The Pursuit of Laughter (51 page)

Harold Nicolson's story, quoted here, of Clemenceau being ‘rather high-handed with the smaller powers: Any objections? No? Adopted! Like a machine gun' is frightful in its implications, and reminds one of Stalin and Roosevelt at a Yalta banquet, when they moved pepper pots and forks representing millions of Europeans around on the table cloth, deciding who was to be merely bullied and who to be enslaved.

The ‘smaller powers' got everything they wanted, provided it injured Germany or Austria-Hungary. They emerged from the Treaties swollen with immense tracts of
central
Europe to which they had no possible claim, whether historical or ethnic. The author skates over all this with a strange indifference. There is no mention, for example, of Masaryk or Benès, and the Treaties of Trianon and St Germain are ignored. Yet, for the future, what timebombs they contained! Europe is still suffering from the cruelty and
stupidity
of Versailles, St Germain and Trianon, and no-one more so than the foolish ‘
smaller
powers'.

Clemenceau went banging on, paying scant attention to his ignorant though
well-meaning
allies. He had a distinct weakness for Anglo-Saxons and particularly admired the
United States, but his theoretical friendliness did not extend to their representatives at Versailles. He hated Lloyd George, House and Woodrow Wilson hardly less than he hated Poincaré, Foch, Briand, Painlevé, Millerand, Léon Blum—the list could be tediously
prolonged
. When, after the war, Clemenceau allowed Mandel to put his name forward as
candidate
for the Presidency, he was convinced that he was bound to be elected. He was
genuinely
amazed by the victory of Deschanel, and his bitterness increased. The fact that Deschanel went mad soon afterwards was a slight comfort. He was beaten by his many enemies, and by the Catholic vote; his old passionate hatred of the Church of Rome had not been modified by the years. At the end of his life he proclaimed that the bolshevist peril was an illusion, the real danger was the Church.

He hated nearly everyone, but whom did he like? He liked his family, except for his American wife. He liked Monet, and admired his painting. He liked writers and painters and actors and especially actresses, and he liked a few cronies and toadies. He could not tolerate an equal, who might turn into a rival. One of his secretaries, Jean Martet, an unconditional worshipper, became his Eckermann or Boswell, producing several little books full of amusing details which find no place in the author's more serious and
specifically
political biography. Martet describes his hero's life in Paris after the war, and the speedy dashes by motor car to his house near the sea in his native Vendée. The
simplicity
of his flat and his cottage did not include plain fare. He sent his cook to have lessons from the chef at Claridges, and when Martet complimented his host upon the
omelette
soufflée
, mouton à la tomate and crême au chocolat
, the Tiger, gulping down a boiling pêche pochée which burnt his mouth, said: ‘That's nothing. You should try my
poulet Soubise
.'

He could never resist a tease, and when Martet asked him whether he did not
consider
that Mme Curie, for example, was more qualified to vote than some drunken sot, Clemenceau replied that he was all for taking the vote away from the drunkard, but that he didn't feel too sure about giving it to Mme Curie, who kept very bizarre company.

Always ready with a sarcasm or an irreverent joke, Clemenceau's company was greatly enjoyed by young people. Hearing that an equestrian statue was being made of Marshal Foch (perhaps the one in Grosvenor Gardens) he remarked that Foch had never ridden a horse in his life. ‘It's as if I had a statue made of myself riding a camel', he said
scornfully
. His statue, in the Champs Elysées near the métro station bearing his name, has neither horse nor camel. He looks as he must have looked in life, striding along into the east wind, bursting with energy; bold, malevolent, rough, ugly and ferocious.

Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography
, Watson, D.R.
Books and Bookmen
(1974)

Counting from 1789, Paris had four revolutions in less than a century. Small wonder if the
bourgeois inhabitants were frightened by rivers of blood. Napoleon built the Rue de Rivoli to make it harder to reach the palaces; in theory a few soldiers could prevent a mob
crossing
from East to West. Yet in 1871 the Tuileries palace was burnt down, and the Louvre only just escaped burning.

Christopher Prendergast is too much concerned with what happens to the mountains of filth and waste, the hundreds of dead bodies, which had to be disposed of in a city of millions. There is nothing special to Paris about the problem, and in fact it used the
enormous
underground space whence the stone that built it had been quarried. He also dwells on human waste, the rag and bone man, the vagabond, encountered by the typical middle class flâneur as he strolls through the streets.

Haussmann during the second empire destroyed much that was beautiful in order to build wide, straight boulevards, and make it easier for police and military to contain
trouble
. He also made parks and green spaces to calm spirits. Yet the mob and the students threw up barricades in no time, when revolution was in the air.

