Читать книгу The Foundling Boy - Michel Deon - Страница 7

Jean was pretending to read. The lines were dancing in front of his eyes. If he rested his forehead on his hand, he could lower his eyelids, make the unreadable page disappear, and go back in the minutest detail to the circumstances in which he had seen and then very gently kissed Antoinette’s bottom. It had happened that afternoon at the foot of the cliff, behind a heap of fallen rocks. Of the scene, which had hardly lasted more than a minute, he retained an anxious feverishness, as though they both had deliberately committed a sin that defied the whole world. He felt proud of himself, and at the same time wondered to what extent his feverishness, which periodically felt just like dizziness, wasn’t the punishment he risked, the sign that would betray him to the abbé Le Couec, his father, his mother, and Monsieur and Madame du Courseau. But between four o’clock and six that evening most of them had had plenty of time to read his thoughts, to question him, to notice how he blushed when they talked to him, and now he felt that their blindness was a serious blow to an infallibility that they had, in their different ways, fashioned into a dogma. Hadn’t Antoinette said, ‘If you don’t tell, no one – do you understand? No one on Earth – will ever know.’

‘Well, my dear Jean, you’re not getting very far with your reading. Aren’t you interested?’

At the sound of the priest’s voice, Jean jumped as if he had been caught red-handed. The abbé was behind him, ensconced in the only armchair in the kitchen, his legs flung out straight and wide apart, stretching the coarse threadbare cotton of his cassock.

‘That boy’s ruining his eyes with reading. Always got his nose in a book,’ Jeanne said, quick to take her adopted son’s side.

‘I wasn’t blaming him!’ the abbé answered. ‘I’m just used to seeing him more engrossed in what he’s reading.’

Albert, who was playing trictrac with Monsieur Cliquet, raised his head and said with finality, ‘Anyway, there’s nothing to be learnt from books. Newspapers and life will show you everything you need. I’ve never read a book in my life, and I’m no idiot, am I?’

He had allowed Madame du Courseau to pay for Jean’s education with great reluctance. To his way of thinking, it would simply mean that the boy would later become a dropout instead of a good gardener who knew and loved his work, because if progress was one of Albert’s key words he also entertained, within that vast idea, an illusion that society, advancing with even step towards human well-being and the mastery of life, would do so with its beneficial inequalities and necessary hierarchies intact. By not continuing the tradition of gardeners in the family, Jean was sowing disorder. But he also conceded that a mystery hung over his birth, and that such a child could thus not be tied down to the Arnauds’ profession from father to son. He had to be given a chance to decide his own destiny, and his seriousness and application consoled Albert.

Captain Duclou, who, with his elbows on the waxed tablecloth, was completing the delicate manoeuvre of inserting a ship into the narrow neck of a bottle, whose three masts he would subsequently raise with a complicated arrangement of threads that he would tie off and snip with the help of long tongs, showed that for all his absorption he was not missing a word of the conversation.

‘At sea there’s no use for books. Everything you need for navigation, you learn from your elders and betters.’

‘Come along,’ the abbé said, ‘let’s not exaggerate. Moderation in everything. We don’t come to God on our own. We need the Gospels.’

‘Your turn, Albert!’ Monsieur Cliquet said, holding out the dice cup to his cousin to remind those present that he took no part in such conversations and considered them pointless.

Jean resumed his daydream where it had been interrupted, and behind his lowered eyelids recreated his picture of Antoinette’s bottom, a white, soft, well-rounded bottom that went into dimples where it met her back. Antoinette’s face was not especially pretty – her nose was a little too long, her cheeks too plump, her small eyes, which sparkled with suppressed amusement, rather close together – but her body was firm, with well-shaped muscles beneath its roundness. She swam, cycled, rode and played tennis with unflagging vigour. She radiated an attractive vitality, and in her company you felt the same strong desire to exert yourself and to imitate and follow her. She had very recently started to develop into a young girl, and her bust joggled nicely when she ran across court playing tennis or stood on her pedals to climb hard up the road from Dieppe to Grangeville. Jean, under a spell of admiration, was almost always with her, breathless, furious, happy, enchanted by this creature four years older than he, who protected him from the endless stream of traps Michel laid for him.

She had asked him without warning, ‘Do you want to see my bottom?’

To be honest, her bottom did not interest him very much. He would have preferred her breasts, but they would be for later, another time, and anyway Antoinette only ever did the things she wanted to do. The two of them had found a place concealed by a rock, where it was hard for them to be seen even from the top of the cliff above them. Antoinette had lifted up her skirt and pushed down her white cotton knickers, uncovering two lovely, smooth fresh globes that exuded a sense that being naked like that filled them with joy, making them want to burst with health and pleasure. The cleft disappeared into a shadowy fold between her thighs. Beyond, other mysteries began that Jean would have liked to find out about and whose importance he sensed without knowing why.

‘So?’ she said.

‘It’s very pretty.’

‘You can kiss it!’

He had put his lips on the soft skin, so soft it had a sweet taste, and had managed to hold back from biting, a maddening impulse that suddenly started up like hunger somewhere between his teeth. He had not been upset when in an abrupt movement she covered up her two marvels, for their contemplation was making him dizzy. Mademoiselle du Courseau straightened her skirt, and they dashed back up the gully together, hand in hand, to fetch their bikes and pedal frantically all the way to La Sauveté …

‘Yes, Father,’ Jeanne said, ‘you’re right. In books we learn how we must behave in life. But there are also books that are dangerous for people’s good sense.’

‘What are you reading, Jean?’

‘Treasure Island, Father. It was a present from Uncle Fernand.’

‘Always stories about sailors!’

Fernand Duclou looked up. ‘Well then, father, perhaps you’ll tell us what you’ve got against the navy, you, a Breton?’

‘Nothing, my dear man. It’s perfectly true that stories about sailors are generally a good healthy read.’

‘Because there are no women on board sailing ships’ Monsieur Cliquet said mischievously, taking the dice cup from Albert. ‘Whereas,’ he added, ‘there are women on trains and even Madonnas in sleeping cars.’

He was referring to a novel that had sold a fabulous number of copies, whose title was known even to those who were illiterate. Jeanne coughed, covering her embarrassment, and pulled her chair closer to spread her knitting over the kitchen table, above which hung an electric bulb and its china shade. The light was yellow and it flickered, but it was a novelty they were becoming accustomed to, not without the anxiety that it would be more expensive than their oil lamps. Jeanne stretched out the sleeve of the jumper she was knitting and compared it with the one she had just finished. Captain Duclou poured warm blue wax into the bottle, and the three-master bobbed on a sea stirred up by a swell.

