“So soon!”
“This evening, sir. But before leaving, I was determined to come see you, to ask you . . .”
His ear bent, Cripure gave a kind smile, but how remote it seemed! “It’s very nice of you,” he said, “I’m very—touched, you know, by this—thoughtful gesture on your part. So—you didn’t have such a bad memory of your old teacher after all?”
They so rarely remembered him except in mockery! So unusual that a good kid, like this one evidently was, would seek him out.
“Quite the opposite.”
“Oh?”
“I owe so much to you, you were, for me, something else—more than just a teacher. May I say so?”
“Why of course, my friend!”
“I wouldn’t have allowed myself,” Étienne went on, fidgeting on his chair, “without the circumstances that will . . . send me away. But everything has changed. I had to come see you. I had to tell you—”
“I’m listening,” said Cripure, becoming more and more immobile behind his rampart of cluttered papers.
“Pardon me. If ever I caused you any trouble, please—”
“In class?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you’re joking. Not at all! Not the littlest bit. On the contrary, you were a very gifted student and—thoughtful. What an idea!”
“I want to be—pure, to cleanse myself.”
How melodramatic the pathos of youth, and in a way, how comical. Particularly these young provincials. They took everything so seriously. What a look this one had! He was fretting like a goody-two-shoes with such a fate before him—he’d come for absolution—
“Leave your childhood be,” said Cripure. “The moment has passed, don’t you see, to burden yourself with daydreams and worries. We’ve entered an era—hm!”
Hands between his knees, he bowed his head.
“What era? Sir—”
Cripure was silent. He looked pained. “A clean man,” he continued, “what’s that? A man who decides for himself, who doesn’t submit. Not a part of the herd. Basically, a man like—”
Once again he trailed off. Modesty, maybe. A least he hadn’t ended with: the man I wanted to be. It was clear he hadn’t made it.
“But the others?”
“What others?” Cripure protested, ironic. “Our fellow men? Bah!” He batted the air in front of him. Then he laughed softly, almost without making a sound, shrinking into his chair. When this boy had suffered as much as he had at the hands of his beloved fellow men, then they could talk . . .
“But the war?”
“That’s the way it is!”
Étienne fell silent.
So this was the man he had searched for! He looked again at the small, reddened face leaning towards him, a face almost without wrinkles. His hair was short and came down over a narrow forehead, but what a look of sorrow! How different it was from how he used to look, in the street, at the door of his class, when he waited for the janitor to ring the bell! His look turning morose, Cripure opened his mouth, wiggled his dentures. With a quick gesture, revealing long practice, he trapped a flea on his neck and crushed it. He rubbed his temples with his fingertips, adjusted his pince-nez. Then nothing else moved in the face except the eyes, when he noticed a little book that, from the start of the conversation, Étienne had been holding on his lap.
“Where did you find that?” His thesis on Turnier!
Since its publication, this was the first time he’d seen it in someone else’s hands. His expression changed.
“May I?”
Étienne passed him the book.
It was a little worm-eaten volume that must have moldered for years in some stock room. It must have taken a great love, a great determination, to rescue it.
“How did you . . .”
“I wrote to the used book dealers, sir.”
Étienne didn’t say at what cost or how many times. He admitted only that he’d been lucky to finally get his hands on it. The edition was out of print. They had all told him that.
That volume on Turnier wasn’t the most important of Cripure’s works, but it was the only one he held dear. As for the others, he had simply renounced them. For a while, when his study of The Wisdom of the Medes was first published, Cripure had enjoyed a certain cult following. There wasn’t much left of that celebrity these days, except people around town knew that he’d had his moment of fame in Paris, and that he read Sanskrit. A few, like Deputy Faurel, who, without being truly cultured, were neither ignorant nor stupid, knew that for Cripure, all this Eastern mysticism was only understandable as a way into a psychic state that was an end in itself—not as a system of concepts. Interpreting Zoroastrian texts through this lens, Cripure understood Greek tragedy as the result of Persian influences. There followed a few short volumes and articles, written in a literary more than technical style. But he had stopped thinking about that nonsense a long time ago, renounced and forgotten, and once, when a student brought it up in front of him, he had scoffed, “The Medes! You can’t be serious!”
