by Michel D
‘“It’s an order. Who are you?”
‘“Your king!” cried the rider, tearing off his mask and firing an arrow straight at the heart of Haroun, who collapsed dying as the hundred horsemen took aim at the vizir’s guard and planted a hundred arrows in their bronze breastplates. Night was falling, and the crowd’s cries of terror turned to panic as they saw that the city was burning. Abderrahman’s spies, making the most of the dignitaries’ absence, had set fire to the palace and the barracks. The zeal of the incendiaries was doubtless somewhat excessive because, in the space of a day and a night, the whole capital burnt down. Salah el Mahdi, having regained his throne but without a palace, decided to live in the mountains with the warriors who had given him back his kingdom. He built himself a fortress and entrusted the country’s administration to my ancestor, whom he made a prince so that the word “vizir” would never again be heard in the country. There you are, Jean Arnaud. That’s how you become a prince.’
‘Goodness, it’s not easy!’
‘No, you’re right about that, and one must also admit that there are fewer opportunities today than there once were to become a prince.’
‘Yes, that’s sad!’ Jean said, thinking of Chantal de Malemort, who would not hesitate to marry him if he suddenly became a prince.
There was a tap at the glass, misted by the rain, and Jean made out the blurred face of the chauffeur, who was laughing. His passenger wound down the window, and the black man took off his cap.
‘Monseigneur, the mechanic is here. He is completing the job. We’ll be able to get on our way.’
The window rose again.
‘This is thanks to you, Jean. I’m very grateful to you.’
He unbuttoned his overcoat and took out a wallet, from which he withdrew two thousand-franc notes.
‘I hope that you have a money box.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then put these two notes in it, and write your name and address in my notebook. I’ll send you a souvenir when I remember.’
‘I can’t accept them. What will my father say?’
‘He won’t say anything.’
‘He’ll never believe I met a prince at the side of the road. Things like that don’t happen.’
‘Sometimes the most unlikely things are the most easily believed.’
He slid the notes into Jean’s cape pocket. ‘
There you are, it’s done. Let’s say no more about it. Goodbye, Jean.’
He seemed very tired, ready to close his eyes and go to sleep. The mechanic was tightening the bolts of the spare wheel with a few last turns while the chauffeur watched him with a superior expression. Jean picked up his bicycle and climbed the rest of the way up the hill as fast as he could, though not fast enough to stay ahead of the Hispano-Suiza, which caught up and then overtook him. To his great surprise, he found it stopped again outside the gates of La Sauveté. The chauffeur waited by the passenger door, umbrella in hand. A young woman in a fur coat dashed out of the house and through the rain and threw herself into the car, which drove away immediately.
‘You took your time!’ Jeanne said when he came in, having shaken out his cape in the hall. ‘It’s too bad that you missed Mademoiselle Geneviève. I told her about you, and she very much wanted to meet you.’
‘Was it her who was leaving as I arrived?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I talked to her husband.’
‘Her husband?’ Jeanne said.
‘Yes, the monseigneur.’
‘What are you talking about? She hasn’t married a bishop.’
‘No, another monseigneur. A real one. A prince. He gave me this!’
He took one of the thousand-franc notes out of his pocket, a reflex that he only understood later holding him back from producing both.
‘A thousand francs!’ Jeanne cried. ‘But he’s completely mad!’
‘I lent him my bike.’
‘You lent your bicycle to a prince?’
‘No. To his chauffeur, a black man in a blue tunic.’
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’
He had to explain from the beginning, and then explain a second time to Albert, who to Jean’s astonishment decided that the thousand-franc note was proper treasure trove and pushed it into Jean’s money box. Yes, Geneviève had been there that afternoon. She had come directly to the lodge to kiss Jeanne, before going across to La Sauveté to see her parents and her brother and sister.
‘She hasn’t changed, our little one,’ said Jeanne, trying as she invariably did to link the fearful present to a reassuring past where everything had been kindly and good.
‘What are you talking about? She’s twelve years older and looks it!’ Albert said, turned as ever towards the future.
