Read Life: A User's Manual for Free Online Page A

large duplex. The room is empty. The walls are in white gloss, the floor is laid with grey flagstones. One piece of furniture, in the centre: a huge Empire desk, with a set of drawers fitted in the backpiece, separated by wooden pillars making an arch over the middle, in which a clock is set, with a design carved in it representing a naked woman beside a little waterfall. On the desktop two objects are displayed: a bunch of grapes, each fruit being a delicate sphere of blown glass, and a bronze statuette of a painter, standing in front of a full-size easel, leaning back from the waist, tipping back his head; he has a long drooping moustache, and curly hair down to his shoulders. He wears a full doublet and holds a palette in one hand and a long-handled brush in the other.
    On the wall at the end, a large pen-and-ink drawing depicts Rémi Rorschach himself. He’s an old man, tall and wizened, with a birdlike profile.
    Rémi Rorschach’s life, as narrated in a volume of memoirs ghosted for him with indulgence by a writer specialising in that kind of service, is a painful combination of courage and error. He began his career at the end of the 1914–18 war in a Marseilles music hall doing impressions of Max Linder and other American comedians. A tall, thin man with melancholy, heartbroken gestures and expressions which could indeed remind you of Keaton, Lloyd, or Laurel, Rorschach might have made a name for himself if he hadn’t been a few years before his time. The fashion was for soldier comedians and whilst the crowds flocked to Fernandel, Gabin, and Préjean, soon to be made famous by films, “Harry Kobinz” – that was the name he’d taken – mouldered in miserable poverty and found it harder and harder to get his act taken on. What with the war just over, the recent national unity government, and the “sky-blue” conservative victory at the elections, he got the idea of founding a group specialising in rousing brass flourishes, military tunes from Tipperary, square dances, and a kitbag of similar Armentières. A photo from that period shows him with his band – “Albert Greenfield and his Jolly Rogers” – wearing a cocky look, a fake kepi tilted to one side, a broad-frogged combat jacket, and impeccably tight puttees. It was an instant success, but lasted only a few weeks. The invasion of the paso doble, the foxtrot, the beguine, and other exotic dances from North, South, and Central America and elsewhere closed to him the doors of dance halls and nightspots, and his valiant efforts to adapt (“Barry Jefferson and His Hot Pepper Seven”, “Paco Domingo and the Three Caballeros”, “Fedor Kowalski and His Magyar Minstrels”, “Alberto Sforzi and His Gondoliers”) all failed in succession. In fact, he recalls on this point, only names and headgear changed: the act stayed virtually the same, as they were happy enough to make slight changes of tempo, to swap a guitar for a balalaika, a banjo, or a mandolin, and to utter the appropriate “ Baby ”, “ Olé ”, “ Tovarich ”, “ mio amore ”, or “ corazón ”, occasionally, with meaning.
    Shortly after this, dejected, his mind made up to abandon the performing arts, but not wishing to leave the world of show business, Rorschach became the manager of an acrobat, a trapeze artist who had rapidly become a celebrity because of two features: the first was that he was very young – Rorschach met him when he was not yet twelve – and the second was his talent for staying on his trapeze for hours at a stretch. Crowds flocked to the music halls and circuses where he was on, not only to see him do his act, but to watch him napping, washing, dressing, or drinking a cup of chocolate on the narrow bar of his trapeze, ninety or a hundred feet from the ground.
    At the start the partnership flourished, and all the major cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East applauded the amazing feats of the young man. But as he grew older, the trapeze artist