by Michel Déon
‘Maman, look, it’s Frankenstein.’
‘Who?’ Papa asks.
‘The man between the two policemen.’
‘Yes, he does look a bit like Frankenstein.’
‘It is him … the Russian man from the bottom of the steps.’
Gradually everything became clear. The crazed-looking man between the two policemen had just assassinated Monsieur Paul Doumer, the President of the French Republic, a fragile old man with a bushy white beard who always dressed in a frock coat, striped trousers and a top hat and went everywhere in an open car, flanked by mounted Republican Guards, saluting a crowd more amused than respectful. He launched warships, opened exhibitions, received foreign heads of state (always with identical republican courtesy), decorated brave policemen and firefighters. On 14 July the French army filed past him for two very trying hours. He had to listen to the Marseillaise three hundred times a year, but that served him right for having wanted to be head of state and of course a moving symbol too, not to mention a slightly sickly one, of a country that had not yet got over the First World War and, for that matter, never would.
‘Do you know this man?’ Papa asked, holding out the page of photos of the Russian flanked by police and the President stretched out on a table, his shirt and beard bloodstained.
Teddy told the story of the competition and the man sitting at the bottom of the steps, smoking cigarettes and offering them sweets.
‘What will they do to him?’
Papa said, ‘I expect they’ll cut this Monsieur Gorguloff’s head off after a quick trial. I should think there’ll also be an inquiry a bit closer to home to find out what he was plotting in the principality. You and your friend N. will be questioned and quite possibly put in prison. I shall come and visit you on Sundays with chocolate and Latin grammar tests.’
‘Tip-top!’ Teddy said.
For some time he had been falling in with his father’s sarcastic sense of humour, partly to annoy Blanche, who disliked it, perhaps because she knew it was her husband’s only way of retaliating, and now her son’s too.
Teddy remained ignorant of who most of the characters were, but he watched the puppet theatre that took place around him increasingly closely. He would not forget it. The principality was a glass dome, beneath which a shrewd conservative had assembled the wrecks and refugees of a Europe devastated morally and physically by the turmoil of war between 1914 and 1918. At regular hours an invisible operator turned a handle, as though the country was a barrel organ, and the puppets took their places and played their parts with exemplary courtesy and faultless delivery. A touching, often ridiculous, grandeur had stopped the clocks, denying the existence of both the war and the post-war. Sheltered from the present, those who had been chosen to play a part – all survivors of that unimaginable disaster – were able to recreate the world into which they had been born before the great upheaval.
Just once a year there was a war. Floats and carriages festooned with flowers carried girls chosen for their looks – and from baskets full of roses and carnations they pelted the crowds massed on the pavements. Even allowing for the odd scratch from a rose thorn, it was far less dangerous than a mortar shell fired across no man’s land. The style, the rococo of that era, was maintained in the hotels, restaurants and bars, right down to the smarter cafés. Mirrors whose silvering was flaking off reflected back (to those rash enough to look at themselves) fuzzy images like the plates the engraver rubs flat when printing is finished.
Luckily – because without them none of it would have made any sense – there was always an audience. You saw them straight away, flocks of visitors from another world – a world of no importance – disembarking from ferries floating outside the harbour and from trains and buses, and photographing and filming the changing of the guard and the celebrities and eccentrics. Without this attention, which the leading actors pretended to be unaware of, there would have been no spectacle at all.
Many decades later, a film called The Truman Show reminded Édouard of something. In it a television producer raises an abandoned child from birth. The child grows up beneath an opaque glass dome in an entirely virtual world. Special effects simulate sunshine, darkness, rain and snow, all to the rhythm of the seasons. Little Truman goes to school, where he’s neither better nor worse than the other children, gets work in some office or other where his mediocrity is deemed perfectly adequate, gets married, gets a house and a mortgage, has children, is tempted by an extramarital affair, almost loses his job, and is caught in a storm on his sailing boat from which he is saved at the last moment. He never imagines that his life is being filmed without interruption twenty-four hours a day, and that the omnipresent cameras are transmitting the results around the globe to an audience that breathlessly follows every episode, as moral as can be, in the life of a very average citizen. Apart from the innocent Truman (read ‘true man’), every other participant is an actor or an extra for life, acting with the predictability of an automaton, which is exactly what he or she is paid to do. When Truman suspects the deception and threatens to rebel, an invisible hand – a deus ex machina – pulls him back and places him back on the straight and narrow path of virtual reality, if one can use such an oxymoron. And so at all hours of the day and night TV viewers worldwide are invited to follow the on-screen happenings in Truman’s life of utter nullity, as a paragon who suffers only vain temptations and minor mishaps in an ideal city where everything has been arranged to produce obligatory happiness. From this point it is easy to imagine that if suddenly the show’s ratings were to waver (accompanied by a corresponding dip in publicity revenue), the cynical producer, wielding his godlike power, would have no hesitation in ending Truman’s life (not without extracting as much lamentation from his audience as possible), thanks to a devastating cancer, a road accident or a random shooting by a homicidal paranoiac (the last a very American fatality).
