TWO VIEWS OF THE MURDER ON BOULEVARD POISSONNIERE, 1929

 

It all started when Andrée Maryse and her partner came back from her tour of the Orient. in 1929

Maryse, whose real name was Marthe Lebrun, formerly of the  Folies Bergère, had formed an act with an ex-boxer named Young Francis, whose real name was Francis Gaillard, which seemed to consist, from the newspaper accounts, of both of them showing their splendid physiques in various acrobatic poses.

Young Francis dropped his wife and his child for Maryse; however, he was a brute, or at least that was what came out at the trial. Jealous, violent, a hitter.  Still, they worked together, toured the Orient, and apparently agreed to find a third splendid and acrobatic physique for their act, which they did: a former dancer at the Opera and an ex-boxer named Jean Torrini, whose real name was Alfred Jean-Jacques Bouisseren. As one newspaper said, Young Francis was male vigor, Jean Torrini was male grace.

Their relations were somewhat aggravated by a fact stated by Torrini at the trial:

“Each time we rehearsed in the theatre at Rue de Douai, nude, both of us, he wanted to throw his mistress out of the window.”

The nudity was of interest to the papers, the reading public, and the jury, who surveyed the photographs of their rehearsals with attention.

Andrée Maryse (“blonde and gracious in her black and white tailored suit”) decided in the end that Young Francis must go. But she was still fond of Torrini. They may or may not have been a romantic couple. In any case, it was as a couple that they went out to eat with another couple, M. and Madame Souque, at a table at the Café Brebant on Blv. Poissonniere on May 4, 1929.

At around seven o’clock, Young Francis turned up at Café Brebant. He made with the rough stuff, or threatened to. Maryse fled the establishment, followed by Young Francis, followed by Torrini. Young Francis apparently threw himself in front of a taxi, a suicidal gesture. The taxi braked. Torrini took out a revolver. He fired at the ex-boxer. Six shots, according to some newspapers.

Young Francis was hit. He was mortally wounded. The crowd in the street that witnessed this was near panic, when the cops arrived.

A faits divers, this.

In the crowd that saw the last moments in the life of Young Francis was the recent editor of the NRF, Jean Paulhan. He, like many of the NRF crew – notably Gide – was fascinated by the form of the faits divers. In fact, Gide’s column for the NRF was titled “Faits divers” and was precisely about that – the scandals, crimes, adulteries, gangland doings, and various low-life events that came into the papers and the courts and formed one of the great subtexts of the twenties. Paulhan mentioned the event in “Treatise on metaphysics for the New Year, 1930”.

Paulhan’s metaphysics was semi-Kantian, and semi-esoteric.  The Kantianism was based on Paulhan’s notion that the subject, when human instead of some abstract substance in an abstract retort, was subject to illusions about the real that effected us on the individual and collective level.

Paulhan in 1929 was still under the impress of his friend, André Breton, and Breton’s idea that the fantastic was abroad, in the streets of Paris – one had merely to tear off the bourgeois conventions on not seeing and look, look hard. In the Treatise (a mock-heroic name for an article of four printed pages), In the interval between the object looked at and the looker, Paulhan was impressed by our tendency, our hopeless tendency, to convention. In that tendency, Paulhan saw the flaw of the surrealist program. A test case was the Torrini shooting.

In the Treatise, Paulhan states that he was in the crowd on Blvd. Poissonniere “by chance”. I wonder. He does not say he was going to Café Brebant himself. I wonder about that, too. At this time, Paulhan was living with Germaine Pascal in a suburb of Paris, Le Plessis-Robinson. When he was in Paris, he camped at his office on Rue Madame, on the Left Bank. One supposes, then, that he was walking in the in the quarter of the Grands Boulevards on the evening of May 4, 1929, for some reason. Perhaps he was walking to café de la Nouvelle France, 92, rue La Fayette, which was one of Breton’s hangouts.

I like to think he might have been out to enjoy Café Brebant. At one time, at the end of the Second Empire, Café Brebant was a literary center. Founded in 1805, it had been a favorite of Heine’s in the 1850s – and was also a hangout for Georges Sand (who wrote letters to the owner, requesting, for instance, a box of her favorite cigarettes) – and of the incorrigibly bitchy Brother Goncourt. Monet used to drop by for a drink, and no doubt nursed it sitting on one of the famous red sofas.

