Series 1, Part 2: On whether she comes running at the snap of my fingers, the bonheur of Fifi here-below, the righteous rage of the Ohio-soul, a woman’s wrath, the true niceties of human nature, the real story of the French revolution and America’s real choice.
“These conges payés …” Karine begins, “We French would not have paid vacations or any other pretty good things at all, at all, if they had not been stealing poor children to use their blood in a black magic formula for staying young.”
On cue, Gabriella Cilmi, not quite Amy Winehouse, floats from the sound system
– Nothin’ sweet/ About me, yeah/Nothin’ sweet/About me, yeah/ If there's lessons/To be learned/I'd rather get/My jamming words/In first, so/Tell you something/That I've found/That the world's/A better place/When it's/Upside down…
“One hot summer day,” Karine continues, “The mamans couldn’t support it, finally! Pouf! The Bastille falls and all France is in flame! Hourra! Hourra!
And the French girls are not silly! So, when the mamans without culottes hear that that duc d’Orléans crétin try to kidnap the King and Queen and steal the Revolution, they are not so much rolled in the flour that they don’t get the buttery king Baker and his little queeny Boulangère to Paris before the big tough guys of le duc know what is what. Hahaha. Hourra! Hourra!”
She points casually to herself as she picks up the milk coffee, brings it silently to her lips, sips.
“Alors, the women got the revolution going and they kept it in the people’s hands, mon Tracy. So, when they realized this revolution stuff was the real thing, sure, they stopped stealing the babies. But more important, mon amour, since then, they are a just little afraid of being too mean even though they are still and always will be des vicieux.
“This is just because they are humans. They cannot help it, not more than goats can help it. I do not criticize it but only have the sense to live with.”
The knowledge that there is always a chance that French mamans start a revolution is, according to Karine, where nice things such as paid vacation for the masses began. “All the rest is just doctoral feces,” she laughs. “I have figured this out myself.”
– Hmmmm, I say noncommittally.
She archly raises her left eyebrow. “Alors? Don’t believe me?”
“Regard-moi ça,” she exclaims. “The proof is all around us.” She sweeps her arm largely, taking in the pleasant-seeming people eating, drinking and chatting at the tables around us. If they hadn’t noticed her before, they now do.
– Nothin’ sweet/ About me, yeah/Nothin’ sweet/About me, yeah…
They think she’s talking about them. Without showing it too much, they strain to hear.
“Les gens, all of them, they are very proud that the women sans culottes force people to be less mean. Le brute and le vicieux, they adore what is cruel struggle because mean is to be superior, see.”
She pauses and looks around a challenge.
“Yes. They think what is mean and harsh is, forcément, mon bien-aimé, more intelligent, better, cool, more efficace. They despise nice. They contempt the very name of nice.”
Karine knows everybody is hoping to catch her out. She knows they want her down a peg. I know that she thinks she knows this because she assumes they do. But how do I know this? How can it be true; I don’t even believe her? But I see that it is true. In a casual way, they want her blood on the floor.
Karine smirks conspiratorially at me and asks me loudly where we are?
I tell her we’re at Voltaire, on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire and the avenue Lédru-Rollin, near the Mairie.
I am not surprised now but still dismayed to see people discreetly nod and smile, meanly, casually, hoping my gimcrack knowledge is prelude to putting the frizzy blonde back into the candy-box she popped out of.
“Non,” Karine says, louder and more firmly than necessary.
“We are at Voltaire – (Léon Blum) – in parentheses, mind, mon Tracy. We look over the Square Léon Blum to the Mairie. That statue is him, Léon, too.”
She points toward the little sandy spit jutting into the traffic circle in front of the Mairie, then to the other patrons. “You did not know that, mon Tracy. And neither did they.”
Léon Blum, of course, is the prime minister responsible for organizing the Front populaire and then expertly using it to pass, in under a year, in the mid-1930s, many of the important nice laws every 80-percenter nobody alive can enjoy today.
Apart from paid vacation, bankrupting the country almost and picking other people’s pockets in a big way, his accomplishments also include the uneconomic but quite nice eight-hour day with obligatory supplementary overtime payments. According to the French-language Wikipédia, the accomplishments of Blum’s Front populaire are “mixed,” though the article does not specify if this is because Jimmy Dean’s pure pork sausages were not included in the paid vacation package or for some other, more specious, reason.
I look around. The faces that had been so expectant are now blank, disappointed.
Disappointed or not, Karine’s got them hooked.
“So. As you know, mon Tracy, in France, the gratitude and the recognition, if you are still alive to appreciate them, which is very rare, are shown by a dinner and, if you are respectably dead, much less rare, by naming a street for you.”
