When Philippe summoned me to his office, I figured I was in hot water over my last feature. Perhaps the Minister of Education had complained about my choice of adjectives or, worse, turned up some inaccuracy. I grabbed my notes.
“No, no complaints from on high,” said Philippe. “Not yet, at least. No, I’ve got a new assignment for you and it’ll take you out of town.” He leaned back and touched his fingers together, a smug gesture when he smiled, a portentous one if he didn’t. He was smiling. “It’s not big like the education exposé, just an interview this time, and in the provinces. Could turn out to be nothing but it might prove interesting. Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of. . .” Philippe lowered his glasses from atop his bald head and picked up an index card. “. . . Mademoiselle Sophie Cordière?”
I was feeling relieved and said I’d never heard of Sophie Cordière as agreeably as I could.
“A candidate for the National Assembly. Independent.”
“What’s the angle?”
“First naturalized refugee to do it—I mean, run for the Assembly.”
“When did she become a citizen?”
He glanced at the card and answered dryly. “Two weeks ago last Tuesday.”
“Really? A little premature to be running maybe?”
“Or well calculated. Either way, it makes news. Salimède, a school friend of mine, is retired and lives in the district. He insists she’s some sort of Communist radical. He thinks she’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“Well, it’s possible, but Salimède thinks half the people he meets are dangerous.”
“You think there’s a story in it?”
Philippe shrugged. “Worth a day-trip. Get you out of the city anyway. Oh, a couple more things. She officially changed her name the day before she filed her papers. Salimède is sure she’s got a past.”
“Everybody has a past.”
“But most of us don’t change our names. Do your research,” warned Philippe officiously and handed me the index card. “Her real name’s at the bottom. Salimède looked up the immigration records. I can’t pronounce it. That should get you started. Au revoir et bon voyage.”
I checked. The name on Philippe’s card was indeed the one on Mlle. Cordière’s immigration record, her initial national identity card, and the document changing it to Sophie Cordière. But the unpronounceable name led to nothing, dead ends. I turned up records of over a dozen women who bore the same name. A few were deceased, others too young or too old. Among those at about Mlle. Cordière’s age, thirty-eight according to Philippe’s index card, was a gynecologist living in Berne, an employee of an engineering firm in Dessau, and a professor of Slavic languages in British Columbia. There’s also an interior designer in Buenos Aires, the proprietor of a furniture shop in Tunisia, a housewife in Bulgaria, and no less than two computer techs in Sweden.
I imagined a factory turning out mass-produced passports—same name, different photographs. My conclusion was that Sophie Cordière’s real name wasn’t any more real than the new one, that France might have been the end of a trail littered with forged documents. This was quite likely a woman who’d been on the run, maybe someone in real danger. I wondered what she had done.
When I phoned to request an interview, Mlle. Cordière politely asked that I send my credentials by email. I did so and got a prompt and positive reply suggesting we meet at her home in two days. “In the morning, around eleven, if that’s possible. That way, if the conversation goes satisfactorily we could continue it over lunch.” She gave me her address and directions from the railroad station.
I got up early to catch the first train, spent the first half of the trip dozing and the second checking emails. The Education Ministry had released a dissembling response to my article. Philippe was delighted.
Sophie Cordière’s tiny second-floor apartment was in a shabby building on a charmless street in a rundown district half a mile from the town center. She was still a good-looking woman, neither tall nor short, with pronounced cheekbones, sparkling brown eyes, dark eyebrows, unfashionably long hair, blonde to the roots. Her purple sweater and snug blue jeans showed her figure to advantage.
Her good looks were attractive rather than intimidating, quite unlike the fashionable Parisiennes who like to weaponize their beauty. She greeted me at the door with a wry smile. To me, it displayed the irony of someone who isn’t readily taken in by the world, who didn’t take it or herself too seriously—or me, either.
The living room was barely large enough for a love seat, one armchair, and a bookcase with a small television on top of it. The wallpaper was old and faded; the furniture looked second-hand.
