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  Still smiling at this comedy, the French party returned to their carriage.

  The curé of Pavilly, brought to order by his bishop, left the realm of the theoretical. It was his duty to warn his parishioners in the sternest of terms against contact with the approaching army of Philistines and Barbarians. He had conducted an investigation, even going among them himself, and had obtained the following intelligence. First, that they were Christians neither in the observance of the faith nor in their moral behaviour. As proof of this, they had rejected their names of Christian baptism, preferring to make themselves known by false names, no doubt with the intention of misleading the forces of order. They did not observe the Sabbath, either working upon the holy day, or else reserving it for activities which ranged from the frivolous, like the washing of their dogs, to the criminal, as in the use of the same dogs for the theft of game and livestock. It was true that they worked hard, and were justly rewarded for their labours, but their threefold wages merely thrust them three times deeper into brutishness. Nor had they any sense of thrift, spending their money as they got it, preferably upon drink. They thieved with no attempt at concealment. Further, they flouted the laws of Christian marriage, living with women in an open state of fornication, and even denying such women the least modesty; their communal huts amounted to no more than dens of prostitution. Those who spoke their own native language blasphemed constantly in the course of their labour; while those who spoke the common language of the excavations were no better than the builders of the Tower of Babel - and did not the Tower remain unfinished and its builders confounded and scattered upon the face of the earth? Finally and greatly, the navvies were blasphemers by their very deeds, since they exalted the valleys and made the rough places plain for their own purposes, heedless and scornful of the purposes of the Lord.

  The farmer who kept the fields at Les Pucelles nodded approvingly at the priest. What did you come to church for, if not to hear a powerful denunciation of others and an implicit confirmation of your own virtue? The girl Adèle in the back pew had also been attending carefully, her mouth falling open on occasion.

  The French party, who had become regular gawpers at the excavations, who had marvelled at the skills and scorned dangers of the barrow-run, and had come to comprehend why an English navvy was paid 3s 6d to 3s 9d per diem while his French counterpart received 1s 8d to 2s 3d, visited the railway workings for the last time towards the end of the year 1845. The Viaduct at Barentin was now almost complete. Across frosted fields they viewed the structure: 100 feet high, one third of a mile long, with twenty-seven arches each boasting a span of 50 feet. It had cost, Charles-André assured them, some fifty thousand English pounds, and was soon to be inspected by the Minister of Public Works and other high French officials.

  Dr Achille examined the slow curve of the Viaduct as it crossed the valley floor, and counted off to himself the elegant, symmetrical arches. ‘I cannot think,’ he said at last, ‘why my brother, who claims to be an artist, cannot see the immense beauty of the railways. Why should he dislike them so intensely? He is too young to be so old-fashioned.’

  ‘He maintains, I believe,’ replied Mme Julie with some care, ‘that scientific advances make us blind to moral defects. They give us the illusion that we are making progress, which he contends to be dangerous. At least, this is what he says,’ she added, as if in qualification.

  ‘That fits his character,’ said her husband. ‘Too clever to see the simple truth. Look at that edifice before us. A surgeon may now travel more quickly to save a patient’s leg. Where is the illusion in that?’

  In the first days of January 1846, shortly after the approving visit of the French Minister of Public Works, torrential rain fell in the region north of Rouen. At approximately six o’clock in the morning of January 10th, the fifth arch of the Barentin Viaduct sundered and fell. One by one the other arches followed, until the entire structure lay in ruins upon the sodden valley floor. Whether the fault lay in over-hasty construction, inadequate local lime, or the tempestuous conditions, remained unclear; but the French newspapers, among them the Fanal de Rouen, encouraged a xenophobic response to the calamity. Not only were Mr Locke the Engineer, and Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie the contractors, all three of them English, but so were most of the labourers, and also most of the investors in the project. What interest could they have except that of extracting money from France while leaving behind faulty workmanship?

