “purest of the pure.” I know that he loves Le Bourgueil, so I’m taking him a little bottle, so as to put him into a good mood. I want him to chat with me! He’s a painter, that’s all I’m going to tell you, at the corner of the Impasse Girardon. He dabs away when it isn’t too rainy, for when it does rain too much, it becomes too dark in his studio. But when the weather is fine, to wit, he is more often found outdoors, on a park bench along Avenue Junot, regarding the trees and the little birds, and how they must grow, and how they must scurry about in order not to starve, so as to capture them in oils. He takes to his sun like an old sparrow. Popol had some difficulty in finding the right situation, conducive to his dabbling, between the full sun and the full shade. Popol is an amputee, a great amputee of the Great War,⁵⁴ having given am entire leg to the defense of la Patrie. 

I informed him straightaway that I had become an anti-Semite, and not by just a little bit just for levity, but ferociously unto my very kidneys! …to uproot all of the Kikes! and to rearrange them into phalanges, into dense cohorts, into battalions to mount the charge against Hitler, and retake the Sarre, all by themselves!… 

“Shit!” he said to me… “You are going to have a time of it!… The Jews are all in positions of authority… They cannot simply absent themselves like that!… You yourself don’t think so either!… There would be anarchy!… Chaos!… They include some indispensable people! Your crusade is not well thought-out!… You would be ill advised to go through with it… The Jews are like lice… When you pick one of them off the shaft, there are ten thousand of them at the base! A million in the entire bed… I can’t emphasize it enough… You are going to be brought to an understanding, o unfortunate one! You don’t know where you are putting your fingers! Aren’t you familiar with ‘bitter dregs’? You put on a brave show! a false front! you are going to wake up on a slab… One of these nights when you are returning home from your clinic, a droll affair of a tile on the head is going to befall you… You could buy yourself a galvanized helmet, a Burgundian… You are wrong to get yourself so wound-up, old nut!… It’s the effects of age that are bothering you… It’s a bicycle that no longer has any use for you! You’re not up to its speed…it’ll make you dizzy… I’ve already told you to be quite careful… You are older, in fact…at forty-three years…(he’s jealous, he can no longer mount a bike because of his leg)…at least you’d want to do like Hitler… But you are not the Tyrolian type… You can’t yodel trou-la-itou… You’d be booed off the stage brusquely with a bullet! Do you want to do your little Barrès? your Bolivar? your Joan of Arc? Annunzio? With the Jews, it’s a tricky affair, old buddy, you will be destroyed calamitously like the worm in the bottle, Ferdinand! quicker than you can say oof!… They’ll have you flattened…not by themselves! …but by your own racial brethren… That I can predict for you! They have every trick in their bag!… They are fakirs one hundred percent… They have the entire Orient in their pocket… They come by…they make promises…they jabber…they swallow up everything… They never give anything back!… They are thoroughgoing at it, they will leave with your home and your heart… You will never recuperate! They’re the Wandering Jews my friend, the citizens of the world! The swindlers of everyone! in every way! They see your pockets and your head, and they skin you alive, they drink your blood… And you are going to try to redeem yourself with scraps of paper! you have fallen to them, the same people, again! 

 

“At the Beaux Arts, they have taken everything! all of the primitives! the folklorists! sauce Juive! The critics, all Jewish or Masonic, intone in unison, loudly proclaiming the genius! It’s only normal, it’s well to be expected in one sense: in all of the Schools they are the masters, the tyrants, the absolute proprietors, in all of the Beaux Arts in the world, above all in France. All of the professors, all of the juries, galleries, and exhibitions are currently completely Kikeish. It’s not difficult to become upset… Me, if I had your considerable cranium, I would play ball with them… In your place, I would have myself made a Freemason… It’s the baptism for an Aryan! it’ll clean you up a little… It’ll make you just a tad negrified… That’ll help to keep you from sin… It is no longer necessary to tend to whiteness in France…it’s now necessary to negrify… The future belongs to the niggers! Nom de Cul!” 

“Ah!” I leapt in reply, “Popol! you’ve sunk me! you’ve left me shaken! I had believed that I would find a friend! A true soldier in my cause! And you advise me to fade away… This has become too grave a matter to discuss out of doors… Let’s go back in, while I…” 

I pursued my train of thought to its conclusion, back at his studio. After all, it was all the same to me, to have the entire world against me, in my anti-Semitic crusade. But I would care about Popol! it still means something to be a brother in war… I would exhort him a little bit more… 

“Popol, how can you…be so supine?… A bona fide Military Veteran with a battlefield decoration…do you find it all quite proper?… That for every Frenchman of the soil, fallen under enemy fire in Flanders or at Verdun, one is now inundated with ten thousand Kikes, all of them mortally racist, most insatiable cuckoos?… Will it perhaps be necessary for us, to put on disguises, or to allow ourselves to be used as doormats? to the sound of the ‘Internationale’? …or as chamber pots…or as phonographs of silence?…” 

