May you get it right in the ass! 

The shits! 
 

[302]¹

“Neither promise nor agreement obligates the Jew with regard to the Christians.”

– The Talmud 

Currently there’s the rather extensive article on that handsome Thorez²…on the cover of My Life…his rather large mug freely offered… Boubouroche in triumph… Incredible!…in shirt sleeves…ample in warmth…ample in flesh…amply vain…amply chubby-cheeked…the ideal Aryan for the Jewish prestidigitator… The dreamt-of cuckold… The newly-promoted sergeant…delighted…exultant…“on a roll”…the maiden voyage!…glittering with the stripe… For pity’s sake!… 

What a splendid piece of work to have walking about in a cage of vampires! What a propitious, savory turkey! Poor innocent super-puppet!… See the Baby-Führer right here!… The anointed anointer! …who is going to play our poor little part, already so compromised, on the international checkerboard?…against the cabal of political horse-traders, diplomats, “idols,” and Jewish commissars, the most cunning, the most perverse, the most obfuscating, the most corrupt, sinister, menacing, venomous, and scorpion-like imaginable!… An assemblage of rogues, djibouks, double agents, magicians, she-asses, illusionists, charlatans, the most comprehensive, the best camouflaged, the best assorted, the most racist, the most impudent on the planet, of proven con-men, well-practiced, bewitching, official, officious, highly-placed, within the sinister intrigue, of magic, hundred-fold dissembly, evasion, the hundred thousand Asiatic sleights of hand, the tarot of assassination, the mirage-filled deserts…of headless cadavers… of ropes from which no one is currently hanging…of words [303] leading to nothing…of false trunk-lids…of smoke signals… Unsurpassable virtuosi in all of the arcana and pitfalls of casuistry…unimaginable acrobats within all of the catacombs and dungeons… The very quintessence of the most infinitely vicious criminal gangsters in the Universe… And who is then going to defend our interests? …our bones, our pathetic “plots”… Who? That Bunch?… Shit!… This is going badly!… This is going very badly!… A single monosyllable is all that is necessary for the Kikes. 

[304]

“As soon as the order for mobilization is given, and before departing upon the glorious route

towards their destinies, the partisans will cut down MM. Béraud and Maurras like dogs.”

(Le Populaire, November 1933.)  

Ah! don’t forget about me! 

While waiting for the brigades of Jewish assassins to show up, get in line! 

Little Fuzzy-Wuzzies, fire away! fire true! Take care! 

 

[305]

“Only the Jews are human; the other nations are naught but varieties of animal.”

– The Talmud

 

I no longer recall which cack-handed little twit of a Hymie (I forget his name, but it was a Hymie name) who took the trouble, over the course of five or six issues of a supposedly medical journal (Jewish lapdogs in reality), to take a shit all over my works and my “grotesqueries” in the name of psychiatry. The racist rage and the neurotic envy of this whiner were disguised, for this purpose, as “scientific” vituperation. He was foaming with insults, this sicko, deliriously, multifariously, in his psycho-Freudian jargon. Considering his lexicon, his obsession, and his pathos, this imbecile must have been an alienationist. Almost all alienationists are idiots, but this one here gave the impression of being possessed of a truly rigid “stupidity,” of being a super-critic in essence. I no longer recall just which hereditary defects, mental and physical, or which abject perversions, monstrous dispositions, morbid obsessions, and spiritual rottenness, that this pedantic sub-bitch cited in explaining all of my books. But in any case, there had never been so warty a toad (referring to my head) completely dripping with toxic guano, which was more hideous, more insufferable with regard to that perfect, white dove (referring to himself). All of this is without importance, save for one amusing observation, which suggests itself: Freudianism has done a lot for the Jews in medicine and in psychiatry. It has given the Diploma to all of these sub-niggers, grotesque, double-dip-shitty and turkey-like, allowing them a free hand in all of their fads, alienations, chaotic animuses, shameful megalomanias, and interpersonal tyrannies… They are all pontificators of Freudianism, these Congoid expatriate [306] brush-hoppers, with all of their diabolical, neo-fetishistic effronteries… “All of Liberia within our walls!” In the colonies there is nothing more comical, nor a more lively subject for amusement, than the supercilious airs put on by the native doctors freshly graduated from our colonial Medical Faculties. They are worthy of their onus of ridicule. But here we accept this, the boogie-woogie of the doctors, of the worst hallucinogenic negrito Jews, as being worth good money!… Incredible! The very least diploma, the very least new magic charm, makes the negroid delirious, and makes all of the negroid Jews flush with pride! This is something that everybody knows… It has been the same way with our own Kikes ever since their Buddha Freud delivered unto them the keys to the soul! (Elie Faure declared to me several days before his death that Freud had discovered the exact spot where God was located! where the soul was to be found!) Admire how the judge and make decisions, currently, and in all sovereignty, our Kikeish super-genius overseers, concerning the entire worthiness, truthfulness, and power, of all of our spiritual productions! Without appeal! Freud! The spokesman of God! Just as Kaganovich is the spokesman of Stalin! 

We must now go to have ourselves judged by these emanations of God himself, little children paralyzed with fear, bleating all the way! 

I myself shit Jewish criticism, every morning, and that hasn’t done anything to hurt my own ass! So to speak… 

But whereby have all these savages acquired so much insolence? Who will make all of these ruptured magical figurines return to their straw huts…all of these negroid buffoons, these depraved “bongo-beaters” with Parchments? …these coconut-headed demigods? What sort of remnant is going to fill these apes and their hecatombs with lead? make them crawl back into their lairs? close their mouths with manioc, and keep their garbage more to themselves? What sort of remnant?… Jewish experts? Jewish psychiatrists? Here are the judges of our thoughts! of our wills! of

 

our acts! This is the final blow! In this we are lower than monkeys! Diddle-shit caked on the asses of apes! To ask the opinion, even the permission of shit, just to breathe!   

[307] Dr. Faustus spoke with the Devil. Dr. Freud talks to God. All is well. 

[308] Brief citations: 

“No man, be he a writer, politician or diplomat, can be considered fully developed until he has squarely addressed the Jewish problem.”  

—Wickham Stead. 

“The admission of this sort of person can only be considered most dangerous. One could compare them to wasps which one would introduce into a hive, only to have them kill the bees, open-up their stomachs, and extract the honey from their guts. Such are the Jews…”  

—Petition of the merchants to Louis XV (1777). 

“Ah! If only Titus had not destroyed Jerusalem, we would have been spared this Jewish plague, and the conquerors would not now be groaning under the yoke of the conquered.” 

—Claudius Rutilius Numatianuss,

Gallo-roman poet (c. 350 AD). 

“In Germany the Jews played the leading roles, and were the revolutionaries of the first order. They were the writers, the philosophers, the poets, the orators, the publicists, the bankers who carried in their heads and in their hearts the weight of their ancient infamy. They will become the scourge of Germany… But they will probably come to harm sometime in the future.”  

—Metternich (1849).   

Anything more complicated is false and rotten. 

[309]

“It is my superstitious belief that if the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were

to fail, it would be because it hadn’t spilled enough blood.”

—Béla Kun. 

[Gustin:] “But I am perfectly well aware that you don’t like Jews!” Gustin answered me, “But you’ve filled my ears to overflowing… It doesn’t bear constant repetition. You enervate us with your diatribes… But I don’t like them either, in fact I detest them, however, I am accommodating… One has to put up with their evil… In my practice among the clientele between Epinay and the “Bastions,” they are the ones who are stealing the whole show… There’s nothing left for anybody but them, down in the flatlands… It was peaceful beforehand… There were Fathers Comart and Gendron… I spoke with you before the war… One lived without coming to harm… Now, there are fourteen Jews and three

 

Armenians in the same place. They have driven-off all of us natives… When one goes off to war, one commits suicide… For each Frenchman killed at Verdun, twenty Yids arrived. Entire cohorts of Yids have built-up within our medical faculties. All of the examination boards are amenable, are devoted to the Jews, Judaized body and soul. Our top specialists’ foremost clients are Jews, don’t forget… It is they who pay our top specialists…and he who pays has the last word!… They get themselves treated, and more… That well predisposes the Jews, the young Jews, in the faculty examinations… those magnificent “social equalizers,” the competitive examinations… to them go all of the to the house… As for the Frenchman, his ‘social equalizer’ is the ‘false benediction’… That’s good enough for the mug, that’s all he deserves!… They have allowed our Jewkins to pop-up like mushrooms throughout medicine…in the name of the Rights of Man… That ‘naturalizes’ the Jewkin, quicker than piss… This syndicate [310] works on all sides, it clots-up in all of the Lodges… This is the ‘take-nique’ of the invasion…the ‘medical cuckoo’… Why resist it? They’ve taken everything! …even the Archbishop has been won-over by the big Jews… There’s nothing like a ‘converted’ Jew for the revitalization of the Churches… The Pope’s doctor has to be a Jew… It’s a tradition… The Vatican is a ghetto like any other… Official Vatican policy has always been propitious towards Jewry… We have had Jewish bishops, even Jewish popes…a completely Freemasonic clergy… When one no longer wants them around, not the least little bit, and one turns-up the heat a little on them, where, I ask you, do the Jews find refuge? The Vatican! And to resist them? …our army?… Judaized to the hilt! …since Dreyfus, since Alexandre Millerand,³ Jew (son of a concierge to a synagogue!) All of the generals? in their pocket! and the Police?… But look… All of those who keep the keys to the cupboard, to the Stock Exchange, to the Wineries, to Education, to Books, to the Cinema, to Music… Jews!… All of the Music Halls! all of the theaters (including the Comédie-Française), all of the newspapers, all of the radios are Jews and Jewesses, militant for Jewry, bubbling-over for Jewry…even folklorists, if need be! …the devil! ‘the better to entice you, my child, so as the better to strangle you’… All of the stars (with a few rare exceptions) of stage, screen, music, science, and ‘thought,’ are Jews (by one-half, one-third, or one-quarter). The people don’t hum, eat, drink, read, admire, vote, or listen to, anything but that of the Jew… Hey there, pot-roast! you hilariously rambling little scribbler, with what do you intend to bullshit us? do you intend to astound us with your manias?… Could you answer me just a little? drop just a bread-crumb?… But they are going to figure you out! my friend! do you know the Jews?… You still do not know them… But no… but no…not yet… Tell me, aren’t there any times when you’ve picked-up a chick? …is it, say, Rheumatism?” 

[Ferdinand:] “I’ve never had any… I’ve never had a chick…” 

[Gs.:] “Why?…” 

[F.:] “I’m afraid to fall in love…” 

[Gs.:] “You’re hateful, and also, it’s repulsive… It’s your foul nature…” 

Gustin drank heavily, but even so he saw clearly. 

[F.:] “They have it all… There are a million Jews allocated to France…perhaps two million, if one counts the Judaized…the mascailles. They ultimately do what they want… and the opposition? there is none! …the ‘Colonels’⁴…the ‘Doriots’⁵…they are simple diversions…it’s nothing serious…it’s the Morphine

 

[311] Shakes… They will be playing only cameo roles in the Tragedy… Should the colonist be left to be eaten?… That’s the matter of utmost importance!… It’s of no importance! my little one! …a trifle!… The Colonel never mentions the Yids! outside of that, he’s allowed to say whatever he wants…just like Tardieu⁶…he has full license! …babblings!… He who doesn’t discuss the Jews, and doesn’t include their being thrown out the door as part of his program, above all…is talking only to hear himself speak… He’s holding back on his real thoughts…or else he’s a terrible stupe…a thousand times more dangerous still…some sort of presumptuous blind man… His job is to lead the masses astray… The other Jacques⁷ is from the same tobacco pouch…a bunch of ‘showmen’…travel agents, I tell you… Not of crusades! no! but of cruises. They arrange for some ‘privileges’…you understand? …some ‘privileges’… They seduce, reassure the small-holders with some ‘privileges’… All of those absolutely ineffectual Legal fictions, are part of the greater program…some amusement for the gallery…under the chapter heading: Diversions… Their handlers moreover, very painstakingly Judaized, have proceeded well in advance, orchestrating all of the concerts…all of the stages of the Cruise… ‘Right here! Ladies and Gentlemen! there are still some excellent placements left!…’ It could not be otherwise with these ‘Guardians of Privilege’… They will founder as so many others have always done, over the past century, who have gone down amidst a veritable torrent of mad laughter. All of these knights of salivation, these Paladins of the visage, are raised up just so as to founder…at the desired moment, as decided upon, and preordained by the Jewish bankers, Jewish commissars, and Jewish International. They will need to say but a single word, these big Jews, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds, in order to have all of these ham actors dissolved, at the hour chosen by the Cabal, in the same manner that they vaporized all of the other puppets, the big talkers: Boulanger… Poincaré… Clemenceau…etc. They turn a little knob and then…poof! …a good little man goes into oblivion…disappears… People no longer speak of him!… 

“France is a Jewish colony, with no insurrection possible, with no discussion, nor murmur… A veritable Sinn Fein is needed for our liberation…an implacable racial instinct… But we don’t have the Sinn Fein ‘class’!… Far too many of the enfeoffed⁸ are already too wine-besotted, degraded, feminized, Judaized, Masonized, and muzzled in every manner. A bunch of cankers rotted-out with alcohol, and ever the most greedy of rat-eaten rats. Atrocious! …a bunch of quite shameful little fistulas!… In order to vanquish, to be free of the Jew, one must first of all be able to tell him right to his snout: ‘You and your stinking, rotten wad of money, you [312] can take one right in the mouth, and then get out! slimeball! or I’ll rub you out!…’ But who can say such a thing as that? …no one from our troupe… Hung-over, nickel-ante, fare-dodging, venal, imbecilic, and over-rated!… Not a chance! All of the peasant rebellions in France have failed pitifully, moreover!… A great tragedy!… Every curse befalls he who would even want to occupy himself with the French! …read a little, and reread again, the most astounding histories of the Dupleixes…the La Salles…the Montcalms…you will remain forever edified!… What other people carries, to its shame, such prodigious pages of halcyon oafishness?… There’s nothing more to say, the die has been cast! And then the war⁹ will come of its own accord, as a righted of wrongs, whenever it suits the ‘Intelligence Service’¹⁰…and then we will have three fronts to maintain…with the Jews amassed towards the rear…amongst the Freemasonic generals…at War Council Headquarters… I am hereby telling you, I, Ferdinand, the secrets of the stars. Diplomacy is ever the abode, in essence, of special words and little reticulations of design, concerning the Art and the Manner of preparing the rottenest state of an epoch, of a continent, for partition, dismemberment, mincing…in the overall scramble…for pâté for the most voracious… After Poland, Turkey, and Austria… It is now our turn… It’s simple…it’s normal… That which the

 

Jews have decided, must come to pass!… Why so many gloomy Gusses?… Veal calves you are?… Vealers? …yes or hell no?… Resist who?… Resist how?… Have ‘Conscientious Objector’ vealers ever been seen?… Are you trying to get yourself killed, bitch?… You’ll be first! you first of all!… You are going to meet the martyrs in just a little bit! Up ’til now you’ve been shitting all over everybody! you are going to pay! blistered crab!… You can no longer count upon anyone… You are all alone!… It’s a wicked thing, you know, what with the martyrs… You are going to be knocked down in droll fashion… And then you won’t even be going to Heaven…because I’d like to forewarn you right now, that God Almighty is Jewish.¹¹ You have exasperated everyone…and you are going to gain just what?… In this great Latin country everything, absolutely everything is for sale, kept for a while, and then absolutely sold… The bourgeoisie, completely burned-out, greedy, cretinous and nattering, is a muck-up both coming and going!… It no longer knows anything but where to place its ancient buns in order to have them ass-reamed! …always! …all the more! …to have them filled as soon as possible by the first dick which offers itself! …to the one which is the most offering¹²… It’s as propitious as an old hackney, it has loaded everything over to the Yids, to the extent that it knows how, all of [313] the keys to both town and country… Its sons…its daughters…its false teeth…to the one who offers the most¹³… The nobility, that ancient imposture, rolls over and begs for consideration¹⁴… Under each of their beds one finds a Jew… The nobility is a bordello for the Yids…a lowly sub-Jewish tribe, something like the Sahel-dwellers perpetually following the camp of the African Battalion.¹⁵ The nobles follow behind the Jews just to eat…just to hang on… The nobility has truly been a cloak for the Kikes throughout the ages, so often has it been the Kikes who ran through the parsnip patch with noble maidens. The French nobility must have sucked-up more than enough niggerly semen to flood the Plain of Agincourt… They are such gluttons for the prepuce. As for the Kings of France, to be quite honest, I have found them to have truly humorous noses… Ferdinand! …those truly humorous ‘Bourbon’ noses… Towards the Third or Fourth Century, the Queen Mother, somewhere…must certainly have gotten some, just a little bit…from some handsome Commissar…a Judeo-Christian…a Bolshevik of those days.¹⁶ A Fuzzy-Wuzzy…don’t you think it so, Ferdinand? …that they have truly humorous noses? …that they have something of an Abyssinian air, our great Kings of France? That they are all somewhat Rastafarian?¹⁷… Look at Henry IV. 

“With the Catholic clergy it is much more transparent still, it’s even transparent…these are some real Yids… For fear of losing their tabernacles, they are prepared to do anything at all… They are ready to bless whatever is put before them… The bungholes of hunting dogs…Masonic Temples…collection boxes for the Poor…machine-guns… They are not at all prejudiced… They are ever ready to make their unctuously plaintive simper at the moment when a person expires. They want to bless elevators…the Smiles of the Abbé Jouvence…many other little relics… They ask only to please… This is the most servile troupe of ham actors in the Universe. 

