The World of Alphonse Allais Page 5

  ‘You get your filthy smelly boots off before you dare come in here, and go up the back way, because I’ve cleaned the front stairs once today and I’m not doing it again. You stink to high heaven of fish!’

  And poor Peter always had to take his boots off and go up the back way.

  The only time the apostle ever got angry was when she objected that all this fresh fish meant hours of extra work in the kitchen and why couldn’t he just bring back some smoked salmon or a tin of sardines. That time he really let her have a piece of his mind.

  Anyway, when St. Peter died in AD 65 in his well-known final appearance as a double act with St. Paul, he appeared in due course at the gates of Heaven and was personally welcomed by God the Father with a little good-natured teasing.

  ‘Welcome, Peter! Nice to meet you at last! My son has told me so much about you.’

  ‘Gosh, that’s very nice of Him,’ said Peter, a bit overcome by his reception.

  ‘He tells me, though, that your behaviour on the Night of the Passion wasn’t entirely impeccable.’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, yes, I must admit that I wasn’t up to my best that night. Bit of a bad show, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Never mind, I don’t blame you. You’ve made up for it since then, and I can never thank you enough for all the work you did for us at Antioch and Rome.’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing, God. I’m sure you’d have done the same in my place, what? I mean ….’

  ‘What I really want to know is this. As a reward for your life on earth, have you any special favour to ask up here?’

  At which St. Peter’s face took on a very thoughtful and not altogether Christian expression.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘do you have a certain party named Ba’aya among your tenants up here?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but I can easily find out. Let’s ask the archangel on duty.’

  A little research revealed that the certain party named Ba’aya had not yet reached Heaven, being engaged on a transit period of 3,000 years in Purgatory.

  ‘Three thousand years!’ exclaimed Peter, a bit taken aback. ‘You don’t believe in half measures, do you, Holy Father?’

  ‘What is three thousand years compared to eternity? I can see you have a lot to learn here, Peter.’

  ‘Well, about my favour. What I’d like to know is, do you have a concierge up here in Heaven?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. The gates of Heaven are guarded by whichever archangel with a flaming sword is on duty. Sometimes when there has been an epidemic or a big war we call out a few extra people, and when there are really big crowds arriving everyone has to work overtime, but things always get back to normal quickly. Why?’

  ‘Because I would like to take over the job of looking after the gates of Heaven personally.’

  ‘What a funny thing to ask!’

  ‘I have my reasons.’

  God smiled omnisciently to himself and said:

  ‘All right, I grant your request. Archangel, hand over the keys of Heaven to this gentleman, will you?’

  And for the last 1,818 years St. Peter has been gleefully anticipating the expression on Ba’aya’s face when she turns up to be admitted to Heaven and sees her old tenant installed as concierge at the pearly gates.

  He rubs his hands and says to himself:

  ‘Only another 1,007 years to go!’

  Which leaves him just about enough time to work out exactly what he is going to say to the old cow.

  THE POOR BASTARD AND THE GOOD FAIRY

  Once upon a time there was a poor bastard. You know when something terrible or other happens to a friend of yours, and you say, ‘Poor bastard’? Well, all those terrible things had happened to our hero. He had bad luck the way other people have bad breath. Like a great black cloud it hovered over him night and day. Though he didn’t know it, he had set several world records for bad luck. Poor bastard.

  There came a day when he decided to empty his pockets and add up his entire worldly possessions. It didn’t take very long. The total came to 1 fr. 90 (one franc ninety centimes) which was just about enough to get him through the day. How on earth would he get through tomorrow, though? Poor bastard.

  Nothing dismayed, he carefully dabbed some black ink on to the worn seams of his overcoat and sallied forth in the vain hope of finding work. The overcoat had once been black, but Time, the Great Dyer, had gradually changed it into a green overcoat, despite which the poor bastard always thought of it as his best black coat. His top hat had been black too, once, but had slowly become dark red over the years. (Are not the ways of Nature inscrutable?) Worn together, the red top hat and green overcoat were somewhat eye-catching – the red looked redder and the green looked even greener. When he went out in what he thought of as his tidy black clothes, everyone criticised the poor bastard for his outrageous taste in colours.