“And what do you make of the proletarian?” he asked me in response… 

[F.:] “He will be easily had, as always. He is alcoholic and cuckolded. Communism is only a byword for party assemblies, a gigantic stavisquerie!⁵⁵ You have seen the red choirs nowadays, giving us the ‘Song of Departure’ in ‘Internationale’ sauce. Doesn’t that say anything to you? Tomorrow, all of the hecatombs of the world will be filled with ‘Kosher’ meat accompanied by all of the favorite hymns… I am already hearing “in the street” that Blaoum⁵⁶ proposes to have Aryans minced-up ‘in revolutionary uniforms’!⁵⁷ Every revolution, no matter which one, turns into a fantastical Burlesque⁵⁸ as soon as it has begun. The esteemed ancestors of ’93⁵⁹ were totally selfish as to who was the greatest of the great… Delirious madmen so completely full of themselves… All of them gathered ’round the treasury, as ‘smotherers’ of the national inheritance. Each did what he could for himself, neither more nor less than the Courtiers⁶⁰ had done… The ideas, the most exalted slogans, the most galvanic doctrines, served only, it is proven, definitely, for nothing but the fighting over the slaves, standing flabbergasted before their barracks, paralyzed from having to chose among the violent distractions, mouths agape… He who presented the most enticing hoax in the great fair of the world, would draw the largest share of the mob to his platform. Everyone would go in… Have everybody, once the herd gathers, hurry on in! Mugs, you don’t know just how unhappy you are, being on the outside! The hinges turn, the chains go down, the tour is on… Greetings vile beasties!⁶¹… You’ll be seeing it again and again for three…four centuries…ten, twenty…according to the strength of the partitions. One master is as shitty as the next, all of them equally lying, cheating, hysterical and cowardly… Sadistic more or less. But they grow in dastardliness to the extent that they gain in experience… They reap profit, they learn…they compare… Athens…Rome…’93⁶²…the Romanovs… The Jews study much, and conspire

 

incessantly… The ‘showmen’ of the Jewish Commune are in the limelight… They mount the stage with great fanfare… Proles! my fellow martyrs, proles from a hundred countries around the world… I am ready to liberate you! This I feel to the depths of my heart! to set you completely at your own convenience… I shall reprise the paddle, in order to defend you, my children!… Security in your old age!… Go look inside!… A goodly flow!… Have no fear!… Do you hear butchery going on behind the partition? It is a deception of your senses! It’s a sorry piece of Fascist scuttlebutt! Go on! Go on! Let’s press on! Let us all press on! If I have a large padlock in hand, and a formidable key… It’s a gift that I want to give you… It’s to make you appreciate things all the more! …so that you might fall back down into life… Go on! Go on! to the movie theater! …you’ll have it every day… 

“The Jewish International will make us nostalgic for Schneider, Thiers, Wendel and Genghis Khan⁶³… The Jew will be the worst of masters, the most inquisitive, the most acerbic, the most meticulous, and I guarantee you, completely unfruitful, ‘Monrovian’ in matters of construction,⁶⁴ completely incapable of building anything but prisons (look at Russia). Where he has no equal, is in the exasperation of the Aryan, in making him swallow frogs, in causing him to rebound when galley slaves are needed in the slaughter, with no serious resistance, the Western simian, obstinate, drunken, naïve, and cuckolded. He’s a born slave for the Jews, all cooked, numbed in the head in primary school with rote phrases and then alcohol, while later he'’ emasculated through obligatory instruction… In order to ensure that he doesn’t get back up, he must no longer have music, he must never again sing his little non-Jewish personal tune; his soul is crushed, just as the eyes of pigeons are crushed, so that they will not escape. This is achieved through cheap wine. Security police, ambulatory guard, military exercise… A dog more or less. A dog of the Jews, that is to say. No sort of Aryan satrap lasts, or could last. The only ones who rattle the saber towards the others, in order to exalt their own herds of buffalo, are mediocrities of mystical, parochial, intellectually limited, or perpetually defensive mentalities… Look at Hitler! The reality of the world today is that of globalist mystics, who must either prevail or disappear… Napoleon understood this. The great mystery of the jungle, of all jungles, and the sole truth among men, beasts and things: “Conquer or be conquered,” the only dilemma, the ultimate truth. All the rest are nothing but impostures, falsehoods, analities, and repetitive electoral natterings. Napoleon did all that it was possible for him to do, prodigiously, so that the whites would not cede Europe to the niggers and the Asiatics. The Jews vanquished him. Since Waterloo the die has been cast. Now, the deal is not the same, it is not a matter of the Jews living in our country. It is we who live in the Jews’ country. Since the advent of the Rothschild Bank, the Jews have universally reprised a powerful idea… They themselves would deny their words. To be everywhere, to sell everything, to keep everything, to destroy everything—the white man above all!… There you have a consistent program!… Later there will be even more programs, even more admirable… There’s no need for gold, precise orders will suffice for the mass of slaves. The Jews do not reveal their chiefs… They weave their web in the shadows… They exhibit only their puppets…their entertainers, their ‘stars.’ The Jewish passion, so unanimous, so shadowy, is the passion of the termite. In the march of these insects, all of the obstacles become weakened, ruined, and mattered back together little by little, unto the very fiber…ignobly resolute in the most foul, shitty magma of rotten juice and mandibles…unto the final calamity, the total collapse, into the Jewish void.”    

