The Snake in the Heart

By Henrik Stangerup

Suddenly he regretted his offer. His place was at his desk and not at his mother´s side as a tourist guide. But if he withdrew his offer the rest of the day would be a resumption of hair-splitting which would probably culminate in of admonitions and reprimands over his sneaking into the maid´s room. When his mother, humming to herself, had gone into her bedroom to get ready, he sat at his desk tried to gather his thoughts and the piles upon piles of notes. In the middle of the desk lay a newly published book on Paris. That´s what they´re like - those Parisians! it was called. The author was a well-known German Paris correspondent for a paper in Hamburg. The book had been published first in Germany, but now it had been translated into French and had reached the top of the bestseller list. He had already read the German´s account and intended, if need be, to use a couple of chapters from it if he was still unable to get going. The German had turned everything upside down and drawn a picture of Paris which was the opposite of the traditional one. He presented Paris as a gloomy heap of stones, as the morbid centre of a modern, technocratic and conformist Prussia. Gone were the happy Parisian days, the old, riotous Parisian atmosphere when the weeks rushed by with no thought for the future and people danced on the boulevards and sang revolutionary songs and the girls were a garland of wanton femininity. The German correspondent presented the modern Parisienne as a steamroller of ambitions, solely intent on earning money. The young people of Paris were depicted as the most energetic but least charming in Europe, with no interest in politics, no feeling for anything other than the state of the market. Possibly the book exaggerated when it denied the importance of Paris as a centre of culture, but its attacks on the modern French novel and new-wave films seemed by no means unfounded: it dealt well with the clash over novels that never depicted real life but concentrated on their own process of creation, and the films that limited themselves to showing the activities of petit bourgeois anarchist groups on the Left Bank of the Seine. The German had a good eye for the Paris snobbery most people accepted. The chapter on sexual liberation in Paris was the liveliest. Liberation and Paris? No, those words didn´t rhyme, he himself had discovered that time after time. A woman could only get hold of a diaphragm after going through the third degree at the doctor´s, and the majority of students did not have sexual intercourse with each other before the age of 28. The statistics confirmed this in black and white. Finally there was a chapter of special interest to him, about the Paris of the Germans. The chapter made no bones about brutally ridiculing the German colony who thought everything was much better in Paris than in Berlin and Bonn. The German had various bones to pick with his countrymen who after a short or long stay renounced their ancestral assets and liabilities in their desire to be more French than the French, more Parisian than the Parisians. This chapter in That´s what they´re like - those Parisians! made him feel really at home.

He held the book up to his nose and sniffed at the scent of printer´s ink and paper, leafed forwards and backwards in and stroked its back. Then he put the book down and turned it around to see it from various angles, imagining it was the first copy of his own book. He took a step backwards to look at it at a distance with the drawing on the cover of a French petit bourgeois looking at himself in the mirror catching sight of a Jacobite in a blood-red cap holding a pitchfork, with the decapitated head of an aristocrat in his hand. Finally he put the book on the letter scales. His book would no doubt weigh the same when it was printed, not too much, not too little. His own book.

Translated by Anne Born