Haussmann, or the Distinction by Paul La Farge

Author:Paul La Farge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

16

THE BOX

AS A CHILD, Georges-Eugène had asked his father—a Protestant child, mind you, asking it of a Protestant father who was a general to boot—what if the dead could feel? What if they could see, and smell, and hear? How terrible then to be in a box and listen to clods of earth falling on the roof, then nothing at all, nothing at all ever again? But how much worse not to have the box. His father had laughed the question away. Ha! That’s why they call it dead, boy, and a merciful thing it is, too. Don’t you know that the soul, in the moment of death, ascends? It sees things the way birds see, climbs higher, the world is a map for the ascending soul, and in the end it goes all the way up to God and that’s the end of the story. Poor Georges-Eugène! Utterly unconvinced by this hot-air account of the afterlife, he lay in bed imagining himself in the box. He didn’t sleep for three nights in a row, and when he slept on the fourth it was only for a few hours between midnight and dawn. So he has slept ever since. Fortunately it left him time to accomplish a great deal.

Late one night in the summer of that plague year, he sat by the window of his office, watching the shadows of the rooftops below and the last few lights in the homes of the sick, the insomniacs, and the debauched. There was a great number of problems to consider, always a great number of problems. For instance the sewers were likely to run grossly over budget, and there would be the Municipal Council to deal with; he would have to bring some doctor to convince them that unless the city disposed of its shit, and soon, cholera was certain to break out again (doctor: he made a memorandum of it). And then there was the Great Cross of the Legion of Honor, which he had, unaccountably, not received. Probably the Chevalier Gastofouard, that scrivening lackey, had calumniated him to the Empress—or perhaps the journalist Fillier was the one to blame; he had enemies enough. How little it meant, in the end, this distinction! A few thousand livres in food, wine, and connections; a medal to wear to banquets; a special contingent of mourners when they put you in a box, in the end. (He made another memorandum: Gastofouard.) Yes, in the end you ended up in a box, and what good was a distinction then? Haussmann knew how quickly such things were forgotten. His own grandfather had been a revolutionary during the Revolution: glory! Then the poor man stayed a revolutionary through the Empire, and the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, and so on until his death, his glory buried under thirty years of enforced silence. To live was well, for as long as you lived you could speak. As long as you spoke you might be heard, and remembered, but when you could speak no more? You wrote, Haussmann supposed.

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