Five Dials No. 8b

Five Dials

Number 8 bis

An Addendum to our Paris Issue

with Guy de Maupassant …and indeed a little more

Thank you to: Gillon Aitken Jacques Audiard Sophia Augusta Jakob von Baeyer Jane Birkin jemma birrell gemma collins Daft Punk Paul Davis David Delannet Alexandra Diaconu Marielle Durand Romain Duris Charlotte Gainsbourg Jean-Luc Godard Paul Graham Johnny Hallyday Stuart Hammond Richard Holligan Michel Houellebecq David Ignaszewski Jessica Jackson Simon Kuper Molly Murray Teresa Oetker Pierre-Louis Phelipot Bénédicte Quoniam Lesley Retallack Anna Ridley Eric Rohmer Audrey Tautou Francois Truffaut Joanna Walsh George Whitman Sylvia Whitman Thank you to Eurostar and to the Hôtel Pont Royal Paris team: Anna Kelly, Juliette Mitchell, Ellie Smith, Craig Taylor, Simon Prosser SUBSCRIBE: hamishhamilton.co.uk Illustrations by MARIELLE DURAND, BADAUDE AND LEANNE SHAPTON Photographs by DAVID IGNASZEWSKI Designed by DEAN ALLEN

A L e t ter fr o m th e E d itor s

On Paris and the Eurostar

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aris allows no half measures. It’s either the worst city on earth or the best – the city of the capsized love affair, the rebuffed marriage proposal, the unfulfilled promise or the rented room meant for you and a loved one that transforms through the alchemy of harsh words and break ups into a vacant room for other travellers who just might chance upon the other side of Paris, the blissful end of the spectrum. In Paris there are no inbetweens. It’s either terrible or it’s glowing.

But when the light hits Notre Dame and turns the stone gold on a warm September evening, then you can only delight in being in such a city of extremes as it shows you its nicer side.

When we speak about September evenings we’re referring, of course, to our own soiree in Paris in late September, the evening of the Five Dials Paris issue launch, which fell into the latter category (the non-heartbreak category). Before the memory fades, as all memories do, we decided to make a record of that night, in the form of this addendum, issue 8 bis, which we hope you will enjoy even if you weren’t able to be in Paris then. The definition of ‘bis’ is a passage to be repeated, so here is a small bis for our eighth issue.

Please don’t think of this slight edition of Five Dials as an issue unto itself: it’s attached to the previous one by a thin thread. It follows on, just as the nap in the sunlit garden of the Louvre followed on from the evening of our Paris launch, the party afterwards, the hours after that in the small bar near la Bastille, and the cab ride home when the sun was just starting to christen Haussmann’s boulevards.

I know our readership is now used to thirty-page issues, and we do have another on deck that will be, we hope, our best yet. In early December we’ll release our first issue of short fiction, featuring new stories from Booker prizewinner James Kelman, Helen Oyeyemi, David Vann and Chloe Aridjis, plus, from the archives, the incomparable B.S. Johnson (introduced here by Jonathan Coe). We also have our first piece for Five Dials from one of our

heroes, Philip Roth, and a list of all the DJs on Brick Lane, which proves that nothing in fiction can ever be quite as strange as reality. And finally we have an essay, written by David Shields, against fiction and all it stands for, so you’ll have something to argue about at your next book club/writers’ group/school debate/ family dinner/meeting with the person you broke up with in Paris (see paragraph one).

Which is to say that we won’t stay fixated on Paris much longer. Nevertheless, our faulty collective memory needs this necessary recap. On a Friday morning in late September we took the Eurostar to Paris and edited the magazine at one of the tables in the carriage as the Kent countryside slid past in the sunlight. We were given seats around our table by a smiling Eurostar employee whose name we wrote on a piece of paper – and then lost. He was tall, we recalled later. He had stubble, another editor remembered. Or was it a goatee?

Thank heaven for the Eurostar. Five Dials doesn’t always do well on crossChannel ferries – those rusty boats full of exchange students lolling about and folk singers listlessly offering up plinky entertainment. As the countryside sped by we thought of others who might have put the Chunnel service to good use if they had been given the chance. Would Thérèse Raquin have continued to suffer in the ugly streets of Paris if this were an option?