Édouard recognised in the film – which was not especially successful, no doubt because it attacked the lie at the heart of the most powerful medium ever invented – something of the glass dome under which he had spent part of his own childhood. He too might never have broken free of it, if cruel events had not brought about his liberty.
They called him, if he was lucky – or even if he wasn’t – l’abbé Tumaine, a laboured play on words that was attributed to the maths teacher, who was furiously anticlerical.3 In fact he was merely Father Chomet, the chaplain at the lycée where he taught religious education. His classes were not compulsory and so, as there were often absentees, in order to collect enough pupils to justify his thankless calling, he would position himself at one minute to four in the corridor outside his classroom, a small room furnished with benches but no desks, a straw chair, and devotional pictures on the walls. As soon as the final bell rang, hordes of pupils would pour out of the classrooms and into the corridor, thrusting arms into sleeves, pulling on coats, shutting school bags.
The father was of substantial build. No boy preparing for confirmation escaped his eagle eye. When he spotted one hugging the wall in an attempt to slip away, or running with head down towards the gate, his arm would stretch out, far further than one would have thought possible, and catch him by the collar in mid-flight, the way one picks up a kitten, before propelling him unceremoniously into the classroom. As soon as Father Chomet had a dozen, he would close the door and note their names in an oilcloth-covered notebook which he would place with the missal in the large pocket of his cassock. A Hail Mary to start with, then on to practical questions. Each pupil had had his confirmation booklet signed by his parish priest the previous Sunday. The chaplain pouted with disgust at the sight of the signature of Father Ricci who officiated in Teddy’s neighbourhood, a priest of skeletal thinness whose vestments had seen much better days. The chaplain was merciless: twelve Our Fathers, twelve Hail Marys written out legibly in a new exercise book if a boy’s parents had decided to take their offspring skiing or swimming instead. The fear he inspired was far greater than m
ight be imagined from his slender build and sloping shoulders. He had a neck like an ostrich. His face looked hairless, with rather curious rolls of flesh under his eyes and earlobes, shaped like droplets of oil. A dimple in the shape of a cross was imprinted on his chin below a tight-lipped mouth. To read or write, he perched a pince-nez on the end of his nose that left two ruddy spots when he put it away. When he took off his cappello romano he was vain enough to run a hand through his very wavy chestnut-grey hair. (It was a long time since priests had given up the tonsure.) His scrupulously maintained cassock finished halfway down his shins. He broke no rules in sporting, as his one luxury, silk socks with elegant low shoes that were impeccably polished – a million miles from the wretched clodhoppers Father Ricci wore. This Italian, with a face the colour of papier d’Arménie and a greenish cassock, was the black sheep of the principality’s clergy, who felt he insulted them with his all-too-visible poverty. His mass, said in a yellowing chasuble that was too short, revealing his skinny legs in their holey stockings, was the only one where the congregation prayed with the celebrant.
‘Father Ricci’s exactly how I imagine the curé d’Ars to look,’ Blanche said. ‘I’m quite sure they both wrestle with the devil every day.’
‘No question of it,’ Papa said, his face appearing over the top of his newspaper. ‘And a fat chance the devil’s got of beating Father Ricci the way he beats everyone else.’
It was well known that the chaplain had ambitions to be a canon. The prince’s approval was needed, and he relied on his counsellors. The little beggars in his class were almost all children of distinguished Monégasques. The chaplain had to play a subtle game with them: to succeed in forcing some rudiments of the history of Christianity and of the meaning of the Gospels into their heads, and at the same time not to hurt the feelings of the most useless ones. His problem was his total lack of charisma. He was impossible to pin down. That wasn’t true: for the adults his objective was clear; but for the children he was utterly impenetrable. Teddy’s classmate, Georges G., repeated what he had overheard his father saying.
‘That chaplain’s as slippery as a bar of soap.’
The fact was that, on the one hand, he slipped through your fingers before you could work out whether he was being sincere or not, and, on the other, there emanated from him a smell (more than a scent) that announced his approach, hung about him like an aura, and after he had gone lingered, leaving behind something that felt like bad luck. This odour of scented soap seemed to fade gradually and vanish, but then reappeared mischievously when the priest, despairing at some idiotic response, raised his arms heavenwards or hid his face in his hands. Nor was he averse to displays of melodrama and, for instance, pacing vigorously up and down in front of the benches, hands nervously clasped behind his back, murmuring, ‘We’ll never make anything of you.’
The boys preparing for confirmation desired above all that nobody should make anything of them. Their gazes rooted to the floor, they did their best not to burst out laughing. Meanwhile the smell, halfway between lily of the valley and patchouli, left its trail as the chaplain passed in front of or between the benches. Noses wrinkled, quick grimaces appeared.
When Teddy reported this to Blanche she responded, ‘He must be one of those obsessive washers. I’ve noticed it: there’s something too clean about him. It hides something dirty. All the same, he smells a lot sweeter than your favourite, musty Father Ricci …’
Musty? Teddy looked for an answer in the dictionary. As for Father Ricci, he’s not interested in what anyone else says: Father Ricci is a saint.
