Fiction

The Mysterious Barricades

François Couperin’s piece for harpsichord Les Barricades Mystérieuses has caught the imagination of many. In these pages I discuss the piece and its title and gather its echoes in music, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, the visual arts, film, and performance.

On July 1st, 1907, Marcel Proust organized a dinner and concert. He himself chose the programme of music for piano or violin and piano, and it included works by Fauré, Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Chabrier. It also included Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses. (The details of the programme are given by Jean-Yves Tadié, on p. 487-8 of the English translation of his Marcel Proust: A Life.)

Edmond Jaloux (1878-1949) published a book Les Barricades Mystérieuses (Paris: Bernard Grasset) in 1922. I conjecture that Jaloux composed this short novel as an attempt to recreate in words the sensibility he found in Couperin’s music. The book tells the story of Guy, Wanda and Martial, as narrated by a reminiscing Guy. He and Wanda grew up as neighbors and friends. When, as a young man, he introduces his friend Martial to Wanda, they fall in love. Guy does everything he can to promote the romance. When Wanda announces to Guy that she and Martial will get married, it becomes evident to Guy that he loves Wanda. Eventually, Wanda becomes bored with Martial, breaks of the engagement and begins a romance with Guy. Early on during these events, Wanda plays to Guy Les Barricades Mystérieuses:

Later, the romance between Guy and Wanda also begins to go wrong. Another performance of the Couperin emphasizes its mournful qualities:

Finally, Wanda breaks off the engagement with Guy too. She explains:

I hid the truth from you for as long as I could, I made superhuman efforts to play my part in your comedy. One day, I just couldn’t keep it up… There is some sort of mysterious barrier in me that stops me from ever being happy. My will has nothing to do with it…(100).

Wrapping up the whole sorry story, Guy concludes:

Well, there’s the sad story that goes through my mind whenever some old almanac informs me that it is the 1st of June, or when, by chance, the morbid, disturbing or languorous strains of Couperin reach my ears. But with time, I’ve ended up hating all music. (105-6).

The translations above are my own (with advice and help from Marc Brudzinski). The French is very overwrought and defies easy translation.

Also in 1922, over in England, a reference to the piece, and its title, appeared in The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison:

She put up a finger. “Hark,” she said. “Your daughter playing Les Barricades.”

They stood listening. “She loves playing,” he whispered. “I’m glad we taught her to play.” Presently he whispered again, “Les Barricades Mystérieuses. What inspired Couperin with that enchanted name? And only you and I know what it really means. Les Barricades Mystérieuses.”

In this connection, it is interesting to look at the comment on the Couperin piece by composer Luca Francesconi, quoted on the Music page of this site: “infinite, interminable, with neither head nor tail.” Is not this exactly what the symbol of Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail, is supposed to signify?

While this may not be the answer to what inspired Couperin with the name, it may, if Eddison heard in the piece what Francesconi does, explain why he invoked it at the beginning of this novel. (In fact, the ‘enchanted name’ seems much more apt as a description of the sensibility of Eddison’s other three novels, the Zimiamvian trilogy, which thematize the notion of separation and disjuncture.)

Glyn Daniel (1914-86) had an illustrious career as an archaeologist at St. John’s College, Cambridge and was also active in extending research in archaeology to a wider audience through publications, radio and television. He was well-known as the chair of a panel of archaeological experts on the television show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? through the mid-50’s. In addition to his archaeological activities, he published two mystery novels: The Cambridge Murders (originally published in 1945 under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees) and Welcome Death (1954). The novels feature, as amateur sleuth, a Cambridge archaeology professor Sir Richard Cherrington. Sir Richard is a don at an imaginary college, Fisher College, located between St. John’s (Daniel’s own college) and Trinity. Various  sources state that Sir Richard is based on Daniel himself. However, Norman Hammond (American Antiquity 54(2), 1989, p. 237) rather more authoritatively tells us that the character was modeled on fellow archaeologist – and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? participant – Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Sir Richard’s age (relative to Daniel’s at the time of the novels’ composition) and his peerage suggest Sir Mortimer; his academic location, a Cambridge college “next to” St. John’s, suggests Daniel. Perhaps the safest conclusion is that Sir Richard is a composite figure, drawing on both these models.