Albert had won. He sat back and lit a pipe, reached for his newspaper and after reading a headline, said bitterly, ‘They’ll have his hide, and then we’ll have another war.’

‘The war is over, for all of us,’ the abbé said.

‘Oh, they’ll wait until Jean’s old enough to be called up.’

‘Well, that gives us a bit of time, and as for your Aristide, no one will miss him.’

‘Briand equals peace!’ Albert said forcefully.

‘Peace equals a good navy,’ the captain said. ‘We no longer have one.’

‘And a decent transport system,’ Monsieur Cliquet said firmly. ‘How can we mobilise today’s wonderful modern armies with a network as out of date as ours? If the government thought that there would be another war, it would take the railways in hand. It’s not doing that, and I therefore deduce that there is not going to be a war in the near future.’

‘Now, now!’ Jeanne said. ‘There’s no need to go having an argument when everyone agrees.’

The abbé protested. He did not agree, and he did not care for Briand, calling him an ‘orator’ and beginning to imitate rather grotesquely his famous ‘Pull back the machine guns, pull back the cannons’ speech. He then raised the embarrassing matter of his criminal record. In his eyes Briand embodied the worst aspects of the centralising republic that got itself mixed up in the affairs of the world willy-nilly, while denying its provinces their rightful cultural freedoms.

‘Just listen to the Chouan!’2 said Monsieur Cliquet, who had voted radical socialist since his youth.

The priest roared with laughter and leant over to borrow Albert’s tobacco pouch to roll himself a cigarette between his fat peasant’s fingers.

Jean was no longer following their talk, his mind having gone back to the delicious picture of Antoinette’s bottom. He now badly wanted to see it again, and stroke its cool skin.

‘It’s time you went to bed,’ his mother said. ‘You have to be up at six tomorrow.’

Jean closed his book. In bed he would be alone in the dark, with no one to interrupt his reverie. He kissed everyone goodnight and went upstairs. Each year at Christmas Marie-Thérèse du Courseau gave him something for his bedroom, bookshelves, an armchair or some leather-bound books, and the simple room, whose only window looked out onto the park, was set apart by its taste from the rest of the house, where waxed tablecloths, the chimes of Big Ben and kitchen chairs reigned. Albert naturally disapproved of such luxury, which seemed to him devoid of sense.

‘One day that boy will be ashamed of us,’ he said.

Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. She did not believe it, and little by little had begun to indulge herself in dreams of a great future for the child who had fallen into her lap. Besides, how could she refuse? Despite being repeatedly rebuffed, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau interfered relentlessly in Jean’s upbringing. Hadn’t she recently been talking about him having tennis lessons, as Michel and Antoinette did, and wasn’t she always picking him up whenever a Norman accent crept into his speech? But for the moment Albert’s fears were unjustified: Jean admired him and adored Jeanne, and even if he showed enthusiastic gratitude to Madame du Courseau for her many kindnesses, he didn’t really understand her attitude and its apparently arbitrary mixture of reprimands and generosity. He remained scared of her and never entered La Sauveté without apprehension, equally on his guard against Michel, who continued to nurse a deep, though veiled, hostility towards him that was more dangerous than kitchen knives or rat poison.

*

A few days later the Briand cabinet fell. Its end affected Albert deeply. War was around the corner, now that the one man who could prevent it had been removed. His successor, André Tardieu, nicknamed ‘Fabulous’3 in political circles for his cigarette-holder and personal elegance as much as his grand bourgeois manner, inspired confidence only among the bankers. They doubtless needed it, being in the middle of a recession, but the magic formulas that were apparently overflowing from Tardieu’s pockets were already too late. The country’s industrial base, including its armaments industry, was crumbling. Antoine du Courseau himself, having for a long time done no more than glance indifferently at his notary’s warnings, found himself having to contemplate the sale of half the La Sauveté estate. The ink was barely dry on the contract when he left for the Midi, as though unable to bear Albert’s reproach-laden look or his wife’s indulgent smiles, laden with commiseration. Marie-Thérèse was admirable in her stoical dignity. She might of course, without straining herself an inch, have used her own fortune to save the park, but such an idea never occurred to her, and, it has to be said, nor did it cross Antoine’s mind to ask her to do so. A wall went up, which Albert covered with ampelopsis. The view out to sea vanished and was forgotten, its only reminder the herring gulls that swooped over the beeches and continued to land on the lawn in front of the bluffs of rhododendrons. They alone betrayed the continued presence of the great disappeared space, the infinity of the sea that had been rendered so finite.

Jean was hardly aware of these changes. He quickly forgot the lost park. Antoinette filled his thoughts. Not all of them, to tell the truth, as though he had already guessed that a man lives better with two passions than one. Certainly Antoinette dominated, because she was there every day, but Chantal de Malemort reigned by virtue of an almost fairy-like absence and her pure, transparent graces. It was, therefore, the little girl he caught sight of once a month if he was lucky, in the course of a formal visit, who captured his heart’s most passionate impulses. If she had decided to reveal to him the same secrets as Antoinette he would have detested her, just as he would have detested Antoinette if she had decided to stop exciting his imagination with her carefully arranged exposures. In fact he did end up detesting her several times when, as much out of caprice as to gauge the extent of her power over him, she refused to show him that part of her body that had so fascinated him one afternoon at the foot of the cliff. She was also prudent: without her foresight and coolness they would definitely have been caught. Jean went slightly mad. He demanded his due everywhere, in the garage, in the woodshed, even in Antoinette’s bedroom when he managed to slip in there. Their difficulties increased when Michel’s attention was aroused and he began to follow them, but Antoinette knew how to shake him off with a mischievousness worthy of her age, and Michel would get lost in the back ways to the sea while the two accomplices sprinted down the gully and hid themselves under the cliff. Jean’s pleasure was spiced with remorse: what would Monsieur du Courseau think if he found out? Their secret understanding, born six years earlier after the incident of the punctured hosepipe, had continued and strengthened, without any need for great declarations. A wink from time to time, a word here and there, had been enough to reassure Jean. Actions and opportunities would come later – but what a disaster it would be if, before that happened, a shadow were to fall between them! Jean did not even dare imagine it. On the other hand, at Christmas there would be a problem: to receive communion he would have to go to confession, and there was no question of confessing to any other priest than the abbé Le Couec. But how would he react to what Jean would have to tell him? By early December Jean was feeling increasingly anxious, and he decided to ask Antoinette about his problem. She burst out laughing.

‘You stupid boy! Why should you confess it? It’s not a sin. Don’t be such an idiot, or I shan’t show you anything any more.’

‘I’m sure it is a sin. It’s called lust.’

