by Michel D
‘I’ll give your problem some thought. We’ll talk about it again tomorrow. In the meantime let’s find a couple of beds.’
He called the waitress, a large blonde woman who smelt of face powder and cooking oil.
‘Tell me, pretty one. There wouldn’t be a cheap little hotel in the vicinity that’s as comfortable as a palace, would there?’
‘The patron has rooms. Do you need two beds?’
‘What do you think we are, a couple of queers?’
‘Oh, Father, the thought never crossed my mind!’
She giggled and shook, hiding her laughter behind a hand with chipped red nails.
‘Just because I wear a skirt,’ Constantin Palfy assured her, ‘doesn’t mean that I’ll let myself be insulted.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of that at all, Father!’ the waitress said, getting frightened.
‘In any case, the ecclesiastical estate is holy … Bring me another cognac. One for the road, or as our English friends have it, a nightcap. Go on, my girl. May God bless you …’
She walked away, wiggling her hips, and the priest murmured to Jean, ‘You’ll have noticed with what delicacy I omitted to add the ritual formula “… and make your hooter as big as my posterior”.’
‘I noticed,’ Jean said.
They were shown to a room on the first floor that smelt of beeswax and lavender. Its amenities – a couple of pitchers of water and a bowl – were not worthy of a palace, but its two deep beds welcomed the weary men without a squeak. In the twinkling of an eye the abbé had stepped out of his cassock and revealed himself in vest and underpants. Almost as soon as he lay down he was asleep, and Jean struggled for no more than a few moments longer before he had also surrendered to a dreamless sleep.
It had been light for some time when he awoke to find that the bed next to him was empty and the curious priest had sneaked away. He got up and was splashing himself from the pitcher when the door opened on a beaming Palfy.
‘Jean Arnaud, the road awaits. I have made my morning’s devotions at the church next door. Breakfast is ready downstairs: sadly no China tea in this hovel, only an inferior variety from Ceylon. But I made the toast myself. Obviously there’s no marmalade. We’ll replace it with honey from the Cévennes. I hope you’re not prejudiced.’
‘Me prejudiced? No. I thought you’d gone.’
‘I wonder what sort of a man you take me for.’
‘To tell you the truth, I’ve no idea.’
Father Palfy held his sides. ‘Please don’t make me laugh on an empty stomach.’
The fat blonde woman served them breakfast in the restaurant, where the smells of the previous day’s menu still lingered. Half asleep, in slippers and a flower-print robe, she brought the things one by one.
‘She is a model of inefficiency,’ Palfy said when she had left them.
But awfully natural … all the dereliction of the world is on a woman’s face when she wakes: without enthusiasm, befogged and distracted, with an obscure resentment against what has dragged her from limbo.
Jean had paid for dinner, and the priest now paid for their room in small change and crumpled notes that he dug out of a huge pocket at the hip of his cassock.
‘It won’t inconvenience you if I give you my small change, will it, Mademoiselle?’ he asked in an excessively polite voice.
‘Change?’
‘You don’t mind if I pay with coins?’
‘Coins?’
‘Fifty centimes, a franc …’
‘Er … no!’ she said, after an immense effort of thought that furrowed her badly plucked eyebrows and put a bitter crease in her unmade-up lips.
They set out once more in the Mathis, which after a night’s repose seemed rested and eager. It started immediately the priest cranked it and covered a good stretch of road before he thought he should check the level in the tank with his gauge. It was almost empty. They managed nevertheless to make it to the next pump, in a hamlet outside Valence. While the tank was being filled, Father Palfy disappeared in the direction of the church, from which he returned with a crestfallen expression.
‘Can you lend me a little money?’ he said to Jean. ‘I’ve hardly got a sou on me.’
Jean paid without demur, and was then surprised in the afternoon to see that the abbé was once again in funds after two prayers in a church at Saint-Étienne. Of course we have realised before Jean has: Constantin Palfy was looting the collection boxes along the road, preferably those belonging to Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers, an unlucky saint who thirty years later would not survive the great reform, so long awaited, of the Catholic Church. A priest looting collection boxes: I admit that it doesn’t entirely make sense. We have a right to show surprise and indignation, especially as donations left at the saints’ plaster feet are properly intended for the poor. Father Palfy was not poor, he was just short of money. He was not a priest either, since we are on the subject, which I know is not a mitigating circumstance. I hasten to make this clear for the sake of those souls who still respect the clergy and will, of necessity, have an interest in his case. Of necessity because Constantin Palfy makes a more than fleeting appearance in this narrative. He has entered it thanks to the fortunes of travel, and he has no intention of leaving it in the years to come. I should also like to add before I go any further that, contrary to what one might think, he is a character of many shades, and it would be hasty to judge him by appearances. Jean himself was surprised not to feel any disapproval when he discovered the truth on their second evening. Constantin Palfy had made himself a little additional pocket money from a church, and they were having dinner at an auberge near Saint-Pourçain when Jean asked him to recite the Benedicite.
