Café Brébant

by Théodore de Banville

Translated by Patricia Worth

What makes Paris so hard to know and describe is that one cannot generalise about anything in this city, for the most well-known quarters have strange anomalies that wildly confound and confuse all logic. Surely nothing exists that cannot be explained, but we are shocked by the brutal oddities produced by a set of complicated, subtle causes that can only be guessed by intuition.

So, when Émile Zola described the Passage du Pont-Neuf at the beginning of Thérèse Raquin and wonderfully depicted its “dark, low shops pressed close together, whence escaped puffs of air, cold as a tomb,” he overlooked one shop that stands out among these unhealthy dens, clean, well-lit and always packed with customers, a boutique of colours and objects for painters where everything exudes prosperity and which no doubt owes its popularity to being in the vicinity of the School of Fine Arts.

The antithesis of this shop, even more astonishing for being the exact opposite, is in the Passage de l’Opéra, surprising those who wander there. Among the bright boutiques decorated and furnished with all the refinements demanded by the high rents, one finds a junk shop, a hovel, which seems to defy the luxury of this splendid quarter.

There in the darkness behind the sticky, dirty window panes, amid endlessly accumulating dust, with no cabinets or shelves or organisation of any sort, are paintings, fabrics, rare furniture, ancient clothing and even jewellery piled on the floor in a disorder reminiscent of that in the booths of ragpickers hidden away in obscure corners of the oldest part of Paris, or in the Rue de Lappe!

How can anyone contrive to rent a shop in the Passage de l’Opéra with the prices as high as they are and then use it in such a ludicrous fashion? It is one of the many problems caused by modern life which will probably never be solved. But perhaps there are enough connoisseurs to discover and purchase at great expense the treasures buried in this cave. Could the dreadful jumble through which one must search be an added attraction for the collectors, perhaps lending a sort of spicy pleasure to their lucky finds?

Last February, the young Duke Philippe de Villeclair was passing this boutique and would probably not have noticed it, in spite of its strangeness, if his gaze had not been drawn to its window by a piece of cloth of incredible richness, a dazzling silk and velvet fabric embellished with gold embroidery, a feast of colour and light. As a great lover of baubles and always in search of beautiful cloth and curiosities to decorate the lovely mansion he had just had built in the Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, the young man stopped, as if in his quick glance he had been taken by enchantment.

His eyes fell instantly on a strange etching, filthy and yellow, glued to the window glass, portraying some witches preparing for their sabbath. With a Rembrandtesque spirit, the artist had depicted some old women anointing their bodies with magic unguents. They were half-rejuvenated, yet in places still flabby and wrinkled.

Other old women, by the use of diabolical oils, were causing silken hairs to shoot from their bare heads, or were polishing broom handles which must have been used as mounts to carry them over a black shroud of cloud through flights of dragons and bats.

In these women’s bodies, at once old and young, in these fresh faces set upon wrinkled necks, in these virginal torsos shedding the old bark of their lopsided and twisted prisons, there was a prodigious mingling of pleasure and horror which cast the mind into an inquisitiveness mixed with daydreams and mysterious dread.

But once the duke had made up his mind to enter the lair, he might have wondered if the engraving were a shingle for, amid the mass of fabrics, of which just one scrap had completely charmed him, sat an old woman, though he knew not on what, a fairy, one of the Fates, of a disproportionate and superhuman age, bald, her nose reaching to her chin, her bloodshot eyes devoid of lashes and shaded by thick eyebrows long as hair.

Philippe asked the price of the cloth that had caught his eye, but the old woman, in a voice broken and quavering yet sly like that of a merchant who knows how to be liberal with all the commercial enticements, told him that with money one can always come to some agreement, but that she first wanted to bring him some other curious pieces.

She showed him fabrics with cut-outs and appliqués like those admired in the Musée de Cluny, yet more beautiful; velvets embellished with silk, embroidered with flowers and arabesques and filigree and gold figures; silks thick as boards in brocaded gradations, their white bases still white, for neither time nor dust had spoiled or soiled them, antique damasks, needle lace, and laces of great character, of the sort kings no longer wear.

Sprawled, entangled and buried in this heap of richness, the old woman kept finding and showing him more and more wonderful things. Philippe, infected with collector’s fever, bought everything, and the pile he had to carry away grew as big as a mountain.

However, the old woman was no longer up to this work, and was truly crushed by the weight of coverlets, coats, skirts and unused lengths of silk woven in fabled eras. She stood up, rang a gold bell, and two old women, bald, wrinkled, broken and bent like her, came to lend her a hand.