‘Oh my gosh, just listen to him! Who do you think you are? A man? For heaven’s sake, there are no children left.’

Impressed, Jean did not say any more, and on Christmas Eve went to confession with the village children. The abbé Le Couec officiated in his icy church, chilled by a west wind that whistled through the porch and made the altar-cloth ripple magically. The dancing candle flames twisted the shadows of the Sulpician statues of Saint Anthony, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Joan of Arc in their niches. Huddled in his rickety confessional, the abbé Le Couec listened to the piping litany of childish sins. When it was his turn Jean kneeled, trembling, and with his voice shaking with emotion recited an Our Father as if he were clinging to a lifebelt, then fell silent.

‘I’m listening, my child,’ said the priest, who had recognised his voice.

Jean confessed to some venial sins that he wasn’t even sure were sins. The abbé’s silence worried him. Was he there, listening behind his screen? What trap was waiting, right next to Jean, in the darkness of the confessional? What if there were no priest on the other side at all, but a huge ear sitting on the wooden bench, an ear of God with hearing so acute it could listen in to the most secret thoughts.

‘Is that all? Well, that’s not too bad. Those are not really sins, more weaknesses that a boy like you ought to be able to put right with no trouble. Two Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. You can go.’

Jean left the confessional, hands clasped together and head bent, and walked to the altar where he kneeled and prayed, his heart heavy with his remorse at having deceived a man as good and generous as the abbé Le Couec.

At La Sauveté Antoinette was waiting in Jeanne’s kitchen, where Jeanne was ironing in front of the range on which she was keeping the iron hot. As soon as he walked in, his gaze met Antoinette’s, and he knew that she was waiting to make sure he hadn’t weakened. He held her look and grinned.

‘So did you make a good confession, little one?’

‘Very good, Maman. The abbé Le Couec told me my sins aren’t really sins.’

Antoinette’s eyes shone with pleasure. She kissed Jeanne on the cheek, shoved Jean playfully, and skipped back to La Sauveté. A few days later, when they were out for a walk together, she showed him her breasts, which had already grown into two charming, nicely firm little domes. Jean was filled with happiness, and his remorse at having deceived the good abbé steadily faded. He was beginning to lose his trust in the absoluteness of a religion that was unable to penetrate the secrets of people’s souls. You could escape from God’s omnipresence, and trick his ministers, without the earth opening up beneath your feet. The idea was not yet clear in his mind, but a glimmer flickered on the horizon: if a person watched where they were going, they ought to reach a world less full of threats and menace. Wasn’t Albert an unbeliever? And Jean could not imagine that a better person than his father existed.

However strong Antoinette’s hold on him was, she could not remove Chantal de Malemort from his thoughts, where she continued to reign discreetly as a figure of pale and dark beauty, pink-lipped, slender and modest. On New Year’s Day, Madame du Courseau drove the children to a party at the Malemorts’. That afternoon, during a game of hide and seek, Jean found himself alone with Chantal in the trophy room on the château’s ground floor. Dozens of stuffed birds crowded the shelves, and the whole of one wall was covered in the antlers of stags hunted in the forest of Arques by three generations of Malemorts. The room was icily cold and smelt of dust, a dead, faded smell that caught in Jean’s throat. Chantal pulled back a brocaded curtain that hid a recessed door.

‘Hide in there!’

‘What about you?’ he blurted out, so close to the object of his admiration that he was unable to stay calm.

‘I’m coming with you, of course!’

The heavy curtain fell back over them and they stood still for a moment, side by side, not touching, their backs against the door. Shouts rang out in the corridor. Michel was looking for them. He entered the room and called out, ‘Come out, I saw you!’

Chantal made a slight movement, and Jean put his hand on her arm. They held their breath, shoulder to shoulder. Michel marched around the room, looking under the table, opening cupboards.

‘I’ll give you three seconds to come out!’ he shouted.

Jean held Chantal’s arm more tightly and she didn’t move. They heard the door close again, and the sound of a stampede in the corridor.

‘He’s gone!’ she said.

‘It’s a trick. He’s going to come back as quietly as he can.’

Two minutes later the door creaked, and Michel burst into the room.

‘Hey! I saw you.’

Terrified, Chantal hid her face in the hollow of Jean’s shoulder. He felt pure happiness. For years afterwards he remembered that impulse she had had to claim his protection, and the firmness with which he had kept her close to him, wrapping his arm around her, with his nose in her fresh-smelling hair. Chantal de Malemort never belonged to him more than she did at that moment, as a child-woman.

When Michel finally gave up his search and left the room, Chantal detached herself from Jean, pushed back the curtain, and pulled him by the hand. They ran to the hall, where the Marquis de Malemort was pulling off his mud-plastered boots and drenched oilskin. He had just been out to take oats and straw to his horse and gave off a strong smell of stables. Jean admired this handsome and solid man, who owned a château and was favoured with a title that belonged in the kind of fairy tales in which kings and princes have daughters more beautiful than the dawn’s meeting with the night. That this character was real did not intimidate him, quite the contrary. He liked his strong, earthy presence, and the way he swore with the same manners as Madame de Malemort and the same gentleness as Chantal. A bond united this family – the château, the name – a bond whose subterranean ramifications Jean had only just begun to perceive, through snatches of conversations whose meaning he did not always understand, but which seemed to exclude him. In short, Chantal belonged to a caste that put her beyond his dreams, in a virtually magical firmament in which she glided on the tips of her feet without touching the earth at all. Left to himself, Jean might eventually have doubted the superior existence of Chantal de Malemort, but he had Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, née Mangepain, to influence his thoughts, a woman sugary to the point of crystallisation in her decorum, hungry to add ever more titles to her conversation and gather like nectar, from one country house to the next, the crumbs of a decaying society of which she would have adored to be a part, even if it meant being swallowed up along with it. Her admiration – stripping her character of every natural quality – helped to sustain the existence of a tradition that had been more overwhelmed by several years of recession than it had been in a hundred and fifty years of revolutions.

However kind the Malemorts were to him, Jean never saw them without a feeling of guilt, as though his place was not among them. He was the son of Albert and Jeanne, caretakers of La Sauveté. If he ever forgot it for an instant, Michel made it his business to remind him with a wounding word. Michel’s unpleasantness hurt him because, even though he did not love Michel – how could he? – he genuinely admired him for his talents. He would have given anything to sing like him at mass, or create the crib figures he made with his own hands, or paint the colourful landscapes that had already been shown in a gallery at Dieppe, and then at Rouen. What did he, Jean Arnaud, possess that he could shine with, in the eyes of the Malemorts? Nothing, apart from his strength, his physical agility, and some secrets passed on to him by Monsieur Cliquet and Captain Duclou, incommunicable secrets that Chantal would never need to use: the history of locomotives through the ages, and how to predict the weather.

