Marindelle was happy with his Cinquiéme Bureau and psychological-warfare business, a sign that with him, too, things were not going so well. Dia, who was the benign magician of the whole team, had been posted to Divisional H.Q. on being promoted to major. He was packing his traps: they were sending him to Ghana to represent France at some congress or other. There remained Orsini and Pinières, with the solid nucleus of N.C.O.s and a handful of seasoned newcomers.
Raspéguy went and stood, with his fists on his hips, in front of the huge map marked with red and blue lines which stretched across the end of his office.
The colonel had the gift of being able at a glance to transpose these contour lines, which he followed with the stem of his pipe, into human exhaustion, expended energy, stumblings and oaths.
One kilometre on this chaotic, jagged terrain was equivalent to four anywhere else. In the valleys there were mosquitoes, and, at two in the morning, mist. Up on the ridges it was icy cold and fires were lit, which gave away their position. And there was no water.
The colonel paced up and down his office. He was thinking:
“The rebels will keep to the valleys; that’s where they’re to be found. But my boys are worn out, and they don’t like savage hand-to-hand fighting in the brushwood, where training and courage count for nothing, where luck alone prevails.
“I shall nevertheless take to the wadi-beds and valleys. We’ll have to sweat it out, and perhaps for nothing. If only the population would keep me informed I’d be able to put paid to this band of fells without too many casualties.
“The army must depend on the people as a fish depends upon water. Heavens above, that’s all I ask! I’m a man of the people myself. I love honours, medals, parades, but, above all, victory. A victor smells good even if he stinks of blood and sweat; the vanquished can drench himself in eau-de-Cologne from Dior, he’ll still leave a smell of shit behind him.
“And Boudin, of course, isn’t here!” (In his usual unfair way Raspéguy was holding him responsible for his absence, although it was he himself who had sent him to Auvergne.)
“Esclavier would already have set out in pursuit with his company and with Pinières’s. He enjoyed the chase, like those wild huntsmen of old, and yet it was not so much the men he wanted to capture . . . Once a band was surrounded he was no longer interested. But then what did he want?”
The colonel, still striding up and down the room, found himself in front of the big photograph which was hung behind his desk: Boisfeuras dying in the sands of the desert, his lips twisted with pain and in his eyes that ironical gleam.
“Boisfeuras is still making fun of someone, but of whom?”
All these questions he asked himself exhausted him, driving him to distraction. Raspéguy picked up the telephone and gave his orders:
“Fall in the whole regiment. We move off in an hour. Four units of ammo, but only two days’ rations, two water-bottles per man. No tents or bedding, they’re too heavy, we’re not going out camping.”
* * * *
The house that Philippe Esclavier had inherited from his Uncle Paul stood apart from the rest of the village and overlooked the valley of the Siagne. In the terraced garden there was an old stone gateway, a stretch of ruined wall which dated, it was said, from the Romans, a few cypresses, some olive-trees; their silver-lined leaves, at midday, reflected the rays of the sun in scattered patches over the thin grass and grey and red rocks.
The rooms were spacious and whitewashed, furnished with long waxed tables, rush-covered chairs, wooden benches; the floor was of dark-red tiles. A few engravings on the wall; some pieces of old chinaware on a sideboard.
In a lofty vaulted room, the remains of an old chapel, Paul Esclavier had had the idea of installing a library. He had had the shelves built, but the books had been left in packages, stacked one on top of another.
Since the end of the war, every year, when the fine weather began, Uncle Paul had made a resolution to abandon all public life, both his post as Secretary General of the Teachers’ Trade Union and his seat on the Central Committee of the Socialist Party, to retire to his “Thebaid.” But it was only a few weeks before his death, and on definite orders from his doctors, that Paul Esclavier had begun to implement his decision by sending his books to Provence. He had not had time to follow them.
Seated on a packing-case which he had dusted with a cloth, Philippe thought about his uncle and of the last holidays he had spent with him in Avignon in 1939.
