The three men separated, and Lafon went home to eat the famous fried fish, the point of departure for new concerns. Madame Lafon did not take long to ask: “What’s up? Something’s bothering you.”
Lafon knew that his wife was a good adviser, and very clever at seeing through many things. He had no hesitation about telling her everything.
“You understand now, my dear Adrienne, the horror into which these suspicions are throwing me? Who paid Baudard to commit the crime? You understand that the bandit couldn’t have gotten any benefit from the crime, and the Commissaire’s first thought, if I took it to him, would be to go back to whoever profited from the murder.”
“To Monsieur Etienne, our benefactor.”
“Anyway, there’s no urgency. Baudard doesn’t know that he’s under suspicion. It’s necessary to watch him, not to lose sight of him.”
“For my part, I’ll try to find out something from Madame Aubert. Without actually putting her in the picture, I’ll try to find out whether she’s ever suspected something worse than an accident.”
“If you want—but be prudent.”
IX. Women’s Confidences
Since the death of Antoine Aubert, the devotion with which Madame Lafon had cared for Madame Aubert and little Ulette had linked them in friendship. Adrienne Lafon was of bourgeois origin and had received a good education. Her parents, ruined by an unwise speculation on the Bourse and reduced to black poverty, had been very happy to encounter Louis Lafon, to marry their daughter to him and be supported themselves by the mechanic. That was a hard time of furious labor for the young man, subsidizing the existence of the two old people. Adrienne had done as much as she could, giving lessons in French and English. When the two old people had died, however, life had become easier and the good wife only kept up English translations as mental relaxation. Adrienne who was only forty, was therefore not out of place in the company of Madame Aubert, and that explains the sympathy between the two women.
When Madame Lafon arrived at Madame Aubert’s home, Aline embraced her.
“I’ve decided to leave for the Midi a little sooner than I thought, and I have a lot of purchases to make. Would you be kind enough to take charge of them?”
“Gladly. Have you made a list of what you need?”
“Here it is.”
“Where can we get all this?”
“I always shop at the Galeries Mondiale.”
“Well then, we’ll continue. You’ve received news from Théoule, then?”
“Yes, Madame Desambrez and her daughter-in-law are awaiting me impatiently. That’s why I’m hastening our departure.”
“And what does Ulette think?”
“She’s delighted to be seeing her friend Simone Ossola again, whom she hasn’t seen for eighteen months, and that scamp Robert. Madame Ossola has a house in Nice. She’ll return there while I’m in childbed, with Ulette and her children. That way, Ulette won’t see her big doll until after my churching. It will work out very well like that.”
“Does Monsieur Etienne approve of the arrangements?”
A cloud passed over the young widow’s face.
“In fact, you’re my friend. I sense that I can confide in you and that you’ll keep the secret. Last Saturday, after a pleasant dinner to celebrate Ulette’s recovery, after my old Madeleine had put the child to bed, Etienne and I stayed together, chatting by the fire. After a few banalities, he declared that he loves me.”
“You, his father’s widow?”
“Yes. I confess that his proposal frightened me. It’s hastening my voyage. Etienne revealed himself to me in an entirely new light. He told me that he’s adored me since the first time he saw me, that he’s suffered from my marriage to his father, that he’s been jealous. But what’s the matter, my dear Annie? You’ve gone pale, fearfully. Would you like a cordial?”
“Go on,” said Adrienne. “It’s a nervous crisis, to which I’m subject. It’s passed. You said that Etienne revealed that he’s passionately in love with you?”
“Yes, and in the end, with such violence that he frightened me, saying that if any new obstacles came between us, he’d be able to break them...”
“He’s mad! What did you tell him? That such a marriage is impossible.”
“No, he was too excited. I talked about waiting, the necessary reflection.”
“Perhaps you were right. But what are you going to do?”