I sense that the reader is eager, as I am, to reach the point where Jean Arnaud becomes a man. But patience! None of us turns into an adult overnight, and nothing would be properly clear (or properly fictional) if I failed to illustrate the stages of our hero’s childhood in some carefully chosen anecdotes. This is, after all, the period when Jean is to learn what life is, or, more specifically, when he is to experience a range of feelings, aversions and passions which will imprint themselves deeply on him and to which he will only discover the key very much later, around the age of thirty, when he begins to see things more clearly. At the time that I am talking about, he is still a small boy, and beyond the walls of La Sauveté the wide world that awaits him, with all its cheating and its pleasures, is a long way off. So far away that you might as well say it doesn’t exist. Jean had an idea of it, however, thanks to an encounter that I want to record and to which I implore the reader to pay attention. It happened under the premiership of Camille Chautemps, which is entirely irrelevant, I hasten to add, and which lasted for nine days, a record equalled in the Third Republic only by Alexandre Ribot and beaten by Édouard Herriot. Returning from an errand in Dieppe, Jean was pedalling back up the hill to Grangeville in a fine drizzle that was working its way through the cape he had spread across his handlebars. Despite his sou’wester, rain was also dripping down his neck, and his soaked feet were squelching on the pedals in shoes that were too big for him. Coming round a bend, he saw a car that had stopped on the verge. It was a car that impressed as much by its size – it looked as large as a truck – as by its yellow coachwork, black mudguards and white wheels. A chauffeur in a light blue tunic and peaked cap was crouching next to the offside rear wheel, whose tyre was flat, and trying to remove the wheel. He must have been lacking an essential tool, because, seeing Jean, he hailed him. Jean slowed and stopped and stood open-mouthed: the chauffeur was black. His face, wet with rain, shone under his cap, and when he opened his mouth Jean was struck by the size and yellowish colour of his teeth.

‘Is there a mechanic near here?’ the chauffeur asked.

‘Yes, at the bottom of the hill.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Maybe a kilometre.’

‘You wouldn’t like to go and get him for me, would you?’

‘It’s hard to ride back up the hill. I’ve already done it once.’

‘Will you lend me your bicycle?’

‘It’s too small for you.’

‘I’ll manage.’

The chauffeur took off his cap and tapped on the rear window, which opened with a squeaking sound. A face appeared, pale and with grey semi-circles under the eyes. The neck disappeared into a tightly tied blue silk scarf. It was impossible to say whether it was a young man ravaged by a hidden illness that gave his cheeks and forehead a parchment-like translucency, or a much older man whom death would soon blow apart, splitting an envelope stretched to breaking point over a fragile skeleton.

‘Monseigneur,’ the chauffeur said, ‘this boy is lending me his bicycle to go and fetch a mechanic. There’s one at the bottom of the hill, he says.’

‘Hurry then! We have to pick Madame up again at five o’clock.’

The man’s voice matched his physique, thin and fragile. Jean was dazzled: he had heard the chauffeur call his passenger with the blue scarf ‘Monseigneur’. This passenger now turned and looked at him sympathetically and added, ‘You’re not going to stand out there in the rain. Come and sit by me.’

The chauffeur opened the door and Jean shook out his rubber cape and climbed into the passenger compartment, where the man pointed to a folding seat.

‘What is your name?’ he asked immediately.

‘Jean Arnaud.’

‘And do you live near here?’

‘At Grangeville.’

‘It looks as if it rains rather a lot here.’

‘Oh, it depends! There are fine days too.’

Jean’s eyes began to get used to the half-darkness inside the car, whose luxury seemed fabulous to him. The seats were of glossy black leather, the carpet of animal fur, and another pelt covered the knees of the traveller, who was bundled up in a black overcoat with an otter-skin collar. A tortoiseshell telephone connected him to the chauffeur, who was separated from his passenger by a glass panel. Beside the folding seat there was a drawer of some rich hardwood, filled with crystal decanters and silver goblets.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Everything … everything, Monseigneur.’

‘I see that you’re well brought up. This is a great strength in life. What do your parents do?’

‘My parents are the caretakers at La Sauveté. My father’s a gardener. He lost a leg in the war. He doesn’t want me to be a soldier.’

‘He’s right.’

‘What kind of car is this?’

‘Hispano-Suiza. Have you ever seen one like it?’

‘Never. It’s beautiful. It must cost a lot of money.’

‘I don’t know. They bought it for me. I’m a very lazy man. I don’t buy anything myself.’

‘Then people must steal from you.’

‘Perhaps, but never mind. That’s the price of my peace of mind.’

The man coughed into his closed fist. He peeled off one of his tan kid gloves to take a phial out of a small box next to him, from which he dripped a few drops onto a handkerchief. A strong medicinal smell filled the car.

‘Are you ill, Monseigneur?’

He nodded his head, put the handkerchief over his nose and breathed in deeply before answering.

‘I have asthma.’

‘Can’t the doctor cure you?’

‘No.’

‘That’s very sad!’

‘You are a very kind boy.’

Jean looked at him intensely, and the man smiled back.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ Jean said.

‘Yes, but I cannot promise I’ll answer it.’

‘How do you become a monseigneur?’