*…*…*…*…* 

 

[61]

Doesn’t one wonder why the press, be it of the right, the left or the center, never reports anything concerning the Jews? And by Jewish, I mean actively Jewish, attentively Jewish, specifically Jewish and racist?… 

When they do decide to speak to us about the Jews, when they find themselves so obliged, by circumstances, it is with infinitely soft kid gloves, an incredible opulence of precautions, dazzling preambles, and ten thousand flatteries of the enfeoffed⁶⁵: “This very great Israelite artist would very much like to receive us…a fine Semitic success story…a great genius and philanthropic financier of the noble race of the Rothschilds…a lost idealism, an overwhelming flame, of dark fires such as to seize you by the eyeballs, to the depths of your soul, in the heart of a young poet consumed by messianic ardor…” 

All of these circumlocuto-asininities, these canine servilities could be better expressed in more direct terms: “Attention! my little journalistic scrivener, my fragile little gossip columnist! Attention! these individuals which you see before you, are so many Jews! Be therefore careful, terribly… They are members of the most powerful race in the Universe…for whom you have been the domestic servants since birth… For a single incidental remark they could have you removed from your job…have you starved to death without appeal…” 

“At what point, Monsieur Le Juif, would you like for me to drop my drawers? And would you have the goodness to screw me?…” 

Such is the significance of these pasted-on preambles, the profound feeling of poignantly hapless compliance.⁶⁶ 

During the entire Stavisky Affair one word of order was passed to every editorial room around the world, a formal commission, which must have cost dearly every day… That little Jewish paranoiac could have been called a Turk, a perfidious foreigner, a half-breed, an oriental spy, a Polish adventurer, a hairdresser, a dentist, a parachutist, a pimp, a syphilitic, a Newfoundlander, a deracinated person⁶⁷…anything whatever…for the sake of evasion, diversion…but never the proper noun JEW… He could have been anything but that… He would never have been able to survive all of his travails save for the influence of Jewry… Just like Loewenstein, like Barmat, like Mrs. Simpson,⁶⁸ like Bigore, like the entire financial establishment and all of the rest…  

Take a little heed…in every similar instance: the same fanfare… Saber-rattling on the right, confused chanting on the left, bedlam in the center, a lack of courage all around… The little ball eventually disappears! It’s admirably well-played… If you were to risk even one little word against the great Hymie invasion, the colonization of your buttocks, all of you, even though you are journalists!… Rotten false-heroic poseurs! and your slatternly ink along with you, down to your very last characters, you’ll be strangled so neatly that within eight hours even the name which you wore will be forgotten!… Unto the color of your pages… Not one personal notice! Not one theatrical notice! within five seconds it’ll be excised, transmitted and made to disappear. Not one letter of credit, not one permit, not one piece of paper, and pretty soon not one novel, not one telephone call, only the void!… The Jew can create a desert around any sort of business, bank, industry, theater, or journal… Ford⁶⁹ was horrified by them, but he was forced to shut his face, as powerful as he was. He was forced to jump into the eight hours!… The Jew either irrigates or he doesn’t irrigate! …with gold!… Either this works or it no longer

 

works. If it no longer works, Mankind starves. As bravely, as stoically as one can possibly imagine. 

O feckless campaign! O furious compromise! O needy hypocrisies! O grumblings of old flunkies!… Swear! Anathematize! Curse! Combat the moon! Tear down the Communist ordinances! Vituperate into the megaphones!… What effect will it have? None whatever! All of the absolute masters of the world, are absolutely all Kikes! In New York, Hollywood, Milan, Prague, Berlin, Moscow…it’s all the same…in spite of all appearances, the same collaborators in the same cosmic farce… Thus what better thing could happen to them than to have the barbarians behind their gates fidget, skin themselves, and rattle their shackles and chains, like this and like that, over a bunch of foolishness? It is necessary to lift some balls-and-chains back up out of the gutter, anything more than this being too much…from time to time. Revolutions serve in this…they serve in nothing else…to moisten the penitentiary irons a little better, those pretty handcuffs, made to disappear, “tall tales”…  

But wait! what is it that the Jews are talking about amongst themselves, a constitution? yet another one? It’s all the same to us Hymies who we’ll grab by the sleeve! Communism? But it is perfectly well at hand! We will all become “commissars” on the day that the Stock Exchanges close… The Stock Exchanges are, more than anything else, tiresome…there are some gaps…there are still some goyim taking advantage of the liberties…who insinuate themselves somewhat into the dividends… This decidedly must be brought to an end. This abuse is going to be suppressed!… All of them are going to be brought back into order, into the perfect herd… That is to say, that the pensioners will eat garbage alongside the other dogs… The gold is for us, the Jews! The Jews get the gold! Anyone more would be too many!… The world is ours! …it’s not for the losers… It’s for us Hymies, the most brooding paranoiacs in the Universe! whose voracity is a thousand times as strong… The new scheme is already prepared…the terrific “slot machine”!… Absolutely, entirely Jewish for the politico-financial transition, with Mongol guards… All of the edicts are ready to go. Simply to promulgate them shall be sufficient. They’re already circulating in the Lodges, where they are greatly admired: 

“1° All of the gold in the true democracies, the true People’s governments, shall henceforth be reserved for international exchange; 2° Value held as currency, or as notes, shall no longer circulate abroad, but such coupons shall be reserved for use in domestic exchange.” 

This is what the edicts of the Future will say…and what they will mean in plain French: 

“Beginning today, only Jews will be able to travel…” All alone or with their family, or better yet more amiably with their little native servants, those most up-sucking, most idolatrous, intimate little hostages of the bedroom, and colonial buffoons. 

