by Allan Massie
‘Besides,’ Lucien said, ‘you are evading your duty. Your duty is to remain here and repair the damage of our débâcle. That at least is clear enough to me. And the chance exists. We are offered the opportunity to take part in a national revolution, which, unlike previous revolutions, is not founded on spite, hatred, the desire for revenge, and all the irrationality of destructive natures, but rests on a tranquil confidence and a profound love of France.’
I condense what he said. There was a bright light in his eye which Armand had never seen.
‘Perhaps you ought to have me arrested then,’ Armand said.
‘For your own sake perhaps I should, but for my sake I must do you the honour of leaving you free to follow the course you have mapped. Let me try to dissuade you. England too will make peace by the end of the summer, and where will your renegade general be then? Do you know the Marshal’s opinion? “In six weeks,” he says, “Hitler will wring England’s neck like a chicken.”’
‘I had hoped to persuade you to come with me,’ Armand said, ‘but I see it is hopeless.’
‘As hopeless as your mad adventure. Believe me, my dear brother, there is noble work to be done here. The Marshal has promised me a share in it, and I had hoped to make room for you …’
Armand ordered more armagnac. They talked of the Château de l’Haye, and of the Provençal summer, and then of their mother. Lucien stretched over and pressed his hand.
‘I must go. I am required in attendance. Good luck. I shall pray for you. At least we are both acting in accordance with the dictates of honour as we interpret it.’
Before he left he asked his brother to seek out Polly, to assure her of his continuing love and respect, etc., etc.
‘She won’t lack for anything with her father there …’
‘And,’ he said, ‘give this to the boy.’
He took a crucifix from his tunic pocket and handed it to his brother. It is round my neck still.
Had he brought it on purpose, knowing of Armand’s intention?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ON JULY 3 the British Navy attacked the French fleet in harbour in Mers-el-Kebir, the French Admiral having concealed from the new government that he had been given the option of sailing to a port in the French West Indies. The news of the attack was received with horror all over France. Philippe Torrance, for instance, who had arrived in Vichy by a train the previous night, and who had at once sought Lucien and requested him to exert his influence to secure him ‘some employment, distinguished employment, you understand’, fulminated at ‘the treachery of the English’. ‘They have always been our enemies,’ he told Lucien. ‘We should at once retaliate against them.’
‘No,’ Lucien said, ‘the Marshal is wiser than that, though I believe both Laval and Darlan agree with you.’
‘There, you see. Can you get me an introduction to Laval?’
‘To Laval? I scarcely know him, and anyway, Philippe, I wouldn’t advise it even if I did.’
It is ironic to think that this refusal perhaps saved Torrance’s life, and so enabled him to speak against my father at that dinner-party given by Virginia Fernie ten years later.
What Lucien didn’t however confess to Torrance was that he himself was fascinated by Laval.
Five days later he was in the little gallery of the Petit Casino while the last Assembly of the Third Republic debated its own suicide. He heard the Radical ex-Premier Edouard Herriot declare: ‘Our nation has rallied in its distress to the side of Marshal Pétain, in the veneration his name inspires in us all. Let us take care not to trouble the accord that has established itself under his authority. We must now render more austere a Republic that we have made too easy.’
He saw Laval, grey, white and jerky, his lapels dusted with cigarette-ash, rise to present, in his coarse and seductive voice, a plan for ‘a new regime, audacious, authoritarian, social, national … Capitalism,’ he said, ‘would disappear and be replaced by a new order’; and later, when a Deputy proposed some revision, he heard Laval snap, ‘Don’t fool yourselves, gentlemen; we are living in a dictatorship now.’ And at ten minutes past seven, at an hour when in a normal summer all those taking the cure at Vichy would have been dressing for dinner, he saw the Assembly pass a motion which accorded all powers to the government of the Republic under the authority and the signature of Marshal Pétain, for the purpose of promulgating, by one or several decrees, a new Constitution of the French State. This Constitution should guarantee the rights of labour, of the family, and of the Fatherland. Only eighty deputies were found to vote against the motion; five hundred and sixty-nine approved it.