‘It’s a very old story. I didn’t become a “monseigneur”. My father was a prince. And my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. You would have to go a long way back into history to find the first of my ancestors who became a prince, in the year 318 of the Hijra, which is to say in AD 940, which you will understand better, I dare say, being a little Christian. At that time there reigned at Bab al Saud an extremely powerful king, named Salah el Mahdi. He was good, but arrogant, and had a serious fault, which was never to know when people were lying to him. When I say “serious fault”, it was almost an illness with him, he made so many mistakes about other men. Haroun, his vizir, who looked after the affairs of the kingdom in the company of a dozen or so emirs who had sworn loyalty to him, used his position to accumulate an immense fortune by extorting money from country people and merchants alike and by using the royal fleet for pirate raids across the Mediterranean, as far as the coast of France. The king suspected nothing. He believed that his kingdom’s finances were prospering, because the vizir very skilfully denied him no luxury. When the vizir offered him a sumptuous present he did not suspect that it was the hundredth fraction of the pirates’ booty, of which the wretched band in power kept the other ninety-nine hundredths. His harem was populated with beautiful, pale, almost diaphanous creatures captured from Christian ships, whom Haroun assured him were gifts from foreign kings dazzled by his reputation, when they were really poor Greek girls snatched from their families or passionate light-skinned Sicilians kidnapped by the crews of pirate feluccas. Haroun and his henchmen were so greedy that after several years had passed they began to believe that what they were giving the king was still too much, that the hundredth of the spoils that they were forgoing to keep him happy would do just as well in their own chests. So they arrested Salah el Mahdi and would certainly have cut his head off if a prophecy known to everyone had not promised that decapitated kings would turn into vampires when it got dark and return to suck their executioners’ blood. Instead they shut him up in a fortress where he was to be guarded by a company of warriors, the fiercest in the kingdom, incorruptible mountain fighters commanded by an officer who knew only his duty. The poor king understood nothing of what had happened to him. Shut up in a narrow cell where he hardly had room to lie down, he was only allowed to walk for two hours each night, chained to his gaolers. A hole in the wall allowed him to glimpse a tiny square of sky and a mountain peak, which he saw covered in snow three times before the vizir, deciding that it was another unnecessary expense to keep under such heavy guard a deposed king who was too lazy to escape, dismissed the warriors and ordered their commanding officer to escort him to his tribe. That officer, Abderrahman al Saadi, which means the Avenger of the Just, was my ancestor. He knew only his orders and that, as he had been told, the king was responsible for the country’s great misery. He treated him like a slave and made him clean his weapons, forcing him to carry out tasks that normally were only done by women. The king humbly accepted his lot. The years of captivity had matured his spirit and he recognised his error – a capital error for a sovereign – in having surrounded himself with double-dealers, toadies and grasping officials. He never complained, suffering his ill-treatment with resignation. Then one day it happened that Abderrahman al Saadi discovered that his prisoner, even though he was famished himself, was sharing his miserable rations with a hunting dog that had been wounded during a chase and could not compete with the other dogs for its supper. He was astonished that such a vile being, whose cruelty and rapacity had been so vividly described to him, could have any such impulse. He had him brought to his tent, and the two men talked all night. Abderrahman al Saadi understood the injustice of which he had been made the instrument. He prostrated himself before Allah and swore to deserve his name of Avenger of the Just, and then went to the king to beg his pardon for having so insulted him. Within a few weeks Abderrahman had raised an army of fighters, every man among them as fierce and as courageous as could be. This small army represented less than a tenth of the vizir’s army, but on its side it had faith and the desire to avenge a king too easily abused. Instead of confronting the regular army head on, Abderrahman decided to act by stealth. He invited Haroun to a great celebration at the gates of the capital. His best horsemen were to compete against each other at a game of skill that would later be called polo. Flattered and pleased to be entertained without it costing him a penny, the vizir accepted, and a great camp was set up in a field. Abderrahman insisted that Haroun come with his personal guards, who would be massed around the main stand. These were all black warriors of two metres in height, chosen for their colossal strength and skill with a spear. On the appointed day Haroun arrived at the celebration and watched the game and then the races until nightfall, when Abderrahman announced an archery competition. Mounted on galloping horses and led by a masked rider, the competitors were to fire their hundred arrows at a target in the middle of the hippodrome, held by an impassive warrior. Filled with enthusiasm for their skill, the vizir asked for the crack bowmen to be introduced to him. Led by the masked rider, the archers formed up in a line in front of the vizir’s stand.

‘“Who are you?” Haroun asked.

‘“Do you truly want to know?”

‘“It’s an order. Who are you?”

‘“Your king!” cried the rider, tearing off his mask and firing an arrow straight at the heart of Haroun, who collapsed dying as the hundred horsemen took aim at the vizir’s guard and planted a hundred arrows in their bronze breastplates. Night was falling, and the crowd’s cries of terror turned to panic as they saw that the city was burning. Abderrahman’s spies, making the most of the dignitaries’ absence, had set fire to the palace and the barracks. The zeal of the incendiaries was doubtless somewhat excessive because, in the space of a day and a night, the whole capital burnt down. Salah el Mahdi, having regained his throne but without a palace, decided to live in the mountains with the warriors who had given him back his kingdom. He built himself a fortress and entrusted the country’s administration to my ancestor, whom he made a prince so that the word “vizir” would never again be heard in the country. There you are, Jean Arnaud. That’s how you become a prince.’

‘Goodness, it’s not easy!’

‘No, you’re right about that, and one must also admit that there are fewer opportunities today than there once were to become a prince.’

‘Yes, that’s sad!’ Jean said, thinking of Chantal de Malemort, who would not hesitate to marry him if he suddenly became a prince.

There was a tap at the glass, misted by the rain, and Jean made out the blurred face of the chauffeur, who was laughing. His passenger wound down the window, and the black man took off his cap.

‘Monseigneur, the mechanic is here. He is completing the job. We’ll be able to get on our way.’

The window rose again.

‘This is thanks to you, Jean. I’m very grateful to you.’

He unbuttoned his overcoat and took out a wallet, from which he withdrew two thousand-franc notes.

‘I hope that you have a money box.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then put these two notes in it, and write your name and address in my notebook. I’ll send you a souvenir when I remember.’

‘I can’t accept them. What will my father say?’

‘He won’t say anything.’

‘He’ll never believe I met a prince at the side of the road. Things like that don’t happen.’

‘Sometimes the most unlikely things are the most easily believed.’

He slid the notes into Jean’s cape pocket. ‘

There you are, it’s done. Let’s say no more about it. Goodbye, Jean.’

He seemed very tired, ready to close his eyes and go to sleep. The mechanic was tightening the bolts of the spare wheel with a few last turns while the chauffeur watched him with a superior expression. Jean picked up his bicycle and climbed the rest of the way up the hill as fast as he could, though not fast enough to stay ahead of the Hispano-Suiza, which caught up and then overtook him. To his great surprise, he found it stopped again outside the gates of La Sauveté. The chauffeur waited by the passenger door, umbrella in hand. A young woman in a fur coat dashed out of the house and through the rain and threw herself into the car, which drove away immediately.

‘You took your time!’ Jeanne said when he came in, having shaken out his cape in the hall. ‘It’s too bad that you missed Mademoiselle Geneviève. I told her about you, and she very much wanted to meet you.’

‘Was it her who was leaving as I arrived?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I talked to her husband.’

‘Her husband?’ Jeanne said.

‘Yes, the monseigneur.’

‘What are you talking about? She hasn’t married a bishop.’

‘No, another monseigneur. A real one. A prince. He gave me this!’

He took one of the thousand-franc notes out of his pocket, a reflex that he only understood later holding him back from producing both.

‘A thousand francs!’ Jeanne cried. ‘But he’s completely mad!’

‘I lent him my bike.’