Cripure flipped through the book. Should he tell this young man the truth? That his dissertation was never out of print—in fact, it hadn’t been picked up. After the Sorbonne had refused to accept his “fantastical” work, Cripure had put it out for the public’s consideration (at his own expense of course). But he hadn’t found a single reader, and to avoid seeing his book trotted out on the sidewalk, he had brought all the copies back home. The entire printing was piled in the attic in boxes. No need to reveal that.
“A Paris used-book dealer?”
“No sir—from Angers.”
“A moment—”
He buried his face in his handkerchief, like a man who feels the onset of a coughing fit, and stayed like that for a minute, his eyes shut. Angers!
It must have been that huge bandy-legged fellow, hidden in the back of his den like a snail in his shell, a filthy penny-pincher. How many times had he visited with Toinette! It had amused them to pay for their books with gold Louis, for the joy of seeing the miser’s hand tremble.
“Do you know his name?”
“Why yes sir.”
Cripure wiped his face with his handkerchief, and removed his spectacles, rubbing the lenses. “Branchereau, I’d guess?”
“No sir, it was a certain Ménard—”
“Hold on—” Had he really thought Branchereau was immortal? He must have died ages ago, covered in gold and filth. “It’s true that since then—but, if you don’t mind?” he asked, bending over the book again.
“By all means.”
Cripure adjusted his spectacles, and carefully examined the title page, where once upon a time he’d written a dedication. He had once given this book to someone whom he had doubtless seen fit to call “my friend,” but the friend had promptly seen fit to scrap it, not without first taking the precaution of erasing his vile name. But the rest of the dedication was there: “To my friend . . . this story of a man who was lofty and pure, written by his unworthy brother. François Merlin.”
“Ah, ah,” Cripure groaned, looking for a magnifier in his drawer. And he bowed over the page. “Who? Who was it? Who was enough of an ingrate—”
Cripure hadn’t handed out his book carelessly. Nor had he carelessly chosen Turnier for its hero. In the development of his argument, he had combined a challenge and a hope. The challenge had been to declare himself a rebel, and in a certain sense, a martyr; the hope was that Toinette would read his pages, and the broken ties would be renewed. He had sent the book to their mutual friends, hoping that one day it would fall into her hands, that she would take it home. Whole pages were written just for her—she alone would have been able to understand their sense, their bitterness, their misery, she alone could answer. But she hadn’t answered. This supreme letter had been lost, a cruelty unequalled in the rest of Cripure’s life. But it’s true that certain long-held hopes become reflexes, since at that moment, Cri-pure, forgetting Étienne, put down his useless magnifying glass an
d flipped through the volume with the unreasonable expectation of finding some notes, the draft of a forgotten letter . . .
To see her handwriting!
Alas, page after page of virgin white space. It looked like the pages hadn’t been cut until recently—he couldn’t bear to ask. If he had, he would have learned, to his great sorrow, that Étienne received these pages in the same state they came off the press. He slowed down to reread some fragments, which he’d never done since its publication. He never climbed to the attic. And then—to have to face himself? Sighs mixed with groans escaped him. With his magnifying glass by his side, he looked like an old antiquarian or a specialist, a Doctor Faust in need, thought Étienne, casting an anguished look around him. What hours of darkness! “Das ist deine Welt! das heisst eine Welt!”
IT MUST be said that following The Wisdom of the Medes, which dated back to before his marriage to Toinette, Cripure had done nothing but repeat himself. The little following he’d earned from that text quickly grew bored. And Cripure with his public. After a while, everything was back to normal. What Cripure called “being sent back out to pasture.”
Out of self-respect, out of admiration and love for Cripure, Étienne had always refrained from asking questions about his affairs. But the stories had come to him anyway.
