Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  What would they do without me, said Nabucet’s face. And it was true. Without him, they wouldn’t have done anything. He was the one who always took the initiative. Who had founded the Lecture Group? Nabucet. Who directed the Theater Company? Nabucet. If they got Madeleine Roch to sing “La Marseillaise” from in between the folds of the flag, well that too would be one of his feats. He was involved with everything, he directed everything. It was impossible to avoid him.

  “And you say the general will be there?”

  “Not only the general, but also the duke, the prefect, the mayor—really the whole circle.”

  “You must be quite somebody,” said Plaire.

  “Oh it’s such a bother. But it’s necessary if you want to amount to anything. It’s a pity you can’t join us, dear Paul.”

  It was out of the question. The captain was booked all day. “Another time.”

  “It would have been such a pleasure to introduce you to my friends. You seem melancholy, my dear fellow—”

  “It’s true,” the captain admitted. But he’d always been a bit melancholy, even in the colonies. And after he was widowed . . .

  “Listen,” said Nabucet, putting a hand on his shoulder, “why don’t you remarry?”

  The captain started. “Me?”

  “You’re a widower, you’re not old, you’re not short on cash—so?” “I’ve thought of it sometimes,” said the captain, hanging his head.

  “So, why not?”

  “I don’t know. The opportunity hasn’t appeared. What can you do . . .”

  Nabucet shook his head, took his hands from Plaire’s shoulders and clicked his tongue. “Nonsense! You’re not being reasonable. But therein lies the only solution, my friend.” He grabbed his hat, took a last glance at himself in the mirror. “Let’s go.”

  They went down the stairs, side by side. It was a huge staircase, which could easily fit two abreast. The rug muffled their steps. Paintings, engravings, signed photographs covered the walls. Statues on pedestals rested on the landings. Everything about it was cozy, comfortable, creating an agreeable feeling of security and bourgeois happiness.

  Nabucet pranced along, his hand barely touching the banister. He was proud of himself, of his house, of the part he was about to play in the decoration of Madame Faurel, of his supple gait.

  “Your house is splendid.”

  “Oh yes,” said Nabucet, “It’s not too shabby, my little spot.”

  On a small table at the bottom of the stairs, the mail was waiting—newspapers, brochures, letters. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not!”

  Nabucet slid the wrappers off the papers and scanned them with a serious face. He flipped through the brochures, then turned to the letters.

  A huge guard dog appeared and stalked towards the captain with a menacing air.

  “Here, Pluto!” The dog came forward, his ears back. Nabucet put his letters down on the table, took the dog by the collar, and made him sniff the captain’s legs. “Don’t forget, the captain is a friend.” And he let the dog go.

  “I hope he doesn’t forget,” said Plaire with an uneasy laugh.

  “From now on you have nothing to fear, my dear Paul. Not only will Pluto never attack you, but he’ll also come to your defense. Isn’t that right, Pluto?” The dog lay at his master’s feet. “Good boy,” said Nabucet, taking up his letters. But he looked through them distractedly, and quickly put them in his pocket: “I’ll show you right now. Some sugar, please Anna!”

  The old servant came out of the kitchen carrying sugar, barely greeting Captain Plaire, the intruder. She left as quickly as she came.

  “This is to show you just how intelligent these dogs are, my dear Paul, and how well you can train them. He’s a prize specimen. But what can I do? I live here in a sort of hermitage, and you must wonder why. I’m far from the heart of town. But it’s because of the light, my friend. The light is amazing here. There are landscapes of light, just as there are of greenery or water. Here, sometimes, it’s magical. But of course, when you live in such an out-of-the-way place, it’s prudent to give a trusty guardian the task of watching over my sleep—and my valuables. I own a few pieces of art, as you might have noticed, and people know that. Oh, it’s not Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s collection, but as modest as mine is, it’s known, and I wouldn’t be surprised to receive a visit from certain specialists one of these days—” While he talked, he broke the sugar cube into little pieces in the palm of his hand.

  “With a beast like that,” said the captain, “I don’t know what you could possibly be afraid of.”

  “I let him loose in the garden every night. Any fool who risked breaking in to my house would have the dog at his throat before he took three steps. Pluto!”

