Night Rounds by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page A

At arm's length, an issue of L'lllustration on the liner Normandie. The grill, the chairs along the afterdeck. The nursery. The smoking lounge. The ballroom. The sailors' charity ball on May 25 under Madame Flandin's patronage. Swallowed up, all of it. I know what it's like. I was on the Titanic when it sank. Midnight. I'm listening to some old songs of Charles Trenet:
    Bonsoir
    Jolie madame…..
    The record is scratched, but I never tire of hearing it. Sometimes I play another one:
    Tout est fini, plus de prom'nades
    Plus de printemps, Swing Troubadour…..
    The inn, like a bathyscaphe, is washed ashore in a sunken city. Atlantis? Drowned men glide along the Boulevard Haussmann.
    …..Ton destin
    Swing Troubadour…..
    They linger round the tables at Fouquet. Most of them have lost all semblance of humanity. Their vitals are barely visible under gaudy tatters. In the waiting room at Saint-Lazare station, bodies drift about in clusters and I see some disappearing through the windows of suburban trains. On the Rue d'Amsterdam, they're coming out of the Monseigneur nightclub, sickly green but much better preserved than the ones before. I continue my route. Élysée-Montmartre. Magic City. Luna Park. RialtoDancing. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand drowned men with labored, listless movements, like the cast of a slow-motion film. Silence. Now and then they brush against the bathyscaphe and their faces come to rest against the porthole, glassy-eyed, open-mouthed.
    …..Swing Troubadour….
    I shan't be able to surface again. The air grows thin, the bar lights waver, and I find myself back at Austerlitz station in the summertime. Everybody's leaving for the Southern Zone. They jam the ticket windows and board the trains bound for Hendaye. They'll cross the Spanish border. Never to return. Some still stroll along the platforms but will fade away any second. Hold them back? I'm walking west in Paris. Châtelet. Palais-Royal. Place de la Concorde. The sky is too blue, the foliage much too tender. The gardens of the Champs-Élysées are like a verdant spa.
    Avenue Kléber. I turn left. Cimarosa Square. A tranquil square such as you find in the 16 th arrondissement . The music shed is no longer in use, and the statue of Toussaint L'Ouverture has a coat of gray mold. The house at No. 3 bis once belonged to M. and Mme de Bel-Respiro. On May 13 , 1897 , they gave a Persian costume ball there, and M. de Bel-Respiro's son received the guests dressed as a rajah. He died the next day in the fire at the Charity Bazaar. Mme de Bel-Respiro loved music, and especially Isidore Lara's "Farewell Rondel." M. de Bel-Respiro painted in his spare time. I really must mention all these details since everyone has forgotten them.
    August in Paris calls forth a host of memories. The sun, the deserted avenues, the murmur of chestnut trees … I sit on a bench and gaze at the brick and stone façade. The shutters have been closed for a long time. Coco Lacour's and Esmeralda's rooms were on the third floor. I had the attic room at the left. In the living room, a life-size self-portrait of M. de Bel-Respiro in his Spahi officer's uniform. For a while I stared at his face and the decorations studding his chest. Legion of Honor. Cross of the Holy Sepulcher. Danilo de Monténégro. Cross of St. George of Russia. Tower and Sword of Portugal. I had used this man's absence to appropriate his house. The nightmare will end, M. de Bel-Respiro will be back and turn us out, I told myself, while they were torturing that poor devil and he was staining the Savonnerie carpet with his blood. A number of very odd things went on at No. 3 bis while I lived there. Some nights I was awakened by cries of pain, footsteps hurrying to and fro on the main floor. The Khedive's voice. Philibert's. I looked out the window. Two or three shadowy forms were being shoved into cars parked in front of the house. The doors slammed. The drone of a motor growing fainter and fainter. Silence.