Prendergast lightens his rather turgid prose with excellent quotes from Balzac, Baudelaire, Hugo and Flaubert to make his points. Some important contributions to Paris as ‘capital of capitals' are entirely missing from his book: the beauty of the architecture; elegance and fashion. The uniquely delicious food gets a passing mention, but the
exquisite
minor arts of couture and decoration, the brilliant intelligence of conversation, the gaiety and fun, all are ousted by squalor, dirt and evil smells. Proust is mentioned, but there is no hint of a Guermantes to be found.

The Continual Pilgrimage
opens with the liberation of Paris in 1944, American soldiers smothered in flowers and champagne. The honeymoon was short, the drunken
boorishness
of Hemingway and his like changed the scene, and on every empty space ‘US go home' was the ungrateful message to the liberators. A few GIs made a bee-line for Gertrude Stein, who had spent the war in France and welcomed her compatriots in her grandmotherly way. Paris was a beacon for young writers, and over the Atlantic they came, both black and white. The blacks were entranced by the apparent absence of racialism in the French. They were accepted as they had never been by white people at home. They quarrelled among themselves, James Baldwin nourishing deep hatred for Richard Wright.

None of the young writers made French friends, they herded together and got their work into print at English language publishers and bookshops which catered for them. Most were very poor, and lived in seedy, bug-ridden hotels, or damp basements with no running water. They liked Paris, apparently because of the cafés.

When the Algerian war began they were disappointed to discover the French were racialists after all, and anti-Arab attitudes fashionable. They drifted away, and probably lived happily ever after in Greenwich Village. Even if some of Sawyer-Lauçanno's swans are geese, it is nevertheless a touching story in its pretentious way.

John Betjeman said that to read American books in an American accent is a great help. Presumably the pilgrimage continues; there is no end to the attraction Paris can exercise
for artists, even now. Its tower blocks made the great ex-American writer, Julien Green, looking over the city from the heights of St Cloud, exclaim: ‘It could be Detroit!' But,
fortunately
, it still could not.

Paris and The Nineteenth Century
, Prendergast, C.;

The Continual Pilgrimage by American Writers in Paris 1944-1960
, Sawyer-Lauçanno, C. (1992)

Besides his legitimate son, the King of Rome, Napoleon had three other children. His son by Countess Walewska became a diplomat, the other two were of scant interest, therefore the title of this book is rather misleading since far the biggest role is that of Napoleon's nephew, the son of Napoleon's brother Louis, King of Holland. Louis-Napoleon's
mother
was Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Josephine. La Reine Hortense, as she was always called, had a younger son by her lover the Comte de Flahaut whose father was Talleyrand. This Auguste, afterwards Duc de Morny, engineered the coup d'état which brought his half brother to the throne as Napoleon III.

The cast is enormous, Napoleon had many brothers and sisters as well as his step-
children
Eugène and Hortense. Even someone familiar with the period might get muddled not only by the sheer numbers but by the determination to leave nothing out, resulting in what Lytton Strachey once described as ‘an unwieldy accumulation of facts'.

The Bonaparte clan, and above all the great man himself, are so much disliked and so keenly denigrated throughout that it's a wonder the subject was chosen. Physically,
mentally
and morally they are attacked: fat, ugly, stupid, mean, cruel and dishonest. Even
beautiful
Pauline (disguised here in one of the many misprints as Paulette) is not given her deserved praise for refined elegance.

After Napoleon's defeat his son lived in Vienna where he bore the title Duke of Reichstadt until his early death from tuberculosis. He is the hero of a tear-jerker play by Edmond Rostand,
L'Aiglon
, which had Sarah Bernhardt in the name part.

Napoleon III was certainly a disastrous ruler. Queen Victoria, who stayed at St Cloud with him and Eugénie after the Crimean War, was enchanted by Paris, and she found the Emperor strangely seductive. But over the years he became unpopular for many good
reasons
, and when he provoked war with Prussia his armies were beaten in a matter of weeks. Eugène fled to England, where Napoleon joined her. The bloody Commune and the white terror which followed in 1871 were his legacy, matching the bloody coup d'état which had brought him to power twenty years before.

That was the end of the Bonapartes as rulers, though Napoleon's cousin Princesse Mathilde lived in Paris and is familiar to us through her literary friends, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, George Sand, and as a character in Proust. She died in 1904.

Napoleon's Children
, Susan Normington,
Evening Standard
(1993)

The Prince de Talleyrand was one of the wittiest, cleverest, most charming men who ever lived. He had inherited the celebrated
esprit
Mortemart from a grandmother, and there are Frenchmen today who give, as a reason for believing that the Duchesse de Dino's
daughter
Pauline was fathered by Talleyrand, the fact that the
esprit
Mortemart cropped up once again in Pauline's grandsons, Boniface de Castellane and his brothers.