“As for the people, I am going to explain it to you… A simpleton, a dupe, forever cuckolded, stuffed-full by his leaders, he will, provided that dissension is spread by wall posters, and that he’s treated to a toot of fanfare, come wine-besotted to be turned about, to wherever he’s wanted! to turn about in the breeze like a top, and to be resolved among the gusts… That is his destiny… That’s his great opportunity!… To the good fortunes of war! for the weird witchery of words!¹⁸ for the ever greater glory of Israel!… Israel Shylocratic, democratic, allied unto the death with the City,¹⁹ the ‘Intelligence’ Service,²⁰ M. Loeb and the Comintern, a triple-tablier²¹of pigs’ skin. All of those fine people will wind up, nothing but “Kosher” meat in the depths of the Maginot Tomb,²² upon the sounding of that clarion call, by the International²³ this time! their mugs still [314] shining with effervescent enthusiasm! This has already been written in the stars, it’s a completely done deal! The slope is slippery as always… Let us note, so as not to leave anything out, that the working class as can be seen, at the present time, as having become sufficiently vicious, as having given itself over to petty machinations lacking in élan, is pushing forcefully and ferociously towards the ‘front,’ in favor of every intervention, fanatically, solidaristically, in a manner currently characteristic of the very worst Kikes of the Consistory… This is not playing nice-nice… This is not being cordial… For what are these crafty little devils hoping? …in the next war?… Still to be able to be spoiled little brats? …little draft-exempt wiseacres?… The “forcible lovers of factories”?… They are somewhat easily resigned, it seems to me, to the deaths of their “brothers of the soil”…because, is it not so…in the last war: of every three killed…two were peasants!… That’s considerable!… These things must not be forgotten… If only this might mean something to the brothers of the factory, across the way… But things no longer work that way at all!… Things never appear the same after a hiatus of twenty-four years!… Perhaps, once they goof things up, they will be able to see it for themselves… The Jews make certain promises and then, is it not so, they change their minds… The white dogs are to take up the rifle! all of the white dogs…without exception!… The herd is no longer abundant, it was enormously raided between ’14 and ’18… This time nothing will be left… It’ll be women who will work in the factories… As in Russia…the men will go to get themselves worked over… Whether working class or not…it’s all the same! …for equality amongst entrails!… You yourselves are not Jews? …you’re not? Then you should know that you have always been the hostages of the Jews!… The meat of experience. White men won’t see Peace in France even as morsels… From Ariège to the rue Lappe, from Billancourt to Trégastel, everyone will be taken away!… Blood sausages!… All of you will go through the meat grinder! Olivet! Dufour! Bidart!.. Dudule and Big Lulu! …and La Gencive! and Le Tondu!… Keriben and Vandenput…you will see none of this!… You will see only a cloud of blood and then you will be dead! …blown apart! …rendered into sections while still alive…all along the three fronts… One funnel you will be left to slop down with you still-moist guts…at another you will stir the soup, a great stew of mud and manure, with your stumps…your expelled lungs, worked into filigrees, translucent, will hang from the barbed wire like an embroidery… Won’t that be lovely? It’s already possible for you to while away Sunday afternoons by going thus to add your names to the Monuments to the Dead, the one of your parish… It will give you something to do on family outings… That way they won’t forget you…not right away… Start doing it tomorrow… Thus [315] engraved into the marble, you will be able to depart peacefully, the most free of spirits. These days, that’s the only place,  that marble, that the Jews haven’t tried to monopolize… There you will be amongst your brothers of the race, that I guarantee you… You won’t find many Jewish surnames upon Monuments of the latter sort…the monuments to our dead…our piss-walls for ghosts, our cairns unto docile dopes, unto our super-cuckolded cadavers…our diseased ‘monuments aux morts,’ they say a lot about our past…our present, and all about our future… They aren’t looked at very closely, never very closely, I find, those meridian-markers of our fate… Everything remains written very clearly thereon…in that granite and that marble.   

“This would be a splendid opportunity, as never has so magnificent a war been made available to the lost hordes, an extraordinary offer into which they may throw their hearts with reckless abandon! From brooding Dunkirk to glittering Biarritz!… For every taste! May there be enough room for our culinary sieves!… It’s going to be necessary to seek out, to rifle drolly through the Lists of Recruits in order to obtain all of the necessary personnel! …to comb through, to scour clear to the end in order to clear out the last crevasses of the terrain, in order to cleanse the least fissures where the indigenous people may be hiding out… Ah! Ah! Laridoire my buddy, you’re quivering! You are gamboling about already! You like the insignia, I see! You rejoice in wreckage! Wait just a little bit, my little trickster. But I find you, my boy, as pale as a deployment notice!… That’s an important doctor who’s talking about you! I can feel you ‘lost’ already… I can already see you lukewarm flesh skewered upon a spit… Is that a properly Gallic attitude?… You may go my

 

friend… Paradise is waiting!… Don’t bother to return I beg of you, ever! …under any pretext! Don’t worry yourself over the welfare of the Jews!… They are comfortable. The Jew is exempt by nature… He is this…he is that… He’s a doctor…a lawyer…too fat…too nearsighted…too rich…too slow. It pains him to be among us… He has always been the one to give orders… He is much too well-educated for us…too refined to be mixed-in…too vicious…more of an interpreter than a combatant…do you understand, you stupefied brute?… You wouldn’t happen to be asking! deliriously! that the Salt of the Earth²⁴ be sown into the muck the same as yourself?… You won’t dare say so too loudly!… This obscenity is good for you!… In your forecasting of events, those which are impending, know what is going on at the present moment…all of the bureaux in all of the Ministries of war, are being ‘purged’ thoroughly and extensively…[316] In the Headquarters and in the Commands…as well as behind the scenes, there will soon remain none but those officers who are completely sold-out, devoted with all their soul to the cause of the Jewish bankers… 

“It is not I who say this, it was rather the Venerable Paul Perrin, on the occasion of a recent Lodge meeting. He has warned you, out of his own good will, that to the Ministry your viscera, is like the franc at the Stock Exchange, it loses value every day… Know it! take it into account!! In another month or two under the current regime, you will no longer have any value as a human being, you will have become completely devalued, you will become a ‘number’ among the draftees… A robot in every sense, both civil and soldierly. So cover your ass! You have been forewarned!… Take a little whiff of the woozy ambiance. You are going to pay them for your ‘vacations’! lowly proletarian!… In your coming Revolution, you won’t have enough asses to wipe, with all of the wall posters and Decrees that will appear…four times a day… But all of that won’t serve to lower, not by a single penny, the price of butter… 

“Once everything has gotten too complicated, Thorez will go off to the Caucasus, and Blum to Washington (if the haven’t been rubbed out) in charge of very complicated missions, while you will find yourself in the Ardennes. While there you might give a little consideration, to how well those furtive little bullets imitate the birds…whistling in the wind…veritable nightingales, I assure you…as they come forth to percolate your head…”  

[Gs.:] “Ferdinand, when it comes down to brass tacks, Fascism is the same as Communism… In the upcoming Valkyrie,²⁵ you may rest completely assured, that whether it’s Hitler or his cousin²⁶ Stalin who carries the day…it will amount to the same thing…the fashion by which there will be pollywogs, those being us. Down through the ages, the Frenchman has never known what he wanted, neither during peace, nor during war. For sixteen centuries, he has made war and revolution, and has looked behind every panel, in order to gain possession of the land, and to get rid of the Jesuits. Now he no longer wants the land, and he has replaced the Jesuits with Jews and Freemasons who are a hundred thousand times as dastardly… Now it’s the factories that he wants…and once he gains them, it’s fatal! he will no longer want them… He will want something else… Only infantilisms, tipsy stupefactions, and the petty whims of old geezers pass through his noggin, never a reasonable proposition. Always trumperies which neither make any sense, nor lead to anything… No one has actually ever told him: ‘Frenchman, you are the biggest stoop-knuckle that’s ever existed, the biggest cuckold in the universe, the venue of doom. Your barbecue is at hand…a filthy reamed-out guinea pig in all your glory. You’re to be done-up with peppers.’ [317] No one has told him. He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t take anything into consideration. Yet he must be forced to admit that by consequence the wars, all of the wars, that the Jews have had us fight, aren’t worth the pee of a customs assessor…the shako of a clown, a half-balled admiral,²⁷ or the keel of a rotted-out bateau-mouche²⁸… It’s all worth nothing. I hate to say it. May it please the Consistory, I myself would be perfectly happy to see Hitler knock the rust off of the Russians. He would not be able to kill many more, in ferocious war, than Stalin himself can rub out, every day, in conditions of free and easy peace. It can’t make much difference! …whether Hitler accedes to all of Ukraine! by way of conquest! and then Romania in addition to that! and the Czechs along with them! I don’t see a single directive that would need to be reissued… I am not an advocate of ghettos… Eh! Not at all!… So long as it’s not my abode that he runs over!… It is the Jews among us that provoke me… It’s their bickerings and their ambitions… Theirs are not at all the same as ours… As for myself, I would much prefer to form an alliance with Hitler. Why not? He has said nothing against Bretons, or against the Flemings… Nothing at all… He has spoken out only against the Jews… he doesn’t like the Jews… Neither do I… And I don’t like niggers outside of their own part of the world… That’s all. 

“I find no exquisite delight in a Europe becoming completely black… That pleases me not at all… It’s the Jews of London, Washington and Moscow who are impeding the Franco-German alliance. It’s the ‘Intelligence Service’²⁹… It’s the descendants of Zakharov. It is owing to no other interests. One is no longer able to act, to move…our very guts are overly speculated upon, overly theorized upon, overly manipulated and oversold, all for the sake of the Jewish Crusade. It’s diabolical!… Whenever a motion, or even a suggestion is made towards a little rapprochement,³⁰ or an anti-Yid manifestation… We are reminded…brutally, from high places, to stand at attention…that meat is needed for the slaughterhouse, and that we are already in the stockyards…you’re given a blow on the ring through your snout, and a whip across the buttocks… I do not want to make war for Hitler, I should say, but I do not want to make war against him, for the Jews. To make sense of the whole confused thing, it’s certainly the Jews and the Jews only, who are pushing us towards the machine-guns… Hitler, he doesn’t like the Jews, and neither do I!… There’s no sense in tormenting yourself over something so minor… It’s not a crime for you to find them repulsive… As an untouchable, they surely find me repulsive!… The Jews of Jerusalem, or a little bit further down along the Niger, they don’t bother me! they don’t bother me at all!… I’d give them back all of their Congo! all of their Africa!… [318] Liberia, their Nigger Republic, I’m familiar with it, it strongly resembles Moscow. To an extent that you wouldn’t believe… It is well that it doesn’t bother me at all, that niggers dominate in Liberia and in Palestine… Provided that one does not transform me into a slave of the Tatarized, Russified Liberians. That is all I ask. That’s the distinction. But when you think of an alliance, between the weak and the strong, it’s always the weak that gets eaten. Look! Look! And look again! Hitler’s going to have his work cut out for him, due to the incredible complications entailed in defending his foolish conquests, throughout the steppes of Russia, and in the suburbs of the Baykal,³¹ which shall surely consume all of his time. Many centuries will come to pass before we come to be irritated… During such centuries…is it not…the King…the ass…and I…there will be a greater need for accordions… And then, in being colonized, to give you some straight talk on the subject, it couldn’t be any worse than we’re getting it nowadays with the Jews, the niggers, and all of that most obscene flow of mud which has ever oozed on over out of the Orient.³² With some mongrels, some half-breeds, the very lowest ‘conglomeration’ of all of the garbage thrown out of Egypt…garbage multiplied by shit… Cheers! to your health! Colonization of the homeland, by these Judeo-Russian mongrels is the supreme infamy… Guano couldn’t fall any lower! Ask around a bit, what they think about your adorable Russia in the states bordering upon it… Those who know by real-life experience, just what a Jewish Tatar might order! They would give you a little education… These experts cannot conceive of anything more hideous, more degrading, more infernal, more excruciatingly ass-reaming, than a Judeomongolic tyranny… Two million Krauts encamped upon our territory could not be worse, more ravaging, more infamous, than all of these Jews who are killing us. 

 

“Carrying things to their logical conclusions, and not having the habit of evading, I speak frankly, as I think, I would rather have a dozen Hitlers than an omnipotent Blum. Hitler I think I can understand, while with Blum it is useless, that will always be the worst enemy, a hatred unto death, absolute. He and his entire clique of Abyssinians, all from the same pushcart, are his personal circle, his Consistory. They themselves know it perfectly well by the way, and they cry out from time to time that a deathly hatred exists between us, between white and black, to which they are devoted… It is enough to remember these words. We would be wrong to regard the issue as being beneath us… We no longer have anything to lose… The Krauts are white men, at least… To put an end to it so as to put an end to it, is my preference…” 

[Gs.:] “So you want to kill all of the Jews?” 

[319][F.:] “I find that they don’t hesitate much when it comes to acting on their ambitions, and their diseased interests… (ten million in Russia alone)… If it is necessary that there be some game for this Hunting Expedition, then let’s bloody-up the Jews! that’s my opinion! Insofar as I let them get away with their charades, then in the process of my being shoved forward to the front lines, I’d kill them all without difficulty and up to the last one! Such is the reciprocity of Man. 

“So that those spineless people called Frenchmen might reclaim a little of their self-respect, I would like it to be proclaimed, absolutely concluded, certified, and universally trumpeted, that a single yellowed toenail, of whatever sort of crooked, numb-skulled wino of an Aryan, wallowing in his own puke, is worth a hundred thousand times as much, and another hundred thousand times on top of that, in any given fashion, at any given moment, as one hundred twenty-five thousand Einsteins, standing in all of their blindingly astounding radiant glory… I hope that I have made myself understood?…”

Gustin was not convinced… He began to go into arabesques, like a Jew, he was fleeing… 

[Gs.:] “There may be a future for them, Ferdinand…even given all of their depredations… Perhaps they are working towards the future…” 

[F.:] “If only those who speak to us of the Future were to be strangled first of all…that would greatly simplify things… When a man speaks to you of the Future, it’s already a done hustle… It is right now in the present that the Jews are fattening themselves! them!…as they hatch cuckoos in our numb skulls… They never say to you: ‘I will wait a little bit!’… No! never! They say to you: ‘Get out, you native slut! go wash yourself! You bloody stupid bit of snatch!’ The Jews are getting the goody out of it at present! …not in the Future!…”  

[Gs.:] “Did they do you a personal wrong?” 

[F.:] “They exasperate me… I’ve had it up to here with them… Whichever way I turn, it’s crushing… I get scratched raw in the course of life… I can no longer engage in small talk, without discovering traces of their slime… of tiny filaments, of the faintest echoes… insidious… of columns… high and low… Such is the camouflage of the Yid Army… Of which there is a full rear…it swarms…it mounts…it tears down…they probe me in order to insinuate into me… They want me to come to appreciate stupidity, with each turn of the page…each minute…to see how much I’ve softened, weakened moreover…and what I’m going to perceive in this new treacherous thread, this one additional piece of garbage, this unforeseeable interloper…the penetration progresses…an infiltration [320] word-by-word… Whether I ever sleep…at times…by which they might still put it to me…whether I’m still lacking in anything… One day it’s the radio…the next day it’s a big drum… A young poet

 

disappears… A swindler is so financially successful that he’s bigger than a thousand honest men… The next day it’s at the price of Charm…of beauty…completely Jewish by chance… That entire travesty, venomous… It’s no longer anything but an underbrush filled with vampires, where one mustn’t fall asleep…some worms crawl about in the shadows, sticky, viscous, in all of the mosses… It’s no longer any kind of existence… It’s a fantastic ‘herpetarium’! The other morning, I stepped out of the house, and what did I see on the wall across the way? A poster: l’Humanité³³… For a ‘free and happy France’!³⁴ Their cake with cream for idiots… I get closer, a photograph…smiling…a beatified Kike! …shit!… It’s an asinine phenomenon!… It’s a veritable challenge!… I don’t go pasting-up posters of Bretons, I don’t, in Tel Aviv… I am more discreet… And then there’s comrade Lipchitz, when he expounded in full form, the manner in which we were to be forewarned. ‘If the French don’t like it, we’ll throw them out.’ I don’t find that at all reasonable!… I find it grotesque, and prejudiced. When the niggers spoke to him about quitting the field during the Battle of Poitiers, Charles Martel, who was not crazy, cut their throats… At least they didn’t make any more noise…”

[321]

If one of these mornings I am ever found on a little hat-rack…

It would be useless to maintain the semblance of looking… 

(It costs only 3000 to 4000 francs to have a man killed, at any given time in Paris, a little less in New York, a little more in London…) 

Pushed to his limit, Gutman has revealed himself for what he is, a nasty, rancorous personality… When I had recommenced telling him, all that I thought concerning the Jews… He became completely enraged!… He ranted on for a while most frightfully… He flew off into a fit! A real fury of the damned…  

[Gutman:] “But you are delirious, Ferdinand!… Nom de Dieu you’re drunk! You’re a foul one to have to deal with! …my word, you’re nothing but a dirty ‘habitual’ drinker… But I am going to have you committed! I promise you!… It’s been good having you for a colleague!… That’s not going to continue… I have some contacts at the Asylums, I do… You are going to see a little bit of them… They are all Jews at the Asylums… This is going to entertain them greatly…to hear your show of inanities…your stupidities… They are going to have to give you a label… I am going to go, over there, to forewarn the Jews as to all of the things that you call them…in a fine nuthatch… I will have a straitjacket made exactly to your measure… Then, you will give us some peace… You will return to your novels… If you are wise you will be using a crayon… Above all it’s the nonsense… ‘Race’ no longer exists…it’s a myth…” 

[Ferdinand:] “And there’s the great tall tale! being laid out for our benefit! …to take us in with a sales pitch…the ‘myth of the races’!… The Jews, those in their mixed blood, their pseudo-oogie-boogie-woogie, they are not so proud of being a race!… Proud like Artaban.³⁵ They weren’t ashamed of being Jews! They [322] knew from whence they’d come… They pulled in unison as a team, like dogs… It is they who are the worst racists… They for whom every triumph is racialistic… The only thing they talk about is how to deceive us, how to razzle-dazzle us…and above all how to disarm us… All of the professors of anthropology, the Freemasons of the Popular Front most Jewish, well-paid, affirm to us that it’s all over, urbi et orbi,³⁶ and voilà ³⁷… It’s irrefutable… It’s not that the Popular Front has never lied… But rather it’s an illusion, it’s a chimera…a detraction from

 

the vision…most distressing, a disruption of your poor Onanistic sensibilities! a veritable diarrhœic discharge of ideas…a substantial loss of phospholipids… You are too uptight, Ferdinand… Do you remember, what ‘Auntie Annie’ used to say?… What am I hinting at?… Could it be the doldrums of menopause?… Are you having hot flashes?… Try ‘The Smiles of the Abbé Jouvence’…” 

[G.:] “What makes you think, then, that they are frizzy-haired?… And why Palestine? That’s not the birthplace of ‘The Race’³⁸…” 

That was it, he was trying to egg me back on, he was trying to broach the subject once I had become cataleptic… 

[F.:] “They are near-sighted! your Semites! and duck-footed! …the bottom of the barrel! and they have the nigger’s smell…isn’t that quite so? …have I spoken more foolishness?… Should I give you two shakes in which to reply…? Don’t they have broad feet from having waded around through the sands, so often, and so strenuously…and their Bedouin ways…in the sands…in their gathering of dates, and old camel piss…for century after century?… It’s irrefutable!… Such opinions are overheard in general circulation…the palmate feet, I call: Jewish! …the odor! and then those glasses!… Those old granulomas! …the sequels…the shabby side-effects…” 

Ah! Ah! I easily hit my mark with that gathering of dates… I thereupon pointed out to him his own pair of “deck-chairs,” which were veritably huge! given his own rather modest height… That left him confounded… 

[F.:] “That’s the ordeal of those handsome Jewbies, as I’ve insisted, to have feet that are a little too ‘strong’… All of the boot-makers of New York know it… They are not deceived on the matter of race…” 

[G.:] “Your criticism of them is rather mendacious, Ferdinand,” he shot back straight away. “You also are descended from savages… If not from the desert, then from caves, and that’s much worse! They were much more fetid, much more sickening… A desert is always clean… It wasn’t dates upon which your stupid Aryan ancestors were dining… It was reindeer droppings! some good shit that really melts in the mouth! and [323] for Winter, kneaded balls of guano! petrified! that’s what your ancestors turned to!…and then some peat with tallow, well-rancid well-smoked… Some true eaters of unclean things… Is that what you’re afraid of?…” 

[F.:] “That’s a very accurate verbal depiction! …but it’s not the same…not the same…” 

[G.:] “You also are tracking straw in from the stable… What are you complaining about? …and even now, after all this time!…” 

[F.:] “Truly! …but it’s not the same!… Everybody has his own stink! that’s what I say!… That’s all!… I don’t force mine upon the Jews… It is they who situate themselves so as to sniff at me… I just don’t happen to like their smell… I have the right… I’m in my own country. It’s not as though I’ve gone over there, to Tel Aviv… First of all, they are much more racist! in Tel Aviv! much more ferocious than Hitler! They are ‘exclusive’ like nobody else!” 