  All day he tramped up and down stairs, waiting for hours in waiting rooms, chasing on vain errands and clutching at straws. Net result: nothing.

  Poor bastard.

  He was so anxious not to waste time or money that he never even stopped for a bite to eat. (Don’t feel sorry for him, though. He was quite used to it.)

  By six o’clock he had had quite enough and decided to retreat to a little boulevard bar he knew well, which served the best glass of absinthe for miles around. A place where, for four sous, you could get ‘a bit of Paradise in your belly’, as the late, great Scribe says.* A taste of heaven for all poor bastards. And there he sat, preparing to dip his lips into the sacred liquid, when his eye was caught by a lady at the next table, an unbelievably beautiful and radiant lady who was watching our hero preparing to drown his sorrows with a look of great compassion.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ she said, but so gently that it sounded like the music of angels, ‘you look rather miserable.’

  ‘Miserable? You can say that again!’

  ‘Perhaps I can help you, then. You see, I happen to be a Good Fairy. Tell me, is there something I can do to make you happy again?’

  ‘There certainly is, Good Fairy. All I need is twenty francs a day for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Well, that’s not much to ask for. I can grant your wish here and now, if that’s what you really want.’

  Twenty francs a day? Every day? The poor bastard could hardly believe his luck.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ went on the Good Fairy. ‘I won’t be able to come and bring you your twenty francs every single day, so would you very much mind if I gave you the whole lot in advance? Because of course I also know exactly how long you’ve got to live.’

  The whole lot?

  Can you imagine how the poor bastard felt?

  Not only was he being guaranteed twenty francs a day for the rest of his life, but he could get his hands on the whole lot now!

  So the Good Fairy worked out the grand total in her head.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘It’s all yours.’

  And she counted out on the table the princely sum of 30 frs. (thirty francs).

  A day and a half! He only had another day and a half to live.

  Poor bastard.

  ‘Well,’ he thought, ‘it could be a lot worse. Yes, it could be a great deal worse.’

  And, feeling much better, he went off to spend it all on riotous living.

  * Are you sure the late, great Scribe said that? – Ed.

  ANIMAL POWER

  You may remember the vigorous campaign I conducted in these columns a while ago to encourage people to stop using coal, oil and other fuels to drive their machinery, and to use animal energy instead.

  Well, the idea is catching on.

  M. Louis Delmer, an influential engineer from Malines, has already converted many plants and factories to a system of hippo-mobilisation, or what I would simply call horse power. And I hear that the first horse-cycles have had a great success in England.

  Meanwhile, M. Adrien de Gerlache, the daring Belgian explorer, is even now preparing for another expedition to the South Po
le and has had three bear-boats made for the purpose. These are large propeller-driven skiffs, the power coming from a polar bear exercising in a wheel, rather like the squirrels you sometimes see in cages in France.

  So things are beginning to happen, and happen fast.

  Because engineers have at last woken up to the fact that the earth’s resources are not inexhaustible and that the day will come, sooner than we realise, when our globe, hollowed out inside like an old turnip, will not yield another lump of coal or drop of oil.

  And when that happens, how will you drive your steam engines and your motor bicycles then, you idiots, you cretins?

  ‘When that day comes,’ I hear you say, ‘I’ll be long dead and gone, so I don’t give a damn what happens.’

  Well, so much for logic, not to mention your concern for mankind. Luckily, not everyone is like you. There are a few souls endowed with selflessness, completely without any thought of personal gain, who are quietly working for the generations to come.

