by Michel D
‘Have you seen many as beautiful as her?’ he asked, over and over again.
Business remained good until the beginning of August, and then there was something in the air that was not yet anxiety, nor simple worry, but more a sort of instinctive, animal-like drawing back. Only the British seemed not to share it. They came in organised groups, got themselves sunburnt and drunk on rosé wine from the Var, were enraptured at the slightest treats offered by the agency – the bus excursions, boat trips, evenings out at the Palm Beach casino – and had a flutter at boules. Jean, who had not had any news from Ernst for a long time, opened a letter one morning in which his friend imparted some disturbing information.
Dear old Hans, I’m writing to you on a Sunday afternoon, during our six hours of weekly rest. There’s a thousand of us, boys my age, in a wonderful camp in the Black Forest, living close to nature while we undergo intensive training. Yes, these are university holidays, and I’m using them to do basic military training. It’s very exciting and we all feel it gives our life a meaning when our country is so threatened by Poland’s constantly aggressive stance. We turn our thoughts towards our German-speaking brothers living beyond our frontier under the insolent tyranny of Colonel Beck. For now it’s just humiliations and skirmishes. Tomorrow there could be a massacre. Poland must know that the Reich will not sit idly by while genocide is committed. Our Führer has warned the Poles. Dantzig is German at heart and in spirit. The present injustice is too blatant for our young hearts to accept it. Do not let any of this disturb you! The new Germany only wishes France well … And even Great Britain. There will be no war in the West. The Munich agreement is signed and sealed, on the honour of two veterans of the last war, who knew the horror of the trenches: Daladier and our Führer. Send me your news. How are your studies going?
Jean showed the letter to Salah when he came to the agency later that day. He read it, handed it back and said, ‘It confirms everything the prince has predicted. In any case, we are leaving for Lebanon tomorrow. Madame is arriving this evening.’
Geneviève in Cannes! Jean felt his legs turn to jelly. At a distance Geneviève was an abstraction, a practically imaginary person who spoke into telephones and only appeared trailing a shimmering, mocking light in her wake. Close to, she would really exist again, and despite holding out no hope that temptation would spark off its simultaneous awkwardness and pleasure between them, he had had a febrile fear of it, ever since Palfy’s whispered warning.
‘I won’t manage to see the prince, after all,’ Jean said.
‘You’ll see him this very evening. That’s why I came to the agency. I’ll take you to him.’
At the Carlton Jean looked anxiously for Palfy, but the Austro-Daimler was missing from its usual parking space. They went up to the fourth floor, and Salah asked Jean to wait in a small anteroom. Five minutes later he reappeared, standing back from a door that opened into a bedroom with half-drawn curtains that let in the ochre light of late afternoon. An indefinable scent permeated the room. Was it medicine, or some subtle, oriental perfume? He could not tell. Sitting at a small desk by the window, the prince closed a folder. The transparent and waxy skin of his face was attached to a death mask in which there lived, velvety and shining, two heavily lashed eyes which seemed enormous beneath the broad, low projection of his brow, crowned with grey hair full of blue glints. All Jean could see of the rest of him was a torso enveloped in a garnet-coloured silk jacket and a neck delicately protected by a white scarf knotted like a hunting tie.
‘So here is Jean, my friend Jean from the hill at Grangeville, from Rome and London and Cannes … a boy who has grown up greatly, seen many things, and works valiantly.’
He held out a cool, thin hand that felt weary and that Jean merely brushed for fear of breaking it.
‘I have wanted to see you for a long time, Monseigneur, but Salah told me you have been too tired. I’m happy you’re feeling better.’
‘I’m not better, but we must leave. War will be declared within a month. I do not get involved in such quarrels. But you? It worries me. You will be sucked into this great machine. You will have to survive, Jean. It’s too ridiculous to die at twenty. For nothing, so that the world of tomorrow can be worse still than that of today. I cannot take you with me, you would be a deserter, but I want to do something for you. Here is a sealed white envelope. You are to open it only in case of extreme need. Inside it there is a second envelope, with a name and address. You can at any time present yourself to the addressee and give him the second, sealed envelope. If, at the end of the war, you have not needed it, destroy it in its entirety, without ever seeking to know to whom I was directing you. I have been glad to see you, Jean. There is a good chance that it may be for the last time. You cannot imagine how cruel it is to say farewell to objects and people and to repeat to yourself: this is the last time. There are so many pictures of which one would like to preserve a memory … But I am very calm and I am ready. The war will seem long to a man who is weary, very weary.’
‘Monseigneur …’
‘Goodbye, Jean.’
He extended his hand, which Jean pressed gently, trying to convey his emotion. Salah made a sign, beckoning him to the door. The prince was already opening his folder again.
In the Carlton’s lobby Salah took hold of Jean’s arm.
‘Come over here. I have something to say to you.’
