It was a stifling day with hardly a breath of wind. Paris was on fire, its glaring avenues molten in the pitiless afternoon sun. Jean-Claude and I were sitting in Les Deux Maggots on the Place Saint-Germain des Prés, two maggots burrowing in the viscera of English grammar. The fashionable cafe was where we invariably had our lessons. I would have preferred somewhere quieter, away from the constant clatter and chatter, the hectic toing and froing of les garcons and the bewitching rudeness of the Parisians; but Jean-Claude said the cafe ambience helped him to concentrate. This was something of a paradox because he would watch les filles slinking by, which of course distracted him from our lessons. However, watching the girls never brought him any joy and invariably elicited some scurrilous comment about their appearance or what he imagined to be their bad characters. It seemed he had nothing positive to say about anything or anyone. His existential nightmares would have intrigued Monsieur Sartre.
Jean-Claude Marsaud wallowed in self-pity and corrosive thoughts; horned demons of jealousy assailed him at every turn. He was my worst student on more than one level. The year was 1985 and I was working as a private English tutor to business and media types who grudgingly accepted English was the lingua franca they were obliged to learn to get on and rise in the world of commerce and industry. Some rose like cream in a bottle of milk while others curdled it, such as Jean-Claude.
Short and squat, he bore a striking resemblance to Napoleon. I watched the perspiration drip from his widow's peak, as if that part of his person were a leaky faucet. The sweat made its way across the sun-burnt slab of his forehead, between his beetling eyebrows and trickled down his Roman nose. He occasionally dabbed at it in irritation but the saline drip continued unabated. His shirt collar strained against his taurine neck as he struggled with the third conditional. He inserted two fingers in the collar in a savage attempt to relieve the pressure, but it didn’t work. Cursing, he undid the top button and yanked his garish purple tie down an inch or two.
‘Alors,’ gasped Jean-Claude. ‘If you had not come to Paris, I would not meet you.’
‘Almost,’ I said, encouragingly.
‘Putain! What is wrong?’
‘I would not have met you.’
‘Salope!’
‘Bitch!’
‘What?’
‘Salope is bitch in English.’
I reiterated that since we were having an English lesson it would be better if he cursed in English. I reminded him of this from time to time but to no avail: merde, putain, salope and other Gallic imprecations constantly fell from his thin, testy lips as he struggled with the vagaries of English syntax and grammar. They were verbal tics he was powerless to resist, even after I had given him an extensive course in British curse words. I think he must have found the English vernacular too coarse and lacking the elan of the French equivalents.
Jean-Claude was a young advertising executive with a lively mind (negatively disposed) and an even livelier temper. He would explode like a stick of dynamite at the least provocation. He had just gone ballistic with the waiter who was a tad tardy in bringing him his espresso, and had showered him with a torrent of uncalled-for insults in demotic French. It was as if the poor man had committed a mortal sin. I told my inflamed student to steady on – ‘Calmez vous!’ – and informed the waiter, in French, naturally, that my friend was not feeling well today. I alluded to a small tragedy, a fib of course, to explain his unreasonable behaviour. The waiter merely shrugged his shoulders and shuffled off to deal with other customers clamouring for his attention.
Jean-Claude sneered and looked at me, his eyes bristling with malice, his expression as thunderous as Jupiter. He was envious that my French was far better than his English and he haughtily informed me that English back in the day was a bastardized form of French and that they, the French, had invented English. He complained that to speak English properly he was obliged to insert a poker up his derrière. He was the most jealous and irascible man I had ever met. His shoulders seemed to be permanently up by his ears in that exaggerated gesture that is peculiar to Frenchmen.
He was a difficult person to get on with, but I didn’t have to like him; I just had to tolerate him for a couple of hours a week and try to teach him English. Every lesson was like combat, a wearisome battle in which I had to deflect the arrows of his rancour and multiple resentments. Having put aside the horrors of the conditional tense, we were now spending the last few minutes of the lesson in general conversation.
‘How is it going at work?’ I asked.
Jean-Claude’s eyes darkened to an obsidian tint. ‘Merde! I cannot support it. That total bastard Dubois is promoted ahead of me.’
‘Has been promoted,’ I corrected.
‘Oui! ‘as been promoted. It seems I am, how you say? On the glass roof.’
‘The glass ceiling.’
‘Ceiling, roof, whatever, I can to go no further.’
‘I can go no further! You know you can’t use the full infinitive after a modal verb.’
‘Merde! I always forget this little rule.’
