The President

by Georges Simenon

  Anyway, that didn’t matter. In those days Marthe de Créveaux, Marthe de C., as the spiteful columnists used to call her, held regular receptions in her private mansion in the Rue de la Faisanderie, where it was her ambition to bring together everybody who was anybody in Paris diplomatic and political circles, admitting no one else except a few writers, provided they were members or prospective members of the Académie Française.

  At that time the new Minister had never set foot in her house, for he went about very little even in those days, and was regarded as an uncouth, solitary being, so that the caricaturists were beginning to depict him in the guise of a bear.

  Was it this reputation that had impelled Marthe de Créveaux to get hold of him, or was it because shrewd observers were beginning to foretell that he would soon be someone to be reckoned with?

  The only daughter of a rich Bordeaux merchant, she had acquired a title by marrying the Comte de Créveaux, and thus launched herself in society as well. After that, Créveaux had resumed his bachelor habits, and there were days when Marthe, in her ground-floor dining room, was entertaining a covey of ministers and ambassadors at luncheon, while her husband, in the second-floor suite he called his bachelor flat, was surrounded by a gay bunch of actresses and dramatists.

  The Minister of Public Works had not been more than twice to the house in the Rue de la Faisanderie before it was rumored that the Countess had taken him in hand, just as she had chosen to play Egeria to two or three political men before him. There was some truth in the rumor. She was familiar with a world of which the future Premier knew very little, and she had decided to polish him up.

  Was she beautiful, as the newspapers declared? After hearing her talked about, one was surprised, on seeing her for the first time, to discover that she was a small, helpless-seeming woman, looking much younger than one had expected, with nothing forceful or self-willed in her manner.

  Though she spent her whole time launching and protecting men she found interesting, each of them felt he wanted to protect her from the others and from herself.

  He wasn’t certain he’d ever been fooled. Frankly, he had known what he wanted in those days, and he’d known she could help him to get it. Besides, he was flattered at being selected, when he was no more than a promising beginner, and even the luxurious atmosphere of her house had played its part.

  Within a fortnight people were growing accustomed to speaking of them in one breath, and whenever the Comte de Créveaux met the young Minister he would hold out his hand with ironical emphasis and exclaim:

  “Our very dear friend . . . ”

  Contrary to what had been supposed, and was still believed by some people who claimed to be in the know, physical attraction had played very little part in their relationship, and though Marthe, whose sexual needs were small, had given it to be understood that they were passionately in love, they had very seldom been in bed together.

  Her great idea was to give him lessons in social behavior, and she had even set about teaching him how to dress.

  It was embarrassing to remember all this, at the age of eighty-two when one was living in a little house on the Normandy coast where death would be one of the next visitors.

  Because of this memory and a few others, he would have refused to have his life over again, if it had been offered to him.

  For weeks and months had he not studied the attitudes and the manner she taught him, which she declared to be those befitting the perfect statesman?

  And he, whose style of dress was correct and restrained, but with no attempt at smartness, had finally yielded to Marthe’s insistence and paid a visit to the most fashionable tailor of the day, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  “He’s the only possible man, darling, unless you go to London for your clothes. He’s my husband’s tailor, by the way.”

  Nowadays he wondered whether he wouldn’t prefer to have some dishonorable action on his conscience, as Chalamont had, rather than such a humiliating memory.

  He could see the tailor, patronizing and ironical, his own reflection in the mirror, with one coat sleeve not yet tacked in place. . . .

  Hadn’t he believed it mattered, if only for a short time, and hadn’t he gone to the point of changing the shape of his hats, the color of his ties and gloves?

  He’d taken to riding in the Bois, too, very early each morning.

  The people who addressed him as “Minister” had no suspicion that he was behaving like a boy in calf love. Furthermore, in Marthe de Créveaux’s house there was a young woman who was to get very much into the news because of him, and her name was Juliette.

  She acted as companion as well as lady’s maid, for Marthe couldn’t bear to be alone and had to have someone with her even when she went shopping or to have a dress tried on, with the car following her from door to door. It was Juliette, too, who kept the list of her appointments, reminded her about them, answered the telephone, paid for small purchases in shops.

  She came of a good middle-class family, dressed in trim navy or black, and looked every inch the convent-educated girl.

  Was she a nymphomaniac even in those days? Probably, and he had probably not been the first to discover the fact.

  On various occasions she had been alone on the ground floor with the future Premier, while Marthe was getting dressed, and she had played her game so well that one fine day, tried beyond his strength, he had taken her, on a sofa in the drawing room.

  It became a habit, a necessity, and for her there could be no pleasure without danger, which she deliberately carried to the furthest limit, devising the most perilous situations.

  The inevitable happened: Marthe de Créveaux caught them, and wounded pride, instead of prompting her to keep the secret, led to a scene of tragicomic fury that brought all the servants running.

  Thrown out of the house together with Juliette, the Premier had had no choice but to take a room for her in a quiet hotel, for he couldn’t take her to the Ministry and would not have her in his flat on the Quai Malaquais.