  The curé of Pavilly felt himself vindicated. The Tower of Babel had fallen and the workmen were confounded. Those who had blasphemed by calling themselves the new cathedral builders had been cast down. The Lord had demonstrated his disapproval. Let them build their folly up again, howsoever high they liked, for nothing could now erase the divine gesture. The sin of pride had been punished; but lest he himself be tempted towards that same path, the priest devoted his sermon the following Sunday to the duty of charity. The farmer who kept the fields at Les Pucelles contributed more generously than usual to the collection. The girl Adèle was missing from the rear pew. She had been absent from the village many times in recent weeks, and her vocabulary had become infected with strange half-bred words. Not everyone was surprised in Pavilly; her mistress had often remarked that Adèle was likely to become fat before she became honest.

  Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie were greatly distressed by the misfortune at Barentin, but responded manfully. They waited for neither litigation nor the apportionment of blame, commencing at once the search for several million new bricks. Suspecting local lime to be the cause of the disaster, they brought in hydraulic lime from a distance away. With energy and determination, and with the skill of their agents, Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie succeeded in rebuilding the Viaduct in less than six months, the whole expense of which they bore themselves.

  The curé of Pavilly did not attend the opening ceremony of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway. There was a military guard of honour, and good society of both sexes, including Dr Achille and Mme Julie, was present. Priests in winged surplices bore aloft stout candles which reached the height of the locomotive’s steam dome. As Mr Locke the Engineer and his two contractors doffed their hats, the Bishop passed alongside the sleek cylindrical engine built by Mr William Buddicom, formerly Superintendent at Crewe, in his new works at Sotteville. The Bishop sprinkled holy water upon the fire box, the boiler and the smoke box; he cast it upwards at the steam-cock and the safety valves; then, as if not satisfied, he retraced his steps and asperged the driving wheels, the crank axle and the connecting rods, the buffers and the chimney and the starting handle and the foot-board. Nor did he forget the tender, in which several high dignitaries were already seated. He attended to the connecting links, the water tank and the spring buffers; he doused the brake as if he were Saint Christopher himself. The locomotive engine was entirely blessed, its journeys and its purposes placed under the protection of God and his saints.

  Later, there was a feast for the English navvies. The French cavalry stood guard while several oxen were roasted and the labourers drank their fill. They remained good-natured despite intoxication, and afterwards danced vigorously, directing their partners with the firm dexterity they daily used upon their barrows. Adèle was swung between Yorkey Tom and Straight-up Nobby. When it grew dark they set off fog signals in celebration of the day, and the sudden noise caused alarm among the fearful. The Fanal de Rouen reported the event at length, and while recalling once more the downfall of the Viaduct at Barentin, praised the Homeric stature of the English navvies and, in a benign confusion of cultures, likened them one last time to the builders of the great cathedrals.

  Ten years after the opening of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway, Thomas Brassey was officially rewarded for his many labours in France. By this time he had also built the Orléans and Bordeaux Railway, the Amiens and Boulogne, the Rouen and Dieppe, the Nantes and Caen, the Caen and Cherbourg. The Emperor Napoleon III invited him to a dinner at the Tuileries. The contractor sat near to the Empress, and was especially
moved by her kindness in talking English to him for the greater part of the time. In the course of the evening the Emperor of the French ceremoniously invested Mr Brassey with the Cross of the Légion d’honneur. Upon receiving this insigne, the foreign contractor replied modestly, ‘Mrs Brassey will be pleased to have it.’

  EXPERIMENT

  HIS STORY didn’t always begin in the same way. In the preferred version, my Uncle Freddy was in Paris on business, travelling for a firm which produced authentic wax polish. He went into a bar and ordered a glass of white wine. The man standing next to him asked what his area of activity was, and he replied, ‘Cire réaliste.’