  The dog pricked up his ears

  “You’ll see,” said Nabucet. “Sit nicely, Pluto.”

  Pluto sat up. Nabucet placed a tiny piece of sugar on his nose. “It’s Captain Plaire who’s giving you this piece of sugar,” said Nabucet.

  A quick movement of his head—the little piece of sugar flew through the air like a fly and was gulped with a dry snap of canines. And then the dog froze.

  “You see that Pluto is your friend, my dear Paul.”

  Second bit of sugar.

  “This time it’s from—the kaiser.” The dog didn’t move. “You won’t accept a little bit of sugar from the kaiser? Good boy! So it’s not from the kaiser it’s from his son, the klownprince.”

  Again, the dog didn’t budge.

  “Fine, it’s from—Monsieur Poincaré.”

  Snap! The bit of sugar went flying and was snatched from the air as before.

  “What do you say to that?” asked Nabucet.

  “Amazing.”

  “Places, Pluto, places! Sit up, my friend.”

  The session continued. Third bit of sugar. “This one’s from General Joffre—”

  Snap!

  Fourth bit of sugar:

  “Monsignor the bishop.”

  Snap!

  Fifth bit of sugar:

  “Cripure.”

  The dog didn’t move.

  “You don’t like Monsieur Cripure?” mocked Nabucet, grimacing. “Why don’t you like him, you naughty dog? Go on, go on, Mister Pluto, make up your mind!”

  Nothing.

  “Good dog! Monsieur Cripure is no friend of yours, that’s plain to see. OK, that sugar isn’t from him, it’s from—Madame Faurel.”

  Snap!

  “And that will be all for this morning,” Nabucet finished.

  “Who is this Cripure?” asked the captain.

  “It’s a nickname, given to this self-important person, a colleague, a so-called philosopher, but really, a disappointment. The nickname comes from the fact that he’s always talking about the Critique of Pure Reason, which the students call the Cripure of Tic Reason, hence: Cripure. Personally, I have nothing against him, the poor fellow! But Pluto can’t stand the smell of him, probably because of an ancient goatskin cape he’s always wearing, which makes him look like a giant ape.”

  All the same, Cripure! If he hadn’t been there, with his so-called Sanskrit and his convoluted books on Medic wisdom—then Nabucet would have been, without fail, the foremost “intellectual” in town.

  This fallen Cripure seemed to have pulled a few pieces of fame down with him—or rather, notoriety, as Nabucet corrected people when he heard them speak of Cripure’s work—and there was nothing Nabucet could do about that.

  Nabucet sat down to put on his galoshes. The dog, having received his daily ration of sugar, went off. Nabucet asked permission to take another glance at his letters, and this time he read them more carefully. They seemed to bring him bad news, since he clacked his tongue several times with an annoyed air and eventually put the letters in his pocket, saying, “They’ll end up making me a Minister of State. Because I’m a friend of the general—and of a few other dignitaries—not a day goes by but I’m asked to intervene on the behalf of someone or other, who
se case is explained at great length. Two more mothers wrote to me this morning, and for what? But I won’t set myself the task of telling you those miserable stories. Anna!” he said, standing up, “my umbrella! We’re ready, we’re leaving.” And, thinking of the letters, “What do they want me to do anyway? They should know I’m not God in Heaven!”

  Anna brought the umbrella.

  “I’ll come back at noon for a quick lunch. What are your plans?” he asked the captain.

  The captain was very busy. They would undoubtedly ask him to eat at the mess hall. His time wasn’t his own. It would be best if they didn’t expect him, pretended he wasn’t around. He didn’t want to be any trouble. He had packed his things and would call for them.

  He explained all this, babbling.

  “Fine,” said Nabucet. “As you like. As long as you don’t forget one thing, my friend: that my house is at your disposal. You understand?”

  It was confirmed.

  “Good, then—let’s go. See you at noon, Anna.”