[G.:] “Well then, what do you say, about Mr. Blum? don’t you find him petty? …the bottom of the barrel? Ah! Ah! Fish soup!… Fish soup!…” 

 

He had made a seminal statement… 

[F.:] “M. Blum Karfulkenstein the Bulgarian? is that what you are trying to say?… Ah! but with him it is another kind of rot! his is from Geneva and Lausanne!… That’s the exception! It confirms the general rule of ‘the bottom of the barrel’… He is doubly from the bottom of the barrel!… He is the Prince of The Bottom-of-the-Barrel!…” 

The blow had no effect… 

The conversation had become acerbic…somewhat biting… The conversation had begun to ramble… 

[F.:] “I don’t want to die on account of the Jews! I would prefer to have a cancer! …rather than the Jewish cancer!…” 

[G.:] “No one is forcing you to do anything!…” 

[F.:] “But yes! But yes!… They are forcing me!… It is they, the Jews, who invented Patriotism, following the Crusades! …and the Reformation! in order to bamboozle the Christians…” 

[G.:] “You think so?…” 

[F.:] “I’m positive! They are the ones who devised the whole thing… Though the Crusades and the Reformation had been very useful to them, it is only for Patriotism that I would like to give it to them in the ass, for that is the one which I once served…”  

[G.:] “They have been persecuted…” 

[F.:] “It is they who persecute us… It is never ‘we’… They take vengeance for torts that never existed! It is not they, but we who have been vamped! told the big lie, paralyzed by [324] falsehoods, cuckolded, and become the duped dying, under all of the Jewish oppressions. Tyrannical travesties, treacherous, of the ‘Optimist’ variety as among the Britons…or crushing as in Russia…pedantic, slick, œnophilic and patriotic as amongst us… It’s all the same!… The world does not just happen all by itself… This I tell you…it does not just happen all by itself… It must be that someone is busying himself with it…commanding it… It’s the Jews who are in command… The world ordered by the Jews, is a Hell for Aryans…not to abuse the term, but literally a Hell! with flames! toad-like creatures everywhere! eternal tortures…with revolutions, wars, and butcheries, without end…and one way or another, with the Jews ultimately calling the tune!…always in the process of reviving, contriving, and delighting in still more Calvaries for our flesh…still more extravagant massacres, in the advancement of their infection! insatiably! always the slick operators! the voyeurs! the scofflaws! recklessly…that’s their way of life! …their reason for being… They crucify. There, I’ve said it all, of what I think concerning…the Jews.” 

[G.:] “That’s not very much, Ferdinand!…” 

[F.:] “Ah! if I might have one little word and no more, just before I go… I am an objector, seven hundred percent. The pacifist is no longer the Jew…it is I!… The military decoration which I’ve had since 27 November 1914… It brings me two hundred francs Blum per annum…(twenty Swiss francs), but I don’t want another one… Such would be a medal for Israel, moreover… If you understand me…” 

[G.:] “That’s not very swift, as wit, Ferdinand…for an Aryan it’s rather sluggish!…” 

 

[F.:] “You know, buddy, I know your type, I understand it, when it comes to wit it’s Eddie Cantor…the Marx Brothers…” 

[G.:] “Always jabbering about the Cavalry!… It is we who are the Salt of the earth!… You have said so yourself!” 

“Salt of the earth!…” Those are the words that made me hop!… I felt like shoving them right back the other way past his glottis… He was coming to provoke my most phlegmatic humor even more!… 

[F.:] “A!h! salt of the Earth!… Ah! Consistory!… Ah! Elder of Zion!³⁹… Ah! Maccabee!… Ah! funny face!… Ah! well, it is indescribable! …but muckety-muck having the balls of a mole!… But you take everything for being phony!… A Jew is one hundred percent hubris!… Drums!… Tambourines! Batons! Bladder thieves!… Let the loudspeaker be wrenched away from you…the Screen be emptied! the balloons bled-off!… You will founder!… And of vice! Of what marque? that of the Titans!… Some ‘confidential work’ as you call it! given your frail [325] constitutions… Peacocks! overinflated false fetishists! …not even coffeehouse attendants! …sponges! …real drips, you take everything!… But there’s no more juice to suck: Not from anyone!… And above all you Jews! pathetic brick shits! of completely exhausted, bleached-out chromosomes! …to be blown upon while being well-soaked in the soup! like any other crouton!… In the broth! …in our soup!…” 

[G.:] “You are going to come to realize, Ferdinand, what lies ahead in the path which you are pursuing… You are going to have the whole world against you, bean face!… It will not always be so easy to pass yourself off as being innocently insane… You’re the type of madman who reasons… The people can’t always be in the know… They sometimes make mistakes… They might misunderstand… You could be vexing to some people… Listen! to me, who wishes you well… I have never deceived you, Ferdinand… I have never set traps for you… I have never told you to ‘Go away’…is that dirty trickery? …really?… Eh? …what say?…” 

[F.:] “Gutman! that’s exactly so!…” 

[G.:] “So I’ll tell you, Ferdinand, my good nigger, to let go of these frightful attitudes…come along with us…you will be happy… You are native-born? …your racial brethren, will shit all over your torso…” 

[F.:] “That’s exactly so, Gutman…that’s exactly so, insofar as the Jews…” 

[G.:] “Because you don’t know how to handle them…the Jews, had you known how to approach them, would have taught you how to succeed…you are nothing but a spoiled loser amongst your kind…from which come your imbecilic animosities, and your pig-headedness… Regard the indigenous a little, the Jews never impede them… On the contrary, they sing ‘Let there be joy!’⁴⁰… But you understand ‘let there be joy’ as sending them on their way!… You knock ’em one upside the head!… That’s not a proper way to behave!… It is you who annoys them… You humiliate them!… It’s reprehensible!… Consider how happy your ‘Frenchmen by race’ were when they so well received the Romans…for having so well palpated their Roman knouts…so well crawled under their Roman crotches…so well positioned their buns…so well lent out their backsides. They are still congratulating one another eighteen centuries later!… The entire Sorbonne is jubilant!… They devote their entire bachelors’ studies to that glorious ass-reaming! They reflect nothing but that memory! …for having so well found their footing…among the surly centurions…for having so well rendered pomp unto Caesar…for having under that heavy yoke, so strangulating, so severe, crawled all the way to Rome, harnessed worse than mules, suffocating under the chains…

 

under the chariots of war…for having been so well spit-upon by the Roman populace… Even now they burst out laughing completely moved, completely immobilized by that [326] retrospection… Ah! how perfectly it is installed… Ah! that great! enormous civilization!… The ass is caved-in forever… Ah! mon popotas! …fiotas! fiotum!… They still cherish the germ…of that familiarity…now lost… Ah! those tender buns!… Dum tu declamas!⁴¹… Roma!… Rosa! Rosa!… Tu pederum!⁴²… Rosa! Rosa! my Cicero! 

“Everything begins all over again and it is perfect!… And there it is! everything! It’s the tempo! It’s the cycle! It’s the waves! with different beats! The Hymie beat is not very high, I admit it! in the animal order, but even so all the same, it does go on… Does anyone really want a dick like a dead Emperor’s!… Aren’t you of that opinion?…” 

[F.:] “Perhaps so, perhaps so… I was of the opinion…” 

[G.:] “Insofar as it is the destiny of the French to be screwed over the course of the ages…as they pass from one century to the next…from the dick of an Etruscan to the dick of a Moor…to the pole of a priest… A Gallic Yid or a Saxon?… It doesn’t make much difference! It’s wrong to pout… All of the conquerors, they must, it’s quite natural, screw the conquered! it’s the law of the most dynamic Species!… If it is so… It is so…” 

[F.:] “Take a little look at all the chicks, the Aryan ones…it’s easy to see for whom they’ve placed their preferences…in the theater, in cinema, in no matter which salon…‘first class,’ tourist, train bag, or sport?⁴³… They all gather ’round, remarkably, literally for the Jew, the Fuzzy-Wuzzy, the ‘toucan.’ The Fuzzy-Wuzzy is the King of the Day… He is rising… The white man is declining… It is he to whom go all of the honors!… It is he for whom one is prepared to pay… The chicks don’t reason, they follow their instincts, their guts… The Jew is perfect for them, he is the future, he has the dough… The chicks don’t have to be taught… They know such things by nature… They vibrate… They receive vibrations…the Negroid vibrations… He’s the golden-haired boy of today! the Jew! the Jew in every film, slightly frizzy, bottom-of-the-pot, flat-footed, somewhat myopic! Oh! how distinguished he is!… A man about town!… Ah! that’s no madman there, nor a peasant!…” 

[G.:] “That’s true, it’s irrefutable, the Jews are winning on every front. All chicks to the Abyssinians! That race will fill their buns!… The chicks will have breadbaskets filled with their marmalade! they won’t know how to sit down they have been so thoroughly Judaized… Ah! how mightily they knock ’em down…those Fuzzy-Wuzzies!… Ah! how passionate they are! volcanic!… [327] Such are the hearts of true lovers!… That estimable Philemon⁴⁴! You think like all niggers! The dick makes the man!” 

“They will come forth unto our embrace… Cut the throats of our sons…our compa-a-a-nions… To arms!”⁴⁵ Such was the droll expressions of Rouget de Lisle!⁴⁶… They certainly cut the throats of the sons, and of the fathers along with them…but they ass-reamed the companions… That’s one more benefit still… It’s already much less horrendous…than it would be amongst the “fer-roh-cious soldiers”!⁴⁷… You cannot pretend otherwise! You will have to recognize it! …be recognizing it!… They “do” the front side at times, but only as a joke! …so as not to stand upon ceremony…in order to assimilate all the better… 

If the Germans had won the War of ’14 (if the Jews had so desired it, that is to say), the Frenchmen of the soil would have well enjoyed it, quite so! it would have been Fritz with whom

 

they’d played Pied Piper… The Pomeranian Grenadiers, the white cuirassiers⁴⁸!… Ah! now there were some handsome fellows!… All would have transpired with enthusiasm, a truly passionate marriage!… Upon reflection, the French are anything that you want to make of them. In the end, they became nothing in particular…no one in particular… They were satisfied to become niggers…they asked for nothing better… Provided that a male of sufficient cruelty ass-rams then clear up to the navel, they regard themselves as being happy… Our entire history, since the time of the Gauls, has been nothing but a very long succession, of cruel ass-rammers. There hasn’t been a single king who was French. In the full decadence of today, she is by necessity coated with larvae…contenting themselves with that which remains… The Frenchman, ever so avaricious, has nonetheless fattened-up all of his great mackerels in power quite well. Now that it’s the Yids’ turn, their supreme triumph, they are going to wind up as stiff as bitches… But the more they get themselves laid, the more they’ll want… And now here is their promise to the French, of Tatar executioners!… Not that these are things to be resisted… But rather it’s an enticement!… How could you even want to stifle them?… But it’s a priapic “bouquet”!… Some savages as the “truest of the true”!… Some merciless torturers!… Not some Abyssinian understudies!… But no!… But no!… Only the most super-competent eviscerators! under wild ox horns! You can see it all right here!… This voyage in the Dipsosphere! Ah! how they are going to make us suffer! Ah! those ardent souls. Ah! my joy!… Ah! those furies!… Ah! my timid one!… After that it will be the Kirghizes… It’s in the program!… Ah! it’s been promised!… And then some Mongols! …even more hateful! …more slant-eyed!… Who eat worms and dirt… Ah! how they are going to run us through!… And then [328] still others, even more Chinese! more yellow! …more rustic… Ever more vicious towards the ass end… Ah! They are cutting you open! They are cutting out our guts!… It’s the Cross right square in the ass!… The more foreign they are…the more bizarre it is!… The more they dilate it…the deeper they can drive into it! It’s the ass-end of an angelic existence!… They are killing us… That is what the French are saying!… Gutman would have the last word… 

[G.:] “I knew a fellow in his death-agony, hold on while I have you understand everything…in my clientele, a lad who was passing-on…young, artistic, man-of-the-world… I had seen many before in their death-agony…but this one here… When the thermometer was stuck into him,⁴⁹ and had been left in position for a while…it revived the sensations within him…it still made him get a hard-on…despite his being in a coma… He maintained his habits… He was like that even at the very end…in his mother’s arms… That is to say, my dear crayfish, that in matters of sentiment, reason never has any place… This will have neither conclusion, nor cessation… It’s a matter of life within death… Do you understand me?” 

[329] Captain Dreyfus is much greater than Captain Bonaparte. He conquered France and he kept it. 

[330] Gutman was right: all of those vices disgust me after all… That entire invasion of Abyssinians is no longer tolerable. Lipchitz was right: “The Frenchmen who don’t like it, we will have deported…” I’m going to move… I don’t have to be told twice. Maybe to Ireland… They don’t like Jews in Ireland, nor Englishmen. They find both equally abominable. That is the right attitude considering how the times are…the only one! But I do not want to go softly… I do not want to become the responsibility of the Irish… I know what would come of it… I will need a little traveling money… Of course, the book will go on sale… The critics are going to dispute it… I’ve anticipated the questions, and the answers… But so what?… I fully believe that I have foreseen everything… They can shit as much as they want, the Critics⁵⁰… I shat it myself well in advance! Eh! I have bullshat it, I may as well say it! It’s in fashion! I will forcibly have the last word! at long last as well as in depth…that’s

 

the only way. I have taken every precaution. But the critics are unimportant, they are quite incidental… It’s the reader who counts! It is he who must be considered…and seduced. I know the average Frenchman, observant, objective, vindictive… He wants more than fish-wrap⁵¹…once he no longer acts at the behest of a Jew… And he does not hold me in high esteem!⁵²… I am therefore going to give him a full measure. I am definitely going to spoil him. I am going to add some chapters…a dozen…so as to constitute a true volume… I will do a little something like Baedecker… It’s all the fashion, it’s a Cruise… It’s liable to fascinate him…the “Travel [331] Magazine” genre… Do you recall?… Ah! the fully well-illustrated! …scintillating and everything! as entertaining as possible…delightful reading…easy-going…picturesque…smartly done… I’m going to return to that principle…to that “Michael Strogoff” magic… I want to end this fat and furious work with great courtliness… A tip of the hat…panache… A grandiloquent salutation… I beg of you! …with my enormous quill, given-over to fanfare⁵³, I kowtow upon the red carpet… A grand allegory! I present you with my homework… A deep curtsey… A magnificent display… I salute you!… Your servant!… 

[332] In order to set things into a location, I must first of all tell you a little about how excellent Leningrad is… The people who build Stalin’s “GPU-utilitarian”⁵⁴ structures certainly didn’t build this… They cannot even maintain it… It is above the abilities of the Communists… All of the streets have fallen through, all of the façades are dropping bits and pieces… It’s sad… Don’t get me wrong, in its own way, it is the most beautiful city in the world…in the genre of Vienna…Stockholm…Amsterdam… How exactly can I express all of the beauty of this place… Imagine just a little bit…the Champs-Elysées…but four times as wide, and inundated with pale water…the Neva… She stretches on…always further…unto the livid infinitude…the sky…the sea…still further on…clear to the end…at infinity…the sea which climbs towards us…towards the city… She puts the sea at the disposal of the entire city! …diaphanous, fantastic, outstretched…at arm’s length…all along the banks…the entire city, a powerful arm…of palaces…and still more palaces… Hard rectangles…with cupolas…marbles…enormous hard jewels…by the side of the pale waters… To the left a little canal, quite tenebrous, which flows right up to there, beside the colossal Admiralty, gilded on each of its aspects…endowed with Renown, shimmering, everything in gold… What a trumpet! made of walls… Now this is majesty!… Is this some sort of giant fantasy? Is this some sort of theater for Cyclopes? …a hundred properly spaced decors, each more grandiose than the last…towards the sea… But a treacherous breeze pirouettes, twitters, and slips on by…a wintry breeze in the middle of summer… The cold waters along the [333] edge roil, splash against the rocks… In the background, defending the park is a long, high, delicate grille…infinitely detailed forged lace…tall trees enclosed within…the ancient horse-chestnuts…formidable monsters thick with branches…clouds of dreams redrawn from the earth…the petals falling away into rust already… Some sad seconds…too light against the wind…when the gusts maltreat them…crumple them…cast them into the current… Further off, other footbridges, “of sighs,” between the crevasses of the gigantic Catherine Palace…still implacable at the water’s edge, with a single terrible vault…the garrote of the Neva…its bracelet of tremendous confection. The bridge is stretched upon the pale arm, between those two notorious hecatombs: the Palace of Alexander the Mad, a catafalque of leprous rose, completely debilitated with Baroque…and the Peter and Paul prison, a squat citadel, crushed upon its own walls, nailed onto its island by the atrocious Basilica, the Tsars’ city of the dead, massacred to the last. A rosette made of prison

 

stone, pinned-down, run-through by that terrible golden dagger, very sharp, of the church, the steeple of a parish of the murdered. 