  But I also heard my uncle tell it differently. For instance, he had been taken to Paris by a rich patron to act as navigator in a motor rally. The stranger in the bar (we are now at The Ritz, by the way) was refined and haughty, so my uncle’s French duly rose to the occasion. Asked his purpose in the city, he replied, ‘Je suis, sire, rallyiste.’ In a third, and it seemed to me most implausible version - but then the quotidian is often preposterous, and so the preposterous may in return be plausible - the white wine in front of my uncle was a Reuilly. This, he would explain, came from a small appellation in the Loire, and was not unlike Sancerre in style. My uncle was new to Paris, and had already ingested several glasses (the location having shifted to a petit zinc in the quartier Latin), so that when the stranger (who this time was not haughty) asked what he was drinking, he felt that panic when a foreign idiom escapes the mind, and the further panic as an English phrase is desperately translated. The idiomatic model he chose was ‘I’m on the beer’, and so he said, ‘Je suis sur Reuillys.’ Once, when I rebuked my uncle for the contradictoriness of his memories, he gave a contented little smile. ‘Marvellous, the subconscious, isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘So inventive.’

  If the neighbouring drinker came in several physical forms, he likewise introduced himself variously as Tanguy, Prévert, Duhamel and Unik; once even as Breton himself. We can, at least, be sure of the date of this untrustworthy encounter: March 1928. Further, my Uncle Freddy, as even the most cautious commentators have agreed, is - was - none other than the mildly disguised ‘T.F.’, who appears in Session 5(a) of the Surrealist Group’s famously unplatonic dialogues about sex. The transcript of this session was published as an appendix to Recherches sur la sexualité, janvier 1928 - août 1932. The notes state that my uncle was almost certainly introduced to the group by Pierre Unik, and that ‘T.F.’, contrary to the subsequent meanderings of his subconscious, was actually in Paris on holiday.

  We shouldn’t be too sceptical about my uncle’s undeserved entrée to the Surrealist circle. They did, after all, admit occasional outsiders - an unfrocked priest, a Communist Party militant - to their discussions. And perhaps they thought a conventional twenty-nine-year-old Englishman supposedly acquired through a linguistic misunderstanding might usefully broaden their terms of reference. My uncle was fond of attributing his permitted presence to the French dictum that within every lawyer there lurk the remnants of a poet. I am not of either world, you understand (and neither was my uncle). Is this piece of wisdom any truer than its opposite: that within every poet there lurk the remnants of a lawyer?

  Uncle Freddy maintained that the session which he attended took place in the apartment of the man he met in the bar; which limits it to five possible locations. There were about a dozen participants according to my uncle; nine according to the Recherches. I should make it clear that since Session 5(a) was not published until 1990, and my uncle died in 1985, he was only ever faced with self-inflicted incompatibilities. Further, the tale of Uncle Freddy and the Surrealists was strictly for what he called the smoking-room, where narrative libertarianism was more acceptable. After swearing listeners to lifelong silence vis-à-vis Aunt Kate, he would enlarge on the frank licentiousness of what had taken place back in 1928. At times he would claim to have been shocked, and maintain that he had heard more filth in one evening among Parisian intellectuals than he had in three years of barrack-room life during the last war. At others, his self-presentation was as the English man-about-town, the card, the dandy, all too willing to pass on a few tips, a few handy refinements of technique, to this gathering of Frenchmen whose cerebral intensity, in his view, hampered their normal sensual responses.

  The published Session, needless to say, confirms neither version. Those who have read the Recherches will be familiar with their strange mixture of pseudo-scientific inquiry and frank subjective response. The truth is that everyone talks about sex in a different way, just as everyone, we naturally assume, does it in a different way. Andre Breton, animator of the group, is a lofty Socratic figure, austere and at times repellent (‘I don’t like anyone to caress me. I hate that.’). The others are variously benign to cynical, self-mocking to boastful, candid to satirical. The dialogues are happily full of humour; occasionally of the unintended sort, inflicted by posterity’s frigid judgment; but more often intended, issuing from a rueful acknowledgment of our human frailty. For instance, in Session 3, Breton is catechising his male companions about whether they would allow a woman to touch their sex when it was not erect. Marcel Noll replies that he hates it. Benjamin Péret says that if a woman does that to him, he feels diminished. Breton agrees: diminished is exactly the right word for how he would feel. To which Louis Aragon rejoins: ‘If a woman touched my sex only when it was erect, it wouldn’t get that way very often.’

