On the Rue de Chateau in Neuilly was a restaurant that was inexpensive and not at all the kind of place where people looked around to see who else was there. Fran?ois often succeeded in avoiding recognition, especially when with his wife and the baby. They were great camouflage, as were ordinary business clothes, and doing without the philosopher’s garb of tortoise-shell glasses, open shirt, velvet jacket, and wild hair. Looking around the first time he had abandoned his spectacles, he said, “Everything’s a nauseating blur, but I don’t think my own mother would recognize me. My glasses are as much a trademark as Jane Mansfield’s poitrine.”
Jules pulled out onto the A14, going against traffic. The lights flashing by in the tunnel were soporific, and he was grateful to exit in speed over the Seine, in a tight two lanes with no shoulders, and glass panels that made him feel that he was rocketing through a pneumatic tube. This road, he thought, will be ideal for self-driven cars, which, thank God, will not proliferate until after he’s dead. Jules had no desire to see a world where one was guided by machines rather than vice versa.
Then to the N13 and exit into Neuilly, where the pace had quieted and the lights had come out. It was difficult to find a parking place after people had come home and packed the streets with their cars. But he found a space, locked the car – how delightful to walk away from one’s automobile – and went to meet Fran?ois.
The restaurant seated only twenty-five or thirty. It was quiet and dark, perfect for Fran?ois, in a corner, reading a newspaper a few centimeters from his face, his back to the other customers. “Do you ever just sit and think, or sit and not think?” Jules asked as he sat down across from him.
“Not in a restaurant. If you sit alone in a restaurant and fail to distract yourself they think you’re a madman about to rob them or blow up the Eiffel Tower.”
“How do you know?”
“You’ll recall that I used to work in a restaurant. I’ve seen it from the other side.”
A waiter came over. Fran?ois ordered fish and the various recommended accompaniments. Jules asked for Boeuf Bourguignon which he (and Fran?ois, were he to have done the same) pronounced in the accent of Reims rather than Paris, although either of them could have done it the other way. “Only a half portion, please,” Jules said, “a salad, and vin ordinaire, white.”
The waiter made a slight bow and left. “White?” Fran?ois asked.
“I don’t drink red anymore. You know that.”
“I haven’t noticed. Why?”
“My teeth.”
“Something wrong with them?”
“I don’t pretend to be young, but there’s no reason to have stained teeth. That’s not an artifact of age but of wine. And I’ve never drunk coffee or tea, or smoked, so I had to cut out only one substance … and certain berries.”
“Open your mouth,” Fran?ois commanded.
He did. His teeth were quite white.
“Now you open yours.” Fran?ois did. He looked like a pumpkin.
Both men, friends since they were six, stared at one another. A diner to the left who had seen them opening their mouths doubted they were sane.
“It won’t be that long now, Fran?ois.” Fran?ois knew exactly the antecedent of it.
“Every human being in the history of the world, Jules, except those who are or were younger than we are, has been in the same situation, and everyone has been able to handle it one way or another. You can’t get kicked off the bus because you’re afraid. You’ll ride all the way to your last stop wherever it is that you get off.”
“I know, but my regrets alone easily overshadow that kind of speculation and philosophy.”
“I know, too. I hate philosophy,” said Fran?ois, France’s leading philosophe. “I’m supposed to be a philosopher, but I believe that if you properly balance sensation and thought, disallowing either to dominate, that’s all you need. To be alive is not to be systematized, and to be systematized is not to be alive. Regrets such as what?”
“That I’ve spent my life in pursuit of art rather than money. It was self-indulgent and I enjoyed it day after day. Once you become really fluent as a musician even the continuous work to stay proficient is rapture. It follows you. After you finish playing, you can hear it all day and in your dreams, in perfect fidelity, but something is missing. Riding home on the train, walking, working in the garden, the music is there, and it keeps you in a high emotional state even though the essence of music is that it, too, is mortal. Because when it stops, its real power disappears. Although the pleasures were pure, in my immersion I was almost a sybarite. Music is like the inconclusive testimony of a temporary visitor to a wondrous world. As it plays, you have everything, but when it stops you are left with nothing.”
“Which is exactly like life itself. Jules, you live in one of the most magnificent houses in Paris. You were always healthy and strong, and Jacqueline was wonderful and stunningly beautiful. Why would you care about money?”
“The house is not mine, as you know.”
“Yes, but for forty years ….”
“Soon to be over, and I can’t say that I’m not used to the place. Jacqueline is gone. I’m on half-time in the faculty and that’s charity that won’t last. Once, I was animated by ambition. Not only have I failed, but part of the reason ambition has fled is that the people I had wanted to impress are dead. Though my own stature is in no way increased, their places have been taken by midgets, idiots, and mediocrities. Impressing such people, even if I could, would be worse than failure.”
“You exaggerate as usual. Granted, one can exaggerate in art, though different ages set different limits, but you can’t justifiably exaggerate in fact or sense. Since you’re trying to talk sense, you mustn’t overdo it.”
“I’m not overdoing it. When civilization turned a corner or two, I didn’t. So some people look back and pity me. But it isn’t that I couldn’t make the turn. I wouldn’t make the turn. I’d rather be a rock in the stream, even if submerged, than the glittering scum on the surface, desperately hurrying to be washed away. No offense, Fran?ois.”
“No offense taken. I like being glittering scum. But why, Jules? Why the attraction to loss? Because that’s what it is.”
“Loyalty.”
“A recipe for dying.”
“There’s joy in dying the way you want, by your own standard, in faith to what you see as self-evident. Enough joy to lift you over death as it comes at you. Though this applies, unfortunately, to Islamist martyrs, it also applies to us.”
“Where exactly is it written?”
“It’s written, Fran?ois, inexactly, in music. That’s how I know. But it’s okay. When I was young I wasn’t, like many others, foolish enough to think that I or those I favored could remake the world. Now that I’m old I’m not disappointed that the world is un-remade as once I would have liked to remake it. Revolutions, if not started by the inexperienced young and finished by their psychopathic elders, are started by psychopathic young and finished by psychopathic elders.”
“You would prefer not to have benefitted from Seventeen Eighty-Nine?”
“Maybe political evolution would have been less catastrophic: no terror, no Napoleon, no emperors, who knows?”
“Fine, but Jules, money? Why suddenly?” Fran?ois had what Jules thought was a strange and inexplicable smile.
“Luc.”