The sky of the great North, is even more gloomy, more diaphanous than the immense river, but not by much…just a tad more, haggard… Still more bell-towers, twenty tall golden pearls…wept by the sky… And then the Admiralty, ferocious, hulking, somber under an open sky…at the far end of October Avenue, Kazan’ Cathedral casts its shadow over twenty streets…an entire quarter, all of wings outstretched from a cloud of colonnades… Opposite it is that mosque…that monster in torture…the “Holy Blood”⁵⁵…twists…coils…chanterelles⁵⁶…with pustules…in every color…thousands upon thousands. A fantastic toad lying dead on a bank of its canal, motionless, and below, all black, simmering… 

Twenty avenues again…of different overtures, perspectives, always towards greater spaces…ever more airy… The city stretches itself out towards the clouds…no longer keeping to the earth… She leaps in every direction… Fabulous avenues…made to absorb twenty frontal assaults…a hundred squadrons…Nevsky!⁵⁷ Serious people!…of prodigious follies…who saw only immensities… Peter…Emperor of the Steppes and the Sea!… A city built to the measure of the sky!… A sky of glass, an infinite mirror… Houses in their decline… Old, giant, wrinkly, handicapped, crumbling, from an enormous past…stuffed with rats… And then that horde that creeps, intermittently, along the street…stuck right up against the sidewalks…creeps some more…tackiness all along the shop fronts…spittle-faced…the enormous, murmuring, viscous swarming of [334] miserable types…edged with garbage… A haunting nightmare as overwhelming as can be… Oozing into all of the crevasses…the enormous tongue of Asia consuming everything all along the length of the sewers… It is the frightful missing washcloth of Tatiana Famine…Miss Russia…Giant…as great as all of the steppes, as great as a sixth of the world…and which agonizes… This is not an error… I would have you understand, to greater detail, a few things still…with words a little less fantastic… 

Imagine just a little…a given “Quarter” of immense size…most unclean…and filled to the brim with reservists…a formidable contingent…an entire army of riffraff in abominable condition…still dressed in civilian clothes…in rags…completely overwhelmed, raggedy…skinny…which must have spent ten years at hard labor…eating the garbage from beneath the park benches…before going across…who will probably arrive at the end of their lives…completely clueless…of a world done differently…who are waiting to be assigned to their units…in the formation of little labor gangs…hither…and yon… An immense retreat in suspension… A catastrophe which vegetates. 

[335] It is probably necessary, at this point in my journey, for me to turn up my lantern…for me to recount to you in detail what was happening… Natalie, my guide-policewoman, proposed some distractions. 

One afternoon she asked me: 

“Would you like to go to the Islands?…” (their Pré-Catelan). “A very interesting tennis match is going to take place…” 

Natalie was a tennis enthusiast, and I wanted to please her. 

“That would be all right…” 

 

And so we went… The Islands in question were not all that close… About an hour by car…because of encumbrances. All of the sports enthusiasts of Leningrad, all of the families of “commissars” of high rank, filled the bleachers… And chitter…and chatter⁵⁸… A tournament between Cochet and Kudriach, their champion, was taking place. Already by the end of August, I can assure you than one can shiver in Leningrad. I can tell you, the wind off the Baltic is severe… Among the babble that was going on, those young ladies from “good families,” how they prattled on!… Not at all like people in the street… I would not speak of a Smart Set…but still of real comfort…of stylish shoes…(at least 1,500 francs a pair), the elite in essence…the bourgeoisie… I had the conversations translated for me…one sweet young thing in shorts beside me…quite stocky…quite solid…quite appetizing…was recounting her vacation… 

“Ah! what a trip, my dearie, ah! if only you could have seen Papa! he was furious, imagine!… We will never be going down the Volga again!… What a [336] crowd!…this year!… You have no idea, how overcharged the boats were! to the point of foundering! of taking everybody down!… There wasn’t anybody but some laborers!…my dear!… Ah! what frightful people…” (sic). So to speak, and make sure to tell the whole world!… 

The match was over…Cochet’s hand was held high…a completely sporting reinforcement came from all the bleachers…unanimous applause…warm…re-warmed… 

Natalie and I started to head out, towards the Park gate…to look for our car…a 1920 Packard, which I was renting for three hundred francs per hour. I’ll say it again, I’m not sorry for anything. I still had some rubles…a small fortune…in Russia… In the State Bank…I still had over thirty thousand francs. That’s twenty pairs of shoes. At the moment when we were getting into the car, a very polite gentleman came up to us…tipped his hat…and through his ever-so Jewish smile, made a modest request of me…     

“Monsieur Céline, would it be all right with you if we were to ride along with you back to Leningrad? …it would be to our mutual benefit… I am the director of Intourist…with my friend… Are we being indiscreet?…” 

The young director of Intourist was being perfectly correct: 

“But do get in… I beg you!…” 

He sat down next to the chauffeur… His associate introduced himself to me…he stammered out a name…the associate was also quite Kikeish…but another model of Yid for all that…not a “young filtrate of the ghetto”…but the “Satrap” model…the very imposing Pasha…the half-breed of Afghanistan…the sturdy enforcer for the ruling class…ample and bushy…in the master’s absence, at the treasury, at the scaffold…“fiftyish”…paunchy due to brioche…to bourlaguet, and to foie gras…a loose-fitting tunic à la Poincaré…unostentatiously military, extremely restrained…all of the “hardware” up on the balcony, in pewter “solar” motifs, and ribbons on a placard over a tit…all of the Leninist “tutti-frutti.”⁵⁹ A slightly darker olive⁶⁰ where the features came together…something of a Buddha…and then after that completely strange…the mustaches, two completely stylized handlebars…separate…opposed…like they wore in London around 1912…on cricket teams…among tightrope walkers, such as the “Commuters of Croydon” and the “Imperial Icarus Brothers”… In the end a truly curious mixture… I scrutinized him for a good quarter of an hour…and then some…all the while bouncing about… The paving stones were abominable… “This chap certainly carries the tenor of adventure,” I told myself… “Here’s a man who has profited under Communism… This is a splendid opportunity!…” The car was proceeding very slowly, due to the terrible [337] potholes…which are a test

 

of endurance… Since the time of Catherine⁶¹, certainly, the same “humpbacks” have constituted the pavement…and I assure you that they are cruel… That is the real charm of this city…in her essence she remains a museum… Nothing will ever change that… One has to see the Russians at work… They are reminiscent of the regiment, lazy… The same ruts will always be there…a few more and then that’ll be it… It’ll be Asia…that’s what…it’ll be Asia… All the cars will be busted-up by then… There’s scarcely a new building…since “Bolshevik ’17”…and then we have that one thing which is always absolutely indispensible: the GPU⁶²…plus there’s one thing more… I’d swear to it… How to say it?… The other “outstanding feature,” that Buddha-like tenor, who has just begun to speak between bumps… Ah! I find that he is friendly…and even that he is witty and everything…and that he is absolutely jovial… At last here’s a Russian who chats…it’s droll…and also…who has a completely casual air about him…obliging! …and what is more! it’s astounding! …who doesn’t have a burr⁶³ up his ass! …who doesn’t have an air which is the least bit abrasive!… He seems to be high-minded…that’s a first!… He speaks English as though it were his mother tongue… He is understandable… It’s odd, but the more I sit listening to him, the more it seems to me that I recognize his voice… It is not I who asks questions, but he who poses them… He asks me: 

“Monsieur, do you like Russia?…” 

“And you, dear Sir? …what is good about her?…”  

I’m not habituated to the use of cunning, I’m a rather straightforward, natural sort of person, and I don’t like riddles… Insofar as he is fascinated by my impressions, I am going to give him the immediate benefit of my reflections…which are not very favorable… Natalie is huddled in the opposite corner…she taps my knee with hers. That which I am saying in all candor should be quite harmless…that I don’t care for their cuisine very much…(and I am lukewarm on matters of cuisine), and that I don’t like sunflower oil… I had the right to say it… That even as a prison it could have been better… That it’s a rather shabby and substandard prison…but enough of playing around…that the cucumbers are hard to digest…that the beds were full of cockroaches…(I paid mine three hundred francs a night) and that there wasn’t any noticeable progress… That their “rehabilitated” workers in the streets, medically speaking, based on a cursory overview…gave the impression of a terrible botch-job on the part of quacks…frightful anemics…chlorotics…bummers…rotted-out down to the marrow… Russia is a real asylum…which didn’t surprise me at all…given their sort of diet…and that Natalie and I, even upon immolating truly orgiastic sums, were able to find only some [338] rather suspicious-looking fishes…enough to make you hold your breath…and some oh-so equivocal soups…with such sour aftertastes…unbelievable… If I was speaking at such length about victuals, of which I am enormously fond, it is because over there they proclaim themselves materialists, do they not, “all for the mug”? Materialism is their great glory… Therefore I was making materialistic remarks…those were in my notes…of things which the good monkish senator⁶⁴ must have understood… My impertinence did not make him angry… He nearly split his baboon lips⁶⁵ with laughter upon hearing my sarcasms…my mockeries… The laughter died down at the far end of the coach… He didn’t seem to have been offended by it all. Natalie was making no obvious sign… Once I had at last finished putting everybody into good spirits in this manner… He resumed his assault with a different tactic… His inquiry took another direction… 

“It appears that Monsieur Céline does not like our hospitals very much?…” 

That was it! That provocation did it for me in an instant! …a flash of lightning! …clarifying my memory… I regained my composure perfectly. 

I answered him blow for blow: 

[Ferdinand:] “But yes! Monsieur Borodin, what a stupid mistake! …but I am an ‘enthusiast’ of them…of your hospitals! …let’s see! …you are, as far as I am concerned, very poorly informed! …if I may be permitted? …so long as we are under conditions of confidentiality… That’s a new name, isn’t it, Borodin?⁶⁶…” 

He laughed harder and harder…  

[F.:] “Over there, in Dartmoor, when you were making little bags, out on the heath, what did you call yourself?” 

[Borodin:] “And you, Monsieur Céline, over there, on Hercules Street…isn’t that quite correct?…when you were taking English lessons at the “Hang Tough”⁶⁷ yellow bar…under the big bridge… Am I wrong?… Waterloo… Waterloo-on-the-Bridge! …the Station of the Dead… Ah! Ah! Ah!… You are a son of ‘Dora’⁶⁸… That’s first rate!⁶⁹… First rate! First Rate!…” 

[F.:] “And you are another’n! …you have to say so loudly and proudly!” 

We were now looking each other in the eye…there was no longer any sense in pretending… 

I remembered him as having been very thin and very pale…he had fleshed-out and darkened⁷⁰ enormously… 

[B.:] “And that excellent Yubelblat…eh what? …always nearsighted? …always the reader in contemplation?…” 

[339]

Ah! he had evoked an epoch. How amusing it was to remember Yubelblat!…

[B.:] “He served me well in Antwerp, you know, Monsieur Céline…” 

[F.:] “Yubelblat?…” 

[B.:] “I stayed three months at his place…in a cave, my friend, in a cave!… There wasn’t one rat in his cave!… I assure you… But what cats! …my God!… All the cats in Antwerp!… What cats!…” 

[F.:] “Quite so?…”  

[B.:] “Quite so!…” 

[F.:] “In a cave?…” 

[B.:] “Like Romanov!…” 

[F.:] “’17?…” 

[B.:] “How old are you then, Céline?… Slowly, chauffeur!” he suddenly commanded… “Slowly…go the long way!… I must speak some more with my friend, the ‘Gentleman’… Always ‘Ferdinand the Headache’?… Ah! it isn’t so every day! …‘enthusiastic’!… He still goes for a good laugh. 

“Yubelblat…is nowhere to be found!… He had solemnly promised, the dear fellow, to pass this way one more time…one more time…to surprise me a little…one little visit…as a true comrade…just like that, without ceremony…upon his return from Peking… He promised… Things are getting worse and worse in Peking, aren’t they?… Isn’t it so?… It seems to me!…” 

[F.:] “I am no longer very up to date Mr. Borodin…” 

[B.:] “That Yubelblat is fantastic…you know? …incredible in reality!… He preferred that wretched boat… He didn’t like the ‘Trans-Siberian.’⁷¹ Ah! Ah! Ah!…” (He says slapping himself on the gut.) “What a voyage… A terrible detour!… The Red Sea actually!… In truth a most disagreeable voyage…” 

Both of us were amusedly taken aback, at Yubelblat’s droll choice of detour… 

[B.:] “And what about you then? Monsieur Céline?… You don’t like Russia?… Not at all… But at least you like our great theater?… You’re as refined as a Lord, Monsieur Céline…not only as concerns hospitals… Ah! Ah! Ah!… You’re as refined as a duke… A grand duke…Monsieur Céline… You are often seen in the lobby at the Dance… Am I correctly informed?…” 

Natalie had nothing to say… She was looking far off…very far off…to the street. She was making her schedule, a short list. 

[340]

[B.:] “Is it all right with you, Monsieur Céline, if I ask you a question? A truly personal question?…” 

[F.:] “I am listening.” 

[B.:] “In case of war, which side will you be on?… With us?… Or with Germany?… Monsieur Céline?…” 

The young Jewbie from Intourist, in the front seat, leaned back in order better to hear… 

[F.:] “I will wait… I will applaud as at tennis…for the most adroit…for the most tenacious…for the boldest…for the strongest! I will be interested…” 

[B.:] “But the strongest, that’s us, dear Sir!… All the experts say so!…” 

[F.:] “The experts are sometimes mistaken… The Gods fool them well… We have examples…” 

Upon hearing these words, his countenance suddenly changed…he was seized by anger, immediately… He jumped up… He stammered… He became agitated… He no longer kept to his seat…the fire rose within him, a low-down Chinese-type of rage… To have heard such babblings on my part!… 

[B.:] “Oh! friend! …friend! …You say such idiotic things… Chauffeur! chauffeur!… Make the slight detour down past Houqué!… Don’t you recognize that, Monsieur Céline, Houqué?… Houqué! doesn’t that say anything to you?… You don’t know?… Hou! qué? No?… No one has told you of Hou! qué!… We are going with you my

 

friend to see Houqué!… Go very slowly, chauffeur…there… Here…in front…look Céline…those houses so low…so squat…look very closely… It’s the quarter of Peter the Great! here Monsieur Céline!… I will show you… It is here, where he came to amuse himself…and to learn a little about those people who chatted so little except amongst themselves…who didn’t want to chat…who responded to questions badly… These people made such noise, and made it so loudly! …when they were amusing themselves with Peter, when they had begun to talk back…when they had rediscovered their tongues… Such an uproar of lungs! Monsieur Céline…from the throat… Hou! qué! …like that!… Hou…! qué! …like that! so strongly! …that nothing was heard save for their cries! across the entire quarter…clear across the Neva…as far as Peter and Paul⁷²… It’s still the name given to this quarter. Houqué!… Regard closely, Monsieur Céline, all of these residences…so squat…so deep⁷³…quite close together!… Ah! It’s truly a beautiful [341] quarter!… They’ll never make a better one!… You’re seeing a little bit of the exterior… But then there’s the interior!… Peter the First was a very great Tsar! …a very great Tsar, Monsieur Céline!… 

The auto slowed down some more…to a walk… We had all the time in the world in which to wander down every street…to visit in great detail…the ins-and-outs of old “Houqué”… And while doing so joking all the way…concerning the tools by which the Tsar was served…in order to put life into those confidentialities…in order to elicit confidentiality…affection. 

[B.:] “Have confidence, Monsieur Céline…have confidence!…” 

Yet it was necessary to draw things to an end…to return to the hotel… Natalie and I were still supposed to go to the theater. 

Borodin knew many more stories, excellent ones! …some truly splendid anecdotes concerning Peter the First… He was no longer angry with me at all… We were no longer able to break company… 

[B.:] “Let’s do it! Let’s do it! Come up to see me…without fail! Come tomorrow! …to the Astoria!… You and I and Natalie will dine together…in my room…no formalities…as comrades!… Isn’t it so! …as comrades?… I will tell you of extraordinary adventures! of ‘events’!… Only of ‘events’! In China! And then you will be going to Moscow… There, we have some much more curious things to see! …to show you! If only I could show them to you myself!… Why remain in Leningrad?… Go then!… Confidence!” 

[F.:] “Could I visit the Kremlin?…” 

[B.:] “Whatever you would like, Céline…” 

[F.:] “Really truly?…” 

[B.:] “I swear!…”

 

[F.:] “The caves as well?…” 

[B.:] “All of the caves!…” 

There was still one good subject for humor!… It was quivering along down the sidewalk…the ridiculousness!… 

[F.:] “Can I bring my interpreter along?…” 

[B.:] “Why, certainly!… Of course! …of course!…” 

[F.:] “Clear to the end? the Kremlin?…” 

[B.:] “Clear to the end!…” 

[F.:] “You promise?…” 

[B.:] “I promise!…” 

[F.:] “Just a single word by telephone! and I will have them get you!” 