They showed the duke some weapons and jewels of an inconceivable skill, while the first woman eagerly pressed close to him and frightened him with her languishing eyes, her fawning, caressing looks, and something that would have been a smile on lips other than the drooping, colourless lips of this sinister ancestor.

Although Philippe usually went out with a full pocket-book, he did not have on him anywhere near the sum needed to pay for his purchases. He beseeched the merchant to send them to him and wanted to give her his address.

‘No need,’ she said. ‘I know Monsieur the Duke’s mansion.’

And as Philippe started with astonishment, she continued: ‘Yes, and I also know Monsieur the Duke himself. I knew you had to pass by here and would be irresistibly attracted to a cloth whose colours were displayed in such a fashion as to arouse your interest with their flashy fanfare.

‘To know by heart the life and tastes of people who can and want to spend their fortune, isn’t that the ABC of Parisian business, the modern alchemy, and which, by a miracle every day, must change and transform everything into gold? To make men become what is most contrary to their nature, that is, to make spendthrifts of them, isn’t it necessary to be thoroughly familiar with their passions? And for that we don’t have to work very hard, for we have acquired the sad privilege, having lived long lives, of being able to foresee everything and, like Balzac or Cuvier, we are able to reconstitute, with a fragment of anything at all, a monster or a story!’

‘What?!’ said Philippe, taken aback. ‘Do you know my story?’

‘I do indeed,’ said the old woman, ‘and I could recount down to the last detail your gracious inclinations to the divine Diane d’Assigny whom you so tenderly adored, whom death stole from you, and for whom you still grieve after many years. But I know a beautiful woman of good pedigree who, unbeknownst to you, loves you more than the blest Diane ever loved you, and you will know her as I do, if tonight you go to the masked ball at the Opera House!’

The duke was astounded and tried to protest. But the old woman gave her companions a quick signal and disappeared with them into a dark corridor which had opened wide into the shop. Left alone amid the clutter, Philippe wanted to abandon his purchases and end his dealings with the hideous old women. Though he called out to them and even rang the gold bell he found beside him, he received no reply and had no option but to leave the place without obtaining any enlightenment on the merchant’s babble, which seemed to go beyond the limits of permissible indiscretion.

Having returned home in haste, he was greatly surprised to find in his smoking room the cloths he had purchased, already delivered, wrapped in serges of various colours and arranged in bundles with an orderliness that bore no hint of the aspect of the shop where he had found these wonders. All this, said his manservant Jean, had been brought by a perfectly proper page who had not left a bill.

Philippe de Villeclair saw in that same moment a box ticket for the Opera ball placed in full view on a table, left by his friend the Marquis Louis de Charlus, and he remembered that he and the Marquis along with Count Henri de Lucé had in fact agreed to go to this ball to say farewell to Paris before leaving for Bordighera, where they were to spend a few weeks.

After dressing for the ball and wanting to be rid of his debt immediately, Philippe returned to the Passage de l’Opéra. But he found the shop locked up with iron bars and shutters on which he could read an inscription in perfectly dry letters, as though painted long ago: Closed: gone abroad.

So, with no satisfaction in this matter, he made his way to the club where he dined and spent the evening with his friends, after which, at about one o’clock in the morning, all three went to the ball as planned.

Philippe had been walking about in the foyer for just a few moments when he fell prey to an amorous intrigue. A domino took his arm; he felt himself enveloped in the rhythms of the most delightful, willowy body, and embraced by a mellow, sophisticated perfume. On his arm he felt the hand of a great lady, elegant and delicate. Naturally he addressed a few banal gallantries to the stranger, but she immediately interrupted him in a softly sorrowful voice.

‘Oh!’ said she, ‘speak not such frivolous words to me! The woman for whom these precious moments will never come again is the one who loves you, a woman who breathes only for you yet whom you must never know, for she begs you to respect her secret! Imagine a creature who has made an idol of you, who lives her life for you, whose hours are spent guessing what you are thinking and whose only joy is to glimpse you for one moment when you pass on horseback beneath her window! Just suppose that by a miracle of the will, of cunning, of love, she was able to steal one hour that she will never get back, in order to tell you she loves you and that her soul is yours; can you not see that it would be wrong of you to spoil this supreme moment with indifferent words which could have been addressed to the first woman to come along?’

A pastoral poem is beautiful in the fields of Mantua and in the mountains of Sicily, but it is also quite tolerable in the corridors and on the staircases of the Opera House when the flame of a burgeoning passion illuminates and transfigures the paintings and golden mosaics. As they talked of the union of souls and the ardent but platonic friendship between people destined to be separated forever, time flew by as in a dream.

