A King Alone

by Jean Giono

  “It was something for me to pull off my slippers, climb to the second floor avoiding the step that creaks, listen at the door, peek through the keyhole, and make my heart beat fast; and for what? For a pair of pants half hanging off the bed!

  “As for that lover of souls, hadn’t he come by again and again with his big bulging belly to drink coffee at my place?

  “Don’t go telling me he set off from Grenoble in his buggy to sleep in Clelles, Mens, or Monétier, and got here at eight on the dot in the morning, all for my coffee. I don’t think that highly of my coffee. Can I tell you? My coffee was no longer worth a damn. That’s what needed to be said.

  “And the coffee of the lover of souls wasn’t worth a damn, and Madame Tim’s coffee wasn’t worth a damn. We were losing Langlois.

  “The way things were going, everyone would lose him.

  “That guy who understood friendship so well, oh! And then that guy all warm and fuzzy, with his little mustache and the smile that slithered under it, and that nationalistic tone of his, and that cutting tone of his, and that way he had of being sure of himself, and of making you sure of yourself!

  “You’ve never needed anyone to make you sure of yourselves, have you? Your cow dung tells you everything you need to know, right? It’s your Big Dipper and your North Star, right? And when you kick the bucket (the Church can carry on all it wants), there will be an inflatable cow hovering above your deathbed, taking good aim. Too bad for you when a big fat ball of cow dung, brown and steaming, finally spreads and splatters smack in your face! Go ahead and save face then!

  “You never needed someone who could make you sure of yourselves, did you? You never suffered from waiting, then getting, then losing!

  “Madame Tim kept telling me her good idea, but I barely listened. I said to myself, and I said to her, but not out loud, ‘Your coffee isn’t worth a damn, your coffee isn’t worth a damn.’

  “And I backed up as much as possible against the wall where my pots hung, because we were two big women, face-to-face in that narrow scullery; we were breathing hard, my breasts were rubbing against Madame Tim’s, and even though she was a café au lait woman, I didn’t like it.

  “Madame Tim’s idea was very good.

  “On the morning of the sixth, the sky was blue as far as the eye could see. I got up at dawn. The trees were having a big discussion.

  “Langlois saddled his horse. The animal was as happy as I was.

  “I heard him talking with his master in the stable. Are you idiots even able to understand what horses say? That one seemed to be chuckling: ‘So, old bean, now’s the time to spend every cent in our pockets; we’re going to paint the town red.’

  “And if you listened to what the trees were saying, horse and master were also talking about an amazing freedom of some sort.

  “The whole clan was in Saint-Baudille.

  “And do you know how we got there? Well, there I was in all my finery, walking some hundred meters on foot next to Langlois while he drags his horse along by the bridle, when he says to me, ‘Get on.’

  “ ‘On what?’

  “ ‘The horse.’

  “ ‘The way I am?’

  “ ‘The way you are.’

  “He makes a stirrup with his hands for me to put my foot in and he lifts me up so I can sit in the saddle.

  “Would I have missed that opportunity? Not on your life! I didn’t give a damn about my bustle. If it gave me a problem, I’d take it off. I’d tied it on with braid trim; I’d just have to slip my hands under and pull.

  “Quick as I’m telling you this, I was on the horse. And too bad for the wrinkles. There’s a big silk bow on my backside, but I’m walking on air. I’d held on to my parasol. He said to me, ‘Open it and act like a duchess.’

  “He didn’t have to tell me twice. Off we went! And that’s how we got to Saint-Baudille.

  “After a league we ran into Bouvard who was coming to get me with the carriage. He was coming up from the Ébron while we were on our way down. We yell to him, ‘Stop, old girl!’

  “But we must have looked so fine that he goes on climbing and, when he gets to where we are, he says, ‘What about me?’

  “To which I answer, ‘You, big fellow, just follow us from behind.’

  “I was only afraid of one thing: that Langlois would make me change ship, but not at all. ‘And mind your manners, my good man,’ he said, winking.

  “ ‘Hell, girl!’ said Bouvard, ecstatic.

  “He understood perfectly that it was all about having a good time in the surroundings.

  “And what surroundings! The fields were beaded with dew where wheat had been cut and the whole expanse was as rosy as butter. The sky was as blue as a new wheelbarrow. All around us the larks sounded like a knife squeaking in a green apple, while soft, spicy scents tickled our noses like snuff. Before my eyes, the forests and groves danced like the hair on a goat to the beat of a drum. What a beautiful morning!

