Europa by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks [Parks, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Humour, Azizex666
ISBN: 9781559704441
Google: w7u9hBdLwegC
Amazon: B006G852BM
Goodreads: 2066719
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 1997-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

She was proud of being French, she said, because the French Revolution lay at the heart of modern Europe. The principles of liberté, fraternité, égalité had transcended national borders and become the rights of every man, and finally the principles upon which the whole of Europe was built. In the great release of energy which came with the separation from her husband and her daughter’s first attendance at nursery school, she bought quantities of books and suggested we read them together and discuss them together. It would be exciting, she said, to have a fresh and intellectual relationship with someone after the years of tedium and near-moronic materialism with her picture-frame-entrepreneur husband. Plus it would be good for me, she said. It would be important for my sense of self-esteem, my sense of being someone going somewhere. So we read Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant and the Duchesse d’Abrantes and Michelet, which had been her special area of study, and we read Xenophon and Thucydides and Plato and Aristophanes, which had been my area of study, and we discussed them together, usually after making love, in the afternoon in the pensione she stayed in when she taught consecutive days in Milan. We lay on the narrow bed, still clasping, still hot and damp, and we discussed, after perhaps hours of mutual adoration and oral sex and never without a bottle of Martini, for she was addicted to ice-cold white Martini, Plato’s notion of a realm of ideal forms, and we would try to relate that to the way the Revolution had, as it were, discarded men to champion an idea of man, an ideal man, since surely, or at least this was my feeling, it was this shift that lay behind the notion of égalité and of a single civil code for all the world. Man should be an incarnation of an idea rather than himself. Man should be a European. Or we would discover that Plutarch’s picture of Sparta was not unlike stories of Stalinist Russia, not unlike, in other ways, The Reign of Terror, or Nazi Germany - a European speciality, it seemed - and apropos of police states various we came across that other line of Benjamin Constant where he says: There is no limit to the tyranny that strives to extort the symptoms of consensus. Then discussing all these things quite seriously - orthodoxy and state terror and media hype -while drinking Martini and smoking the Gauloises Blondes she smokes, we would fall to making love again, remembering how all the great men we were talking about had loved women passionately, Talleyrand to start with, and more coyly Chateaubriand, not to mention Alcibiades, and how the great women we were talking about had loved men likewise, and likewise passionately, Ariadne and the Duchesse d’Abrantes, Madame de Staél and Medea, and how Napoleon had certainly been lying to Madame de Staél when he said the best women were the women who bore most children, that was Sparta

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