“Good-bye, you greedy, clever old tom-cat. Much love from your daughter,
Irène.”
Donadieu put the letter away and made a trumpeting sound with his mouth. He was not displeased with his daughter. With a great deal of effort he struggled to his feet, dreaming of a life in which he would no longer have to move: the news and tittle-tattle would be dished up to him at home, in his old leather armchair, together with hare pâté, trout cooked with almonds and the lot washed down with this Muy wine of which he had just received three demijohns.
But had not reality, like a wave, already landed him with a major who had helped to overthrow the Republic, and a Rastignac in skirts on the eve of her career?
As he drew level with the town hall, Donadieu thought for a moment of going up to his office, but the effort appeared out of proportion to the interest he might derive from the few bits of gossip that his secretary would give him.
He sank into a metal armchair outside Léonce’s little café, by the fountain on the square.
During the heat of the day Urbain Donadieu loved the cool sound of water, which was never the same, imperceptibly changing in tone according to the way in which the wind was blowing: the warm salty sea-breeze or the dry luminous mistral. It was now mistral weather. He clapped his hands.
“A pastis, Léonce, a big one and well iced, with just enough water to turn it cloudy. Send your boy to the town hall to say that I’m here and, if I’m needed, to come and fetch me.”
The upper part of Léonce’s body was that of a sparsely built man with anxious, abnormally deep-set eyes. But below his chest bulged a vast pear-shaped belly.
His trousers hung very low on this bulge, so that the crotch was almost level with his knees.
“Come and sit down, Léonce. I’ll stand you a swig of white. . . .”
“Delighted, Monsieur le Maire.”
“What do they think of this fellow Esclavier in the village?”
“That depends. The men or the women? The Whites or the Reds? The young or the old?”
“What do you think of him yourself?”
“It might bring in a little business, since he’s featured in the papers; it’s rather like film-stars. The girls think he looks like the Duke of Edinburgh; the mothers say it might be a good match, but that a man like him would never choose a country girl, or at least only to amuse himself.
“The schoolmaster, who has served in Algeria, would like to organize a party for him. The priest, since he goes almost every evening to Marcel Audran’s who’s a Communist——”
Léonce broke off, as though he had just made a great discovery:
“But actually, this priest, why is he such a Red? It’s not his place.”
Urbain pursed his lips:
“It’s the latest fashion this year in the sacristies.”
“So the priest goes around saying that the paratrooper has come here to organize a plot, that he’ll disturb the peace of the village, people’s consciences and the young girls’ hearts, that he must be a freemason like his uncle, that he’ll set a bad example by not going to church. It seems he did things in Algeria that you could hang a man for, this fellow Esclavier.”
“Including having put the gang which now governs us in power!”
“But, Monsieur le Maire, what have you got against General de Gaulle? He’s going to make peace in Algeria.”
“After strangling the Republic to death.”
“Once there’s peace, that’s all that matters.”
“Peace on any terms—even we could have brought that about, with our nasty little schemes and rackets. But de Gaulle is infatuated with greatness, which always implies sacrifices. That suits the young. France is old, sceptical, pleasure-loving and garrulous. She only dreams of being like Switzerland, and they keep talking to her about crusades. When it comes down to brass tacks what does he offer us, your general? Austro-Hungary at the time of Francis Joseph, but without the waltzes, and a little atomic cracker which even the Chinese or Negroes will soon be able to make.”
“Even so, Monsieur le Maire, if de Gaulle makes peace in Algeria I’ll vote for him even if it means voting against you. A thousand million a day it’s costing us, this war. Without Algeria we’d be able to improve our water supply.”
“How often do you drink water, Léonce?”
* * * *
Marguerite, Donadieu’s old housekeeper, had surpassed herself. The trout swam in a black sauce faintly scented with thyme and lemon. The thrushes on toast might have done with a little more juniper, but they melted in the mouth and the clove gave them an exotic taste.
The major ploughed through this succulent food without noticing it, much to Donadieu’s distress. He did not even praise the wine; he added water to it.
The mayor sorrowfully thought to himself:
“There was a time when soldiers and priests enjoyed good living. The young priests today nibble at their cassocks and dabble in social services—when they’re not working as manual labourers! The officers play at revolutionary warfare and drink water, which leads them to overthrow governments because they annoy them.
“Wisdom, the great traditions of good living, tolerance and common sense, have happily found refuge among a few old Socialists, whom no one, alas, takes seriously.”
They had their coffee in the arbour.
“My dear Philippe,” Donadieu began, “let me call you by your Christian name, for by making me his executor your uncle made me responsible for you in a way. . . . Marguerite, bring us the brandy—no, not the electors’ bottle, the other one, on the corner of the sideboard. You don’t drink brandy, you don’t smoke? But you’re going to be even more bored than I thought!
“Do you know, at least, why Paul made you his only heir?”
Philippe shrugged his shoulders. By leaning back a little he could see the sky and the first stars. He would have liked to be alone, and at the same time the idea of solitude made him frightened.