[342] Ah! or so you will think…all exaggeratedly… That exaggerating fellow!… Let’s see! The Bolsheviks, those “bombs between their teeth” fellows…they weren’t so calamitous!… They didn’t smash absolutely everything…blow everything to hell!… Ah! I’d stake my life on it!… Ah! That remark was pertinent!… Look then, at their theaters! …admirably preserved! …quite so! much better than their museums! …which present a certain aspect of the second-hand, or of eminent domain”… But their theaters! in full splendor!… Incomparable! …dazzling!… Especially the interiors!… The buildings, the edifices…are always somewhat armory-like…colossal…a tad “dutchy”… But the interiors! the chambers!… What august settings! What rapture! Which is the most beautiful theater in the world? The “Marinskii”! no contest!… No rivalry is possible!… It alone was worth the entire voyage!… It must have well over two thousand places… It’s of the genre of the Grand-Gaumont…of the Roxy…in terms of size… But what style!… What an admirable, unique success! …what ecstasy!… In the mammoth genre…perfection…lightness…one couldn’t do better…at mammoth lightness…a graceful airiness…a décor of sky-blue pastel, trimmed with gold… So many balconies, so many boxes…edged with purple…and rosettes⁷⁴… The lighting, a nebula of stars…a rain in suspense…crystalline…completely scintillating… The entire parterre, all of the rows in lemon-wood…lattices of branching intonations past…well-turned woods, velvets in pastel…an overwhelming of the palette…a poetry in seatings!… A miracle [343] even! The Operas of Paris, Milan, New York, London! …delirious Turkish baths! …pastries puked back out by a dying Grangousier! It could profitably be compared to Mont Saint-Michel au Sacré-Cœur⁷⁵, our own great Levantine lavatory… In order to convince you, you might go to Leningrad yourselves…to verify it… (This advertisement is absolutely unpaid.) With a little space I could still… It would be easy…jabber on descriptively…but the time?… You would be deprived of my better…and quite different prodigious perspectives …evoking to the full measure of my vain abilities, all of the majesties of these Imperial residences…in their “Baroque” as well…their droll excesses…and more palaces still…ever more grandiose…by the sea…and many more magnificent elancements in sculpture and in movement… And then there’s the Esplanade of the Winter Palace… That velodrome for elephants…where two brigades could become lost, without knowing it! …between two

 

reviews! …or two charges!… And surrounding that, along the whole perimeter, is an entire skyscraper laid horizontal, languorous, reclining, spread-out in a fan...with a hundred thousand little openings, dormers and indentations…the Bureaux of the Tsar. 

[344] I spoke to you of the “Marinskii” with a certain enthusiasm… I see you coming…always suspicious…I swear!… But hold on just a minute!… Natalie and I went out every night… We admired everything, the entire repertoire…and The Queen of Spades⁷⁶…six times…that melodious old whore The Queen of Spades… That elfin witch, that rotted-out old column⁷⁷… The Empress of Souls… “Spades!” await in the depths of the Russian soul, “Queen!” is the festival of the hecatomb… The Queen of Spades is an unsworn, unswearable Mass…the mystique of all murders…the dull flame of massacre, mischievous, at the end of a world burnt to cinders… Some day, this timid flame will rekindle…will shoot up higher! …so high! …much higher than the tallest golden bell-tower!… The flame is in waiting…vacillating…sputtering…oscillating…the music breathless…tighter…oscillating…a matter of luck… “Tré cartas!”⁷⁸… Three suicides! …the game of the Queen within the clutches of the mummy… The orchestra gently stages three suicides every night… In the rolling of the enormous burning waves…to the end…where no policeman knows to look… Three little birds of suicide take flight…three little souls…so diminutive…that the waves whisk them away furiously…roaring…howling…I swear…to the end of the world, where the police don’t see… The old whore, the raven of every Age…a dowager done-up in murders…in curlers…in baubles…in a muumuu covered with faux coat-of-arms decorations,⁷⁹ within which she dies every night…singing…by the edge of the Abyss… So much rottenness cascades…from a body so petite! …so frail! …so many things! …in a torrent [345] of arpeggios…smothering the auditorium…leaving all of those Russians…gasping… “Tré cartas!”… The crowd is cursed!… The Russians blanch! …dissemble! …supplicate!… Let no one leave!… Your future is going to be destroyed! Some evening! in a whirlpool of agreements… The Madman-on-high is going to deal you your card… “Tré cartas!” The officer at the Queen’s game… What is happening?… From Old Hell…all of the demons in serial rows, are leaping, wriggling, bursting forth…all of the joys, the regrets, the remorse, are overshadowed⁸⁰ by the leaping forth⁸¹ of all of the hatreds…they surge from all the hellholes… Saraband!… The orchestra sets everything afire…all of the souls and torments snag at the violins… Unhappiness lurks…roguishly…roars! …opens-up its lair… The old woman collapses… She didn’t say a thing…the Queen of Spades had said everything!… Was able to say everything!… Would that she had no import…less than a single wisp of wool…less than a faltering sparrow⁸²…less than a soul in pain…less than a sigh of Destiny… In that fall her body didn’t make the slightest noise…upon that immense stage, the little crumpled monster, all in frills… The music is louder…much louder than that slight rustling of fabrics. A dead yellow leaf, silky…tremblingly strikes the Earth. An exit. 

[346] The Leningrad Soviet occupied the Tsar’s lodge… Workers were in the back, in their Sunday suits. In the front, bespectacled Jews…a few long-hairs…in the “Bakunin tradition”… Veteran political prisoners. All of the Martyrological Brichant. O perilous parody!… The insult!… In the other balconies, are the provincials, amassed, squashed… Engineers…bureaucrats…and finally the Stakhanovites…the loudest, the most verbose, the most hysterical of the Regime…row upon row, feverish…intoxicated…exhibitionistic…not very well appreciated, it would seem…by the other mid-level spectators… All of the balconies and aisles, the entire parterre and parquet, were packed, compacted…hither and yon, several grouplets of young Jews of the student type, in white caps with red bands…some young French Jews…undoubtedly from a political academy… All here to see The Queen of Spades … But what of Dance?… The Russian Ballet?… The real one?… Their greatest pride and joy?… Yet more dizzying heights!… What a deployment of

 

stage sets! …of ensembles!… What a richness also of talent!… It must be said!… And what numbers!… An army of “extras”! Let us correct ourselves! a wealth of “medium” talents! …but what impetuous ardor! What brio in stagecraft! What vivacity! …wild!… The troupe was certainly very well brought-up. I did not leave Natalie at home during even one of these evenings of fantasy… As for Natalie, her favorite above all, was The Queen of Spades… To each one his foibles, his preferred enchantments…mine are dancing… Vive la danse!… The Fountains of Batchichara!… What a battle!… A melee…of demons! [347] flying, lashing out, leaping upwards…driving everyone up into the rafters… And what a massacre! run through with enough thunder and lightning to make the theater tremble!… Four hundred devils, acrobats, and massacrers. There wasn’t an artist who wasn’t on fire in that terrifying musical brazier, and who wasn’t completely consumed in that flaming craziness! For Swan Lake⁸³ the same expertise was turned towards matters of enchantment…with all gracefulness… 

It declines, however…much less happy…a fever which only simmers⁸⁴…insipid…the reply to Reason…of grimaces…the “lost illusions”…at enormous cost!… Here we have a dud! well beyond hope!… All told, in the ensemble of The Seasons, there’s quite a bit of clinker! already!… A repertoire terribly strewn with monstrous wreckage… What disarray! …the results are damning!… How many directors had been shot? …in truth?… How many captains had failed to return!… Whose fault is it?… Everybody’s! nobody’s! …mine! …yours!… Ballet wants to speak of fantasy. There you have the most ardent, the most universal, the most human genre of all!… Who’ll deny it?… But the soul has declined and left-off… The verve is no longer sustained by the disorderly ensemble. There is no longer any sort of creative spirit at the heart of all of these poems… How is it that they have been overwhelmed?… They have departed towards Reason… Reason has well paid them back… They no longer speak but of Reason…rationally…a collection of quite cracked bells… The ones here are all crumbling under reason… More’s the pity!… The most irremediable, the most execrable of catastrophes are not those that make our houses collapse, but those that decimate our fantasies… It seems that the Russians have been condemned in spite of their Music…disowned by their past…“dying of thirst next to a fountain”… Their “success”?… Some Mordieu is needed! in order to populate those gigantic naves! and places not given!… It’s needed!… And then?… The old hobbyhorses, corny though they may be! Their Carmen…their Manon…their Onegin…the inevitable Queen⁸⁵…Ruslan and Ludmila…Mazepa!⁸⁶…worse still!… I guarantee a triumph, all the crowns of Russia, to the audacious producer who revives Michael Strogov complete with chorus, soldiers, and full orchestra, on the stages of Leningrad… The Winter Palace is his! 

Shall we return to the artists?… Among the dancers: two admirable aspects… Lyricism, or refined technique, and tragedy, of true poets… The women? some excellent workers, very gifted…nothing more…one exceptional ballerina—Ul’ianova… But their ensembles? Divinity itself!… Of the organs of human movement. Troupes of second-stringers⁸⁷ [348] to fill the entire heavens… Their “Four step”? twinkling comets… The shimmering sources of the Dream…the outskirts of the Mirage!… Every evening at the Marinskii! What sensual pleasures! two or three times in every program!… Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was seized by an idea…an obsession… It seemed so even to me, despite everything… Ah! how the pride is a false counselor… How it multiplies every stupidity ten, a hundred fold. Should I try my luck?… He who risks nothing… My poems? …were they going to fall in love with them, those Russians?… How else would I know?… A setback in Paris…perhaps a success in Russia…one of my old “bears”?… Both of them perhaps? I steeled my courage… But I had to make haste! …it was already beginning to escape me…

 

“Natalie, my dear child, would you do me a favor, and telephone the Director? …would he like to meet with me?…to listen to me for a few minutes… I have a complete conspiracy in my pocket!”   

[349]

It is I the impresario, the whirlpool of women, the gallant Ferdinand! 

It’s the end of the day…now for my presentation of my poem⁸⁸ to the director. There were thirty-some people in that immense room…as I count them, scattered about an oval table…of prodigious size… Artists…musicians…administrators…secretaries…were waiting for me… What a suite! …imperial! …a room very well preserved in its Alexandrine Era⁸⁹ essence…that’s “Tilsit”⁹⁰ for us… Perfect furnishings of dark mahogany…powdered tapestries…naphthalenized…carpets worn…to the backing…of bees against a background of daffodils… The director is a sly-faced Jew, perfectly amiable and hostile… His political secretary…a completely silent lump…self-cluttered with little notes…a hedgehog of pencils… Various composers…some old virtuosi in “periwigs,” mutely figuring into the interview…some cartoons on-high…some of Dullin’s “full effect” masks… Vaganova to my right…a dainty thing spared by the great cataclysm…on the defensive…distant…the ultimate defender of a receding tradition. A faded, patched-over, warped star, looked-out for…and on the lookout… 

At this meeting, everyone is espying one another…smiling… After some brief introductions…I am given the go-ahead… 

Straight away I throw myself into a recital…of “The Birth of a Fairy”⁹¹… They all understand me perfectly…but not a one of them makes an expression…perfectly inert, atonic. I furnish all of the animation… I’m enthusiastic! …the entire exhibition!… I make one of myself!… I mime… I give it all I’ve got…how I’m gesticulating! volubly! …evoking [350] that and more! a cavalcade!… I exceed myself!… I’m the theater, the orchestra, the dancers! all of the “ensembles” at the same time…all by myself!… I make the omelet!… I hop, I burst out of my seat!… I act-out everything in “The Birth of a Fairy”… All of the joy, the sadness, the melancholy… I’m everything!… I imitate the violins…the orchestra…in lively waves…and now for the “adagios”… No one holds me back, they all remain a “grand jury,” immobile, welded to their table. I strain myself…developing…different approaches! …quadrilles!… I shoot back again to the other end…another leap…cabri! …multiplied, all in arabesques, around that entire set of enigmas!… I run away possessed! eclectic… I rush forward again… Ah! and then stop! dead! …arch! …twirl! …move on, step back…a set of deboulés…in the meandering course of the plot…to underline the theme of the passage a thousand-fold…in demi-pointes…in relevés… Very good! …two arabesques!… In the aerial tremolo of a waltz…two more “fouettés”…very much to the outside… I running out of control…plot… I let it all go…volte! …return… In position! I do a pique!… Sarabande… I land in the great “fifth” position! directly before the director… I bow low…to dazzle the audience…with a deep curtsey!… 

I finally have them “decided”! …the ice is broken!… The monks⁹² thaw-out… Murmurs! …approbations! …acclaim! …and I am being complimented!… I’m being cajoled!… I’m celebrated!… Vidi! Vici! Vici!⁹³ It’s most evident!… What a break! …what flight!… The spirit!… The taking-off!… Taglione!… They’re in Seventh Heaven!… It can be seen! But

 

then everyone brusquely quiets down, everyone desists… The director, their sly-face, claps his hands and orders silence, he is going to speak. 

“Dear Monsieur, all of this is obviously most pleasing, and certainly most welcome…and I congratulate you… But would you read to me again… I beg you…very slowly, certain passages…and then the entire libretto if you would?…”

Ah! He wanted nothing better than to put on such a spectacle by a foreign author…and one of such importance!… Very desirous… If I would be so good as to take note… In the fashion of another form of poetry…less frivolous…less old-fashioned…less “archaic”…less daydreaming a style…a somewhat more realist a structure, more impetuous…which suits itself better to modern musical chords…to the harmonic possibilities of the counter-tone…somewhat brutal, even violent… The Russians are crazy about violence. Had I ignored that?… It was necessary to them!… They demanded it!… Some battles! …some rioting! …why not? [351] …some murders! …some sizable massacres well brought-off… In addition perhaps I could see to it, to include several passages in my story as dialogues… Ah! there’s something that would be an innovation! …some dialogue! …in danced-out words!… One dancer per word…per letter! The theater of “shock,” in a new country!… And then some more advice…to avoid like cholera…like thirty-six thousand plagues!… Evasion!… Ah! no more Evasion! …no more Romanticism! …deplorable Elegies!… No more of those fidgetings-about in mythological Parnassus! It’s over!… Ballets must make people “think”! like any other form of spectacle! …and to think “sozialistische”!  

To be touching…certainly! …to charm…but to charm “sozialistische,” n’est-ce pas? The more the poem is successful…the more it is zee “sozial”!… 

“This, dear Monsieur Céline, is the aspect of reality towards which we must always attain, the ‘sozial’ at the heart of the crowd… The ‘sozial’ in charm and in music… The danced poem! vigorous! moving! tragic! bloody! rioting! …liberating!… This is the inspiration! …this is the theme! …‘sozial’ everywhere above all!… This is the line! …the command!… The artist! who understands us! These are the works awaited by the Russian Ballets of the “Plan.” And more than that, never again! those perfidious shrill anemias! those languishing melodies!… Shameful betrayals, dear Monsieur Céline, of the ‘sozial’ Future!… Perhaps around 1906…around 1912 such annoyances could have still been defended…but in our day…bah!…” 

I was taking things very hard… I’ll admit it…on my stool… Little aware of the ridicule, in no way hurt, I responded to this setback only with a very sincere sorrow… I had collapsed upon the threshold of the Temple… I had received a bad review, from these perfect connoisseurs, as some shabby affair… It was almost enough to make me cry… 

Then all of a sudden, before my crestfallen visage, he instantly changed his tone… To fix things back up at full steam!… 

“But no! But no! monsieur Céline! It is we who have taken everything the wrong way! Hope! Hope! on the contrary! dear monsieur Céline! Great expectations! These have been

 

friendly words! We are counting on you for our next season! Come back to see us next spring!… We will always be most happy to welcome you! …always ready to hear you, I assure you…infinitely favorable… I cannot compliment you enough… 

The little director suddenly showed himself to be more encouraging than everybody else… 

“Don’t forget us… Do come back! Send us another manuscript [352] from Paris… We recognize your admirable gifts!… It will really be sublime! We know it!…”. 

