by Allan Massie
She spoke on, telling him her family history. It was a chronicle to which he hardly listened. The details didn’t matter. His pity had been stirred. It was a small thing, but he would speak to Ménétrel, try to see if something could be done.
Later that afternoon, the Marshal told him he was appointing him to the position of Under-secretary in the Ministry of Education. He spoke of the force for good that Lucien would be; and Lucien found that his first thought was how he could serve the mother-in-law of the Jewish schoolmaster, Simon Halévy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FOR ALMOST EIGHTEEN months Lucien contented himself with the administration of French schools. I rather think that, despite moments of loneliness, these held the happiest months of his adult life. He stopped keeping a journal, itself perhaps a sign that he was content. He believed that he was doing good and necessary work, every morning he went to his office with a song in his heart. He was by nature a teacher himself; one of the pleasures of running his magazine had been the opportunity to collect round him a group of young people whom he might influence and guide. And now the youth of France was entrusted to him. What more could he wish for?
Of course there were problems. The Marshal had decreed that secondary education should no longer be free: ‘We don’t wish to create an intellectual proletariat.’ Well, Lucien conceded that that was certainly undesirable. Since there had to be a proletariat as the world was constituted, it was wrong that they should be educated in such a way as could only foment dissatisfaction. On the other hand, he found it distasteful to think that intelligent children of any background should be denied the chance of full development. Was that proper? Was it Christian? There is a long memorandum – some 10,000 words – in the Ministry’s archives, in which he argues this question.
And then there was the problem of personnel. This revealed the weakness of my father’s character. He was quite ready to declare that there were certain types who, simply by reason of belonging to particular groups, were rendered unsuitable for employment as schoolteachers. But it was a different matter when it came to the individuals belonging to these groups; that is, when they presented themselves as individuals. The case of Simon Halévy is sufficient example.
But for his meeting with Halévy’s mother-in-law, Madame Villepreux, he would never of course have considered intervening in the affairs of a Jewish teacher. Though he would never have claimed, in that phrase which has become a mockery, that some of his best friends were Jews, and indeed this would be untrue in his case as it is in that of most of those who make such an assertion, he wasn’t in any deep sense anti-Semitic. He was inclined to deplore excessive Jewish influence if it seemed likely to dilute French culture, but being an intelligent man he also knew that it had often rather enriched it. (There is, Hugh, an unfinished essay on ‘The Jewish Contribution to French Literature’, which I shall send you.) All the same, he accepted the Marshal’s views, even if with reservation. That was fine. But he had nevertheless taken some trouble to find Halévy, and had then invited him to Vichy.
The young man who appeared in his office was, to his disappointment, distinctively Jewish. He clearly belonged, as Lucien’s superior would have put it, ‘to the large-nosed fraternity’. That was a pity. He was also hostile.
‘I can’t think what you want of me,’ he said, lighting a pipe and sitting down.
Lucien explained that he wanted to help him.
‘I understand that there have been difficulties in Paris.’
‘That’s an understatement.’
‘And you realise, I’m sure, that some of these difficulties will emerge again wherever you are.’
‘I realise that your Ministry is likely to prohibit the employment of Jews, even when they are good Frenchmen as I am.’
He blew smoke across the desk, into Lucien’s face.
‘We live, unfortunately, in a time of categories,’ Lucien said. ‘The problem is how can I help you?’
‘Why, if I may ask, should you wish to do so? I can’t say that I would look for help in your direction.’
‘I was approached personally. That is, I was asked to see if I could do something for you. By your wife’s mother, in fact.’
‘Old Mother Villepreux? Well, that’s kind of her. I wouldn’t have looked for that either.’
‘She spoke of you in warm terms.’
His own tone was cold.
‘She admires your intelligence and she is aware of course that her daughter loves you and depends on you, isn’t that enough?’
‘Enough? I don’t choose to be beholden to her. Or to you if it comes to that.’
‘Believe me, I understand that,’ Lucien said. ‘However, you must see that you will have to be beholden to me, as you put it, or your family will suffer.’
‘My family will suffer in any case. Whatever happens. And why? Because I am a Jew. Monsieur de Balafré, I used to be a subscriber to your magazine, and then I thought you an intelligent man, and a man of honour, but when I find you sitting here, in this office, as a functionary of a regime built on a foundation of lies, lies which are to my mind all the more reprehensible because they have a spurious sound of nobility, then I must consider you either a fool or a hypocrite. There: I have spoken.’
He sat back, folded his arms, his pipe replaced at a jaunty angle in his mouth, as if, in that time of half-truths and outright mendacity, he was satisfied to represent the honest man of good sense. He had put himself in the ascendancy, and Lucien was disgusted by his assumption.
‘It is never,’ he thought, ‘as easy as that.’
‘What do you want then?’ he said.
Halévy took his pipe from his mouth and, holding the bowl, jabbed the mouthpiece in Lucien’s direction.
‘Perhaps the first satisfaction would be to compel you to admit that your establishment in that chair is offensive – an offence to your own history and intellectual honesty, among other things.’
‘You’re being ridiculous, you know.’
