My father was an enigma. But an enigma with twenty slick answers from the Sorbonne, and a stipend from the Count of Praslin. His mystery, as regards the world, was mostly resolvable in economic terms, the commonest and dirtiest denominator to which humanity enslaves whatever can be discovered of that truer enigma: ‘ourselves.’
How many times did mother repeat to me the tale of his charities on behalf of the ancien regime? Scouring warring streets ragged with cries of ‘Liberte, Egalite… Etcetera!’ to get one last line of credit for his imprisoned Count, to spring him from the bad old Bastille ‘once again.’ And all this merely so that my father could again pursue his diurnal doubletrack of duty and dissolution. By day, the Count of Praslin’s children came stomping and laughing into the well-appointed chamber in the main household, yanking on his liturgical frock, and settling down only when he would recite, in a voice that moved like vodka over ice, the daily grace. This stunned them into stillness, and they remained cowed and ready to begin the day’s schoolwork, their satin slippers lined up on the oriental carpeting in the very model of military attention.
By night, my father would escape gasping through the solid ornamental doors of buffed brass and begin to make his way to the sullen, sullied quarter where he made his apartment.
He would stroll rotor-erect, first to the Via Seculae, then subtly strutting over the Vinge Bridge which let him down onto the golden-toned Rue de Rouge Ruine. Perhaps Minks, or perhaps Vital, or even the self-flagellantly outrageous Whippe Strange, would call a greeting from one of their studios or the wine shop and an evening of discourse, both coarse and crowned, would commence in some nearby hovel.
He spent the rest of that hideous ‘mass’ revolution of Robespierre’s drinking wine from bombarded cellars, routing God from his tongue (a punishable offence in those degraded days), and ‘drawing pictures for the instruction of “The Public.”‘ My own run-ins with the Napoleons of ’48, were still many fat annuities of papa’s resuscitated royals away. Needless to say, when the plundering hubbub were banished, and Count Praslin had come home again, he remembered with loads of lucre my father’s angelic agency in extracting him from the raunchy ignominy of the too-crowded hoosgow.
It was on the annuities of this limited luxury that I came into my own ‘damned adolescence.’
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