There was no time for congratulatory speeches and the awarding of medals on the outskirts of Paris either. After the fall of Brussels and Antwerp, Kluck’s 1st and Bülow’s 2nd German Army crossed into the north of France without difficulty. The kaiser’s army took Sedan and St Quentin and advanced swiftly towards Paris. A blackout was ordered in the streets of the City of Light. One morning, proclamations appeared in the squares. General Gallieni, the military commander of Paris, alerted Parisians to the danger of the city being besieged and appealed to them to evacuate, but Paris was already empty. All who had got wind of war and didn’t want to smell gunpowder had already left: for America like Georges Braque and the cubist painters, for the Côte d’Azur like the former petty gentry and disinherited counts, for Latin America, Spain or London like many foreigners who had considered Paris their home until 1 September 1914. The declaration of a possible siege turned the ongoing flow from the city into an exodus.
The police issued new orders: all public places had to be closed by nine. The city no longer resembled that merry metropolis of bohemians and spivs. One September morning, the student Stanislaw Witkiewicz was woken by a terrible racket. He jumped out of bed and ran out onto the terrace of the small Hotel Scribe to see what was causing it. The sounds of powerful motors were coming from Boulevard Haussmann, where an endless line of cars was taking troops to the north. In that monstrous column were classy models adorned with French flags, sports cars hastily converted into armoured cars and the requisitioned camionettes of various wineries — and all of them were hurrying north. Horrified by what he saw, the young Pole groaned. For Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the Great War began when he thought the Parisian garrison was fleeing and General Gallieni was surrendering the city to the Prussians. What was the young fellow doing on the terrace of the shabby hotel anyway? Why wasn’t he with the troops in the north or with the conceited, cowardly artists in the south of the country? He wasn’t in the north because he had been turned down by the Foreign Legion recruitment office for having a heart murmur; he hadn’t skipped off to the south because he was a waverer like every Pole and still wished to help his new fatherland, France. He imagined himself as a doctor performing an operation; he imagined driving an ambulance with only one hand because the other had been amputated in a heroic battle, and he lived on those illusions for all of August 1914 while he eked out an existence by helping at the Rotonde and eating the leftovers from the plates he was brought to wash up.
Now the end had come, he felt. Paris was deserted and he no longer knew anyone. Rue de la Paix, where before the war you could see all the peoples of the world, was empty the next day. Silence reigned, an eerie silence: no creaking omnibuses, no cars blowing their horns, no clatter of horse’s hooves. Most of the restaurants were closed, and in the streets the wind played with the remains of clothing, crumpled-up greasy paper which failed to interest even the stray dogs, and newspapers still touting the great successes of General Joffre‘s forces in Alsace-Lorraine. And then he felt hunger overcome him. A nourished man chooses one of the masks from the arsenal we call life, he said to himself, but a hungry man has only the face of hunger. He had to do something. The metal shutters on all the shops were drawn down and it was hard to force them in the daytime, so he decided to use the curfew. He set off on forays to the ghostly, deserted apartment buildings at nine in the evening when the curfew sirens sounded. He would cut through the side streets to avoid the patrols. At Place de l’Opéra he would break through the gate of one of the buildings and quickly ascend the stairs. Night by night he learnt to judge by the size of apartments’ front doors, or by the value of their brass door handles, which of them would have the most food left in its pantry.
Then he would eat from others’ plates, as he had done recently at the Rotonde. He entered the apartments of prominent Parisians and found what the fugitives had left behind. The taste of mould and sour red wine didn’t bother him. He needed to eat and drink, and as a man of good manners Stanislaw would set the table in the new apartment every night, don the owner’s housecoat with initials monogrammed on the breast pocket, light his candles in the candelabra and sit beneath his portrait. Then he’d eat the crumbs from his hosts’ table. The goose-liver pâté and crab which the poet Jean Cocteau had once gorged himself with were no longer edible, but the cured meats, preserves and hard cheeses were by all means palatable in the days when Paris darkened its streets and the entrances of its metro stations.
One night, Stanislaw set his sights on a splendid apartment occupying the whole first floor of a proud building adjoining the Tuileries Gardens, but he had no idea that he would find not only food, clothing, copper candlesticks and his own little romantic supper ritual — but also the woman of his life. Just as he was sitting down at the table, he heard something rustle. He thought it might be the rats, which, like him, had also remained in Paris, but he was mistaken. No sooner had he put the first bite in his mouth than the barrel of a pistol emerged from the bedroom, followed by two frightened eyes belonging to a young woman in a nightie.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Having dinner,’ Stanislaw answered simply and continued to eat ravenously.
‘Why are you eating here?’
‘Because I found food here, and now I’ve found you,’ Stanislaw added between mouthfuls and proffered her a seat at the table.
The girl sat down next to him. She told him she was sick, which is why she couldn’t leave Paris, and that she would starve if he ate up the food the apartment’s owners had left, for whom she had worked as a maid. First Stanislaw calmed her, then he took her in his arms. To begin with, they ate up all the food left behind by the girl’s employers; then our thief, like a real man, decided to go in search of food for himself and his companion. Every evening after midnight, he came back to the apartment at the end of the Tuileries Gardens with whatever he had found that evening. First they would eat; afterwards they told each other about their trivial lives; and in the end they kissed. Her breath had the taste of sour fruit which puckers the mouth. That love could not resemble the Parisian romances from the stage of the Comédie-Française. She smelt of penury and had just one seasoning: the smell of disease.
The girl was melting away, had a hacking cough and was constantly changing dark red handkerchiefs. But she longed for life. After their meal, she would undress before Stanislaw, and he in his passion was soon naked before her. His lover had dark circles under her eyes, two dangling things which hung from her diseased chest in place of breasts, and long, thin legs, whose muscles barely covered the bones. But it was war, the Great War, and it seemed to Stanislaw that he and she were the last people in the world.
And they made love like those last people. They rolled, groaned, coughed and exchanged the smells of sweat and their less than pleasant bodily secretions, but they were in seventh heaven. Their relationship lasted a whole week and they both knew it wouldn’t be longer, but ceremony had to be upheld. At nine, when the sirens wailed, Stanislaw ran out of the little Hotel Scribe and off into the night and the curfew. He broke into apartments like a righteous thief, bagged food and rushed to the Tuileries Gardens. At midnight his beloved would be waiting for him in 47 Rue de Rivoli, in an open silken dress, with ribs that stood out beneath her breasts, as seductive as a dried haddock. When they sat down at the table to eat, everything smelt of blood. After satisfying their hunger with their one and only meal of the day, they’d shift to the batiste sheets, from which they no longer bothered to wipe the traces of blood.
On the fourth day, after several frenzied copulations, Stanislaw told the girl that no one had ever satisfied him like her. On the fifth day, he told her he would never leave her. On the sixth day, Stanislaw Witkiewicz promised he would make her Mrs Witkiewicz when that terrible war was over, but even as he spoke those two words, ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’, he knew he was lying. Mrs Witkiewicz said she knew she would be cured of tuberculosis as soon as the war ended and they found better care and a little warm, kindly sun from the south, which she expected that coming winter. And as she spoke those two words, ‘coming winter’, she knew she was lying.
That love came to an end on 13 September 1914, the day the newspaper boys began selling papers on the streets of Paris again and shouting: “Great