by Michel D
‘And what does he recite to you?’
‘Jean de La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, Albert Samain.’
‘La Fontaine I understand … some nice lines in Victor Hugo too …
Yesterday from my skylight was a view
That I blinked at with stares like an owl’s,
Of a girl waist-deep in the Marne who
Was washing brilliant white towels
or this, which isn’t bad:
The dreamy angel of the dusk who floats upon its breezes
Mingles, as it bears them off in the flutter of a wingbeat,
The dead’s prayers and the living’s kisses.
But Samain is for idiots.’
Yann had uttered the few lines of poetry in a tone that made Jean shiver, and he stared intently at the handsome giant, who had been suddenly altered as he recited Hugo in his steady, calm voice with a lack of restraint that was almost embarrassing.
‘A fine time for reciting verses,’ the abbé broke in. ‘Time’s getting on. How long will it take you to get to Tôtes, Jean?’
‘Thirty kilometres … at my usual speed I should be there in an hour and a half.’
‘Perfect! Before nightfall. And then you can do the return trip with Monsieur Carnac in the dark.’
Yann began to walk up and down, stroking his chin and looking so distracted that both Jean and the priest watched him for a moment without daring to interrupt.
‘He needs to go!’ Monsieur Le Couec said finally.
‘I know … I’ve just thought of something. There’s still a danger. What if there’s a gendarme there instead of Carnac?’
The abbé sat down hard on a rocking chair that nearly overturned under his weight.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ he exclaimed. ‘That would be the end of everything. My dear Jean, I can’t let you run that risk.’
‘Father, don’t worry, I won’t talk … They won’t get a word out out of me.’
‘No,’ Yann said firmly. ‘On the contrary. I’m not going to send you there unless you undertake to give us away if you find that a policeman has taken Carnac’s place. It’s an order I’m giving you. We’ll exonerate you immediately … Swear it!’
‘I can’t swear something like that.’
Monsieur Le Couec jumped up, his expression threatening.
‘Swear it!’
Jean, who had begun to acquire a certain talent for equivocation, crossed his fingers behind his back and murmured, ‘I swear.’
‘Louder.’
‘I swear.’
‘All right, you can go!’ Yann said.
The priest kissed Jean and then, to conceal his emotion, opened the cupboard and took out the bottle of calvados again to pour himself another glass.
Jean was so happy to have his bicycle back that he set out for Tôtes without a second thought for the importance of his mission. From the moment the abbé had lent his support, he did not even wonder what it was all about. There would be plenty of time for the mystery to be cleared up later. His bike was riding divinely, without a sound, even though he had perhaps very slightly over-tightened the chain. It was a question of adjustment, just as it was for the tyres, hardened by their immobility over the recent weeks. Jean concentrated on regulating his breathing to the speed of his pedals, pacing himself progressively. A decent average demanded good tactics and knowing how to use the road conditions, Georges Speicher had told a reporter from L’Auto. You pedal with your legs but also with your head. It’s pointless to over-stress your heart by racing every time you’re challenged on the flat, otherwise the slightest gradient becomes an ordeal. Jean, his attention fixed on the road ahead, did not allow himself to be distracted by anything, except for the drive leading to the Malemorts’ château, where he slowed down to glance through the open gateway: the marquis, in riding boots, was unsaddling his bay mare, which Chantal was holding it by its bridle. After Malemort he gave himself up to the enjoyment of a series of wild ups and downs in the road, diving with the fields into pretty hollows with brooks at the bottom and then climbing back up to apple orchards and an old church or a farm of red bricks with meadows around it. Just before Tôtes his rhythm was disrupted by potholes, and he had to zigzag his way around the areas where the road was being repaired and occasionally take to the verge, among the loose gravel. The setting sun was softening the landscape’s colours: greens turning to grey, copses darkening as if, suddenly, life was about to stop, to freeze for the night and only awake with the new dawn and the breath of the dew, with colours freshly alive, an opal sky and sheep on their knees nibbling the brilliant grass in their pasture.
As Jean approached the village he caught sight of a Renault Primaquatre belonging to the gendarmerie, which had stopped a car. A sergeant was asking for the driver’s and passengers’ papers. Jean slowed down and cycled past them, sitting up, hands on the flat of his handlebars.
The café called Les Amis de Tôtes sat with its terrace at a crossroads. Jean parked his bike, and ignoring the pinochle players and two pensioners sitting idly outside counting the cars coming from Dieppe and Rouen, went inside. He saw Monsieur Carnac’s carnation instantly, a white fleck on the lapel of a man tucked away reading L’Ouest-Éclair in a corner of the room. He walked over to the table, gave the password, and received the expected answer.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Monsieur Carnac asked.
