by Jean Giono
“On the empty streets that led back to the hotel, something—maybe the champagne, maybe my former life—something made me ask, ‘Shocked at what?’
“ ‘My scruples,’ he said.
“I didn’t sleep a wink. I drew up my battle plan and by morning I was armed to the teeth. ‘In the first place,’ I said to myself, ‘my ideas are good and, then, so are my personal connections.’
“I gave my morning over to the ideas. My idea was to take an innocent stroll around the student quarter and the theater on the Place Bayard. But before eleven I realized my ideas were no good at all.
“When it comes to the ‘housewives’ I met in those neighborhoods, there’s no fooling me. I’m sure they had what it took as a matter of substance, as they say in court, and even of good looks, but as for brains . . . Those women were too smart, having rubbed shoulders with intelligence, don’t you know! They thought very highly of themselves! They would have everything figured out the moment they got undressed; we couldn’t wait until then, and we didn’t want to resort to gelée de veau. So much for my ideas.
“As for my personal connections, well, that would mean seeing old girlfriends and talking about my former life, which had no appeal at all. But then, as always, what must be done must be done; all’s fair in love and war; desperate times call for desperate measures. I went through a whole series of these old saws before knocking on the first door.
“In the end, the first step is the hardest. I actually enjoyed running around town. Grenoble was less frightening than it had been the previous day. I was as shrewd as I’d always been. That made me happy. I said to myself, ‘You’ll be up to the task. If that rare pearl exists, you’ll get her.’
“I’m skipping over a lot of things. I drank at least twenty cups of coffee; as good as the ones we know how to make. At around four in the afternoon, I got an address; off I go. I’d been told, ‘You don’t need to put on kid gloves.’
“I ring. A young soubrette opens the door, looking a little put out to see I’m a woman. I say to myself, ‘Get to work, girl, you’re paid by the day.’
“ ‘Who are you looking for?’
“ ‘Excuse me,’ I say, and I’m in.
“It was very tidy, appealing even, with little chocolate-box knickknacks here and there. Those things don’t lie. Very telling clues. Especially in the shrewd state I was in.
“Then I see the lady. And, while I’m spouting some little compliment by way of introduction, I walk slowly toward the armchair. I say to myself, ‘It’ll be her or no one.’
“You couldn’t have dreamed of anyone better.
“She was more than presentable: a fine piece of work. Ten minutes of conversation: she’s magnificent. Good enough to offer as a gift to a child. I make a few thrusts to see if an instinctive parry won’t reveal her true nature. She was that sort of neat, pretty woman who would’ve sobbed if you’d called her the sharpest knife in the drawer. Her age? I knew how old she was, but I still called her ‘my child.’
“ ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
“ ‘Delphine,’ she said.
“I explained the whole business to her very honestly. ‘But why me?’ she asked.
“I told her she’d been highly recommended, that the past was the past, a word to the wise is enough (it was my day for proverbs).
“ ‘He needs to see me though,’ she said (at least she was smart enough to think of that).
“I agreed. I told her that the gentleman would come calling tomorrow at three in the afternoon. As I was leaving, I couldn’t help but add, ‘Have that young girl put on a white apron, my child.’
“Not that the maid’s apron was dirty, mind you: the maid’s apron was flawless. From that day on, however, I’ve always had reason to find fault with everyone and everything.
“The next morning, Langlois knocked at my door. It was seven o’clock.
“ ‘May I come in?’
“ ‘If you don’t mind seeing me in bed.’ (Nothing mattered to me.)
“He comes in.
“ ‘I’ve reserved your seat in the public coach,’ he said. ‘It leaves at eleven.’
“That took my breath away, so he went on: ‘Take care of the Bongalove. The plaster’s dry; the rest can be finished in five days. We’ll arrive a week from today.’
“ ‘But what if she doesn’t fit the bill?’
“He walked me to the coach. He had reserved a corner spot. He settled me in.
“ ‘Don’t stay here,’ I said to him.
“ ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I apologize.’
“He walked away with his big, easy stride. I saw him stroll under the trees of the Place Royale, cross the rose garden in front of the Palais, turn a corner, and disappear.
“I must have thought a hundred times about that white apron during my return trip. And a hundred times about Delphine: young, pretty, and whose stupidity had made her wait for everything simply to fall into her lap. Which it did in the end.
“Fortune favors the innocent. That’s easy to say. But when she arrived, I heard that they called her madame commander! A girl from Voiron! For she was simply from nearby Voiron. Nothing rare about her!