Everyone in unison: “We know it! All is not lost! Quite on the contrary! We will study it together as soon as possible!… We will put it on, and it will take off on its own! And like this!… And like that!…” 

I am quick to perk back up…one little compliment is enough for me…it brings me back up like a shot of strychnine… I was fortified… I instantly pulled myself together again…good for the most foreboding of performances…in the blink of an eye… For a brief while, I was preparing to start all over again! They calmed me down gently…joyously… We spoke of nothing but next year! We had become so amicable, so extremely buddy-buddy…that it was a kind of fantasy… They had well-observed my personality… The way in which I regained my confidence… All in the tasting of the tea…the hors d’œuvres…the cigars and cigarettes… They enveloped themselves in a haze of smoke so thick, massed right by the edge of the table, that I could no longer make them out… They were speaking to me very loudly, through the clouds…their locomotive of a language… Arracho!… Harracho!… Harracho! …arrou! …Harrou! …more and more violently…everyone was getting carried away!… This could not be a conspiracy… The little Jew did not cease explaining to me, still, always, the themes of the dance of the Future! …holding his head by both hands…he carried-on in a monologue: “You understand me, dear monsieur Céline… “Sozial”… That’s the word! …not too historical! …and not too many current events either… But quite modern however…and then above all something that will make people think!…” 

At that moment the political secretary was seized by a coughing fit…he coughed loudly…as though suffocating…amongst his pencils… The interview had come to an end… We parted company, happy… 

In a sudden burst, I regained the door…leaping…with unbridled enthusiasm…across the infinite corridors…the miles of maze…at each turn…at each double door…a body of guards on duty… That marvelous Opera, with all the agreeableness of its interior: was a fortress! …an entranced citadel! …all of its labyrinths patrolled! …on the defensive! …on the alert in all of the narrow passageways…attackers might be lurking… Eyes are following you, espying you from the depths of the shadows… Quickly out into the street!… Ah! the joy, the delirium carries me away! …in full flight…the breeze of joy! …marvelously energetic!… I barely touch upon the sidewalks… The spirit possesses me… 

“Ding! Para-ding! Dying! Overblown! Ventre dieu! …487 million impalified Cossackologists! Quid? Quid? Quod? In [353] all of the cankers of Slavonia! Whither? from Baltic Slavigothia on the White Black High Sea? Thither? The Balkans! Seamy! Rotten! like cucumbers! …sad sacks! fartin’-tarts! spastic colons! I’m busting a gut… I’m screwing myself! Enormously! I’m out of here! horse apples!… Barbatoliers? immensely! Volgaronov!… Tataresque Mongomoles!… Stakhanovoids!… Assholovich!…

 

Four hundred thousand hectare-versts…of the steppes of condachiures, of Zébis-Laridon skin!… Ventre Poultre! I’m running up against all of the Vesuviuses! …Floods! …shit sponges!… For you, all of the Tsar’s dirty chamber pots!… Stablin! Voroshitlov! Super-Disaster!… Transsiberry!…” That is how I was chattering to myself out of enthusiasm!… And resolved moreover, and admirably decided! forged in iron! and all with the utmost circumspection!… Never again to mutter…to insinuate…the most whispered sigh…which might be wrongly construed… Viciously misinterpreted…pejorative!… Ah! not at all!… Ah! a mistake!… My palinodes!… 

I will be dripping, with unbridled praise!… Favorable towards the Soviets?… Phenomenal!…heck!… Brought to the boiling point! …from my socks which are drooping to my hair which is growing out… Hosanna!… Ah! how I would like to sing them! …most believably… Sublime “productions”!… To sing them in a hundred and twenty different keys… Lord! …to sunder my vocal chords for them…to have all of my bronchioles burst for them… And to explode for them!… And as for adversaries, those treacherous runny rancid cancers, I will stun them where they stand!… To “vile doubters,” it is sworn! I will reply to the one as to the other! with all of my gut: “All is going very well! Very strongly! very far ahead! better and better! …as strongly as possible!…” I will go militate in all the courtyards of Paris, with Popaul⁹⁴… There’ll be two of us!… I will give myself body and soul to the “four hundred year” plan… I want to enfever, to overwhelm with “Soziologie” all of the suburbs to the south and west of Paris, from Seine-et-Oise unto Conflans…and perhaps Pontoise… Natalie has already been keeping me in eager anticipation, teaching me the rudiments…never losing a chance to cross swords…of dialectical disputation! …materialist”…brutal and without mercy… I shall arrive at Popaul’s all decked-out with casuistry! …solid! good for any contestation!… While walking along I’ve stocked-up on all of the invincible arguments… My mouth was filled to the brim with slogans… I rehearsed them up in my room (which was so expensive)… 

“They aren’t missing a single nail!” I shall so assert…amongst the journalists to begin with…frowning, obstinate…a real [354] bull for the Adversary!… I will practice in the mirror… “Not one leather strap…not one little knout! …not one halter is in too short of supply!… Not one underweight haystack!… It’s marvelous how they can mill! and grind… Ah!… Done deal! how I shall instantly assail the least snotty distracter!… I won’t let him refind his tongue!… Overrated!… Comatose!… Mad syphilitic!… Gonococcus! Kidney stone! Spastic colon!… Metastasizing cancer! Lesbianish caiman!… There you are! Not a nail which is not absolutely correctly planted! I repeat! profoundly!… Listen to me! …inalterably! …riveted! …completely faithful to the USSR! in each door of every prison from glacial Vladivostok to the still more atrociously frigid Estonian Sea!… Crap-eating mugs! Consider yourselves banished! Precisely! fanatics, screw! from now on! …agitators of toads!… Not one mutton! in any of the forty-eight disfavored republics! to the colors!… From the Kalmuk Enclave to the Reserve of Bidzhan.⁹⁵ Fixe! From Gourgoulie in Tatarstan! Ah! All the same! faithfully… At ease!… It’s just as I say! in no matter which sovkhoz! those proud parcels of Paradise!… Not a cow without its train!… Not one wheel without its thirty-two bicycles!… Velocipedes!… Not one horn without Korku! Not a single bottle without a drunk! Not one bread crust without a stomach!… Not one hod-carrier without an astrakhan!… Not one placard without Stalin!… Not one post⁹⁶ without its Trotsky! Not one procession without traitors! Not one happiness without Stalin! Not a single traitor without a placard! Not a single sleeve without a banner! Not a single Stalin without a traitor! No Paradise without a serpent! Not one Stalin without a photo! Not one happiness without an executioner! Photo! Poto! Ma-Tire-laine! Tirolo!” This is how

 

I was carrying on! …at the precise moment! when everything had fallen into place! concerning all of those ever-so delicate matters… 

[355] I was able to take a tour, every morning, if I had the time, before Natalie’s arrival… 

She would finish her chores and then quickly scurry over to the Reporting Bureau…at the Police Station… I had a good two hours before me in which to stroll about… The streets of Leningrad are no laughing matter, the people are pathetic…distressing…as I’ve said…even the boutiques… So many poor tents, decrepit…poorly patched-up…parquets worn down to the nubs…antique counters of massive wood…sumptuous…glowing with a pre-War air…still dubiously decorated with horns of plenty…tall display armoires…decorated with “little bouquets” and fluttering ribbons… Faded, moldy imitations of the Parisian style of 1900… Their merchandise?… An immense jumble of infinitely depreciated junk…absolutely unsalable anywhere even in Russia… A terrible “collection” of second-hand goods…all of the pathetic unsellables of very old village haberdasheries…such as one found in France around 1910 in the course of maneuvers… I remember… But over here it’s the latest thing… All of those pieces of junk too pathetic to look at, that dump of the worthless, is their stock in trade, the Sovietico-monstrous production of the giant cooperatives… In Monrovia, in Liberia, they are supplied with cottons and baubles by John Holt, of Liverpool, and I assure you that this is defensible… There’s no comparison!… These are extremely popular articles. “Article” for “article” of trade, there are limits to banditry… I myself did business with the savages… At Bikobimbo, in a straw hut, in the very furthest reaches of the Cameroon. I did tons of trading… I no longer had any competition… But I would never have dared… I would have blushed. [356] When I saw that the Soviets’ goods are garbage, I know what I’m saying. With Natalie, I made the tour of all of their boutiques, along the major streets… The sort of garbage that they put on display is incredible… It requires ingenuity for a person to be able to dress himself… It is not a given! It is necessary to know how!… Their materials are so coarse that they don’t take well to clothes-making… And it takes a wheelbarrow full of rubles to pay for something very mediocre…several cotton remnants!… Ultimately, it’s easy to drain the blood and sweat of a people, and the esteemed Soviets are the worst, the most intractable of bosses, the most diabolical, the most cunning of bloodsuckers!… The most ravaging of exploiters… Diabolical, I say, because they have superdastardly ideas, to a greater extent than do the others. They are in fact having their people crushed…their “redeemed” people, by pure calculation and system, all of that abracadabra of misery… Premeditated scheming. They know full well what they’re doing!… Decapitating, starving, grinding-down, and reducing them to nothing, the dear people! …always all the better to work them over! unto the last vertebral scraps, unto the innermost of internal fibers! to imbibe the agony, which disgorges therefrom! …to grasp them absolutely in one’s fist like a washcloth, completely consenting to whatever sort of destiny… The Jewish orgasm, the great spasm of bastardized niggers in delirium, to shit upon all of us when dead, more degraded, more downtrodden, more foully, abjectly putrid, than all of the nightmares of all of the toads on Sabbath. And then to dump us into the latrine once we have all been pumped, tortured in millions of ways… Our charming mortality! As for the eating in Leningrad, it’s even worse than the attire if possible… Their butcher shops, almost always in basements around back, away from the street, towards the end of the row, are caves underneath the buildings…stinking badly… The people remain standing in line…each awaits his turn…the “queue” is bunched-up before a curtain covered with flies…dense…undulating…completely blue…the people chatter… They buzz along with the flies… They struggle against the swarm of flies…between the flies… 

One after another, the concierge, the matron in boots, the swaddled “baba,” the young girl in glasses, each descends into the cave…crushes aside the vexillum of the flies… trots down the tunnel… Reappears triumphantly into the light of day…in hand their little packet of suet! Flies immediately darken the top of it…as do the people…all of whom fondle, pinch, and murmur…in the swarm… There’s a cloud, a melee around the matron in boots. 

 

[357] On returning from my excursions, I always cast a little glance towards the offices of the “Vox”⁹⁷…to see whether I’d see anything… The building was across from the hotel…the “Warm Welcome to Foreigners”… I am of a curious nature. These offices which open so late, never much before noon, intrigued me. One morning, just like that, while casting a glance into their half-light, I hear some music… I hear…a piano… I sit down upon the steps… It was being very well played… I want to investigate a little more closely… I make something of a tour of the tenement… I go down by degrees…in the basement I find a door…a little hallway…I somewhat want to see this person…I am familiar with the piano, at one time I had played a little piano myself… It has always been in the back of my mind… Here I am in the house… All of those completely empty offices make a noticeable echo… I arrive at the first floor…it’s coming from the side over yonder… A curtain… I stop…on tiptoe, I turn about. Now I see the pianist… It’s the little old lady, whom I know well… It’s the “grandmother,”⁹⁸ it is she who chats in French at the “Warm Welcome”… She even uses elegant language, she adds finesse…she speaks affectedly… It is she who gives me directions for the outings which I desire… I remain concealed in a corner of the room… I don’t make any noise at all… I listen very attentively… She had never alluded to the fact that she could play the piano so marvelously… Never… That was too much self-effacement. I held that against her… We were friends moreover… Every day at noon for at [358] least three weeks I had been coming across the street…in order to give her my orders…and to chat a little bit…to cast the bull… That little old lady was as fine as amber, and as friendly as possible… 

There, in my chair, I didn’t fidget… I listened… I heard it all…a perfect performance…first of all almost all of the Preludes and then Haydn, the Fifth… And I don’t mention Haydn simply in order to cite a genre. As one of my personal accomplishments, I used to frequent a pianiste, for some years… She made her living on Chopin and Haydn… You might say that I am familiar with their works…and am sensible as to their quality… And I can well affirm that in my opinion, the grandmother was an artiste… 

After a while, I left, as I had come, on tiptoe. The next day, at first I didn’t want to mention my indiscreet audition to her…and I’m enough of a chatterbox to get myself hung… I ran the risk of several allusions…finally I paid her the compliment…that she touched the ivories like a virtuoso…and even infinitely better!… Without seductive hooks, without flashiness, without outbursts in tempo… She understood by my words that I knew how to appreciate…and that in view of my refinement I was quite capable of real conversation… Speaking to me sotto voce, very sotto, she brought me up to date a little… “I am ‘new’ in this country, do you follow me, Monsieur Céline?… ‘New’ not in terms of age, alas!… But in terms of the date of my return… I had remained away for twenty years!… It has been a year since I have returned… I played a lot of music while I was abroad… I gave concerts sometimes…and lessons always… I wanted to return…to see things…

 

here I am… They do not like me very much, Monsieur Céline… I must however remain… It is over!… It is necessary… They do not want me as a musician… But they do not want me to leave… I am too old for the piano…so they tell me… But above all my absence for so many years…arouses their suspicions… Fortunately I speak several foreign languages…that saves me…qualifies me for this job… I do not want to complain, Monsieur Céline, but I am not truly happy… You can see that, can you not? I arrive at the office early, well before the others, for the sake of the piano… Here they have a piano… Where I live, we have no means…certainly not…for a piano… We are three old people living together in a small apartment… It is quite good enough… You understand… I do not want to complain…”.  

[359] On the eve of my departure, I found the grandmother perturbed, anxious, with something she wanted to confide in me still… She whispered: 

“Monsieur Céline, you will excuse me… May I be permitted to ask you… Oh! one little question…perhaps most indiscreet… Oh! I do not know whether…if I ought?… In the end you will agree that I am unfortunate… Eh! Monsieur Céline! I am not very happy… But there are many people Monsieur Céline, are there not, who are not very happy?… What do you think? …in your opinion, Monsieur Céline?… One person in this world, absolutely without family…without any ties whatever…who is no longer useful to anybody… Old…already an invalid…unfortunately, no longer loved by anybody…who must endure many privations, many affronts…does she not have the right in your opinion? …most sincerely? …without reservation, I ask you, to put an end to her days?…”. 

Eh! Upon those words…I made but one leap! …but what a leap!… 

“Whoa there! Madame! this is a veritable blasphemy!… And how! Most shameful and regretful! Eh! I won’t hear any more of it!… What an idea! so vicious! senseless! wicked!… Have you surrendered, Madame? …before the arrogant abuses of mediocre bureaucratic imbeciles… I have found you to bee too good, for such silly maliciousness… Bah!… So many pranks on the part of wood lice… Confounding! Madame, confounding! …in truth… A perfect talent such as your own must return to giving concerts!… This is an imperative obligation! Demand to be heard! Madame!… And you will triumph!… I will grant you that all of those Bolshevik fellows, taken one with another, are not very amiable… They are perhaps somewhat cruel…somewhat uncouth…somewhat wily…somewhat sadistic…somewhat lazy…somewhat intoxicated…somewhat thieving…somewhat cowardly…somewhat lying…somewhat cruddy… I will agree with you on that!… Is it a matter of deciding from which yardarm it would be best to hang them?… But the ends would not be unworthy! …as soon as you think it over!…”. 

The grandmother, like all Russians, had a passion for reflection. We reflected together…passionately… 

“You see,” I gaily concluded, “you see! I can assure you, Madame, I can bet you, a hundred thousand rubles! that your talent so precious, so consummately deft, so sensitive, so intimately nuanced, will not go long unrecognized!… Ah! but no!… You will return to the public, Madame! I foresee it for you! I can see [360] it now!… And in all of the great cities of Russia of the “Plan”! You will be going everywhere, triumphant, anticipated, acclaimed, desired! …requested!…” 

 

“Do you think so, Monsieur Céline?… They are distrustful of us, of all those who have returned…of those who have been abroad…” 

At that moment Natalie entered…reticence became necessary. 

“Au revoir, Madame, au revoir! I shall return! absolutely!” 

I made this promise, two or three times over. 

[361] And now for this… 

My interpreter, Natalie, was completely dedicated…perfectly trained, very punctual to her job… She had shown me all that she knew, all of the palaces, all of the museums, the most beautiful sights…the most renowned monasteries…the most astounding panoramas…the old parks…the Islands… She recalled all of her lessons very well…for each circumstance…at every moment…the little persuasive editorialization, the little political allusion… She was still quite young, but she had the experience of revolutionary torment…the social upheavals…of worlds in collision… She learned while still a small child… She was just four years old, when the Civil War⁹⁹ was going on… Her mother was an actress, that is a bourgeoise… One evening during the perquisition, there were many people down in their courtyard…her mother said this to her, very tenderly: “Natalie, my little girl, listen to me well, my dear little one… Remain very calm… I am going to go downstairs to see what’s going on down there… I’ll be coming right back up with the coal…” Her mother never came back up, she was never seen again… It was the Bolsheviks who would raise Natalie, at first near the city, and a little later, in the far North… And after that, in caravans… Several years were spent like that…back-and-forth across Russia… She recounted the fears, and also the fun, of the little children… All of those peregrinations… All of those years…the entire boarding school was evacuated when the enemy troops [362] arrived… At first it was the “rebels” of Kolchak…and then of Wrangel…and still later of Denikin… Each time, it meant an excursion out into the steppes…which lasted for months and months…all of those little orphaned children… One must realize that they, the Bolsheviks, were doing everything that it was possible for them to do, so that the whole lot of them wouldn’t drop like flies…along the entire length of the route… Some times, it was so cold, that the little ones who died became completely hard like little logs… The ground couldn’t be dug… They couldn’t be buried. They were thrown from the carriage, it was forbidden to descend. She had well seen, Natalie, the complete Civil War…and then it was the filthy rich¹⁰⁰ Kulaks!… She had danced with them…gotten along badly with them…led dozens upon dozens to be shot… And following that came the austerities, still, always, other austerities…two-year, ten-year, three-year, “five-year”…those torrents of vain jabbering…and now she was a guide… She had learned French, German, and English, all by herself… They recognized her on sight at the “Intourist” office, that most curious collection of herons straight from La Baule¹⁰¹…these being almost entirely Jewish (ninety-five out of a hundred)… She was discreet, and secretive, was Natalie, and she had a steely character. I liked her very much, with her clever little nose, quite impertinent. I never hid from her, for a single solitary minute, all that I thought… She was supposed to maintain good relations… Physically she was cute, a solid, firm Balt, a blonde, with a musculature like her character, sturdy. I wanted to take her to Paris. I’d have paid her way for that little voyage. The Soviet didn’t allow it… She was in no way backwards, she was actually rather emancipated, not

 

at all jealous, or petty, and she could understand just about anything… She was obstinate on only one point, miracle of miracles, when it came to the matter of Communism… She became frankly impossible, infernal, when it came to Communism… She would have killed me, then and there, in order to make me arrive at the correct conclusions…a veritable contradiction!… And I would stand down. Her periwinkle-blue eyes would flash…and they were lacerating… 

Things came to blows only one time, but terribly, with Natalie… It was on our return from Tsarskoe,¹⁰² the Tsar’s last palace… We were in a car at the time…we were proceeding at a good clip…the road there isn’t bad… When I happened to make the remark to her…upon reflection…that I didn’t find it in very good taste…that tour…in the victims’ own home…that exhibition of ghosts…augmented by commentaries, of a thousand facetious remarks… That insouciant, petulant [363] enumeration, relentless…of minor foibles…poor taste…ridiculous “Romanov” manias…with reference to their amulets, rosaries, chamber pots… She wouldn’t admit to it… She found it perfectly proper, Natalie did. I insisted. Irrespective of anything else, it was there, in those several chambers, from which they all departed as a group, the Romanovs, towards their destiny…to their butchery in that basement¹⁰³… One might have given that some consideration…made some note… But no! This, I found to be in bad taste! Very much worse in terms of bad taste, a hundred times worse than all of the Romanovs put together… A truly very bad blunder be dirty disgusting Jews… It gave me no pleasure whatever to see assassins in the process of joking around like that…in the nursery of their victims… All of a sudden I found myself a Tsarist… For they had well been assassinated, mother, father, and five children…never tried, assassinated right and proper,¹⁰⁴ massacred, absolutely without any defense in that Siberian basement…after several transfers! …over the course of months! …with that hemophiliac kid…amongst all those drunken and sadistic guards, and Judeotatar commissars… And then finally the great fun event… One must consider… The intimacy of the deceased…the worst degradations, before being crowned¹⁰⁵ for good…without regard for anyone… Usually assassins don’t come around to puke all over their victims’ tombs… Revolution?… Of course!… Certainly! Why not?… But bad taste is bad taste… The bad taste of the Jew, the leash upon the neck, it’s the massacre of the white man, his torture. All of the great revolutionary saturnalias carry above all the smell of the nigger, in full goatiness, the Jew and the Asiatic…Marat…Kerensky…Béhanzin…the Euphrates…Voodoo…equatorial sorceries…the slaves to the sharks…Santo Domingo¹⁰⁶…it’s the same horror cropping-up… It’s all the same sauce in the end…oozing from the same barrel… 

“Why?… Why?…” she relanced… She, the slut, didn’t want to understand… “The Tsar was without pity…he was! …for his unfortunate people!… He had them killed! …shot! …deported! …thousands upon thousands of innocent people!…” 

[Ferdinand:] “The Bolsheviks had well paraded him around over the course of weeks, across all of Siberia. He was finally rubbed-out in that basement, along with all of his little snots! to the smashing of rifle butts!… Thus he paid the price!… Now they want to disturb his peace…let him rest…” 

[Natalie:] “The people must be able to learn! …to see for themselves! …to be able to see with their own eyes, how stupid the tsars were…[364] bourgeois…narrow-minded…without taste…without grandeur… In what they did with all that money! the Romanovs! with the millions and millions of rubles which they extracted from the poor people… The people’s blood! …some amulets!… With the people’s blood they bought some amulets!” 

