The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (29 page)

“Seriously, Diana, where are you going?”

“I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may stop off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the color of the eyes of my neighbor in the compartment. I have reserved rooms at the Imperial, on the Ring, and at the Hungaria, on the quay at Budapest; but I am just as likely to sleep in some horrible hotel in Josephstadt or in a palace on the hillside at Budapest.… I am, even more than usually, open to suggestion. My life has been monotonous, these last six months. Don’t you agree with me, Gerard? It is high time that I changed the menu and dug my spurs into my beloved adventure. A migrating bird, weary of capitals and watering-places,
I shall make my nest at the will of my desire, I shall sing in the moonlight when the spirit moves me, and I shall seek illusions far from the lying world I know so well. I proudly withdraw the pessimistic avowals I made at Glensloy, my dear.… Life is always beautiful, after all. Men will never be any less stupid. And I’m giving myself exactly six weeks to discover the imbecile who will cater to my whims and ripen in my safe deposit box some golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides.”

“Diana, I am more delighted than I can say to find you in such an optimistic frame of mind. I always knew that a woman of your spirit would never admit defeat or die of despair like an amorous midinette or a dowager who has lost her lover.”

“There is only one shadow in my path, Gerard, and that is my sincere regret in leaving you. For six months now, we have lived the same life. Had we been married, we could scarcely have been closer to each other. Our mental union, our spiritual union has been complete. That affection, so very tender, that friendship colored with a tiny ray of passion, those are things one does not forget.… In the course of future sleepless nights, I shall console myself with the marvelous memory of a friend who was a gallant man. When I look at your picture, which I carry in my absurd crocodile toilet case, my heart will beat hard and I shall murmur somewhat as Hamlet did of Yorick, ‘That was a man of infinite tact and loyalty! He knew the most awful secrets of my life and yet he risked his own so that Luxury with its eyes of gold would not go out the door of my house.’ Yes, Gerard, I shall say all that when I look at that old photograph you gave me on Christmas Eve in exchange for our first kiss under the mistletoe in Berkeley Square.”

Lady Diana’s hand was resting on my arm. I stopped, far more moved than I appeared. I answered, my voice trembling a little:

“Your words touch me very deeply, Diana. Let me tell you that our secret affection is a sacred chapel in which I love to kneel and where I pray for your future happiness.”

“Nonsense! Happiness is an enigma. Those who want to badly enough become millionaires or misogynists. All I want is to become a millionaire again. As for you, Gerard, you can smile forever. Love and money. The Princess Séliman awaits you, revanquished. The most perfect serenity is ready for you in a corner of Eldorado.”

“I am not thinking of myself, Diana, I, who am completely happy with Griselda. But of you.”

The hour of departure was imminent. Whistles were screeching and excited arms were tossing valises through the open windows. The car was swallowing baggage and vomiting the friends of travelers.

Lady Diana put her two gray suede hands on my shoulders and, her eyes glistening with big tears, murmured, “Gerard—Our last kiss perhaps?”

I was so overcome that I did not move. Then very gently, her lips touched mine. A caress of velvet on my beating heart. A marvelous solace for the wound of departure.

I stammered, “Diana—God bless you.”

She closed her eyes to hold back the tears and said, “Thank you, Gerard—my great friend—
mon chevalier errant
.”

The conductor asked us to get aboard. Lady Diana jumped in, lightly. She reappeared in the frame of the open window, while the engine whistled furiously. I can still see that beautiful face and those blond curls between her hat and her flowing gray scarf. I can still see those great wet eyes, as sad as those of the virgins of Correggio. That look replete with tenderness. A mute farewell from the Woman in quest of a Grail of certified checks. Her last thought as she traveled along a road
of damask flanked with flowered palaces and dazzling gems.
What did chance hold in store for her at the journey’s end? A park full of orchids or a corner in a cemetery shaded with cypress trees? A massive golden throne or an operating-table? A lover’s arm or a strangler’s bony fingers?

The train started. The dear little gray-gloved hand still waved. My hat answered. For a long time I stood on the platform, my head bare, looking after an affection which was departing, perhaps never to return. I did not move. A great melancholy weighed me down. My eyes followed the rails along which the train had disappeared, the
train de luxe
bearing the “Madonna of the Sleeping Cars” toward a new destiny.

In the years between World War I and World War II, Maurice Dekobra was perhaps the most popular writer in France. He made his name with
The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars
in 1925, which was translated into thirty languages and sold more than 15 million copies around the world. Dekobra was also handsome, a trilingual journalist who interviewed such luminaries as Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller; he was a hob-knobber with the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, and Errol Flynn, and an adventurous world-traveler, who invented his pen name (his real name was Maurice Tessier) in 1908, when he met a snake charmer in North Africa who commanded two cobras.

In one of Henry Miller’s novels, there’s a scene in which a man, trying to pick up a woman at a café, implies that she wouldn’t be intelligent enough to read Céline or Proust: “You’d prefer Maurice Dekobra, no?” It’s no wonder that Miller may have held a snobbish grudge, considering Dekobra’s book sales. But Dekobra, even if he wasn’t a modernist like Miller, was no less invested in the modern world, especially its women.

Dekobra interviewed the French novelist Colette, just after she wrote
The Vagabond
(1910), a story about an independent, divorced, music hall artist, a heroine anyone would call a self-empowered female. When Dekobra asked Colette if she was a feminist, Colette replied, “Me, a feminist? You’re kidding!”
She explained that the suffragettes repulsed her, that their behavior was unacceptable in France. “You know what the suffragettes deserve? […] The whip and the harem.” Colette’s self-contradiction was emblematic of the general conversation around women.