‘My dear boy,’ Father Palfy said, ‘you won’t catch me out like that. I know the Benedicite, even though, as you have guessed, I’m not a priest. But I did spend three years with the good fathers. A conscientious pupil, it must be said, and gifted with a fine memory. Why, then, am I dressed like a priest? One has to dress like somebody. One can hardly walk the roads in one’s underpants. The sacerdotal habit inspires trust, especially for those small exactions I’m reduced to making as a result of a very temporary lack of money. As to the moral aspects of the question, I owe you a confession: they leave me cold. I could invent good reasons – that the money of the poor is for the poor, or if you like, that I shall pay it back to the Church a hundredfold, or that this small change was offered to particular entities – saints – which have no earthly existence, so I’m not misappropriating a thing. I steal because I am in a situation where I have to steal to survive. Finally, and in short, thanks to a father superior who informed me of my expulsion from the college, I discovered the key to my character. “You cannot remain within our walls,” he said to me, “despite the fact that you are not really bad, but you are incurable because you are amoral.” The privative a, you see. I advise you therefore not to place any trust in me. Ever. Having said that, if my cassock offends you, tomorrow I shall appear in civilian dress, but we risk facing financial difficulties on the road ahead.’
‘I’ve got a bit of money. We’ll share it. And if we run out, we’ll work.’
‘Work is not my strong point, even though by happenstance I have been an interpreter, a chauffeur with a very aristocratic family, private tutor to a young prince and even a professional dance partner and I forget what else. But to be a proper worker you need to have known the worth of a good example. My father did nothing whatever. He spent his life gambling. As for my mother, she was too busy putting on her make-up to think about anything else. Not a good start, as you see.’
‘So what about the future?’
‘The future doesn’t exist. Only the present exists. And by way of an example we shall now celebrate these confidences, with which I’m usually very niggardly, by ordering a bottle of champagne if they have any in this joint, which so far has offered none of the usual hallmarks of a smart restaurant.’
They did. Jean accepted a
single glass. Palfy’s self-assurance fascinated him. He felt he was faced with a man who did not resemble the men he knew in any way, a monstrous, astonishing exception, who had opened up a gulf at his feet. At the bottom of that gulf a thousand charms sparkled, of an adventurous and carefree existence, while the rest of humanity buried itself in low and menial tasks. Jean met Palfy’s dark velvet gaze; he was no longer smiling, but waiting for him to react. Jean extended his hand across the table. Palfy kept his arms crossed.
‘A pact? I cannot have made myself sufficiently clear,’ he said.
Jean continued to offer his hand.
‘Let’s try anyway.’
Palfy shrugged and shook the offered hand.
‘If it makes you happy.’
At seven o’clock next morning, carrying their shoes, they went downstairs and left by a service door to make their way to the Mathis, waiting for them at the roadside. Ten kilometres further on, Palfy threw his cassock into a ditch and put on a tweed suit with a matching cap.
‘You’re very elegant,’ Jean said. ‘I look like a rag-picker in these cotton trousers and this sweater.’
‘Elegant?’ Palfy said, frowning.
‘Yes, elegant.’
‘Are you saying I look loud?’
‘No, elegant.’
‘Elegance is invisible. If I “look” elegant it means I must be ridiculous. And I cannot be ridiculous. My suit comes from Savile Row. In London I would not be elegant, I would be invisible.’
‘All right. I didn’t say a thing.’
‘That’s better. Now, the next thing we need to do is change our car. We can’t go on in this dreadful rattletrap, which in any case threatens to give up the ghost every time it sees a hill.’
‘Is it yours?’
‘Mine? You must be mad. All I own is a suitcase that contains two suits and a few shirts. No! I borrowed it. And we are going to borrow another one. Are you scared?’
‘Yes. To be honest, I am.’
‘Well, you’re lucky. I don’t even feel scared any more. I’ve reached the point where it bores me. But sometimes you have to do boring things. Moulins is the place.’