Paul Esclavier was then living in a little cottage just outside the town. The warm night was full of the sound of crickets; it was the evening that war was declared.
Paul was wearing espadrilles and old linen trousers topped with a none-too-clean singlet. His ruffled hair was already white. A lock kept falling over his eyes and he swept it aside with the back of his hand; it had become a characteristic gesture. Absent-minded and impulsive, he had not been able to pass his certificate in German, which condemned him for the rest of his days to being a third-form teacher in provincial lycées.
He played bowls, drank pastis, and, because he was unambitious but a man of fanatical integrity, the Socialist professors and teachers had made him their departmental delegate.
Étienne Esclavier, on the other hand, had just been nominated to the chair of Contemporary History at the Sorbonne. That evening he was wearing pin-stripe grey flannel trousers and an alpaca coat somewhat tight across the shoulders, which made him look like a 1925 fashion-plate.
The world lay open before him. Who could say that he might not one day become Grand Master of the University? But already he was dreaming of another rôle: of becoming for the country a sort of conscience, soaring above the base contingencies of daily life, and who would be consulted rather in the manner of the Delphic Oracle.
As for Philippe, who was seventeen, he had passed the second part of his baccalaureate and was to start training as a teacher in October. A place was earmarked for him at Louis-le-Grand.
All three of them sat leaning over the old wireless which was crackling. Suddenly there was the sound of Hitler’s voice, raucous and frenzied, fuming, screeching, rising to a hysterical pitch, falling and rumbling again, like distant thunder.
Uncle Paul pointed a threatening finger at the wireless set:
“Hitler’s a madman; he should have been locked up long ago!”
“Don’t say that,” said Étienne, as though he were frightened.
He got up and went out on to the terrace.
“Our great man is on edge,” Uncle Paul quietly observed, turning up the volume. “You see, Philippe, I like the German way of life, German high spirits and what the best of them have written. But what you’re hearing now isn’t Germany.”
Professor Esclavier came back, his voice trembling:
“Germany—and you’re one of the few people, Paul, who don’t realize this—is, on the contrary, the unleashing of all the obscure forces of evil. Hitler and Nietzsche, and not Goethe and Heine.”
“I don’t believe in obscure forces, Étienne.”
“Once again Germany is threatening intelligence; the sound of her jackboots is drowning the voice of reason.”
“And it’s we, France, who represent that intelligence and have a monopoly of it? Do you really think that? For me intelligence doesn’t exist without courage. Athene, the goddess of intelligence, relied on her spear. We are going to have to prove our courage.”
Hitler’s voice had fallen silent and thousands, hundreds of thousands, of other voices started chanting “Die Fahne Hoch,” the barbaric hymn to a murdered pimp.
Uncle Paul nodded.
“Yes, we shall need all the courage we’ve got!”
Uncle Paul was one of the first to show his. He had tried to join up, but he had been rejected. When Pétain came to power Paul Esclavier had refused to take the oath and was dismissed from the University.
In London, just before setting off on his third mission, in the course of which he was taken prisoner, Second Lieutenant Philippe Esclavier discovered that Uncle Paul was in charge of all the resistance movements in the south-east. He was known by a nom de guerre taken from Roman history, that of Manlius, the defender of the Capitol.
This first evening that he spent in Uncle Paul’s “Thebaid,” Philippe Esclavier went to bed very early, but he could not sleep.
Down in the valley the rumbling sound of the Siagne rose and fell. The moon had risen, and through the open window of his bedroom the officer could see, pale and unreal, the ridge of hills opposite him. An owl hooted.
A furtive rush, a cry: he jumped out of bed. Under his window a dog had just broken a cat’s back-bone.
Silence fell once more and Philippe Esclavier went back to bed, but the white mountain ridge, the Roman ruin, this furtive killing, awakened in him memories that he wanted to forget. Until daybreak he struggled against them, in this unknown room and this over-soft bed.