They sat on a sofa next to a window, through which cars could be seen stopping and guests coming and going. The luxury hotel resembled an anthill, animated by unceasing movement: the ants arrived with their suitcases and left again with their hands free, while doormen channelled this ebb and flow of motion, running to the cars, opening doors. Dusk was falling red upon the sea. In the middle of the bay a cruise ship was switching on its deck lights.
‘Never speak about that envelope,’ Salah said. ‘I say that in deadly earnest. It’s your secret, your talisman. Even your best friend must know nothing about it.’
Jean realised that ‘best friend’ meant Palfy, the very person whom he feared might materialise at any moment and swoop down on them.
‘We don’t know if Monseigneur can survive the voyage. I hope he can. Madame’s arrival will help him, but it will be a great shock for her. He has hidden his state of health from her.’
‘Does he love her?’
‘Immensely.’
Jean felt profoundly uncomfortable. In his appetite for life, and in the muddle of his feelings, he had, in his imagination, betrayed the prince, a singular man who had shown him nothing but goodness. Was every life subject to this series of temptations that couldn’t be kept in check, from which only happenstance or some ruthless decision could save you? He felt ashamed and promised himself that he would spell out his resolve to do better, in black and white, that evening in his notebook.
‘Lastly, there is another thing,’ Salah said in a different voice, as if he wanted to inject a more serious note of warning into his words. ‘Yes, one other … I doubt you will understand, but you’ll pass on the message, I’m sure. You are to warn your friend, “Baron” Palfy, that he is involved in a much more dangerous game than a person of his sort should be. If he weren’t your friend, he would already have found himself in serious trouble. Some well-informed people have granted him a reprieve. But it is only a reprieve.’
Salah saw that his words had disturbed Jean, and he placed his hand on his arm to reassure him.
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you. Now let us talk about something else. When this war is over and Monseigneur and I come back to Europe – or perhaps I alone – I should like to see you. Paris and London are both enormous. We could pass each other a hundred times without seeing each other.’
Jean thought hard. The only lasting affections that he could count on were those of the abbé Le Couec and Antoinette. Albert would not survive a war that had insulted his only article of faith: peace at any price.
‘I think you could always write to Antoinette du
Courseau, Geneviève’s sister. She will know where I am.’
Salah wrote the address in a notebook.
‘Do not let us lose sight of each other, my dear Jean. How the time here has flown past! I’ve hardly seen you. We haven’t talked about anything. I would have liked to share my admiration for a marvellous poet with you … You must have heard of him, and you must not make fun of me because I am completely self-taught. I have had to go a long way on my own down a path along which you were guided at a very young age.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Paul-Jean Toulet.’
‘I’ve never read him.’
Salah raised his arms.
‘You fortunate man! You have a delightful writer to discover. I envy you. Tomorrow I’ll send a copy of his Counter-rhymes to you at the agency. I’ll leave you the joy of hunting through bookshops for the rest: The Stripling Girl, The Misses La Mortagne, Monsieur du Paur, Public Figure. Reading him, you will think of me, and above the fray we shall maintain a Touletian friendship.’
A bellhop appeared in front of Salah.
‘Monsieur … The prince is asking for you. Urgently.’
Jean walked out of the hotel. Night was falling. He did not know where to go in this elegant and handsome town that was so cold in the evening, without secrets and so aloof that to encounter it in the darkness was to feel immediately uneasy. His solitary evenings usually ended in a small restaurant at the port where Palfy sometimes joined him, but mostly he returned to his hotel room to read. He had started on a reading list of epic proportions: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Roger Martin du Gard’s The Thibaults, Jules Romains’ Men of Goodwill. Many of his nights were now spent with his nose in a book, and whether excited or disappointed, he felt that his life was gaining a new dimension as his curiosity was awakened and he measured the narrowness of his own experiences against other destinies of so many different stamps. At twenty, he felt he had seen nothing. His work at La Vigie, his six months in London, his job at the agency were dead ends. He would have given anything to go to Lebanon with the prince, and then maybe to Egypt. At least war – if there was going to be war – would make some space and movement. For a short time that evening he wished it would come, in the form in which it is often imagined by naïve eyes: a masculine adventure that disrupts the monotony of a cowardly and gloomy world in which boys of his age encountered only brick walls to bang their heads against.
Palfy did not turn up at the restaurant, and when Jean called Madeleine the telephone rang vainly in an empty apartment. He left a message at the Carlton, went to bed, read, and slept. The next day Palfy remained untraceable, but when he called Madeleine again she answered immediately.
‘Yesterday night? I must have gone out for five minutes to get cigarettes. I don’t leave the apartment for anything else, as you know. It must have been you I heard – around nine? – as I had my key in the door. I ran, but I was too late. I was afraid it might be Palfy. He would have been furious.’
‘Why?’
‘He likes me to be at home then.’
‘Oh. Okay … Listen, I need to see him, the sooner the better. Tell him, will you?’
‘Mm. Jean … do you think he’s really a baron?’
‘He’s as much a baron as I am.’
‘You’re a baron too! I thought so.’
