Home » France » Lydie Salvayre » La Compagnie des spectres (The Company of Ghosts)
Lydie Salvayre: La Compagnie des spectres (The Company of Ghosts)
We open in a small flat in Paris, inhabited by Rose Mélie and the narrator, her unamed. daughter. though we will later learn that she is called Louisiane There is a third person who has just arrived – the bailiff. It is clear that the pair have not being paying their bills.
Louisiane tries to placate the bailiff, sweet-talking him. The mother is more aggressive. Did Darnand send you?, she asks, using the familiar tu form. Darnand is Joseph Darnand who was executed in 1945. This novel is set in 1997. She will continue to ask the bailiff if Darnand sent him. As Darnand wore a beret, she hates any man who wears a beret such as Franco, Saddam Hussein and, M. Cousinet (a neighbour).She still believes that Pétain is in charge (he died in 1951). She refers to him as Putain, i.e. the French for prostitute. Interestingly this play on words with putain is now used for another leader, Putin. When she sees a man in uniform on he TV, she thinks it is Lammerding, a German SS officer responsible for killing many French people.
The mother clearly has mental health issues, living both in 1943 and 1997. She has recounted numerous times and will continue to do so, the death of her brother in March 1943. Two twins, the Juel brothers, known as J1 and J2 (the J being short for jumeau, the French for twin. Note that I read this in French; the English translation may well call them T1 and T2.). The twins want to join the French militia unit the Franc-Garde and attack Rose Mélie’s brother to impress the militia. Rose Mélie/Salvayre spare us no details of the vicious attack and murder of the brother which ends with his mother finding the body y the following day. Rose Mélie will continue describing the details of the attack, though the bailiff seems to pay no attention to her outpourings. We will later learn more about the twins though as it comes from the mother, it may not be entirely accurate.
Louisiane wants to deal with the bailiff and tries to shut her mother, wearing only a dirty nightgown, in her bedroom, apologising to the bailiff for her mother’s behaviour.
Louisiane’s usual method is to dose her mother with sleeping pills and this is what she now does though, apparently, with little effect. She prefers it when her mother is asleep but has to give her enough sleeping pills to put a horse to sleep to be effective. Sometimes she wished that the pills would kill her mother while at other times she worries that they might. Dr Donque has examined the mother and accepts that she has problems and has prescribed the pills.
The two women seem to spend much of the time in the flat watching TV. Louisiane is obsessed with kissing. particularly between film stars. Indeed she claims to be studying the issue and losing the TV to the bailiff would naturally interrupt her studies. The mother spends a lot of time talking to the TV and people on it. Louisiane pleads with the bailiff not to take the TV as it would push her mother even more over the edge. Both women blame Leducq for their plight. He is the landlord and they have rot paid him any rent for seven months. Louisiane writes to him every month explaining the situation, They seem to live entirely off the mother’s disability pension.
Louisiane often thinks of running away far from my mother and her ghosts and going to live in the Oise region with only dumb animals as companions but, of course, she does not.
We now get another story. It seems that Louisiane’s grandmother feels that Pétain cannot possibly know what is going on and, as soon as he does, he will act so she sets out to visit him. Not surprisingly it does not go well. Interestingly, we get an account of a day in the life of Pétain, which does not include hearing grievances from the public but does include casually reading a very few of the many letters he gets. He is, or course, unaware of the grandmother’s visit. However the police search her house and Rose Mélie thinks the bailiff is connected with that search. However she also thinks he is something to do with the impending apocalypse.
It may seem that the two women only have each other for company. apart, of course. from Rose Mėlie’s ghosts, which she insists are real. However Louisiane has two friends in the building – Nelly and Jawad. Nelly lends Louisiane romantic novels which she loves but her mother abhors. Indeed, the bailiff is surprised that the few books in the flat are by the likes of Cicero, Pliny and others from the classical world.
So we essentially we have three characters. Louisiane is the narrator. She seems not to be in education or employed, her job being looking after her mother who clearly has severe mental health issues. Her mother rants and raves and seems to spend much of her life in the past, damning Pétain and his crew and still determined to avenge her brother, for example by killing René Bousquet, a collaborationist who got away with it for a long time and waas finally assassinated, though not by Rose Mélie but by Christian Didier.
Meanwhile the bailiff is making a meticulous inventory of everything in the flat, barely saying a word, with Louisiane trying to butter him up while her mother is accusing him of heinous crimes. It works very well as Salvayre tells her story convincingly, switching between the past and present and obviously damning the many French collaborationists from Pétain on down while we watch the unfortunate bailiff examining the meagre possessions of the two women.
Publishing history
First published in 1997 byÉditions du Seuil
First published in English in 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press
Translated byChristopher Woodall