‘A shandy, please.’
The waitress poured beer and lemonade together and put the glass down in front of Jean, who sipped politely, even though he was very thirsty.
‘How are your parents?’ Monsieur Carnac said.
Jean immediately lost his composure.
‘Do you know them?’
Monsieur Carnac glowered as if the whole world was listening, despite the room being empty. There was only the waitress, wiping a table near the door with a tired and dirty cloth that left spiral-shaped smears on the slate.
‘How are your parents?’ Monsieur Carnac repeated more firmly.
‘Very well, thank you. They’re expecting you tonight.’
‘Drink your beer and we’ll be off.’
‘There are policemen stopping cars on the road out of Tôtes.’
‘I haven’t got a car. I borrowed a bicycle in Rouen.’
‘I’ve got a bike too.’
‘How far is it?’
‘Thirty kilometres.’
Monsieur Carnac frowned.
‘You can take my wheel.’
‘Take your wheel?’
Monsieur Carnac clearly knew nothing about cycling terminology. Jean’s explanation received an incredulous reaction. How could staying glued to the wheel in front help you if you were the unlucky rider pedalling behind?
‘All right,’ Monsieur Carnac said, ‘let’s see how it goes. If I need to rest, we’ll have to stop.’
Jean decided not to explain that to stop, far from helping, was extremely bad for your hamstrings. He was surprised to see Monsieur Carnac pick up a milk can and a small loaf of bread from the chair next to him and remove the carnation from his buttonhole. Jean finished his shandy standing up and followed him outside, where several bicycles including his own were parked.
‘That’s a nuisance. I can’t remember what the bike I borrowed looks like.’
‘Didn’t your friend tell you what make it was?’
‘I didn’t borrow it from a friend, to tell you the truth, but from someone I don’t know who is probably, at this moment, combing the streets of Rouen and pouring his heart out to a policeman.’
‘Did you steal it?’ Jean said, horrified at the idea of a theft that affected him personally. The bank robberies and corruption of government ministers that Albert enumerated every evening left him cold. But a bicycle thief was a man without soul or scruples, who deserved the severest punishment.
Monsieur Carnac read Jean’s indignation on his face and hastened to reassure him.
‘I left a car in exchange, whose registration number the police know only too we
ll.’
‘Oh I see!’
He didn’t see anything, but it didn’t matter. So long as the abbé Le Couec was involved, everything was all right. To locate the right bicycle all he had to do was decipher the compulsory registration plates above the excise stamp. Monsieur Carnac knew nothing about traffic regulations, so Jean pretended to tie his shoelace in order to crouch down and inspect the plates, among which he found one from Rouen. Monsieur Carnac hung his can of milk on the handlebars and fixed his loaf of bread on the front carrier before getting on clumsily. Night was falling as they left Tôtes, and a moment later found themselves halted by the beam of a flashlight.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home, where else?’ Monsieur Carnac said in an accent that was more Norman than the Normans.
The sergeant came closer and shone his flashlight on the can of milk and bread, which seemed to reassure him.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘On your way.’
The cool evening air reinvigorated Jean, but he felt as though he was dragging a heavy weight on an invisible thread behind him. Monsieur Carnac wheezed and spluttered and spat and loosed torrents of swear words, threatening continuously to get off and continue on foot, reduced to fury by the slightest gradient. The return journey took them more than two hours, and when they arrived outside the rectory they glimpsed through the lighted window the figure of the abbé Le Couec pacing up and down, his hands clasped behind his back. He opened the door in such a state of emotion that he could hardly speak as he enfolded Jean tightly in his arms.
‘Jean, my dear Jean, I was afraid … I should never have forgiven myself.’
Monsieur Carnac came in, carrying his bread and milk can. Yann appeared and shook his friend’s hand, before taking Jean by the shoulders and looking him squarely in the face.
‘My boy,’ he said, ‘we owe you a great debt, and one day it will be repaid! I won’t ever forget it.’
‘We might make a start by hiding the bike,’ Monsieur Carnac interrupted. ‘I stole it in Rouen.’
‘Stole?’ the abbé said.
Jean looked at Monsieur Carnac anxiously. He was a short man with thick hair that was already going grey, though he was certainly no more than forty. He looked like someone with a short fuse, hot-tempered and violent, but his face, weathered by the sun and creased with very mobile wrinkles, expressed a ruthless determination.
‘Yes, stole! One pinched bike is worth a man’s skin, I’d say.’
The abbé crossed himself and murmured a few almost unintelligible words.
‘Come on, my dear abbé,’ Yann said, ‘let’s not panic … the cause justifies the means.’
