THE FACTS OF LIFE
395
But while she is eating breakfast, an awful emptiness for her
hoy Harry spreads within her, and she bursts into tears.
Louis, who is quite intelligent, often cannot resist being cruel
and supercilious to Ronnie, so that Ronnie feels like punching him
in
the nose-but then suddenly, at a poignant touch, even sug·
gested by his own monologue, he relapses into natural melancholia.
"To me of course," says he suavely to Ronnie, "your Jewish prob–
lem doesn't exist. My paternal parent 12th removed was Joseph
Karo, the author of the
Shulchan Aruch,
or
Table
of the observ·
ances; he had established the lineage back to Joseph son of Eli, so
that obviously, if we may lend any credence to the Gentile gospels,
we go back to David the son of Jesse and further; but you're a
Russian Jew. On my mother's side, I am related to the convert
Leo the Hebrew; but that blood thruout is tainted by conversions;
my three cousins, Georges de Duchesse, Georges Catala, and
Georges Catala-de Duchesse were all converts of Maritain. My
cousin Georges Catala-de Duchesse is the Abbot of St. Germain
des Pres, an idol-worshipper, as I told him last summer.
It
ought
to be clear by now, I said, that only Maimonides conceived the
relation of God and Man in a way helpful and necessary to the
Modern Age. This is my faith.
'If
every Jew would read the
Mishneh Torah,
he would become a perfect snob,' cries Louis Parigi
with pride, 'and would set tradition against tradition and not take
the insults lying down or by appealing merely to good sense!'
Besides, in our poetry both the Parigis and the de Duchesses look
for inspiration to the Prophets. My cousin Georges de Duchesse,
on the very eve of his baptism wrote his rime royal
Habakuk;
but
'Habakuk,' as Voltaire says, 'etait capable de tout!' But even in
writing my
Anacreontics
I have drawn on the dipsomaniac rhythms
of your Chassidim. And by the way, my cousin Georges Catala
was married to an 8th remove descendant of the Vilna Gaon, and
her suicide was the cause of his conversion, which goes to show
what comes of marrying with the Ashkenazim. (Are you also
related lo the Vilna Gaon, like all the other Lithuanians?) On the
National issue, I am like Judah ha-Levi an allegorical Zionist; but
the vulgar desire of a temporal habitation-this destroys,
ilS
I see
it, just our sacred distinction from the
Goyim"-(he
pronounces
Go-yeem
as if he had stepped from a Christian fastness in Aragon