He lit a cigarette himself, got to his feet and crossed the room behind Halévy to the window. The late-afternoon sun still shone on the boulevard, which was not busy. A few girls, typists probably, going home from their offices, strolled past; their laughter rose to him. Most of them were wearing coats, for it was now autumn, and the breeze brought a chill air from the mountains towards evening. He imagined they were discussing the problem of where they might find winter clothes, even winter fashions, in this resort town; his own secretary had asked him that morning whether it was possible to go north, to the occupied zone, to Paris actually, to restock her wardrobe. ‘Why not?’ she had said. ‘The war’s over, isn’t it?’
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he repeated, without turning round. The man who accused him of hypocrisy was a hypocrite himself; how else had he impressed the mother-in-law he so evidently despised with his ‘good manners’? Lucien was conscious of the man’s immobility behind him, an immobility that was moral also. Why didn’t he reply? Dislike filled the room like the stench of rotting food. And yet, wasn’t it precisely Lucien’s consciousness of this dislike which made him determined to help Halévy? We are all hypocrites in our fashion. He turned the thought over like a coin he suspected of being counterfeit. But no, it was valid currency. Rhythms of hypocrisy ran through the social order; he had learned that from listening to Gaston Hunnot. The Hunnotismes which his disciples so relished, which they admired for their cynical ‘realism’, displayed the flower of hypocrisy in full bloom. But wasn’t hypocrisy part of any public statement, his own included? When the Marshal had said in a recent broadcast that ‘the National Revolution means the will to rebirth … the determination of all the elements of the Past and Present which are healthy to make a strong State, to remake the national soul and to restore to it the lucid confidence of the great and privileged generations of our history, which were often generations on the morrow of civil or foreign wars’ – weren’t those words, some of which Lucien had himself supplied in an early draft
of the speech, evidence of hypocrisy on a grand scale? They contained truth but they concealed a lie. He had known that even when he supplied the phrase about lucid confidence. Because confidence was as impossible as lucidity. Moreover, though the Marshal was perfectly right in asserting the need for a National Revolution, the effect of the self-conscious nobility of his utterances on those who heard them depended on their willingness to forget that the Army had not wanted to fight. He had seen Major Delibes in a restaurant the night before last and heard him speak in a language which echoed the Marshal’s; and Delibes had run away, deserting his men, while Alain Querouaille had been killed.
But it was necessary to ignore Halévy’s gibes. He wanted to send him away, but the consciousness of his dislike and the memory of the worn parchment of Madame Villepreux’s face prevented him from doing so.
‘What do you want then?’ he said again. ‘And this time please try to give me an answer which will be of some help to us both.’
‘I’m a teacher,’ Halévy said.
‘And that’s impossible.’
‘And a writer.’
‘Which is dangerous.’
‘So,’ Halévy said, ‘I am unemployable in France, and have wasted my time in coming here.’
Lucien said, ‘And yet I promised Madame Villepreux.’
This was not true, for he had not been in a position to make such a promise and was anyway too wary to do so.
He said, ‘I think you must leave the country.’
It was his first act of treachery, and he was not sure even that he knew what he was betraying. He took such measures as were necessary – the provision of suitable papers – to make it possible for Halévy to do so. It seemed an act of humanity to him. He was acquitting himself of a debt which he had voluntarily incurred. He was salving his conscience by proving to himself that the individual counted for something. There were all sorts of soothing explanations he could offer. But it was still an act of betrayal. In helping Halévy, he was confessing that the National Revolution was a lie, that he had bound himself to a monstrous farce.
He hid this knowledge from himself for a long time. When, that winter, he visited his mother at the Château de l’Haye – and must incidentally have held his little bastard son in his arms – he was still free from distress because of what he had done; able to present it to himself as an act of exceptional benevolence, exceptional precisely because it had no wider significance.
His mother sparkled with pride to see him. He was the servant of a State with which she could at last identify, to which she could give her blessing. She invited his uncle the Bishop to visit, and they joined in a purring communion. Lucien expanded in the sunshine of her approval. When he talked of the Marshal and what he was doing for France his mother crossed herself and the Bishop said he regarded him as a Redeemer, for whose continued health he prayed every day.
‘I can see,’ he said, ‘the mark of his benevolence in your demeanour. You are a different man, dear boy. It must feel as if you have come home, working in close association with the Marshal. It is like coming to a knowledge of salvation.’
One subject was forbidden. This was his brother Armand. When, on his first evening home, he tried to tell his mother of his last meeting with Armand in Bordeaux, she said, ‘Don’t speak of him. He has brought disgrace on our name.’ That was of course a common reaction among good families.
‘In his way, mother,’ Lucien said, ‘Armand is a patriot too.’
‘A patriot,’ she said, ‘associating with riff-raff.’
When he had first mentioned the possibility of emigration to Halévy, the schoolteacher had objected to ‘those Monarchist corner-boys around de Gaulle, that absurd little General’.