  •

  The rain had momentarily stopped, and Nabucet could let his handsome umbrella dangle from his arm without trepidation for his dashing formal wear. They kept up their conversation, walking sometimes on the sidewalks when they were passable, and sometimes on the verge when there weren’t too many puddles. This gave their walk a prancing and runaway air, which Nabucet managed to use for a million elegant little effects, but which annoyed the captain no end—he feared for his nice boots. What a poorly maintained town! He had to admit the one he’d come from was no better, but he’d had high hopes for this one, like a green young man who travels for the first time and expects to find palaces from the Thousand and One Nights twenty miles from his door. Speaking of palaces, they were walking beside an endless high wall, green with moss, which threatened to collapse in places. An abundance of leafy branches poked up behind it. Nabucet explained that they were the walls of a convent, that behind those walls some few hundred nuns prayed and fasted, those of course, whose vows prevented them from bending over the cots of the wounded. It took all kinds to make a world. The captain agreed. He wasn’t particularly anticlerical. Of course, he always thought it was a shame when some lovely girl entered a convent rather than making some man—himself—happy. But after all, there had to be some girls like that. And anyway, you never knew, prayers might do good. But he also thought: Did they really do nothing but pray?

  “There must be some pretty little unripe ones behind those walls,” he said, batting an eye.

  “Oh, I’ve never been inside to check!” replied Nabucet in a tone that made the captain’s ears prick up. Well, well! You’d have thought it touched a nerve, that sort of comment.

  “Is it a big place?”

  “It’s a real palace. But there are others. We have a few convents here. I’ll give you a detailed tour of the town one of these days—you’ll be astonished, my friend. The clergy is very rich here. To give you an idea of just how rich, think about this: by my calculations, and including the bishop’s residence and its grounds—which are splendid—properties owned by the clergy make up about a quarter of the total area of the town. And I’m not even counting the seminary—as big as a barracks—nor, you understand, our thirteen churches.”

  “Thirteen?”

  “There are also a few chapels.”

  “Goodness!”

  A puddle separated them for a moment. Nabucet gracefully leapt over it. The captain jumped clumsily, and dirty water squirted on his boots. He groaned.

  Nabucet continued: “You see my friend, I won’t naysay religion. Without being a believer, neither am I an atheist. Whatever you choose, we have the chance to create our own philosophy, a stoic one, if need be. The world of ideas is open to us. But the people! They have no ideals but in prayer. The other day I saw a poor mother, overcome, you see, at the death of her son. She was praying all alone in a little chapel where I had gone with a visiting friend to show him a magnificent work from the thirteenth century, a ducal tomb. Well, at the sight of that poor woman—some laundress if what they told me is correct—I’m not ashamed to admit that tears came to my eyes. You want to be able to do something for downtrodden people like that.”

  “It’s hard.”

  “Alas! But all the same there are charities—specifically, Christian ones.”

  “That’s true.”

  “His grace the bishop told me the other day that between the running of his charities and his domains, he has work enough for the staff of a cabinet minister.”

  “You know the bishop?”

  “A truly remarkable man.”

  “And the inspector of public welfare?”

  “I don’t mean to say,” Nabucet continued, “that the laity isn’t doing enough. We’re of the laity, and we’ve done everything in our power, and we’ll continue with perseverance. But it’s certain that the war has revealed the astonishing charitable capacity of the Church. Yes, my friend, these people are doing admirable things. And I, in a spirit of justice and holy union, I say that the chaplain and the socialist laborer are perfectly worthy of each other’s brotherhood, and they should forget their old and futile quarrels.”

  The captain agreed. He replied dully that Nabucet was right and thought that they should have been talking about something else. He was finding Nabucet tiresome, with a dangerous tendency to take a moralizing tone. Who the devil did he think he was? Between two old friends, friends from childhood, that tone was all wrong.

  At the end of the street, the humid sky seemed to detach in one piece, pushed gently towards the west by a wind they could not feel. They moved forward, still jumping over puddles and potholes, and finally the wall ended, and they were passing houses with smooth façades and bristling grilles on the windows. A murmur reached them, a kind of creeping, buzzing litany, a sad moan. The nuns, no doubt, at prayer?

  “That’s the chapel?”

  No. It wasn’t the chapel. The chapel wasn’t in view; it was inside the convent.

  “This is attached to the convent—an asylum, a house of correction.”

  The grilles were now perfectly clear.

  “Have you heard of Saint-Blème?”

  “No.”