‘You lent your bicycle to a prince?’

‘No. To his chauffeur, a black man in a blue tunic.’

‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’

He had to explain from the beginning, and then explain a second time to Albert, who to Jean’s astonishment decided that the thousand-franc note was proper treasure trove and pushed it into Jean’s money box. Yes, Geneviève had been there that afternoon. She had come directly to the lodge to kiss Jeanne, before going across to La Sauveté to see her parents and her brother and sister.

‘She hasn’t changed, our little one,’ said Jeanne, trying as she invariably did to link the fearful present to a reassuring past where everything had been kindly and good.

‘What are you talking about? She’s twelve years older and looks it!’ Albert said, turned as ever towards the future.

‘I mean that her heart’s still in the right place. She gave me a stole and a bag which will be just right for mass on Sunday.’

After dinner Madame du Courseau appeared, and Jean was sent to bed. Grumbling, he went upstairs, leaving his bedroom door slightly open. He could not hear everything, but he realised that Marie-Thérèse had come to find out whether Geneviève had unburdened herself to Jeanne any more than to herself. Jeanne was stony in her replies, answering in monosyllables until the conversation was interrupted by the familiar rumble of the Bugatti being driven out of its garage. This one was a Type 47, the largest cubic capacity ever produced by Ettore Bugatti, a 5.35-litre engine that effortlessly accelerated to 150 kilometres an hour.

‘It really is far too late to be going out for a drive,’ Madame du Courseau said in an offended voice.

Antoine had been left feeling confined and stifled by the emotions that Geneviève’s visit had aroused. For several days he had wanted to try out the new car, delivered three months earlier from the Molsheim workshops, over a proper distance, but as it was late he switched his itinerary and took the road for Paris, where, arriving shortly after midnight, he stopped for a demi and a ham sandwich at a café at the Porte Maillot. Not having been to Paris since 1917, he found the city changed. He remembered black streets and empty boulevards, in which glimmers of blue light escaped from behind blinds placed over windows: a city of often beautiful women, of whom he had been instinctively suspicious. Now he wandered in search of memories and found none, and as in such circumstances we generally find what we would like not to, on Place de l’Étoile he overtook a yellow Hispano-Suiza driven by a black chauffeur. He let it pass him and followed it to a side road off the Avenue du Bois, where it stopped outside an hôtel particulier. The chauffeur opened the door. Geneviève stepped out first, waiting for the prince, tall and slightly stooped, to follow and take her arm. Antoine accelerated past them so that he would not be recognised.

It was two o’clock by now, and the only life to be found was at Place Pigalle, Montmartre, where he abandoned the car and walked. Because the girls who began to accost him bored and repelled him, he pretended to be part of a group that had just alighted from a bus and were hastening towards a nightclub whose entrance was in the shape of an enormous red devil’s mouth. English was being spoken around him, then German, as a trilingual guide steered the group, sat it down at small tables and clapped his hands to call the waiters, who arrived with demi-sec sparkling wine in champagne flutes. Antoine found himself sitting between an American woman and a German, facing a nondescript individual who laughed for no reason and who, for as long as the show (pretty bare-breasted girls playing with snakes) lasted, kept his hand in his trouser pocket and did rather unspeakable things, apparently without conclusive result. Scarcely had the show finished than the guide collected up his herd and stuffed them back into their bus. Antoine followed. At this late hour no one was counting the tourists in search of the legendary Paris by night, and in any case it was highly likely that some had been mislaid en route, either too drunk to go on or spirited away by some hungry seductress. The bus drove on to Bastille, from where the passengers had a brisk walk to a dance hall on Rue de Lappe. At the tourists’ arrival the band struck up. Bad boys in shiny black shirts and striped trousers danced a rakish waltz with molls in plunging necklines. Antoine found himself with a Swedish couple, who were beside themselves with pleasure. They asked him where he was from, and when they discovered they were talking to a Frenchman their joy was boundless. The woman was not bad-looking, with attractive breasts that stretched the fabric of her low-cut dress; when Antoine distractedly stroked her thigh under the table, she bit her lip. They drank warm white wine and nibbled slices of soft sausage that were supposed to get them in the mood. Antoine was looking forward to enjoying himself when the bad boys and their molls had left the dance floor, but no one was brave enough to follow them and the guide gathered his tourists together to go. The tour was over. The bus discharged its dazed and exhausted night owls at Place de l’Opéra, which was deserted except for the street-sweeping machines sluicing it clean with great jets of water. The Swedish woman looked around for Antoine, but he was already gone, walking quickly up towards Trinité and then via Rue Blanche back to Pigalle, suddenly anxious for his car, which he had left with the hood down in the fine drizzle that had started to fall over the city, varnishing its empty, dirty streets strewn with dustbins. Girls leaving nightclubs as they closed ran, pushing up their coat collars. The blue Bugatti was where he had left it, its handsome leather upholstery soaked and its steering wheel dripping. Antoine dried both with an old raincoat and set off slowly in search of the Porte d’Italie, to which a policeman on a bicycle eventually directed him. Day was breaking. He shivered in his still-wet cockpit, but the engine’s organ-pipe sound was on song with such evident pleasure that Antoine kept going to Fontainebleau, cutting deep into the frosty forest that sparkled in the morning light. On the main square he found a brasserie and ordered a bowl of coffee, as he waited for a barber and a shirt-maker to open their doors. He felt pleasantly light-headed at the change he had wrought in an itinerary that for ten years had been immutable. He had a pang of regret about the Swedish woman – the warm skin between her stocking and knickers had seemed very welcoming. But one cannot have everything, and at the other end of the Nationale Sept4 there was Marie-Dévote and little Toinette and at Roquebrune Mireille Cece, the daughter of poor Léon. It was already plenty. Antoine was no longer twenty years old. He even admitted to being fifty-six, and though he had lost weight at Marie-Dévote’s express request – despite her shamelessly filling out herself – he could no longer lay claim to a young man’s adventures. Shaved and roused by coffee, he set out again and made Lyon without stopping, where he slept for twelve hours and opened his eyes on a deep, swirling fog. A pea-souper, thick and dirty and clinging, had come in through the window and was raking his throat. He could not see as far as the end of his bed. The foggy moods of the Saône and Rhône were joining forces. Antoine remembered the nickname given to Lyon by Henri Béraud: Mirelingue-la-brumeuse.5 The Lyonnais, accustomed to this miasma blanketing their city, seemed not even to notice it. Antoine eventually found the Vienne road, and immediately the fog lifted, revealing the Rhône valley, green and grey and lovely under the winter sun.

