A King Alone

by Jean Giono

  “In addition to the table next to us, piled with unfinished canvases, and the lavish, inlaid game table, the upholstered armchair, that other chair polished like a musical instrument, there was, in the order they disappeared into the shadows: a heavy round sculpted table, a piano stool, a slipper chair, a small low settee, a chaise longue, and a few objects drowned in darkness, too far from the window for me to identify.

  “I could only glance furtively around me, so it took more than an hour to inventory everything I’ve told you about in five minutes; only gradually did I realize that an entire household’s worth of furniture was piled up in there.

  “It felt like the Exodus or an anthill. Add to that the gray woman’s anxiety and the curved grilles on the windows: all this was no doubt what was left of a fortune; it had been carried off and packed in there.

  “Almost entirely in shadow, amid the indistinguishable objects, I could see Langlois’s shoulder. He was sitting deep in a wing chair. And if not for the light-colored cloth of his frock coat, I wouldn’t even have recognized his shoulder.

  “Under the pretext of examining an apron made of satin bouillonné and decorated with lace flounces that, according to the gray woman, was meant to go with a plum-colored cashmere toilette de visite, I shifted my position to get a better glimpse of Langlois.

  “He was sitting as deep down as possible in the armchair. I could see the very glossy black hair of one temple, darker than the shadows.

  “Motionless, he faced the darkest part of the room.

  “I moved the apron in front of me so that, while I continued to express my deep admiration for it, I could see the skin on Langlois’s temple was smooth, without a wrinkle: he was thinking.

  “But I couldn’t yet tell what he was looking at.

  “Madame Tim and I were discussing a quilted child’s cloak, with braiding and frogging, trimmed with crimped feathers. This was all the rage at the time. The gray woman was trembling with apprehension and desire. Such work had never been undertaken by a country seamstress before, but Madame Tim was sure the gray woman could pull it off. Madame Tim was ready to pay for the materials and accept all the risk. And the hands of the gray woman trembled because it was a very grand order.

  “Langlois was looking at a portrait hanging on the darkest wall.

  “I say a portrait because of the shape of the gold frame, a narrow rectangle, upright like a man. Man or woman, there in the shadow was a full-length, almost life-size portrait of someone standing. The light from the window reflected by the polished wood of the big round table cast a few glimmers but I was too far away and too dazzled by the whiteness of the cloth we were examining to make out anything more than some blurry shapes that must have been hands. That bituminous body, I finally decided, was a man’s.

  “From where Langlois was, and especially from the care he’d taken to shelter himself in the wings of the chair, his eyes must have become sufficiently accustomed to the dark to make out how those hands fit into that body, how that body stood, and perhaps he could even make out the face that body was carrying up there where I couldn’t see a thing, and where instinct was telling me not to look.

  “An agreement was reached on the child’s cloak.

  “Madame Tim remained a short time, maybe two seconds, as if suspended in the air in silence. For well over an hour she’d been exhausting herself.

  “I understood how kind Langlois had been in beating around the bush. That man knew all the secrets of friendship. And how much more tiredness, remorse, and fear Madame Tim and I would have avoided had we agreed to be perfectly innocent and order so much finery with no questions asked.

  “Again what I’m telling you lasted only a short time—the time of Madame Tim’s tired silence. No longer than a blink of an eye; but the silence struck the three of us like a bolt of lightning. The gray woman registered it a mere instant after we did: the time of the blink of an eye and she was so happy, she was smiling at an angel.

  “ ‘And about the pillowcase?’ Madame Tim asked with difficulty.

  “She was at the end of her rope. She looked at me desperately.

  “But as her poor cousin, there was only so much I could do. What right did I have to put my two cents in?

  “And in fact it was too late. The gray woman answered politely about the pillowcase and searched her worktable, but without enthusiasm. Besides, as far as the pillowcase was concerned, there was no need for endless discussion.

  “I looked over at Langlois.

  “This is when he should have given us a sign of life. Now Madame Tim had to use the last of her strength to wrap things up. And then it was time for us to leave.

  “We were completely drained and it would be a lie to say that in the end we felt no pity for that gray woman.

  “Even the bourgeois that Madame Tim was playing had to pity her. If she wanted to be true to her role, it was time to get up and go.

  “Something brushed the window. It was a little boy pressing his face against the windowpane. His eyes were blue like the woman’s.

  “I surmised that every evening when he got out of school, he must have done the same thing, pressing his nose against the window to see who was in the house before coming in. Because of the shadows and the backlighting, he didn’t notice us right away. His child’s mouth still had a placid, greedy look about it. But as soon as he saw us, he drew back in a hurry, like a small animal wondering where to run and hide.

  “Madame Tim lost her nerve and started rummaging through her handbag. ‘The pillowcase, the flounces, the handkerchiefs, the child’s cloak.’ Words that she realized had lost all meaning. But she couldn’t come up with any others.

  “ ‘What fools we are!’ I thought.

  “I could see what she was about to do. In her shoes I would have done the same thing. Exactly what shouldn’t be done. And that’s what she did.

  “She took three louis from her change purse.

  “ ‘Here,’ she said thoughtlessly.

