Murder in Lascaux

by Betsy Draine

  “It might. We need to learn what’s in the Cazelles’ cave.”

  “Marianne swears the cave is of no importance. Do you still think she’s lying?”

  “Why wouldn’t she lie, if there really is a hidden trove of art? That’s something the family would want to protect and keep secret from the government. And Malbert was trying to inspect the cave.”

  “Yes, but how does Marc come into the picture?”

  “We know Malbert exposed his father’s wartime past. But what if there’s another part of the story that still hasn’t come out, some secret involving an archaeological discovery at Cazelle? Maybe Marc feared Malbert would uncover that secret. That would explain why Marc might try to silence Malbert now rather than at any other time in the past when he could have found an opportunity.”

  Yes, that made sense. And there was something else in this journal entry that leaped out at me. Drawings, wrote Jenny Marie. The young professor was making drawings to send back to Germany. Of what? Prehistoric frescoes? If none existed, what else was he after? There was that rumor about paintings that had been stored at the château during the war to keep them out of Nazi hands. Could the professor have been making an inventory? But surely Jenny Marie would have known about that secret had she been asked to participate or to copy paintings, and no reference to anything of the kind appeared in the notebook.

  Instead, what the notebook recorded was a moving, ground-level account of life in southwest France during the war years. I read with foreboding that as hostilities with Germany neared, Jenny Marie grew increasingly estranged from her nephew.

  3 May 1939

  Pierre spouts slogans from the Parti populaire français, with their fascist salutes and disgusting talk of welcoming the Germans if they invade. To purify the nation, he tells Antoine. Such rot. What’s galling him is the flood of refugees from the Spanish Civil War who have settled in the Dordogne in the past few months. It’s easy enough to talk of expelling immigrants, but where will the French go when the Nazis invite themselves in, unless we make them at home and lick their boots?

  And when war finally broke out and France capitulated in the summer of 1940, it was no surprise to Jenny Marie that Pierre embraced the collaborationist government set up in Vichy under Marshal Pétain. Antoine was despondent after the armistice was signed. Jenny Marie made plain her views about Pétain.

  2 February 1941

  They have pasted propaganda posters glorifying Pétain on every available wall. This is the so-called Art Maréchal. It is a disgrace both to art and to France.

  Nor was she solaced by living in the phony free zone, unoccupied by German troops but managed by Vichy on behalf of their Nazi masters. “What we do ourselves is more humiliating than what is done to us by our conquerors, because it is we who do it,” she wrote in August 1942. The occasion was the roundup and deportation of Jews in the Southwest, abetted by French officials.

  They say the children were screaming as they were taken from their parents. Where is France? Where is the Church? At least there is the Archbishop of Toulouse. He condemns the arrests, but otherwise the Church is silent. Soon it will be as bad in the Dordogne as in the North.

  Jenny Marie was prescient. By 1943, Hitler saw no reason to prolong the sham of a free zone in the South and ordered the total occupation of France.

  15 January 1943

  The Gestapo has arrived in the Dordogne. Now the enemy wears German uniforms, and they are no longer disguised as our neighbors. Not that our complete capitulation has done anything to heal the rifts between us. The Resistance is growing stronger, but the right has organized the Milice, who are no better than the Nazi SS and help them do their dirty work. Neighbors go on killing one another. The ones who join the Milice are the worst of the worst. Even Pierre has his doubts about them. He thinks Pétain does not approve and that his monster of a deputy, Laval, is responsible for this group of thugs, but who knows for sure? There is just one piece of good news. Pierre has prevented Charles from signing up with them. Can you believe it, Antoine told me, Charles wanted to join the Milice but Pierre said no. It’s the first prudent step he’s taken since the war began.