Through this sleight of hand, gold will become entirely the property of the Jews, the politicians, the Jewish commissars, the Jewish bosses and Jewish artists… Do you understand? As of this instance the natives will no longer receive anything for their labor save for some entirely fictitious tokens…some little salaries in “monkey money,” some “brownie points,” absolutely dependent upon the arbitrage of the Jewish masters. That’ll be the domestic money, sickly money, called national, for the purchase of a kilo of bread, a coffin, or some balls… 

The Jewish lords, forever anxious, harried, will be in perpetual motion from one end of the planet, their planet, to the other... They will never rest... From New York to Yokohama,

 

with Jewish cousins and brothers-in-law, from Trébizonde to Kamchatka, with uncertainty and anguish, they will go to sign accords and deals…to prepare the deportations, the shipments of new slaves, the Stakhanovite reinforcements. Right here is the “liberty” about which Dorgelès⁷⁰ is always telling us…80,000 leagues under the Jews. Intimidated, oppressed by hunger, cold, and the madness of war, and preconditioned unto their very blood, unto their very marrow, unto the very roots of their cucumbers, the natives will of course no longer have the right to any sort of passport! For what? …for what?… They will march from the borders into the interior, into their formidable kennels, each pack enclosed behind the gates. They will march under the banners, to music, in great groaning choruses, carrying the magic placards, the effigies of their slave galleys, and enormous sentences of Jewish slogans… I don’t have to strain my imagination in order to foresee these events… I don’t need to make them up… It is enough to take account of the goings-on in Russia…how well the Grand Adventure is working out… Our future is there, in its entirety, presenting itself to our view, not at all concealed… The Aryans are not curious… They stay at home, playing cards, getting tanned out in the dunes, boozing, and joining together out in the woods. Meanwhile as for the Jews, they are moving about, they are all going to the Soviets to take account of things, and to pick up a little seed corn… Ninety-eight percent of the tourists who go to the USSR each year, from all of the countries of the world, are Jews…authors, sleazes, art critics, comedians, all Jewish… 

They have gone to breathe in the breeze of Asia…to smell the admirable revenge. On the trip, those who aren’t Kikes, are at least Freemasons, important democrats, important demagogues, that is to say our most zealous traitors, unbridled propagandists, fervent ralliers for Peace! all of them sold-out, suspect, with eyes closed, all that they will absorb, is everything that they will be told…effete, gluttonous, greedy, and as screwy as a clop upside the head.⁷¹ 

As for that little refractory clan,⁷² those perpetually complaining toads, they croak forth only what is necessary… They’re needed! If they didn’t exist, those rotters, it would be necessary to produce them, at some expense… They provoke, they justify certain measures, certain restrictions… Certain decrees for example: “All anti-Semitic statements shall be made only under penalty of death”… Here you have a very convenient edict. And I’ll bet that in a little bit right here, we will be seeing the very same thing posted upon our walls… I’m doing what is necessary. 

*…*…*…*…* 
 
 

I must say that Popol and I had fallen into complete agreement, and had concluded: They’re a bunch of vampires! of phenomenal pieces of filth, they must be sent to Hitler! from Palestine! from Poland! They have done us an immense wrong! They can no longer stay here!… All the more so since Popol, parenthetically, came to suffer a severe setback, in that his masterpiece, a magnificent landscape for the Exhibition, had been completely rejected by the City.⁷³ All of the Jews were honored, he alone remaining beached upon the sand… 

But in putting together my crusade Popol, so worthy, so stouthearted, would not be enough, even so… I had to recruit some more… I forestalled him thus: 

“Wait up for me! I’ll be back in a jiffy… I’m just going to hop on over to Bezon, I’m going to rouse my cousin, Gustin Sabayote… I’m going to kick him out of his torpor… He’ll just have

 

to follow us… He’s a bachelor as well… Thus he’s free in principle… His place is just to the left of the Town Hall… Just a moment!…” 

At the moment when I walked in on him, Gustin was in his kitchen, in the process of opening some peas… Gustin has only one little vice, he smokes his pipe ceaselessly… I don’t waste time on the preliminaries… I tell him the whole story… I bring him up to speed in five seconds… He answers me thus: 

“Ferdinand, you have become quite the fanatic, thus you are always chattering on, but I’m warning you and I’m putting you on your guard, that the Jews are very intelligent…they are the ones in France who read the books, who gather information, who man the information pipeline, they are armed with knowledge, and occupy all of the high positions, all of the rackets are in their hands, they know how to make themselves popular, in addition they do good, to the little people, the forty hour week, that’s their security…and then there’s the vacations… You are going to get yourself put into prison… You are going to wind up getting cut to pieces, beyond doubt…” 