At length, Philippe begged his companion not to leave without having supped with him, even if she must eat only one strawberry, drink one drop of wine, and keep her mask on; but since this meeting must never happen again, would it not be a delicious memory to have sat a moment at the same table and clinked glasses? Blanche — for she had given her name — refused at first; she had come with her two sisters and could not leave them.

But in that very instant Philippe met his two friends and, having introduced them to Madame Blanche, assuring her that in them she would find the most respectful and most discreet gentlemen, he convinced her to try and persuade her sisters to come to supper. They found Ysabeau and Marguerite in a theatre box where they were awaiting their sister. Louis de Charlus and Henri de Lucé did not seem to displease them, and negotiation was not too difficult. As Philippe de Villeclair was proposing the Café Anglais, Marguerite said: ‘No, let’s go to the Café Brébant, it’s more modern!’

During Carnaval one must not wonder at anything. On the upstairs landing in the restaurant, this same Marguerite who was leading the way took an unfamiliar corridor, at the end of which she pulled from her pocket a small key and opened a heavy door. They found themselves in a spacious room in a castle decorated in sixteenth-century style, with a tall monumental fireplace where tree trunks were burning, and a sculpted mantelpiece portraying a hunt where the deer and dogs were life-size.

The three sisters disappeared for a moment into a nearby room, then returned, still masked but without their dominos, and now decked in velvet dresses and bonnets pompously adorned with tawdry spangles: Blanche crimson, Marguerite blue, Ysabeau orange and black, and all three wearing in their hair pearl bows and a diamond star sparkling with strange lights.

They sat at the table, the women removed their masks, then the young men could admire the superb and curiously varied beauty of the women: Blanche, pale and pensive beneath her black hair; Ysabeau, red-haired and green-eyed, a laugher who showed her white teeth; Marguerite, blonde with dark eyes, like Venus the goddess of Cyprus.

So pleasant was this sight that they did not notice how romantic the excellent Brébant had become. Indeed, on the table were enormous carp with flowers in their mouths, pies with silver and gold turrets, peacocks with their feathers and tails, and the dinner began with Taillevent’s famous golden toast for which some slices of bread were fried and thrown into a jelly made of sugar, white wine, egg yolks and rosewater.

The waiters were pages in satin suits, but Villeclair’s fears about all this archaeology were put to rest when he saw crawfish in Bordelaise sauce appear. The three women were the wittiest sisters alive, speaking merry nonsense and responding genteelly to the compliments of their partners.

They knew all the most recent little love-tales from the Saint-Germain quarter and the artistic world, and even anecdotes about Sarah Bernhardt’s journey to America. They recounted them with amusing sallies, and the only disturbing thing was that sometimes they spoke of Queen Margot’s dressing table as though they had seen it with their own eyes, or of a witty remark by Brantôme to his friend Monsieur de Ronsard, as though they had heard it themselves.

During dessert, Ysabeau took a lute from its hook on the wall and sang the lovely song by Ronsard, not with the music of Charles Delioux, but playing the old tune of Goudimel:

When in the temple we are on our knees,
we will do as the pious do.
But when...

Then Marguerite told the story of a witch from Touraine who had the gift of becoming young again whenever she wished, but who, once a hundred years had passed, had to remain old and die if a certain dance partner had not kissed her lips before the hour struck. And what increased the danger for the witch was that the gentleman had to be informed of this condition in advance, an intentional and inescapable law imposed on all supernatural beings.

As Marguerite was finishing her story, Philippe de Villeclair saw Blanche worriedly looking at the clock hands; she drew closer and pressed herself to him as though begging for a kiss. A thought flashed through Philippe’s mind as he noticed Ysabeau and Marguerite also looking longingly at Henri de Lucé and Louis de Charlus. He drew back and tried to resist, but then the diamond star in Blanche’s hair burned him and mesmerised him with its blinding light, and seemed to be forcing him to obey.

Mad with rage, the young duke tore the star from her hair, threw it to the ground, stomped on it and broke it. The clock immediately struck the hour and Blanche was transfigured, becoming once again the horrible old woman of the Passage de l’Opéra with her wobbly chin and bald head.

The diamond stars worn by Ysabeau and Marguerite broke at the same time as their sister’s; the two distraught women hastily put on their masks again, but still their necks could be seen wrinkling like a lake rippled by the wind, and long strands of grey hair began to grow visibly and climb like vipers over their coiffures.

The three men fled, despairing and crazed, not wanting to live. They regained a sense of reality only once they were in the railway carriage — for they had left without returning to their houses — at the moment when they saw opposite them a young English lady sitting beside her father the baronet. She was clearly contemporary, nurtured on the most succulent roast beef, and her healthy complexion, fresh and dazzlingly beautiful, resembled a bouquet of roses.

Proceed to Challenge 1125...