Castle to Castle Read Free

the Duchess d'Uzes . . . We held the officers' horses. I remember the Duchess d'Uzes well, on horseback, the old bag, and Prince Orloff who hobnobbed with all the officers in my regiment, and my job was holding the horses . . . That's as far as it went. We were treated just like cattle. It was taken for granted, nobody expected any different.
    Interviewer: And anti-Semitism was drafted onto this social consciousness of yours?
    Céline: Yes, I caught on to another exploiter. At the League of Nations I saw where the big deals were being made. And later, in Clichy, in politics, I saw . . . yes, I remember, there was this little louse . . . I saw all I needed to see . . . The answer is yes . . .
    Interviewer: Did your mother have much influence on you?
    Céline: I have her character. More than anything else. She was a hard woman, she was impossible . . . I can't deny it, her temperament was something special . . . she just didn't enjoy life. Not in the least. Always worried and always throwing a fit. She worked up to the last minute of her life.
    Interviewer: What did she call you? Ferdinand?
    Céline: No, Louis. She wanted to see me holding down a job in a department store, the Hotel de ville, or the Louvre. As a buyer. That was her ideal. My father felt the same way. Because he hadn't got anywhere with his degree in literature! . . . Or my grandfather with his doctorate! . . . They'd made out so badly they thought maybe I'd make a go of it in business.
    Interviewer: Wouldn't your father have been better off in the school system?
    Céline: Of course he would have, poor man, but here's what happened. He'd have needed a teaching degree, and he only had a general degree, and he couldn't take it because he had no money. His father had died, leaving a wife and five children.
    Interviewer: Did your father die late in life?
    Céline: He died when Journey appeared in 1931.
    Interviewer: Before the book came out?
    Céline: Yes, just before. He wouldn't have liked it . . . Besides, he was jealous . . . He couldn't see me as a writer, neither could I for that matter. On that point at least we agreed . . .
    Interviewer: And what was your mother's reaction to your books?
    Céline: She thought they were dangerous and nasty and would make trouble . . . She expected things to end very badly. She was a very cautious type.
    Interviewer: Did she read your books?
    Céline: No, she couldn't, they were over her head. She'd have thought them very vulgar. Anyway she didn't read books, she wasn't a woman to read books. No, she had no vanity. She worked till the day she died. I was in prison. I heard about her death . . . No, I'd just got to Copenhagen when I heard about it . . . An abominable trip, stinking . . . yes, the timing was perfect . . . Abominable . . . But don't forget things are only abominable from one angle . . . Well, you know . . . experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer . . . it's incommunicable . . . better keep these things to myself . . .
    The way I felt about it, a man was entitled to die, to go in, when he had a good story to tell. You told your story and you passed on. Symbolically speaking, that's what Death on the Installment Plan is. The reward for life being death . . . seeing that it's not God who governs but the Devil . . . Man . . . or nature stinks, just look at the lives of the birds or the animals .
    Interviewer: When have you been happy in your life?
    Céline: Damn well never, I think, because getting old, I'd need . . . I think if somebody gave me a lot of dough so's I wouldn't have to worry—I'd like that—it would give me a chance to go away somewhere and not do a damn thing and watch other people . . . Being all by myself on the seashore with no one to bother me—that would be happiness. And to eat very little . . . that's right . . . next to nothing . . . I'd want a candle. I wouldn't live with electricity and gadgets . . . A candle! Give me a candle and I'd read the paper . . .