The President

by Georges Simenon

  But why interfere? It didn’t concern him.

  Was there anything left that did concern him?

  All he had to do was to wait, trying to keep as calm as possible, until the drug took effect.

  Even Emile wasn’t back from Etretat, where Gabrielle must have given him a whole lot of errands.

  “Hush! . . . One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . ”

  Standing motionless, he was counting his pulse, as though his life were still of importance.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN BY GAFFÉ AND DR. LALINDE, with the approval of Professor Fumet, were to take one pill, not two, at a moment of crisis, and another three hours later if need be. He had deliberately doubled the dose, partly because he was in a hurry to calm his panic-stricken nerves, but chiefly as a protest, in defiance.

  The result was that before the usual ten minutes were up he began to see black spots before his eyes, flickering so that he felt dizzy, and that once seated in his armchair, in which he had hastily taken refuge, he felt torpor creeping over him.

  If he had been an ordinary man he would have surrendered to it with relief, but they wouldn’t let him. At the slightest change in his habits or behavior they would begin by summoning the young doctor from Le Havre, who in his turn would send for the man from Rouen, and once they were together the pair would shift the responsibility to Fumet, by telephone.

  Did Fumet, in his turn, report to somebody higher up, while the three police inspectors were informing their own boss of the Premier’s off moments, as though he were a kind of sacred animal?

  The idea made him cross, illogically, for a few minutes earlier he had been moping about being forgotten in Paris, almost in a rage because somebody was ignoring his veto.

  When Milleran came in with the letters she had sorted, he was looking surly, his small eyes were tired but aggressive, and as she was about to put down the letters on his desk he stopped her with a gesture.

  “Read them to me.”

  He had not the energy to read them himself, for his eyelids were heavy and his brain dulled.

  He began by asking:

  “Where’s Madame Blanche?”

  “In the waiting room.”

  This was the name given to the library farthest from his bedroom, the one that led to the front hall and was, indeed, used as a waiting room when necessary. If Madame Blanche was settled there, with a book or some magazines, it was because she wasn’t pleased with the state she had found him in and expected him to be needing her, unless it was Milleran who had said something to her.

  What was the use of bothering about it, mulling over the same old suspicions and resentments? He said again, resignedly:

  “Read them to me.”

  The public believed that he had a great deal of correspondence, as he used to when he was Premier, but in actual fact the postman usually brought a mere handful of letters every morning, except on the days following the publication of an article about him in some magazine or newspaper with a big circulation.

  From time to time somebody would come bothering him for this purpose, from one country or another, invariably asking the same questions and taking the same photos, and he knew so well where they would ask him to stand that he would get into position even before the photographer opened his mouth.

  The resulting correspondence was almost identical each time. He would be asked for his autograph, often on cards specially cut to be filed in a collection, or on postcard photographs of himself such as were on sale in stationers’ shops.

  From Oslo a girl of sixteen, writing poor French in a careful hand, sent him a list of questions, with blank spaces for the answers, explaining that her teacher had asked her to write an essay of not less than six pages on the Premier’s career.

  The questions began like those on a passport application form:

  “Place of birth:

  “Date of birth:

  “Education:”

  She could have found those particulars in any encyclopedia, even in her own country.

  “What made you choose politics as your career?

  “Which statesman did you admire most when you began your career?

  “Did you hold certain theories when you were very young, and have any of them altered as time went on?

  “If so, why?

  “What recreations have you gone in for?

  “Which of them do you still keep up?

  “Are you satisfied with your life?”

  Milleran had been surprised when he had sent a serious reply to the girl, who in a few years would doubtless have settled down as a wife and mother.

  An old couple—younger than he was, though!—

  ingenuously requested him to help them end their days in the way they had always dreamed of, by making them a present of a cottage in the country, not too far from Bergerac, where the husband had just been pensioned off from his job as a postman.

  A lot of people supposed him to be rich. Humble people wouldn’t have understood how a man who had led the country so often and for such long periods, living in palatial government houses and surrounded by official pomp, could be left with no private fortune at the age of eighty-two.

  Yet so it was, and the Chamber had voted him a pension without his asking for it. The government also paid Madame Blanche’s salary and, since he had left Paris, Emile’s wages.

  Were they afraid it might be said later on that France had left one of her great men to die in poverty?

  So even at Les Ebergues, after retiring from public life, he was not completely independent, he remained a kind of civil servant.

  “After all, there are funds for preserving historic monuments!” he sometimes said jokingly.

  At other times he would point out that owners of premises classed as of historic interest were forbidden by law to make the slightest structural alteration in them. Didn’t he come under the same heading? Had he any right to reveal himself in a light different from that in which the history books displayed him?