The novels are said to be of the Van Dine school of mysteries. Like others of the school, “Daniel writes about the intelligentsia, with wit and sophistication. The Cambridge Murders is at its most charming when it is recreating traditional life within that school. Like the Van Dineans, Daniel produces a very complex plot whose chief interest is its storytelling as a whole, complete with a multitude of rich detail. In the Van Dine school tradition, Daniel is especially interested in the movements of the suspects around the murder scene at the time of the crime. These are looked at exhaustively, and one can follow them with a map of the college. Also like Van Dine school writers, Daniel likes to get new perspectives on such movements, new approaches that bring to light hidden patterns. Daniel also follows Van Dine school tradition in having a number of pleasantly surreal touches deck out his story” (Mike Grost).

In the late 1940’s, Daniel composed a draft of another Sir Richard Cherrington mystery, entitled The Mysterious Barricades. The novel was never published, but the draft is in the Daniel archive at St. John’s College, Cambridge. In this novel, Sir Richard is in India, delivering a series of archaeological lectures during WWII. The background for the plot is provided by British Intelligence in Delhi. In fact, Daniel served in British Intelligence in India during the war so, as with the academic setting of The Cambridge Murders, we can be assured of a certain authenticity.

Besides supplying the title, Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses plays an essential role in the novel. On his way to Delhi, Sir Richard spends the night at the Sind Hotel in Karachi. In the room next door, a young soldier, Chandler, whom Sir Richard had befriended during their several-day journey from England is murdered. Chandler was going to Delhi to start working for British Intelligence there. So when Sir Richard arrives in Delhi, he continues to investigate the murder. The plot of the novel is typically complex. In the broadest strokes, it turns out that Chandler recognized someone in Karachi who wasn’t supposed to be there and so had to be silenced. The malefactor had been working himself for British Intelligence in Delhi, but as an Irishman with a grudge against Britain, he was actually spying for the Japanese. The investigation becomes intertwined with another, older murder near Delhi, in a place called Murree. (There is evidence that the novel was originally to have been called The Muree [sic] Murder.) This was done by the dead man’s wife and her lover. The Couperin piece becomes relevant to the Murree murder, though this only emerges gradually. (Fans of The Cambridge Murders may be pleased to learn that Giles Farnaby also turn up in Delhi for a small role in the novel.)

Here is Sir Richard, discussing Conningsby, one of the intelligence officials with Anne Longford, the friend, and perhaps more, of Chandler:

Sir Richard mentions Conningsby’s tick to some of the investigating police officers.

“You might ask him another question,” said Cherrington. “Ask him why, when he is nervous or excited, he whistles to himself, and slightly out of tune, the melody from Couperin’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses.”

The other three stared at Cherrington uncomprehendingly; indeed Sir Richard was rather puzzled himself why he had said what he did. (90)

In due course, a witness, a young soldier trained in classical music, comes forward with testimony that indicates a man walking away from the scene of the Murree murder was whistling a tune. This leads to suspicion falling on Conningsby as the murderer in that case. The actual villain, though, was too clever by half. Sir Richard interviews the witness:

So Sir Richard infers that the hapless Conningsby is being framed for the Murree murder. While Conningsby is still under arrest, he is visited by Sir Richard and the police officer Henley:

And so it does. The real murderers at Murree are apprehended and the death of Chandler, linked to espionage, is also explained. It also turns out the Sir Francis Cooper was part of the espionage ring. His lovely gramophone concerts had allowed the conspirators to meet. He kills himself on discovery.

The final chapter of the book, chapter 17, is entitled “The Mysterious Barricades.” Here it is in full:

(In the transcriptions from Daniel’s draft, above, I have silently amended his punctuation, which is somewhat careless. The drawing of Daniel by R. Tolland and the excerpts from his MS are reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College Cambridge.)

Surely one of the strangest and most literal responses to the title of the Couperin piece is the children’s story “The Mysterious Barricades” by the English author of fantasy and supernatural novels and stories, Joan Aiken (1924-2004). The story is in her 1955 collection More Than You Bargained For (London: Jonathan Cape). In a town at the foot of some really tall mountains, there is a small village. One day, the first stranger in ten years, Smith, comes through on a bicycle. He is on the trail of the previous stranger, Jones, who stole his canary and his music and went off into the mountains. Smith finds the canary, whom Jones had sold to a villager for a cup of tea and buys it back for the same price, producing the cup of tea from his pocket. Smith and Jones are both Civil Servants, and Jones was on his way to the Mysterious Barricades, where “Civil Servants go when they retire.” Smith pursues Jones into the fearful mountains, keeping up his courage with the verse junior Civil Servants learn when they first join the Service:

Always helpful, never hurried,
Always willing, never worried,
Serve the public, slow but surely,
Smile, however sad or poorly,
Duty done without a swerve is
Aimed at by the Civil Service.

