Then:
‘When he’s earning two hundred francs a month.’
Miette would state that he was earning two hundred francs. Isabelle would say the same. Monsieur Vétu would believe it. He believed everything. He had not come to Nevers today, to see for himself, as he had announced that he was going to, and possibly his stomach trouble was just an excuse.
In less than a year, Félicien had obtained everything he wanted. One morning, when he had gone into the shop, his employer had not given him time to put on his grey overall.
‘Will you come upstairs for a moment, Monsieur Miette?’
It was the first time he had been invited to climb the spiral staircase, the first time he had entered that huge, dark, low-ceilinged room which served as both drawing-room and dining-room, and his gaze had been drawn straight away by Isabelle’s piano. Madame Vétu, who had not yet gone downstairs, had disappeared as if in obedience to a silent order.
Monsieur Vétu, for his part, had opened a drawer and Félicien had had a shock on recognizing his letters which had been held out to him without a word.
‘I must ask you to leave this house immediately.’
Where had Isabelle been? Probably behind a door which must have been that of her bedroom.
‘I must explain to you, Monsieur…’
Nothing had stopped him, neither the simple dignity and sorrowful reserve of the sick man standing in front of him, nor the unfamiliar atmosphere enveloping him, nor the bell ringing in the shop.
‘You can’t throw me out without listening to me. I love your daughter. Isabelle loves me.’
‘Go on.’
How long had he gone on talking, his throat full of suppressed sobs, his eyes shining wildly?
‘I’ll leave here. I’ll go anywhere you like. On the other hand you must, you simply must leave me some hope, I must know that one day …’
He had obtained this reply:
‘Perhaps.’
And he had experienced the blackest of weeks, so black that he could remember it only in outline, with aimless comings and goings, interminable waits outside the Rue Montmartre house from which Isabelle no longer emerged. Sometimes he had pressed his nose against the window-pane like a poor man trying to arouse pity.
He had run after Monsieur Brois.
‘She hasn’t said anything to you? Please, Monsieur Brois, give her this letter. I’m capable of anything at the moment. A dozen times I’ve nearly thrown myself in the Seine.’
Monsieur Brois had handed the letter to Isabelle. In the evening he had brought back a reply.
‘My father is very unhappy. I feel ashamed of the sorrow I have caused him. He was ill for two days. He does not speak to me any more, and does not dare to look at me. We must wait, my love, wait patiently …’
Then he had found pathetic words with which to counter, in Isabelle’s heart, the sight of her father’s unhappiness.
Unshaven, with his clothes in a pitiful state, he had hung around under her windows in all weathers.
‘Have no fears. You will soon be rid of me and your father will be able to breathe again …’
Eight days? Ten days? He could no longer remember. It was a black hole, as black as the memory of the Rue Coquillière and the five hundred francs.
And then one morning he had seen her come out of the shop, in broad daylight, and walk up to him.
‘My father says it is all right for you to come to the house this evening. He makes no promises. He doesn’t know you.’
They had given him a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a biscuit, and after that, every evening, he had spent a couple of hours in the big low-ceilinged room while Madame Vétu did her housework and Monsieur Vétu brought his invoices up to date on the table after it had been cleared of the dinner things.
‘Later on, when you’ve found a job, we’ll see.’
Monsieur Brois had sent him to the Stock Exchange Press where they were looking for a proof-reader. He spent his days in a glass cage, bent over proofs still wet with ink, with two rows of linotype machines as his horizon. Journalists came and went, looking busy and important.
‘Tell me, my boy …’
And at night, his lower lip quivering with pride, he wrote:
‘Your poor father imagines that I am going to take over his shop one day and manufacture rubber stamps!’
He used to accompany the Vétus, on Sunday, to their little country house on the banks of the Marne, feeling impatient and disgusted with their calm, empty existence.
‘When we are just the two of us …’
He had written a long letter to Léopold.
‘It is absolutely essential that you should get me a birth-certificate form, either from Liége or from a nearby village, preferably a small village.’
And triumphantly, without admitting that it was Doms who had taught him how to forge identity papers, he had filled in the blanks himself. As for the rubber stamps with the arms of the borough of Huy—he remembered his brief acquaintance with that town and the painter’s clothes which he had taken off in the station lavatory—he had made them himself with his own hands, with the help of materials taken from Vétu’s shop.
‘You see! Nobody will ever write to the Huy town hall to check the authenticity of this paper. Henceforth I’m officially called Félicien Miette and I’m twenty-one years old, so that I’ve finished my military service.’
He had no remorse. It was absolutely essential, as he had written to Léopold, that his fate should be fulfilled. So much the worse for those who did not believe in it. And if the obstacle was too stubborn to be overcome, he went round it, without any false sense of shame.
‘Once I get going, you’ll see, Isabelle, what sort of a life I’ll give you.’
One day, two journalists had been talking together at the door of the glass cage.
‘I’ve had a letter from Boquélus to say that he’s looking for a young fellow for his Nevers rag who doesn’t expect too much. You don’t know anybody who would do?’
‘Excuse me, Monsieur. Did you say that somebody was looking for a journalist?’
