The Last Days of New Paris

NOTES Some Manifs, Details, and their Sources

“It’s the Vélo!”: The bicycle-woman is from Leonora Carrington’s 1941 pen-and-ink work, I am an Amateur of Velocipedes. Though Thibaut was scandalized at the sight, in her drawing, Carrington also depicted a rider on her figureheaded machine.

As everyone gathered watched the black virtue: The phrase “black virtue”—“La Vertu noire”—was my informant’s. Based on this, and on his description of the presence-filled darkness behind the glass, the chaos of colors in the house seems to have been a manif of Roberto Matta’s oil painting of the same name.

There are worse things than garden airplane traps: Around 1935, Max Ernst painted more than one Garden Airplane Trap, landscapes in which vivid, feathery, fungal, anemone-like flowers overgrow broken planes.

Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies: Winged figures are hardly culturally unprecedented, but the particular flying bourgeoisie described seem to me emergent from Ernst’s 1934 collage, Une semaine de bonté: from the Tuesday of that “week of kindness,” its figures cut from catalogues and chimera-ed with draconic wings.

mono- and bi- and triplane geometries: The horrifying colorless aerial shapes that predate like antimatter are from René Magritte’s 1937 painting, Le Drapeau noir. It’s been claimed that the work was inspired by the bombing of Guernica: in the skies of New Paris its manifs seem like remorseless machinic iterations of some Thanatos.

Huge sunflowers root all over: Though he did not explicitly refer to it, there was something in the scale of the sunflowers Thibaut described and the unease with which he described them that makes me suspect the progenitor of these oversized specimens of what Dorothea Tanning called the “most aggressive of flowers” is manifest from her 1943 painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which a colossal, balefully glowing specimen threatens two girls.

up-thrust snakes that are their stems: These snake-held, eye-and-heart-petaled plants, the Lovers’ Flower, were drawn for André Breton (“quite clumsily,” he gracelessly reports) by “Nadja,” the woman we now know to be Léona Delacourt, and reproduced in his 1928 quasi-novel named for her.

human hands crawl under spiral shells: Dora Maar’s uncanny photo-collage Sans Titre (1934) is the source of the shelled hand manifs. In the war notebooks he showed me, Thibaut describes a fishing village of tents below the Quai d’Auteuil. “People dredge with wire, bring up spiral crustaceans that crawl the wet sand sluggishly on human fingers and thumbs. Painted nails. The locals boil them. They winkle steaming hand-meat from the shells and eat without cannibal shame.”

each shark is hollow-backed, with a canoe seat: In 1929, the Belgian journal Variétés printed the results of several Surrealist games. In “If, When,” one player writes a conditional and another, without looking, a main clause, which are then combined into a new proposition. “If,” Elsie Houston mooted, “tigers could prove how grateful they are to us,” then, the photographer Suzanne Muzard concluded, “sharks would allow themselves to be used as canoes.” As in New Paris, it seems, sharks might sometimes do.

the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up: Just as the Eiffel Tower is the most iconic image of Paris in our own world, so its astoundingly truncated, floating pinnacle is in Thibaut’s. In his Paris and the Surrealists, George Melly remarks of the tower in passing that during one discussion about “embellishing” Paris, “it was proposed that ‘only the top half be left.’” I’ve been unable to find any other mention of this mysterious suggestion, which clearly cleaved with the dynamics of the S-Blast.

an impossible composite of tower and human … a pair of women’s high-heeled feet: The helmeted figure that investigated the young Thibaut appears to be manifest from a 1927 exquisite corpse created by André Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy.

enervation infecting house after house: I have not found a specific source in Céline’s work for the manif of enervation mentioned. The overall sense described, of course, permeates his work.

Enigmarelle, foppish robot staggered out of an exhibition guide: Enigmarelle was a freakish machine figure with ringletted hair and a vacuous wax smile. The Surrealists were fascinated by the “Man of Steel,” supposedly created by the American inventor Frederick Ireland in 1904, and popular in vaudeville. They promised it would attend their 1938 exhibition (it did not). What was without question a fake in our world appears to have become, in New Paris, real.