“Intelligent, how?…” I retaliated. “They are racist, they have all the money, they have seized all the levers of control, they have latched unto all the positions of command… Is that how they’re intelligent?… There’s nothing of brilliance to that!… They do stay on track admirably, as they eliminate, dissuade, pursue, and hound down, all of those who might rival them, or cause them the least little bit of umbrage… It’s their crusade against us, a crusade unto the death… That’s the stuff of their intelligence!… All of the interesting jobs, they’ve put into their pockets…monopolizing, they expel outright or with little ado anyone who is not properly Jewish…filthy Jewish…Judaized…pro-Jewbie…ass-reamed Jewish… This is the great technique of the cuckoo… To put it bluntly, in order to cast a better light on things, if Einstein weren’t Jewish, if Bergson weren’t circumcised, if Proust had been only a Breton, if Freud didn’t bear the mark, people wouldn’t be saying very much about any one of them…these are not at all amongst those geniuses who will have brought enlightenment unto the world!… I can bloody well guarantee that… The least little fart by a Jew is called a boom! one of the admirable discoveries of our age my friend, instantaneously! through the automatic effect of the world Jewish apparatus…millions of little bells go off… That pathetic fart is raised up like some sort of miracle! and at top speed!… It is due to that that the painting of Cézanne, Modi, Picasso and all the others…the films of Monsieur Benhur, the music of Tartinowsky all suddenly become a big deal… An enormous favorable pre-judgment, world-wide, precedes and forms the prelude for every Jewish intention… The Jews, all of the critics in the universe, all of the artistic circles…all of the news media!… All of the world’s Jewish agencies set about spitting forth claps of Thunder, to the very least murmur, the very least quiver of Hymie creativity…and the Jewish supremacist⁷⁴ publicity in the spoken media⁷⁵ provides an admirable echo… Every trumpet sounds from one end of every continent to the other, heralding, intoning, resounding, buzzing with the marvelous Hosanna! to the sublime messenger from Heaven! Yet another incomparable Jew at the palette! on the screen! at the violin! in politics! infinitely more brilliant! without contest more renovating, than all of the geniuses of the past (and all Aryans of course). The grotesque goyim are quickly caught-up into a whirlwind of epilepsy, they rejoice as a choir of cuckolds, they violently join into the chorus, with all the force of their stupidity, and they have themselves completely consumed within! …it’s the triumph of a new Jewish idol!… In order to pack them in, it is enough to offer them a little more Jewish shit in which to wallow… They are no longer particular… They have lost all of their instinct… They don’t know the difference between the living and the dead…the ‘organic’ and the diffuse, a cardboard box and the pure juice, the bladder rather than the lantern,⁷⁶ the false and the authentic… They no longer know at all… They have sucked up far to much garbage over too many centuries and epochs, to wind up with anything

 

of authenticity… They would rather treat themselves to falsifications… They mistake bleach for spring water…and they find it most preferable! infinitely superior. They are geared towards the counterfeit. By consequence, of course, misfortune, shit! for the indigenous person who through some sort of original gift, some little bit of music all his own…one little whispers attempt! he immediately becomes hateful, suspect, perfectly shameful to his racial brethren. It’s the law in a conquered country that nothing must ever be allowed to disturb the torpor of the enslaved masses… Everyone must fall back down as soon as possible…into the ruminations of drunkards… It is they, the racial brethren, who are most strictly charged methodically to obstruct, to denigrate, and to stifle. No sooner does one of the indigenous people arouse himself…than the others of the same race rise up against him, with lynching being not far off… In penal colonies, the dirtiest deeds are performed by the convicts themselves…amongst themselves, a thousand times as cruel as the most atrocious slave galley…  

“The racial brethren have been well trained… For the habitual alcoholic, water from the spring has become a poison. He hates it with all his soul… He no longer wants to see it at the table…he wants some bottled guano…in films, in books, in monologues, in love songs, in piss… He no longer understands anyone other than the Jew…all that issues from Jewish taste… He eats it up, he’s transported by it… And by none other! Aryans, and above all Frenchmen, no longer exist, no longer live, no longer breathe, but in the form of envy, of a hatred both mutual and total, of a fanatical, maximum, absolute scandalmongering, of hysterical, even petty bits of gossip, of a delirium of backbiting, of a denigrating alienation, of a low judgment made even lower still, more down-and-dirty, more ardently vile and cowardly. The perfect slaves, agents provocateurs, enthusiasts, sheep, base-metal slugs, two-facers between the office and the pub, admirably trained by the Jewish police, the commissioners of the great Jewish authority. No feeling of racial mutual support. No longer any sort of mystical community. The Jews swim about beautifully in such shitty sumps… This enormous, everlasting poltroonery, this mutual treason of all against all, delights them and satisfies them… The colonialization becomes a source of profit. It is upon this mean, absolute venality with the French peasant at the bottom, that the Jews entreat themselves, exploiting and speculating in the process of robbing… They fall into this environment of absurd dastardliness like a hyena upon rotted viscera… This rottenness is their feast, their providential element. They are triumphant only in conditions of full gangrene… 

“Diligent, weaving, obsequious, informed, oriental, greasy, secretive, ever-ready to instigate, and to proceed forcibly towards an ever greater rottenness…even more spongiform, more intimate… They are good at it! They do it up magnificently!… To corrupt by-and-large…and more intimately… Along the routes of their triumph they’ve never encountered a more servile horde of lackeys, more self-defeating through mutual hatreds, and numbed by centuries of alcohol and divisive polemics. To cut and to rummage through this French peat, in order to extract all of the juice, all of the gold, the profit and the power, is the Jew’s royal game!… The slave arrives to him staggering, broken, in irons… It is enough for the Jew merely to put them under his heel. The white man, the Frenchman above all, loathes everything that reminds him of his race… He doesn’t want any of it at any price… Anything that does not bear the Jewish cachet, that does not carry the Jewish scent, no longer comports taste, reality or flavor to the Aryan of today. He must have, he demands his Jewish illusion, Jewish pomade, Jewish flashiness, Jewish swindle, Jewish imposture, Jewish cultural leveling, and by all that he would designate as progress, Jewish progress… All that is simple and direct, like his own occidental nature, he receives with suspicion, and an immediate hatred… He rises up, he goes into a huff…he desists only when those evocations, those phantoms which irritate him, are made to disappear from his view. Truth and simplicity insult him… A total inversion of his aesthetic instincts… Through propaganda and advertising he is brought about to make a denial of his own rhythms…  