Finally, following a very narrow path up into the mountains, he finds Jones. Neither is able to turn around or pass  the other, so narrow is the path. Jones, having wandered in the mountains for ten years, sustained only by the buns he pulls from his pocket (he hadn’t risen far enough in the Service to be able to pull out cups of tea and biscuits, as Smith can), he is beginning to doubt the existence of the Mysterious Barricades. Smith suggests they play his Sonata in C Major for two flutes and continuo, the music of which Jones had stolen. Each pulls out a flute and they play. “‘It wants the continuo part’ said Smith sadly.” They play it again and the canary supplies the missing continuo. The Mysterious Barricades open up to receive them. The villagers below never look up, and miss the whole thing. An illustration, by Pat Marriott, accompanies the story. It is reproduced in full size, with some further information, on the Visual Arts page of this site.

According to the London Times, this story was read aloud at a memorial service for Joan Aiken in 2004. It was also read, by Miriam Margoyles, on the BBC on September 24th, 2006 as part of a series of five stories by Aiken.

The Mysterious Barricades (Douglas, Isle of Man: Times Press, 1964) is a novel by the English musicologist Cedric Glover. Fans of Peter Schaeffer’s Amadeus will be pleased to learn that the novel is about the legend of Mozart’s murder by Salieri and according to the author’s son, Myles Glover, the original cast of the play were given the novel to read in rehearsal, at the suggestion of Ursula Vaughan Williams. Glover asked Ursula Vaughan Williams (wife of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and a prolific poet) to supply some verse for his epigraph. See the Poetry page of this site for the resulting poem.

The main character of the novel, a cellist in 1930s London, after hearing a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operatic setting of Pushkin’s verse drama Mozart and Salieri, comes to believe that he is himself a reincarnation of Salieri. He relates a series of events in which people resembling the main characters in the Mozart-Salieri legend play out a kind of parallel to the alleged murder.

The quasi-scientific attitude to the occult and the obsession over making clear the (multiple) means by which the narrative we read was put together give Glover’s novel  a strong resemblance to some of the novels of Bram Stoker. The book has many charms and there are passages of very fine writing in it, such as the following, describing the intermission in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem:

I recognized plenty of familiar faces; I had seen the owners countless times and to me they seemed, as it were, part of the trappings of the hall. I could not think of them as having any life apart from it or as following the ordinary avocations of mankind. Some even made tentative signs of recognition as I passed, possibly as a token of appreciation that I, like the programme sellers and the doorkeepers, was at my post. We were all somehow mutually dependent on one another for our enjoyment, though we would have fainted with horror if any one of us had so far forgotten himself as to address a remark to a fellow genius loci. (69)

The significance of the title is explained by a remark in a preface by one of the novel’s characters:

Pitland’s pitiable story goes to show how tenuous are the mysterious barricades which divide clairvoyant perception from hallucination, reality from unreality and sanity from madness. (2)

Myles Glover supplies the following account (in personal correspondence):

De gåtfulla barrikaderna (1983) is by a Swedish novelist, Bengt Söderbergh and was published in an English translation as The Mysterious Barricades (London: Peter Owen, 1986; the title in English is a literal translation of the Swedish title). The novel concerns a harpsichordist in France during the middle of the 20th century. An important event for her is her discovery, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, of the only extant manuscript of “Les Barricades Mistérieuses.” She imagines Couperin performing the piece:

The writing is obscure but the mysterious barricades seem to be keeping separate the past and the present and perhaps, in addition, life and death.

There are three different covers for the book, two associated with the Swedish original, one from the English translation:

Paul Auster‘s novel The Music of Chance (Viking, 1991) gives a prominent role to the piece and its title. The novel’s hero, Jim Nashe, is an amateur keyboard player. At the beginning of the action of the novel, he sells or gives away all his stuff and takes to the road. Before he sells his piano, “he went through several dozen of his favorite pieces, beginning with The Mysterious Barricades by Couperin and ending with Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz, hammering away at the keyboard until his fingers grew numb and he had to give up” (11). Later, owing to bad luck in a poker game, he and Pozzi, a young man he has fallen in with, becomes, in effect, indentured to two millionaires, Flower and Stone, an odd couple who got rich winning the lottery. They have bought a medieval Irish castle which they have shipped, in stones, to their estate in Pennsylvania. Instead of reassembling the stones into the original castle, they decide to build a wall with them:

“A monument, to be more precise,” Flower said. “A monument in the shape of a wall.”

