The Diaries of Franz Kafka (67 page)

A day in Paris at the time: Sunny and fine on the boulevards, people strolling placidly along; the scene changes near the Hôtel de Ville where the Communards are in revolt, many dead, troops, excesses. Prussian shells whistle on the Left Bank. Quays and bridges are quiet. Back to the Théâtre Français. The audience is leaving after a performance of the
Mariage de Figaro
. The evening papers are just coming out, the playgoers collect in groups around the kiosks, children are playing in the Champs-Élysées, Sunday strollers curiously watch a squadron of cavalry riding by with trumpets blowing – From a German soldier’s letter to his mother:
Tu n’imagines pas comme ce Paris est immense, mais les Parisiens sont de drôles de gens; ils trompettent toute la journée
– For fourteen days there was no hot water in Paris – At the end of January the four-and-a-half-month siege ended.

The comradely way old women behave to one another in a compartment. Stories about old women who were run over by motor-cars; the rules they follow on a journey: never eat gravy, take out the meat, keep your eyes closed during the trip; but at the same time eat fruit down to the core, no tough veal, ask men to escort you across the street, cherries are the best fruit for roughage, the salvation of old women.

The young Italian couple on the train to Stresa joined another couple on the train to Paris. One of the husbands merely submitted to being kissed, and while he looked out of the window gave her only his shoulder to rest her cheek against. When he took off his coat because of the heat and closed his eyes, she seemed to look at him more intently. She wasn’t pretty, there were only some thin curls around her face. The other woman wore a veil with blue dots one of which would frequently obscure her eye, her nose seemed to come too abruptly to an end, the wrinkles of her mouth were youthful ones, by which she could give expression to her youthful vivacity. When she bent her head her eyes moved back and forth in a way that I have observed at home only in people who wear eyeglasses.

The efforts made by all the Frenchmen one meets to improve one’s bad French, at least temporarily.

Sitting inside our carriage, uncertain as we were of which hotel to
choose, we seemed to be driving our carriage uncertainly too; once we turned into a side-street, then brought it back on the right road; and this is in the morning traffic of the rue de Rivoli near the markets.

Stepped out on the balcony and looked around for the first time as though I had just awakened in this room, when in fact I was so tired from the night’s journey that I didn’t know whether I would be able to dash around in these streets the whole day, especially in view of the way they now looked to me from above, with me not yet on them.

Beginning of our Parisian misunderstandings. Max came up to my hotel room and was upset that I wasn’t ready. I was washing my face, whereas I had previously said that we should just wash up a little and leave at once. Since by ‘washing up a little’ I had only meant to exclude washing one’s whole body, and on the other hand it was precisely the washing of my face that I had meant by it, which I hadn’t finished yet, I didn’t understand his complaints and went right on washing, even if not with quite the same solicitude; while Max, with all the dirt of the night’s journey on his clothes, sat down on my bed to wait. Whenever Max finds fault with someone he has the trick of knitting his mouth, and even his whole face together in a sweet expression, he is doing it this very moment, as if on the one hand he intended by this to make his reproaches more understandable, and as if he wanted to indicate on the other hand that only the sweetness of his present expression keeps him from giving me a box on the ear. In the fact that I force him into a hypocrisy unnatural to him there is contained a further reproach which I feel him to be expressing when he falls silent and the lines of his face draw apart in a contrary direction – that is, away from his mouth – in order to recover from the sweetness they had expressed, which of course has a much stronger effect than did his first expression. I, on the other hand, out of weariness can retreat so deeply inside myself that these various expressions never reach to me (such was the case in Paris); which is why I can then behave in so lordly a fashion in my misery (out of a feeling of completest indifference and without a trace of guilt) as to apologize at once. This pacified him at the time in Paris, or so at least it seemed to, and he stepped out on the balcony with me and remarked on the view, chiefly on how Parisian it was. What I really
saw was only how fresh Max was; how assuredly he fitted into a Paris of some sort that I couldn’t even perceive; how, emerging from his dark back room, he stepped out on a Paris balcony in the sunlight for the first time in a year and knew that he was deserving of it, while I, unfortunately, was noticeably more tired than when I had first come out on the balcony shortly before Max. And my tiredness in Paris cannot be got over by sleep, but only by going away. Sometimes I even consider this one of the characteristics of Paris.