‘I mean that her heart’s still in the right place. She gave me a stole and a bag which will be just right for mass on Sunday.’
After dinner Madame du Courseau appeared, and Jean was sent to bed. Grumbling, he went upstairs, leaving his bedroom door slightly open. He could not hear everything, but he realised that Marie-Thérèse had come to find out whether Geneviève had unburdened herself to Jeanne any more than to herself. Jeanne was stony in her replies, answering in monosyllables until the conversation was interrupted by the familiar rumble of the Bugatti being driven out of its garage. This one was a Type 47, the largest cubic capacity ever produced by Ettore Bugatti, a 5.35-litre engine that effortlessly accelerated to 150 kilometres an hour.
‘It really is far too late to be going out for a drive,’ Madame du Courseau said in an offended voice.
Antoine had been left feeling confined and stifled by the emotions that Geneviève’s visit had aroused. For several days he had wanted to try out the new car, delivered three months earlier from the Molsheim workshops, over a proper distance, but as it was late he switched his itinerary and took the road for Paris, where, arriving shortly after midnight, he stopped for a demi and a ham sandwich at a café at the Porte Maillot. Not having been to Paris since 1917, he found the city changed. He remembered black streets and empty boulevards, in which glimmers of blue light escaped from behind blinds placed over windows: a city of often beautiful women, of whom he had been instinctively suspicious. Now he wandered in search of memories and found none, and as in such circumstances we generally find what we would like not to, on Place de l’Étoile he overtook a yellow Hispano-Suiza driven by a black chauffeur. He let it pass him and followed it to a side road off the Avenue du Bois, where it stopped outside an hôtel particulier. The chauffeur opened the door. Geneviève stepped out first, waiting for the prince, tall and slightly stooped, to follow and take her arm. Antoine accelerated past them so that he would not be recognised.
It was two o’clock by now, and the only life to be found was at Place Pigalle, Montmartre, where he abandoned the car and walked. Because the girls who began to accost him bored and repelled him, he pretended to be part of a group that had just alighted from a bus and were hastening towards a nightclub whose entrance was in the shape of an enormous red devil’s mouth. English was being spoken around him, then German, as a trilingual guide steered the group, sat it down at small tables and clapped his hands to call the waiters, who arrived with demi-sec sparkling wine in champagne flutes. Antoine found himself sitting between an American woman and a German, facing a nondescript individual who laughed for no reason and who, for as long as the show (pretty bare-breasted girls playing with snakes) lasted, kept his hand in his trouser pocket and did rather unspeakable things, apparently without conclusive result. Scarcely had the show finished than the guide collected up his herd and stuffed them back into their bus. Antoine followed. At this late hour no one was counting the tourists in search of the legendary Paris by night, and in any case it was highly likely that some had been mislaid en route, either too drunk to go on or spirited away by some hungry seductress. The bus drove on to Bastille, from where the passengers had a brisk walk to a dance hall on Rue de Lappe. At the tourists’ arrival the band struck up. Bad
boys in shiny black shirts and striped trousers danced a rakish waltz with molls in plunging necklines. Antoine found himself with a Swedish couple, who were beside themselves with pleasure. They asked him where he was from, and when they discovered they were talking to a Frenchman their joy was boundless. The woman was not bad-looking, with attractive breasts that stretched the fabric of her low-cut dress; when Antoine distractedly stroked her thigh under the table, she bit her lip. They drank warm white wine and nibbled slices of soft sausage that were supposed to get them in the mood. Antoine was looking forward to enjoying himself when the bad boys and their molls had left the dance floor, but no one was brave enough to follow them and the guide gathered his tourists together to go. The tour was over. The bus discharged its dazed and exhausted night owls at Place de l’Opéra, which was deserted except for the street-sweeping machines sluicing it clean with great jets of water. The Swedish woman looked around for Antoine, but he was already gone, walking quickly up towards Trinité and then