“How fascinating,” Pozzi said, his voice oozing with unctuous contempt. “I can’t wait to see it.”

“Yes,” Flower said, failing to catch the kid’s mocking tone, “it’s an ingenious solution, if I do say so myself. Rather than try to reconstruct the castle, we’re going to turn it into a work of art. To my mind, there’s nothing more mysterious or beautiful than a wall. I can already see it: standing out there in the meadow, rising up like some enormous barrier against time. It will be a memorial to itself, gentlemen, a symphony of resurrected stones, and every day it will sing a dirge for the past we carry within us.”

“A Wailing Wall,” Nashe said.

“Yes,” Flower said, “a Wailing Wall. A Wall of Ten Thousand Stones. (86)

Needless to say, Nashe and Pozzi are the ones who will build it. Much later, while still working at the wall, Nashe resumes his keyboard playing on a small electronic keyboard. He concentrates on

works by pre-nineteenth-century composers: The Notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, “The Mysterious Barricades.” It was impossible for him to play this last piece without thinking about the wall, and he found himself returning to it more often than any of the others. It took just over two minutes to perform, and at no point in its slow, stately progress, with all its pauses, suspensions, and repetitions, did it require him to touch more than one note at a time. The music started and stopped, then started again, then stopped again, and yet through it all the piece continued to advance, pushing on toward a resolution that never came. Were those the mysterious barricades? Nashe remembered reading somewhere that no one was certain what Couperin had meant by that title. Some scholars interpreted it as a comical reference to women’s underclothing—the impenetrability of corsets—while others saw it as an allusion to the unresolved harmonies in the piece. Nashe had no way of knowing. As far as he was concerned, the barricades stood for the wall he was building in the meadow, but that was quite another thing from knowing what they meant. (181)

Flower’s claim that “every day [the wall] will sing a dirge for the past we carry within us” echoes the reactions of Ursula Vaughn Williams and Bengt Söderbergh noted above that the mysterious barricades have something to do with the disjuncture between past and present or past and future.

In an interview, Auster has said that the book was originally going to be entitled The Mysterious Barricades:

It’s funny, I originally had a different title for that book. It was called The Mysterious Barricades, which was the title of the Couperin piece that Nashe plays in the book. I never liked it as a title for the book, but it was the only one I had. I must have been two-thirds of the way through the book before I found The Music of Chance. I was waiting in line at the supermarket. It just came to me.

(And a rock band in David Mitchell’s novel Ghostwritten takes its name, “The Music of Chance,” from the title of Auster’s novel, so if the novel had been called The Mysterious Barricades, who knows but that the band in Mitchell’s book might have been so called too!)

This novel is far from the only connection between Auster and Couperin’s piece. A poetry journal entitled The Mysterious Barricades, edited by Christine Berl, Allen and Andra Kimball, and Henry Weinfield, was published from 1972 to 1976. Auster published something in the journal. The piece is also referred to by Auster in his novel Moon Palace (1990). The narrator, Marco Fogg, is travelling across country with a man who turns out to be his father:

Later on, when the sun began to go down, we spent more than an hour enumerating our preferences in every area of life we could think of: our favorite novels, our favorite foods, our favorite ballplayers. We must have come up with more than a hundred categories, an entire index of personal tastes. I said Roberto Clemente, Barber said Al Kaline. I said Don Quixote, Barber said Tom Jones. We both preferred Schubert over Schumann, but Barber had a weakness for Brahms, which I did not. On the other hand, he found Couperin dull, whereas I could never get enough of Les Barricades Mystérieuses. He said Tolstoy, I said Dostoyevsky. He said Bleak House, I said Our Mutual Friend. Of all the fruits known to man, we both agreed that lemons smelled the best. (290)

Fogg’s liking for the Couperin echoes earlier language in the narrative, where he speaks of crossing “some mysterious boundary deep within myself” (213) or of “gain[ing] entrance past the mute surfaces of things” (230).

Finally, in the Wayne Wang film Smoke (1995), for which Auster wrote the screenplay, one of the main characters is an author Paul Benjamin. In one scene, we see another character, Rashid, asleep with one of Benjamin’s novels in his hand. The novel is entitled The Mysterious Barricades:

Helmi Nyström, of Finland, has a dissertation, entitled Three Sides of a Wall – Obstacles and Border States in Paul Auster’s Novels, which discusses the passages quoted above and the theme of walls and barriers in Auster’s work more generally.