At Aix he halted outside Charles’s garage, under the sign saying Chez Antoine. Charles no longer got his hands dirty, and instead oversaw his mechanics from a small glass office which he filled with caporal tobacco smoke while reading books about the war. Hearing the Bugatti’s engine, he came straight out.

‘All right, Captain? Well, well, the new one, eh?’

He spread his arms wide, as if the Bugatti was going to jump up and hug him. The engine was idling, and he put his ear to the bonnet to hear the tick-over.

‘Terrific!’ he said. ‘Really terrific.’

‘Twenty-four valves, single overhead cam. Like a watch: I averaged 112 between Lyon and Aix. In October I’ll have the 50: double overhead cam and supercharger.’

‘Ye gods! … This one must do at least 200 an hour.’

‘Only 175,’ Antoine said modestly.

They drank a pastis together, standing by the car, while a mechanic changed the plugs and the engine oil. Charles insisted that the captain dine with him.

‘We have business to discuss,’ he said.

Antoine shuddered inwardly. The most recent warnings of his notary at Dieppe were fresh in his mind, and as people only ever discussed business with him with one purpose in mind, he was on his guard. The garage was big enough as it was; and he would say the same to Marie-Dévote, who was planning a new wing to her hotel, and to Mireille, who wanted to add a long terrace to her restaurant that would face Cap Martin and the sea.

Charles, not imagining for a second that anyone might want to run from his company, asked anxiously, ‘How’s the little one? Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘Nothing at all. She’s as right as rain.’

Antoine’s heart beat faster. He thought of Toinette, the little girl he had had with Marie-Dévote, so slight and skinny, who had just recovered from typhoid fever. Charles, who for some time had known everything that went on in his captain’s life, added, ‘What about Mireille?’

‘She doesn’t often write. She prefers me to visit.’

‘It’s understandable.’

Night was falling.

‘I’ve still got a good way to go,’ Antoine said.

‘What a shame! Jeannette would have made us tomato soup.’

‘Tomato soup?’ Antoine repeated, seized by weakness.

‘I can send a lad over to let her know.’

‘No!’ Antoine said, agitated at the thought of all these banquets costing him so dearly. ‘Next time!’

‘As you like, Captain.’

The Bugatti was ready. A mechanic started the engine, with one eye on the dipstick. Antoine shook Charles’s hand and sat at the wheel.

‘Till the next time!’

Charles turned to the mechanic, who still held Antoine’s tip in the palm of his hand.

‘A little beauty!’ he said with a wink.

‘A real beauty,’ the mechanic said thoughtfully. ‘It would take me two years of working without eating or drinking to afford one of those.’

The Bugatti was already gone, leaving behind it a bluish trail of oil. Antoine reached Saint-Tropez two hours later in a cold, cloudless night. The hotel was extensive now, with twenty or so rooms, a lounge, a large dining room and an enormous kitchen. There was no off-season any more, and during the summer Parisians who did not fear the sun, and were sometimes even incautious about going out in it, occupied the rooms vacated by the painters, who preferred the months of winter, bathed in its limpid light.

The hotel’s door opened, and Marie-Dévote appeared with her back to the light. Her southern beauty made the most of a certain plumpness, a bigger waist and more splendid bust, and Antoine felt happier the moment he set eyes on her and she ran towards him, kissing him tenderly on both cheeks while he still sat in the Bugatti’s cockpit, the engine ticking as it cooled.

‘I was longing for you to come! Come inside quickly, it’s cold out here.’

He followed her into the kitchen, where, since her mother had died, one of Théo’s aunts had taken over, an immense and rather strong-smelling woman, a genius at making fish soup, tomatoes à la provençale and pissaladière. He was cold through from the drive, having come all the way with the hood down, and they served him a hot supper there and then on the kitchen table.

‘When I’ve warmed up, I’ll go up and kiss Toinette. How is she?’

‘Wonderful. And first in school too. This evening she came home with two more good marks.’

‘Is Théo in bed?’

‘He’s in Marseille. He’s coming home tomorrow or the day after. He’s buying himself a new boat to take the Parisians on trips next summer.’

Antoine was content. Tonight there would be no complications, none of the innuendos that irritated him so much. His cares instantly slipped away, he thanked aunt Marie with a gentle slap on her bottom, and took the stairs that led to Toinette’s bedroom two at a time. She was asleep in a four-poster bed draped in pink silk, and was every inch his daughter: pale skin, blond hair with a tinge of chestnut, and long, blue-veined hands. In any case the doctors had confirmed to Théo that he could not have children. Antoine pressed his lips gently on her fragile temple, and Toinette turned over in her bed with a little moan. He was so happy that he put his hand up Marie-Dévote’s skirt as she came to stand behind him.

‘Antoine! Not here,’ she chided him. ‘You don’t have any morals at all!’

He would so much have liked to. But how do you explain these things? As the years went by, she was becoming more and more bourgeois. In a sense it was reassuring, because with all the artists who came to lodge with her for the winter, she could easily have been making love every night. But she joined him later in his bedroom and left him the next morning, shaking him vigorously as she went.

‘Antoine! Your daughter …’

‘What about my daughter?’

‘She’s going to be late for school …’

There were rituals, then. Every time he visited he drove their daughter to the Saint-Tropez primary school. With a ribbon in her hair, dressed in pastel colours that went with her Nordic complexion, Antoinette made an arrival that the children chattered about for weeks.

‘Uncle Antoine, the other girls, they really want to be me.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Their uncles don’t have Bugattis.’

‘Well, I’ve always had one, so it doesn’t seem very unusual to me.’

‘Will you come and fetch me at lunchtime?’

‘Yes, if you like.’

He returned to have breakfast at the hotel. Three painters were there. He didn’t recognise them and so, reserved as usual, he pretended to ignore them. The dining room was full of pictures, some of which commemorated unpaid bills, others Antoine’s purchases. It was beginning to acquire a reputation, and people often came a long way to admire the Derains, Dufys, Dunoyers de Segonzacs and Valmincks hanging on its walls. Théo was starting to worry.

‘Soon there won’t be any more room … What are we going to do with all these daubs?’

Marie-Dévote, whose instincts were more sensitive and who overheard what passing visitors said, was beginning to see the daubs as a good investment.

‘You don’t know anything. One day they’ll all be famous, and then you’ll be following them around, begging them to do you a drawing on the paper tablecloth.’

‘You’ll always know how to make me laugh.’