This was really written without ill will, but he was at my heels at every word.

At first I was against the Café Biard because I thought you could only get black coffee there. It turned out that they have milk too, even if only with bad, spongy pastry. Almost the only way to improve Paris that I can think of is to provide better pastry in these cafés. Later, just before breakfast, when Max had already sat down at the table, I hit upon the idea of going about the side-streets to look for fruit. On the way to the café I kept eating a little of the fruit, so that Max would not be too astonished. After a successful attempt, in an excellent café near the Versailles railway station under the eyes of a waiter leaning over us in the doorway, to eat apple strudel and almond cake bought by us in a bakery, we do the same thing in the Café Biard, and in this way discover that, apart from enjoying fine pastry, you more decidedly enjoy the café’s real advantages; such as the complete lack of attention paid to you in the relative emptiness of the place, the good service, and your position near the people passing by the open door and standing at the counter. You have only to put up with the floor’s being swept – something they do frequently because the customers come in directly from the street and mill back and forth at the counter – and their habitual disregard of their customers while they do it.

Looking at the tiny bars that line the route of the Versailles railway, you would think it simple for a young couple to open one up and so lead a fine, interesting life involving no risk and no hard work except at certain hours of the day. Even on the boulevards you find cheap bars of this kind cropping up in the shadow at the corner of a wedge-shaped block of houses between two side-streets.

The customers in whitewash-spotted shirts around little tables in the suburban inns.

The woman with a little barrow of books calling out her wares on the boulevard Poissonière in the evening. Look through them, gentlemen, look through them, take your pick, they’re all for sale. Without urging him to buy it, even without watching obtrusively, in the midst of her cries she at once quotes the price of the book that one of the bystanders picks up. She seems to ask only that the books be looked through with more speed, more speedily exchanged for others, all of which a person can understand when he watches the way here and there someone, myself, for instance, will slowly pick up a book, slowly leaf through it a little, slowly put it down and finally walk slowly away. The solemn way she quotes the prices of the books, which are full of such ludicrous indecencies that at first you can’t imagine your ever deciding to buy a book under the eyes of all the people.

How much more decision is required to buy a book from a pavement stall than inside the store, for choosing a book in this way is really nothing but a free deliberation in the accidental presence of the books on display.

Sitting on two little chairs facing each other on the Champs-Élysées. Children up much too late were still playing in the dusk and could no longer clearly see the lines they had drawn in the dirt.

A fat usherette at the Opéra Comique rather condescendingly accepted our tip. The reason for it, I thought, was our somewhat too hesitant approach one behind the other with the theatre tickets in our hand, and I inwardly resolved the following evening to refuse a tip to the usherette at the Comédie to her face; stricken by shame in her presence and mine, however, I then gave her a large tip, though everyone else came in without giving one. I even said something at the Comédie to the effect that in my opinion tips were something ‘not indispensable’, but nevertheless had to pay again when the usherette, this time a thin one, complained that she was not paid by the management and hung her head on her breast.

Boot-polishing scene at the beginning. How the children accompanying the watch walked down the stairs in step. The overture played perfunctorily to make it easy for the latecomers to take their seats. They used to do that only to operettas. A nice simplicity of scenery. Lethargic extras, as in every performance I have seen in Paris, whereas at home they can hardly contain their high spirits. The donkey for the first act of
Carmen
was waiting in the narrow street outside the entrance to the theatre, surrounded by theatre people and a small pavement audience, until the little entrance door was clear. On the steps outside I bought, almost purposely, one of those fake programmes which are sold in front of every theatre. A ballerina substituted for Carmen in the dance in the smugglers’ inn. How her mute body laboured during Carmen’s song. Later Carmen’s dance, which seemed much prettier than it really was because of the merits of her previous performance. It was as if she had taken a few hasty lessons from the leading ballerina before the performance. The footlights whitened her soles when she leaned against the table, listening to someone, and crossed and uncrossed her feet below her green skirt.