Or would she have bundled up, scored a ticket and sequestered herself in the quiet carriage in the hopes of escaping Camille and her hateful life? Madame Bovary might have taken herself to London for an affair and, who knows, met a decent bloke who collected stamps and did a little ballroom dancing in the evenings, and who had enough je ne sais quoi in his foxtrot to help steer her away from her other pastimes – namely, succumbing to provincial inertia. Or Bill Sykes might have taken a stool in the bar car, steadying himself with a bottle of Stella, ready to break through French windows rather than English locks.

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We thought of all those wonderful reporters who brought Paris to life. Would A.J. Liebling have appreciated the langoustines and turbot of his favourite restaurant on the the Rue Saint-Augustin even more if he had just left London’s limp post-war cuisine behind hours before? And the writers . . . Henry Miller nipping back for antibiotics on the NHS. Anaïs Nin’s writing in her diary: ‘The speed, fast. The bottles of red, tiny.’ Would Lawrence be shocked that the French versions of his supposedly obscene books were so easy to stash in the overhead racks?

The Chunnel has changed the idea of Paris – and all fiction set in the present must take into account that Paris is but a couple of hours away from London. Love scenes on boats have been all but made obsolete by the 50.5-kilometre tunnel, one of the seven wonders of the modern world – all that achievement passing silently in the underwater darkness. (After even a cursory bit of research on the tunnel, what’s interesting is the number of failed attempts and the worries that kept the tunnel from being built, from ventilation to invasion issues, and, our own personal favourite, the fact that drivers might succumb to mesmerization, due to the endless track stretching ahead in the headlamps.)

As others napped and ate, we scratched away on our proofs. There’s nothing like the promise of a very public launch to ensure a quick and thorough edit. Staring at us as they passed were the usual collection of Eurostar tourists and business​people who had no idea what we were doing.

They napped and ate and we scratched away. At one point an editor pointed down at the page and called out, ‘Syphilis only has one “l”’, which woke up one of the passengers across the aisle.

Our Paris event unfolded as planned.

We got together by the side of the Seine at the famous Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, and a crowd soon gathered around us. We tested the microphones and fixed our ties.

We kept the readings short, the question period shorter, and soon cleared away the chairs so that the audience could stand and talk. A cellist played. A poet from the US appeared from the crowd and tried to interest us in his collection entitled I Found the Clitoris. ‘Thanks for ruining the ending,’ someone nearby commented. We’d brought over a few supplies – some posters, huge A0 sheets that covered the windows

of the bookshop, our pistachio-green cards and some blank white cards. One of our volunteers waded into conversations and asked attendees to write down their own thoughts on Paris. We’ve reprinted five of our favourites. There were Five Dials subscribers from New York, London, Oxford, Croydon. The prize for the longest journey went to the woman who had travelled from Melbourne, though not just for the event. Apparently she had other things to do in Paris.

We’d like to hold more social events and we’d like to get a chance to know our subscribers – as long as they don’t proffer too many volumes of sexually explicit poetry. We know many of you live far away – one subscriber in Denver, Colorado, recently wrote to thank us for the issue: ‘I’ll be carrying it around for a looong time’ – but there will be more events in the future. We cannot promise Paris, or beautiful warm evenings, or the cellist sitting in the corner, or the

conscientious staff of Shakespeare and Co. delving into their own stash of wine to sate the crowd, or the fairy lights, or the croque monsieurs we ate afterwards, or Joe Dunthorne on fine form, or Steve Toltz’s well-chosen extract, or the sight of our designer Dean and copy-editor Ellie arguing over grammar in front of Le Petit Château next door, or the surly children’s television presenter who nearly got into a late-night scuffle with one of our writers in that bar by the Bastille, or the sight of a Five Dials intern wandering off into the Paris night (sorry, morning), having booked a hostel room he never ended up laying eyes on. We can’t promise anything like that, but next time we bring Five Dials into the social sphere we’d be more than happy to have our subscribers there to take part.

We stayed at the Hotel Pont Royal, a beautiful building near the Musée d’Orsay.

Portraits of famous writers hang in their lobby, so we thought it only fair that they

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should support the writers of the day, not just Camus and Boris Vian. They seemed to agree and offered us a couple rooms overlooking the Rue du Bac. The next morning was sunny and refreshingly free of Parisian heartbreak. It was a good day to sleep in a jardin with one hand resting on the hand luggage, to walk the streets of the Marais and to visit the bookshops Lauren Elkin spoke about in her excellent article, then finally to regroup at the Gare du Nord.

