Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  André said, “Sounds amusing, your husband. Where is the Irish Dermot?”

  “Supposed to be in Mexico. But more likely to be in Scandinavia. I think he has a Danish or Swedish mistress. Come here.”

  André moved onto the grave. Tentatively.

  He said, nervously, “It’s not true that Kierkegaard peed on his father’s grave.”

  She reached out for him. He hesitated. She pulled him to her. He kissed her. A heaving up wave of intensity. Flood tide meeting ebb tide. The word PAX in the small of her back.

  But she knew there would be no enduring peace this way.

  She walked through the wood towards the house. André stayed with her. La Fontanelle, built on the grave of another Montriveau. Mort pour la patrie at Waterloo. It’s not the House of Mirth. Truly, she thought, the House of Shame. Not an old bastide in the tradition of the country but a sort of Taj Mahal of a place. A strange abberation, this lapse of taste. Built around a central hall, it is resembles a bit the villa La Rotonda. Perhaps they had Palladio in mind. It’s called a ‘château’ on the map. An important house. Hidden behind the tall pines. Last bastion of the family fiefdom. A faded citadel. They came to the orchard of apricot trees and cherries. Sat on the bench outside the main gate.

  She said, “You can’t come any further. I’ll see you back in the village.”

  But she clung to him. There was time. She was apprehensive. Like going before the examiners for the oral discussion on the thesis. She remembered walking through the wood every Sunday. She was talking nervously, feeling a need to explain to André her apprehension, her fear of the place. She remembered 1944. The burial of the peasant and the warning for her grandfather.

  The first signs of local animosity were evident. She was too young to understand what was happening. But she felt something. She went with her grandfather and Aunt Marie to the funeral of Henri Ripert, the peasant on the farm. He had been shot by the Germans. One of eight hostages. Their presence was unwelcome. The villagers looked at them and muttered. They were isolated not just by position but by presumed alliances. The locals thought her grandfather was working with the Germans. He was not. He hated the occupiers. But he hated the English too. The Bolsheviks most of all. And, of course, the Jews. He had written too that a German victory was to be desired because it was that or communism. Yet he had nothing to do with the Germans. He enjoyed protection and that was enough to damn him. The signals were easy to read. Grandfather refused to admit them. Who were they to question his actions? He continued to write, right up to the end. Drieu visited with his new mistress, the wife of Louis Renault. His friends were all men of letters, poets, above the common herd, beyond the reach of the law. Aunt Marie had pleaded with him to stop writing after the Vélodrome d’Hiver incident, the round-up of Jews in Paris and their shipment to the camps. Arrogantly, he had refused. Then, when the Americans had landed in the south and it was all over bar the shouting, they came for him the first time. He hid behind the shutters upstairs. Marie, her daughter Martine in her arms, stood at the door and told them he wasn’t at home. They respected her. They knew about her husband, a real soldier of France. They knew he had been offered his freedom in exchange for working for the Germans and that he had refused. They knew she cycled every day, rain or shine, to Carpentras, to teach their children. They came back three times, more insistent every time. Finally, René fixed it for a man with a small van to smuggle him away. They went down to a small road and waited. Aunt Marie and Laure. The van, an old Citroën filled with tomatoes, arrived late. Her Grandfather climbed into the back and prepared to cover himself with tomatoes. Aunt Marie sat in front with Laure on her knee. It was a big adventure. How big she didn’t realize. They managed to cross into Switzerland, to Geneva. His brother, Great-Uncle Jacques, gave him a house outside Geneva. Later, her Grandfather went back to Grenoble.

  Laure thought, ‘Hubert de Montriveau. 5 Juillet 1876—25 Avril 1957. Grandfather. Patriarch. Beloved tyrant. Her hero with feet of clay. Polytechnicien. Author. Explorer. Went to China with his brother, Great-Uncle Jacques, and wrote a book, To the Gobi Desert before Younghusband. Spent his honeymoon in India. A year’s honeymoon. Wrote a biography MacMahon of Sedan. And 1789: More than a Crime, an Error. Translated Stevenson. He became political editor of l’Action Française in 1937. Laure had the page of the paper with his picture and his travels and his literary eminence. She didn’t know this until recently. It’s one of the exhibits found among her mother’s belongings. She didn’t know until she read (with shock and horror at Sciences-Po) about fascism in France that he was a friend of Léon Daudet, Drieu la Rochelle, Maurras, Brasillach. All the fascists, the anti-Semites. Didn’t know that one day he would have an entry in The Vichyists. She had a vague recollection of important people coming to visit him and of being told to keep quiet. The library out of bounds for the afternoon. She knew that he had certain old-fashioned manners. Before the war he sent his shirts to London to be laundered. Only place where they knew how to starch a collar properly. Made his wife wear his new nightshirts at the beginning, to get the roughness worn away. Family jokes. This she told to André. She knew her love would overcome his aversion to her family’s criminal behavior.