William Wharton‘s novel Last Lovers (New York, 1991) tells the story of an American businessman, Jack, living in Paris, who leaves his family and his job to live as a homeless painter. By chance, he meets Mirabelle, a woman in her sixties who has suffered from hysterical blindness since she was a child. Though blind, Mirabelle has acquired, and taught herself to play, a harpsichord. As she and Jack, or Jacques as she calls him, becomes friends, and then lovers, she plays for him. On the first occasion, she plays a suite by Louis Couperin. Later, she plays “Les Barricades Mistérieuses” (I try to reproduce the author’s use of font to indicate the different characters):

“Now we should stop and go to bed. But first, after all that Bach, I should like to play one of my very favorites from Monsieur François Couperin. There are eight morceaux, and this is the fifth piece in the sixth ordre. It is called ‘Les Barricades Mistérieuses.’ This would be called ‘The Mysterious Barricades’ in English, I believe. I think of my affliction sometimes as my personal barricade mistérieuse, perhaps this is why I like to play this one so much. Listen.”

She begins to play. I know the work but I’d never heard it played as Mirabelle plays it. There is the deep, dark mystery of the unknown. I can almost experience her blindness in those sections. The contrast with the lighter sections is strong and the continual recurrence of the low tones is beautifully executed. I’m enthralled. I almost lose contact. Then she is finished. I get up, turn on the light, go over, and put my arms around her from behind. She clasps her hands over mind. They are warm and must be tired. (315-6)

Jack Anderson‘s Traffic (Minneapolis: New Rivers Press, 1998) reprints a prose-poem of his called “The Mysterious Barricades: or, The Enchaînments of Memory,” which originally appeared in the magazine Chelsea. A sub-title to the piece reads “A Free Fantasia on Themes from the Ballet To the Ghost of Joseph Cornell,” and, true enough, Anderson’s piece picks up on one of Joseph Cornell’s wonderful boxes, Taglioni’s Jewel Casket (1940). The box contains glass jewels and cubes (that resemble ice-cubes). On the inside of the top there is the following text:

On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie TAGLIONI was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.

Anderson’s prose-poem tells the story of Taglioni and the highwayman but with crucial differences of detail. The story is told by a Russian ballet teacher in Milwaukee, who claims it was handed down over the generations by teachers and students at the Imperial Russian Ballet School in St. Petersburg. In this version of the story,  the highwayman prevents Taglioni from escaping by creating barricades across the road comprising the female corps de ballet accompanying her. Also traveling with her is the composer Couperin (which, of course, dates Anderson’s version to over a hundred years before Cornell’s). On returning to Paris, he composes “The Mysterious Barricades” as “a musical memento of that remarkable adventure.”

An entire, though short, chapter from Camille Laurens‘s Dans ces bras-là (2000) is devoted to the piece, and what it says about difficulties in personal relations between the sexes. I quote the chapter, “Alone with him,” from the 2004 translation by Ian Monk, In His Arms: A Novel:

Men are separated from women forever.

Just listen to Couperin’s music, for example, Les Barricades Mystérieuses. The piece lasts only about two minutes… It’s shorter than a love song but it says it all, clear as crystal: I try, I approach, I come, I come back, the air trembles, I say this and that, the same thing or practically, always rephrasing it, shading it, repeating it—I love you, maybe; but hang on, someone’s stopped me, who goes there, who are you, who on earth are you?—silence falls, the mystery remains.

Man and woman: mysterious barricades. A lesson in shadows, if you can learn from the night. (204)

Kathryn Davis‘s Versailles: A Novel (2002) reimagines the life of Marie Antoinette. The following passage represents her drumming on the arm of her chair, recalling playing the Couperin piece as a child:

My eyes failing but my ears still perfect—I could hear every whisper. Oho, look at her now, the bitch. That’ll teach her to steal our food. But why is she drumming like that on the arm of the chair?

My mother stifling a yawn as  my fingers flew across the keys of the clavichord. Les Barricades Mystérieuses. François Couperin. Sit straighter, Antonia. Do you want to end up with a hump?

To which the answer of course is no no no no no, unless to avoid it you have to die before the age of forty. (200)

Others, too, have made a connection between the Couperin piece and Marie Antoinette. See Sarah Loven’s photo Les Barricades Mistérieuses (Visual Arts page) and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (Film page).

The protagonist of Edmund White‘s story “A Good Sport” (originally in The Yale Review, vol 95, no. 3, 2007 and then, in the same year in White’s Chaos: A Novella and Stories) says:

For a year or two I took up the harpsichord just so I could play Scarlatti’s Sonata K 24 and Couperin’s “Les Barricades mystérieuses.” (151)