2
THE THREE NOTES OF THE TOAD OF SAINT-GILLES-DE-VALREYNE
On the following day Esclavier was out and about early in the morning. He had put on his canvas jungle-boots with their thick rubber soles; they reminded him of Indo-China and Algeria. In the shade of an old sheepfold which had half capsized he lay down in the cool grass which had not yet gone yellow in the summer heat and, with his head on a stone, fell into a deep sleep.
When he woke, the sun was at its height. Philippe set out again, straight in front of him, struggling through the under-growth, clambering over stones, until the sweat fell salty on his lips.
He wanted to forget that in Algeria other men, who were likewise marching, along the dried-up river-beds, over the scorching rocks or in the mud of the Djurdjura, were talking about his desertion.
As he made his way back to his house along a winding path, he instinctively studied the terrain as though he still had to send out patrols or avoid an ambush. And he said to himself: “I must buy some large-scale maps of the district.”
This reaction he had just had made him conscious of the extent to which warfare had become his profession, the army his reason for living.
He prepared his meal himself: a slice of bread, three raw tomatoes and a glass of milk satisfied his hunger. Esclavier was frugal by nature, which did not prevent him from being equally able to drink until he passed out.
The officer had never known solitude, having always lived in military communities, camps or prisons. For fifteen years he had got up at first light, had poured himself out a cup of coffee and had then gone to attend the reveille of his men, who groaned, swore and stretched as they emerged from their barrack-rooms or dug-outs. Sleep had softened them and decomposed their features; their limbs were stiff and their gestures clumsy. They would then see him freshly shaven, faultlessly turned out even in the rice-fields or the mountains, clean-cut, ironical and slightly contemptuous. How they hated him at that moment! But they smartened themselves up, shaved and tried to emulate him.
From now on Esclavier no longer had an act to put on for anyone.
To while away the time he started arranging Uncle Paul’s books: historical and political works, travel books and a quantity of detective novels.
The iron knocker on the front door banged three times. Philippe ran to see who it was.
A huge man was standing on the threshold. At first all that Philippe noticed were the bulbous eyes, the drooping moustache, the coarse shirt streched over an immense stomach and the quivering jowls.
But, even though enveloped in fat, the figure had a certain majesty and the voice was deep and melodious, the voice of an orator or of an actor of a certain standing.
“Major Philippe Esclavier?” the visitor enquired.
“In person. Do come in.”
“I say, you’ve started unpacking the books. Funny, isn’t it, Paul’s taste for detective novels? I’m Urbain Donadieu, your uncle’s executor and mayor of the village. Did you know it was I who urged Paul to buy this house?”
Urbain Donadieu had sat down quietly on a package of books and, wheezing slightly like an asthmatic, started rummaging in a stack that had just fallen over.
“Would you lend me one of these? I read a lot, in fact that’s all I do, and I’m somewhat short of printed matter. Do you like it here, Major?”
“I’ve only just arrived.”
“You’ll get bored. At first I got bored myself, then you get used to anything, to living alone, to growing fat, to growing old, then to dying. I came to invite you to dinner. I like this format. I’ve just re-read the memoirs of Saint-Simon.”
He ran a greedy tongue over his lips:
“We shall have trout and thrushes, the last of the season. I live in the first house at the entrance to Saint-Gilles. Let’s say eight o’clock, but you may as well come at half past seven; I’ve got nothing to do. You’re intriguing the inhabitants of our little village, therefore you’re frightening them. At first I used to play this rôle of bogey-man. Then they elected me mayor, as one exorcizes a magician. Since then they’ve no longer been frightened. Would you like to be president of the entertainment committee? Don’t worry, your only job would be to buy fireworks for the feast of Saint-Gilles, who’s our patron saint. This feast is in September, but we have put it forward to July on account of the summer visitors. There are only ten of them, and they’re all connected with the district.”