 

“All that is to be found any longer in cinema, books, music, and painting is the artificial, the convoluted, the funny face, the Afro-Asiatic contortion. It is necessary to go still further along the route of capitulation… Suppose that, one fine day, it were to occur to me, a little goy, to publish, God forbid! some small novel…to brush up some slender portraits…to transcribe some cantatas…to redact a skinny memoir, or some recherché study on the origins of warts…or the rules to the cup-and-ball game, we’ll print ’em on the side…if I were nothing but a simple native…not even a Freemason of the third order…who would ever happen to read me? …to listen to me?… Certainly not my racial brethren… They overly venerate their ignorance, their indolence, and their pretentious stupidity… But certainly all the Jews who are walking about in the vicinity... If my load of rubbish, be it big or small, were to contain any sort of authentic substance, motive or lyricism, they would promptly deface it, and chew it up alive...  The Jews are rather poorly endowed for the arts, biologically, due ultimately to their very nature. The Jews are disastrously lacking in direct emotion, in spontaneity… They speak rather than do… They reason before they feel… Strictly speaking, they can’t do anything… They’re braggarts… Like all Afro-Asiatics, their nervous system is purely reflexive and atavistic, and remains rudimentary, undistinguished, and all said very common, in spite of so much effort, and such enormous pretensions… Precocious and unsophisticated, but without resonance. If they go frolicking about in our climate, they are condemned to giving themselves over to imitations, the tom-tom, and funny faces, like niggers and like all apes… They take in nothing directly, and assimilate few things to any degree of profundity… 

“Like all of the great insensible types, their minds produce virtually nothing but follies. 

“The entire Jewish bulimic process… By the way, this must be recognized…my racial brethren, on this occasion, show themselves as being, certainly, a hundred thousand times as abject as any sort of Kike… I believe that they have no equals, in the entire world, when it comes to puking with full gall all over honest work. The Frenchman in particular has become completely alienated from the Aryan ensemble by an intractable, inexpiable hatred, for all of that which, even from afar, reminds him somewhat of that lyricism. Thus he is no longer content to fume in private! his eyes turn red with anger… What moral bankruptcy… What brutalization! since the

 

caves… What a rout! What an ignoble inversion into inertia, and into the shits… If only the Cro-Magnons, those sublime engravers, could see us now! how ashamed of us they’d be! There is nothing in our day more odious, more humanly odious, more humiliating than to observe the so-called modern French man of letters sardonically savaging a manuscript, a piece of work…just about any old beastly failure possesses some sort of an allure which is noble, profoundly touching, and worthy of sympathy. But observe that tinkling little braggadocio, so indecently smug, so obscene with highfalutin’ oafishness, with pigheaded presumptuousness, that he’s positively oppressive… How can anything be explained to him anymore? how can one answer him?… He knows it all!… He is incurable! Once he has obtained his high school diploma⁷⁷ he is no longer even approachable. He is no longer a cousin to the peacock. Anything that might possibly even vaguely resemble any sort of poetic intention, has become a personal insult to him… Ah! yes! But yes! why is he bothered?⁷⁸… He leaves that unfortunate high school a thousand times as savage and as irremediable as a Kafir. He finds all of his vivacity, all of his caprice, his capacity to shine, his Figaro-like swagger,⁷⁹ all of his tradition of pirouettes, his biting lightheartedness, and all of his affected contortions of constipation, only when it’s time to flatter the Jew, his supercilious master. Then he puts forth all at once, he really puts himself into it, he outdoes himself. Everything that has been simmering in honey within the depths of his cowardly carcass he squirts out through his pen, at a single stroke… The other day, while perusing an art exhibition, I happened upon one of these pieces of trash and his ideas. It involved painting, and I’ll give you the gist of it, from memory: 

“‘Ah!’ this do-nothing exclaimed, ‘it has already been quite a while, at least in France, that our most eminent critics no longer make any sort of distinction in their appreciation between French [71] artists born on our soil, and our dear artists of foreign extraction! (read Jews) Paris owes so much to so many of them! The Parisian Influence! (Jewish). Now that they have adopted us, we must adopt them! They have all become equally French! (so you say! but not at Verdun!) just as worthy of the name as the others. Artistic fraternity above all! transcending every frontier! There’s no longer such a thing as country in the Fine Arts! Let a single heart unite us all! No more racial prejudices! Cultural brotherhood! He who would aspire…, etc., etc.’  

“Of course! Of course! Durandin! When your Jewish masters, the next time, order you to give their butt-cracks a goodly lick-and-blow…and to masticate the residuum thoroughly, without getting sick to your stomach, then you will surely be able to discover even more spirited bursts of enthusiasm, if possible, by which to communicate your intoxication… I can hear you from here… ‘But to the French palate, my dear brothers, Jewish shit is a taste without equal! An ineffable nectar! verily! an ascension unto Heaven! Ah! unsavory fellow! Ah! cry poor cockroach!⁸⁰ To those who are oblivious to the difference! To those who are holding back! To those who are not mobbing the author! devouring the adorable turd…the exquisite caca of Jewish genius! Yours is nothing but the retarded development of the soul!… The divine guano of the “French twice over”! adopted! It is this which must always be preferred, preciously, devotedly, over any other delight, over any other heavenly abode!’” 