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.

a spoon covered with fur: The spoon that Thibaut half expected to find often accompanies a similarly furred cup, he said, and is of course manifest from Meret Oppenheim’s famous assemblage, sometimes known as Breakfast in Fur. A reasonable minority of the spoons left in New Paris are, apparently, now furred.

“‘Those who are asleep … are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.’”: Géographie nocturne’s opening line, which Thibaut quoted, is from Herakleitos. It, along with La Main à plume, was printed in 1941.

“Ithell Colquhoun?”: Colquhoun, in our reality, was an unusual and minor artist who had been expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940. She retained a lifelong fascination for the occult, particularly Kabbala, and was a member of various magically inclined orders and groups over the years. She was later the author of the odd hermetic novel Goose of Hermogenes.

“‘Confusedly … forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’”: Robert Desnos’s description of the forest dates from 1926, from the piece “Sleep Spaces.”

those rushing futurist plane-presences: Launched with a manifesto in 1929, “aeropittura”—“aeropainting”—was a heavily fascist-influenced iteration of second-generation futurism in Italy. It was associated with Benedetta Cappa, Enrico Prampolini, “Tato” (Guglielmo Sansoni), Fortunato Depero, Fillia and Tullio Crali. It offered its quasi-abstraction in breathless service to imagined speed and bombastic propaganda, and to quasi-religious fascist iconography, such as Gerardo Dottori’s 1933 portrait of Mussolini, Il Duce. It was the frenetic angular plane-presences of aeropittura that appear to have manifested occasionally in New Paris.

“Fauves? … The negligible old star?”: The fauvism of André Derain, referenced here, was tolerated and, to a degree, celebrated in the Vichy regime. New Paris is home to a few too-bright figures walked vaguely from his images. A short and elliptical six-line poem by Gertrude Stein gives its name—and, in New Paris, its unpleasant manifest quiddity—to the manif known as the negligible old star.

A giant’s pissoir: It was Paul Éluard, in 1933, in the collective discussion on the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, who suggested the trans­mogri­ficat­ion of the Arc de Triomphe into a urinal.

a great sickle-headed fish … a woman made up of outsized pebbles: The fish with its huge orange crescent head was one of many manifs emerged from the vivid monsters of Wilfredo Lam. The figure of the stone woman cropped up more than once in Thibaut’s testimony. He sketched it for me, and it was from that that I was able eventually to identify the manif as Meret Oppenheim’s 1938 painting Stone Woman. And there is, indeed, something particularly arresting about the simple image, even among so much strangeness. I’m not able to express exactly what it is. But I think it may lie in the fact that because we have heard, many times, in fairy tales, of people being turned to stone, and because we’ve seen statues, we know what we think something called a “stone woman” must look like. But Oppenheim’s reclining, resting woman is composed instead, jarringly, of a handful of loosely coagulated pebbles. We sense their tactility, we know how they will fit in our hands. But the chop of the water at her ankles shows that the woman is appropriately tall, and that these carefully rendered smooth stones are wildly out of scale. That problematic of scale, as much as the fact that the woman is rock, is what is so jarring.

the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones: Breton’s suggestion for the “irrational embellishment” of Palais Garnier, the opera house, was that it become a perfume fountain, and that its staircase be reconstructed “in the bones of prehistoric animals.”

Le Chabanais: The extraordinary and macabre fate of Le Chabanais is manifest from Tristan Tzara’s proposed “embellishment” of 1933. Of the famous brothel, he demands, “[f]ill it with transparent lava and after solidification demolish the outside walls.” This, horrifyingly, is what has occurred in New Paris, setting around all those within. They are frozen, suspended, staring and unrotting in eternal surprise, like insects in amber.