Lucien had always loved winter in Provence even more than the hot weather. It delighted him when the mistral blew icy gusts as he struggled up a jagged hillside to see snow-capped mountains. He loved to hear the rattle of the naked olive trees, and to smell roasting chestnuts in the cafés of the little town. It was a pleasure to turn up the collar of his coat as he sat outside in the late afternoon, and to experience the moment on the terrace when he had at last to admit that it was impossible to sit there and read any longer. What he valued most was the assurance of brevity the winter brought.
Only one thing depressed him that first winter of the war. This was the stream of people approaching him to beg that he should intervene on their behalf with the authorities, to procure a licence for this, a post for a son, a special concession of some sort. He did not yet admit that their importunity defined the regime to which he had given his heart and mind, but he was embarrassed to be seen as the fount of favour. The most persistent of these clients was the garagiste Simon, who not only besought favours for himself and his family – in a wheedling tone that was especially irksome – but was also quick to relay information to him about the misdemeanours of his neighbours – how Jean was already working the Black Market, Pierre contravening licensing regulations – and so on. Eventually Lucien was forced to say:
‘I’m not the police, you know. These are matters for them.’
‘Ah,’ Simon said, ‘but they will listen to a big shot like you, whereas a poor man like myself is quite without influence …’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IN MARCH ’41 Lucien paid his first visit to occupied Paris. He was prepared, of course, to find the streets full of German uniforms and empty of civilian motorcars, and for the shabbiness of the children’s clothes, but nothing had prepared him for the emotion he felt on unlocking the door of his own apartment in the Rue Claude Bernard and finding a pile of the last number of his magazine in the hall, with dust lying thick and unruffled on it. He went through to the cold bedroom and looked at the bed he had shared with Polly, and wondered who she was sleeping with now. He had accustomed himself to the knowledge that she would be unfaithful and that his marriage was over, but he had not imagined that the sight of his marriage bed would distress him. He lay down on the bed and looked up at the dark ceiling, and then at a photograph of Polly which stood in a silver frame on the table beside him. There was nothing else in the room to remind him of her, and yet her presence pervaded it.
He thought, and spoke his thought aloud: ‘Will I ever be ready to love another?’
He had come to Paris on government business, and yet the next morning found it impossible to leave his apartment. For a long time he could not even rise from the bed, where he had lain sleepless, listening to the night, the cats, and the awakening city. He tried to telephone the office of the Ministry where he was expected, but, despite orders, the telephone had not been re-connected. There was nothing to keep him in the apartment, and yet he could not leave it. Across the hall, in the dining room, Gaston Hunnot had once lectured him about the power of the Will, until Polly, pushing aside the brimming ash-tray which was a measure of her boredom, had said, in English and with a rose-garden English sigh, ‘This particular Will is to be fucked. Good-night, Monsieur Hunnot,’ and drifted through to the bedroom, beckoning him with a glance so utterly compulsive that he had had Hunnot out of the house within five minutes.
‘Whatever made you speak out like that?’
She had put naked arms round his neck, and thrust her tongue into his mouth, and for a long time they had stood, still, entwined, like a statue of love; and there had been no need of words to …
Remembering it, standing there, in the cold dusty room, he felt an upsurge of desire; the memory of lust sharper than anticipation can ever be.
‘What have I done? Whatever has made me act as I have?’ There came a knock at the door. They had sent someone from the Ministry to find him, and his state must be obvious and shameful.
It was, to his confusion, a girl who was standing there. She was slim, pale, and wearing a dark suit cut like a uniform. That was all he took in at first.
She explained that they had been worried when he did not appear, and she had been sent to find him. There was a driver downstairs.
�
��I’m not ready,’ he said, ‘Come in, though I can’t even offer you coffee.’
She entered without speaking. He was grateful for that. He sensed, though he couldn’t say why, that she was a girl who would be able to deny herself unnecessary words.
‘I’ve been confused,’ he said. ‘It’s my first visit to Paris, you understand, since the Occupation, and I came to this apartment where I used to live with my wife, and I shouldn’t have done so.’
She sat on the arm of a chair. He saw that she had dark chestnut hair, cut short, a clear skin, and big eyes to which he couldn’t put a colour: they were dark, yet with a shade of blue.
He was surprised to find himself noticing this. He wanted to break down and weep, and be comforted by her. Instead, he held out his hand and watched it tremble.
‘You must think me absurd,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think coming here would affect me as it has.’
He went through to the bathroom and shaved in cold water, cutting himself twice. The sky was as grey as a German uniform, and the nearby dome of the Val-de-Grâce disappeared into mist. A clock struck, twelve times. ‘I’ve missed an important meeting,’ he thought.
‘We put the meeting back,’ the girl said, ‘till the afternoon. We said you had been delayed, or weren’t well, I don’t know which excuse they used. But a satisfactory one, I’m sure.’
‘So we have time,’ he said.
‘Time?’
‘Is it possible to have lunch somewhere? I have realised I’m hungry.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, then …’
‘You’ll need a coat,’ she said. ‘It’s bitter outside. No wind, but gripping cold.’
‘But you haven’t got one.’
‘I’m not susceptible to cold. I don’t feel it. My mother says I have the Atlantic in my veins and icebergs in my bones.’