 

[F.:] “That’s not even a reason… They’ve paid… It’s over!…” 

How insulting she was, the bitch!… I was hoist on my own petard… I can be shot down like thirty-six buffaloes when a chick has me by the head… 

“You are all assassins!” I insulted her thusly… “even worse than assassins, you are all a bunch of raping, sacrilegious vampires!… You are so perverted that now you shit all over the cadavers… You no longer possess human features… Why don’t you cast your victims in wax? …like at Tussaud’s? with the wounds gaping? …and the maggots a-swarming?…” 

Ah! but she struck back, terribly. She didn’t want to admit to anything…the arrogant little slut…she got going again back in the car… She shouted herself hoarse… “The Tsarina¹⁰⁷ was worse than he! …even worse… A thousand times worse! …cruel I tell you!… A heart of stone!… She! the vampire! …a thousand times worse than the entire Revolution. She never had any consideration for the people!… Never for all of the suffering! of her unfortunate people! Who had come to her in supplication!… Never!… She allowed it all to happen… She herself had never suffered!…” 

[F.:] “The Tsarina? …but heights of horror! but tornado of trash! But she had had five children! Don’t you know what it’s like to have had five children? Once you’ve had your ass end spread wide open like that! as she had five times in succession, then you can talk!… Then you will have the gut with which to speak! of suffering! of suffering!… Well, diddly-shit!” 

One must say that I was furious… It was her fault! I felt like throwing her from the car!… I was no longer able to control myself! due to a feeling of brutality! I had become a real Russian!… 

The chauffeur had to slow down…he stopped…he had to intervene…to separate us…it was ruined… She did not want to resume! she was being stubborn…she was at daggers-drawn all the way back to Leningrad. I didn’t see her again for two days. I thought that I would never see her again… And then voilà, she returned… It was already forgotten!… There were no hard feelings… Seeing her again made me happy. I liked Natalie very much. I shared just one secret with her, a real secret I should say…when I [365] spoke to her of revolution… I told her that soon we in France would also have that fine communism…that the necessary Jews were already there…that things were ripening properly…and that she should come to Paris…and that in order for it to be permitted…that she should come to see me accompanied by a Jew… 

“Oh! Monsieur Céline, you know…revolution is not like that… In order to make a revolution, two very essential things are necessary… First of all, the people must be dying of hunger…and then it is necessary that they have arms…all of the arms… Without that…nothing doing!… It will above all be necessary to have a war in your country…a very long war…and then some disasters…when you are all dying of hunger…it is only then…after the civil war…after the foreign war…after the disasters… That the doubts come…” 

She never brought the subject up with me again… She was always on the defensive…in attitude, more or less… Never on her own initiative… I had a high opinion of her… I would gladly have taken her back to Paris. She was the perfect secretary, secretive.  

 

[366] As for myself, I have some ideas concerning absolute monarchy, which I have taken from an anarchist whom I knew some time ago, in London, a real anarchist—a Bulgarian—a regular pachyderm by weight. He was a cumulard, he held two professions, piano tuner as well as dye-mixer.¹⁰⁸ I listened to him religiously. He was called “Borokrom.” I was a slight young man not very attuned to the epoch. I admired him enormously. I was easily taken in. 

“I have wasted my life, as you can plainly see, Ferdinand, and as others are always telling me. You see, I have always wanted to be, myself, the King, of an immense and powerful Kingdom… And that all my subjects, all! you understand me, without a single solitary exception, have a total deadly hatred for me! They will have no thoughts other than that…to take my skin…to make me disappear…on Sundays and during the week…the same idea will pop into all their minds… They will incessantly scheme, conspire to end my days… Whenever I leave my magnificent château, in my ceremonial carriage…I will have something like terrible bombs thrown into my face! They will rain down! my friend, there will be a downpour! a flood of the most horrific grenades! …of “incendiary devices” of all calibers… I will not have survived save by some miracle…in effect by some quite subtle agency, by some concurrence of prodigious circumstances… On my royal part I would be even more dastardly if possible than all of my subjects taken together…absolutely without mercy…[367] without pardon…without pity… I would govern those hateful masses even more hatefully and absolutely by myself! through threats, executions, atrocities, and perpetual hectoring!… From the safety of my redoubtable citadel, I would be devising without respite still more insults, still more punishments, still more atrocities! still more! always more abominable! to appall my odious subjects! Still more means by which to render myself ever more abject, more demonic, more implacable! more unpopular! Thus I will definitely fascinate them. I will never make a single one of those acts of clemency, of favor, of truce which discredit a tyrant more so than would a hundred thousand hangings. As for myself, I will hang only the sensitive, the understanding, the pathetic…Evangelists…do-gooders of all stripes… I will organize enormous competitions for virtuous youths and maidens¹⁰⁹…in order to have them all scourged and then promptly put to death…before the entire populace… I will commit treachery without end, without limit, without respite…save in order to inflict still other vexations upon my subjects…to oppress them, and above all to pillage them, in every sense and fashion. Hate for hate! and without limit! …my royal motto. I would live all alone, encamped upon the revenues of my immense Treasury, protected within my ceremonial carriages… I would have my abominable subjects, agonizing, panting, wary of my least gesture, and always on the lookout, brought under the sufferance of new iniquities, and that throughout the duration of my reign. Never would a single day go by without some ghastly miscarriage of justice, some atrocious royal misdeed…the drawing-and-quartering of an honest man, the scalding of an innocent… Eh! ignoble people! don’t you see? forever febrile, delirious with the fragile, fleeting hopes of beating me into a pulp anytime soon, into a bloody pâté beneath my magnificent carriage? In this way my reign will have been, I am certain, exceptionally successful, in truth the happiest of all reigns, in all of History—without war, without revolution, without famine, without bankruptcy. Such calamities in fact afflict peoples only when they have been long in advance desired, brought forward, premeditated, thought through, and cooked up by the rumination of the masses…a vicious idleness, the ruination of peoples. As for my super-hateful subjects, they would never have the time to think up such foolishness, such catastrophes! I would be keeping them to well occupied with my inexhaustible inventiveness, my diabolical dirty tricks!… They would be much too impassioned concerning the best, the most dreadful, the most efficient manner, of reducing me into

 

clots of blood, into a marmalade of  [368] viscera. I, their monarch, would have given concordance to all of the hatreds in my Kingdom, I would have centralized, magnetized, fanaticized them against my own royal person. Here you have the only royal means, Ferdinand, truly to reign! to govern! Ah! Ferdinand! my life could have been so different! a marvelously useful destiny…while at present, as you see, as I speak…I am wasting myself as I am…” 

[369] Doctrine…Natalie was easily drawn into arguments by it… I truly didn’t exist at all… She had taken the complete course in “Dialectical Materialism.” Like a curé¹¹⁰, she kept all of the questions, all of the answers at her fingertips. 

[F.:] “What is it that the capitalists do?” 

[N.:] “They exploit poor people, they speculate, they form monopolies!…” 

[F.:] “What do they do with their capital?” 

[N.:] “They manipulate constantly and always…they form cartels to control raw materials…they create scarcity…” 

[F.:] “What do they do with their accumulated wealth? do they sleep in three beds every night?… Do they keep fourteen mistresses?… Do they drive along in eighteen automobiles at the same time?… Do they live in twenty-two houses?… Do they eat seventeen times a day? …only the finest dishes?¹¹¹ What do they ultimately do with that entire terrible wad, which they extort from the oppressed, bent-over, moaning people?”    

Ah! These facetious little remarks did not trouble Natalie. 

[N.:] “They indulge all of their capricious desires…” 

Suddenly, I saw it all… The advantage then was mine. She was bogged-down, handicapped, when it came to the concept of “caprice”… For her “caprice” was a word… Nothing more! She had never seen anything capricious…or of capitalist capriciousness… She was quite incapable of defining, or of citing for me one good example of caprice… I had her hemmed-in with her [370] usage of “caprice”… I enraged her… The day over, towards the end, she asked for a “tip”… I was so intrigued by this that I told her a story about what truly constituted “caprice.” I searched for a good example, one which she would be able to recall thereafter, for when she would be speaking to tourists. 

“Here,” I said, “listen to me well, my sweet thing, for I am going to enlighten you. I was quite young at the time, it took place around 1910, in Nice, where for a time I made deliveries for a very famous jeweler, M. Ben Corème…Boulevard Masséna… I had the complete confidence of my employer, Ben Corème, ‘Jeweler to the Smart Set, to Cub Society and the Casino.’ My parents, so poor but so fundamentally honest, had sworn upon their lives that I would never be in the wrong by a single penny…and that I could be trusted with valuables. In fact, I was frequently entrusted—those were not mere words. Mr. Ben Corème immediately put me to the test…and thereafter entrusted only me with his diadems, his most wondrous ensembles, his strings of pearls several yards long… Several times a day I took to the goat-path up the side of Mont Boron, towards the Hillside Mansions,

 

overloaded, with jewel boxes chock-a-block full with a desultory assortment of gems, gold platinum, and ‘Riviera pieces’…for perusal and selection by the ‘Beautiful People’…the most notable courtesans of the Era… according to the fancies of a ‘High Life’ clientele, the most extravagant in Europe, of the most whimsical of Clubbers, and of Queens of the Boudoir. In my pockets, secured by safety pins, I carried around in a single day more riches than a Spanish galleon returning from Peru. But I had to hurry, and to run back down the hillside in droll form…in order to get back to the store as quickly as possible. I had one more equally confidential a job—one that Mr. Ben Corème himself often did. I had to remain standing in the back room of the boutique, behind the little panels, behind the bric-a-brac… But I was never to show myself…never to enter into the boutique! I was the one who monitored the hands of the clients, male and female… That was my job…to espy the least furtive gesture…particularly the furtive gestures… Closed hands!… Not to take my eyes off of closed hands!…ever… And there you have it… Looking back on it, it must have been a delicate matter for a vendor, to observe the hands like that… He can’t do everything… He must, himself, remain smiling. He had to maintain the confident visage above the pedestal-counter…always considerate…always unselfconscious… He didn’t dare to jet an eyeball at people’s hands… That would not be good manners… It was I who was the peeper…the cat… I recognized all of the clients… They didn’t recognize me… I recognized all of the shoplifters. There were some evildoers among the [371] Italians and the Slavs…among the women above all…the Russians, the most finely-crested aristocrats…there were some funny ones among them…some striking little scamps! …teasers!… It was their bad habit to make the smaller ensembles disappear… Ah! the “cuffs” were lethal… I was on guard… I saw it coming… Right at the moment… Swish! …when it slid into the muff. ‘Tap-tap-tap!’ I lightly knocked on my door three times… This was understood by Ben Corème… Things always turned out well, there was never a scandal. 

“I have no reason to complain, there was some pleasure to be had in my role…some compensation…when the clients were pretty…seated…dresses rustling… I took on a terrible case of the jitters, and I observed their legs. I hypnotized myself… Ah! the curve of the thighs… Ah! how well that made me send myself off… Ah! those divine hands! Ah! how I could swear by all the Queens of the Era that I was cut out for reflection…standing all alone, in the back-room, in the employ of Mr. Corème. I had a fine youth, of erotic fantasies. This did not impede my being honest and having impeccable vigilance… For all of this trust, these mountain-climbing deliveries, this prophylactic cat-eyeing, as well as the management of the boutique (being the opener and the closer, along with the shop boy), I was paid fifty-five francs per month… Along with my board, I was doing very well—except for the shoes, in which I was wanting…because of Mont Boron…the terrible stones of those slopes…which tore up all of my shoes… They wouldn’t last fifteen days, my shoes, however much I coddled them… Mr. Ben Corème understood, and it was he who ultimately had me go to get resoled. 

“Among our clientele we had one marvelous dignitary, not a thief like the rest, but to the contrary, a true spendthrift, the Tsar’s own uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich.¹¹² He is easy to remember, if only on account of his height…he was at least two meters tall. It was precisely he, this giant, who lost the War and the Russian Army.¹¹³ Eh! I could already have told him back in 1910 that he was going to lose everything… He never knew what he wanted… One afternoon, just like that, he came into the

 

boutique…it was necessary for him to stoop in order to clear the door-frame, but he was in a hurry. He banged his head… He was not happy… He sat down. He was of two minds… 

“‘Tell me, Ben Corème,’ he said, ‘I would like a present for a lady. I need a bracelet.’ 

“The objects were quickly brought to him…entire trays full…they were worth several fortunes… There was nothing fake at Corème’s. The Great Nicholas looked…and he looked… He fumbled with them…he scrutinized them… He was unable to decide… He stood back up, all two meters of him… He started to leave… ‘Au revoir!’ Bang!… He hit his head on the top of the doorway… This made him recoil back into the store… He showed himself back in… He once again took his head in his hands. He had a headache… 

“‘Ah! here, Corème, give me the whole lot of them!…’ 

“Then, by the handful, he snatched all of the bracelets off the table… He filled-up his overcoat…filled his pockets full…  

“‘There!’…he said…‘Now show me the cigarette cases!’ The entire selection was passed before his eyes… He remained stupefied for a moment…all of the cases in gold…the diamond ‘inlays’…then he opened them all up…he neatly re-closed them…he amused himself by making them click… Click!…Clack!…Click!…Clack!…Click!… Then he showed irritation… He grabbed up the entire assortment…two…three dozen… He forced them all into his pockets on top of the bracelets… He got up… He headed towards the door… ‘Sire! Sire! look out! your head!…’ Ben Corème leapt forward… The Grand Duke bowed forward…with a smile…he passed through… But there, in the doorway, he changed his mind…he turned about…a brusque half-turn… He went to reenter the boutique… Bap! …he gave himself another whack with the door-frame! He took his head in both hands… He staggered back…  

“‘Corème! Corème!… You will send your bill to St. Petersburg! to my nephew…he will make the choice himself there…himself! …there! That would be better!… That would be much better!…’ 

“There you have a capricious occurrence!… Natalie!… There you have an authentic capricious occurrence! …or, if not, I don’t know of any… Natalie, you must remember, that good example of a capricious occurrence …”  

Poor Nicholas Nikolaievich, capricious occurrence concerning his memory continue still… 

Due to circumstances, his grand Palace on the Neva has become, since ’18, “The Institute for the Brain,” for the Study of Psychical Phenomena. 

That was fortuitous, though unfortunate. 

“You see how life occurs humorously…and how small the world is, even for the great Nicholas Nikolaevich, who really didn’t have much of a head at all…” 

This made Natalie laugh…this little story, but moderately, as she believed that I was going to start up again, as at Tsarskoe Selo…to repay me with a fit… She found that I was sneaky.   

 

[373] In the end it is necessary only to repeat these three words: time marches on…that is sufficient for everything… 

Nothing escapes time…save for a few faint echoes…more and more faint…more and more infrequent… Of what importance are they?… 

Some letters have come to me from Russia…from Natalie…I never reply to letters… A long silence…and then one last message… 

“Dear Monsieur Céline, 

“Do not think me dead, or missing… I was very ill for several months and I was not able to write you. That is past! I have recovered, though I am not as strong as I was beforehand… Winter is over, and it is spring in our country, with the sunshine for which I had been waiting…with so much impatience. But I still feel weak and a little sad. You have not written… Have you forgotten me?… We now have visitors from your country in Leningrad and we expect more for the June Festival. Will you also be coming here some day?… That would be wonderful. I very much want to hear from you and I am giving you the address of my domicile. 