“Paul thought that you’d get tired of the army one day, that you would then like to have some quiet spot in which to get it out of your system, to become once more a normal man who has had enough of great heroic conflicts which end up as charnel-houses, towns of which you can remember nothing because you creep through them in the dark, and villages being burnt at dawn. . . .
“I’m quoting him, my dear Philippe—my own sentences are shorter and I don’t go in for sermons. But it looks as if Paul was right, because here you are. I must also tell you that he was not very fond of your sister or her husband, that he had quarrelled with your father and that he was proud of the little exploits you performed during the war.”
Esclavier looked the older man straight in the eye.
“My uncle was mistaken, Monsieur Donadieu. It was not because I was fed up that I left the army, but because that particular army could not become the one we had dreamt about, a few of us, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Indo-China.
“We went as far as we could, we even crossed the Rubicon, as Uncle Paul would have said. Only, the man we brought to power is not one of us. He belongs to another army, another history. One of my friends, Boisfeuras, got himself killed, others resigned or even came to terms with the powers that be, the wildest of us dabbled in plots without a future. I preferred to hand in my papers.”
“Your French Algeria was a cause that was lost in advance; you can’t go against the course of history.”
“The Israelis managed to, and it was a history two thousand years old.”
“My daughter’s coming down here, Philippe. She’s called Irène, she’s extremely pretty.”
Esclavier gave a short, rather strident laugh.
“You want to marry her off? I’m sorry, but——”
“Not at all. I like her as she is, free, cynical, at least in her manner of speaking, with a taste for anything that glitters but well a
ware that it isn’t gold. I don’t see her under any man’s thumb, with a brat on her knees, and it’s not my line to play the heavy grandfather.
“A shame you don’t enjoy good food. Don’t try and pretend. I saw how you behaved at dinner. Frugal men make me feel uneasy, and also those who don’t sleep well. Caesar, who knew something about men of your sort, said: ‘Let me have men about me that are fat . . . and such as sleep o’nights.’ You chaps, the officers of this new army born in Indo-China and Algeria, are thin, restless, and you sleep badly. Does de Gaulle know that?
“My daughter’s exactly like you.”
* * * *
When Donadieu was alone again he took out his tobacco jar and the old long-stemmed German pipe that Paul Esclavier had brought back for him from one of his countless journeys across the Rhine. He filled it carefully and lit it. The sky had grown dark, the stars twinkled brightly.
Urbain had at last reached a state of indifference, of curiosity without passion. The little daily certainties he had chosen had taken the place of the dreams of adolescence and the desires of maturity. He lived under a glass dome, in a rarefied but pure air, and only certain sounds, certain images, smells and tastes, freed from all context, reached him.
A toad croaked on three notes—the first three notes of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue.” For a moment this sound appeared to sum up the whole world, to be the most perfect expression of it. Nothing else counted but the acrid taste of the tobacco, the gentle breeze redolent of resin that swept the darkened landscape, and those three notes hanging in the silence.
* * * *
On the following morning Esclavier found two letters slipped under his front door. The first one he opened was from Squadron Leader Jacques Glatigny and was ten days old; it had followed him from the Val-de-Grâce to the apartment in the Rue de l’Université before being forwarded to Saint-Gilles.
“My dear Philippe,
“It is with great sorrow and real dismay that I have just heard about your resignation from the army. After Boisfeuras, who chose to die, here you are leaving as well. I’m staying on and I feel guilty. But I’ve got five children, I’ve no private income and I can’t think of any other profession but the army. General de Gaulle’s régime, in spite of all its shortcomings and defects (including the defect of depending solely on the life of one man), suits me for the time being. I look upon it as a temporary but necessary stage in our history. This adventurer has perhaps given evidence of wisdom in not following us. He had acquired a sense of the possible in his retirement, and what we suggested was not possible if one considers the real state of France and that of the world. It was a great dream which only suited a young nation. It was you who summed him up so succinctly, after one of those visits to officers’ messes which we organized for him so that he should get to know us better: ‘You can see he was never out in Indo-China.’ And Boisfeuras had then chuckled in that grating voice of his.
“Oh that voice! I can still hear it. I close my eyes, and there he is in front of me with his swinging Vietnamese coolie gait.
“De Gaulle, it’s true, was not out in Indo-China, nor did he undergo our temptation. So he is bound to condemn us, because he can’t understand us. He wants to create a France, and perhaps a Europe, set aside from the great currents of violence that are sweeping the world, to make it a sort of refuge for a certain civilization, which is ours and to which we cling. He hopes that when the great delirium of the newly liberated countries has died down it is to the West that they will turn.
“But for that to happen our old fortress will have to hold out another twenty years, the time needed for the Communists, who are a prey to their internal contradictions, to start killing one another and become humanized; the time needed, too, for the bitterness born of colonization to come to an end. And if we want to defend our old crumbling citadels we need warriors. Your resignation is not well timed.
“They tell me you mean to retire somewhere near Grasse for a few months, to ‘get your bearings,’ as they say.