  So Pierre’s son, Charles—the current baron—had toyed with the idea of joining the Milice! Charles was then nineteen. He had entered the French army in 1939 but had been released and sent home after the 1940 armistice. I had no trouble picturing the baron as a young man recently demobilized, panting for membership in a right-wing terrorist organization. That his father had doubts about the Milice was provident, for as the war ground to an end, the Resistance exacted heavy reprisals on its members. Charles had survived the war, but he might not have survived the peace. No wonder he was hesitant to talk about those years, except in the vaguest terms.

  As we came to the end of the journal, what surprised and moved me the most was Jenny Marie’s account of the circumstances of her brother’s death. Cross-checking her final journal entries with the volume on the Resistance that Toby had picked up, we were able to piece together the following events.

  During the first two years of the occupation there had been very few efforts on the part of the local population to try to help French Jews. But after the roundups of August 1942, cracks began to appear in the wall of public indifference. There were some who tried to hide Jewish families and, if possible, to spirit them out of the country. In the Southwest, the most effective of these networks was the OSE, Œuvre de secours aux enfants, or Children’s Relief Organization. Routes were established to smuggle Jewish children over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, and from there to safe harbors elsewhere. Word spread throughout France that a path of escape led through the Dordogne, and news of it brought a plea to Jenny Marie from her old friend Aimée Laurance.

  She hadn’t heard from Aimée for many years. Unlike Jenny, Aimée had given up her career for marriage and had raised a family. She was a widow now. Her daughter had married a Jewish pharmacist, and there was a grandson. Now she wrote to her former comrade, desperate for help.

  17 April 1944

  Today received a heartbreaking letter from my dear old friend, Aimée, reminding me of our days at the academy. So long ago, such happy days. And such a pitiful letter from one who has nowhere else to turn. Her grandson, Arnaud, a boy of seven, is classified as a Jew according to the Vichy racial laws. Deportations in the North are speeding up. It is no longer safe in Rouen. Aimée begs me to shelter the boy at the château until arrangements can be made with the OSE for his rescue. Her son-in-law has already been deported, and she fears the boy will be taken next. Will I do it? Will I? Yes, Aimée, send Arnaud to me, not just for the sake of our friendship, but for the sake of humanity. France has lost its reason, not only the war. Send him to me, Aimée, and God help all of us.

  The boy came in May. He arrived at twilight in the back of a truck, hidden in one of several sacks of potatoes. Antoine, old as he was, carried the sack inside himself.

  3 May 1944

  He is safe now in our attic, and Antoine has gone to find our contact in the underground to make arrangements for the transfer. A beautiful boy, with big, wide eyes and soft brown hair. I can see a bit of Aimée in his features. Trembling like a rabbit, but considering the situation, very brave for his age. Quiet, intense. He seems to understand exactly what we must do, so we needn’t speak very much. I have written to Aimée using the phrases we agreed on to let her know he’s arrived. No one besides Antoine knows he is here. Just now I brought him milk and bread with cheese, which he gobbled up, and then I covered him with a light blanket. He is sleeping now. It may be days or even weeks before he can be moved, but meanwhile he is snug above my head.

  But events forced a move more precipitously than Jenny Marie and Antoine anticipated.

  5 May 1944

  For two days all has been well, until this morning, when Charles, growing suspicious of my trips to the attic, discovered Arnaud in his hiding place. He said not a word to me but informed his father, and Pierre ran up the stairs and f
lew into a rage. He went on and on. We must turn this boy over to the authorities. If not, we’ll be ruined. We’ll lose the château. We’ll be arrested. I’m sorry for the boy, but we have no choice. Antoine refused. There were words exchanged that should never pass between family members. I was beside myself with emotion. I said, if you denounce this child, I will never speak to you again. Never.

  Jenny Marie was shaking with anger when she wrote this line. I could tell, because her pen wavered. She must have been trembling with outrage when she spoke it, too.

  In the end we arrived at a bargain. Pierre will keep silent but only if we send Arnaud back to his mother immediately. To make peace, I agreed, and we began packing the little boy’s things. But after Pierre left, Antoine took me aside to confide his fears. He is worried about Charles. We must move tonight, he thinks, without waiting another day. And so Antoine has sent word to our contact in St. Cyprien to arrange the rendezvous this very night. After curfew, he will bundle the boy in the trunk of the car and set out for the meeting. Yes, it is dangerous, very dangerous, but what else is there to be done?

