The Last Days of New Paris

Hélène Smith…glossolalic channeler of a strange imagined Mars: The Surrealists described the medium Hélène Smith (pseudonym for Catherine-Elise Muller), the manif of their dream of whom Thibaut’s card summoned, as a “muse” of automatic writing. It was in a trancelike state that she would “channel” a deliberation-free scrawl she called Martian script. Thus she described the lives of extra-terrestrials — Martians and “Ultra-Martians,” extraordinary manif figures Thibaut also glimpsed on the Île de la Cité.

the Société de Gévaudan…in a Lozère sanatorium: I was eager to hear more from Thibaut about the Société de Gévaudan, that he mentioned, but he knew little, and seemed not particularly interested. From our-world sources, I learned that this extraordinary collective was centered in the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in the region of Lozère, in south-eastern France. Under the experimental leadership of Lucien Bonnafé and François Tosquelles, in the face of the vicious eugenic ideology of Vichy France, a resistance group was formed in the hospital comprising various of the medical practitioners, including avant-garde psychiatrists (later inspirations to what became known as the “antipsychiatry” movement), alongside philosophers (some of whom, such as Paul Éluard, had been close to Surrealism) — and the patients themselves. They seem to have run a clandestine publishing house, collaborated with other resistance groups, organized weapon drops, all while pursuing “institutional psychotherapy” and “geopsychiatry,” the therapeutic collaborative integration of patients into the local population. The facts are extraordinary enough in our timeline. But of all the untold stories of the world of New Paris, it is about the actions of the Société de Gévaudan that I would most like to know more.

A man in a coat watches eyelessly from a chessboard head: The man with the chessboard face seems to be a manif of a photo of Magritte taken by Paul Nougé, in 1937. Before its filmed murder, it had been rumored to walk New Paris in its bulky coat, invoking zugzwangs and gambits, turning situations into chesslike occurrences.

“the Soldier with No Name!”: The Soldier with No Name—der Soldat ohne Namen—was the persona of an anti-Nazi German officer under which the incomparable Claude Cahun and her partner Suzanne Malherbe intervened in the war in Jersey. The two artists instigated an extraordinary campaign of propaganda among the Germans stationed there, distributing flyers and coins painted with anti-Hitler slogans into soldiers’ pockets and through their car windows. The soldier, as manifest in New Paris, was said to flick such coins at all who saw him, bringing, or perhaps legitimating, a spirit of mutiny and anti-war resistance particularly among the German forces. It is no wonder it was one of the targets of the Nazis’ investigations.

tiny exquisite corpses ripped into their components by machines: Judging by the descriptions of the exquisite corpses being experimented upon, the Nazis of Drancy had captured specimens manifest from specific collaborative works by Man Ray, Miró, Yves Tanguy, Max Morise, Picasso, Cécile and Paul Éluard, and others.

“It’s a self-portrait.”…“Of Adolf Hitler.”: Of course we cannot see a work by even a twenty-one-year-old Adolf Hitler free of the shadow. We cannot and should not try. The sense of horror that infects the viewer of the future Führer’s amateurish watercolor is ineluctable. “A Hitler,” we read in the bottom right corner of the image. “1910.” A Hitler indeed.

In our timeline, the painting from which this manif occurred was found by Company Sergeant Major Willie McKenna, traveling with comrades in Essen in 1945. According to Thibaut, it has remained unknown in the world of New Paris. It’s not due to any particular fame that Sam and Thibaut were able to tell what the manif was, to recognize it.

I’ve come to think, rather, that they could do so because it is so very accurate a portrait.

A stone bridge straddles a stream. The waters are rendered in dilute red. Perhaps meant to be reflections of sunrise or sunset, it’s quite impossible now not to see that river as a tributary of blood. Sitting at the furthest point from us on the bridge, ungainly in a child’s pose, his legs dangling over the water, is a figure in brown clothes.

The artist has penciled a cross above it, and — anxiously, pathetically — written “A.H.” That is all. There is the sweep of that familiar side-parting, and below it, nothing. Bar hesitant lines for eyebrows, the face is faceless. Unmarked by any features.