“You’ll be quite near the estate where Boisfeuras’s father lives. He’s an old taipan from Shanghai, a very rich old man who played an important political rôle in the Far East, a sort of disillusioned sharp-witted opium-addict, who was very upset by Julien’s death.
“He’ll be glad to see you. I know he’d like to have an eyewitness account of his son’s last hours. You yourself were too influenced by Boisfeuras not to want to know him better through the medium of his family and background.
“It’s because of his death that you’re resigning, isn’t it?
“The children are well. Claude leads a very social life and, as you know, I’ve been put up for promotion to lieutenant-colonel by my branch of the service. I don’t belong to the paratroops any more, I’ve come back to the cavalry.
“It’s a shame Raspéguy hasn’t got you with him any longer. You can’t imagine what hatred he has roused against himself at H.Q. I’m doing what I can to save his bacon by keeping him on in his command.
“At the Ministry of the Armed Forces, Rue Saint-Dominique, no one, or hardly anyone, has tramped across Indo-China as we did. How can they understand Raspéguy!
“If I lost your friendship I shouldn’t have much left in life.
Jacques.
“P.S. Here is the address of Boisfeuras’s old man: La Serbalière, Cabris Road, Grasse. The property is enclosed in a high wall about two kilometres long.”
The second letter, a very short one, was from Isabelle Pélissier, whom Philippe had loved and then left during the battle of Algiers and whom he had met again at the time of the May 13th revolution. It was addressed direct to Saint-Gilles-de-Valreyne, which intrigued Esclavier, for he had not given his address to anyone.
Algiers, 13 March 1959
“Philippe,
“I was not surprised to hear about your resignation from the army. The news was given me by one of your friends in the 10th Regiment, who seemed astonished. But it was bound to happen.
“It is rarely one fights for ideals, but more often for a piece of land, also for a woman.
“You never liked Algeria, and still less us, the French Algerians, who live here. Our faults were easy to see; they’re the faults of any young nation; our qualities take longer to discover.
“All you remember is our vulgarity, our love of money and our bravado. You tried, through me, to love Algeria and you didn’t succeed.
“I am terribly sad. I sometimes feel that our failure, yours and mine, is rather like the failure of the relations between Metropolitan France and Algeria. And yet if you only knew how passionately we people here loved France when she was at her lowest, and how much I loved you, Philippe, how much I still love you.
“Good-bye,
Isabelle.
“P.S. Do you remember? One evening you told me about that little cottage in Provence which an uncle of yours had left you. You wanted us to spend a month there together, on our own, so as to enable me to get to know France, you said. I’ve remembered the name of the village and I thought you might have taken refuge there. But I no longer want to get to know France.”
Philippe put the two letters away in his desk, decided he would answer neither of them, but that he would go, as soon as he was properly settled in, and call on Captain Boisfeuras’s father.
He fell asleep bathed in the moonlight which came in through the open window. He would have liked a woman beside him; any woman, provided she was beautiful and silent. He would have talked to her as one talks to oneself, but taking greater pains to be clear and precise, in the same way as one takes pains to compose one’s features in front of a mirror or perfect one’s style in a personal diary.
3
THE END OF A MYTH
According to the official bulletin published in Algiers, the band that had crossed the barrier consisted of no more than a hundred or so fellaghas equipped with a motley co
llection of arms. The same bulletin claimed that this band was in the process of being annihilated—whereas it had not even been tracked down—and hinted that the barrier, instead of playing its usual rôle, which was to contain the enemy, had this time been employed as a sort of trap.
The Algiers paper had made the most of this explanation, but those at home had confined themselves to a strongly worded criticism of the measures being taken on the Algerian-Tunisian border.
This band, the biggest that had ever crossed the barrier since it had been set up, numbered some two hundred and fifty men and was armed with ten light machine-guns, two heavy machine-guns, three light mortars and two bazookas. This material was of Czech origin and recent manufacture. Every fellagha was equipped with a ground-sheet, a pair of jungle-boots, a cap, and carried a rifle, or, if issued with an automatic weapon, a pistol.
It therefore consisted of two kattibas who were on their way to the Aurès and the Némentchas to take up a position there.
As Raspéguy had foreseen, the fellaghas had avoided the ridges and had crept through under cover of the valleys. They were thus able to hide up during the day and rest without being spotted by the air force. They marched only by night. After forty-eight hours’ pursuit the 10th Regiment had found no trace of them. The district was more or less uninhabited, the population having moved elsewhere, and, as usual, the few shepherds wandering about the mountains with their wretched flocks of sheep knew nothing, had seen nothing.
At six o’clock in the morning H.Q. Tebessa informed the paratroops that a company of the 7th Infantry Regiment composed of reservists and engaged on a routine operation—combing through a little valley at the foot of Jebel Doukane—had just come up against the band.
Raspéguy was sitting on a flat rock, dipping a crust of bread into a tin of sardines. The wireless message made him leap to his feet. He tore the microphone out of the operator’s hands.
The Praetorians Page 4