The corpse of the Third Republic was ready for burial.
Later that evening Lucien saw the Marshal sign three decrees: all beginning ‘We, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France …’ The signatures were firm, the Marshal calm, the mood of all assembled had a strange exhilaration.
‘It is like Louis XIV,’ Lucien noted in his journal.
‘And that’s how you overthrow the Republic,’ Laval said, taking the fountain-pen from the Marshal and screwing on its top. He put the pen in his own breast pocket, took out a cigarette and lit it. Pétain kept his eyes for a moment on the sheet of blotting-paper, then turned it over as if reading the reflection of his signature.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was only fifteen when it was inaugurated. If my mother could see me now. I’m hungry.’
He retired to wash his hands, then they all descended – the Marshal and his immediate aides in the lift, the others by the grand sweeping staircase, to the Chantecler restaurant. A screen had been erected at the rear of the room and the Marshal’s table was laid there.
‘Where is Monsieur Laval?’ someone said.
‘Monsieur Laval has no time to eat.’
‘Not chicken,’ the Marshal said. ‘A boring dish. I should like a beefsteak.’
Lucien was impressed by the old man’s appetite.
‘Who would have thought he could still chew a steak?’
They ate for the most part in silence. When they spoke, the war was not mentioned. All felt that they had participated in something momentous which made ordinary conversation ridiculous. Yet, unless the Marshal led the way, they were conscious that it would be indecorous to discuss what was to be done. That, after all, was his business. The French people had made the future the
Lucien lay long awake after he had retired to bed. He heard a woman crying in the park: ‘Pierre, Pierre.’ She must be seeking her son. The thought pained him. All over France families had been divided in the confusion of the flight from the German Armies. There were several thousand people camped in the park, and one, at least, hunted through the night for a child who had strayed. ‘Pierre, Pierre …’ In the morning he must telephone his own mother to let her know where he was and what was happening. He wouldn’t of course mention Armand, he would say he knew nothing of him. For one thing it wasn’t safe. People were already saying that the Germans were intercepting telephone calls. He didn’t know if it could be done, at such a distance; but even if they weren’t, it would be unwise to advertise his own connection with a brother whom he must describe as a traitor. ‘Pierre, Pierre,’ the woman’s voice was fainter now. He fell into a fitful sleep as the new dawn broke over the mountains and touched the walls of Vichy with rosy summer fingers.
Lucien had had no private conversation with the Marshal since their meeting at Nitray. His memorandum had not convinced Reynaud, and he wondered if Pétain might not have decided, on account of this failure, that he had overestimated his abilities. The thought depressed him. On the other hand he could not bring himself to join the host of supplicants who sought personal interviews with the Marshal. These were to be seen at every corner, and in every lobby, of the hotel. Of course he had no need to associate himself with them; he was still welcome, apparently, at the Marshal’s table behind the screen in the dining room and, if Pétain said nothing directly to him, that was not so very different from his treatment of others.
/>
All the same it was a relief when Bernard Ménétrel, Pétain’s doctor, stopped him as he was going out for a walk one morning, and suggested that he might perhaps be permitted to accompany him.
‘Only I don’t like to be absent for too long,’ he said. ‘I never know when the Marshal is going to need me, and I don’t care that someone else should perhaps seize the opportunity to substitute for me. However, the truth is that I do need some fresh air, and besides, I have something to say to you.’
It was with that speech that Lucien realised that a court had been established at Vichy. As he wrote in his journal later, ‘To understand Vichy, read Saint-Simon.’
Ménétrel was not only Pétain’s doctor. Some said he was his bastard son. Lucien had never talked with him alone before, but he had noticed that he was the only member of what he thought of as the dining-club at whose jokes Pétain condescended to smile. They were coarse, crude, vulgar jokes, the jokes of a man who was still in some ways the callow medical student from a dull province and a petit bourgeois background, and Lucien thought that only affection could persuade the Marshal that they were to be tolerated.