“My best sentiments, 

“Natalie” 

And then that’s that… 

Very softly, everything becomes phantoms…everything…[374] everything…Yubelblat and Borokrom…the Grandmother…Natalie…completely like Elizabeth…the other Empress…like Nikolas Nikolaevich, who found it so difficult to decide…like Borodin…like Jacob Schiff…who was so rich and powerful…like the entire “Intelligence Service”…and the “Brain Institute”…like my shoes on Mount Boron…each one passes away into a phantom…booo!…boooo! They are to be seen in the heath… Which is so well-made for them… They are happier, much happier, in the wind…in the shadows of the shadows…wooo…woooo…dancing in circles… I no longer want to go anywhere… Ships are full of phantoms…whether towards Ireland…or towards Russia… I distrust phantoms… They are everywhere… I no longer want to travel…it’s too dangerous… I want to stay here in order to see…to see everything… I want to become a ghost here, in my cubby-hole…in my lair… I will go like this to everyone… Hoo! roo!… Hoo!…roo!…They will wither from fear… They bullshat me enough during the time when I was alive… This time it will be my turn… 

And as for the ballet?… It was ready… I was happy enough with it… Always concerning ghosts… I sent it to Leningrad… And then that’s that!… Circumstances…unfortunate…too bad!… I am going to read you the beginning of a long divertimento…a trifle!¹¹⁴ All of it?… I would bore you… Is an epic production even possible? …even a thinkable proposition?… No!… Just a little leap between death and existence…exactly our speed…this which dances precisely between death and existence…this is entertaining…it takes you away!… Do you follow me?… A little illumination and it is agreed… The Dream takes us away… But the Music?… Ah! Therein lies all of my agony… I fall back to earth completely entangled!… Music! …the wings of Dance! Without music

 

everything crumbles and crawls… Music the structure of the Dream!… I am once more in good form… Should you happen to hear, by chance, amongst your acquaintances…of a rather precarious musician…who only wants to do well…please make a little sign… I beg of you… I will offer him terms…between death and existence…of an easy situation… Surely we can come to an understanding… 

[375]

VAN BAGADEN 

Grand Ballet Mime with a few words¹¹⁵ 

These events take place in Antwerp, around 1830. The interior of an immense warehouse is represented on the stage. A large cast of porters, dock-hands, and duty-assessors, who are doing business, making side-deals, making transfers, unwrapping and opening boxes…packages…fabrics…silk…cotton…grain…all manner of cargo… They are coming…they are going from one dock-head to another… At the very end of the warehouse, between partitions…loose merchandise is piled high, oh-so high… Tea…coffee…spices…draperies…Campeachy wood…wood paneling…bamboo…sugar cane… In the general animation which prevails, in the great hustle and bustle, a group of fair working girls stands out…graceful…mischievous…utterly!… They pass by…they return…flighty…chattering…coquettish…among the gangs of roustabouts, grunts, and drudges…coming and going… The perfumed girls!… They take up and pour the various perfumes…from bottles…having a thousand subtleties…perfumes from Arabia…the Orient…the East Indies… Greatly afraid of being jostled…with their precious vials…little cries of emotion! …of fright! …frills! [376] First of all, to sniff the essences of the vials…delights! Little ecstasies!… They argue over the perfumes…the arrangement of the bottles…always chirping…always hectic… The “cigar girls” other coquettes occupy the opposite corner...also wasting a lot of time in a schedule of horsing around…going, coming…jabbering…prattling… This entire little world evolves amidst the “work gangs” of longshoremen…coming and going around the ships… A slow procession of “strong men,” charged with breaking out the really heavy loads…enormous bales…tree trunks…some porters are teasing the perfume girls…pinching the cigar girls…in the passageway…plunging into barrels full of “carrots”… A great hullabaloo…arguments…dances…groups… The hustle and bustle…of the enormous hangar…humming with activity…with work…with disputes. One also hears the scuttlebutt of the great port…the klaxons…the calls…the songs of the men in the work gangs…the songs of the laborers…in toting their burdens…etc….and then other music…crank-organs…of street musicians… A nigger suddenly pops up…he leaps from the wharf right into the hangar…a savage little interlude…he disappears as suddenly as he came, that nigger…with a leap!… 

It will be noticeable from the beginning that one of the perfume girls appears more graceful, more playful than any of the others…more conscious of her appearance than the others…as smartly-dressed as possible…the prima ballerina…Mitje. In a corner, in an angle of the warehouse is a redoubt… The audience sees the interior of this cabin: the Ship-owner’s Office…separated by a giant curtain from the general crowd of the vast warehouse. In this redoubt, is the ship-owner Van Bagaden! He can no longer move from his armchair…he can scarcely move… He no longer ever leaves his armchair, and that small room… It is there where he lives, swears, cusses, annoys, sleeps, menaces, eats, spits phlegm, and keeps all of his gold…the gold which comes to him on

 

a hundred boats… The Ship-owner of all the seas of the world!… Thus we see Van Bagaden, tyrant of seas and navigators, in his den. He wears a big black turban upon his head, to protect him from drafts… He is wrapped in thick woolens. Only his head emerges from all of these swaddlings… He does not cease to swear, cuss, and vituperate his clerk, the unhappy Peter… This latter, always at hand, and perched high upon his accountant’s [377] stool, never ceases to align figures...to add them up…in enormous registers… The entire desk is encumbered by these monstrous registers… The ancient Van Bagaden, the enraged, the menacing, the leather mummy, the damned! Peter, in his opinion, is never going fast enough…in his accounting… Van Bagaden slaps the floor, with his thick cane… He fidgets in his armchair… He is incessant… Peter jumps at each tap of the cane… The sound of an uproar, the hubbub of the hangar… Van Bagaden is exasperated… His workers are amusing themselves rather than working!… He hears the young girls, the laughter of the working girls, the joyous clamor. He is no longer in control! He is too old!… All of the little hoodlums are teasing him! escaping from him! He can no longer make them obey! Damn!… He tries to uproot himself from his armchair!… He falls back down… And each time that he beats the floor in anger…with his terrible cane…the young working girls and the boys from the work gangs, all of the working people, far from feeling pity, mock him, and sing slogans! to the cadence! …of the cane!… The despair of old Van Bagaden, defied! …ridiculed!… (The mice are dancing, the old cat can no longer move…) The young perfume girls, mischievous, go to cast a glance behind the curtain…and then flee from it, bounding…above all the coquettish Mitje, the most vivacious, the most mischievous…of all of that impudent swarm… Peter, the faithful accountant, is moored to his enormous registers with a chain…and is further attached to his stool by a leg iron… Peter is the terrible old Van Bagaden’s object of abuse… Peter leaps in terror, along with his stool…each time the old man’s cane strikes the floor. Then he recommences once again with his additions… 

A captain, returned from a long voyage, enters the hangar, plows through and cuts across the groups… He has come to alert old Bagaden… 

He whispers a few words into his ear… Old Bagaden beats…and beats again…the floor with all his might… Peter leaps Bagaden gives Peter a little key… Peter undoes the padlocks of his impediments… He can descend from his stool… He departs the warehouse with the captain… 

There is a great deal of interest within the hangar… Great emotion… Much jabbering… Comments… Waiting… 

In a moment Peter returns, dragging behind himself a heavy net, captive within which is an enormous mass…a prodigious confection of pearls…a mighty string…a fantastic piece of jewelry…made completely of pearls…each one as big as an orange… [378] Peter refuses any assistance in dragging this magnificent burden to the feet of his master Van Bagaden… The dance is interrupted… The entire crowd within the hangar…sailors, workers, working girls…comments admiringly on the arrival of this new treasure. Van Bagaden does not bat an eyelash. He has his armchair moved over just a little… He has the very deep coffer located just behind him opened up to Peter. With a great deal of caution, Peter encloses the extraordinary jewel, within that little cavern…then climbs back onto his stool, and resets the chain around his ankle…he sets the padlocks, returns the little key to Van Bagaden, and resumes his additions… Work resumes all around… A moment passes…and then another

 

captain returns…more news is whispered into the ear of old Van Bagaden… The exact same routine is repeated. This time Peter returns bearing boxes and bags…of yet more jewels, gold coins…precious stones…rubies…giant emeralds… All of which is again secured under triple lock, with the same ceremony, behind the aged Van Bagaden… 

By the dock…from far away…just now, the echoes of a martial fanfare reach us…a fanfare which approaches…and passes by. It can be seen passing before the great entryway…wide open… In the background…soldiers…townsmen…sailors…in full binge… Cheerful lads…drunks…a mob full of effervescence…joyous…rambunctious… Enormous fluttering flags pass by…above the crowd… Banners which are left to the imagination…and then a disproportionately minuscule “Saint” in a sedan chair carried on high with poles¹¹⁶…and then immense cardboard giants…carried along by the crowd…having a good time!… Old Bagaden, fixed into his redoubt…annoyed…enraged…by all of this new bacchanal, this racket…which is surging past!… 

What a madness for self-diversion possesses everyone!… Van Bagaden is not amused!… The joy evokes horror in him, the great farandole more than anything else!… He rises a little in his armchair, at the cost of some effort! …what suffering! …what agony!… Finally he can see a little… Horrors! all of his puppets are in a delirium… He hurriedly sends Peter forth…towards that new crowd!… That insulting saraband!… “Put them back to work, immediately…bring order! to all of those scoundrels!… Here! Peter! take my cane! …beat! …pound all of those cads for me!… They shall obey me!”… 

[379]

But presently the festivities mount…engulf…submerge the entire wharf…the entire space! …echoes are everywhere!… 

Poor Peter, completely distraught, sets out with his stick all alone, against that entire mob…against all of that joy, that madness…that immense farandole………. 

THE END

 

---

Notes:

¹ Same as p.170 (290); accidental reprint in the original.

² Refers to Maurice Thorez, PCF head, 1930s-60s.

³ Millerand (1859-1943) was Premier (1920), President (1920-24), and Senator (1925-40), among other public offices. (Not to be confused with Mitterrand.)

⁴ Refers to the far-Right manifestations of 6 Feb. 1936.

⁵ Refers to Jacques Doriot (1898-1945), a former French Communist, who was expelled from PCF in 1934, converted to fascism, and established the Parti Populaire Français in 1936. Also see pp. 28, 169 (288) and 181 (311) of this work.

⁶ Refers to André Tardieu (1876-1945), Premier, 1929-30, 1932. Also see pp. 141 (242), 154 (267) and 175 (298) of this work.

⁷ Refers to Jacques Doriot; see p. 180 (310), plus the attaching note.

⁸ OV: “enfiotés.”

⁹ Refers to WWII.

¹⁰ Refers to British Intelligence.

¹¹ Facetious attribution.

¹² OV: “la plus offrante [bite],” compare with the note immediately below.

¹³ OV: “au plus offrant [youtre],” compare with the note immediately above.

¹⁴ This passage criticizes of the corruption of the nobility, rather than the aristocratic principle per se.

¹⁵ “African Battalion” refers to French forces in Northern/Western Africa.

¹⁶ Alludes to the Merovingian possession of an Hebraic ancestral bloodline. See: Baigent et al., pp. 236-39.

¹⁷ OV: “Tafaresques,” alluding to Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie); also see pp. 60 (99) and 174 (296).

¹⁸ OV: “marrante magie des mots”; note the alliteration in the original.

¹⁹ “City” refers to the London financial district; also see pp.  33, 55, 76, 152-53 and 163.

²⁰ Refers to British Intelligence; also see pp. 55, 88, 142, 181, 185 and 217.

²¹ “Tablier” = a Masonic apron.

²² Refers facetiously to the Maginot Line.

²³ Refers to the Comintern, or Third (Communist) International.

²⁴ Facetiously complimentary reference to the Jews, pursuant to a mendacious though not uncommon reading of Gospel (Matt. 5:13).

²⁵ I.e., episode in which men are selected for death, in combat.

²⁶ Facetious attribution.

²⁷ Perhaps refers to a Lower-Half Rear Admiral, or Commodore.

²⁸ Refers to a Parisian tourist boat, as used on the Seine.

²⁹ Refers to British Intelligence; also see pp. 55, 88, 142, 181-82 and 217

³⁰ Refers to diplomatic détente with Germany.

³¹ Refers to Lake Baykal, in Siberia; facetious attribution.

³² Also see: Raspail, passim.

³³ Refers to the French Communist Party’s daily newspaper.

³⁴ OV: “la ‘France libre et heureuse!’” Note the usage of the term “France libre” (“Free France”), in Communist propaganda, even before WWII.

³⁵ Refers to various kings of Parthia (Artabanus I-V, 2^nd Century BC to 3^rd Century AD); direct connection with Jewry unclear.

³⁶ “To the city (of Rome) and to the world” (as a salutation used in the publication of papal bulls), designating a measure which pertains to all of humanity.

³⁷ Or, “that’s that.”

³⁸ The Jewish “race” is here implied.

³⁹ Obliquely refers to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

⁴⁰ OV: “Y a de la joie.”

⁴¹ Or, “For as long as you say,” implying compliance.

⁴² Or, “I am at your feet,” implying servility or supineness.

⁴³ OV: “‘première’ [first class/ haute couture/ high fashion], croisière [ocean liner (respectably well-dressed tourist)], musette [small suitcase (train, around-town)], tennis [sport (casual)],” implying four classes of expenditure.

⁴⁴ OV: “Philomène.”

⁴⁵ Portion of “La Marseillaise.”

⁴⁶ Refers to the composer of “La Marseillaise.”

⁴⁷ Portion of “La Marseillaise.”

⁴⁸ “Cuirassiers” = cavalrymen wearing light armor.

⁴⁹ Rectal insertion is here implied.

⁵⁰ OV: “la Critique” = criticism, i.e. by Establishment media critics; “Critics” substituted.

⁵¹ Or: “than something with which to wrap his plaster,” or “than something to put in his plaster” (que pour son plâtre); signifying an undignified alternative use for printed matter.

⁵² Or: “And I don’t have his moral vote [cote d’amour]!”

⁵³ OV: “esbouriffée,” esbrouffée substituted.

⁵⁴ OV: “guépouistes,” or GPU-esque, alluding to an aesthetic consistent with the activities of the GPU. Also see p. 196, plus the attaching note.

⁵⁵ Céline’s appraisals of Russian architecture, when such represents a revival of traditional motifs, are far from being commonly held. The church in question is patterned after St. Basil’s, in Moscow; it normally elicits attention from tourists, which is not at all unfavorable. It was built upon the site of the assassination (1881) of Tsar Alexander II.

⁵⁶ OV: “giroles,” or “girolles,” a kind of mushroom.

⁵⁷ Refers to Nevskii Prospekt, the main street in Leningrad.

⁵⁸ OV: “papoti” and “papota” = ironical corruptions of papoter (to chat).

⁵⁹ OV: “bananes” = bananas; “tutti-frutti” or “scrambled egg” may be substituted.

⁶⁰ OV: “citron” = lemon; “olive” substituted.

⁶¹ Refers to Catherine II, “the Great” (1729-96, r. 1762-96).

⁶² OV: “Le Guépéou” (=GPU, sounded-out), the Soviet secret police agency. Also see p. 193, plus the attaching note.

⁶³ OV: “barillet” = little barrel, cylinder, or barrel-shaped object; “burr” substituted.

⁶⁴ Facetious attribution.

⁶⁵ OV: “babouines” = babines (lips) + babouin (baboon); “baboon lips” substituted.

⁶⁶ Refers to Mikhail Markovich Grusenberg (1884-1953). “Borodin,” a Stalinist agent, had previously introduced Communism to China, back in the 1920s. Also see p. 164 of this work.

⁶⁷ OV: “Au Courage.”

⁶⁸ I.e., “a son of Dora Kaplan” (who had tried to assassinate Lenin), meaning: a treacherous fellow.

⁶⁹ OV: “top!”

⁷⁰ OV: “jauni,” or, gone to a deeper shade of yellow.

⁷¹ Refers to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

⁷² Refers to SS. Peter and Paul Fortress, which was also used as a prison in the Tsarist Era.

⁷³ OV: “profondes” = long from front to back; “deep” substituted.

⁷⁴ Refers to bas-relief rosette/wreath motifs.

⁷⁵ Refers to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, on Montmartre in Paris (not to Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy).

⁷⁶ Refers to an opera by Chaikovskii, based upon a story by Pushkin.

⁷⁷ OV: “trumeau faisandé.”

⁷⁸ Or: “Three cards!”

⁷⁹ OV: “vaporeuse de guipures.”

⁸⁰ OV: “s’etrignent” = (lit.) strangled, squeezed (out), oppressed.

⁸¹ OV: “cabriole.”

⁸² OV: “oiseau” = bird; “sparrow” substituted (just as “piaf” was rendered as “bird” on p. 77 (128)).

⁸³ OV: “les Cygnes.”

⁸⁴ Also see: Soiled Sheets, p. 46 (“lukewarm” fever).

⁸⁵ Refers to the Queen of Spades, mentioned previously (from 201/344 to 202/346).

⁸⁶ Refers to an opera by Chaikovskii, based on Byron’s poem Mazeppa, based in turn on the life of Ivan Mazepa (1640-1709), Cossack hetman (who now appears on the Ukrainian ten griven’ note).

⁸⁷ OV: “coryphées.”

⁸⁸ By “poem,” is meant the script for a ballet.

⁸⁹ Refers to the reign of Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825, r. 1801-25).

⁹⁰ Refers to the Peace of Tilsit, 1807.

⁹¹ See pp. 8-15 of this work.

⁹² Facetious characterization.

⁹³ Self-deprecatingly ironical allusion to Caesar’s “Veni. Vidi. Vici.”

⁹⁴ See pp. 34-5 and 39 of this work.

⁹⁵ Refers to the Kalmyk ASSR, and to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan.

⁹⁶ Refers to a post before a firing squad.

⁹⁷ Or, “VOKS” (BOKC), for the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul’turnykh sviazei s zagranitsei / Всесоюзное общество культурных связей с заграницей).

⁹⁸ OV: “grand-mère,” alluding to the Russian term “babushka” (бабушка), literally grandmother, but often used to designate any elderly woman.

⁹⁹ Russian Civil War, 1918-20.

¹⁰⁰ Ironical attribution.

¹⁰¹ OV: “La Boule,” refers to the beach area west of Nantes.

¹⁰² Refers to Tsarskoe Selo (Царское Село), the Tsar’s country place.

¹⁰³ OV: “cave”—a key word which Céline uses in a variety of contexts, always signifying something of a low-down or depressed nature (see pp. 47, 92, 197, et passim). “Cave” has been rendered as “basement” in each instance on this page, though it has been left standing as the English-cognate “cave” on several other pages. 

¹⁰⁴ Idiomatic ironical characterizations, used extensively in this paragraph.

¹⁰⁵ OV: “crounir.”

¹⁰⁶ Refers to the present Dominican Republic, and to the level of political culture attaching thereto.

¹⁰⁷ Refers to Aleksandra, the wife of Nicholas II. 

¹⁰⁸ OV: “chimiste-teinturier,” meaning that he was skilled at mixing coloring agents to achieve a desired shade. (Nowadays the term is used to designate a dry cleaner.)

¹⁰⁹ OV: “concours de rosiers et de rosières”

¹¹⁰ OV: “curé” = the head priest of a parish.

¹¹¹ These scenarios would not have been completely far-fetched by the standards of America in the 1990s. By the standards of the 1930s, however, they would have been considered eccentric. Such eccentricity is the author’s implication. 

¹¹² Refers to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (1856-1929).

¹¹³ Refers to WWI, which entailed the collapse of the Tsarist regime, and the Bolsheviks’ concessions at Brest-Litovsk. Nikolai Nikolaevich had been Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief in the Caucasus during the War; he was forced into exile in 1919.

¹¹⁴ OV: “une bagatelle,” meaning a “trifle” or a “little nothing” (“petit rien”), refers to a short ballet piece, of such shortness that it hardly deserves a title, rather like a skit. The usage here alludes back to the title of this work.

¹¹⁵ Those “few words” would be the nondescript background chatter of the workers, not dialogue among the principal players.

¹¹⁶ Or: on a palanquin.