  “ ‘No, madame,’ the woman answered.

  “And she stepped back, her hands tightening into fists.

  “ ‘Yes, take it,’ said Madame Tim, and she brought the louis closer to the tight fists.

  “ ‘Take it, take it,’ said Madame Tim, foolishly trying to shove the louis into the tight fists.

  “I heard the woman violently push away a chair.

  “ ‘Where is the gentleman who was with you?’ she asked.

  “This time, there was just the perfect little silence.

  “ ‘I’m here,’ said Langlois, emerging from his armchair. ‘I was sleeping. Have you finished your purchases, dear friend?’

  “He stood up. His eyes were in fact puffy like the eyes of someone who just woke up and his cheeks were marked with little red stripes from the fabric of the chair. You didn’t stand a chance against Langlois.

  “ ‘Forgive me, madame,’ said the gray woman (she was smiling). ‘I don’t know what happened, I’m tired. I’ve stayed awake for three nights over Mademoiselle Michard’s trousseau. I am happy to do it, that’s not what I mean, but there comes a time when one can no longer control one’s nerves.’ (She was speaking in a tone of calm exaltation like someone who has just escaped a grave danger.)

  “She continued to smile as she looked at Madame Tim and then at Langlois (she had never been worried about me), and Langlois looked even more ridiculous than we did, with his striped cheeks, his puffy eyes, his stupid mouth the corners of which were still greasy with the saliva of sleep (but I knew he was putting it on).

  “ ‘Is that your little boy?’ asked Madame Tim.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘He’s just getting back from school. He’s shy. We live alone.’

  “I said to myself, ‘As long as Madame Tim . . .’

  “And I was thinking, thinking, especially about that portrait of a man that Langlois had stared at until his eyes had grown swollen and the fabric had left stripes on his cheeks.

  “But Mada
me Tim pulled herself together. She didn’t ask what I’d been dying to ask ever since I’d seen those eyes and cheeks (and what Madame Tim must have been dying to ask, too). ‘You’re a widow, aren’t you?’ No. Madame Tim simply dropped the act that had been weighing on her so (as she could now without taking any risks). With her natural kindness, she managed to have the three louis accepted as an advance.”

  •

  “You,” Sausage continued, “you are the cream of sapheads and the flower of fatheads, with your empty noggins shaped like big bowls, spittoons, and chamber pots. I’m talking to you.”

  We were still sitting next to her, on the gravel in the maze of the Bongalove. The low walls of green bushes prevented our being seen from where Delphine was, as usual, lighting the lamps well before nightfall.

  Sausage was talking to us, but this wasn’t the first time she’d bawled us out. We were used to it. We expected it. And this time she didn’t even make it all the way to that famous line of hers, the one where she wound up losing her breath (and we had to pat her on the back to set her breathing again), the one where she said we’d all been forged from the rotted ruins of men, women, children, worlds, and gods.

  At first these words had made a big impression on us because of what she said about women and children. We all had women and children. And it was not pleasant hearing what she had to say about them, what they were made of, where they came from, and where they were going, and in nasty ways at that. As if we spent our lives—men, women, and children—camped out in the bowels of some colossal beast. But when she started to choke on the pile of filth she was spouting, well, we patted her gently on the back.

  She had the old mouth of her eighty years, smashed into her yellowing bones for all those years by the blows of a hammer that only recently had succeeded in knocking it in completely. Her black lips were emaciated and the big, stiff, white hairs of her stubbly mustache quivered above them. Those hairs were as sharp as a pike’s teeth.

  “And after that trip we took, you all were like cheese from a cow’s ass.” (It was a shame to hear an old person speak in such a vile way.) “On the way back, even though it was night, he made us take the path through the woods, so as to avoid Chichiliane.

  “Didn’t you notice that the royal prosecutor came around more than usual at that time? Didn’t you notice that somewhere between the little square with the linden trees and my door Madame Tim had set up headquarters? Back and forth she paced (maybe you thought it was because you were all so handsome?) and then, whenever she was exhausted, I’d say to her, ‘Come in.’

  “She’d say, ‘No.’

  “And I’d say, ‘I’ll bring you out a chair.’

  “And she’d answer, ‘No.’

  “And I’d say, ‘What are you afraid of?’ Because she still had her terraces over in Saint-Baudille, her rose gardens, her grandchildren. None of that had been swallowed up by some natural disaster, I imagine!”

  •

  Sausage made us feel lower than low. I won’t repeat the words that came out of her mouth about us; it’s not that they sully us but that we don’t really like speaking that way, in cold blood. In a fit of anger, yes; but never the way she did. She said all that to us calmly. She chewed us to bits between her little black lips and her pointy pike mustache.

  “I see the prosecutor coming,” she said. “A week goes by; you’re all making hay. I see Madame Tim arrive. She doesn’t come in. She looks through my window to see if I’m there. I wave her in; she waves back ‘no.’ She goes away; I watch where she’s going. She walks down your streets as if she were strolling down a city boulevard, sticking her parasol in your streams of liquid manure, raising her skirts above your streams of liquid manure; carefully placing her little white satin shoes on clean stones. And all of you were running right and left because the day was dark and you were afraid it was going to rain on your hay. Out come the hay carts and off you galloped through the fields.