‘I would like to be as certain of that as you always are.’
‘If not, we would never have got our young friend of the poets mixed up in this business.’
‘Young friend of the poets?’ Monsieur Carnac said, arching his left eyebrow, as if he was about to screw in a monocle.
Jean felt transfixed by his hard stare.
‘And may one know which poets you honour with your friendship, dear boy?’
‘La Fontaine and Victor Hugo,’ Jean answered, swiftly forgetting Samain, whom Yann had thought fit for idiots.
‘Exactly right,’ Yann said, ‘just earlier on I was reciting those lovely lines from “Crépuscule”:
The dreamy angel of the dusk who floats upon its breezes
Mingles, as it bears them off in the flutter of a wing beat,
The dead’s prayers and the living’s kisses.
Monsieur Carnac burst into sarcastic laughter.
‘Oh, that’s a good one, that is! You’re forgetting – intentionally, I imagine – the first line that rhymes with “wing beat”:
Love each other! ’tis the month when the strawberries are sweet.’
‘Every poet has their weakness!’ Yann said, annoyed.
‘Unforgivable! Unforgivable!’
The abbé Le Couec was in a state of some irritation. The question that was bothering him was not Victor Hugo’s weaknesses, but the stolen bicycle. What were they going to do with it? Monsieur Carnac suggested throwing it in the sea. Jean shivered. The abbé wanted to compensate its owner or return his property to him.
‘Returning it is out of the question,’ Yann said. ‘It would be putting the police on our trail immediately. Let’s write down the owner’s name, and I’ll send him a postal order from somewhere in the north, when we get there.’
The abbé offered to go himself, under cover of darkness, and fling the bicycle into the sea.
‘Details, details, we can deal with all that later!’ Monsieur Carnac said. ‘At this very moment I am dying of hunger.’
Jean’s hopes rose. After the excursion hunger was gnawing at him too. The hot shrimps he had eaten that morning were a distant memory. The abbé opened his wire-mesh pantry door and threw up his hands.
‘A hunk of bread, a pot of cream, butter … but it’s true, I do have some buckwheat flour and a drop of sparkling cider left over from last autumn, two or three bottles.’
‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get the pancakes on,’ Monsieur Carnac said, dropping his jacket on a chair, turning on the stove and starting to prepare the mixture.
‘I can go home to my house,’ Jean suggested.
‘No, you can’t, young man,’ the abbé said. ‘Tomorrow at six you can serve mass.’
‘I haven’t confessed.’
‘I give you absolution. Two Paters and three Hail Marys before you go to sleep. Three because it’s the Holy Virgin who is particularly responsible for protecting us in this undertaking.’
They ate the pancakes off chipped plates with their fingers, standing up next to the range. The cider was undrinkable. The abbé offered calvados, which was refused, so he was obliged to replace the bottle on the shelf without touching its contents, after which he sent Jean to sleep in his bed, the only bed in the rectory.
‘My friends and I have matters to discuss.’
Even though he would have liked to hear what they said, Jean obeyed, and slipped between the abbé’s coarse bedclothes. A strong smell of leather pervaded the room, and when he peered under the bed he discovered an enormous pair of patched work boots, the priest’s pumps, and his seven-league boots that helped him take the word of the Lord into parishes that lacked a priest and to square up to the bishop of Rouen. Spent with fatigue, Jean fell asleep without even trying to overhear what the three men gathered in the neighbouring room were saying.
Monsieur Le Couec woke him up shortly before six, as the sun rose. He himself had slept briefly in an armchair after Yann and Monsieur Carnac had departed.
‘They won’t hear mass?’ Jean asked, disappointed not to see again the two strange characters who stole bicycles and tossed lines from Hugo at each other.
‘No question of mass for them for the moment. They’re in hiding. They’re good Christians. Brave too. Come on. We shall go and pray, you and me, so that they won’t be arrested.’
‘You mean they’re not real thieves?’
‘No. They’re heroes. But you must never talk about them, even if the police start asking questions.’
‘I won’t, ever. I promise.’
‘To anybody?’
‘Not to anybody, Father.’
‘That’s good, it means you’re a man.’
Jean thought that if Monsieur Le Couec were to say these words in front of Antoinette she would no longer think him a child and would let him take the same liberties with her that she had allowed that swine Gontran. But such a thought stained his soul before communion, and he chased it away. He did his best to serve mass well, and afterwards followed the priest into the sacristy, where he helped him take off his chasuble. One of the ladies who lived next to the church brought them bowls of milky coffee and thick slices of bread and butter that they devoured at the sacristy table.
‘Now it’s time for you to go home, my son. Lips sealed.’