‘Poor Father, he just smells a bit too much of—’
Blanche stopped. Teddy would never know quite why his parents kept the Church at arm’s length. No more than that: there was never any outright hostility, and they maintained with great firmness that Teddy should receive a religious education.
‘Afterwards,’ Papa said, ‘he’ll make his own mind up.’
About what? Apart from the Catholic Church, he can’t particularly see who or what he should trust. At home there are friends who pass through: he has made a list of them. First is Salah Mahdi, a Moroccan with the looks of a prince, a Muslim married to an Orthodox Estonian. Hard on his heels is Georges-André W., a delightful slacker, an amateur magician, bohemian, Jewish. Followed by a respectable number of Protestants, a Copt and several freethinkers. But it’s still a lot simpler to associate with those that chance has chosen. All the more so because his school friends preparing for confirmation, however unreflective they might be generally, are starting to ask themselves questions about their religion. As personified by the chaplain, for example, it seems harsh, punishing far more than it forgives. They have never heard him utter the word ‘love’, which the wretched Father Ricci, officiating in his shabby church (built but never finished by a dishonest contractor), pronounces often from the altar to his kneeling parishioners.
‘May Jessous’s love go with you!’
The difference between the two is acute. They talk about different masters. Can divinity have two faces? Can Father Chomet speak in the name of the God of retribution while Father Ricci speaks in the name of the God of earthly love? How can this dichotomy of divine representation be explained in the framework of the catechism, whose very first lesson defines Christianity as a monotheistic religion? One episode in scripture particularly troubles Teddy: at the order of Yahweh, Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac. As he raises his arm to carry out the deed, Yahweh stops him. Or so it is said. How can the God of love amuse himself with such a cruel game?
‘Papa, would you sacrifice me if God asked you to?’
‘No, my lovely boy, I would sacrifice God instead, after making him admit his responsibility for the ridiculous mess the world is in.’
‘So would God be willing to do the same to us, to make sure we really love him?’
‘I don’t think so, Teddy. But ever since the world was created it has been suffering from a duality whose attraction is, to say the least, a bit mixed, and which is also leading it straight towards apocalypse, by which I mean the next revolution. We haven’t got to that point yet, and our only recourse, philosophically speaking, can be summed up in two words: carpe diem.’
Teddy was none the wiser as a result of this conversation. A doubt had nevertheless been sown. The chaplain’s words were no longer the voice of heaven. Conflict was brewing. It burst into the open the following Monday. Father Chomet grilled him with insincere goodwill.
‘How did you start your week, my boy?’
‘Not very well, Father. This morning I put my left sock on inside out and I immediately knew it was going to bring me bad luck.’
The class laughed. The chaplain managed a condescending smile.
‘… then I knocked over my bowl at breakfast and I was late for Monsieur Pollack’s class and he gave me a poem by Lamartine to learn by heart for tomorrow. Lamartine’s so boring—’
‘Very good, I sympathise with your feelings about Lamartine being “boring”, as you say, but I’m talking about yesterday, Sunday.’
‘The week doesn’t start on Sunday.’
‘Dear child, that certainly is the day it starts.’
‘How can it? If there’s a God, which is not as certain as all that—’
‘What do you mean, if there’s a God—’
Teddy had been speaking with his eyes closed and did not see the priest’s face suddenly turn pale or his friends, who a few seconds earlier had been wriggling on their benches, now sitting stock-still, waiting for the eruption.
‘If there’s a God,’ Teddy went on, ‘I don’t understand how he could have worked at making the world on a holiday. On Sunday God rested after he’d worked for the whole week, which therefore starts on Monday. And if I was God, I’d have spent some time thinking about what I was doing before I created the light and the air and the fire and the water and the birds and our grandparents and Adam and Eve and all the rest of it.’
Teddy had discovered
the intoxicating feeling of speaking without fear, of taking on and repeating the disenchanted words and phrases of his father and his freethinking friends.
‘… really it’s completely normal, whether he’s God or not, to have a rest, even though, like Papa says, it was a rush job and a bit botched really …’
The whole class had fallen utterly silent in their rows on the benches. But the chaplain did not explode as might have been expected. He was, instead, waxen, his hands clasped, squeezing his fingers together so tightly that his knuckles were white.
‘Édouard, I would be grateful if you would collect your things, walk from this classroom, and from now on never think of yourself as my pupil again. I am afraid that you are no longer worthy to receive the sacrament.’
‘I don’t mind, Father; I’ll ask Father Ricci to give it to me instead.’
The priest’s outstretched arm – Virtue expelling Calumny – pointed at the door, the corridor, the street, the principality, perhaps the whole of France, the realm of the damned even.
That evening Blanche received a letter, which she immediately gave to Papa to read. From his expression he was not happy, and did not hide the fact.
‘I’ve warned you time and again,’ Blanche said, ‘that you speak too freely with Teddy.’
He agreed, admitting that there was nothing for it: Teddy would have to go to Father Chomet and make his apologies.
Blanche picked up the phone and rang the chaplain. A female voice (though not very female) answered, ‘Yes, we know. Édouard may come tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.’