Man in the lobby talking to two ladies; had a somewhat loosely hanging frock coat which, had it not been new, had it fitted better and had he not been wearing it here, could have come right out of the past. Monocle allowed to fall and raised again. Tapped uncertainly with his stick when the conversation halted. His arm continually trembled as if at any moment he intended to put it out and escort the ladies through the centre of the crowd. Worn, bloodless skin of his face.

We were too tired to sit out the last act (I was too tired even for the next to the last), went off, and sat down in a bar opposite the Opéra Comique; where Max out of weariness sprayed soda over me and I out of weariness couldn’t keep from laughing and got grenadine in my nose. Meanwhile the last act was probably beginning; we walked home.

The German language’s faculty of sounding beautiful in the mouths of foreigners who haven’t mastered it, and for the most part don’t intend to, either. So far as we have observed, we never could see that Frenchmen took any delight in the errors we committed in French, or
even so much as deigned to notice them, and even we, whose French has little feeling for the language –

The very fortunate (from my point of view) cooks and waiters: after the general meal they eat lettuce, beans, and potatoes mixed in large bowls, take only small portions of each dish though a great deal is served them, and from the distance look like the cooks and waiters at home – The waiter with the elegantly contracted mouth and little beard who one day waited on me, I think, only because I was tired, awkward, abstracted, and disagreeable, and for this reason was unable to serve myself, whereas he brought the food to me almost without being aware of it.

At Duval’s on the boulevard Sébastopol at twilight. Three customers scattered about the place. The waitresses murmuring quietly to each other. The cashier’s cage still empty. I ordered a yogurt, then another. The waitress silently brought it to me, the semi-darkness of the place added to the silence too, silently she took away the silver that had been laid at my place in preparation for the evening meal and that might be in my way. It was very pleasant to have been able to sense a tolerance and understanding for my sufferings in this woman moving so silently about me.

In the Louvre from one bench to the next. Pang if one was skipped – Crowd in the Salon Carré, the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen – In front of the pictures the crossbars that you could conveniently lean upon, especially in the gallery where the Primitives were hung – This compulsion I have to look with Max at his favourite pictures, though I am too tired to look by myself – Looking up admiringly – The vigour of a tall young Englishwoman who walked up and down the length of the longest gallery with her escort

Max’s appearance as he was reading
Phèdre
under a street lamp in front of the Aristede, ruining his eyes on the small print. Why does he never listen to me? – But I profited from it, unfortunately, for on the way to the theatre he told me everything he had read in his
Phèdre
on
the street while I had been having supper. A short distance; Max’s effort to tell me everything, everything; an effort on my part too. The military show in the lobby. The crowd had been pushed back several yards, and soldiers in military fashion were regulating the flow to the box office.

Apparently a claqueur in our row. Her applause seemed to follow the regular outbursts of the head claqueur busy in the last row above us. She clapped with her face absent-mindedly bent so far forward that when the applause stopped she stared in astonished concern at the palms of her mesh gloves. But at once recommenced when it was called for. But in the end clapped on her own too, and so was no claqueur after all.

The feeling theatregoers must have of being on an equal footing with the play in order to arrive towards the end of the first act and make a whole row of people stand up.

A stage set that was never changed during the five acts made the performance more impressive, and was, even if only made of paper, more solid than one of wood and stone that is continually changed.

A group of pillars facing the sea and blue sky, overgrown by creepers. Direct influence of Veronese’s
Banquet
, of Claude Lorrain too.