A vegetal puppet, stringy, composite floral thing: The vegetal puppets are manifs from a 1938 work of that name by the Spanish-Mexican anarchist and artist Remedios Varo. Twisted, anguished, fibrous and sliding figures against a dark background, here and there they wear faint traces of human features visible.

Celebes: Max Ernst’s 1921 painting, Celebes, or The Elephant Celebes, is one of the most celebrated and instantly recognizable works in the Surrealist canon. The vast actualization of it—a strange, terrifying quasirobot elephant, derived in shape from an image Ernst once saw of a Sudanese corn bin—has become one of the most well-known in New Paris. It leaves a trail on its wanderings through the city, Thibaut told me. Where it stops to rest it leaves pools of sticky yellow grease.

The sun over Paris isn’t an empty-hearted ring: The “sol niger,” the black sun, sometimes with a hole at its core, is an image borrowed from alchemy and popular with the Surrealists. Max Ernst painted it repeatedly, as part of his “forest” works, in the 1920s.

smoke figures wafting in and out of presence: Wolfgang Paalen, the Austrian-Mexican painter, created the semiautomatic method that led to the “fumages” manifest here in the late 1930s, by holding his paper or canvas over a lit candle or oil lamp so the soot and smoke discolored it, moving it so the marks extended into vaguely recognizable shapes. Over these figures of evanescent schmutz he would then layer ink and/or paint, amending, adding details and texture.

“The horse head.”: Thibaut was later to see her photograph of what Sam called “the horse head.” It was a tall and sinister robed figure, staring at the camera, fingering a crucifix in its bulky three-fingered hand. As much, he said, as the cast to a head was equine, it was canine, and savagely fanged. I believe this to be a manif from Leonora Carrington’s 1941 drawing, Do You Know My Aunt Eliza?

Seligmann. Colquhoun. Ernst and de Givry: The Surrealists had a long interest in divination, the occult, the hermetic and alchemical and traditions of witchcraft. As well as Ithell Colquhoun, among many other figures who exemplify this tradition are Grillot de Givry (whose 1929 book Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes the Surrealists enthusiastically greeted) and Kurt Seligmann, and the inspirations Nicolas Flamel, Hermes Trismegistus, Agrippa and Joséphin “Sar” Péladan.

“‘On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Embellishment of a City.’”: The source of so much of the matter of New Paris, the extraordinary questionnaire-style article about the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, “Sur certaines possibilités d’embellissement irrationnel d’une ville” dates, as noted, from 1933, from issue 6 of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The piece asks, of seven Surrealists, “[s]hould one keep, move, modify, transform or remove” thirty-one varied and eccentrically chosen Parisian sites (though none of those asked give answers for all of them). Those questioned are Andre Bréton, Paul Éluard, Arthur Harfaux, Maurice Henry, the redoubtable Trotskyist Benjamin Péret, Tristan Tzara, and Georges Wenstein. Not particularly widely cited in the English-language literature on the movement in our timeline, it is obvious from his story that in Thibaut’s, this piece has become central to the manifestational nature of New Paris.

“‘Chemical-blue, twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh?’”: The description of the manif inhabitants of the forests that Thibaut quotes comes from the Martinican poet and theorist of Négritude Aimé Césaire, from his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), published initially in 1939, and in expanded version (in our reality), with a fervent encomium from Breton, in 1947. Césaire, in his original, is not merely describing but invoking the ghosts that manifest in New Paris: “Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of human skin.”

a feathered sphere the size of a fist: The feathered lookers that feed on the sight of Thibaut and Sam are manifs of the 1937 painting Object-Phantom by the astonishing Czech artist known as Toyen, after rejecting the name Marie Čermínová, (and, in Czech grammar, the feminine gender). Toyen’s work seems to have had a strong influence on the topography and inhabitants of New Paris, after the S-Blast.

a winged monkey with owl’s eyes: The monkey on the windowsill is instantly recognizable as a manif of the beast crouching at the feet of the semi-nude woman in a doorway in Dorothea Tanning’s 1942 painting The Birthday.