  And I have recently been privileged to visit a few of the factories now using the systems I have so strenuously advocated. One of them, for instance, is powered by the efforts of 30,000 mice, representing in toto about forty horse-power. The mice are divided into two relays and do shifts of three hours on, three hours off, to drive a huge hollow wheel which keeps turning at an impressive, regular pace. And the energy gained is absolutely free, because the minimal cost of food and bedding (all the straw, crusts, old cheese and domestic scraps come from a nearby town) is more than made up for by the excellent manure produced by the little workers (300 kilos a day, or more than 100,000 kilos a year!).

  But the most interesting factory I visited was one driven by frog power. The principle involved was the same as at the mouse-driven factory: a large hollow wheel, not unlike the treadmill used by the English for prisoners condemned to hard labour. (The difference being that we use frogs, whereas they use well-known aesthetes.) No-one who has not seen one at work can have any idea of the thrust produced by a fit male frog when it jumps. This particular wheel is about one-third covered in water and, to prevent the agile little creatures enjoying the pleasures of their native element for too long, has a small electric current passed through it once a minute, which encourages the frogs to rise sharply in unison and apply pressure to the inside of the wheel. (Ever since Galvani carried out his experiments on their Italian forebears, frogs have possessed an immense aversion to electricity.) The energy derived from the 18,000 or so frogs working at present in the factory amounts to no less than sixty horsepower.

  A striking proof of the truth of my case.

  I will return to this absorbing subject in a later bulletin.

  THE FAILED FIANCE

  Recently I became engaged to be married (about which more anon) and was suddenly reminded of something which happened to my friend Sapeck years ago. Sapeck was walking down the Boulevard St Michel one Sunday evening, minding his own business, when he was approached by a Lycée schoolboy who came up cap in hand and asked him very politely:

  ‘Excuse me, sir – I wonder if you would do me a little favour?’

  ‘Of course, dear boy,’ said Sapeck. ‘There is nothing I would rather do. Tell me what it is.’

  ‘It’s very simple, really. I would just like you to come with me to the Lycée St Louis so that you can pretend to be my uncle saying good-bye to me. You see, we are not meant to be out like this without being accompanied by relations.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly.’

  So off they went together, Sapeck looking his most grown-up and respectable, and the boy looking rather pleased with himself. When they got to the school entrance and saw the vice-principal waiting for the return of his charges, Sapeck put on an even more dignified air, insofar as it was possible, and turned to the boy.

  ‘Good night, dear nephew,’ he boomed.

  ‘Good night, dear uncle.’

  ‘Now work hard, my boy, and promise me not to get kept in of a Sunday for extra study. You will never come to harm if you obey Tacitus’s wise precept: Laboremus et bene nos conductemus. For was it not Lucretius who so justly remarked in one of his immortal lines, Sine labore et bona conducta ad nihil advenimus? But above all, treat your teachers at all times with the utmost courtesy and respect. Remember, Maxime pionibus debetur reverentia.’

  The poor lad had become rather uneasy during this impromptu dog Latin lecture from his new uncle, so he ventured another tentative farewell.

  ‘Well, good night, uncle.’

  But Sapeck had other ideas, especially having just noticed a rather expensive gold watch and chain draped across the boy’s waistcoat.

  ‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can I believe my eyes? You young wretch, are you taking your watch back to school? Has no-one ever told you that in classical Rome there was a man stationed at the entrance to each place of learning whose sole function was to search pupils in case they tried to bring in a water clock or hour glass under their toga, and to take it away if he found one? He was called the Scholarius Friscator. As Sallust so truly said: Chronometrum juvenibus discipulis procurat distractiones.’

  ‘But, uncle …..’

  ‘No buts, my boy. Give me your watch.’

  The vice-principal came to his support.

  ‘Go on, boy, give your uncle your watch. You won’t be needing it here in school.’

  The young student was beginning to fear that he had seen his treasured timepiece for the last time when Sapeck, under whose rough exterior ticks a heart of gold, relented.