“And so? Dark hair and a smooth skin on her, painstakingly preserved from the slightest wrinkle. If there’s anything to be proud of, it’s not that! And that’s how she’s made. How she was made, thank God! And she was being called Madame Commander? Madame Commander of her soup when she’d eaten it, that’s what she was and nothing more.
“They got here on the eighth. She didn’t even realize that on the morning of the ninth, bright and early, Langlois left for the pass where the Piedmontese team was working in the quarry.
“Ever since the weather had taken a turn for the better, we began hearing their explosions again.
“If he could have left on the night of the eighth, he would have; but the coach arrived at six in the evening, and Langlois had to deal with everyone and his brother. That’s why he was nice enough to wait until the following morning.
“And I bet that Delphine got up calmly whenever she was ready, and I bet she was full of good intentions, and I bet that her remarkable intelligence went as far as saying to herself, ‘I’ll just straighten up his cigar boxes.’ And I bet that innocent girl fortune had favored sweetly placed his boxes of cigars on either side of the mirror above the mantel in the dining room: four on one side, four on the other.
“I can just see her. I bet she stepped back to admire the visual effect of the labels.
“Cigars! He had spoken to me about them in Grenoble, in that restaurant full of ostrich feathers, and at a time when Delphine didn’t have two beans to rub together. Madame Commander! Whatever did she have to command, that one?
“As for the mine blasts, well before we left for Grenoble they had begun going off up there near the pass. But how was I supposed to know that Langlois was listening to them and not something else? From the time he took the coach with me, could I possibly have imagined his scruples?
“I know you’ll say, ‘You chose Delphine and chose your role. Just look at Madame Tim and the prosecutor. From that point on, they remained at a respectable distance.’
“Fine. The prosecutor, Madame Tim, and I could go walking arm in arm, but that didn’t mean we were on the same side of the barricade.
“I happen to be ill-mannered. I don’t know how to leave well enough alone, even if it’s a question of respect. And then, well, respect . . . do we respect the people we love?
“I didn’t choose my role. Being forced by circumstances to do something is not what I call ‘choosing.’ I was carrying the weight of my seventy years on my back. Literally on my back.
“I chose Delphine, I’ll grant you that.
“And, yes, I know, she was a woman perfectly incapable of seeing in a box of cigars anything but a box of cigars. I should have suspected that. Well, I didn’t just suspect. I knew.
“I have no reason to find fault with her,
no more than I had reason to find fault with her maid’s white apron, which was very white, even a bit starched, with an adorable little flap with fluted ruching. Do you think I didn’t know that either? It was as plain as the nose on your face!
“What fault could anyone find with Delphine? She wasn’t an ‘embroiderer.’ Not in the least. Hadn’t she accepted the plastered walls, the bed, and the two chairs, and even the linen curtain that Madame Tim gave them and that Langlois took down and put away in the cupboard?
“Hadn’t she accepted the table and two chairs in the so-called dining room? And the mirror that Langlois’d had hung above the mantel, saying, ‘I’m sure you’d like to look at yourself on occasion,’ and that reflected the plastered walls?
“Wasn’t she complimentary when the two of them went to visit Madame Tim? And didn’t she walk without saying a word among all those beautiful things in Saint-Baudille, just like someone dancing to music?
“Was she what he wanted? Exactly what he wanted.
“When I came with my knitting, she said to me, ‘What are you doing here?’
“I said, ‘Nothing. I’m knitting, knitting, knitting.’
“ ‘But what will it be in the end? Stockings? A sweater?’
“ ‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t be anything. I’m just lining up stitches one next to the other, and then stitches one on top of the other. To keep my fingers busy. It might be a muffler or a scarf, or a blanket, depending on how long I need to keep my fingers busy. I don’t plan things ahead of time.’
“Evenings were peaceful. Every evening Langlois would open a box of cigars, take one out, and go smoke it at the back of the garden. Through the window we could see the red tip of his lit cigar coming and going in the night; a night that was too black and in which we could make out the shape of the mountains and the ember of the cigar moving across them like the lamp on a coach traveling through the forest, the valleys, the ridges and peaks; then, suddenly, the mountains disappeared and the coach went on stoically past nothing in the gray night.
“From time to time I would raise my eyes from my knitting to see exactly where he was in his distant voyage; then once again I began to line up stitch after stitch of what could be a scarf, a blanket, or . . . enough. I didn’t need anything. Neither did he. So what did it matter! . . .”
•
We remembered that time very well indeed.
The cigars, of course!