And as he had said, at Moulins Palfy spotted a handsome little red Alfa Romeo parked outside a garage.
‘Wait for me on the other side of town, on the Nevers road.’
An hour later Palfy came into view at the wheel of the Italian-registered Alfa.
‘How did you do it?’ Jean asked.
‘That’s my secret. Don’t you think she’s rather smart?’
‘She won’t be when I’m sitting next to you.’
‘Come along, no false modesty. Jump in and let’s go …’
We shall not follow their every kilometre on the last stretch of their journey, which was, as may be imagined, far more rapid than the first in the old and worn-out Mathis. The Alfa Romeo, with all due respect to Antoine du Courseau, was an agile, sparkling car that stayed glued to the road as if by instinct. Palfy nevertheless affected to consider it merely an amusing toy for the nouveaux riches. His taste was for English cars, and when in Rouen he saw, left for a moment by its owner, a majestic black and chrome Bentley with white-walled tyres, his hand flew to his heart.
‘I’m lost, dear boy. Head over heels. I must have that Bentley. I know what you’re going to say: it’s not as good as the Rolls …’
‘No, that isn’t what I was going to say!’
‘And actually it isn’t as good as the Rolls, the most beautiful outward sign of wealth that can be imagined, but the Bentley is sensitive and responsive and not quite so noticeable. With a Rolls we wouldn’t get far. With that Bentley we’ll cross France all over again, and no one will notice.’
‘I’d really like to get back to Dieppe.’
‘Agreed, model son, but first a short detour via Deauville, which cost my father so dear that I rarely pass up an opportunity when in the vicinity to recoup a few of the notes he scattered on its green baize …’
Deauville was deserted in midweek, whipped by a wind laden with spray. Palfy explained the town’s topography and pointed out the boardwalk that, as he assured Jean, he had walked up and down a hundred times, clutching his mother’s skirts, around 1910. They pulled up in front of an exceptionally smart restaurant, where their appearance in a Bentley with English registration plates made a doorman snap to attention and greet them with a few words painfully learnt from a small book he kept at the bottom of his coat pocket. Jean had ceased to be surprised and did not even smile as Palfy began to speak with an English accent that was so affected it was hard not to laugh. But the Bentley, and his friend’s blue blazer and flannel trousers, were more than enough to impress a maître d’hôtel.
‘Understand,’ Palfy said, ‘that appearances are all on our side. The car, my clothes … and you …’
‘What do you mean, me? I’m getting to look quite revolting.’
‘That’s what makes it real. I picked you up on the road, now I’m going to feed you, and for them there’s no doubt about the outcome: tonight I shall take you to bed with me. We’re two queers, do you understand? Few things inspire more trust.’
Jean thought to himself that they would have to pay when lunch was over, even so, this restaurant was not the kind of place where you could slip out through the toilets. Palfy seemed not to be worried in the slightest.
‘Do you know how to eat?’ he asked.
Jean was suddenly afraid that he did not know how to hold a fork or knife properly, despite the lessons he had been given over and over again by Marie-Thérèse du Courseau. Obviously he had not strolled the boardwalk at the age of four, clutching Jeanne’s skirts, and faced with Palfy’s poise – he seemed to have spent his whole childhood at spas and luxury seaside resorts – he felt paralysed. Eventually he understood that Palfy only wanted to make sure that the unimpressable maître d’hôtel was left a little surprised by his guests. First the chef was summoned, to take down a recipe for oyster soup.
‘Careful with the onions,’ Palfy reminded him. ‘Diced very fine, above all. Then simmer. On no account let it boil, it will be a catastrophe if you do. Do you have a fresh mullet?’
‘This morning, Monsieur.’
‘Then serve it for us with a hollandaise sauce.’
‘Monsieur means—’
‘I mean a hollandaise sauce: egg yolks, flour, melted butter, a cup of stock. Careful, no boiling there either, or the sauce will turn.’
‘Oh no, Monsieur, of course not.’
‘The sommelier, please.’
Palfy crowned his performance by ordering a single wine, a blanc de blanc. Jean observed the reverse of a ritual he had watched at Mireille’s, in a less refined version, from the pantry. Palfy was suddenly disclosing a whole new world to him. He could no longer be regarded in the same light, this Fregoli brimming with self-assurance. 11 His roguishness had greatness, it had something superb about it. If they were arrested by the gendarmes, he would make sure they knew it. But for how long would his luck hold? The first glass of blanc de blanc swiftly dispelled his anxiety about the final act, and when Palfy, casting a cursory look at the bottom of the bill, took out a cheque book and wrote a cheque drawn on an English bank, he hardly even experienced relief. Everything was turning out so well!
