Imaginary dialogue between Rodolphe Salis and Alphonse Allais
by Charactorium · Alphonse Allais (1854 — 1905) · Literature · 5 min read
It is a foggy evening on the Butte, in the autumn of 1898, when Rodolphe Salis closes the Chat noir hall and seats Alphonse Allais near the stove, a bottle between them. The gas hisses, a smell of stale tobacco still lingers. For a good fifteen years they have been hoaxing each other since the first Incohérent Salons, and Salis, tonight, does not feel like joking: he wants his wittiest lodger to confess the secret of his best-kept pranks.
—Alphonse, before haunting my cabaret, you were destined for the mortar and pestle of Honfleur. How does a pharmacist end up here, chez moi?
My poor Rodolphe, my father ran a pharmacy in Honfleur and already saw me weighing arsenic and rolling pills until death. I studied pharmacy in Paris, very seriously, I swear — enough to know that a good hoax requires the same precise dosage as a remedy. Only the shop bored me to death, and the lab left me with nothing but a stubborn taste for outlandish experiments. When I came up to the Butte and you opened your door to me, I understood that journalism is ground like a drug and served every morning. I traded the mortar for the pen. My father saw it as a downfall; for me, it was the only prescription that ever cured me.
A good hoax requires the same precise dosage as a remedy.
—Do you remember our early days, when I made you editor-in-chief of my paper? Tell me what fumisme really was within these walls.
How could I forget — you entrusted me with Le Chat noir as one hands a match to an arsonist. Fumisme, my dear Salis, was not a doctrine, it was a hygiene: taking seriously what is not and laughing at what everyone reveres. In the evening, poets and songwriters arrived here with their flowing cravats, and we staged hoaxes as others stage plays. We mystified the bourgeois who paid for his beer to slum it, and he left delighted to have been fooled. You welcomed the customer with false seigneurial courtesies; I supplied the copy. We were two honest crooks selling well-turned hot air. It is the only business where the customer demands to be cheated again.
Fumisme was not a doctrine, it was a hygiene.
—Remember the Arts incohérents in 1883: you hang a completely black rectangle with a scandalous title. What did you hope to prove that day?
Ah, my famous “Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit”! A fine black rectangle, framed like a Flemish master, and the audience searching for detail. I repeated it with a pure white square — “Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige” — then a blood-red one. You laughed, because you understood before the others. I was proving nothing, Rodolphe: I was noting that the title makes the painting more surely than the paint. Give a fine name to a plain surface and the gullible will see a whole drama. Later I made a collection of it, the Album primo-avrilesque, so that the farce might have its letters patent. A well-captioned monochrome is worth any landscape: at least it does not lie about its color.
The title makes the painting more surely than the paint.
—Last year, you brought me a score without a single note. A funeral march entirely silent — explain this madness to me, my friend.
My Marche funèbre pour les obsèques d'un grand homme sourd, yes: staves, bars, repeat signs, and not a single note inside. The musician turns pages in silence, very gravely, and the audience meditates. The reasoning is ironclad, Salis, and you cannot fault it: great sorrows are silent. And since we are burying a great deaf man — what do you expect him to hear? Composing a racket for him would be an insult. It is the same logic as my collection Deux et deux font cinq: I push common sense so far that it tips into absurdity and lands right on the other side. Silence, you see, is music from which everything that tires the ear has been removed.
Silence is music from which everything that tires the ear has been removed.
—You who rhyme the impossible, regale me again: where does this mania come from, making two lines that are written oppositely sound the same?
You mean my holorimes! Two entire lines that strike the ear identically and mock each other through spelling. Listen: “Par les bois du djinn, où s'entasse de l'effroi, / Parle et bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid.” Same sound, opposite meaning — language itself is a permanent hoax, you just have to listen askew. It is my pharmacy speaking again: I weigh syllables to the centigram. I love the punchline, the aphorism that catches you on the last word. For instance, about money, I say you should take it from the poor: they have little, but there are so many of them that they each have a little. Nothing is more serious than a good joke: it takes apart the clock of the world and shows you the gears.
Language itself is a permanent hoax, you just have to listen askew.
—Our regulars think you are always cheerful. But I, who see you leave at dawn in Montmartre, tell me: what remains of the man when the hall empties?
You know me too well for me to give you the façade, Rodolphe. The night owl you push out at daybreak does not return triumphant: he returns drained, cravat undone, with the absinthe still buzzing. I get up late, I blacken my pages reluctantly because the editorial offices demand their daily fodder, and I rush to deliver my copy. They think I am light; in truth I work like a convict to appear nonchalant. Gaiety is my job before it is my mood — the hardest part is finding funny a world that is not always so. But I do not complain: I would rather manufacture laughter on demand than roll pills in Honfleur. At least here, the hoax keeps me warm.
They think I am light; I work like a convict to appear nonchalant.
—Between us: do you really believe these solid-color rectangles will last, or is it just another prank soon forgotten?
A prank, of course — but the best pranks have a long life, you would know, you who sell shadow theatre to delighted bankers. I do not take myself for a painter, Salis; I take myself for a logician who has pushed painting to its ridiculous point. If you can sell an emotion with a title and a flat surface, then I have put my finger on a deception that others, one day, may take seriously. That would be the best of my jokes: being imitated without laughter. In the meantime, my monochromes cost only a pot of paint and have as much effect as a whole Salon. Perfect profitability. A fumiste must know how to count — that is still the pharmacist speaking.
That would be the best of my jokes: being imitated without laughter.
—Last question, my old accomplice: in all these hoaxes, are you trying to make people laugh, or to say something that seriousness cannot say?
A fine question from a boss who has drunk too much of his own wine, Rodolphe. I aim for both, and I suspect you know it. Laughter is the bait; under the bait, there is always a hook. When I make two opposite lines rhyme, when I paint emptiness and christen it, when I compose a march without notes, I am saying the same thing: the world stands on conventions that a trifle can overturn. Two and two can make five if no one dares to recount. Serious people build cathedrals to assert that; I slip it into a three-page story read in the privy. It is more honest. We will all die, but at least we will die laughing — and that, no one can take away from us.
Laughter is the bait; under the bait, there is always a hook.
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This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Alphonse Allais's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.