But we said to ourselves, “It’s surely to honor his lady. Many young ladies are repulsed by a pipe. Early in a marriage, one makes concessions. Older husbands are always happy to do at least one nice thing without too much effort. Afterwards, things fall into place.” We said to ourselves, “He’ll go back to his pipe.”
It was right after the first snowfall (a dusting of autumn snow that fell on October 20, a very fine layer, but it was enough to turn the whole countryside white, much whiter even than when there was a meter of snow, snow dust that has a sparkle like salt) that Anselmie saw Langlois turn up at her place.
The next day there must have been fifty of us at Anselmie’s, filing through for hours.
We said to her, “So, tell us. What did he say to you? What did he do?”
“He came,” she said.
And it was ages before we could get anything else out of her than “He came.”
That woman is a brute!
Still, we managed to learn a little something. The snow had fallen. The countryside was completely white. Langlois had arrived at Anselmie’s. He didn’t go in. He opened the door and shouted, “Are you there?”
“Of course I’m here,” Anselmie said.
“Come here,” Langlois said.
“Why should I?” Anselmie answered.
“Don’t argue,” Langlois said.
“Can I at least put my leeks in the soup?”
“Hurry,” Langlois said.
“The way he sounded,” Anselmie said to us, “made me drop my leeks and rush out to him.”
“How’d he sound?” we asked her. “Talk. The prosecutor is coming, you know. He’ll get you to talk.”
“Well, what do you want me to say? He was angry!”
“Langlois?”
“Yes. His voice was angry.”
“Fine. So you came out and he was angry?”
“Not at all!”
“So how was he?”
“Like always.”
“No more?”
“No more what? No, like always.”
“He didn’t seem crazy?”
“Him? Oh, you people! Crazy? You’ve no idea! Not at all; he was just like always.”
“He wasn’t nasty?”
“Not at all. I told you he was the way he always was. You know he wasn’t much fun; well, he kept on being not much fun, but barely. He was nice!”
“So what did he say to you?”
“He said, ‘Do you have any geese?’ I said, ‘I might; it depends.’ ‘Go get me one,’ he said. I said, ‘They don’t have much meat on them,’ but he insisted, so I said, ‘Well, come along then.’ We went around the shed and I caught a goose for him.”
She stopped speaking. We were harsh: “Go on, talk!”
“Well . . . that’s all,” said Anselmie.
“What do you mean, that’s all?”
“I mean, that’s all. He said to me, ‘Cut off its head.’ I picked up the cleaver and I cut off the goose’s head.”
“Where?”
“Where what?” she said. “On the chopping block, of course.”
“Where was the chopping block?”
“In the shed, for Pete’s sake.”
“And what was Langlois doing?”
“He was keeping his distance.”
“Where?”
“Outside the shed.”
“In the snow?”
“Oh! There wasn’t much snow.”
“Talk, then!” And we jostled her.
“You’re getting on my nerves,” she said. “I’m telling you, that’s all that happened. If I say that’s all, that’s all, for Pete’s sake. He said to me, ‘Hand it over.’ And I gave him the goose. He held it by the feet. And, well, he watched it bleeding on the snow. When it had bled for a moment, he gave it back to me. He said, ‘Here, take it. And go away.’ And I went back in with the goose. And I said to myself, ‘I suppose he wants me to pluck it.’ So I started to pluck it. And when it was plucked, I looked. He was still in the same spot. Just standing there. He was looking at the goose’s blood at his feet. I said to him, ‘It’s plucked, Monsieur Langlois.’ He didn’t answer me and he didn’t budge. I said to myself, ‘He’s not deaf. He heard you. When he’s ready, he’ll come get it.’ And I made my soup. Five o’clock came. Night was falling. I go out to get some wood. He was still in the same spot. I said to him again, ‘It’s plucked, Monsieur Langlois. You can take it.’ He didn’t budge. So I went in to get the goose to bring it to him but, when I came back out, he was gone.”
•
So this is what he must have done. He went back to his place and hung on until right after the soup. He waited for Sausage to take up her knitting and for Delphine to place her hands in her lap. He opened the box of cigars, like he always did, and he went out for a smoke.
Except that night it wasn’t a cigar he smoked but a stick of dynamite. Except that what Delphine and Sausage were looking at as they always had—the small ember, the small coach lamp—was a sizzling fuse.
And, at the back of the garden, there was an enormous golden spray that lit up the night for a second. It was Langlois’s head finally taking on the measure of the universe.
Who is it who said, “A king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness”?
Manosque
September 1–October 10, 1946
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