“Leave, first. Etienne is willful, violent. The factory is his life. I thought he was entirely absorbed by it. He became its absolute master by virtue of his father’s death. And now, in a few months, a child will be born, a brother or sister, with whom he’ll have to share. It will be necessary to appoint a guardian to whom he’ll have to render accounts. All that frightens me, and if my godmother consents, I’ll stay with her. My personal fortune permits me to live independently. I’ll settle somewhere in the Alpes-Maritimes and raise my children in tranquility. Retreat to the sun.”
“I won’t see you any more, then?” said Adrienne, sadly.
“Why don’t you and Lafon come next year? Your husband has the right to a month’s vacation now, as director. You can spend it with me, and in the meantime, we can write to one another often.”
“I accept,” said Adrienne, “but perhaps you’ll come back without anything to fear from your stepson.”
“It’s certain that he might change his mind…if he marries, for instance.”
“He’ll marry!” said Madame Lafon, recklessly, thinking: The red widow, the guillotine. “Now that the future’s settled for you, let’s think about the present. I have the list of all the things you need. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
The two women chatted for a little while longer about various trivia, and then Adrienne withdrew.
X. The Anxiety of Worthy Men
When the good woman found herself with her husband again that evening, she told him about her visit to Madame Aubert.
“There’s no longer any possible error,” he said, sadly. “Etienne had his father murdered in order to become the master of the factory, and now he wants to marry the pretty young widow. It’s terrible! And it’s to him that I owe the direction of the workshops! The man I considered to be everyone’s benefactor. If I denounce him, it’s the end of the factory and the workers’ co-operative. In punishing a cowardly and miserable murderer, I’d be putting all those men out of work.”
“Have we the right to do that?”
“I don’t want to take that responsibility on my own. Albaret and Ouchy are already partly informed—I’ll tell them everything. They’ll give me their advice. What do you think, old girl?”
“You’re right, and it will take some of the weight off us.”
“I’ll bring them here tomorrow evening, then. They’ll have supper with us, and we’ll chat at the end of the meal, or afterwards.”
XI. The Factory Protects the Boss
The next day, the two comrades, rather astonished by the invitation, came to take their places at the director’s table. The dinner was almost silent, Albaret and Ouchy divining that their friend had something serious to tell them with regard to Baudard.
After dessert, Madame Lafon brought a bottle of old wine, and Lafon related the result of his investigation briefly, evoking the consequences of the factory owner’s arrest.
“I can’t take this under my hat. Like me, you’re old hands at the factory, you knew Aubert, the father, and even his father, the founder. You’ve shared in the grandeur of the company. Give me your opinion.”
They reflected for some time. Finally, Albaret said: “The factory must come first. The severed head of Etienne Aubert isn’t worth the livelihoods of a thousand households and progress in the corporation. Ought we to sacrifice that to judiciary vengeance? What advantage would we get out of it? It would even be a black mark for Socialism. Léon Daudet’s clamoring that those who are leading the democratic movement are sectarians and murderers.64 I think we should keep quiet.”
“Don’t you think,” objected Lafon, “that to act thus is only to listen to your instinct?”
“Possibly. But it’s in everyone’s interest. If we could consult the comrades, they’d say the same as me.”
“Perhaps. Everyone thinks of himself first. What about you Ouchy?”
“If it were up to me, I’d gladly see the Boss guillotined, but fundamentally, I agree with Albaret. It’s necessary to sustain the factory, since the factory is us. I have an idea though. What if we were to profit from our secret by demanding further concessions from the Boss? For example, if we were to forbid him to marry and have children, so that on his death the factory would revert entirely to the workers. You can’t say that’s an egotistical proposition, since Etienne Aubert is younger than us—but it would be our children that would profit from it.”
“From a parricide? That’s frightful!” said Adrienne. “And then, you know, Madame Aubert is pregnant.”
“Zut!” cried Ouchy, naively. “In a fortnight of marriage!”
“That’s sufficient, my dear,” said Adalbert, laughing.