People said—people whose unwavering good sense, mind you, went unquestioned—that Cripure wasn’t quite what you’d call certifiably crazy, but still a little touched in the head, a little cuckoo, as sometimes happens with great minds. Or they said he was an original, not like the others, a man apart. A useful method of explaining away the teacher’s subversive ideas and scandalous behavior. In fact, he was a man apart through his obvious, cartoonish deformity, by his pedantic way of speaking, his senile schoolboy jargon; by his habit, picked up as he got older, of talking to himself when he was alone; by his extraordinary gait, impossible to copy. The funniest moments were when, with that Maïa of his, he went biking. Étienne had often seen them, on Thursdays or Sundays, leaving together for their little cottage at the seaside. Cripure rolled along, nose in the air, peeking from underneath his pince-nez, having to sit up straight, since at each turn of the pedals, his thighs sprang up so high they risked banging the handlebars. He cycled carefully, with a serious expression, his little cloth hat held in place by an elastic, or if the elastic was broken, a handkerchief. His alpaca jacket rippled. A rifle slung over his shoulder, bundles piled on the racks, he would go “blow off some steam,” shoot a rabbit, maybe a curlew or a sea swallow, “poor little beasts so good to eat . . .” Maïa and the four dogs would follow. In summer, she generally wore white from head to toe, including her stockings. Swollen as a wineskin, amply buttocked, her nose buried in net bags of provisions, she wheezed along, yelling after the dogs that capered ahead.
For more than twenty years, he had been the laughingstock of the whole town. One day Étienne had fought with a stranger who too openly mocked Cripure.
How did they know that he had been married once before and that he had divorced? He had never breathed a word about his past to anyone. But in spite of his embarrassed silence, he was nothing if not a drinker. As for his secrets, everybody knew them as intimately as he did. If it had been someone else, he might have admired the largesse by which a town of twenty thousand souls was informed about the most hidden parts of his life. Not only did they know he had been married, but where (at Angers) and that his wife Antoinette (they knew her name!) had left him for a handsome captain. But how, but why, by what stretch of the imagination had a woman become enamored of such a being and married him? No one would have dreamed of denying Cripure’s genius, and on occasion they were even proud of it. They well knew he had published a book about the Medes, a dissertation on Turnier, that he had taken courses at the highest level. But marry someone for his research? That Antoinette, all things considered, had done well to leave him. Was this turn of events really so shocking when you considered that this genius was also a gambler, a womanizer, and by all accounts jealous to boot? Once again, that Antoinette had done the right thing. She must have been a delicate woman, accomplished. The daughter of a magistrate! Not at all the type for Cripure, you could tell by the next one he took up with, that Maïa, an old sailors’ lass, pulled out of the muck. Still they recognized, in all fairness, that Maïa, however ugly, fat, and uneducated, gave him the attentions of a mother, not a servant-mistress. It was she who bathed him in the morning, who scrubbed him like you scrub a child, who helped him get dressed, tied his tie, fastened the laces of his monstrous shoes. A faithful servant—like a certain Hélène, much discussed in his thesis, who had been a faithful servant to Turnier.