 

“All of the nations of the Earth will be bound to the Throne of Israel, following an atrocious

world war in which three quarters of their populations will be wiped-out. It will take three

hundred Elders to carry the keys of the Treasury.” 

—The Talmud. 

“But you are anti-Semitic, my fine mooncalf! That’s vile! It’s a prejudice!” 

[F.:] “I have nothing in particular against the Jews insofar as the Jews are what I would describe as slobs like everybody else, bipeds in search of their soup… They don’t bother me at all. As such a Jew is perhaps the same, on the job, under conditions of equality, as a Breton, an Auvergnat, a New Caledonian native, a “child of Mary”… It’s possible… It is rather Jewish racism against which I revolt, against which I harbor animus, against which I seethe, unto the ends of my benouze!… I’ll shout! I’ll thunder! Those racists certainly howl well enough themselves! They never relent! with their abominable pogroms! with their secular persecutions! That’s their gigantomaniacal alibi! That’s their great cake! their cream! Don’t bring me that trunk through which the Jews drolly rummage for histories of persecution! foutre bite! I’d rather believe my own eyes! If only they hadn’t deployed so many zouaves all over the surface of the planet, if only they hadn’t shit away so many men, then maybe they wouldn’t be taking such a beating!… Those who have hung a few of them, had well had good reason… Those Kikes had best be on their guards! Patience becomes worn, then lost… a pogrom doesn’t come about for nothing!… A pogrom is a great success in its genre, an implosion of something… It is not humanly possible to believe that others are all uniformly shitty… That would be too facile… 

“It is well to note that in France no one has ever done them harm… They have prospered and more, they have taken all of the top positions… They were treated very liberally, all the way down to their shorts, but now look at how they behave!… A band of vociferous rats, of intractable, implacable enemies… The great martyrdom of the Jewish race is a phenomenal fake…which works on the Christians, forever gullible, bird-brained and enthusiastic cuckolds…two million martyrs in France alone,⁸¹ that makes up a considerable force! It’s invincible, to tell you the truth… Once they get a sure grip on our bones, once they’ve softened our good hearts, once they are quite sure that they possess us down to our very last leucoplasts, then they will transform themselves into despots, the very most arrogant and brazen that have ever been seen in all of History.  

“Napoleon always said: ‘For me, neutrality means the disarmament of others.’ This is an excellent principle. The Jews could say quite the same thing: ‘For us, communism means the enslavement of all the others’… 

“Just take a little look at the victims of the Jews throughout the ages…over the course of this or that war (such a small population) they never suffered too badly, they never got too raw of a deal, they never got it as bad as did those knuckle-headed Aryans. Save your tears!… They don’t often fly off to combat. More often they follow it at the Stock Exchanges! Hecatombs? Hecatombs? Buy orders… Sell orders… Transfers…⁸² 

“In Russia, as soon as they were in command, the Hymies didn’t waste any time in setting about to the decimation of the Aryans… Over the past seventeen years, they have had the impure destroyed by the millions… The Jews don’t like to see the color of blood? That’s not worth the price of a nail! Not their own of course!… But that of others, they give themselves a generous view…as soon as

[Proceed to page 45.]

---

Notes:

¹ Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, whose nom de plume was “Céline.”

² Bagatelles pour un massacre is also commonly translated as Trifles for a Massacre.

³ Refers to the various “anti-Semitic” works of Céline, c. 1937-41, which in addition to Bagatelles would include A School for Cadavers and Soiled Sheets.

⁴ This is an insufficient explanation of events. It would be more accurate to say that the author “sat on” the reissue of this and similar works, in order not to exacerbate the conditions of ostracism to which he and his works were subject, following the Second World War. Also, his original publisher, Denoël, had been assassinated during the War.

⁵ These occasional numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in the 1937 Denoël edition. The pagination of the text of this translation, found at the bottom of the page, conforms as closely as possible to that of the most common “.pdf” file, downloadable over the Internet. The Denoël edition, apparently hastily assembled, has unreliable pagination until one gets to page 81 (page 49 in the “.pdf” edition).

⁶ Refers derogatorily to the Prix Goncourt.

⁷ Refers to Fortunat Strowski de Robkowa (1866-1952), member of the “Jury” circle of literary critics.

⁸ Refers to Léon Daudet (1867-1942), conservative journalist and critic, cited also on p. 126 of this work.

⁹ By “poem,” a script for a ballet is meant.

¹⁰ Refers to a prolific but long-deceased French writer (1811-72).

¹¹ I.e., mid-18^th Century.

¹² OV: “Ils se rincent l’il,” [“l’il” = l’œil] .

¹³ OV: “vux de bonheur.”

¹⁴ OV: “s’enlace” (compare with following note, “s’élance”).

¹⁵ OV: “s’élance” (compare with preceding note, “s’enlace”).

¹⁶ Or, “…as I have already arranged things the way I want them, all around Paris, for all manner of considerations…”

¹⁷ Alludes to the lyrics of a “Credo”; see p. 139 (239-40).

¹⁸ Facetious attribution.

¹⁹ This would have been just before the end of Charles X’s reign (1824-30), and the “July Events” of 1830, which brought the Bourbon Restoration period to an end.