Poor Jean-Claude — overlooked, overruled and grammatically compromised. The bile of his ire consumed him in its acid. He went on to tell me that he and Dubois had lately become mortal enemies and not just because the latter had been promoted ahead of him: they were competing for the affections of a beautiful graphic designer who had recently joined their advertising agency. According to Jean-Claude, Camille was a rare jewel, a woman, in his estimation, who could only be compared to Aphrodite or perhaps, Brigitte Bardot — both mythical creatures.
‘She is just 25. Oh! You should see her. She is like a ripe beautiful peach on the tree.’
I improved his word order in passing. ‘A beautiful ripe peach. I see. So, why don’t you go and pluck her off the tree, then?’
‘Quoi!’ he spat. ‘You see, I am no Alain Delon.’
‘Looks aren’t everything, Jean-Claude. One of the best way to seduce a woman is to make her laugh.’
‘That is what Dubois does with his little bonmots.’
‘Is he an Alain Delon in the looks department?’
‘Non! He ‘as a big nose like Depardieu and a big fat cul.’
‘Arse!’
‘Oui! In addition to his fat cul, he is also a self-satisfied arse!’
‘He doesn’t sound like much competition.’
‘He make her laugh.’
‘Makes her laugh!’
‘I makes her cry!’
‘Make her cry!’
‘He is ugly but he ‘as crisma.’
‘Charisma, you mean.’
‘Oui! Charisma!’ he said, spitting out the word as if he were ejecting a small toad from his mouth.
By now I had a headache but the two hours was mercifully up and we parted company. As we shook hands, I said, ‘Buy the girl some flowers on your way back to the office and ask her out to dinner.’
He looked at me with mournful eyes. ‘Dubois ‘as already done it. I will kill him! C’est un salaud!’
‘He’s a bastard.’
‘Oui. Complètement.’
The sigh I gave was a mixture of frustration and relief. ‘Time’s up! Goodbye, Jean-Claude. See you next week.’
In Jean-Claude jealousy was pathological, a disease, a miasma that poured out of every cell of his body. There was something gross and abnormal about it. In him, the emotion was exaggerated, attenuated to a painful degree. He was maggoty with it, jealous of practically everything: his neighbour’s new car caused aneurysms; he envied every handsome, well-built man and any beautiful woman, apart from Camille, apparently, was clearly a self-serving demi-mondaine; he hated success and was jealous of a vast number of people he had never even met: successful writers, musicians, actors and television personalities, and so on were bludgeoned with his remorseless pique, and he was covetous of other people’s possessions and positions. He was even jealous of his cat de Sade (‘le chat de l’enfer’) who got to lounge about the apartment all day while his master toiled grimly with accounts for toothpaste and shampoo, and battled with clients who were a rabble of ‘ignorant clowns’. Envy and jealousy gnawed at Jean-Claude like an endless toothache. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were jealous of his looming shadow in the mornings and evenings because it was taller than he. At least, that is the impression I had formed after two months of bleak two-hour lessons in Les Deux Maggots every week. No one looked through the glass more darkly than this gloom-tarred Frenchman.
I have come to believe that jealousy is an emotion indulged in by the spiritually bereft. The truly spiritual person is untouchable, a serene island secluded from the choppy waters of negative temperament. The saracen idea of protecting one's honour with preposterous pistols at dawn is laughable. Even anathema. The adept is withdrawn from such matters, resilient, opaque as pewter. But for the rest of us, jealousy and envy are thorns that slash the psyche and cause us to drown in bitter tears. These useless emotions confound us and drag us down into turbid waters that corrode the soul. But my green-eyed monster of a student took the biscuit: he escalated the usual petty jealousies that humans rake themselves with into a dyspeptic and all-engulfing mania. I had tried a few times to point this out but it was like trying to gather water in a sieve. Les fleurs du mal sprouted and proliferated like poisonous thistles in the drab garden of his consciousness. Jealousy had consumed and choked him with its debilitating weeds. Later, I realized he was mentally ill, bordering on insane.
He didn’t show up for his next lesson. After sitting in Les Deux Maggots for thirty minutes and consuming two espressos and puffing through three Gauloises, I phoned his office. Although I wished he would have, he had never missed a lesson before. The receptionist related a dismal tale: the previous day there had been uproar in the agency. Marsaud had thrown Dubois down a flight of stairs and the latter had ended up in hospital with multiple fractures. Jean-Claude was what the French call mal vu. Terminally so, it turned out. He was immediately fired and charges were pressed by the seriously injured Dubois. Such are the wages of jealousy, the excoriating sin of envy. It was I suppose what they call a crime of passion — un crime passionnel. The story does not have a happy ending. In fact, it came to a tragic and very final full stop. I had to strike him off my list of students: the day before he was due to appear in court, Jean-Claude Marsaud hanged himself in his apartment.