  6 May 1944

  The worst has happened, a catastrophe. At dawn the police found Antoine’s car by the side of a ravine and summoned Pierre to identify it. They had traced the license plates. Doors riddled with bullets, tires spattered with mud, bloodstains on the front seat. It looks very bad, said Pierre, but the family knows nothing about it. Yes, it’s our car, but it went missing a few days ago. We know nothing about this at all. That’s our story, he said to me later, better stick to it. Oh, Antoine, my dear brother, what happened last night? Was it the Gestapo? The Milice? Did you make the rendezvous before they caught you? Is the boy safely away?

  There was no further news of either Antoine or Arnaud. There never was.

  “Do you think our friend the baron betrayed Antoine to the Milice?” asked Toby.

  “Betrayed his own grandfather? I hope not. Jenny Marie didn’t think so, or she would have written about it.”

  But whatever she may have thought after that night, Jenny Marie said no more. Following the narration of these events, there was a melancholy sketch of the face of a young boy, but no other entry in the notebook for a full three months. Then, in September, she wrote: “Je vais mourir.”A doctor had come and delivered grave news about her lungs. The outcome was inevitable, the doctor said. “I am going to die, and perhaps that is just as well.”

  I wondered whether Jenny Marie, ill and with no end of the war in sight, had placed this last notebook behind the offering plaque in the chapel—she who had never been religious. The last page of the notebook was undated and filled with sketches of tiny crosses, quite distinctive ones, with the stem and crosspiece of similar thickness so the form looks almost round. I recognized the pattern from the family’s Limoges china. Scrawled across the drawings, as if to cancel them out, in capital letters from the lower left hand corner of the page to the upper right, was the prayer repeated on the offering plaque: “Deliver us from Evil.” DÉLIVRE-NOUS DU MAL.

  12

  IN THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN, I brooded over Jenny Marie’s sufferings, the fate of her friend’s grandson, and the unselfish death of Antoine. I wondered if the family had ever acknowledged his sacrifice. I wondered how he was remembered by his grandson, Charles, who was now the old baron. I wondered what other secrets about this family had yet to be revealed.

  I also worried about the coming day. In the afternoon, our group was scheduled to visit the cave of Rouffignac, but I was reluctant to go. Although not as famous as Lascaux, Rouffignac is known for its prehistoric paintings, and the trip into its interior by electric train makes it a popular attraction. Back in California, when we first read Marianne’s program brochure, I’d checked that box on the itinerary as a plus. I thought it would be fun to compare Rouffignac to Lascaux and exciting to ride the train. But that was then. By now I had no further need of underground excitement. Finally, I gave up on further sleep, got dressed in the dark, and sat for what seemed a long time, until my glow-in-the-dark alarm clock said six o’clock. Then I thought it was decent to go to the kitchen and cadge one of those emergency coffees from Madame Martin.

  This time she wasn’t surprised to see me and in fact gave a welcome. “Ah, Madame Nora! You and I are the only ones in the house who enjoy being up before light. I’ll be glad to have your company. Will you join me in a café au lait?”

  That was just what I wanted. “Yes, with pleasure. But then you’ll have to let me repay the favor by helping you prepare breakfast.”

  “No, no, no!” she protested. “There’s hardly any preparation this morning. We’re serving on the terrace, just a bare continental breakfast. If I’d been cooking something interesting, I’d be happy to let you help me. In fact, why don’t we do that tomorrow morning? Get up early, and I’ll show you how I make baked eggs. I do it my mother’s way, without a water bath. We call that oeufs sur le plat.”

  “I’d like that very much, thank you.” I let her serve me a wonderful bowl full of milk-laced coffee, and we chatted about her life in the kitchen when her mother was its queen. I couldn’t resist an opening to ask her something I’d been wondering about.

