The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 by Michel Leiris

Author:Michel Leiris [Leiris, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300212396
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

III

I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old when I saw, at the Alhambra in Paris, the following act.

Dressed in a dark suit of very correct cut, a man in the prime of life—announced as a magician and having, it seems to me, a Dutch name—came onto the stage with a hurried step. Speaking volubly and moving incessantly from opposite-prompter to prompt-side and vice versa, he unfurled handkerchiefs or other pieces of material, manipulated utensils picked up from occasional tables or taken out of suitcases. Then he invited one, and soon many, spectators to come up onto the boards, volunteer collaborators or colleagues such as often take part in conjuring acts. Once there, in a sarabande punctuated by numerous incidents and even by a pistol shot, he had them spin like teetotums, assigned them duties that one could think were useful, encumbered them with a quantity of props, and put into the arms of some of them the most unexpected burdens (giving one, for example, an enormous block of ice brought from the wings). After a good quarter of an hour of this game, the stage being now crowded with people and strewn with heteroclite objects, he would break off in the middle. The curtain would drop, and one would realize then—confirming a suspicion that had only just dawned—that from beginning to end of his performance he had done absolutely nothing, not even the most innocent sleight of hand.

With this book, into which I have thrown, almost unsorted, descriptions, evocations of people, accounts of dreams and real events, notations of the condition of my soul, and very diverse perceptions, the whole accumulating without great profit in a baroque profusion, haven’t I done to some extent what that professional hustler did, or rather what, humorously, he contrived not to do? Since my own goal is not to keep the company amused and to mystify by creating a pointless imbroglio, it is time for me to get to the end of it . . .

One or two kilometers, as the crow flies, from my house in Saint Hilaire, on a wooded eminence which one can climb effortlessly along paths scarcely cleared, for (unlike the cliff of which I have dreamed so many times) it is neither very high nor very steep, there is a small ruined tower that one can see, to the left, from the road that leads from Châlo-Saint-Mars to Boutervilliers and that, after a level crossing, runs alongside, for a time, a single-track railroad to the right, on which, on weekdays, a short freight train with an electric engine passes going in one direction in the morning and coming back in the other in the evening. A little farther along on the road, and also on the left hand, before passing under a bridge whose only purpose seems to be to connect two sections of the same vast property dominated by a building that one takes, from a distance, to be a château (a massive structure with walls

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