The end of the gorgeous Napoleonic dream
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson
HERMES IN PARIS by Peter Vansittart Peter Owen, £16.50, pp. 234 Ican think of few books which would more annoy those bright young things (they would not like to be called that) who have dubbed themselves the New Puritans than Peter Vansittart's new novel. For a start, it has a historical setting (Paris, Napoleon III just before the outbreak of the Franco- Prussian war). But it is Vansittart's prose which would have them writhing on the floor. He likes set-pieces, and there are a great many of them.
Take this wildly overwrought passage: So, a Paris gala, the air rainbow, partitioned by dragoons in green tunics, white surcoats, carabineers with gold breastplates, a dense
array of silver lace, polished froggings, heavy shakos, further dabs of colour added by crim- son epaulettes, scarlet kepis. Officers with puppy faces swagger as they had outside Troy and Carthage, at Marathon and Zama, though those applauding may be yearning not for some overwhelming triumph but for whores from Mabille's circus or the flesh markets of rue Doudeauville, a flash tenor from the Opera, even... but hush! The mili- tary march forward. Blue cloaks of the Line, long Arab cloaks of Spahis, blue and scarlet with green turbans.
Nothing for Puritans here. The writer is drunk with words and colours, cascading off the page, intoxicating the reader, but threatening to overwhelm him.
I have to ask two awkward questions. Is this a novel, and why is it called Hermes in Paris?
It is true that Hermes, the messenger of the gods, but also the insitigator of quarrels and imbroglios, does appear, usually at a café table, observing the passing crowds with cynicism and malice. I presume that Vansittart has plucked him from the world of Offenbach, a stirrer, a connoisseur of the decadent and over-ripe. But he is a mere device, wholly unnecessary, barely present in any event.
And it is not a novel, in the true sense. The setting is historically accurate. Most of the characters, emperor, politicians, gener- als, the German Kaiser, Bismarck, existed in real life. Here, there are no newly mint- ed characters, except for one humble fami- ly, parents and son. The action centres on a handful of journalists, political agitators, court hangers-on. They have no inner lives, they represent attitudes and the inexorable passage of days which will lead to the catas- trophe of Sedan and the end of the fitful Napoleonic dream. Oddly, the most telling chapter in the entire book is set outside France. Bismarck and his military advisers gather at Ems in order to decide how to capitalise on an appalling diplomatic blunder. A telegram is concocted. The French passion for la gloire is aroused. War is inevitable. It is a brilliant vignette. What is best about Hermes in Paris is the evocation of the city itself. We are in the post-Haussmann era. Paris has been redesigned, conveniently, it would seem, for mass demonstrations, military parades — and riots. The lights in the Tuileries blaze, but outside there is poverty and, above all, disaffection, A successful war might change everything. Might... And there is the prose. Every colour in the rainbow, and every shade of colour, is here. Vansittart shakes his kaleidoscope and the little stars and crescents leap and sparkle. It is wonderfully dazzling and won- derfully enjoyable, but like Hermes the reader perhaps needs to be sitting at a café table on the Left Bank sipping a glass of absinthe, as the trumpets sound far off in the Invalides, and the lights all over Europe rehearse for total extinction in the near future.
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