‘Where did you find that cheque book?’ he asked when they were outside.
‘In the glove compartment. There usually is one in that sort of car. If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be much fun borrowing them … Now, I suppose you want very much to see your popa and your moma …’
‘Yes … actually I don’t really know.’
‘Let’s not go overboard. Everything must come to an end. Our little entertainment was a success. Not one snag. Let’s head for Dieppe. Shall we keep the Bentley?’
‘Why not?’
‘I wonder if it isn’t a little too pompous to turn up to your house in. A Traction Avant would be quite adequate.’
He replaced the cheque book in the glove compartment, a
nd they drove slowly through the streets until Palfy spotted a Citroën that he liked the look of. By late afternoon they were at Grangeville. La Sauveté’s gates were locked. They drove along the wall by the hawthorn hedge and stopped outside the door where seventeen years earlier unknown hands had left a basket containing the baby Jean. A woman in an austere black dress, her hair scraped into a bun on top of her head and thin lips made up with a single slash of lipstick, opened the door.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘My parents.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Albert and Jeanne Arnaud.’
‘They don’t live here any more.’
The door shut in Jean’s face. The sun was going down. He could hear the magpies chattering in the park and the first gusts of the west wind that would blow all night, driving the Channel waves onto the high cliffs.
‘I know that person,’ Palfy said behind Jean, who had not moved.
‘Who is she?’
‘The former sub-mistress of Two Two Four.’
‘I don’t know what a sub-mistress is, and I don’t know Two Two Four.’
‘My dear innocent friend, a sub-mistress is the supervisor of a brothel, and Two Two Four is at 224 Rue Déroulède, the smartest whorehouse in Paris. Has she come to retire here, or to open a country annexe? It would be interesting to know. Meanwhile, we ought to find your parents. Who can put us on the right track?’
‘Monsieur the abbé Le Couec.’
‘A shame I chucked my cassock away.’
‘Don’t be an idiot. The abbé is the best man in the world.’
9
Monsieur the abbé, seated on a kitchen chair with his cassock hitched up to his knees, was soaking his feet in a bowl of cold water in which a fistful of rock salt was dissolving, after a hard day: mass at six o’clock, mass for the repose of the soul of Mathieu Follain at eight o’clock, baptism of Célestin Servant at ten o’clock, marriage of Clémentine Gentil to Juste Boillé at midday, a wedding feast that had finished at four o’clock, just in time for him to give extreme unction to Joseph Saindou. The wedding feast had been the most exhausting: seven courses, and so large a number of trous normands12 that the groom had staggered out supported by two of the ushers and Clémentine, a girl who was usually rather reserved, had undone her bodice and let a white breast slip out, goose-pimpled like the skin of a plucked chicken. Monsieur Le Couec was musing about all these people who had been born, got married and died in a single day. He had accompanied them through their lives and to the brink of death, been present at their celebrations and their sorrows, known the fragments of secrets that they gave him during confession, and yet he knew nothing at all of whether they were happy or not. They did not listen to him very much, less and less in fact, and for several years he had been asking himself whether the religion of which he was a minister did not represent a formality for these people, in which God or the sufferings of Christ appeared to them as no more than magic potions. They remained loyal to it in order to guarantee themselves a little good fortune, out of superstition. Had he been right to follow his nature, to be familiar, bon vivant, understanding, sometimes even complicit? His attitude meant that people treated him as an equal, as a good fellow they respected, but knew that a full glass of calvados could make him all-forgiving. Where had they vanished to, those priestly wraths he had been armed with as he emerged from the seminary? Even from the pulpit he thundered no longer, stripped of the illusion that his sermons held the attention of his faithful. And so? He had only ever had a very relative propensity for asceticism, but in his idealistic moments he liked to imagine that his parish’s destiny would have been quite different if he had shown the sublime, intransigent faith of Saint John Vianney – the curé of Ars – if his flock had believed that he was fighting every day against a devil trying desperately to overturn his potato soup or set his cassock on fire. It was true that the war had weighed heavily on him. You couldn’t explain away that gigantic spectacle of filth, heroism and idiocy, and keep your faith intact. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney had very prudently deserted before becoming a priest. The wise thing would have been to follow his example in 1914 …