Time passes. The Café Brebant was hopelessly outmoded in 1929. The sofas were spongy, the service was so so, the food nothing to get excited about. It was on the way out – its doors closed in June, 1930, which evoked a number of nostalgic obituaries in the Parisian press.

So, Paulhan, who witnesses the killing: “Torrini pursued Francis into the road across a traffic jame and killed him with two shots from a revolver. We learned afterwards that Francis, desperate, tried, in that moment, to commit suicide by throwing himself under a taxi.”

How would Paulhan have learned this if not from the papers?  The rustle of language was already there in the street, reality was being reshaped even as it shaped itself.

Paulhan’s sympathy for the brutal boxer might have something to do with his own situation that night. His legal wife was battling him in the divorce courts. He wanted to marry his lover, Germaine, but his wife, for her own reasons, wanted to prevent that.

In 1945, when Paulhan published his Entretien sur des faits divers, he did not mention the Torrini case. The 1945 book is a curious text: in exploring “cognitive illusions” (illusions de l’esprit), one feels that there is a politics underneath this, tugging at the reader.

The illusion that concerned Paulhan the most was anachronism: the projection into some past moment of facts, circumstances and motives that “we” only know looking back on that past – which have been accrued in the interval. The example he uses is the classic robbery. A woman is killed by a robber, who only gains 20 francs in the business. Thus, the headline: Robber kills woman for twenty francs. But at the time of the robbery and the killing, it was not necessarily known to the robber or even the woman that she had only 20 francs on her. The excitements of the moment were of a different order.

Anachronism makes it hard to base an ethics of responsibility on our acts of the moment, given our lack of any total knowledge of any moment. Paulhan is responding as much to the cultural politics of the end of the war as he is advancing his metaphysics of morals. The great purge of collaborators caught  many of Paulhan’s friends and collegues, and even Paulhan had articles published in suspect journals. That fact definitely has some sway over his larger argument, resisting the "responsibility" ethos of the existentialists. 

In 1929 the Occupation was a future nobody was reckoning on. Tugging at Paulhan in this moment was what he would later called “terrorism” – the idea that literature could somehow cleanse us of our illusions – elect us, remove us from the bourgeois chain.

In 1929, in Breton’s Second Manifesto, he had famously written that the first surrealist act would be to fire a gun into a crowd. Paulhan had witnessed a revolver being fired in a crowd, although not exactly at random. If the newspaper account that claimed that six shots were fired, then in fact it was, to an extent, at random. Did Breton read the papers on May 5, 1929, when the Young Francis shooting was on the front page? Did he hear about it from Paulhan?

In the Treatise, this is Paulhan’s account: “My first sentiment was to have been witness to a sort of stunt, or crime. Of course, I had never before seen something that had the nature of being, outside of myself, evil or criminal: this was only to apply to these indifferent events the shape of the idea I had of evil or good. If I thought of assassination as an art, I would have been struck, on the other hand,  by either the beauty of Torrini’s gestures, or even by their ugliness. Thus, what did I receive here? Just the sentiment that Torrini was on top, that he won over Francis – even though by an irregular means – which held to a certain opinion I had about life. If I thought, as many a person has thought, that life is not worth the pain of being lived, was a dupe’s game and a torture, I would have seen Francis winning over Torrini. The whole scene would have unrolled as a slow triumph towards death, cleverly spreading itself out through the suicide to the murder of Young Francis.”

The twenties motif, according to Sartre, was “Letting go”. “Let go, drop out, leave the orders, coordinates, find yourself naked and alone, strange to yourself, like Philoctetes when he gave up his bow, like Dmitri Karamazov in prison, like an addict who takes drugs for fun, like a young man who abandons his class, his family, his house, to put himself alone and naked into the hands of the Party.” Paulhan was a twenties personality, in the Sartrean sense. The first Surrealist act is not, in the manifesto, called a positive good – to shoot at random in a crowd is simply to shatter the reality the individuals in the crowd have assumed will be, somehow, always there to protect them.

In the event, the trial of Torrini went well. A waiter testified that Young Francis screamed at Maryse that night that he was going to kill her.  Andrée Maryse herself, gracious and supple, as one reporter put it, testified that she had gone to Young Francis’s funeral because she owed him that, but that he was a threat to both her life and Torrini’s. M. Robert Lazurik, Torrini’s lawyer, was much lauded: while the judge was evidently hostile to Torrini, Lazurik transformed the atmosphere in the courtroom to one sympathetic to the man who shot Young Francis.

Torrini was acquitted by reason of self-defense.

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.” – Andre Breton.