He did not have the heart to disillusion her. That evening, before dinner, he went for a walk by the port. A new liner was waiting out to sea, and launches were leaving, loaded with passengers. The exodus was under way, still hardly perceptible but clear enough for it to be unmistakable nevertheless. Jean mingled with the other onlookers and friends of travellers gathering on the quay. The yellow Hispano-Suiza appeared, driven by a white chauffeur with Salah seated beside him. It stopped in front of the customs building. A nurse came forwards, pushing a wheelchair. Salah and the chauffeur sat the prince carefully in it. Geneviève followed, wearing a light-coloured dress and a beret, with a travelling coat over one arm and a jewellery bag in her other hand. Jean had time to register her lightly made-up face and see its sadness and disarray. How would she survive so far from London and her friends? The group moved towards the police and customs building. They emerged again on the other side of the barrier, and two porters lifted the chair into a launch at whose bow there stood a black sailor in a white turban and uniform. Geneviève turned round to look at the crowd gathered on the quay. If she had known he was there, she would have been able to make him out among the other anxious and curious faces. The launch cast off and pushed back, helped by the sailor at the bow with his gaff. Salah stood next to the prince, one hand resting on the back of the wheelchair, contemplating the diminishing quay, the town switching on its first lights, France and Europe in their last days of peace.
‘The rats are leaving the sinking ship,’ someone said behind Jean.
Other cars were arriving, bringing their passengers: a Cadillac, a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes, a Bentley. The yellow Hispano-Suiza started up. The chauffeur had taken off his jacket and was smoking a cigarette.
Jean called Madeleine. She sounded anxious. No, the ‘baron’ was not in Cannes. In the society column of the Éclaireur du Soir she had seen a photo of him in a dinner jacket at a reception at the Casino de la Méditerranée at Nice. Perhaps he had stayed on to spend the day there. She also needed to see him urgently. Jean walked the streets of Cannes for a while, alone and lost. He was reluctant to return to his hotel room, for he knew that reading would not banish the two images that had suddenly forced their way back to disturb the peace of mind he thought he had found: Geneviève going away from him towards the Middle East, and Chantal, her long hair tumbling across the pillow, framing her sleeping face. Running away had made no difference. Everything was still there within him, and the one person he would have liked to confide in lived cooped up in Grangeville. Writing to her might alleviate the obscure, nameless pain that he felt.
Dear Antoinette,
Midnight. I have no one to talk to. I wish you were here. I want mussels, cider and apples. I dream of a green field. I saw your sister just now, boarding a ship for Lebanon. It hurt to see her go, as if I had lost someone dear to me. It seems impossible to deny that I’m as attached to the du Courseaus (not all of them!) as I am to my own family. A question I hardly dare ask: where is Chantal? Do you know? With love, Jean
In his notebook he wrote:
m) Writing is a wonderful exorcism. A letter to Antoinette and I feel better. And often – not often enough – this notebook has served to show me things more clearly in the muddle of every day. Everything’s so complicated! And no one warned me. All I was told were platitudes. Geneviève could have talked to me. It didn’t happen, and doubtless Palfy was right to put me on my guard. Now there she is, disappearing. I shan’t forget the real heartbreak there was for me in her last fleeting appearance. Where did I read, ‘The heart must either break or turn to lead’? Mine will have to turn to lead, or I’ll be no good for anything.
n) We know nothing about other people. Or rather, others know everything about me and I know nothing of them. On my list of questions that I need to resolve, one of the most important is about the prince and Salah. After the message Salah gave me to pass on, I no longer see him in the same light. Palfy has to clear up this mystery, as he also needs to tell me what he is up to with Madeleine.
o) I have placed the prince’s envelope on the table in front of me. It is the apple of the tree of knowledge. Am I Adam or am I Eve?
Next morning the Toinette docked at the marina and Jean had to give Théo some bad news. The group of English tourists booked for that day had just cancelled. The agency was sinking under the weight of telegrams from holidaymakers announcing that they would rather not come just now. Théo took it badly.
‘What are they worried about, these Angliches? That we’ll make corned beef out of their suckling-pig hides? The war? But there isn’t going to be any war in Cannes. Two weeks, two weeks I tell you, my fine friend, is all it will
take General Gamelin to drive those Germans straight back to Berlin with a marching band to lead the way. I tell you … the Saint-Tropez brass band is ready to go. Right out in front!’
Jean stayed on board for lunch. He enjoyed Théo’s posturing and unflagging swagger, and for once Toinette was not unreachable. She had no one to serve and she stayed sitting at her father’s side, leafing distractedly through a fashion magazine. She was listening, without appearing to, and refilling their glasses. Jean watched her lovely fifteen-year-old face, her beautiful light eyes, from her mother almost certainly, her long chestnut-coloured hair and her bare arm as she poured, with its still-childlike hand. Who would be the first to capture this sweet being, so lovely in her simplicity and natural beauty? The first Gontran Longuet who appeared on a motorbike or at the wheel of a red Delahaye, most likely, if all women were the same.