She invited me to sit on the love seat then offered both tea and coffee which I declined. When she was seated, I asked her permission to record the interview, though I’d also be taking notes on my laptop.
She sighed. “Who was it said that we live in an age that records everything and remembers nothing? Yes, of course. Sorry. Go ahead.”
I took out my recorder.
“Where do you want to begin?” she asked.
“With your name.”
“Oh, my name. You know I changed it? Well, new job, new home, new name. I’ve had a number of them. My stage name was Gaia Gulova—less for the earth-mother than the alliteration.”
“Why Sophie Cordière.”
“Sophie’s for wisdom, to which—like a seat in the National Assembly—I aspire. Cordière is a tribute to one of the great women of this country that has so generously taken me in, Louise Labé. You know Louise Labé?”
“I think I might have heard the name at school.”
“Louise lived in the sixteenth century, a feminist avant le fait. Because she was the daughter of a rope-maker, she got the sobriquet of La Belle Cordière. In her youth, she excelled at horsemanship and archery and dressed as a man. She even armed herself as a man and fought as a knight at the Battle of Perpignan. It seems she even engaged in jousting. Imagine! A real Amazon but not, apparently, a lesbian—at least to judge by her reputation with men. In Lyon, she started a literary salon and she wrote, both prose and verse. Her poems were published along with twenty-four written in her honor, all by men who gushed. In general, I’ve found, the more sincere, the worse the poem.”
This made me laugh. “Are they all so bad?”
She shrugged. “Some are better than others, of course. But Louise’s sonnets are quite good, though restrained by the conventions of the times. The last of them begins Do not reproach me, Ladies, if I’ve loved / And felt a thousand torches burn my veins. It appears Madame Labé had a long string of lovers, pearls on a string, all glittering but none perfect. Calvin was scandalized by her cross-dressing. He called her a whore. I know what that’s like.”
I would naturally have liked to follow up on that last remark, but thought it better to get down to business. “Why are you running for office?”
“I came to this country, the country of Louise Labé, seeking refuge and found it. I was stateless and France has granted me citizenship. I want to pay back. I want to be an outstanding citizen. Besides, it’s good for everyone to have both a hobby and an occupation, wouldn’t you agree?”
“And which is politics for you, Mlle. Cordière? Hobby or occupation?”
She gave me a variation of the wry smile I’d seen at the door. “That depends on the outcome of the election.”
She stood up, went into what I presumed was her bedroom, and returned with an old scrapbook.
“For your amusement,” she said, spreading it out beside me on the love seat.
There were pictures cut from old newspapers with captions I couldn’t decipher. She unfolded a splashy poster of dancers and three jazz musicians behind a singer with her legs and arms akimbo.
She pointed. “Gaia Gulova, c’est moi!”
“You didn’t overdress,” I remarked.
“Still young enough not to need to. My prime was brief and in another country. Stale news now, but for a while men ran after me in herds—women too. Flowers and necklaces were the most popular inducements. Also, the most terrible poems—”
“The sincerest being the worst?”
“Precisely.”
She held out her right hand and wiggled it.
“But I’ve always held on to this.”
“Is that a ruby?”
“A real one, too.”
“It’s rather large.”
“As vulgar as the man who gave it to me. That’s why I won’t part with it. He was a passionate man and very tough, a union organizer. In those days, I was a proletarian pinup. Rubies are red and so was I—much redder than I am now, of course. These days I’m hardly even pink,” she said almost demurely and gave me yet another version of that smile. I found it irresistible.
“. . .Yes, back then I was bright scarlet. Well, conditions were bad. Bad food, bad air, bad police, bad government, bad everything. All the injustice made me indignant and my indignation—I confess I wallowed in it—made me see more injustice. Tear everything down, that was my slogan back then. I used it as the refrain in one of the songs I wrote, a march and a good one too, though it never caught on. I wasn’t a politician, a Saint Jeanne.”
“What were you then?”
She touched a finger to her lips. “A post-adolescent vaudevillian with good legs.”
“A vaudevillian?”