  The next day a minor newspaper had given a fairly accurate description of the incident, in a few lines, winding up with what purported to be the Comtesse de Créveaux’s comment:

  “When I think that I knocked off the man’s corners and even bought his clothes for him!”

  Had she really said that? It was possible, the words sounded just like her. She had not foreseen that they were to dog him right through his career and add greatly to his difficulties.

  For the journalists, delighted with the windfall, had made an investigation, and the result had been the famous “Gentleman and His Tailor” article.

  It asserted that Marthe de C. had sent the young Minister to her husband’s tailor, whose address was given, and that it was Créveaux who, in due course, had paid the bill.

  As white-faced as Chalamont had been when he wrote that letter, the Minister of Public Works had seized the telephone, rung up the tailor. He could recall nothing more agonizing than his feelings as he had listened to the voice at the other end of the line.

  It was true! The journalists had not made it up. The tailor, his voice polite but unruffled, offered his apologies: he had believed . . . he had thought . . .

  “So you took me for a pimp?” he had shouted into the telephone.

  “Oh, Minister, I assure you that . . . ”

  Ordinarily he waited to pay his tailor, like any other shopkeeper, till the bill was sent in. It was barely three months since he had been to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and he had felt no surprise at not hearing from the man. After all, didn’t some firms, especially in the luxury trade, send in their accounts only once a year?

  Did Marthe de Créveaux pay in this way for the clothes of every man she took under her wing? He had never known because he had never seen her again, though she had written to him “to get rid of a misunderstanding and make peace” when he had beco
me Premier.

  Her end had been sad, for she, who had been so feverishly active, was bedridden with paralysis for five years, and when at last she died she was so wasted that she weighed no more than an eight-year-old girl.

  Juliette had not remained on the Minister’s hands for long; she was taken over by a journalist who introduced her to the newspaper world, where she soon made good on her own merits.

  She had interviewed her ex-lover on several occasions, and had never failed to be astonished because he took no advantage of his renewed opportunity, as most men on whom she made a professional call no doubt did.

  Her death had been more sudden than that of her former mistress, but no less sensational, for she was among the passengers on board a plane that crashed in flames in Holland on its way to Stockholm.

  As for himself, he had sent the tailor a check, of course, but hundreds of thousands of people were still convinced that . . .

  And after all, didn’t it come to much the same thing?

  He didn’t like the man he had been in those days. He didn’t like himself as a little boy or as an adolescent, for that matter.

  And nowadays the play-acting of the Five Grand Old Men, the airs they had put on, seemed to him to have been ridiculous.

  Was all his indulgence reserved for the old man he had grown into, who was gradually drying up, like the Countess, until he’d become nothing but parchment stretched over a skeleton, with a brain spinning emptily in his bony skull?

  For what did he think about all day long, while people crept like mice about the great man whose slightest sneeze was turned into a drama?

  About himself! Himself! Always about himself!

  He prowled round and round himself, sometimes with satisfaction, but usually discontented and bitter.

  He had already told his story once, his story as the public wanted to have it, and no mere marginal notes scribbled later on would suffice to show him in his true light.

  It was all false, because it was all described from a false angle.

  The corrective notes were also false, being nothing but a shot at countering the legend.

  As for the real man, as he had been and as he now was . . .

  He stared uncomprehendingly at Gabrielle, who was standing in front of him, perhaps forgetting that she came every day at this time to tell him the same thing:

  “Lunch is ready, sir.”

  It was Gabrielle’s privilege to make this announcement, and she would not have left young Marie to do it for anything in the world. But surely, at the age of seventy, she should have got beyond such childishness?

  The fog pressing against the dining-room windows was so dense that it seemed almost like a snowy landscape beneath a heavy, unbroken, motionless expanse of cloud, such as one sometimes sees in winter, when earth and sky are indivisible.

  Young Marie had at last replaced her red jersey by a black dress and a white apron. She had been taught to hold the old man’s chair while he bent forward, and then give it a gentle push, and this frightened her; she was always afraid of taking too long and letting him sit down on nothing.

  “It seems you have another little sister?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is your mother pleased?”

  “I don’t know.”

  What was the use? Why utter meaningless words? The menu was almost as monotonous as the evening one. Half a grapefruit, for the vitamins, followed by three ounces of grilled meat, which had to be cut up for him now that his false teeth had got so loose, two potatoes and some boiled greens. Dessert would be an apple, a pear, or a few grapes, of which he wasn’t allowed to eat the skins.

  Would Chalamont, in Paris, follow tradition by inviting his new colleagues to a fashionable restaurant, where the main lines of his Cabinet’s policy would be laid down over dessert?

  In his own day the choice had almost always been a private room at Foyot’s, near the Senate, or at Lapérouse’s,

  Men who’d often been in the same team would be there, swapping memories of previous Cabinets, old stagers would invariably be offered the same inglorious posts, and there were nearly always some newcomers, still ignorant of the rites, who would keep an uneasy eye on the old-timers.