  I am straying from the point. I’m probably also trying to put off the admission that my uncle’s participation in Session 5(a) is for most of its extent frankly disappointing. Perhaps there was a false democracy in the assumption that an Englishman picked up in a bar because of a verbal mistake would have important testimony to offer this probing tribunal. ‘T.F.’ is asked many of the usual questions: under what conditions he prefers to have sex; how he lost his virginity; whether and how he can tell if a woman has reached orgasm; how many people he has had sexual relations with; how recently he has masturbated; how many times in succession he is capable of orgasm; and so on. I shall not bother to relate my uncle’s responses, because they are either banal or, I suspect, not wholly truthful. When asked by Breton the characteristically compendious question, ‘Apart from ejaculating in the vagina, mouth or anus, where do you like to ejaculate in order of preference: 1) Armpit; 2) Between the breasts; 3) On the stomach?’ Uncle Freddy answers - and here I have to retranslate from the French, so do not offer these as his exact words - ‘Is the cupped palm permitted?’ Quizzed about which sexual position he prefers, my uncle replies that he likes to be lying on his back, with the woman sitting on top of him. ‘Ah,’ says Benjamin Péret, ‘the so-called “lazy position”.’

  My uncle is then interrogated about the British propensity for sodomy, over which he is defensive, until it transpires that homosexuality is not the topic, but rather sodomy between men and women. Then my uncle is baffled. ‘I have never done it,’ he replies, ‘and I have never heard of anyone doing it.’ ‘But do you dream of doing it?’ asks Breton. ‘I have never dreamed of doing it,’ ‘T.F.’ doggedly responds. ‘Have you ever dreamed of fucking a nun in a church?’ is Breton’s next question. ‘No, never.’ ‘What about a priest or a monk?’ asks Queneau. ‘No, not that either,’ is the reply.

  I am not surprised that Session 5(a) is relegated to an appendix. The interrogators and fellow-confessors are in a lethargic or routine mood; while the surprise witness keeps pleading the Fifth. Then, towards the end of the evening, there comes a moment when the Englishman’s presence seems briefly justified. I feel I should at this point give the transcript in full.

  ANDRE BRETON: What is your opinion of love?

  ‘T.F.’: When two people get married …

  ANDRE BRETON: No, no, no! The word marriage is anti-surrealist.

  JEAN BALDENSPERGER: What about sexual relations with animals?

  ‘T.F.’: What do you mean?

  JEAN BALDENSPERGER: Sheep. Donkeys.

  ‘T.F.’: There
are very few donkeys in Ealing. We had a pet rabbit.

  JEAN BALDENSPERGER: Did you have relations with the rabbit?

  ‘T.F’: No.

  JEAN BALDENSPERGER: Did you dream of having relations with the rabbit?

  ‘T.F’: No.

  ANDRE BRETON: I cannot believe that your sexual life can possibly be as empty of imagination and surrealism as you make it appear.

  JACQUES PREVERT: Can you describe to us the principal differences between sexual relations with an Englishwoman and those with a Frenchwoman?

  ‘T.F.’: I only arrived in France yesterday.

  JACQUES PREVERT: Are you frigid? No, do not take offence. I am not serious.

  ‘T.F.’: Perhaps I can make a contribution by describing something I used to dream about.

  JEAN BALDENSPERGER: To do with donkeys?

  ‘T.F.’: No. There used to be a pair of twin sisters in my street.

  JEAN BALDENSPERGER: You wanted to have sexual relations with both of them at the same time?

  RAYMOND QUENEAU: How old were they? Were they young girls?

  PIERRE UNIK: You are excited by lesbianism? You like to watch women caress one another?

  ANDRE BRETON: Please, gentlemen, let our guest speak. I know we are surrealists, but this is chaos.