‘The Marshal however wants to speak to you. This afternoon. He is, I know, sorry he has not had the opportunity to do so before, but you can’t believe the strain he is under, the demands that are made of him. I’m always anxious about his health. He has arthritis, you know, which I treat by a hot-air method invented by my father, and as a tonic I inject him with oxygen. It’s a great responsibility to know that the health of France is in my hands, and you can’t wonder if I am protective.’
Holding Lucien’s elbow he steered him round the square in front of the hotel. Every now and then he glanced up at the balcony of the Marshal’s suite. Perhaps he had arranged a system of signals whereby he could be warned if his presence was required.
‘Laval is bad for him, you know. The Marshal’s blood pressure always rises after he has had an interview with that dirty type. And then he feels both giddy and faint. There’s no end to my problems. Furthermore, the Marshal’s still a lusty man, you understand, it’s a great mistake to think he is past the sexual act … but if he should happen to overdo it … and wine, I put water in his wine, but if I am not alert, he seizes the bottle himself. Not that he drinks, you understand, only what is temperance in a man of sixty can amount to excess when you are eighty-four. Yes, what is it?’
This remark was addressed to an elderly lady whose approach Lucien had not observed. Now she was plucking Ménétrel’s sleeve, and Lucien felt his own arm released while the doctor tried to shake himself free of her.
‘What is it? Oh, it’s you again, Madame. Can’t you see that I am busy? I’ve no time for your little troubles now. You will hear from me in due course. When the time is ripe, I say, when it is ripe.’
He seized Lucien again and hurried him forward, leaving the poor woman lamenting behind them.
‘Such importunity,’ he said. ‘I can’t even put my head out of my hotel to take a little exercise and fresh air, both of which are necessary to my health, but I am seized by the arm and bothered.’
‘What does she want then?’
‘That one? Oh, merely that I should trouble the Marshal. She has a son-in-law, a Jew if you please, and she seeks security for him. At present he lives in the occupied zone, where he is a schoolmaster, yes, indeed, yet another Jewish schoolmaster corrupting the youth of France, and she is requesting a transfer for him; and she claims to have influence with the Marshal, because, if you please, she says she had an affair with him before the last war, when he was a Colonel. I said to her, “What makes you think the Marshal will remember you, you’re not unique, you know.”’
He laughed and gripped Lucien’s arm harder.
‘She actually confesses to an affair?’ Lucien said. ‘A respectable woman like her?’
‘Not in so many words, it’s true. But it’s obvious. And all for a Jewish son-in-law, who is a schoolteacher. If I had my way he would go down a coalmine. But that will be your responsibility.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh,’ Ménétrel clapped his hand over his mouth, with an exaggerated gesture like a music-hall mime’s, ‘I’ve spoken out of turn. But you will soon find out all about it. The Marshal will see you at half-past four.’ He glanced up at the balcony again. ‘Excuse me, I’m needed. At half-past four then.’
Lucien waited till he had entered the hotel, then turned back looking for the woman. He wasn’t sure that he would recognise her. There were so many old women in black, and he had noticed nothing more about her. For a moment, he stood lost, and then he realised that he was being observed. That must be her. He was about to approach her when it occurred to him that it might be injudicious to be seen talking to her; he wouldn’t put it past Ménétrel to be keeping an eye on him from a window. He was surprised by this thought, for such imaginings were unfamiliar to him. However, he acted on it, and strolled out of the square, not looking behind him. He walked along the boulevard, pausing at a flower stall. He glanced up. The woman – if it was the same woman – was following him. He turned the next corner which led into a long, narrow street, deserted in the heat of the afternoon. There was a café about halfway along. He looked back to see the street empty but for the old woman, who was moving towards him in a determined fashion. Of course she might be followed herself, but, if he entered the café and sat down, and was accosted by her there, it would be easy to explain matters. Certainly he couldn’t be thought to have accosted her.
