Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 25

Chabrot is ringing at my lodge.

Chabrot is Pierre Arthens’s personal physician. He is one of those ageing beau types who are always tanned, and he squirms in the presence of the Master like the worm he really is. In twenty years, he has never greeted me or even given the least sign that he was aware of my presence. An interesting phenomenological experiment might consist in exploring the reasons why some phenomena fail to appear to the consciousness of some people but do appear to the consciousness of others. The fact that my image can at one and the same time make an impression in Neptune’s skull and bounce off that of Chabrot altogether is indeed a fascinating concept.

But this morning Chabrot seems to have lost all his tan. His cheeks are drooping, his hand is trembling and as for his nose…wet. Yes, wet. Chabrot, physician to the mighty, has a runny nose. And on top of that he is uttering my name.

‘Madame Michel.’

Perhaps it isn’t Chabrot at all but some sort of extraterrestrial mutant assisted by intelligence services that leave something to desire, because the real Chabrot doesn’t clutter his mind with information regarding subordinates who are, by definition, anonymous.

‘Madame Michel,’ says Chabrot’s flawed imitation, ‘Madame Michel.’

Well, we’ll find out. My name is Madame Michel.

‘A terrible misfortune…’ continues Runny Nose who, gadzooks, is sniffling instead of blowing his nose.

Well I never. He’s sniffling noisily, expediting his nasal runoff to a place it never came from, and I am obliged, by the speed of his gesture, to witness the feverish contractions of his Adam’s apple working to assist the passage of said nasal secretion. It is repulsive but above all disconcerting.

I look to the right, to the left. The hallway is deserted. If ET here has any hostile intentions, I am doomed.

He takes himself in hand, repeats himself.

‘A terrible misfortune, yes, a terrible misfortune. Monsieur Arthens is dying.’

‘Dying? Actually dying?’

‘Actually dying, Madame Michel, actually dying. He has forty-eight hours left to live.’

‘But I saw him yesterday morning, he was fit as a fiddle!’ I am stunned.

‘Alas, Madame, alas. When the heart gives way, it’s like a bolt from the blue. In the morning you’re hopping around like a mountain goat and by evening you’re in your tomb.’

‘Is he going to die at home, he’s not going into hospital?’

‘Oh, Madame Michel!’ exclaims Chabrot, looking at me with the same expression as Neptune when he’s on his leash. ‘Who wants to die in hospital?’

For the first time in twenty years I feel a vague flutter of sympathy for Chabrot. He is, after all, a human being too, I say to myself, and in the end, we are all alike.

‘Madame Michel,’ he says again, and I am astounded by this profusion of Madame Michels after twenty years of nothing, ‘a great many people will no doubt want to see the Master before…before. But he does not want to see anyone. With the exception of his nephew Paul. Would you be so good as to send the importunate boors on their way?’