  “A week goes by; I see the prosecutor coming. Eight o’clock in the morning. What time did he have to leave home to get here at eight in the morning? Home? He lived in Grenoble, three days away. Where did he spend the night? In Clelles or Mens? Where? Why come from Grenoble in the dark, gliding through the night in a buggy all the way to Clelles or Mens and then sleep there so he could arrive at my place the next morning at eight?

  “He sits down; I give him his coffee. He doesn’t say a thing to me. He’s listening to Langlois whistling a little tune upstairs in his bedroom the way he does every morning when he shaves. We’re both there; he’s sitting, I’m standing, and between us is the marble table, the coffee in a glass (because the prosecutor always drinks his coffee in a glass, never in a cup), and in the glass, a teaspoon. We’re listening to Langlois whistle. We know he’s shaving. And all of a sudden he stops whistling. I lean on the marble table and the teaspoon starts clinking against the glass. And Langlois begins to whistle again. He’d only stopped because he was shaving a difficult spot, around the mouth or on the throat. I stand up straight and go into my kitchen. The prosecutor drinks his coffee.

  “You all had brought in the hay and now it was the potatoes. Ha! Not even the normal harvest potatoes, because the harvest is in October and we were in July; they were new potatoes, fingerlings, ever so fancy! A week goes by. Madame Tim arrives. She looks through my window to see if I’m inside. But this time I open the door. I say to her, ‘Maybe he’s in the little square; he left five minutes ago.’ She heads there. She doesn’t choose the clean stones. She’s a grandmother. She’s a lady. She’s practically running. The rest of you are caught up with your fingerlings. One or the other of you is always going off to Pré-Villars with your spade and your basket.

  “No sooner had Madame Tim turned the corner than I heard trotting: the prosecutor. This time, how’d he manage to get there at three in the afternoon? Where had he slept? Isn’t it exactly as if it had only taken him two days to get here instead of three? I said to him, ‘Langlois is probably in the little square. A minute ago Madame Tim went to look for him.’ What are you supposed to serve a prosecutor at three in the afternoon? ‘Oh, a coffee!’ he says, ‘Just a coffee,’ as if he didn’t have the time to choose something else.

  “For the rest of you then, this is when the wheat ripens, is about to be ripe. The harvest. Another week goes by . . . This time, no Madame Tim or prosecutor, but me. It’s four in the afternoon. I take off my slippers. I climb the stairs barefoot, avoiding the step that creaks. I listen at the door. I place my ear against the wall and listen. I peek through the keyhole. I see two limp legs hanging off the bed. I open his door. You hear me? I open his door!

  “Down in the street one of you is sharpening a scythe with more than two thousand idiotic strikes of the hammer.

  “I open his door: it’s a pair of trousers he’s left on the edge of the bed to get the proper crease. He’d gone out when I must not have been paying attention.

  “And you, the rest of you, you’re all tied up with your harvest! Can’t lose one handful of grain, can you? And you didn’t, that’s for sure. I even see one of you coming in from the field with a handful of corn that he must have picked up on his way back. What are you? Canaries?

  “Another week goes by. Madame Tim arrives. And he’s there, by the way. He’d come down from his room. He was watching me chop chard leaves. And I wasn’t about to stop; if Madame Tim hadn’t come, I would have liquefied them. I was scared he would leave if I stopped chopping, or even raised my head.

  “Madame Tim invites him to a party they’ll be giving in Saint-Baudille three days later, it seems. Her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren will all be there. It’s a kind of anniversary. She’s speaking a bit too much and too quickly, the way she did when we went to the home of that gray woman. She invites me. She says they wrote to the prosecutor and he accepted.

  “And then Langlois starts to smile.

  “I understood his smile only later: that lovely smile he had, the one that ran along his serpentine m
ustache. It was all so obvious. If the prosecutor had already accepted the invitation, it must have been in the works for a long time. And Langlois was only being told at the last second?

  “But by the time I’d understood that smile, Madame Tim and he had gone for a little stroll. He was in a good mood; he had accepted the invitation.

  “So that night we finally slept like logs. And the rest of you with your hay, your wheat, and your dung, you could go screw yourselves.

  “So it was on August third that Madame Tim invited us. It was on August third that she yanked me out of my scullery to get me up to speed about her plans.

  “My scullery isn’t big. Madame Tim was a fine figure of a woman; I wasn’t thin either. We were squeezed up together, face-to-face. Her words were warm on my face. The words of a very good idea. But I had it figured out long before.

  “There was no sense in trying to influence me when it comes to that full-length portrait that Langlois had stared at until his eyes were pigeon eggs and his cheeks wore the print of an armchair. My mother stitched boots and my father was a hummingbird. There were no full-length portraits in my mother’s house. Yet God knows I’d stared at bitumen portraits and been dazed by the gilt reflections on large picture frames on those evenings when, in the off-season, I lay on my folding cot listening for the footsteps of soldiers on midnight leave outside on the sidewalk.

  “So, as far as good ideas are concerned, we know what they’re worth.