‘Why, do you want to be a journalist?’
Going to the police-station, reporting lectures and charity bazaars, fairs and accidents, putting on the earphones and taking the telephone calls from Paris—this had been his work for the past month.
Monsieur Vétu had promised:
‘When he is earning a minimum of two hundred francs …’
He was earning only a hundred, but what did that matter, seeing that Isabelle was in agreement?
He had thought of everything, even of making Félicien Miette legally an orphan.
He was joking now. He had banished the memory of all the black holes of the past. They were lunching together in this bright restaurant where they were alone and where, crossing the threshold flanked with laurels in wooden boxes, they had made the sleepy-headed waiter jump.
‘A table for two, sir?’
His eyes were laughing at the future, the tablecloth was white, the glasses sparkling, the light gentle with the blinds lowered, but the slightest thing was still sufficient to cast a shadow over his features.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing.’
He turned round quickly, jealous already, but saw nobody behind him, nothing but a row of tables with napkins placed fanwise in the glasses and yellow chairs in curved wood.
‘What were you looking at?’
Him! It was at him that she had been looking a moment earlier, at him that she was looking now, not at his face which had brightened up, but at his head with the long hair which made the neck look thinner, at his shoulders which were not yet a man’s shoulders. While he talked and ate, she could see him from behind in the mirror which went all the way round the restaurant; it was strange seeing a man from in front and behind at the same time, and she smiled vaguely. He bristled up.
‘You’re laughing at me!’
He was so sensitive to the slightest sa
rcasm that she hastened to reassure him.
‘No, my love, I’m happy. It’s nice here, just the two of us.’
It was true. The cloud had passed, swollen and grey like those ugly summer clouds which melt so quickly into heavy streaks of rain, leaving nothing but sunshine in their eyes, and around them the wonderful tranquillity of this restaurant which they had entered at random, because of the simple laurels, the waiter who called them Monsieur and Madame, and the proprietress who looked in at them now and then through the half-open yellow door of the kitchen.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing.’
About nothing and everything, about themselves, about the life which was beginning. They discussed all manner of things for hours on end, wandering haphazardly through the streets which the flying display had emptied and where they could imagine themselves to be alone, kissing each other whenever the idea entered their heads.
‘You’ll see. I’ll start looking for somewhere to live straight away. I’ll put an advertisement in the Gazette. When you come in a month …’
Now and then a breeze ruffled the pale foliage of the plane-trees and the shadows moved on the pavement.
It was four o’clock. From the terrace of the café where they had finally stopped, they could see the station clock.
‘I can’t go a whole month without seeing you. Next Sunday, I’ll come to Paris. I’ll tell Monsieur Boquélus …’
He would make up some tale or other. It didn’t matter what it was. What he was sure of already, was that he would go.
‘Do you love me?’
‘It’s time for me to go, my love.’
She got into her compartment too soon and he frowned as he saw a young sailor on leave inside. They said nothing more.
‘See you in a month.’
‘Next Sunday.’
The doors were closed. The train waited a little longer. Miette turned his head away to hide his eyes which the clouds were invading once more.
‘See you on Sunday. Promise me …’
He saw the sailor standing behind her. The train moved off. A handkerchief disappeared round the bend.
‘Give me a Pernod, waiter, and some writing materials.’
He had sat down at a table in the Café de Paris, where four musicians were playing Viennese waltzes.
‘My love; You have only just left, I am alone and…’
He felt feverish, ran his fingers through his long hair, and looked vaguely at the table facing him, where there were four elderly whist-players for whom real life had already ceased to exist.
‘I beg your forgiveness, my darling, my love, my all, I beg your forgiveness on my knees for making another scene with you, but if you only knew how unhappy I am, how often I am tormented by evil thoughts! At the last moment, when I saw that man behind you in the compartment, I felt like jumping on to the train and leaving everything to …’
‘Waiter! The same again …’
Four pages, six pages, of his fine, nervous handwriting. The music carried him away; and he could dimly make out the noise of the black and white discs in the backgammon boxes, the sighs of the card-players.
‘When, quite soon now, we are on our own, just the two of us at last, I feel sure that …’
He was hot. His temples were throbbing. He went himself to put his letter in the box at the General Post Office. After that he did not know what to do. He was not hungry. He roamed about in the twilight, thin and restless, while in the white house by the stone bridge the Chapelle family were sitting down at table round the steaming soup-tureen, and Monsieur Vétu, in Paris, was dissolving a tablet in half a tumblerful of water.
At Embourg, swaying from side to side on his bench, in Madame Laude’s garden, Roger was waiting for that oppressive day of 15 August to come to an end with the reassuring concert of the frogs.
CHAPTER FIVE
ON All Saints’ Day, they had been to the Robermont cemetery, on Désiré’s side, as they put it, and the next day, All Souls’ Day, to the Sainte-Walburge cemetery. Because for the dead as for the living, and even for inanimate objects, a distinction was made between the ‘Mamelin side’ and the ‘Peters side’.
‘She’s a distant cousin of yours on your father’s side,’ Roger was told.