“It’s an honorable profession, vaudeville—honorable though not respectable, like so many other fine things, and just the opposite of so many other professions.”
“Such as?”
“Well, how about banking? ‘What’s robbing a bank compared to founding one?’ That’s Brecht. Do you know where the word vaudeville comes from?”
“No.”
“And yet you’re French—more French than I am, you’re thinking.”
“We’re both citizens, Mademoiselle.”
“Oh yes, egalité, fraternité.”
“Sororité too.”
She scoffed. “If you say so.”
“You’d describe yourself as a feminist?”
“What’s that but a woman who thinks?”
“If you say so.”
“Touché. Anyway, vaudeville. The word has a good working-class origin, right down to the mispronunciation. About a century before La Labé’s heyday, a fuller named Basselin churned out lots of pop songs—drinking songs, love songs. War songs, too. He died fighting the English. Anyway, this Basselin was from the Val-de-Vire and might have been famous, but his songs were attributed to his birthplace rather than to the fuller. Val-de-Vire was slurred to vaudeville.”
“Interesting. But what’s a fuller?”
“Talk about working-class! Fullers cleaned and whitened wool. They had to pound and tread on it. The smelly job required ammonia. You can guess where that came from, I suppose. Maitre Basselin probably wrote some pissing songs too. I’d have enjoyed performing one of those for the comrades. They’d have loved it.”
Mlle. Cordière said she’d like a cup of coffee and I said I’d join her. While she was in the kitchen, I examined her little library. It consisted of half-a-dozen books by left-wing political theorists; the rest were literary classics in various languages including a volume of Louise Labé’s works. I took that one out. I skimmed the love sonnets, direct and intensely passionate—too good to be sincere? There was also a prose dialogue, The Debate Between Love and Folly. Perhaps the woman felt these were the poles of her life; maybe Sophie Cordière did too.
The coffee was delicious.
We resumed.
“Question?”
“How would you describe your political views?”
“Ah, getting to the point at last. Well, my opponents from all sides are calling me a radical. Fair enough, but not accurate. Radix. Latin for root. I suppose a radical is what I was once, since I wanted to tear weeds up by the root. But, as mentioned, I’ve moderated my views. I’m no longer so hot-blooded or optimistic. When I hear people touting utopian dreams and colossal social engineering projects, I feel like saying something sarcastic. I don’t agree with technology-besotted youngsters who imagine a sleek, smooth world into which they would deposit equally sleek, smooth citizens. Free markets are really good at generating wealth, but when have they ever been free or distributed the loot fairly? The prospect of changing people’s insides by amending the outside excited me when I was young. To change is to ought was a challenge that energized me. So much was wrong! The country in which I found myself was one big scandal. Not surprising then that I was moved to join young people like myself who wanted to blow it all up and build something better on the ruins. At that age and in that place, I’d have been ashamed not to have joined. But now I think we must begin more humbly and modestly, with something more reliable and less nebulous than dreams.”
“And what is that? What’s the more reliable platform?”
“I mean human nature, the rock on which utopias always founder. Human nature is one of the great conservative forces, like inertia and language. I’ve learned to respect human nature and also Newton’s First Law.”
“It’s surprising to hear you praise conservatism.”
“Not conservatism and not praise, just respect. Different things.”
“Point taken. But can you tell me—and my readers—a bit more about what you mean by human nature?”
“Oui, bien sûr. I take it as the first axiom that people are born self-interested. Who’s more selfish than an infant? The second axiom is that most people gradually become aware, with more or less clarity, that they belong to a social species. I conclude that by nature we’re squeezed between freedom and necessity, isolated bags of skin bound to others. Politics, as I see it, ought to acknowledge the first axiom and remind people of the second. I favor policies that don’t coerce—much less crush—the individual and her liberty but increase the coherence and, above all, the decency of a society.”
“I’m not sure I follow. Could you give an example? A policy?”