Gravely, Lafon went on: “It’s necessary to think hard about all this. I think we should put off a decision for a year. Who knows what might happen in the meantime? It might be that Etienne Aubert will indicate the way to go by his conduct.”
“You’re right. There’s no urgency. In any case, mouths shut about our secret. Today’s the tenth of October 1923. Next year, on the same date, we’ll meet again—here, if you like, Lafon. We’ll make a decision.”
“In a year, to the day,” said the director. “Once, it was the cathedral that provided sanctuary to the guilty. Today it’s the factory.”
Interlude: Silly Talk on the Mountain
Etienne Aubert, the protagonist of this book, appears in a very bad light here, and perhaps some might wax indignant, claiming that such a criminal son could not exist, especially one who is young and brave. Brave? He only risked death during the war, and was decorated for that, and merely paid in order to occasion a fatal accident for his father. But is not that excess of egotism—which very rarely goes that far, I admit—characteristic of the mores of the period after the Great War, of which no one is proud? Have you noticed that no one recounts his exploits; everyone hides the atrocities that were committed during those five years of trenches, in which human beasts had their instincts unchained, whereas the soldiers of year II, the Revolution and the survivors of the Napoleonic Era continued to recount their magnificent actions when the wars were over and they had retired to their hearths, drinking coffee with a dash or two of cognac—a “gloria”—under the casks that they still call “gloriettes” in Provence because of the tales of the battles that the veterans repeated there, in the shade of jasmines and bindweed.
Never has the quarrel and struggle between men under thirty—or forty at the most—and those above that age, been as sharp. The generation that was dressed in blue horizon cloth to kill and to die is in haste to live, to enjoy, intensely, and without waiting, everything that their elders possess. They manipulate them, push them, knock them over, as much as they can, while waiting to stick them in the ground by means of ruses, perfidies, deceptions, concerted filthy tricks and calumnies—in short, by all cunning means devoid of the risks that pilfering carried in the war—on the principle of every man for himself. The “heroes” jostle people with their elbows, rudely, in the street, on trams and in the metro—even women—without apologizing or begging pardon, as an old man would do instantly, as a reflex.
Indifference reigns, and the boor is king.
Will you say, young men, that Etienne Aubert does not exist? How do you know? Perhaps he will exist longer than you. In any case, he is representative of the soul of thousands upon thousands very like him, and if he is unique, art, in the novel as in the theater, only sees exceptions. He kills his father; moreover, he is in love with his father’s wife. Well, I am only reiterating old stories, transforming ancient tragedies into a twentieth-century novel, renewing, by modernizing then, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides—and the depths of the human heart have not changed much: civilization, with the telephone and wireless telegraphy has only put a varnish over eternal appetites; at the first tremors of interest or passion it cracks; during five years of massacre, pilfering, theft and hasty prostitution, it cracked everywhere.
And the young are marching more terribly than ever, on the heels of their elders. Certainly, the adolescent cannot remain the baby who regards his father and mother, those benevolent despots, as infallible and perfect beings; one has the right, between twenty and thirty years of age, to contemplate the terrain to be conquered with immeasurable ambitions. Besides which, it is necessary not to cure youth; it is necessary to maintain its incomparable prestige carefully. It is not an evil, but, on the contrary, the best of trump cards, it is the conqueror to retain within oneself, for it is necessary to be green with white hair, to be young for as long as possible, to be twenty as long as one lives.
The young, escaped from the abattoir, no longer have any courtesy. They act like savages forcing an old man to climb a coconut palm. If the poor man cannot climb the trunk, or if, having reached the top, he cannot hold onto the branches of the tree when it is shaken, if he falls, they kill him—and eat him, if they are cannibals.
Personally, I would bombard them cheerfully with coconuts.