Most visibly, fashion reflected the era’s confusion. There was, of course, the 1920s “flapper” look—the bobbed hair, the scandalously short waistless dress. But actually, what women wore was less uniform than that. A person was almost as likely, in those years, to see a woman wearing harem pantaloons, or an asexual smock, or a face with obliterated eyebrows, or a “little girl frock,” or a plain gray shirtdress, or a mask of make-up with orange cheeks and orange lips, or even a coif that resembled a rooster’s comb. After the demure, long dresses of the turn-of-the-century, it’s not hard to imagine how a woman could cause a flap, walking down the street flashing her legs. But some women also took up the habit of binding their hips and breasts to obscure their curves. Fashions included both revelations and disguise, and there was much debate about what it all meant in terms of new moral standards.

Men and women must have been thrilled, and sometimes terrified, to see what a woman might do—or be—next. In the 1920s, the same decade that American women were granted the right to vote, the nation’s first female governor was elected in the state of Wyoming, and its second was elected in Texas. Just as more women were eschewing marriage for sexual freedom, the first rubber diaphragm came on the scene in 1923 (making it even easier to avoid the consequences). The suffragettes insisted that women should work outside the home, and as if to help this along, the first Maytag Gyrofoam washing machine was invented in 1922. In 1924, General Electric had an advertisement that said, “Shall the men work—or shall you?
Back of every great step in woman’s progress from a drudge to a free citizen has been some labor-saving invention.” And by 1926, the General Electric advertisement was: “Any woman who does anything which a little electrical motor can do is working for 3 cents an hour.” There were endless debates about what a woman could do and couldn’t do, and should do and shouldn’t do, and what can only be described as a kind of mania for defining the New Woman, who refused to be defined.

Dekobra seems to slyly poke fun at this impossible quest to pin down the New Woman, for instance in the line, “Why should we classify all women on the basis of the worn out models on display in Destiny’s Bazaar?” (
this page
). Lady Diana, the beautiful, capricious heroine of this novel, can barely make sense of all the different parts of herself, when called on to explain to Gerard Séliman, our narrator, why she needs him as her personal secretary:

Through Séliman’s narration, Dekobra writes with a dapper prose, reminiscent of Raymond Chandler in its surprisingly apt descriptions of faces. A policeman has “the profile of a clam” (
this page
), and a servant is drawn as “a silhouette of white wood, crowned above the mouth with the yellow wisps of a drooping mustache” (
this page
). He also describes places with a witty baroqueness: “This ancient palace was protected by a great many trees and it reminded me of a piece of cold meat surrounded by a quantity of water cress” (
this page
). And Séliman’s reflections are charmingly philosophical in a way that deepens the story, without ever slowing it down:

Séliman, though he’s the main character, is willingly duped by beauty, happy to be bossed, polite to a fault, and he gallantly cedes the story to the females around him.

In the first chapter he accompanies Lady Diana to her appointment with a Freudian disciple, who produces a fantastic “magic eye” of his own invention, a “radiograph” with “Roentgen rays” designed to capture the innermost emotions of a person. When the magic eye is aimed at Lady Diana, the contraption doesn’t work very well, and she remains stylishly opaque. The pseudo-psychoanalysis also doesn’t reveal much, though it’s highly entertaining to read. Lady Diana leaves in a huff, annoyed that, after she tells the doctor about a disturbing
dream, he cannot foretell her future. This scene is the perfect beginning for a story in which the unpredictability of Lady Diana supplies so much of the fun. Within a few pages, she’s dancing in the nude.

With her erotic dancing and sexual forthrightness, Lady Diana resembles a more conventionally glamorous, less self-destructive Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who, in the 1910s and early 1920s, paraded Greenwich Village wearing a bra made of two tomato cans tied together with string, and often made nude appearances, as a kind of performance art, thumbing her nose at the censors. Just as the Baroness’s nudity was not mere burlesque, but in the service of art and protest, Lady Diana’s disrobed performance is designed to draw the press’s attention away from her financial ruin, and to benefit charity in the meantime. Lady Diana’s unabashed promiscuity, though less aggressive, is just as pointed as that of von Freytag-Loringhoven, who insisted, for instance, that the poet William Carlos Williams should have sex with her and contract her syphilis, so he could free his mind for art. Lady Diana uses her sexuality to get money from men, but it’s on her terms: “ ‘I am neither a semi-idiot, nor a nymphomaniac. I do what I do quite openly and without the slightest regard for that false modesty which is so dear to my fellow countrymen’ ” (
this page
). Men are her inferiors, and she takes pains to let them know that, even if they are also her means of traveling the world—they are her “sleeping cars.” She’s also smart enough to be an actress when she needs to be. Lady Diana is witty, canny, and careful (around the men at least) not to appear the intellectual. (In 1922, Rudolph Valentino famously said, “I do not like women who know too much.”) The novel often tells us of her double-sidedness:

The New Woman is the perfect character for a spy novel, because she frequently played a feminine part. Part of the testimony during the 1927 trial of American housewife Ruth Snyder for the murder of her husband went like this:

The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars
ingeniously seizes on the unknowability of the New Woman and translates the fear and giddiness surrounding her into a story of international intrigue. “Would she be the first woman capable of wearing a mask in order to deceive someone?” sarcastically asks the Communist delegate, Varichkine (
this page
). The suspense is heightened because Séliman is continually astonished that the women are not who they at first appear to be. Klara, the easily seducible, blonde German widow, Séliman’s “little Lorelei” (
this page
), turns out to be an agent for the Soviets. Lady Diana—promiscuous, fickle, a proponent of free love—suddenly announces that
she wants to get married. Madame Irina Mouravieff, “a tiny woman,” “rather more beautiful than ugly” (
this page
), is actually a “breaker of hearts and torturer of bodies” (
this page
), “the Marquise de Sade of Red Russia” (
this page
).