“Certainly. Our first priority must be to save the planet from becoming as uninhabitable as its neighbors. We have the freedom to drive cars, burn hydrocarbons, raze rainforests, and crosshatch the sky with contrails. Freedom to do such things is exercised not just by profiteering corporations abetted by short-sighted governments but also by indifferent individuals—which is to say voters. This has put us and our descendants in peril along with our innocent fellow creatures, flora and fauna. People keep their eyes down and argue over pensions and potholes, ignoring the tsunami looming rushing toward them.”
“So, you’re a Green? An Eco-Warrior?”
She made a wiping gesture. “Stow the labels, please. I’m an independent in solidarity with my fellow creatures, a solitary member of the collective.”
“If you say so. But, back to your platform.”
“Yes. So far, the political response to the obvious crisis has been laughably inadequate. What’s almost worse is that everybody knows it. Democratic politics are like God—both give us free will which means we can choose the bad as readily as the good.”
“Excuse me. You believe in God?”
“Again, you’ve mistaken me—not on purpose, I hope. But, since you ask, I’d say that at least six days out of the week, I’m an atheist.”
“And on the other? You rest?”
“Ah, a wit! It varies. I believe that faith without doubt is stupidity.”
“And what of doubt without faith?”
“Unsustainable. We can’t prove we’ve got free will any more than we can prove there’s a God—or that a decent economy provides the greatest good for the greatest number. In that respect, all faiths resemble each other. Either you assent or you don’t. But suppose for a moment that there is a God and this God did grant us free will. What would he want us to do with it? Either to be entertaining or to freely choose what’s good. However, for either alternative, we don’t need God, since he made us free even of him. God’s like my old audiences. Look, all I’m saying is that good politicians should respect everybody’s freedom but give encouragement to choose the better, wiser path. The trick is to enact the good without forcing it down people’s throats. Do that and the good isn’t good.”
“Is this why you’ve proposed extending our system of public transportation and making it free?”
“The people will be free but, of course, transportation isn’t.”
“Thus, your proposed new system of taxation?”
“Absolutely. Fifty percent of all corporate profits, all private, unearned incomes, and all salaries over a fixed minimum to be dedicated to restructuring transport, agricultural and energy sectors before it’s too late. I don’t see any other alternative. The decisions, however, of corporate managers and individual consumers will be left entirely to them.”
“Excuse me, but won’t these new taxes, which your opponents call—with some reason—‘confiscatory’, divorce economic freedom from personal and political freedom?”
She sighed. “Listen. If you give a child ten dollars to buy toys, she’s just as free to choose her purchases as if you gave her fifty. In the country where I was born, the peasants had a saying: Even a pauper can choose to sleep on his back or his side. Now, I’m famished. What do you say we grab some lunch? There’s a workers’ bistro two blocks away. It’s clean and the food’s not that bad.”
As we walked, she waved and accosted everybody who didn’t smile back, informing them she was running to represent them in the National Assembly. She introduced me as a reporter from the capital where her candidacy had created great interest, then she asked everyone what they’d like her to do if she won. Few of the women said anything, but all the men answered, some at length. The reply that seemed to please her best was from an old pensioner who shuffled along with a cane. “Do what the liar in office promised to do and didn’t: take from the rich and give to the poor.
“Yes,” said the candidate taking his hand. “That would make a change.”
The bistro was modest and not crowded. They already knew her there, greeting her by her new name. She asked for a salade niçoise. On her recommendation, I ordered the onion soup. We shared a bottle of vin ordinaire.
I took out my recorder. “Can we talk about your past?”
“Off the record or on?”
“On—off if you insist. Does it matter?”
She shrugged and gave her hair a toss. “Not really.”
Sophie Cordière spoke freely about herself; I’ve no idea how truthfully.
“It was during one of my former country’s interludes between dictatorships that I became a semi-celebrity. I went on tour and drew good notices everywhere. I sang, I danced, I told funny stories. Sometimes I recited my own poetry, but I always wound things up with a speech—a fiery one.”
“What were your speeches about?”