He planted a kiss on both of Jean’s chee
ks, kisses that smelt of milk and coffee.
As Jean reached the doorway, the priest called to him.
‘Tell me, these stories about girls that got you such a wigging? There wasn’t anything in them, was there?’
‘Oh no, nothing, father … nothing at all.’
Pedalling home in the glorious morning, Jean told himself that in fact his stories with girls were nothing at all, that real life was the life that men like Yann and Monsieur Carnac led, heroes who moved in the shadows. Everything else was childishness, kids’ games with little hussies. Gontran could indulge himself with Antoinette all he wanted. He wouldn’t be challenging him for her.
At La Sauveté he found Jeanne and Albert at the kitchen table, their bowls of coffee in front of them.
‘At last!’ his mother said.
‘I served mass at six o’clock.’
‘Oh, that is a fine way to start the day!’
Albert grumbled that no priest should be disturbing the good Lord’s rest at such an hour. It was in poor taste.
‘Don’t listen to your father!’ Jeanne said. ‘He served mass more often than his turn and now he’s just talking big.’
‘It’s not about talking big. I’m for freedom of conscience!’ Albert said, with a mouthful of bread and kidney beans.
Perhaps for the first time, Jean realised his father was talking nonsense, and it pained him, in the way it pains us when someone we admire suffers a humiliating defeat. Antoine du Courseau had disappointed him in a similar way: how could you be so removed from life, so distracted? It felt like a sort of resignation, when men like Yann and Monsieur Carnac were living life’s great adventure. One day he, Jean Arnaud, would defy the forces of the law for a noble cause which was yet to reveal itself, but which the grave events announced by Albert would doubtless make sure they brought about.
Jean never discovered the reason why Yann and Monsieur Carnac had been forced into hiding. The secret has stayed well kept. We may nevertheless advance a hypothesis by consulting the newspapers of the period. During the night of 6–7 August, in other words two days before the arrival of Monsieur Carnac at Tôtes, a person or persons unknown had blown up the monument erected at Rennes for the quatercentenary of the union of Brittany and France. This act of vandalism could have been justified on aesthetic grounds: the work of one of those sculptors much cherished by the Third Republic of Doumer and Lebrun, the monument symbolised the triumph of overblown pomposity. It showed Brittany on her knees before the king of France. The clandestine nationalist movement Gwenn ha Du had been determined to demonstrate with maximum impact against the visit of Édouard Herriot,8 who in turn had responded with more modest impact by refusing to attend the mass said at Vannes by Monseigneur Duparc, bishop of Quimper and Léon. Were Yann and Monsieur Carnac numbered among the perpetrators of that act? It is possible, even probable, but nobody knows any more today than they did then, and we leave the reader entirely at liberty to imagine other hypotheses that justify the attitude – singular for a priest – of the abbé Le Couec. What is certain is that, overnight, Jean Arnaud matured by several years, learning that a priest may also be a plotter, and that without being thieves or murderers men might have to hide from the police because they were defending a noble cause. The world was not built of flawless blocks, of good and bad, of pure and impure. More subtle divisions undermined the picture he had so far been given of morality and duty. For another boy than Jean, this discovery would have been dangerous. It was only useful to him because his innocence kept him out of temptation’s way better than all the lessons he had been taught. He therefore decided, in the days that followed, not to punch Gontran Longuet in the face the next time he saw him, and to forgive Michel du Courseau his spiteful nastiness towards him. What had Gontran really done, apart from make the most of what he was offered and would have been a hero of Spartan self-denial to refuse? And if Michel loathed him, it must be because Michel had guessed a long time ago, with remarkable intuition, that one day Chantal de Malemort would elope with his rival. And if Antoinette found it hard to keep her knickers on, it was a quality she had inherited from her father, about whom there was enough gossip among the locals for Jean to be fairly fully informed. In short, the world was not just full of guilty parties, and if you looked hard enough, you could find an excuse for everything. This philosophy has no technical name. For young Monsieur Arnaud it is called the Arnaud philosophy, for Jean Dupont it is called the Dupont philosophy. Each practitioner shapes it in the way that works for him or her, with personal variations. It was in this state of mind that Jean, with a return ticket from Dieppe to Newhaven in one pocket and a thousand-franc note in another, both given to him by Antoine du Courseau, wheeled his bicycle on board the ferry at the end of August 1932, en route for London. His fingers also frequently felt for the visiting card that Antoine had given him, to make sure it was still there. It was for Geneviève, Antoine’s daughter, and had these few words written on it: ‘Here is Jean Arnaud, whom I spoke about in my letter. A few days in London will complete his education. Be kind and look after him, and send him back to us at the end of the week. With love from your affectionate father, Antoine.’