It stands like a person under a great weight … hedgerow chic: They did not invent the game of “Consequences,” but at 54 rue du Château in the late teens or early 1920s, the Surrealists certainly developed it, giving it the name by which we now know it—“Exquisite Corpse.” They raised it to a, perhaps the, central place in all their methodologies. Simone Kahn describes the technique and its importance: “On one of those idle, weary nights which were quite numerous in the early days of Surrealism… the Exquisite Corpse was invented… The technique of transmission was readily found: the sheet would be folded after the first player’s drawing, three or four of its lines passing beyond the fold. The next player would start by prolonging these lines and giving them shape, without having seen the first. From then on, it was delirium.” “[W]e had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity,” Breton said.

There are countless beautiful examples in the archives. Some are simple lines of black ink on paper; some are carefully colored; some are much more complex and time-consuming cut-and-paste works. Grotesque, playful, sinister, combining the iconography of politics, the components of a bestiary, industrial machinery, and dream grammar. The collaborations include the work of Oscar Dominguez, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Naville, Jeannette Tanguy, Gerardo Lizárraga, Greta Knutson, Valentine Hugo, Breton, Max Morise, André Masson, Nusch Éluard, Picasso, Man Ray, Duchamp, and many others.

The exquisite corpse of which Thibaut and Sam became unlikely companions—which can be seen as the frontispiece of this book—is manif of a 1938 composite collage of stuck-together engraved images by André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Jacqueline Lamba. It stands, a tottering pile of parts, and looks out from below its caterpillar hat with a vatic melancholy.

everyone … feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase: Thibaut was very specific about this anxiousness he felt in the moment described, putting me in mind of Pierre Roy’s 1927 or 1928 oil painting, Danger on the Stairs, of a large snake descending and crawling, toward the viewer.

They are in rubble full of birdcages … a baby’s face the size of a room: The shooting ranges are manifs from Toyen’s various drawings of that title, dating from 1939 to 1940, variations of the flat, troubling, and troubled landscapes. All the components and inhabitants of these stretches Thibaut described to me are from these images: the giant baby’s head, for example, is depicted in Tir IV / The Shooting Gallery.

a storm of birds: Birds recur throughout Surrealist iconography, and this collective bird mentioned, the dancing figure Thibaut saw in the sky, may be Loplop, Max Ernst’s “Bird Superior.”

Chabrun, Léo Malet and Tita: The role of these and other stalwarts of La Main à plume, the clandestine Surrealist group, is, of course, more dramatic in New Paris (not that it was uninteresting or without incident in ours).

Thibaut had fought the Carlingue once, alongside Laurence Iché: I tried repeatedly to persuade Thibaut to speak more of his Main à plume comrades but he was resistant, burdened, it seemed to me, with a respect and mourning that muted him for reasons he could not articulate: their death clearly weighed very heavily on him. Particularly Iché’s. In our timeline, Iché survived the war and lived until 2007. For reasons I can’t explain, including to myself, I did not tell him this.

The manifs he described fighting alongside, that Iché was able to bring forth and direct, come from her poem “I Prefer Your Uneasiness Like a Dark Lantern,” published—in our reality—in Au fil du vent in 1942. There she writes of “[t]he eagle-headed caterpillar,” “the wind-haired eagle,” and “the bath of shredded mirrors.”

Iché modeled at various times for several artists, including her father, the sculptor René Iché, a resistance activist with the Groupe du musée de l’Homme. In 1940, she was the model for his bronze La Déchirée—The Torn—a statuette of a semi-naked, blind woman reaching for the sky. This histrionic allegory for France under Nazi occupation was smuggled to London, where it was given to de Gaulle. He kept it on his desk, and it became something of a symbol of the Resistance. In our reality, the statue later disappeared (Thibaut had never heard of it, so its fate in his world I don’t know). This was not a great loss to art.