via Rue Blanche back to Pigalle, suddenly anxious for his car, which he had left with the hood down in the fine drizzle that had started to fall over the city, varnishing its empty, dirty streets strewn with dustbins. Girls leaving nightclubs as they closed ran, pushing up their coat collars. The blue Bugatti was where he had left it, its handsome leather upholstery soaked and its steering wheel dripping. Antoine dried both with an old raincoat and set off slowly in search of the Porte d’Italie, to which a policeman on a bicycle eventually directed him. Day was breaking. He shivered in his still-wet cockpit, but the engine’s organ-pipe sound was on song with such evident pleasure that Antoine kept going to Fontainebleau, cutting deep into the frosty forest that sparkled in the morning light. On the main square he found a brasserie and ordered a bowl of coffee, as he waited for a barber and a shirt-maker to open their doors. He felt pleasantly light-headed at the change he had wrought in an itinerary that for ten years had been immutable. He had a pang of regret about the Swedish woman – the warm skin between her stocking and knickers had seemed very welcoming. But one cannot have everything, and at the other end of the Nationale Sept4 there was Marie-Dévote and little Toinette and at Roquebrune Mireille Cece, the daughter of poor Léon. It was already plenty. Antoine was no longer twenty years old. He even admitted to being fifty-six, and though he had lost weight at Marie-Dévote’s express request – despite her shamelessly filling out herself – he could no longer lay claim to a young man’s adventures. Shaved and roused by coffee, he set out again and made Lyon without stopping, where he slept for twelve hours and opened his eyes on a deep, swirling fog. A pea-souper, thick and dirty and clinging, had come in through the window and was raking his throat. He could not see as far as the end of his bed. The foggy moods of the Saône and Rhône were joining forces. Antoine remembered the nickname given to Lyon by Henri Béraud: Mirelingue-la-brumeuse.5 The Lyonnais, accustomed to this miasma blanketing their city, seemed not even to notice it. Antoine eventually found the Vienne road, and immediately the fog lifted, revealing the Rhône valley, green and grey and lovely under the winter sun.
At Aix he halted outside Charles’s garage, under the sign saying Chez Antoine. Charles no longer got his hands dirty, and instead oversaw his mechanics from a small glass office which he filled with caporal tobacco smoke while reading books about the war. Hearing the Bugatti’s engine, he came straight out.
‘All right, Captain? Well, well, the new one, eh?’
He spread his arms wide, as if the Bugatti was going to jump up and hug him. The engine was idling, and he put his ear to the bonnet to hear the tick-over.
‘Terrific!’ he said. ‘Really terrific.’
‘Twenty-four valves, single overhead cam. Like a watch: I averaged 112 between Lyon and Aix. In October I’ll have the 50: double overhead cam and supercharger.’
‘Ye gods! … This one must do at least 200 an hour.’
‘Only 175,’ Antoine said modestly.
They drank a pastis together, standing by the car, while a mechanic changed the plugs and the engine oil. Charles insisted that the captain dine with him.
‘We have business to discuss,’ he said.
Antoine shuddered inwardly. The most recent warnings of his notary at Dieppe were fresh in his mind, and as people only ever discussed business with him with one purpose in mind, he was on his guard. The garage was big enough as it was; and he would say the same to Marie-Dévote, who was planning a new wing to her hotel, and to Mireille, who wanted to add a long terrace to her restaurant that would face Cap Martin and the sea.
Charles, not imagining for a second that anyone might want to run from his company, asked anxiously, ‘How’s the little one? Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘Nothing at all. She’s as right as rain.’
Antoine’s heart beat faster. He thought of Toinette, the little girl he had had with Marie-Dévote, so slight and skinny, who had just recovered from typhoid fever. Charles, who for some time had known everything that went on in his captain’s life, added, ‘What about Mireille?’
‘She doesn’t often write. She prefers me to visit.’
‘It’s understandable.’
Night was falling.
‘I’ve still got a good way to go,’ Antoine said.
‘What a shame! Jeannette would have made us tomato soup.’
‘Tomato soup?’ Antoine repeated, seized by weakness.
‘I can send a lad over to let her know.’
‘No!’ Antoine said, agitated at the thought of all these banquets costing him so dearly. ‘Next time!’