  The priest’s 2CV came rumbling through the gates. He stopped briefly. He looked at them and frowned. Then went on.

  She said, “I’d better go in. It’s time for lunch. I’ll meet you in the village at three.”

  She was amazed at her new boldness. She had strength. She walked slowly up the drive. It was only 12:45. She went and sat by the fountain, waiting for the bell. Not at all looking forward to sitting around a table with the family. All strangers, including her Uncle René. He had inherited all his father’s dictatorial habits, but few of his virtues. She remembered that the cardinal rule was to be prompt for meals. God help her grandmother if lunch wasn’t on the table at precisely one o’clock. Still, Grandfather indulged her. She had been welcome to come into his study at any time, except when he was writing his column for l’Action Française. She well remembered the row one day when they wanted to erect a memorial in his woods. They had two farms attached to the property. One day a year the villagers were invited to shoot wild boar over the land. During the shoot someone ‘accidentally’ shot dead the communist maire of the village. The local party wanted to put a stone at the spot.

  “How dare you!” he shouted at the man. “A memorial to a communist on my land. Never!”

  He was choleric for days. But the peasants have long memories. And at the end of the war they were trying to take power. They still insist that the Résistance was mostly communist. What they don’t tell you is that they didn’t hesitate to betray all the rightist agents to the Gestapo.

  Her grandfather used to push books at her. She was already—how do you say it?—a bookworm. And he would help her understand some of his translated works in their original English. She had been made serious, had already lost her childhood and her sense of fun. Her Uncle René had been less forthcoming. He was the master now, by God. And he disapproved of her. He disapproved of almost everybody. Except those who were working at Greek. He particularly disliked her father, who had encouraged her mother to sue for her part of the inheritance when her grandfather had tried to push most of it onto Uncle René.

  Still, apart from the tension, and her sense of abandonment, life had been good at La Fontanelle. They always had enough to eat there. Lamb. The famous melons, strawberries, artichokes, big salads. Fruit from the trees in the orchard, cherries, almonds, apricots, figs. The best asparagus. Goat cheese, honey. The scent of lavender, rosemary, thyme. The wisteria over the pergola. The constant cooing of the doves. By comparison with the wartime restrictions and the shortages in Paris, it was a sort of Arcadia. With the serpent of war always trying to wriggle into the house.

  She had spent most of her time at this fountain in front of her grandfather’s study. There’s a fabulous view north to the Dentelles de Montmirail. Two dogs, Bergers des Pyrénées, always
playing. And Minos, the big grey cat lying in the sun. The skies were certainly bluer and the grass greener, or so it seemed. The Mistral blew away all the dirt. The cypresses bent in it, the platanes talked. It was a childhood that should have been unblemished but was tortured by loneliness. That was when she turned in on herself, lost contact with humanity. Her father was in Paris, or Vichy, and her aunts looked permanently worried. There were frequent huddled meetings, whispered news, an air of danger and conspiracy. Children pick up these things. Their antennas are more finely tuned to adult moods. It was, after all, the end of the war and they were on the losing side. There was talk of ‘Le Maréchal’ and what would happen to him. There were messages from Paris about various friends who had been killed. There was the awful shock when Aunt Marie got the news about her husband. She remembered the day well.

  Aunt Marie had been so looking forward to his return. Her younger daughter, Martine, had never seen her father. He had been a nice man. When he was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, they offered to release him if he would work for them. He was a librarian. He refused. Odd man out in that family, she was beginning to realize.

  Great-Uncle Jacques came over from Geneva from time to time, bringing things that were scarce in France. Chocolates! Sugar! Coffee! He was a Swiss resident. He put up her grandfather when he fled in 1945. He had packed up and left France when Blum and the Front Populaire came to power in 1936. He’s in his grave by Lac Léman, having shaken the dust of France off his feet and saved his fortune for his son, Jean, who was now spending it on a sailor from Nice and whose only job was to be for a limited time a habilleur at the Folies Bergères. ‘Jean has certain little eccentricities,’ is all they would say about him. She liked him. He used to play games with her, dressing up and so on. He was fun. He, more than the treatment, snapped her out of her withdrawal breakdown when she was in a clinic in Switzerland. She supposed he was still fun if he hadn’t succumbed to the dreaded virus. Last she heard he was still alive, still in his hotel particulier in Geneva and spending his summers on Cap Ferrat. He gave her some valuable books that had belonged to her great-grandfather and some jewelery he thought should stay in the family. After all, he could have given them to the little matelot.

  The beginning was the past and the past was made present. It’s always there. Seared in the memory. The épuration, they called it. A cleansing. An excuse to settle scores. Everyone she liked was killed in 1944 or 1945.

  According to Adrien Tixier, who was the post-war minister of justice, over 100,000 summary executions were carried out between June 1944 and February 1945. More conservative, and perhaps more reliable, estimates later put the figure at about ten thousand. Right where she lived when she was in Provence, in the next village, Lourmarin, they shot the clergyman and his wife because the wife denounced their brutality, their cowardice and their dishonest opportunism.