  ‘Well, never mind, lad. Keep your watch this once. It can be a symbol for you of the way time passes, never to return. Fugit irreparabile tempus, eh?’

  So when I was engaged to be married recently (about which more in a moment) I thought of this adventure of Sapeck’s and was reminded of an almost identical incident in which I was involved. Identical to begin with, anyway.

  I, too, was approached by a young boy from the Lycée. It was a Sunday again, though this time at the fair at Neuilly. And my young schoolboy, just like Sapeck’s, came up to me cap in hand and said, very civilly:

  ‘Excuse me, sir – I wonder if you would do me a little favour?’

  ‘Certainly, as long as it does not inconvenience me at all,’ I said politely*. ‘Tell me what it is.’

  ‘Well, sir … But first let me introduce you to my girlfriend. The thing is, we are both very much in love and we need some help.’

  So saying, he presented me to a funny little brunette with a slight squint.

  I don’t know how you feel about little brunettes with squints. Personally, I love them.

  I gave her a deep and flattering bow.

  ‘Well, you see,’ explained the student, ‘I desperately want to have her picture on my mantelpiece at home. But my mother would never let me have any girl’s picture on any mantelpiece anywhere in the house, so I have to think of a way round her. And what I thought was this: if I had a photograph taken of her with you, I could tell my mother that it was a picture of a teacher of mine taken with his young wife. Then she wouldn’t mind at all. Well, are you on, sir?’

  Deep down I’m not a bad old thing so I said I was on and the three of us repaired to a nearby travelling photographer’s booth. After a few intensive minutes we emerged the proud possessors of a startlingly life-like reproduction of her and me on a copper plate, tastefully framed, all for a mere 1 franc 75, and everyone was happy.

  Which brings me to my recent engagement (about which more now). I was not only engaged, I was on the very brink of getting married, till one day my ex-future-father-in-law-to-be took me aside and asked, rather stiffly, I thought:

  ‘By the way, is that other business all over now?’

  ‘Business? What other business?’

  ‘You know. Your liaison with the little squinting brunette girl.’

  I explored the deepest recess of my memory. Nowhere, on the spur of the moment, could I find any evidence that I had ever been embroiled with a squinting brunett
e, undersized or otherwise. I told him as much.

  ‘Then how do you explain that?’ said my almost-father-in-law, brandishing that in my face. God knows where he got it from, but it was the very same photograph.

  ‘I can understand a man having a mistress now and then,’ he said. ‘I am even prepared to overlook the matter if it is discreetly managed. But when he goes out of his way to have publicity photographs taken ….!’

  He seemed unable to finish his little speech, but his gestures indicated amply that his daughter would never be mine.

  All for the best, as it turned out. I have since learnt that she drank like a fish.

  * This tells you all you need to know about Alphonse Allais (Author’s note).

  MY WORLD RECORD

  Dear Puzzled of Nantes,

  Thank you for your letter. Yes, you have been correctly informed. I, Alphonse Allais, am the current holder of the one millimetre free style bicycling record. Not just for France, but for the whole of Europe and America. I am told that there is some Australian who claims to have broken my record, but my manager advises me to make no comment until an official statement is forthcoming.

  No, of course I don’t mind giving you some details about my record-breaking performance.

  Firstly, the machine I use is an all-wooden vélocipède built thirty years ago, in 1864, by a blacksmith from Pont L’Evêque who is unfortunately no longer alive. This particular model is now very rare – in fact, the only person I know who still uses one beside myself is Paul de Gaultier de la Hupinière, an elderly book reviewer who lives in Normandy and relies on it to help meet his deadlines. When it was first put into production, Dunlop was still a baby and Michelin had a long way to go to his first communion, which explains why the tyres on my bicycle are solid cast iron. They aren’t as flexible as rubber, of course, but they are a good deal more reliable. Put it this way; I take sharp stones in my stride and broken glass doesn’t stand a chance against me.