‘As you like, Captain.’
The Bugatti was ready. A mechanic started the engine, with one eye on the dipstick. Antoine shook Charles’s hand and sat at the wheel.
‘Till the next time!’
Charles turned to the mechanic, who still held Antoine’s tip in the palm of his hand.
‘A little beauty!’ he said with a wink.
‘A real beauty,’ the mechanic said thoughtfully. ‘It would take me two years of working without eating or drinking to afford one of those.’
The Bugatti was already gone, leaving behind it a bluish trail of oil. Antoine reached Saint-Tropez two hours later in a cold, cloudless night. The hotel was extensive now, with twenty or so rooms, a lounge, a large dining room and an enormous kitchen. There was no off-season any more, and during the summer Parisians who did not fear the sun, and were sometimes even incautious about going out in it, occupied the rooms vacated by the painters, who preferred the months of winter, bathed in its limpid light.
The hotel’s door opened, and Marie-Dévote appeared with her back to the light. Her southern beauty made the most of a certain plumpness, a bigger waist and more splendid bust, and Antoine felt happier the moment he set eyes on her and she ran towards him, kissing him tenderly on both cheeks while he still sat in the Bugatti’s cockpit, the engine ticking as it cooled.
‘I was longing for you to come! Come inside quickly, it’s cold out here.’
He followed her into the kitchen, where, since her mother had died, one of Théo’s aunts had taken over, an immense and rather strong-smelling woman, a genius at making fish soup, tomatoes à la provençale and pissaladière. He was cold through from the drive, having come all the way with the hood down, and they served him a hot supper there and then on the kitchen table.
‘When I’ve warmed up, I’ll go up and kiss Toinette. How is she?’
‘Wonderful. And first in school too. This evening she came home with two more good marks.’
‘Is Théo in bed?’
‘He’s in Marseille. He’s coming home tomorrow or the day after. He’s buying himself a new boat to take the Parisians on trips next summer.’
Antoine was content. Tonight there would be no complications, none of the innuendos that irritated him so much. His cares instantly slipped away, he thanked aunt Marie with a gentle slap on her bottom, and took the stairs that led to Toinette’s bedroom two at a time. She was asleep in a four-poster bed drape
d in pink silk, and was every inch his daughter: pale skin, blond hair with a tinge of chestnut, and long, blue-veined hands. In any case the doctors had confirmed to Théo that he could not have children. Antoine pressed his lips gently on her fragile temple, and Toinette turned over in her bed with a little moan. He was so happy that he put his hand up Marie-Dévote’s skirt as she came to stand behind him.
‘Antoine! Not here,’ she chided him. ‘You don’t have any morals at all!’
He would so much have liked to. But how do you explain these things? As the years went by, she was becoming more and more bourgeois. In a sense it was reassuring, because with all the artists who came to lodge with her for the winter, she could easily have been making love every night. But she joined him later in his bedroom and left him the next morning, shaking him vigorously as she went.
‘Antoine! Your daughter …’
‘What about my daughter?’
‘She’s going to be late for school …’
There were rituals, then. Every time he visited he drove their daughter to the Saint-Tropez primary school. With a ribbon in her hair, dressed in pastel colours that went with her Nordic complexion, Antoinette made an arrival that the children chattered about for weeks.
‘Uncle Antoine, the other girls, they really want to be me.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Their uncles don’t have Bugattis.’
‘Well, I’ve always had one, so it doesn’t seem very unusual to me.’
‘Will you come and fetch me at lunchtime?’
‘Yes, if you like.’
He returned to have breakfast at the hotel. Three painters were there. He didn’t recognise them and so, reserved as usual, he pretended to ignore them. The dining room was full of pictures, some of which commemorated unpaid bills, others Antoine’s purchases. It was beginning to acquire a reputation, and people often came a long way to admire the Derains, Dufys, Dunoyers de Segonzacs and Valmincks hanging on its walls. Théo was starting to worry.
‘Soon there won’t be any more room … What are we going to do with all these daubs?’