  People said the Germans were ‘correct’ but the so-called ‘résistance’ was often made up of thugs.

  She missed the bell. She was late for the funerary lunch. Unforgiveable. But Uncle René sat her on his right, which was something. Something unwelcome. There was a fearful silence at the table. You do not speak unless spoken to. He treated them them all as if they were students in his Greek class at Aix.

  “Ah, the late Madame McManus! Never on time.”

  “Yes, sorry, mon oncle. I went up to the village. I met old Monsieur Grégoire.”

  “And what did the old bolshevik have to say for himself?”

  “Just the usual banalities. He liked Tante Marie. Don’t you think it’s time to stop worrying about the communists?”

  “Perhaps. Have you still got your tame Jew? The picture expert.”

  “Marcel? Yes, he’s still a friend. But I do know quite a lot of other Jewish people.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Your business is rather tribal.”

  “Oh, well, so is yours. The Greek academics around the world speak only to other academics. I always thought it a rather incestuous calling. And the old gang seems to be functioning well.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “I was thinking of Touvier being protected for forty years. And Bousquet at large and having dinner with Mitterand. An embarrassment if he lives to be tried and names names. I gather both the right and the left want him out of the way. Leguay’s trial has taken nearly ten years to prepare. De Gaulle had him sent to New York after the war for l’Oréal, owned by the leading fascist, so there’d be no recriminations. And Papon still free and unlikely to be allowed to spill the beans, as the English say. All the old fascists retiring from lucrative positions. The boys look after their own.”

  “We were never, as you put it, members of ‘the old gang.’ It seems to me that Mitterand has strange bedfellows. Of course, both Mitterand and his great friend Grosrouvre were on the far right until 1943. Followers of l’Action Française, even. Decorated by Pétain, your left-wing socialist. Members, both of them, old members of Vichy’s Service d’Ordre Légionnaire which became the Milice. They saw which way the wind was blowing and entered the maquis. You do realise, my dear, that General Leclerc was a member of l’Action Française? That Dewavrin, Colonel Passy, was a Cagoulard? That de Gaulle had innumerable royalists with him? Colonel Rémy, for instance. We were never turncoats, my dear. Never dishonest moneymakers like your ministers. Never vulgarians.”

  “No? Grandfather didn’t write vulgar things in l’Action Française? He didn’t write nasty things about the Jews? Even after they were shipped away to the camps? He wasn’t as guilty as Drieu, Léon Daudet, Maurras, Brasillach? Seems to me Boulin, Giscard’s employment minister, was helped to commit suicide.”

  “You really have it in for us. My dear Laure. They were all great writers. Céline too. Judge the work. Read Drieu’s Les Chiens de paille. Straw-dogs, they call it in English.”

  “Yes, Grandfather too was quite a writer. I gather his letters were worth reading.”

  He looked at her suspiciously. Tried to change the subject.

  “When I consider how you could have gone to l’ENA, and how much my son, Jacques, wanted to and failed both tries. You were head of Chevalier’s law practice in no time. Walked out in a huff, I understand. You could have been in a ministry. Or the Quai d’Orsay. Anything. Where did you come in Sciences-Po? First out of three hundred wasn’t it? Your doctoral thesis on the Cyprus question published. With commendations.”

  “God forbid that I should have joined all those petrified functionaries, even in the Academy. What’s Jacques doing now?”

  She looked across at her cousin, who smiled conceitedly but left it to his father to answer for him.

  “He’s chef de cabinet of the minister of industry. How’s it going, Jacques?”

  “Very amusing. The other day we had to take the ambassador of an arab nation out to Chantilly to see some racehorses run. The king wanted one as a present. He chose it. Then a few days later the ambassador called and said he’d changed his mind. He wanted a woman instead.”

  “For the night, or longer?” Laure asked.

  “For good. A present.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Well, I refused to have anything to do with it but they enlisted the PR man of an armaments company and he said no problem, so I guess he got his present.”

  Laure said, “Sounds entertaining. Women as chattels still.”

  “Well, you know how they are in those countries.”

  “No, actually. The ones I’ve met in the art business seem more interested in blond boys. Catamites. I gather a certain monarch has a man in Paris as a sort of recruitment officer.”

  Her Uncle René asked, “Where’s your Irish husband today, Laure? Michel, isn’t it?”

  “Dermot. Last heard of in Mexico. He travels a lot.”

  “I hope you’re both behaving yourselves.”

  “Perhaps rather better than Grandfather. I understand the house in Les Barroux is no longer in the family?”

  He loo
ked at her in surprise and anger.

  “What do you know about that? That’s something we do not discuss.”

  The rest of the family were now listening intently. Uncle René glared at them.

  Laure said, “No. We only talk about the things that glorify the family.”

  “I presume your father has been talking too much again.”

  “No. I heard it years ago. Apparently Grandfather was, as the English say, having it off with Madame Schidlovsky, the concert pianist.”