  Even the voices, the clatter of forks and the tinkle of glasses seemed to have a special resonance at those luncheons, and the headwaiters, who knew all the guests, hurried around with conspiratorial smiles, playing their part in the distribution of portfolios.

  Different, but no less typical, was the noise made by the reporters and press photographers lunching in the main restaurant on the ground floor, who were just as conscious as the group upstairs of their role in the day’s events.

  Those two hours, in point of fact, were the most agreeable in the life of a government. Later in the afternoon, after the Ministers had been presented at the Elysée and been photographed on the steps with the President in their midst, his face wearing the inevitable smile, the time came to draft the ministerial statement, and then the difficulties began, with endless wrangling about each word, each comma.

  Each of them had family matters and practical problems to consider as well. Were they to move into the various Ministries without waiting for the vote of confidence in the Chamber? Would there be room for the children? What furniture of one’s own should one take along, and what dresses would one’s wife need for official receptions?

  He had been through this experience on twenty-two occasions, his biographers had made the tally for him, and on eight of them he had been the central figure.

  Today it was Chalamont’s turn, and suddenly something unexpected happened: remembering the bustle in Foyot’s dining rooms, the Premier tried to visualize his one-time subordinate in that setting; but although he had spent more time with that man than with anyone else, been in closer contact with him than with any other, he was surprised to find himself unable to recall his features.

  Yet it was only two days since he’d seen his photograph in the papers. Chalamont had altered in the last ten years, as was to be expected. But his memory didn’t even present him with the Chalamont of ten years ago. It conjured up a young man of twenty-five whose expression, though already determined, was anxious, to whom he remembered saying at the time:

  “You’ll have to learn to control your feelings.”

  “I know, Chief. I assure you I’m trying hard.”

  He had always called him “Chief,” adopting the term by which a great surgeon or doctor is addressed by his juniors. He was no sentimentalist. He was cold and cynical. All the same his cheeks would sometimes flush, all of a sudden, with a bright color that his usual pallor made all the more remarkable.

  Did Chalamont, too, look back over his life now and then, or was he, at sixty, still too young for that? Would he be willing to have his time over again, and if so . . .

  The Premier remembered precisely in what circumstances his former secretary could not keep from blushing, despite his self-control. It was whenever he felt, rightly or wrongly, that someone was trying to make him feel small.

  He had formed an opinion about his own character which he believed to be accurate, and which may indeed have been so. He clung to this, and at the least threat to his self-confidence the blood would instantly rush to his head.

  He never argued, never protested. He made no attempt to retort, but maintained a cautious silence; yet his flaming cheeks alone betrayed his feelings.

  In the Premier’s office in the Hôtel Matignon the blood had not risen to his cheeks; on the contrary, it had seemed to drain out of his whole body.

  “Are you tired?” young Marie inquired, suddenly arriving from worlds away.

  He looked at the hand he had just brushed across his face, then he gazed around him, as though awaking from sleep. His plate was hardly touched.

  “Perhaps I am,” he confessed in an undertone, so as not to be heard i
n the kitchen.

  He made as if to rise, whereupon young Marie rushed to pull out his chair, and he looked so bent and feeble that she took hold of his arm.

  “Thank you . . . I’m not hungry any longer. . . . ”

  She didn’t know whether to follow him or not. She watched him as he moved away, shoulders bowed, long arms dangling, while he went with a wavering step into the passage leading to his study. She must have thought he might be going to fall, for she held herself ready to leap after him.

  But he didn’t even need to lean against the wall, and when at last he disappeared young Marie shrugged her shoulders, turned to clear the table.

  When she went back to the kitchen with the dishes and plates, Milleran asked anxiously:

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s gone to bed. He looks tired.”

  But the Premier was not in bed, and when Milleran tiptoed into the study she found him asleep, with half open-mouth, in the Louis-Philippe armchair. His lower lip was slightly pendulous, as though from great weariness, or disgust.

  CHAPTER 7

  THIS TIME HE REALLY HAD GONE TO SLEEP, for he didn’t hear Madame Blanche come when Milleran fetched her, nor was he aware that she was standing beside him, watch in hand, feeling his pulse with a light finger. Neither did he know that she had telephoned to the doctor, in lowered tones, or that while she was about it Milleran sat on a chair facing him, gazing steadily at him with a grave, sad face.

  Then the women signed to each other and Whispered together. Milleran made way for Madame Blanche and went to her office.

  More than half an hour went by like this, in a silence broken only by the regular ticking of the little clock, and at last the sound of a motor was heard, and a car drew up. Emile had said something to somebody, his voice hushed, too.

  There was a kind of impromptu ballet going on around him, for now Madame Blanche, in her turn, made way for Dr. Gaffé, who, after taking the patient’s pulse again, sat down facing him, as erect and formal as in a waiting room.