“What can a man of fifty expect?” writes a young man, François Mauriac.65 “We are only interested in him out of politeness and necessity.” Paul Raynal, in his tragedy Le Tombeau sous l’Arc de Triomphe, designates the father by the insult “the Old Man” and makes him kneel down before his son to beg his pardon. And Jean Sarment cries, over the trestles: “I’m too great for myself!”—which is to say, less nobly. “I want to fart higher than my ass!” They are at least fellows of verve and talent—but what can one say about the insignificant and the failures, the pretentious innumerable who lay their fly-specks gratuitously in the newspapers and magazines? Literati who have printed, more or less at their own expense, three thousand amorphous novels a year, devoid of originality, style and imagination, competitors for and beneficiaries of a host of Prix Goncourts, Balzacs and Conrads, which are no longer anything, and are sometimes founded in order to be, thanks to complaisant and bribed juries, launch platforms and advertisements for some book or other, and are attributed to the abortions of donors. O public, how is it possible to select, without being duped, from that ever-rising ant hill of books that assaults railway bookstalls and the shelves of bookshops every day?
As for me, having arrived at the summit of the mountain a long time ago, and who must be on the further slope, if I had to recommence my career, I would choose another métier. “Does it still amuse you to write novels?” Henri Letellier the owner of the great daily Le Journal—to which he adds oil, international sleeper cars and the Train Bleu—asked me one day in Nice. And a sixteen-year-old shorthand typist with golden red hair to whom I was dictating a few pages, while occasionally hesitating slightly, searching for a phrase, turned round to say to me: “So you can’t do anything except write novels, then?”
Alas, no—and I regret not having chosen finance! When I was twenty I went to see a banker, Monsieur de Lamonta, the director of a carriage company in the Rue Taitbout—fiacres in those days, yellow fiacres, the Urbaine. He had left the Digne, my homeland, with no money, and I knew that he had wandered around Paris with patched and ragged trousers. As he wasn’t stupid, he said to me: “You know how I started out. Well, do as I did. I have six million now. I’m owed three. That makes nine.”
Immediately, he gave me a lesson in business. If I had gone into a bank and had educated myself there, perhaps, if chance had favored me, I would now be someone, like the extraordinary pirate Zaharoff, Grand’croix de la Légion d’honneur, who, while clinging like a fantastic octopus to the rocks of Monte Carlo, on French soil, captures by means of speculations, in his florid tentacles, profits of a hundred and fifty million a year, having amo
ng his employees the Prince of Monaco, and in order to avoid any fiscal inconveniences in Paris—for he pays no taxes—a former President of the Council, Louis Barthou, and his brother, Léon Barthou, as administrators. Perhaps I would be in the place of that magisterial, hyperbalzacian businessman, and I would found, in honor of Balzac, a literary prize of ten thousand francs.66
I would regret not having listened to the banker Monsieur de Lamonta if I did not think, even long thereafter, that dreaming and women are the best and sweetest things in life, and if I did not have the care and the pride, in spite of everything, of joyful work and a well-made book.
However, there is an annihilation of writing.
Young people want to be rich immediately, to be leaders rapidly, without waiting to be beaten, reduced and compressed by life. And why not? During the Revolution and under Napoleon, there were beardless generals. With their superabundant strength, which knows no limits, they are not resigned, as the old are; quite simply, they want everything and they want it now. They’re right.
But I tell them this parable.
A couple—a pretty blonde of twenty, a delightful cinema actress, and a fellow of fifty, I dare not say more; it’s abnormal, disgusting and unjust, isn’t it?—were traveling by car, with the old man, an expert and adroit driver, at the wheel along the road to Gonfaron, a village in the Var perched on a picturesque crag. They encountered an old man who was moaning. They stopped to ask the poor man what was wrong. Sobbing like a child, he replied: “I’m crying because my father beat me.”
They continued on their way, and further on they met another white-bearded peasant, and told him about the old man in tears.
“Oh, you listened to that young rascal, did you? I clipped the lad round the ear because he was disrespectful to his grandfather.”
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