Or else:
‘This box comes from an uncle on my side.’
The button-box! Although Roger, who was now at the Friars’ school, no longer played with the buttons, the box remained in its place on the kitchen shelf, between the alarm-clock and the brass candlestick, a very old box decorated on five of its sides with scenes from Robinson Crusoe.
It was a box from Élise’s side and its contents were even more characteristic of the Peters, since it came from the branch of the family which had remained in Germany, from relatives of whom they knew scarcely anything, of whom all that they possessed was two yellow photographs in the album with the brass corners, shiny photographs with an oval bulge in the middle of the cardboard: an ascetic-looking woman, severely dressed in black, who belonged to a third order, and a lanky young man who was so indistinct that you could no longer make out his features. Élise was incapable of explaining to Roger what a third order was. She knew only that this cousin lived all alone in a big house at Aix-la-Chapelle, and that she was a nun in lay dress.
The buttons inside the box came from the same branch of the family. When she had been very young, Élise’s parents had taken her by train to somewhere in Germany, she had forgotten where, on a hill covered with fir-trees (she really must ask Léopold about it, but she kept forgetting), and she had been shown round a button-factory which belonged to a cousin of hers.
These buttons, which Roger had played with for years, were as foreign to the house, to the district, to the town, as the photographs in the album or the cups decorated with brown squares which hung in Aunt Louisa’s kitchen, at Coronmeuse, and which probably came from the same source. The prettiest and newest buttons were white with red, blue or green dots. Others were decorated with circles or crosses; some were made of brass, with figures in relief, or of bone, with real hunting scenes, stags and hounds. Finally, in the middle of some buttons, there was a white flower which did not exist in Belgium; the schoolmaster next door had only recently told them that it was an Edelweiss from the mountains.
The Robermont cemetery, which was on the same side of the bridges as the Rue de la Loi, but higher up, was as it were an extension of the district where they lived. From the parish of Saint-Nicolas, they went straight into the parish of Saint-Remacle where Arthur lived. They stopped outside his house, in front of the window full of caps, they said hullo to Juliette, who always looked attractive and whose children were extremely neat and tidy, and they slowly climbed the gentle slope of the Thiers de Robermont where they would pass hearses coming away empty.
They always met the whole population of the Rue Puits-en-Sock and Désiré never stopped raising his hat. On the plateau, the streets were wide and the houses new, built of bricks of a pale, fresh pink, with spaces between them surrounded by fences behind which Élise went to adjust her suspender.
‘Building plot for sale. Ten francs a square yard.’
It was to one of these streets, which had no name as yet and was only half paved, that a fortnight before Roger had started coming every Thursday for violin lessons. For his parents had bought him a violin, because there had been a child’s violin for sale in the district. For want of a real violin-case for such a tiny instrument, he carried it in a cardboard box, and the end of the bow, which was too long for the box, stuck out through a hole.
His teacher, the organist at Robermont, had bad breath which he insisted on blowing into his face; with the same cruelty, he pressed the child’s fingers on to the strings until he cried out in pain.
‘Music is such a wonderful thing!’ Élise used to say ecstatically. ‘It’s so nice to be able to play an instrument.’
Why was it, when they went to the Robermont cemetery, that the weather w
as nearly always fine? It was November, admittedly, but a breezy November, with long intervals of sunshine. The cemetery was a gay sight, a new cemetery surrounded by brick walls, with a fine centre walk, a chapel, and monuments in immaculate stone.
They greeted on the way the vault of the Gruyelle-Marquants, the confectioners in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, that of the Velden family, and others on which they recognized the same familiar names as on the shop-signs in the district.
They never lost their way in the maze of paths. The candles, in the glass cases in front of the tombs, burnt with a bright flame, and on both sides of the cemetery railing, hawkers were selling waffles and chrysanthemums.
‘Good afternoon, Lucien, good afternoon, Catherine. How the children have grown!’
‘Are you still pleased with your lodgers, Élise?’
Every week, Chrétien Mamelin came to care for his wife’s grave as if it were a garden, with its upright tombstone surmounted by a cross.
Marie Demoulin, wife of Chrétien Mamelin
born at Alleur on 5 October 1850
died in her 61st year
Pray for her
A medallion set in the stone showed a child with blurred features, the little girl who had died in infancy.
Désiré put a pot of flowers on the grave, Élise lit a few candles from those which were already burning, and then, taking an old tin hidden behind the tomb, she went to get a little water from a nearby tank to pour it over the pots.
‘Nobody ever thinks of watering the flowers.’
A sign of the cross. Désiré stood there for a few moments with bowed head, looking at the grave and moving his lips, made the sign of the cross again, took his son’s hand and walked away, putting his hat on again.
This was the day on which they wore their new winter coats which still smelled of the tailor’s shop.
‘Shall we go home by way of the drill-ground?’
The wind made the veils of the women in mourning flutter like flags. Going along an alley-way with uneven paving-stones, half in the town, half in the country, they came to the vast plain between Jupille and Bressoux and followed the Quais de la Dérivation; everything here was familiar and reassuring, and they scarcely felt as if they had left the Place du Congrès district.
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