This time we sped past a Kent darkened by the early evening. We probably would have spent the train journey discussing more literary cross-Channel jaunts, but a group of women had purchased and were eating a shockingly pungent block of French cheese. It shook our concentration, so we resorted to the small bottles of Eurostar wine. We’ll have to save our next reserve of concentration for issue 9.

We hope you enjoy it, as well as this petit morsel. ◊

A Parisian Affair Guy de Maupassant Translated by Siân Miles

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s there any keener sense known to man than woman’s curiosity? There is nothing in the world she would not do in order to satisfy it, to know for certain, to grasp and possess what has hitherto remained in her imagination. What would she not do to achieve that? When her impatient curiosity is at its height, she will shrink from nothing, and there is no folly to which she will not stoop, no obstacle she will not overcome. I refer, of course, to the really feminine woman, the sort who on the surface may appear quite reasonable and objective, but whose three secret weapons are always in a high state of readiness. The first is a kind of watchful, womanly concern for what is happening around her; the second, even more deadly in its effect, is guile disguised as common decency; and the third is the exquisite capacity for deception and infinite variety which drives some men to throw themselves at her feet, and others off the parapets of bridges.

The one whose story I want to tell you about was a little provincial woman who had led until then a boringly blameless life. Her outwardly calm existence was spent looking after her family, a very busy husband and two children whose upbringing, in her hands, was exemplary in every way. But her heart was ravaged by an all-consuming, indefinable desire. She thought constantly about Paris and avidly read all the society pages in the papers.

Their accounts of receptions, celebrations, the clothes worn, and all the accompanying delights enjoyed, whetted her appetite still further. Above all, however, she was fascinated by what these reports merely hinted at. The cleverly phrased allusions half-lifted a veil beyond which could be glimpsed devastatingly attractive horizons promising a whole new world of wicked pleasure.

From where she lived, she looked on Paris as representing the height of all magnificent luxury as well as licentiousness. Throughout the long, dream-filled night, lulled by the regular snoring of her husband sleeping next to her on his back

with a scarf wrapped round his head, she conjured up the images of all the famous men who made the headlines and shone like brilliant comets in the darkness of her sombre sky. She pictured the madly exciting lives they must lead, moving from one den of vice to the next, indulging in neverending and extraordinarily voluptuous orgies, and practising such complex and sophisticated sex as to defy the imagination. It seemed to her that hidden behind the façades of the houses lining the canyon-like boulevards of the city, some amazing erotic secret must lie.

And she herself was growing old. She was growing old, never having known a thing about life beyond the hideously banal monotony of regularly performed duties which, by all accounts, was what happily married life consisted of. She was still pretty. The uneventful life she lived had preserved her like a winter apple in an attic. Yet she was consumed from within by unspoken and obsessive desires. She wondered if she would die without ever having tasted the wicked delights which life had to offer, without ever, not even once, having plunged into the ocean of voluptuous pleasure which, to her, was Paris.

After long and careful preparation, she decided to put into action a plan to get there. She invented a pretext, got herself invited by some relatives and, since her husband was unable to accompany her, left for the city alone. The alleged discovery of some long-lost friends living in one of its leafy suburbs enabled her as soon as she arrived to prolong her stay by a couple of days, or rather nights, if necessary. Her search began. Up and down the boulevards she walked, seeing nothing particularly wicked or sinful.

She cast her eye inside all the wellknown cafés, and each morning her avid reading of the Figaro’s lonely hearts’ column was a fresh reminder to her of the call of love. But she found nothing that might lead her to the great orgies she imagined actresses and artists enjoyed all the time.

Nowhere could she discover the dens of

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iniquity about which she had dreamed.

Without the necessary ‘Open Sesame’ she remained debarred from Ali Baba’s cave.

Uninitiated, she stood on the threshold of the catacombs where the secret rites of a forbidden religion were performed. Her petty bourgeois relatives could offer her an introduction to none of the fashionable men whose names buzzed in her ears. In despair, she had almost decided to give up when, finally, happy chance intervened.