Urbain Donadieu got up, carrying off three books. Philippe noticed that his feet were bare in their ancient slippers. He accompanied him to the front door and watched him waddling away through the olive-trees.
When Donadieu had walked three hundred yards he sat down on a low stone wall to recover his breath. A lizard scuttling away between the cracks in the stones caught his attention for a few moments.
On the horizon, in a faint blue-and-grey mist, the succession of ridges of the Esterel looked like a mysterious, flat Chinese painting.
For years Donadieu had gazed at this countryside and each time he found it different, either through man’s having imposed some unexpected modification, such as fires or forest clearance, or through a jet aircraft’s leaving its wake in the sky like a boat at sea of which one can see nothing but the stern.
He drew out his handkerchief, which made a letter fall from his pocket: his eyes wrinkled with pleasure as he unfolded the sheet of paper.
The major’s arrival had reminded his daughter Irène that outside Paris, outside her little group of self-satisfied, tuft-hunting snobs, there still existed an isolated bit of countryside, and right at the end of it, a village, Saint-Gilles-de-Valreyne, where her father lived, and that this father of hers might still be of use to her.
He re-read the letter, which was typewritten on paper with the heading of the weekly periodical Influences.
“Papa Urbain,
“You’re like a great big tom-cat snoozing inertly in the sun but watching everything that goes on around him. Between Forcalquier and Grasse there isn’t a single case of adultery, not a single squabble over a will or local election secret, that you don’t know about. And you keep yourself informed of French political life. Did you not meet most of the men of the old and new régimes when you were working with Paul Esclavier? I want you to do me a favour. Up to now you’ve been good enough to send me fifty thousand francs from time to time, to keep me out of the red or to pay off my arrears of rent. I’ve now got my foot in the stirrup: Villèle, somewhat reluctantly, has entrusted me with the enquiry into Major Esclavier. I had to tell him I was his cousin, that we were brought up together and God knows what else. . . . After all, I am Paul Esclavier’s god-daughter, and I might easily have met Philippe at his uncle’s. I never did, of course, and I don’t even know what this new young god looks like. I am therefore coming to Saint-Gilles for a week or two’s holiday. No point in warning our paratrooper of this. F
or him I shall be what I still was six months ago: the editorial secretary of Arts et Jardins.
“Here is the explanation given by the Ministry of the Armed Forces to account for this astounding resignation:
“‘Esclavier, seriously wounded in the Sahara and no longer able to take part in active operations, has applied for two years’ unpaid leave.’
“The papers have made a great splash of this official version, but no one, at least among the initiates, believes it for a moment.
“The major, once more according to Villèle, has used these means to show his disagreement with the policy adopted by the Government in Algeria (which would be our policy if our boss was in power, but which we are bound to oppose since it wasn’t dictated by us) or, better still, to voice his solidarity with certain conceptions and methods which are current in Algeria. The name of Esclavier would add even more to the sensationalism of such a ‘disclosure.’
“So I must hear what he has to say and perhaps get his agreement to publish a confession.
“If necessary, I can do without his agreement.
“You see, this is my big chance.
“One small point will amuse you: a fortnight ago Michel Esclavier, the major’s brother-in-law, joined our board of directors.
“‘Watch your step, my girl,’ said Villèle (who is no longer like the old Villèle), ‘this Esclavier’s real name is Weihl, but he considers himself obliged to defend a name which he has as good as usurped.’
“I’m enjoying Paris, Papa Urbain, because nothing here is true, neither politics nor love, and because the great unwritten law is not so much to make money, as those simpletons of Communists believe, as to be seen in public, to be talked about, pulled to pieces and adored.
“It’s Plato’s underworld, with the shades flitting through it. Perhaps, behind the shades, there exists something real, a real France behind an insubstantial France, love that lasts, men who dream of making history instead of practising politics, but no one sees it or appears to see it. I’m twenty-six, I love shop-windows and sliding down the banisters, I enjoy doing harm and being kind occasionally. So long live the shades!
The Praetorians Page 3