  “Obviously, Madame Tim had nothing to do with that particular beauty. But the beauty that was waiting for us at Saint-Baudille, and that she had created, was just like English sucking candy: slightly acidic, fresh, multicolored, shot through with lemon, vinegar, and azure. A peppermint to make you strong as an ox!

  “First, her three daughters: Cadiche, Arnaude, and Mathilda. Ah! Those convent women know how to dress their daughters! Because Madame Tim looked after the business (it was much too mischievous for it to have been anyone else).

  “Ah! Sons-in-law! Letting your little women run around like that! But they were bigwig pencil pushers, and do pencil pushers have any common sense? Even though they gave those girls, let’s see—three and three is six, plus five—eleven children, why stop there if you have any common sense?

  “Ha! Pen and paper make people do such ridiculous things!

  “Eleven children underfoot like a puddleful of birds. The horse stood with one leg in the air for fear of crushing one of them. And I didn’t dare set my own feet on the ground. I shouted, ‘Hey, you fool! Get me off of here!’

  “Oh, indeed! He winked and left me stuck on my horse so he could run off with those swanky little rascals!

  “Oh! What a man! And he knew how to live. The fool!

  “Saint-Baudille was superb. Couldn’t have been better for taking your mind off things; so much so that no idea could stick.

  “Cadiche? If it was Cadiche, her face was rosy and round; round and rosy with the most beautiful smile in the world, a smile that lasted a long time, and those serious eyes that knew the price of a smile.

  “Arnaude? Enough to stroll back and forth on the terrace for days. What’s the point of dancing or waltzing when you could get more out of a stroll like this? More agility, more rhythm, more euphoria than from a waltz. And as for a danger of the moment, those lovers of one thing and the other had here, I imagine, a much more dangerous danger. I saw her little pointed shoes stick out from below her dress with each step she took, one after the other, preceded by a tiny, precise command that began with the satin at her hips and ran down to the ground beneath her skirt like a little lash of the whip, and I don’t know if that soft rustling I heard was the sound of her footsteps on the gravel or the voice she used to whisper to her partner as she bent her head ever so slightly toward his shoulder.

  “Mathilda? She was my favorite (if I’d been a man): a beautiful doe, a beautiful female with fur, lying on her stomach in the summer savory.

  “The prosecutor was dressed to the nines, he was! In fact, he strolled on the terrace with Arnaude. And you know what? Well, those fat men are very agile.

  “There were people from Mens and a doctor from Grenoble. And they introduced me as Madame Tim’s friend, and Madame Tim sat next to me most of the time. And we looked at everything.

  “Langlois? You couldn’t tell him apart from anyone else: Cadiche, Arnaude, Mathilda, the doctor, an old lady from Mens who I suppose was Madame Savignan but who, in any case, was not just anyone because sometimes
her eyes were swathed in sadness. And naturally, Captain Tim. Langlois spent time with all of them, even with the prosecutor who was avoiding him. I saw his game. I told Madame Tim about it. And she said that all three of us were avoiding him, not just the prosecutor but Madame Tim and I, too—or rather, she said, we are keeping a respectable distance.

  “The accuracy of this idea struck me. That beautiful morning, had Langlois and I exchanged any words? Not a one. A couple with Bouvard. But between him and me, not a one.

  “Of course, I could always claim I’d imagined he was just as blissfully happy as I was; that we left each other in peace to enjoy it. Hypocrisy! I was keeping a respectable distance from him. That’s the truth. Respectable? Not really. Respectable hypocrisy. Selfish: I was keeping a selfish distance. I was using the excuse of the beauty of the morning and the peace we ordinarily leave friends in at those times to keep my distance. Not only to keep my distance but to enjoy the beauty of the flowers on my own. These were not ordinary circumstances. That’s selfishness. Nasty creatures that we are!

  “I couldn’t stop myself from mentioning it to Madame Tim. She told me not to dig too deeply.

  “ ‘I’ve reserved the word “respectable” for myself,’ she said. ‘But you and the prosecutor are no worse than I am.’

  “It was one of those occasions when she put her hand on mine and tapped me gently on the glove.

  “Still. My good mood was gone. Even if all Saint-Baudille had tried to get that idea out of my head, I wasn’t going to take any pleasure watching Langlois strolling with Arnaude on the terrace. When those little quick commands left her satin hips, wending their way down under her skirt to land on that pointy little foot, and when those same little slow waltzing commands wound their way up from her hips to Arnaude’s swanlike neck, I said to myself, ‘Do whatever you want, girl, but keep a respectable distance.’

  “We were scheduled to spend three days at the château.

  “Madame Tim must have been thinking much like me. While the rest of the company was busy playing battledore and shuttlecock, she said to me, ‘Come along, let’s go see.’

