The Last Days of New Paris

The dreaming cat: The bipedal cat is manifest from The Cat’s Dream, an image by Nadja. It’s unclear whether the animal is dangerous, constrained as it is by a weight tied to its right leg, and with its tail tethered by rope to a metal ring that, according to Thibaut, floats constantly behind it and above its head like an unlikely balloon.

sagelands, smoothed alpine topographies like sagging drapes: It took me some time to realize from his description and the areas’ odd name that the “sagelands” are places where geography has come to manifest certain paintings of Kay Sage, with their frozen, twisted, melancholy rippling coils and rock forms.

Under one lamppost, it is night: This isolated outpost of manif night, with its streetlight, seems certainly to be from Magritte’s painting series The Empire of Light (1953–54).

Jacques Hérold set a black chain on fire: It was in May 1944, in our timeline, that the journal Informations surréalistes was published with a cover by Jacques Hérold: a simple, stark image of a flaming chain.

a dream mammal watches him with marmoset eyes: Thibaut made no mention of the source of the image of the clawed beast, and I did not think to try to track it down. But during quite other researches I came across Valentine Hugo’s drawing The Dream of 21 December 1929, of that year, and it was clear that it was from there that the animal was manifest. The image also includes a drowned woman: it’s possible that the prey, as well as the predator that Thibaut disturbed, was manif.

Redon’s leering ten-legged spider:The Smiling Spider, with a gurning, almost chimpanzee-like face, dates from the 1880s, in its original charcoal and later lithograph form. Odilon Redon was one of the Surrealists’ revered recent predecessors, and more than one of his “noirs,” his “black things,” have been sighted in New Paris: Thibaut described to me watching Redon’s great sky-gazing eye-balloon rising sedately over the smoking ruins of a battle between Nazi soldiers and forces of the Groupe Manouchian.

such prim Delvaux bones…prone Mallo skeletons: Manifs from the work of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux seem to be relatively common in New Paris, in particular skeletons such as those described here, to which, if not as obsessively as he did his big-eyed nude women, he repeatedly returned. To quote the title of his 1941 image, the whole of New Paris could be considered “la ville inquiète”—the worried, apprehensive, anxious, unquiet city. The uneasy city. A city also inhabited by other, fitting, trembling bone figures, ripping themselves apart as they lie shaking, reconstructing themselves repeatedly. They are manifest from Maruja Mallo’s 1930 Antro de fósiles — Den of Fossils.

The Musée de l’Armée is being emptied…by curious undergrowth: Paul Eluard’s idea, from Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution number 6 in 1933, has clearly manifested. The “irrational embellishment” he suggested for Les Invalides was that the area “be replaced by an aspen forest.”

“They’re called wolf-tables…Manifest from an imagining by a man called Brauner.”: The most famous iteration of the “loup-table,” the “wolf-table,” of the Romanian artist Victor Brauner, was the physical object itself that he made, in our reality, in 1947. Whether or not he physically made it in that of Thibaut, too, I don’t know, but he had imagined the furniture-beast at least twice before the S-Blast, in his 1939 paintings Psychological Space and Fascination, which Thibaut appeared to know. As Thibaut mentions, in both these earlier renderings, as in the later sculpture, the predator’s snarling head—“screaming over its shoulder at death,” as Breton put it — and tail and ostentatious scrotum appear more vulpine than lupine. Breton considered Brauner’s wolf-table to be a uniquely sensitive tapping of fear, of anticipation of the war to come.

a barnacled book: Initially I presumed that the “book that has rested underwater” was Prospero’s grimoire, but in later conversation Thibaut corrected me: it is the manif of a 1936 object made by Leonor Fini.