  The care taken in this respect was such that three policemen took turns outside his door, and he felt convinced that his telephone was regularly tapped, his correspondence, especially letters from well-known foreigners, opened before being sent on to him. Or did Milleran take it upon herself to report to the authorities about what he wrote and whom he saw?

  “Dear Sir,

  “I am at present writing a large-scale work on a man with whom: you were well acquainted, and venture . . . ”

  He was not jealous, although there were many letters of that kind. For some twenty years there had been five of them, known as the Grand Old Men, each representing his own country more or less uninterruptedly, and between them they had controlled world policy.

  They used to meet periodically, on one continent or another, nearly always in some well-known spa, for conferences to which journalists and photographers would flock in hundreds.

  The slightest word uttered by one of them, the faintest frown on emerging from a meeting, would be reported in press communiqués with banner headlines in all the newspapers.

  Sometimes they had quarrels, followed by spectacular reconciliations, often staged merely for their own amusement; some of their talks, whose outcome the world awaited in breathless suspense, had turned only on trivial subjects.

  The Englishman, who in private was the most humorous and cynical of the five, would look at his watch on arriving.

  “How long are we supposed to argue before agreeing on this communiqué?”

  And he would produce from his pocket a ready-drafted announcement.

  “If only they were decent enough to leave us some cards, we could have a game of bridge. . . . ”

  They all belonged to the same generation, except the American, who had died young, at sixty-seven, before any of the others. They had summed one anothe
r up so precisely that each knew the true worth of all the others, and even their little eccentricities.

  “Gentlemen, with my country about to go to the polls, it is imperative for me today to put my foot in it, as our journalist friends will report presently. So we will announce that I banged on the table and that my obstinacy has brought the conference to a deadlock.”

  There was nearly always a garden surrounding the luxury hotels that were taken over on these occasions, and as soon as one of the five ventured into it he would be set upon by reporters and photographers.

  All five were accustomed to power and fame, and yet the varying shares of publicity they received had now and then caused sulks and sub acid comments from one to another; these white-haired statesmen, depicted in profile on their countries’ stamps, descended on such occasions to behaving like a bunch of actors.

  In the margins of his book the Premier had noted some traits of this kind, not all of them, only the most typical, especially those with a certain human quality.

  And now, when, except for Cornelio, who had lost his wits, he was the last survivor of the group, he still felt a slight twinge when somebody wrote to ask him for information about one of them, and not about himself!

  In London, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, all over the world, people were still writing books about him and about the others, and he sometimes caught himself feeling tempted to make up the whole of each of them!

  “I’ll answer that tomorrow. Remind me. You may go on reading.”

  An unknown man wanted his help in obtaining a post in the prison administration.

  “I come from Evreux, like yourself, and when I was young my grandfather often talked to me about you, for you lived in the same street and he knew you well. . . . ”

  Milleran was watching him furtively, wondering whether he had dozed off, but his white, smooth-skinned hand, which now had the unquestionable beauty of an inanimate object, signed to her to continue.

  “Dear Sir,

  “I have applied everywhere, I have knocked on every door, and you are my last hope. The whole world acknowledges your benevolence and your deep understanding of human nature, and I am confident that you will understand me, you who . . . ”

  A professional sponger.

  “Next one!”

  “That’s all, sir.”

  “Didn’t I have an appointment for today?”

  “Yes, the Spanish general was coming, but he sent a message to say he’s ill with influenza at San Sebastian. . . . ”

  Speaking of generals, there was one who seemed likely to outlive them all, arid of whom the Premier thought with some envy and a touch of annoyance. He was ninety-three years old, but he turned up every Thursday, alert and inclined to be waggish, at the meetings of the Académie Française, of which he was a member. A month ago there had been an article about him in a weekly paper, including a photo where he appeared in shorts, bare-chested, doing exercises in his garden under the indulgent eye of his wife, who sat on a bench in the background as though watching a child at play.

  Was it really worth it?

  At Evreux, at this very moment, someone was laying out Xavier Malate, whose worries were at an end. He was through with everything. And he, who had been haunted by the idea of burial, would have nobody to walk behind his hearse, unless some old maid automatically turned up to follow it, as occasionally happens.

  For a long time the Premier had paid no attention to the deaths of people in his circle, most of whom were his elders. He considered they had had their day, even those who died at fifty.

  Then, when men hardly older than himself began to die as well, he had sometimes felt a certain selfish satisfaction, if not downright pleasure.

  Someone else had been taken, and he was spared!

  But the ranks of his own generation had gradually thinned, the Five Grand Old Men had begun to drop out, and on each occasion nowadays he caught himself counting, without grief but feeling vaguely apprehensive, as though it began to occur to him that his turn might really come one day.