  “What was there to see, I wondered. Everything and nothing, naturally. One doesn’t have all that much at one’s disposal on this earth.

  “She wanted us to make a sort of tour of the property. Arm in arm, we climbed up the three terraces (but why?). The view got wider and wider. At last we reached the rooftop terrace on which they’d even placed an orange tree in a crate.

  “Next we went into a vestibule that I knew well from all the times I’d been there before; she had no need to take me to see it again. It was larger than the three rooms of the Café de la Route put together and it was, just as it was, a very pleasant place to be, cool, fragrant with the scent of balsam fir, with paintings of aviaries and birds covered with ribbons and feathers on all sides. But I said to myself, ‘We’ll see about that.’

  “We were walking in step, Madame Tim and I, at the slow pace of two grand, fat, fully mature women, on carpets as thick as first-cut hay. We crossed through the sitting room full of heavy armoires with gilded books behind glass doors. On the walls the bird paintings continued.

  “Then she led me into a room I had rarely seen. It was a theater, just like a real theater but in miniature, with a stage at the back hidden behind a red curtain painted with birds flying around a huge figure with terribly empty eyes and a mouth open as wide as a carnival ball-toss clown. We remained there for a moment, facing the stage, high up in this room where the slightest noise could be heard; we could hear my nails grating as they gripped the satin of Madame Tim’s sleeve.

  “I’d been in this room a few times before. Each time I felt so uneasy that I left right away.

  “This time, however, I was attached to Madame Tim’s arm. She stood there in front of the stage in order to make me see, as she had everywhere else in the château (a sort of inspection of her troops; of our troops). She was far from suspecting what that theater made me see.

  “I saw the little café where at sixteen I’d tried to earn my living honorably by singing ‘Berg Op Zoom.’ And I could picture the tiled floor of the orchestra pit in this château, neat and clean, full of marble tables dripping with beer and lemonade while I moved around asking for coins, carrying my little tray at which I would steal a glance, all while smiling at everyone in a very businesslike manner and saying to myself, ‘Good. Now I’ve got enough to pay my rent. Good: there’s my chop. Good: there’s my café au lait.’ The same tray on which, as time passed, there was no more coffee, no more chop, no more rent, just enough to buy a little cigar to smoke myself into a stupor in the waiters’ lavatory. Until that evening when a miller stroked my behind and said, ‘Well, this girl has the stuff in any case.’

  “I don’t mean to say that there’s anything extraordinary about my story. I’m just trying to explain to you that Madame Tim might have had a lot of hope tied up in all that: terraces, vestibules, salons, theater; and maybe I lacked experience in regard to terraces, vestibules, and salons, but as to the theater, you couldn’t fool me. I knew what went into making that, and I could easily imagine, in another scheme of things, the same ingredients going into the terraces, vestibules, and salons. Making an indigestible dish. I know what I’m talking about. If you force yourself, you’ll vomit. And some people would rather drop dead than go on vomiting their whole life; some people do whatever it takes to eat something digestible.

  “Ceding to the pressure of Madame Tim’s arm, I turned around slowly with her to go back into the salon, and I said to myself, ‘We’ll see about that.’

  “We went back through the salon. As we were re-entering the vestibule to pass to the other wing of the château (judging from the direction that Madame Tim was pulling me in), someone behind us coughed discreetly. It was the prosecutor.

  “He was like a bloated balloon, enormous and very light, riding on the tip of the wind. His anxious eyes wondered which way that wind was blowing.

  “ ‘Come,’ Madame Tim said to him.

  “We let go of each other and he placed himself between the two of us: Madame Tim on his right arm and I on his left. He was as tall as we were and twice as fat, but he walked at our pace. And this is how we entered the large dining room.

  “The table was set for the evening meal. Four big French doors, through which the ashen afternoon came in and lit the long table gleaming with crystal. Ceremonial decanters filled with lovely purple wine oversaw the aquatic rippling of a whole host of spotless silverware, milky pools of porcelain, and the twinkling of a thousand tiny broken rainbows that burst from the crystal glassware’s beveled edges like a water lily in bloom.

  “We walked around the table very seriously, all three of us together, side by side. The stomach that, with every step, the prosecutor shoved out of the way with a thrust of his thigh gave even more gravitas to our stroll.

  “First we passed along the French doors that separated two frontiers, with on one side those terraces under the ashen sun, the lawns, the yews pruned in a checkerboard pattern, the balustrades, and in the distance, league after league of pearly mountains rising above vast carpets of rosy wheat; and on the other side, that miraculous lagoon of the long table with its crystal waters.