Sacré-Cœur: It was Breton who suggested, as one of his “irrational embellishments,” that Sacré-Cœur should become a tram depot, painted black. He also claimed it should be transported to the northern region of France, the Beauce. This, obviously, did not occur.

a ladder of sinewy muscled arms: The ladders of thick arms gripping each other, emerging from the earth and supporting each other at each elbow, leaning against walls, are manifs from an ink drawing by Tita, Les Bâtisseurs de ruines, printed in Transfusion du verbe in 1941. Other aspects of the landscape of New Paris, as Thibaut described them to me, also seem derived from illustrations from that journal—stones like praying mantis claws, a windowed hand growing from the ground, manifs from Aline Gagnaire’s illustration in the same issue, for example.

A huge featureless manif woman holed by drawers … dolls crawling crablike: The drawered, headless woman Thibaut imagines Sam considering is from Dalí’s 1937 painting The Burning Giraffe. That famous giraffe has also, he told me, more than once galloped through New Paris, pouring out smoke, but the huge propped-up women, extruding drawers from their legs and chests, leaves shedding in drifts from the tree-boughs where should have been their heads, are the more dangerous and threatening manifs. Their drawers slide open and shut hungrily.

The dolls mentioned are manifs of Hans Bellmer’s notorious and grotesque sculptures of young women’s body-parts reconfigured into lubricious and frightening formations.

“‘My pajamas balsam hammer gilt with azure.’”: Simone Yoyotte, from whose poem Thibaut’s pajamas were a manif, was from Martinique. She was a collaborator of the Parisian Surrealist Group before her death in 1933, at the age of twenty-three. More important, she, along with her brother Pierre, was an activist in the Légitime Défense (Self-Defense) group. It was in their journal, of the same name, that this poem was published, in 1932. The group was formed on Rue Tournon in 1932 by the Martinican poets and philosophers Etienne Léro, Jules Monnerat, René Ménil, and five others, including the Yoyottes. None were above the age of twenty-five. The extraordinary, explosive journal, with its uncompromising anticolonial, Marxist and Surrealist interventions, was later to be described by Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the so-called “fathers” of Négritude, as “the most insurrectional document ever signed by people of color.”

Trapped in their Marseille hinterland … the Surrealists had drawn new suits, a cartographic rebellion: The origin story of the “Marseille game,” the deck of cards that the captive Surrealists created and described to Parsons, is the same in our timeline as in Thibaut’s. The full details of the cards and the artists who depicted them were as follows:

BLACK STARS, FOR DREAMS:

Ace; Oscar Dominguez

Genius—Lautréamont, the author of the Surrealist favorite The Songs of Maldoror; Wilfredo Lam

Siren—Lewis Carroll’s Alice; Wilfredo Lam

Magus—Freud; Oscar Dominguez

RED FLAMES, FOR LOVE AND DESIRE:

Ace; Max Ernst

Genius—Baudelaire; Jacqueline Lamba

Siren—the Portuguese Nun, the supposed author of a set of passionate love letters of the seventeenth century (now thought to be fictional); André Masson

Magus—the poet and philosopher Novalis; André Masson

BLACK LOCKS, FOR KNOWLEDGE:

Ace; André Breton

Genius—Hegel; Victor Brauner

Siren—Hélène Smith, the nineteenth-century French psychic; Victor Brauner

Magus—Paracelsus; André Breton

RED WHEELS, FOR REVOLUTION:

Ace; Jacqueline Lamba

Genius—the Marquis de Sade; Jacques Hérold

Siren—Lamiel (the heroine of the novel of the same name, by Stendhal); Jacques Hérold

Magus—Pancho Villa; Max Ernst

The jokers were images of Père Ubu, the monstrous swearing clown-tyrant of the plays of that beloved Surrealist precursor Alfred Jarry. The image chosen was by Jarry himself.