One day, as she was walking down the Chaussée d’Antin, she stopped to look at the window of a shop selling Japanese bibelots in such gay, cheerful colours as to delight the eye. She was looking thoughtfully at its amusing little ivories, its huge oriental vases of vivid enamelwork and its strange bronzes, when she heard from within the voice of the proprietor. With low, reverential bows, he was showing a fat, bald-headed little man with grizzled stubble the figure of a pot-bellied Buddha, the only one of its kind, or so he claimed.

With each of the merchant’s utterances, the famous name of his customer sounded like a clarion call in her ears. The other browsers, young ladies and elegant gentlemen, cast oblique, highly respectful glances in the direction of the well-known author who was absorbed in his examination of the figure. One was as ugly as the other. The pair might have been taken for brothers.

‘To you, Monsieur Jean Varin,’ the shopkeeper was saying, ‘I’ll let it go for 1,000. Cost, in other words. To anyone else, it would be 1,500. My artist customers mean a lot to me. I like to offer them a special price. Oh yes, they all come to me you know, Monsieur Jean Varin . . .

Yesterday, for example, Monsieur Busnach bought an antique goblet from me . . . and the other day . . . you see those candlesticks over there, aren’t they lovely? Sold a pair like them to Monsieur Alexandre Dumas . . . and I mean . . . that piece you’ve got there . . . if Monsieur Zola saw that, it’d be gone in five minutes, I can assure you, Monsieur Varin . . .’

The writer hesitated, undecided. He was obviously attracted to the figure but not the price. Had he been standing quite alone in the middle of a desert, he could not have been more oblivious of the interest he was arousing. Trembling, she went in. Young, handsome, elegant or not, it was nevertheless Jean Varin himself and on

Jean Varin alone she now fixed a bold gaze.

Still struggling with himself, he finally replaced the figure on the table.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s too expensive.’

The merchant redoubled his efforts.

‘Too expensive, Monsieur Jean Varin?

But you know it’s worth two thousand if it’s worth a franc!’

Sadly, as he continued to gaze into the enamelled eyes of the figure, the man of letters replied, ‘I’m sure it is. But it’s too expensive for me.’

At this, wildly daring, she stepped forward and said: ‘Supposing I were to ask.

What would it be to me?’

Surprised, the merchant replied: ‘Fifteen hundred, Madame.’

‘I’ll take it.’

The writer, who until then had been totally unaware of her presence, turned round quickly and at first somewhat coldly looked her up and down. Then he cast more of a connoisseur’s eye over her.

She was charming, vibrant and suddenly lit up by the flame which had till this second been dormant within her. After all, a woman who snaps up a curio at 1,500 is not exactly run-of-the-mill.

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With exquisite delicacy in her movement, she turned to face him now and said in a trembling voice, ‘I’m so sorry, Monsieur. I’m afraid I rather rushed in. Perhaps you had not yet decided.’

He bowed. ‘I had indeed, Madame.’

In a voice shaking with emotion she said: ‘If you should ever change your mind, either today or at some later time, it shall be yours. I bought it solely because you liked it.’

Visibly flattered, he smiled. ‘But how on earth do you know who I am?’ he inquired. She listed his works and expressed with some eloquence her admiration of them. Leaning his elbows on a piece of furniture he settled down to a conversation, weighing her up all the while with his penetrating gaze.

New customers had come into the shop and from time to time the merchant, delighted with such living testimony to the excellence of his stock, called from one end of the shop to the other: ‘There you are, you see, Monsieur Jean Varin!

What about that then?’ Everyone looked over and she felt a thrill of pleasure at being seen chatting on such intimate terms with one of the great and the good.

Dizzy with success, she felt like a general about to make one supremely daring attack. ‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘would you do me a great, a very great favour?

Will you let me give you this figure as a keepsake from a woman of ten minutes’ acquaintance who has the most ardent admiration for you?’

He refused. She insisted. Laughing happily, he resisted yet again, but she was determined.

‘In that case, I shall take it to your home straight away. Where do you live?’

He refused to give his address but having acquired it from the merchant as she paid, she rushed off to find a fiacre. The writer ran to catch her up, unwilling to expose himself by accepting this gift from a total stranger, and, with it, who knew what sort of obligation. Reaching her just as she was jumping into the cab, he flung himself in and nearly fell on top of her as it jolted into motion. He sat down beside her, more than a little embarrassed.

She was quite intractable. His protests and pleas fell on deaf ears. As they arrived at the door, she set out her conditions.