  “At the far end, we turned and walked back in step, moving along the other side of the table and inspecting the whole series of large and small Venetian mirrors where thousands of tiny reflections of our three solemn selves framed the one big reflection of our three solemn selves as we passed. And I said to myself, ‘We’ll see about that.’

  “When we returned to the vestibule, we climbed the staircase in unison. The stairs were low, marble, and easy to climb; our fat bodies rose one step at a time, and I said to myself, ‘Heave-ho! Heave-ho! How far up are you going to have us go? All the way until we’ve found the one who has the cure?’

  “We were so enormous that the huge landing of the second floor on which the collection of antique instruments was housed began to tremble a
s we approached its old guitars and old pianos. And when all three of us stepped on the landing together, hauling our three fat bodies in a final effort, those wild drums that Madame Tim had brought from her country and hung on the walls began dully beating some sort of somber ‘call to arms.’ We were very imposing. And we really wanted to give orders to all that to carry out some brilliant exploit. And I said to myself, ‘We’ll see about that.’

  “I realized where Madame Tim was taking us. We went along the hall and turned right, so that we wound up facing the third set of double doors.

  “That’s where I’d seen a servant carry Langlois’s cantle. Madame Tim opened the door.

  “We entered a vast bedroom but instinctively all of us stopped short and stood at attention at the threshold of the first carpet: it was Langlois’s bedroom.

  “The only thing there that was his was the small portmanteau of the captain-commander-horseman resting on the shoe stand.

  “The bedroom was enormous and peaceful and I was impressed by Madame Tim’s intelligence, which was altogether equal to the intelligence of that man who possessed a deep knowledge of human things. The room was meant for Langlois, and here the heavy gray-blue linen drapes were extensions of vaster and still more peaceful vistas. All that time we stood there, I let myself be taken and enfolded by the folding and unfolding of those artificial vistas with a soft evening wind wafting through the half-open window. And I said to myself, ‘We’ll see about that.’

  “After the evening meal, the gaming tables were set up in the salon.

  “Do you know what my impression was? It seemed to me that Madame Tim, the prosecutor, and I were giving orders with a hunting horn.

  “Langlois seemed to be saying: Wine from Chirouzes? Why not? I can easily drink your Chirouzes. Roast pork à la maman Rose? I’ll gladly eat your roast pork with carrots, onions, garlic, shallots, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, vin gris. I like it all. Duck salami? Of course. I’ll take some. Cardoons à la piémontaise? I’d love some. And I’ll have a conversation with Arnaude, who is sitting on my left batting her eyelashes, that’s my business. And I know how to recognize the petal-soft words of Cadiche on my right, don’t worry, you’ll see, I know how to handle it. A smile across the table to the old lady from Mens? Done. And did you see? It was very well done. She’s all aquiver in her jet-black gorget. Ah! The prosecutor! I haven’t forgotten him, do not fear; I’ve forgotten no one. You can’t imagine the memory you need to survive those empty, frozen expanses. Look: the prosecutor, with his deep knowledge of human things, is in heaven. Why? Is it a mystery? No, it’s simple: a gesture that reminds him of the long-forgotten gestures of his youth, gestures we made long ago. And that I do remember. Monsieur Tim? Monsieur Tim will love me all his life. I just told him something he’s been waiting to hear for the last twenty years. Don’t worry about Mathilda; it’s all taken care of. It was enough not to wander off but to extend my arm to her and to make our legs touch at least once as we walked, as if by accident, but from hip to heel. That’s done. Don’t forget I’m the one who escorted her to the table. Do you think I would risk neglecting Mathilda? The desert is a country of diplomats. I mustn’t take a single risk, I can’t even tell you where I’m going and where I’m taking you, Madame Tim, my dear friend—of saying to you, for example, that it’s not you who will lead me, kindly and maternally, to go to the right around this bush or to leave my footprints in that soft snow; it’s not you who makes your hunting-horn players blow. It’s me. I’m the one who pulls the breath from deep within your hunting-horn players’ lungs and out through the instrument to make your orders blare above the forests. Of course I’m not going to tell you this; I mean to remain the man I am: for me to awaken your feminine susceptibilities or to destroy in one fell swoop your timeless conception of things would be too foolish for words. This is why, Madame Tim, I smile at you like a wolf in sheep’s clothing; it’s why there’s a lovely sway to my hips and why I take off as swiftly as a long gray bird, with a smile as charming as the day is beautiful, from those distant pearly mountains on carpets of rose wheat all the way to those false open spaces of gray linen that you so intelligently wound around the bedroom where my little wolf’s luggage has been deposited. And, my clever old Sausage, I couldn’t even share this with you!