In our timeline, the designs were published in the Surrealist journal VVV in 1943, in New York, some reworked a little. Mostly this was just a matter of tidying up the images, but there were more substantial changes. The Ace of Revolutions, for example, became a wheel seemingly balanced on a spatter-pattern of blood, rather than, as in Lamba’s original design, a waterwheel churning blood. The radical-melancholy and foreboding sense of blood as a motor for change was thus, uncha­racte­risti­cally for the movement, bowdlerized away.

In the reality of New Paris, the cards were never published, though they did, obviously, appear within the city, in card form no less, as immensely powerful manif items, capable of invoking their geniuses, their sirens and magi. Thibaut claimed to me that it is not just the face cards but the aces and number cards that were present in Paris. What they manifest, and how, he did not know.

“A lobster. With wires…”: It would be surprising if Salvador Dalí’s absurdly iconic Lobster Telephone of 1936 did not appear in Thibaut’s reconfigured world.

scratch-figures etched with keys: In the 1930s, Brassaï famously photographed the images scrawled on and scratched crudely into Paris walls. In New Paris, the faces (as they mostly were) he obsessively captured in black and white are live, and full of motion. If, Thibaut said, you put your ears close to the walls, they move their scratch mouths, and whisper to you in a cementy language no human understands.

a great shark mouth … smiling like a stupid angel: This manif is from a text by Alice Rahon, from 1942, in which she describes, at the horizon of the city, “a great shark mouth appear[ing] with the smile of a stupid angel.”

It is a sandbumptious: The sandbumptious is a freakish beast manifest from the work March 7 1937—4 (Sandbumptious) by the extraordinary Grace Pailthorpe. Pailthorpe, now an obscure figure, was described in 1936 by Breton as “the best and most truly Surrealist” of the British Surrealists (which could be read, admittedly, as damning with faint praise). She had been a surgeon in France during the First World War, and went on to be a pioneer in British psychoanalysis. Born in 1883, she turned to painting late, at the age of fifty-two, when she met the artist Reuben Mednikoff, who was to become her partner (in another overlap between the worlds of the occult and Surrealism they met at a party hosted by Victor Neuberg, a Satanist and one of Crowley’s lovers). Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940 in a bout of toxic infighting (Conroy Maddox called Pailthorpe an “Ogre”) but the spirit of her work clearly remained allied enough in spirit to be made manifest in New Paris after the S-Blast.

the Lion of Belfort: The Lion of Belfort is one of the Parisian sites irrationally embellished in 1933, but none of the suggestions from the article exactly concord with Thibaut’s description here. The stone figures through which Thibaut walked seem, rather, perhaps to be refugees from the “Lion of Belfort” section of Max Ernst’s collage novel Une semaine de bonté.

the Statue of Liberty: The semi-living replacement of the—real—statue in the Jardin du Luxembourg is manifest from a grotesque 1934 collage of the Statue of Liberty by Czech Surrealist Jindřich Štyrsky.

where the Palace of Justice once was … sawdust swirls from the windows and doors of Sainte-Chapelle: The form taken by the Palace of Justice in New Paris is a combination of the “irrational embellishments” suggested by Benjamin Péret, who proposed that it be replaced by a swimming pool, and by André Breton, who wanted it replaced by a huge graffito visible from planes above. It was Tristan Tzara who proposed that the Sainte-Chapelle be filled with sawdust.

the squat square towers to either side of its sunburst central window: The two towers of New Paris’s Notre-Dame have been irrationally embellished somewhat as per Breton’s suggestion: he suggested they be replaced by glass containers full of blood and sperm. Why the blood appears to be a blood-vinegar mix, and why the towers are silos, rather than the giant bottles of his suggestion, Thibaut did not claim to know.

Arno Breker’s looming, kitsch, retrograde marble figures: Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, the Austrian-German and German “official” Nazi artists, were sculptors specializing in grandiose sinister “Aryana,” held to be the antipode of “degenerate,” especially “Jewish” art.

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.

The watercolor of young Hitler by young Hitler has no specificity. It is blank. Incompetence makes it a death-drive’s dream of itself, in pale skin.