•
They had at least this much in common, Cripure and Turnier: both had shared most of their lives with a servant, the big difference being that Turnier’s servant wasn’t his mistress. Another connection: they were both sons of ruined bourgeoisie. Turnier’s father had possessed a considerable fortune, frittered away by unknown means. In Cripure’s father’s case, everyone knew perfectly well that it was the war of 1870 that had destroyed his industry, depriving him of his job as a factory manager, and making him an office drudge. From grade school on, Turnier had been a brilliant mind, as Cripure argued, marked. Marked, evidently, for ruin. At the town library, even though they didn’t have Cripure’s thesis, they still had a few articles on a so-called bizarre and intriguing local character. Étienne had asked for them to be brought out—and Babinot, though he was astonished by such a request, nonetheless did it, all the while talking to Étienne of other things—his “dear students,” his son who was at the front, the bad faith of “Lady Germania.” He had pulled a few clippings and a portrait out of a dusty folder. The clippings were run-of-the-mill articles about Turnier’s death. As for the portrait, picture a small face, perfectly round, a splendid forehead, a long beard, and two eyes that pierced with their sadness. It was said—by the same people, mind you, who considered Cripure a little crazy—that Turnier’s drama all started when he ran out of money. Turnier had, it seemed, managed to bankrupt himself without noticing. Head in the clouds. He’d turned his back on teaching, which Cripure had never dared to do, and he’d come back to live with his old cleaning woman, in a house that used to belong to the Turnier family, staying from then on, and dedicating himself to a life of the mind. He must have been just a little over thirty. The old servant, Hélène, welcomed Turnier like a son. For his part, he went straight up to his childhood bedroom and started clearing out everything besides a bed, a desk, a chair. He even removed the portraits and paintings from the walls, and the room became something like a monk’s cell. He cut out a large red paper cross and glued it to the wall, and afterward that cross was the sole ornament. It was huge, so big that if Turnier had propped his back against the wall and stuck out his arms, he could have played at being the Christ. No one knew, wrote Cripure in his book, if he had ever enacted that blasphemous parody, but a similar impulse must have occurred to Turnier’s religious and lunatic spirit, since he inhabited the house for ten years without any occupation besides meditations on the mysteries of predestination and evil. Not once, in the course of those ten years he had left, did he inquire where the food old Hélène served him came from. Yet he never wanted for anything. Around town, they thought he had gone crazy when they learned how he lived, not talking to anyone except drifters he met, when they heard he’d glued that big red cross to the wall. A few friends from grade school, most of whom were businessmen, potters, hatters, innkeepers, and others who were magistrates, came together in secret and agreed to aid this “poet” without Turnier ever suspecting a thing. When Hélène went to buy food in town, someone would have already paid her bill. At the house, the firewood replenished itself as if by magic, new outfits replaced the old, and so on. Turnier passed whole days in his room where he paced incessantly, praying out loud and writing. Sometimes he went out, went to the sea and swam for a half hour. He was a remarkable swimmer. Things went on that way for several ye
ars, until Mercédès arrived on the scene.
It was likely that Turnier had never loved anyone before he met Mercédès. She wasn’t quite twenty, and he was already pushing forty. As Cripure described her, she was spirited and kind, a good heart. Étienne imagined her in a long, white dress, wearing a lace cap with ringlets peeking out at the sides, a parasol on her shoulder. She lived with her family in a chateau. That family, thought Étienne, must have been pretty upper-crust—men with riding crops and monocles, their stiff, matronly wives. They took very badly what they called the glances of that good-for-nothing, that vagabond dressed like a beggar who let his beard and hair get as long as a prophet’s, who walked around town with the slack jaw of a monk at prayer. They never thought for a second that Mercédès could do them the bad turn of falling in love with Turnier. Étienne could easily imagine Turnier stopping sharply in the middle of the road to watch Mercédès with his clear visionary stare, and Mercédès passing by on the arm of some chaperone, not acknowledging the crazy man’s eyes. Did he even dream of greeting her? Probably not. And so it went on for a while.
Finally they spoke. Nocturnal meetings. Love letters. The whole story was full of romantic clichés and sentimentality. The love letters were left in the hollow trunk of an oak. They must have held hands, but as for kisses? No. Turnier offered to marry Mercédès. He would change his life, go back to teaching. He arrogantly refused a dowry, making this one of the conditions of their marriage. Everyone expected a big fight. They expected to see Turnier getting his hair and beard trimmed, perfumed and pomaded, running to the town hall to “extract” the certificate of good moral conduct and character, and arriving at the chateau in a new suit, boots polished, hat in hand, to make the official offer. But things didn’t turn out that way. He went to the chateau all right, but he presented himself in his ordinary clothes, and Monsieur Baron or Marquis didn’t even bother to receive him. They simply left him on the doorstep. That evening a letter appeared in the oak trunk, in which Turnier reminded Mercédès of what was agreed between them, asking if she would run away with him if they refused him her hand. She should be ready to leave the next day. She didn’t appear. Her father had discovered the hiding place, stolen the letter, whisked Mercédès off to Paris. Turnier waited for two days. When he had understood that she was lost to him forever, he went down to the ocean, plunged into the water as was his habit, and swam toward the deep, to his death.
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