  There were branches of Saint-Blème everywhere. “But here,” said Nabucet, “is the founding chapter. Saint-Blème is a house of correction for recovering . . .you know . . . bad girls,” he rapidly finished.

  “Well, well, well!”

  “The prayers you hear come from them, my friend. They pray while they’re at work. Poor girls!”

  The murmur of prayers increased. In unison, the whole workshop took up the rosary—“Hail Mary full of grace . . .”

  “You’d almost say it was bees buzzing,” said Nabucet.

  The clouded, stuffy sky held no birds. The smoke from chimneys climbed slowly, spread, disappeared into the lowering fog. The murmur of prayers diminished, becoming more and more feeble as they walked. Soon it was gone.

  “How old are they?”

  “All ages. Some aren’t yet thirteen.”

  “And what work do they do?”

  “They make clothing. They also do ornaments for the church. I believe they even work for some of the big Paris fashion houses.”

  Silence

  “They’re very strange creatures,” Nabucet continued. His voice trembled a little. “Very curious creatures . . .”

  “Oh! Ah, yes?” The captain searched out Nabucet’s eyes, but he was looking straight ahead, so that it was impossible to see anything of his face but his bearded cheek, the point of his ear, his neck, chafed by his too-starched, too-white collar. “In what way?”

  “In what way are they curious? In this, my dear Paul, that they are quite cunning. It takes great patience to care for them. I assure you the nuns deserve credit! I’ve heard several tales of their ways from a few of my friends. I was interested in the question from a . . . psychological, moral point of view, naturally, as well as a humanitarian one. To spend one’s youth imprisone
d? That’s harsh. Not everyone believes in it. But what can you do? It’s anyone’s guess. As soon as you let them out, they go back to their sins.”

  “Then what’s the point of locking them up?”

  “You have to try everything. Society owes it to these poor wayward souls to do everything it can on their behalf, and it has to . . . ahem . . . protect itself. They pass love notes to one another, you know—I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “What?”

  “You must remember, my friend, that even though the society is a religious one, those in power still have the right to oversee it. The prefecture even allocates a certain amount of money to the house, doubtless for the care of those children the Board of Public Welfare trusts to them. Meaning the inspector of public welfare is constantly working with Saint-Blème. So he showed me—”

  The captain turned purple. “You know him?”

  “He’s an excellent fellow,” said Nabucet.

  “Oh? Oh! Yes? Who—how so?”

  “A real fatherly type.”

  The captain didn’t press it. But there was definitely something there.

  “So he showed me the notes these . . .young ladies passed among themselves. You’d be dumbfounded—they call each other dearest, darling . . .very revealing!”

  “You think it goes further than that?”

  Nabucet laughed, a snide little giggle, the laugh of a wicked old man. “Here, there was, but you must promise not to repeat this, there was a nun who had been . . . deviant when she was a girl. They thought she was totally cured. She had taken vows, donned the veil. She was thirty-three. One day, a peasant came to deliver wine to the convent. And then the old girl somehow got a baby inside her.” The story ended as it had begun—with the same elderly laugh. “What do you make of that?”

  “They’re all the same, aren’t they!”

  But Nabucet objected: “Not at all! Certainly not! Since we’re on the topic, I’m going to tell you another story. A story that happened to me personally. I took an interest in one of the girls placed in (or better to say recommended for) residency there by his grace. One of his little unhappy ones, you know, an innocent victim. Yes, I thought she was innocent,” he said in a vaguely wounded tone. “I heard the whole story from the bishop himself. The girl was fourteen, a timid little peasant who’d never known anything but rough farm ways, and she had the misfortune of losing her mother, who had remarried. The stepfather started beating her. She ran away for the first time. They brought her back, she ran away again, and they brought her back once more. But the devil was on her shoulder—she left again and, according to some, stole.” Nabucet made an evasive gesture. “So she got picked up by the police, brought to court, sentenced. His grace let me know, and I attended her hearing. The girl behaved very badly—cried, stomped, made threats. They decided to put her in Saint-Blème. I was struck by the intelligent air of that young thing. When I saw his grace again, I confided my impressions. He agreed with me in thinking that the story was based on a real injustice. It was also true that the girl couldn’t get used to Saint-Blème, that she . . .”