‘I shall agree not to leave it with you if, throughout the whole of today, you will

carry out all my wishes.’

The whole thing sounded so extraordinarily amusing that he accepted.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘What would you normally be doing at this time of day?’

After a little hesitation, he said: ‘I’d be going for a walk.’

In a firm tone she ordered, ‘To the Bois!’

And off they went. After this, he had to tell her the names of all the women people were talking about, especially the flighty ones, and give her every intimate detail he could about where they lived, how they spent their days, and all their wicked little ways.

It was now getting towards evening time.

‘What do you usually do at this sort of time?’ she asked.

Laughing, he replied, ‘I go for a glass of absinthe.’

They went into a large boulevard café where he was a regular and met all his colleagues. He introduced them to her. She was wild with joy. And in her head, there echoed ceaselessly the words ‘At last! At last!’

Time passed. ‘Is this when you normally dine?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Madame,’ he replied.

‘Then, Monsieur, let’s go and dine,’ she said.

Emerging from the Café Bignon, she asked, ‘What do you normally do in the evening?’

He looked at her steadily.

‘It depends. Sometimes I go to the theatre.’

‘Well then, Monsieur, let’s go to the theatre.’

He was recognized by the management at the Vaudeville who found seats for them straight away. To crown it all, she was seen by the entire audience, sitting by his side in the first row of the balcony.

After the show, he kissed her hand gallantly and said, ‘It only remains, Madame, for me to thank you for a delightful . . .’

She interrupted. ‘What is it you do at this time of night?’

‘What do I do? You mean what do I . . . ?

Well I go home, of course.’

‘In that case, Monsieur, let us go to your home,’ she said, laughing shakily.

Not a word more was spoken. From time to time a shiver ran through her, half of terror, half of delight. She was in an exquisite agony, torn between the desire

to run away and her determination, in her heart of hearts, to stay and see it through.

As they mounted the stairs, her feelings nearly overcame her and she leaned heavily on the banister while he wheezed on ahead, carrying a taper.

As soon as she was in the bedroom, she undressed quickly, slid wordlessly into bed and, huddling up against the wall, waited.

She was as unsophisticated, however, as only the lawful wife of a country solicitor can be, while he was as demanding as a pasha with three tails. They did not get on at all well. Not at all.

Afterwards, he fell asleep. The night hours passed silently save for the ticking of the clock as, motionless, she thought of her conjugal nights at home.

By the yellow light of a Chinese lantern, she looked in dismay at the tubby little man beside her, lying on his back with the sheet draped over his hot-air balloon of a belly.

While he snored like a pipe-organ, with comic interludes of lengthy, strangulated snorts, the few hairs he possessed, exhausted by the onerous responsibility of masking the ravages of time on his balding skull during the day, now stood perkily on end.

A dribble of saliva flowed from the corner of his half-open mouth.

When dawn finally broke, light fell through a gap in the drawn curtains. She got up, dressed noiselessly and had just managed to ease the door open when the latch grated. He woke up and rubbed his eyes. It took a few seconds for him to recover his senses, when the whole affair came flooding back into his mind.

‘Oh . . . so . . . you’re leaving then, are you?’ he asked.

‘Well . . . yes,’ she stammered, ‘it’s morning.’

He sat up in bed.

‘Look . . .’ he said, ‘let me ask something for once, will you?’

As she made no reply, he went on, ‘I don’t understand what you’ve been up to all this

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time . . . since yesterday. Come on . . . tell me what you’re up to . . . I can’t work it out . . .’

Gently, she drew closer, blushing like a young girl.

‘I always wanted to know what it was like to be . . . wicked . . . and actually . . . it turns out to be not all that much fun . . .’

She ran from the room, flew down the staircase and flung herself out into the street.

Down it an army of sweepers was sweeping. They swept the pavements and the cobblestones, driving all the litter and filth into the stream of the gutter. With the same regular movement, like reapers in the field, they swept up all in a wide semi-circle ahead. And as she ran through street after street, still they came to meet her, moving like puppets on a string with the same, mechanical, mowing movement.

She felt as though something inside her, too, had now been swept away. Through the mud, down to the gutter and finally into the sewer had gone all the refuse of her over-excited imagination.

Returning home, the image of Paris swept inexorably clean by the cold light of day filled her exhausted mind, and as she reached her room, sobs broke from her now quite frozen heart. ◊

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