Transportation

One day Uncle Édouard got the brilliant idea of going up to the Genitron office to sound out the possibility of a little job for me. He had another reason, he wanted to consult him about his bicycle pump . . . He'd known de Pereires a long time, since the publication of his seventy-second handbook, the one that people still read more than any of the others, that was most widely distributed all over the world and had done the most for his reputation, his fame: How to equip a bicycle in all latitudes and climates for the sum of seventeen francs ninety-five, including all accessories and nickel-plated parts. At the time of which I am speaking this little manual published by the specialized firm of Berdouillon and Malarmée, on the Quai des Augustins, was in its three-hundredth printing! . . . Today it is hard to conceive of the enthusiasm, the general craze that this piddling, insignificant work aroused when it came out . . . But around 1900 How to Equip a Bicycle by Courtail-Martin des Pereires was a kind of catchism for the neophyte cyclist, his bedside reading, his Bible . . . Still, Courtail never ceased to be shrewdly self-critical. A little thing like that didn't turn his head. Naturally his rising fame brought him bigger and bigger mountains of mail, more visitors, more tenacious pests, extra work, and more acrimonious controversies . . . Very little pleasure . . . People came to consult him from Greenwich and Valparaiso, from Colombo and Blankenberghe, on the various problems connected with the "oblique" or "flexible" saddle . . . how to avoid strain on the ball bearings . . . how to grease the axles . . . the best hydrous mixture for rust-proofing the handlebars . . . He was famous all right, but the fame he got out of bicycles stuck in his craw. In the last thirty years he had scattered his booklets like seeds throughout the world, he had written piles of handbooks that were really a good deal more worthwhile, digests and explanations of real value and stature . . . In the course of his career he had explained just about everything . . . the fanciest and most complex of theories, the wildest imaginings of physics and chemistry, the budding science of radio-polarity . . . sidereal photography . . . He'd written about them all, some more, some less. It gave him a profound feeling of disillusionment, real melancholy, a depressing kind of amazement to see himself honored, adulated, glorified for the stuff he had written about inner tubes and freewheeling . . . In the first place he personally detested bicycles . . . He'd never ridden one, he'd never learned how . . . And on the mechanical side he was even worse . . . He'd never have been able to take off a wheel, not to mention the chain . . . He couldn't do anything with his hands except on the horizontal bar and the trapeze . . . Actually he was the world's worst butterfingers, worse than twelve elephants . . . Just trying to drive a nail in he'd mash at least two of his fingers, he'd make hash of his thumb, it was a massacre the minute he touched a hammer. I won't even mention pliers, he'd have ripped out the wall, the ceiling, wrecked the whole room . . . There wouldn't have been anything left . . . He didn't have two cents' worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep . . . The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit . . . The result was wreckage . . . He could tackle a problem in theory . . . But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room . . . or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout "Let her go" . . . and roll up in a ball to land when he was through . . . Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn't even move anything without dropping it or upsetting it . . . or getting it in his eye . . . You can't be an expert at everything . . . You've got to resign yourself . . .

-- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1966), 331-33.