She laughs softly.
“You have a street, mon Tracy. But you are exceptionally, I believe, alive even if only I have truly appreciated the respectability au fond de toi. Héhé.”
“Léon, he did nice,” she continues, fixing her gaze on me and wiping the corner of her mouth with the flat of her thumb.
“Yes. This Blum is the father of millions, oui, mon ami, millions et milliards of happinesses!
Mais, les brutes et les vicieux human beings? They, they secretly regret him. Like this Blum con is a crazy uncle or sa tante nymphomane, they want to hide as much as possible even if they must trot them out for important stuff like getting at their money.
And, they are especially ashamed of the success of niceness.
She gives me a leer, raps my elbow, hard, makes me jump.
“Nice is not respectable. Street names here are for respectable people and places and ideas, not for your absurd, foolish, addle-headed-but-nice people and their idiocies. This is why Blum only got “mixed results” and Charles De Gaulle is a great hero.”
She’s hissing.
“You’ve got avenues, quais, rues and what not, all named for this Voltaire that shares his metro stop with the pauvre-type Léon. Apart Léon the nice guy, who is besides stuffed into parentheses, only La Motte-Piquet-Grenelle – And who are they, you might ask? I shall tell you: ‘dirt heaped up pretty high,’ ‘a stake, or a card game, or a picket,’ ‘the site of a battle or just a plain old Paris neighborhood,’ that’s what! Only this dirt, picket and neighborhood, I tell you, share a metro station like Léon Blum must do!”
Karine pauses to catch her breath, continues.
“Battles and triumphs have their boulevards, avenues, même, an étoile: Jena, Magenta, Wagram, Stalingrad, statues of the peevish De Gaulle and the drunken Churchill at Champs-Elysées-Clémenceau, nothing against them, mon Tracy, but all sorts of monuments to martyrs, and to plenty of cons, too, even to people and symbols the bourgeois supposedly hate… Maurice Thorez has an avenue! Thorez! Auguste Blanqui has a whole boulevard to himself… Auguste Blanqui!”
Karine taps her forefinger on the table and looks aggressively around. Does she suspect someone here of wanting to eat her kids, of defending the massacre of the children last November, mealy-mouthed apologies for the horrors of communism?
Sure looks like it.
Blanqui was the first theoretician of political terrorism – the idea is both to undermine people’s faith in the power of the existing state to provide security and to demonstrate the power of the revolutionary state. Maurice Thorez was leader of the communist party in the 1930s, famously, an unabashed admirer of Stalin and Stalinism, with a truly remarkably ambiguous political record – which includes the welcome of the Nazi conqueror in France.
Tension has risen in her continuing silence; some faces squinch up, but nobody looks boldly in her face. A scan of the room tells me that ruining a sunny morning by arguing down a good-looking, blonde, brassy, opinionated – “crazy” – woman doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
On a gloomy day and getting towards Christmas, I think, we might wind up fighting our way out.
Why have I chosen a woman like this? Does she know the feeling she’s raising? What do I really know about her, after all?
I look in her eyes, consult my feelings.
But look in her head? What can I know even if I could peer in there? Are her feelings, any less than mine, less of a tidal massing of the shocks and surges we call joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation oscillating to occasional discharge? Are her thoughts any more source-able than my own – if I were able to express her thoughts in words would they even remain her thoughts?
She fixes her gaze on me.
“What Léon Blum did was nice. Yes. This Blum is the father of millions, oui, mon ami, millions et milliards of happinesses! Mais, they, we, human beings, des brutes et des vicieux? They, we, secretly regret him. Like this Blum is a crazy uncle or sa tante nymphomane, to lock up in the attic. The truth? We are as ashamed of the niceness as they are. They are ashamed for we, too. Nice is not respectable.”
She sighs loudly, theatrically, and points at me, at herself, circles the whole room with the accusing end of her index finger,
“They believe Auguste Blanqui was the better man! – it’s a tough, nasty, bold, hard-headed idea to shoot into dance halls and restaurants to get political attention, non?
She leans toward me, as if to whisper, but continues in the same loud voice.
“They is we, mon Tracy. So, enfin, here is what my heart says to you and your Ohio-soul so outragée!”
I half expect her to rip off her bodice and show me…
“You, the silly American you are, really, if you want if your nice conges payés for all American nobodies, you have two choices.
One, your American pompon girlies, they get fed up, make a revolution for to make les cannibales afraid of you nobodies. Or, secundo, you figure out a way to make nice as respectable as nasty.
But make a decision, mon Tracy. Decide what!”
She gets up suddenly, so forcefully, so suddenly, I find myself staring up at her.
“I’m getting out of here.” She walks out.