  He had never attended funerals, except on the very rare occasions when he was obliged to represent the government of the day. He had avoided death chambers, every kind of ceremonial death watch, not because they depressed him, but because he considered that kind of pomp to be in bad taste.

  He would simply send in his card, or have himself represented by a member of his staff, and to his staff, too, he left the task of drawing up letters or telegrams of sympathy.

  But Xavier Malate’s death today had made a different impression on him, though he couldn’t say exactly in what way. The drug had slowed down his mental processes, as though he were half asleep, and his thoughts were at one remove from reality.

  For instance, he kept seeing the face of an old woman with thin hair and very long teeth. Heaven knew what had conjured it up, and there was no reason why she should resemble Eveline Archambault, whom he hadn’t seen since she was just a little girl.

  All the same he felt certain it was she, as she looked nowadays, and her face wore a curiously sweet expression, tinged with silent reproach.

  She had doubtless prayed all her life that he might find religion before he died, as though words said to a priest could make any difference to anything. Like him she was seated in an armchair, an old rug over her knees, and a kind of stale smell emanated from her.

  In the end he realized that the rug was the one that used to be wrapped around his mother’s legs in the last weeks of her life. But what about the rest?

  But for the fear of seeming ridiculous, he would have told Milleran to ring up Evreux again, the Town Hall, for instance, to inquire about Eveline, to find out whether she was still alive, if she were ill, if she had all she wanted.

  He felt tired. He knew it was the natural effect of the drug he’d taken, but it gave him a depressingly helpless sensation, and if he’d had the right, he would have gone to bed.

  A neighbor’s cow, escaped from the barn, was running around the orchard, knocking against the boughs of the apple trees, pursued by a little boy armed with a stick.

  That little boy would still be living long after he himself was dead. All those around him would outlive him, as would most of the earth’s present population.

  Would Emile tell the truth about Les Ebergues, later on? Perhaps so, for he liked vulgar stories and people would give him bigger tips if he made them laugh.

  He had not been the first to use the cliff-top farm as a country house; before him a lawyer from Rauen—dead too now!—used to bring his family there for the holidays. The Premier had only made the additions required for his own convenience, such as the tunnel that now linked what were originally two separate buildings.

  Names were of no importance to him, so he had not altered the one the property went by when he bought it.

  The local people had told him that the word “ébergues” referred to portions of the codfish prepared for use as bait, and as Fécamp was a codfishers’ port and fishing was the mainstay of the whole coast, he had been satisfied with that explanation. Probably the skipper of a fishing smack or the owner of a small fleet had lived in the house at one time?

  But one day when Emile was tearing away the ivy that had crept over the parapet of an old well, he had brought to light an inscription, roughly cut in the stone:

  Les Ebernes

  1701

  The Premier had happened to mention this to the schoolmaster, who was also Secretary of the District Council and sometimes came to borrow books from him. The schoolmaster had had the curiosity to look up the old land-survey maps, and had found the property marked on them by the same name as that on the well.

  However, nobody could tell him what “ébernes” were, until at last he found the explanation in the big Littré dictionary:

  “Eberner: to wipe excrement off a child.

  “Eberneuses: women
who wipe excrement off children.”

  What kind of women had once lived in the house and been given the nickname that had stuck to the place afterwards? And what later and more prudish occupant had given that cunning twist to the spelling of the name?

  He had mentioned that, too, in his secret memoirs, but would they ever be published? He was not sure whether he still wanted them to be. When the future of the country was at stake he had always been prompt to take the most fateful decisions, with no fear of committing an error, but, faced with the question of what he should reveal about his own life, he became hesitant and was tormented by scruples.

  The picture the world had formed of him was cut and dried, it took no account of the changes wrought by time, it was rudimentary and often downright false, and his legend included one particular chapter he had always tried to correct, but in vain.

  It had appeared in the scandalmongering rags of the day, and later in a national newspaper, under the heading: “A Gentleman and His Tailor.”

  For thirty years his opponents had made the most of it during every election campaign. Only the title had altered from time to time, the variants including “Tradesman’s Entrance” and “The Countess’s Chambermaid.”

  The chambermaid and the Countess, for they had been real people, were both dead now, but the “Gentleman,” who was about the same age as the Premier, still survived and could be seen every afternoon at the races, upright as ever, but with creaky joints.

  This was the notorious Créveaux case, which had kept the Premier out of several successive Cabinets, just as another man had been barred from office for ten years by a certain letter hidden between the pages of Le Roi Pausole.

  The difference was that he himself had been innocent, at least of the charge brought against him. He was hardly more than forty, and had just joined a Cabinet for the first time—as Minister of Public Works, in which capacity he was about to be visited by Xavier Malate.

  Wasn’t it odd the way things linked up through time and space, wreathing together mockingly, as it were? Could it have been on the actual day of Xavier’s visit that . . .