²⁰ OV: effarées du bobinard.”

²¹ OV: “char-à-bancs” = an open wagon with benches running lengthwise on either side.

²² I.e., red wine (“le rouge”).

²³ I.e., to drink straight from the bottle without touching it with one’s lips.

²⁴ Or: “they stood around muttering obscenities at one another.”

²⁵ I.e., Schmutz (Ger.) = smut, or smutty person.

²⁶ On Irishmen, also see: pp. 181/311 and 192/330.

²⁷ OV: “Soumissionnaire.”

²⁸ Facetious acclamation.

²⁹ I.e., in PCF party elections.

³⁰ PCF membership card.

³¹ I.e. the Second Arrondisement (borough) of Paris.

³² See pp. 192-218 of this work, for details concerning Ferdinand’s trip to Russia.

³³ Facetious self-attribution.

³⁴ “Intourist” = the Soviet state travel agency.

³⁵ I.e., WWI.

³⁶ Céline did not receive wide popular recognition in the USSR, due to the lack at that time of a decent Russian translation of his works.

³⁷ Refers to the Soviet Union of the mid-1930s, rather than to Russia per se.

³⁸ Psalm 109:5-6 (Roman Catholic & Orthodox); Psalm 110:5-6 (Protestant). KJV: “A Psalm of David”: … “[5] The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath. [6] He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill (the places) with their dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.”

³⁹ Refers to Walter McLennan Citrine (1887-1983), English trade union leader, and author of I Search for Truth in Russia.

⁴⁰ Refers to French President (1932-40) Albert Lebrun (1871-1950); President at the time of Céline’s writing of Bagatelles.

⁴¹ “Stakhanovites” refers to those influenced by a Soviet labor-enthusiasm drive, c. 1935, inspired by the coal miner Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov.

⁴² Refers to Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1882-1945; author of The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin), not to the more noted Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi (d. 1910).

⁴³ Refers to Lake Baykal and Sakhalin Island, both in Siberia.

⁴⁴ Refers to the Bolshevik Karl Radek.

⁴⁵ Isaiah 34:1-3. KJV: “[1] Come near, ye nations, to hear; and harken, ye people: … [2] For the indignation of the Lord (is) upon all nations, and (his) fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter. [3] Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood.”

⁴⁶ Refers to the actors Douglas Fairbanks and William Powell.

⁴⁷ OV: “empapoutables.”

⁴⁸ Refers to the autoworks of the late André Gustave Citroen (1878-1935), which had just undergone bankruptcy (1934) and reorganization (1935), and whose workers were facing uncertainty in both employment and remuneration.

⁴⁹ Refers to “the City,” London’s financial district.

⁵⁰ Refers to Crédit Lyonnais, an important French bank.

⁵¹ The preceding refer to the Hollywood producer Adolph Zukor (1873-1976), and to the Soviet diplomat Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov (1876-1951).

⁵² Refers to the dramatist Henri Bernstein (1876-1953).

⁵³ “Popaul” (also see pp. 39 and 206 (353)) is a fictionalization of the expressionist painter Gen Paul (see p. 126 (216), and Bib.). (The real Gen Paul was actually born on the 2^nd of July, 1895).

⁵⁴ The “Great War” = WWI.

⁵⁵ Refers to a corrupt affair à la Stavisky.

⁵⁶ “Blaoum” = Léon Blum.

⁵⁷ OV: “à la carmagnole.”

⁵⁸ OV: “Topazerie.”

⁵⁹ I.e., 1793.

⁶⁰ OV: “Gens de Cour.”

⁶¹ OV: “zoizeaux.”

⁶² I.e., 1793.

⁶³ Refers to: Joseph Eugène Schneider (French armaments manufacturer, and supporter of Louis Bonaparte); Adolphe Thiers (suppressor of the Paris Commune); Wendel (family of arms-industrialists and financiers, similar to Schneider’s).

⁶⁴ Alludes to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and the level of development attaching thereto.

⁶⁵ OV: “enfiotés.”

⁶⁶ OV: “veulisseries poignantes.”

⁶⁷ OV: “heimatlos” (Ger.).

⁶⁸ Refers to Mrs. Wallis (Warfield) Simpson, who married the Duke of Windsor (the abdicated (Dec. 1936) Edward VIII) in the June of 1937.

⁶⁹ Refers to Henry Ford, Sr.

⁷⁰ Refers to Roland Dorgelès, French novelist.

⁷¹ OV: “foutrés comme des clacs.”

⁷² Probably refers to cagoulards and other far-right radical activists.

⁷³ I.e., the Exhibition Commission of the City of Paris (not the London “City”).

⁷⁴ OV: “raciste juive,” “raciste” rendered as “supremacist” for this particular usage.

⁷⁵ OV: “publicité parlée” = advertising in media other than print (i.e., radio, movie trailers, etc.).

⁷⁶ As in: “prendre des vessies pour des lanternes.”

⁷⁷ OV: “bachot” = secondary school graduation qualifying examination.

⁷⁸ OV: “on se fout de lui?”

⁷⁹ OV: “figarotisme,” i.e., comportment reminiscent of the character Figaro, from The Barber of Seville.

⁸⁰ I.e., syncophant.

⁸¹ Facetiously refers to the French Jewish population of about two million.

⁸² OV: “Reports… Reports… Transferts…”