much about the world on account of having to live among the Greeks, the Romans, the idealist philosophers and the Doctrinaires of the July Monarchy: they were, however, as people say ‘on the Left’. With what was going on in the world, even on their free days, they would have had to be blind . . .
A normalien of Rosenthal’s acquaintance procured them invitations on 24 November to the lying in state. It was to take place at the Palais-Bourbon, in the Salle Mirabeau, which had that very morning ceased to be called the Salle Casimir-Périer: at the last moment people had judged the latter to be impossible, because of the memories that hyphenated name evoked. Echoes of the Lyon risings crushed in eighteen hundred and thirty-one by the Interior Minister grandfather would, after all, have jarred; nor could any great connection be discerned between Jaurès and the President of the Republic grandson. Mirabeau could be accommodated, by stressing his speeches and his historic sallies in the Summoned-here-by-the-will-of-bayonets style, while casting a veil over his intrigues with the Court. Since there was in any case no question of Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Babeuf . . .
Violet gauze hangings draped the stone walls, which recalled the Expiatory Chapel in Boulevard Haussmann and also, already, the cellars and subterranean glory of the Panthéon; they shrouded the chandeliers and diffused a gloomy mauve light, just right for half-mourning, over a fragile scaffolding that awaited the coffin and a black cloth with silver stars that had done sterling duty. The women seated at the foot of the walls were saying to themselves that this mauve lighting must give them an odd complexion, but that they would not solve the problem by putting on more powder. The guests all consisted of figures from a house of bereavement: little groups of individuals were chatting quietly in corners; deputies were shaking hands, with a mien and bowed shoulders imbued with grief-stricken familiarity; every now and then, the husky tones would be heard of someone who could not manage to keep his voice down. The ushers, who carried their little cocked hats with the tricolour cockades under one arm, marched in double slow time like Swiss Guards, in well-broken shoes that did not squeak; they kept a passage open between the catafalque and the door, through the crowd that had grown denser as though Jaurès had really had quantities of brothers, relatives and inconsolable friends. Everyone kept glancing towards the door. People were thinking about that great man, dead ten years and five months, who was still not arriving. They were vaguely uneasy: the news spread that the Albi train had had an accident at Les Aubrais. Someone said in the vicinity of Laforgue and Rosenthal:
— It’s really rotten luck.
Bernard sniggered.
Then they recognized Lucien Herr, who was chatting to Lévy-Bruhl and whom they respected, since being told that Herr still talked to young men about the will not to succeed. Lucien Herr, who already bore – along with the invisible weight of the great books he had not written – the burden of his imminent death, came up to them. They greeted him. Herr said to their companion from Rue d’Ulm:
— Don’t go too far away now. I want to introduce you to Blum.
Herr moved off and returned with Léon Blum, who proffered them a long hand, which they found soft and burning, and said nothing to them. He did not seem to take much interest in these young men; after turning his head this way and that, like a large bird on the lookout, he moved away with a strange stiff, jerky gait.
At a quarter to eleven, the two leaves of the door at last slowly opened as if upon a scene at the Opera; everyone thronged forward, the crowd made the same noise as a theatre audience does when the curtain goes up. Outside there was a milky darkness astonishingly luminous for the end of November, as though somewhere behind the sky there had been a moon of frost or spring; those sparkling mists on the black courtyard of the Palais-Bourbon caused the insipid violet twilight of the Salle Mirabeau to grow pale; people felt cold and anxious to leave that long cavern to walk beneath the trees; the women shivered.
The bearers deposited the coffin on the bottommost tread of the stairway; their steps resounded heavily in the murmurous silence. Miners lined the way. An outburst of shouts exploded brutally like a great nocturnal bubble above the crowd that was surging against the gates of the Cour de Bourgogne and that had just rushed through the sleeping streets behind the hearse, after its departure from the Gare d’Orsay. But the coffin entered, the double doors fell shut again and the shouts were stifled. The Carmaux miners, who were wearing their black pit overalls and their leather caps, lined up clumsily around the catafalque where the ushers and undertaker’s men were piling the withered wreaths which had just made the journey in the icy gloom of the goods van.
No one was weeping – ten years of death dry all tears – but men were fabricating masks for themselves: Saumande, who gave rather a good impersonation of a lizard’s grief, Lautier of a pig’s, François-Albert of a ferret’s.
It was still necessary to wait, nobody knew for what – the dawn perhaps. From time to time a band would play Siegfried’s ‘Funeral March’ to relieve the waiting. It was an unbearable night. In that great stone cell, Laforgue and his friends had the impression they were the silent accomplices of adroit politicians who had deftly filched that heroic bier and those ashes of a murdered man, which were destined to be the important pieces in a game whose other pawns were doubtless monuments, men, conversations, votes, promises, medals and money matters: they felt themselves less than nothing among all those calculating, affable fellows. Luckily, through the walls and above the muffled sound of trampling and music, there would sometimes arrive what sounded like a stormburst of shouts; they would then tell one another that in the darkness there must exist a sort of vast sea which was breaking with rage and tenderness against the blind cliffs of the Chamber: they could not catch the words that composed these shouts, but they sometimes thought they could make out the name Jaurès at the peak of the clamour. The guests looked at one another with a particular expression, like people warm and snug in a house near the sea on a stormy evening, who do not care to think about the squalls the night is fashioning.
Rosenthal felt like a smoke, and said to Laforgue in an undertone:
— Did you spot that society type Léon Blum shaking the miners’ hands, those horny hands of theirs? Talk about old family retainers, I must say . . .
Around one in the morning, Laforgue said:
— I can’t take any more of this. Let’s get the hell out of this cellar!
They made their escape, taking precautions, but no one noticed their departure. Outside, Laforgue continued:
— Well, we’ll have had the honour of keeping watch beside the body of Jean Jaurès.
— Yes, said Bloyé. It’s even an honour we’ll have shared with M. Eugène Lautier.
— And with Herr, said Rosenthal.
— Which is much odder, Laforgue went on. Because after all, with him you really don’t have to worry, he’s not got any little trick up his sleeve. He must have been the only person who was actually thinking, as if the body blow of July ’14 had happened only yesterday, about Jaurès – a fellow who had been in the same year as Baudrillart and Bergson, and who had strength, hairs on his chin, courage, a voice and who, in his youth, had written a thesis in Latin on the reality of the sensible world . . .
People were beginning to move away from the Chamber, taking the Pont de la Concorde or Boulevard Saint-Germain, in order to catch the last Métros. Some groups lingered, however, still listening to the muffled strains of the funeral marches issuing from the loudspeakers between the columns. An imponderable haze submerged the flutings and the great tricolour drape that flapped from top to bottom of the Palais-Bourbon’s façade; the Seine was unusually lonely and black, and in the silence of Paris you could hear it rending and gently hissing round the piles of the bridges as though you had been walking through open countryside beside its waters. When they reached the Légion d’Honneur building, Laforgue said:
— All in all, there was a prize little band of swine there this evening. Instead of playing at being pallbearers and pious young university types, we’d have done just as well being out on the embankment with the others.
The next day, at the start of the afternoon, they had positioned themselves on the corner of Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel, and were