*

When he was at Saint-Tropez Antoine dressed in old trousers and a turtleneck sweater and went for long walks along the beach, during which he contemplated his life. He would have liked to rectify two of its big events, his marriage and the war, but in its present specifics it pleased him. He had to acknowledge, for instance, that Théo’s equivocal indulgence added fire to the few nights he spent with Marie-Dévote. If Théo had not balked at letting him enjoy her more freely, she would have had more power over him, and perhaps his appetite for her would have been sated. He loved her without her being close to him, and in truth no one was really close to him, not even his children, Michel, Geneviève and the two Antoinettes. He was essentially a shy man and, like most shy people, had impulses of tenderness that were not always returned. He was realistic; he harboured no illusions about Charles’s friendship, or the love of Marie-Dévote or Mireille Cece. Money stimulated warm feelings, and that was what one used it for, to create those momentary illusions. Without money, he would have known nothing, and if he happened not to have any one day, his existence would be a desert and no part of it would be worth living.

He left the beach and came back through the woods. He loved the fragrance of the pine groves and the silvery-pale sheen of the olive trees. At Saint-Tropez, as he waited for school to finish, he paused at La Ponche beach and sat on the terrace of a fisherman’s bar. The weathered boats pulled up on the shingle were unloading red mullet, bass and rock lobster. He drank a second pastis, and his lost rapture returned. No one talked about the war here. Had it ever happened? He could almost have believed that the past twelve years had wiped it from memories and hearts, if he himself hadn’t continued to be troubled by terrible dreams. And then there had been the death of Léon Cece, from the live grenade he had clutched to his stomach so that he exploded like a pig’s bladder. Others like him were still suffering, but now they hid themselves away. Their morbid trains of thought disturbed the pleasures of peacetime and put the younger generation off their food. Léon had killed himself so that he would stop being a blot on the world’s happiness. At La Ponche Antoine gradually found himself talking to everyone. When he bought a round the fishermen exaggerated their southern accents, and he was not fooled: that too was part of the act that everyone was putting on and that seemed, year by year, to become more real than reality.

As soon as Antoinette appeared at the school gate, she ran towards the Bugatti and climbed in next to him.

‘Uncle Antoine, will you take me for a drive?’

He drove her as far as Grasse to buy fougasse flatbreads still warm from the oven, which they ate with bars of chocolate as they rolled slowly back to Saint-Tropez. They had bought perfume for Marie-Dévote, who loved to soak herself in lavender water.

‘How are you my uncle?’ Toinette asked. ‘You’re not my papa’s brother, or Maman’s, yet everybody says I look just like you.’

‘I’m the uncle of your heart. When you love a little girl very much from the day she’s born, she gradually starts to look like you.’

‘Is that really true?’

‘Truer than anything! I swear it.’

Antoine left then, before his heart got any softer. At Roquebrune he parked outside Léon’s restaurant, which had been renamed Chez Antoine after it was extended. Mireille greeted him with a well-rehearsed tantrum and then, when her sulking and reproaches were over, this strange little vine shoot wrapped herself around him, locked the kitchen door and gave herself to him among the pots and pans. A waitress drummed on the door and went away laughing. Antoine usually stayed for a day or two, never longer, attracted by a basic and violent desire, but was eventually driven away by Léon’s ghost, which wandered through the house with its terrible smashed face, impossible to contemplate. The restaurant was doing well, and Mireille had discovered that she had ambitions after she had been written up in the food columns of several newspapers. When Antoine arrived her mother faded into the background. Sitting on a chair at the roadside, her hands lying in her lap on a grey apron that partly covered her black dress and cotton stockings, she fixed things and people alike with a look of complete vacancy, like an Indian fakir trying to escape from his earthly self. Her relations with Antoine were limited to a nod when he arrived and left. Mireille was not, strictly speaking, beautiful in the way that Marie-Dévote was, but her ascetic skinniness, the fire in her eyes, her blue-black hair curled tightly about her small face, emphasising her sharp features, the nerviness of her body with its taste of saffron, and the impression she gave of being ready to flare up at the slightest spark, attracted Antoine irresistibly. Yet each time he left her without regret. She was too fiery for his temperament, and he was afraid of getting burnt. On the road back he stopped again briefly at Saint-Tropez, kissed Marie-Dévote and Toinette, listened distractedly to another of Théo’s new plans, and drove north to Aix where he stopped at Charles’s garage but, less vulnerable to its owner’s charm, listened noncommittally, not to his war stories this time – that era had been exhausted – but to his fabulous speculations for Provence’s future.

Ah, the wonderful way back! The Bugatti sang. Antoine worked the engine hard up the Rhône valley, and as though it preferred the roads that led to cooler climates where it could carburate more happily, it gobbled up the kilometres, glued to the road and without a squeal through the bends, flew up the hills and strained at the descents. At garages where he stopped, mechanics flattered the engine with their caresses, scarcely daring to touch it, so perfect did it seem, like the creation of some heavenly watchmaker or a wizard of the road.

When he arrived home from his trip of February 1930, Antoine was surprised to see that work had already started in the part of the park he had sold at the end of the previous year. In flagrant disregard of the agreement signed at the time of the sale, the new owner, a Parisian, Monsieur Longuet, the proprietor of two fashionable bordellos at Montparnasse, although he preferred to claim that he had made his fortune in hardware, had begun building what looked like a two-storey villa for himself, his wife and son. From the first floor they would be able to see everything that went on at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse was only waiting for Antoine to come back so that war could be declared. He had not got out of the car before she came running to him.

‘Have you seen? A week! A whole week just to put up that scaffolding. We’ll be just in time to get the building stopped.’

‘Let’s plant trees instead.’

‘They’ll take fifty years to grow.’

‘Not if you plant pines or eucalyptuses.’

‘They’re not trees from around here.’

‘Then let’s put up with it.’

Marie-Thérèse shrugged angrily, turned on her heel and went back inside to scold the new Martiniquan, a Mademoiselle Artémis Pompon, who worked in the laundry, the children having grown too big to have a nurse. Artémis aroused no feelings in Antoine: she was a skinny nag, always barefoot in the house, with a disappointing bosom and a dropping lower lip. She was nevertheless a dutiful girl, who had been told that her employer would sleep with her for the same price as her predecessor, and had appeared on her first morning, giggling, at Antoine’s library door, where he, in his dressing gown and smoking the first cigar of the day, had received her with astonishment.

‘Artémis, you are mistaken. I want peace and quiet in my house. Go to bed. You need to rest. I know Madame treats you badly, but there’s nothing to be done, it’s the way she is.’

Satisfied – sometimes even beyond his capacity – he now preferred to devote his early mornings to reading, so much so that in a bold step, uncharacteristic of his conservative nature, he had bought in a sale at a Dieppe bookseller’s a complete edition of Alexandre Dumas, whose pleasure he had not yet managed to exhaust.