“Important things like freedom and humanity and justice. Big ideas, big feelings. But my speeches didn’t work the way I wanted. I used to blame the audiences, only wanting to be entertained and not roused. Now I know they were too abstract.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve sat through more than a few excruciatingly tedious rousing speeches.”
“Really? Well, maybe mine were tedious. But I enjoyed giving them. When I denounced injustice, I felt more righteous, and when I praised freedom, I felt freer.”
“Do you think if you’d enjoyed speaking a little less, your speeches might have gone over better?”
“You may be right about that. Only the police—and I’m proud to say the police were always at my performances—only the police took any notice of what I said. What interested everybody else was how I looked, how vivacious, sexy, and flamboyant. Even if they didn’t care what I said, they could tell what I was just by looking. Sometimes I couldn’t bear their stares—the ogling men, the women worse—and then I’d wind up the performance with a sardonic Charleston and a rude gesture. Our little company lived together in a big old apartment in the capital. We were squatters and crusaders, creative collaborators. It was a wonderful time, really. We were devoted to our mission. We performed right up to the end.”
She paused then repeated sadly, “The end. When they came for us.”
I waited for her to go on. “There’s nothing you’d like to add?”
“I’d simply like you to understand. There wasn’t any middle ground to dance on. Only lucky countries can afford moderation.”
“Does a lucky country mean a rich one, or do you believe it’s one that’s built solid institutions and sticks by them?”
She thought about that for a moment. “Not mutually exclusive, are they? But I don’t know.” She shrugged. “The people where I come from excel at drunken joy but have no talent for happiness.”
“You equate happiness with moderation? That’s surprising for someone called a radical.”
“Ex-radical,” she said sharply. “We’ve covered that.”
“Do you believe this country has a talent for happiness?”
“Why, it’s famous for it! Oh yes, France has a talent for happiness as much as for protest and going on strike. In fact, the protesting and striking are the result of expecting to be happy, as if happiness were the natural condition of things. On the happiness chart, I believe France comes in third, just behind Denmark and Bhutan. My aim’s to make my new country still happier.”
Remarkable, how smoothly she transitioned into campaign mode, her voice louder, her expression more ingratiating. “Rousing speeches weren’t nearly enough, though.”
“I’d like to go back to the past again, if that’s all right.”
“Yes?”
“How old were you when you left your country?”
“I was twenty-four. And I barely made it out. Most of my friends didn’t.”
This is what I wanted, a story.
“What happened?”
“The respite between dictatorships came to a sudden end, like all the others. The police bided their time and went on filing their reports. Tommy, my manager, was the first to be arrested. They dragged him right out of the Café Magus at three in the afternoon. That must have been because they wanted the news to spread fast. At three o’clock, the Magus was always filled with our sort. Maybe not being first on their list was what my celebrity bought me. More likely they figured Tommy, the oldest among us, was our ringleader. Poor Tommy. He cared a lot about his dignity. He even had business cards! How humiliated he must have been—dragged away in front of the comrades. It must have been almost as bad as being tortured. I still have bad dreams about Tommy.”
“Such as?”
“In one, he’s horribly emaciated, in rags and chained to the floor of a medieval dungeon. He sits there bravely reciting a Brecht poem to an audience of rats.”
“Reciting a poem? Any particular poem?”
“Yes. The one called ‘Seven Hundred Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tanker’.”
“Are you suggesting they took your manager first to warn you—or that somebody was trying to protect you?”
“For a while I wondered about that. Not now. By five, they’d arrested Georg, Herman, and Andej. They meant to round us all up at once and just missed me and Bella and Milena, my backup singers. Bella and Milena were sisters and good friends to me. Jaffar, our pianist, took off on his motorcycle as soon as he heard about Tommy. I learned later that he made it to the frontier. Seems he tried to disguise himself as a Muslim lady—a Muslim lady on a motorcycle. Poor Jaffar! He was so meticulous about his cross-dressing, so elegant, and he was caught in plaid flannel skirt and a phony shyla. Maybe he’d have had a better chance if he could have laid his hands on a niqab.”