As he ordered a café crème, he was astonished by the way his mind was working.
He sat at a table. She came in and, ignoring the waiter, made straight for him.
‘Excuse me, Monsieur,’ she said, ‘do you mind if I sit here a moment? It’s because I saw you talking with Dr Ménétrel that I wish to speak to you.’
‘But of course,’ Lucien said, rising, ‘if I can be of any assistance.’
‘It’s a sad state of affairs when a respectable lady like myself finds herself accosting strange men. But I saw you talking to Dr Ménétrel. Do you think he can be trusted?’
‘The Marshal trusts him, I believe.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but then the doctor has something to gain from the Marshal.’
She hesitated, embarrassed, as if she had already said too much. Lucien recognised in her something with which he was to grow all too familiar in the next months: a recognition which perhaps accounted for the full account he wrote of this otherwise – one would have thought – unimportant incident. It was the look of a person who understands that the confidence which experience had persuaded him or her to repose in the way things were ordered was no longer justified. People could in short no longer believe anything life had taught them. Actions could no longer be spontaneous. Everything had to be considered in advance. You could no longer speak your mind because you had to be sure of your auditor’s. And that was impossible; even those in whom you had hitherto reposed infinite trust had become unaccountable. Everyone was an unknown quantity. Here, for instance, was a lady whose dress and general demeanour (the neat black suit – for it was neat, he saw that now, and had been elegant and expensive; the carefully coiffured hair, which actually needed attention, but still spoke of hours at the hairdresser; the soft unused hands) proclaimed her as someone who had never questioned that the world was well-arranged, now, at an age when her life’s pattern should have been assured, brought bang up against the fact that she understood nothing.
But if certainty had vanished you had nevertheless to take more risks. You could no longer dare speak intimately even to friends, but you might find yourself compelled to approach a stranger.
‘What is your problem?’ he said.
Ménétrel at least had not deceived him; it was as he said. Her son-in-law, married to her only daughter, her only child in fact, was a schoolmaster in Paris, and – again she hesitated, then brought it out with a little flush – a Jew.
She looked up to see how Lu
cien received the news.
‘I don’t like Jews myself,’ she said, ‘and I must tell you that I was against the marriage. Nevertheless they went ahead, and I’m bound to say it’s been a success. Simon is a good husband, and I have grown fond of him myself. He’s dutiful, and, though he is much cleverer than I am, he has the good manners not to show it.’
Lucien told her that, though he was flattered by her confidence in him, he didn’t see what he could do.
‘And that’s not all of it,’ she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘It’s not only that they live in Paris and that Simon being a Jew is in danger there, but he is also an intellectual, he’s written things against the Nazis. I’ve told him it’s unwise, but why should a clever man like him listen to me?’
‘Is he a Communist?’ Lucien asked.
‘A Communist? Of course not. I told you he is my son-in-law.’ What was there to say? Lucien knew that he had no power to effect the transfer of such a man, of anyone indeed; moreover it really was a case of ‘such a man’, who sounded precisely the type that the Marshal blamed for the demoralisation of French youth. Lucien suspected that this demoralisation was exaggerated, but didn’t deny that it existed. The woman toyed with a string of pearls. For a moment he entertained the absurd idea that she was going to offer him a bribe. He wished she would. It would make it easy to get up and walk off. But of course she did nothing of the kind. Instead a tear, almost as big as a pearl, escaped her eye.
‘Have you grandchildren?’ he said.
‘Two girls.’
‘And are they in Paris still?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘But if you don’t know, isn’t it possible that the whole family has managed to leave?’
‘That’s not the point,’ she said. ‘The war’s over, isn’t it? He must earn a living. They can’t expect me to keep them. I’m a widow. My investments are already threatened. As for Simon, he has no money of his own, merely his salary, and it’s not safe in Paris.’
