Paris, or the Curvature of a Chord
I recall the incident as if seen through smoked glass. There was a scent—violet and cigarettes—and a ceiling mural so chipped it seemed an excavation of angels. The nightclub’s name has escaped me, perhaps deliberately: something faux-exotic like Le Chat Zébré or La Lune de Fer. In those days, the French believed everything modern required an animal, a machine, or the moon. We English merely stood by, taking mental notes for the next luncheon.
A man was playing Poulenc—though I did not yet know his name—on a piano that was not in tune, but was, in a sense, cooperative. His fingers had that unstudied quality of a child touching the surface of an aquarium. Notes came up bubbling, slapdash, perfectly incorrect. At first I thought it was parody. Then I realised it was sincerity performed as if parody, which amounts to genius or madness depending on the hour.
I’d spent the day before sketching along the Boulevards, trying to find a new kind of angle, a geometry of fatigue perhaps. I’d drawn too many façades. Paris at dusk is all façade; sincerity must be rented by the hour. But that evening—oh!—a fragment of perfection appeared in the rhythmic clutter: a thin, mischievous sequence that sounded like a music-hall tune rearranged by a clockmaker suffering delirium.
A woman at my table—I hesitate to call her friend—whispered that Poulenc was a jeune homme terrible, a Catholic with the morals of a balloon. “He wears his sin like perfume,” she said, as though that were an achievement. I remember thinking it was a very English sort of remark, though she claimed to be Belgian.
At that time, I fancied myself a painter of moods, though by 1938 I’ve learned it is moods that paint us, like intrusive decorators insisting we need more vermilion in the corners. I wrote later in my diary (a green one, gauchely gilt): The French pianist performs as if attempting to play Debussy but having no patience for mist. A cruel entry. Yet it is true—Poulenc possessed not the shimmer but the wit of moisture: damp irony rather than dew.
I suspect I fell in love with the idea of dissonance that night. Not the real sort—social, political, or erotic—but the orderly mischief of a misplaced note. The kind that turns expectation into laughter. His melody pirouetted near sentiment, then recoiled, bowing mockingly. One heard suggestion and denial in the same bar: a minor miracle of hesitation.
Beside me, an English sculptor (whose work, stone and sorrow, has since quite rightly vanished) murmured that this was “not art, but cleverness.” Which, of course, is precisely what every art truly is, once the candles burn low enough.
A small group of Americans were clapping too early, having mistaken a pause for the end. The pianist gave a half-smile—saintly, disdainful—and continued as though rebuking the rhythm of applause itself. I envied that serenity. For an artist, the capacity to ignore his audience is the final luxury.
It was about then, or after, that I began to notice the pianist’s hair: thin, fair, uncertain about direction. Hair, like harmony, tells one’s intentions. His head inclined as if in dialogue with someone beneath the keyboard—a girl, a ghost, God. One of those necessary inventions to justify tension. When he reached what must have been the resolution, a kind of impolite lull hung over the smoke. And then someone, drunk or prophetic, cried “Encore!” though he had not yet stopped.
The night concluded (as so many do in recollection) under a quarrel of laughter and rain. I remember walking home past the Seine and thinking I might never again paint anything straight. My lines needed to curve, to yield, to mimic those obstinate harmonies that resist decorum. In the following months I threw away three canvases—for not curving enough.
Naturally, years contradict everything. I have since heard that Poulenc disliked nightclubs, preferred choral forms, and often despaired of his own music’s levity. People evolve, or decay, into these revisions. But I choose to believe in the pianist I saw: corpuscular, dazzling, all hesitation and nerve.
Somewhere I read that the gods send us music not to soothe but to humiliate us: to show what sincerity might sound like if briefly possible. That night was my lesson. Yet how confidently I contradict it! Each time I recall those notes, I feel their mockery like perfume that refuses to fade—even now, when the bottle, like the man, must be long empty.
Still, were you to ask me about the piece, I could not name it. Its title—if it had one—evaporated into the chatter of that unrememberable room. What remains is only a contour, a residue: Paris in 1922, and a pianist making mischief with belief.
And as I write these words, I am almost certain—though perhaps not sincerely—that the music never happened at all.
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