  “Madame Martin, do you remember Jenny Marie’s brother, Antoine, at all?”

  “Only vaguely; I was so little then. But Maman thought very highly of him. He was brave, she said.”

  “I’ve been reading Jenny Marie’s notebooks in the library, and she mentioned it was Antoine who invited her back to the château after the man she loved was killed in the Great War.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Antoine had been a widower for a long time, and he was lonely. By then, his father, who disapproved of Jenny Marie’s life in Paris, had also died. With the baron gone, Antoine had the right to invite Jenny Marie back, and they had always been close. I’m sure it was a comfort to him to have her with him again at Cazelle.”

  “She speaks lovingly of her brother in the notebooks.”

  “They were a devoted pair. The time between the wars was a good time for this house.”

  “But then war came again.”

  Madame Martin winced. “Those were terrible years.”

  “I’m sure they were. I have another question, though. It’s about the year Jenny Marie died. Out at the chapel, there’s a little plaque that was put up in 1944, and it reads ‘Deliver us from evil.’ I’ve been wondering whether it was Jenny Marie herself who put up that plaque.”

  “Oh, no.” Madame Martin shook her head. “It was my mother who installed that offering plaque, in Jenny Marie’s memory.”

  “Do you know why she chose those particular words?”

  “Well, yes, because, according to Maman, those were Jenny Marie’s last words.” She paused, as if thinking of something for the first time. “I suppose Maman must have been surprised that Jenny Marie would repeat the Lord’s Prayer at the end. Jenny Marie was never religious, you know.”

  “Your mother never wrote any of this down, did she? I’m asking because I’d like to use some of this information in my article.”

  “My mother was a simple cook. She never wrote anything but recipes, grocery lists, and letters when our men went to war.”

  “Then I’d need to attribute the information you just gave me to my conversation with you.”

  This suggestion changed Madame Martin entirely. She stood, looked uncomfortable, and turned away, saying indistinctly, “I can’t say. The family might not like it. You don’t really need to write all this down, do you? I just thought we were talking entre nous. I should have remembered you are here to uncover stories about the family.”

  “That’s not my purpose, Madame Martin. I only want to understand Jenny Marie.”

  “You have your work to do, and I have mine. Excuse me while I get the breakfast ready. I need to work alone now, if you don’t mind.”

  She had spoken to me so freely up until this point that I regretted her change of tone and felt a twinge of guilt that I had been its cause. B
ut now I knew who had discovered Jenny Marie’s notebook after her death and who had placed it behind the offering plaque in the chapel.

  When Toby and I arrived on the terrace an hour and a half later, the ambiance was elegant, with white linen cloths on little round tables placed just in front of the rose garden. The breakfast tables were set for three, a clever way to mix up the group. David and Lily were already seated with Patrick. Roz and Dotty arrived with us. We hesitated a moment, and Marianne, acting as hostess at the French doors to the terrace, directed us where to sit. I was sent to start a table with Roz. Toby and Dotty were told to join Guillaume, who was seated at the farthest table, poring over a copy of Le Figaro.

  I was still disturbed about the tense end to my conversation with Madame Martin and so was grateful to be seated with Roz. I’d always found her good company. It would be soothing to have a quiet breakfast with her on the terrace.

  Each place was set with an empty coffee cup, a small glass of apple juice, and a lunch plate filled with four square toasts, a pat of butter, and three strawberries. Shallow bowls were brimming with jams in three colors: red, orange, and brown. Marianne came to our table and clinked her glass for silence.

  “The breakfast is a bit Spartan today, because our class is going to follow immediately, and we’re preparing brunch. But it might interest you to know those dry toasts on your plate are the commonest breakfast food in France. We call them biscottes. The British call them rusks. And you Americans call them melba toast. Your coffee is coming round. After breakfast, please join me in the dining room. We need to start promptly, so we can have a good class and you can get to your afternoon outing on time. Your appointment at Rouffignac is at two o’clock.”