“What happened to Tommy and Jaffar and the others?”
“What do you think?”
“I see. And how about your escape?”
“Oh, it was dramatic but also rather funny. Milena said she’d take her parents’ car. The three of us dressed up as men and put on long overcoats. We all had ski balaclavas. The girls phoned their cousin Gustave. He bought us toy pistols. The plan was to pass ourselves off as a special police squad rushing to round people up. The irony appealed to us, but it was ludicrous, of course. We laughed about it ourselves. We parked the car in an alley, ate cold goulash out of a can, and waited until midnight. Then we took off for the border.”
“You thought the border guards would let you cross?”
“I know! It was crazy. I was to tell them in my deepest deep voice that we’d been sent to apprehend a pair of high-value targets who’d made it across the night before. I’d say we knew their whereabouts and were under orders to track them down and liquidate them.”
“And that worked?”
“Of course not. There were two guards, both sleepy, but one was suspicious. It was the toy guns that did the trick. When they asked for our papers, Milena and I aimed the plastic pistols at them, Bella gave a whoop, floored the accelerator, and we blew straight through the barrier.”
“It’s quite a story.”
“As I said, it was dramatic but also laughable.”
“But I’m not sure why you had to escape, I mean why the new regime wanted to arrest your whole circle.”
“The whole troupe, you should say. Why go after inoffensive vaudevillians? I’d say it was for or the same reason Calvin called Louise a whore. We offended them. Our views were exactly the ones they feared. We were young and they were old. We didn’t live by family values. We read the wrong books and sang the wrong tunes. Also, our popularity was a threat. If we spoke out, people might listen. Some of them, anyway. As for me, they hated how I looked, the way I dressed—the titillation perhaps even more than the politics. Actually, I doubt they saw any distinction between the two.”
“You like being provocative?”
“I did back then. Well, maybe I still do. Politically, that is.”
She smiled at me. She knew that I was flirting.
It was a fine afternoon. After we left the bistro, I suggested we walk for a while then go back to her apartment.
“I beg your pardon, but I thought the interview was over. There’s something else you want to ask me?”
“Well. . .one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Is there a man in your life? Readers will be interested.”
“No. Not a single man.”
“A woman?”
“Likewise, no.”
I knew I was about to be dismissed.
She made a show of checking her watch. “Look, I have to speak to a meeting of sanitation workers in two hours. I need to prepare.”
“Two hours? But that’s plenty of time.”
And it was.
I wrote the beginning of my article that night:
Sophie Cordière is the first refugee to aspire to the National Assembly. Her political career is more likely to be short than long. She belongs to no party, but she is a remarkable person who could win against the odds. If she succeeds, she will introduce an original alto voice to the Assembly’s monotonous chorus. Mlle. Cordière is a woman of the Left but with original views. Though she is most likely to figure as the smallest of political footnotes, she is a charismatic speaker fully capable of outclassing the pedestrian leaders of all our parties. In any event, her aims are in accord with her chosen name. Rope is made by braiding the thin and weak into the strong and stout.
After typing this, I phoned Philippe and asked if he could spare me for another couple of days.
“It’s a good story,” I said lamely, “but complicated.”
Philippe just laughed.
I visited Sophie again, just before the election, which she won narrowly. I couldn’t get away, so we celebrated by phone and email.
Sophie was sworn in, took her seat, made her first speech. It was modest, rather than rousing; sensible, yet urgent. Now that she was in Paris, I saw her as often as she would allow.
Then, as everyone knows, she was brutally attacked on the steps of the Assembly, like Caesar. Stabbed ten times.
The assassin was a young man, initially thought to be a right-wing fanatic. He turned out to be a spurned lover.
“Not a single man,” she’d said. Misleading, but technically accurate.
I’ve been reading Louise Labé’s love sonnets, especially the one Sophie quoted to me. I’ll give the final word to La Belle Cordière.
Ladies, do not denigrate my name.
If I did wrong, the pain and punishment
Are now. Don’t file their daggers to a point.
You must know, Love is master of the game.
