But he could either stay and die with them or refuse, get out, and work toward what would change everything, including this.
NABUCET leapt toward the door and opened it silently, slipping into the corridor like a shadow. He disappeared into the library. An instant later, he emerged, innocently finding himself nose to nose with the dean, red-faced and still feverish from the scene that had just taken place. But Nabucet didn’t appear to notice. His hand outstretched, his head coquettishly tilted to one side, a wide smile behind his beard, he approached this large man, weighty and respectable, who smelled of tobacco, cheap cologne, shoe polish, and whose hand—what an admirable tool for slaps—was hairy as a monkey’s paw.
“You’re just the man I’m looking for,” Nabucet chirped, who, though he was still holding the dean’s hand, found a way to avoid his blank stare, the sad, resentful look in his protruding eyes, where the light lay like a reflection on stagnant water.
“Do you have a question for me?” His anger hadn’t yet passed.
“No,” said Nabucet, “Nothing in particular my friend, just your opinion on the set-up for the party.”
“Oh?”
“Is this a bad moment?” said Nabucet, letting go of the dean’s hand. He certainly was a brute. It would never have crossed Nabucet’s mind to behave like that. Family quarrels were no excuse, by God. It was no fault of Nabucet’s.
A feeble smile—the dean was making an admirable effort. “A bad moment? Not at all . . . I was . . . I myself was just going to ask you if I could see the arrangements.”
So much the better. Since he had decided to save face, there was nothing more to say.
“Excuse me,” said Nabucet, opening the library door. They went in, and Nabucet said, “Please, I want to know exactly what you think. I’m counting on it.” He’d say that over and over this evening, to everyone. “Oh but before we start,” he said, “I have good news for you—the gods are with us! The general has recovered.”
The dean seemed impatient. “What general?” He was miles away. Fortunately, he remembered. “I didn’t know the general was ill.”
“Goodness!” cried Nabucet, “I did a good job of keeping it from you. Cui bono? You would have panicked, my friend, you would have worried that the party, without the general, would be totally ruined. I wanted to spare you that torment. And I was right, since the danger has passed. Having the general here is a huge, huge coup!”
The dean agreed, letting himself fall heavily into an armchair. He sighed.
“Are you . . . unwell?”
“No, no, not at all,” the dean replied, tapping on both arms of the chair at once.
“Everyone in your family’s all right, I hope? Madame Bourcier is well?”
“Why, yes, very well,” said the dean, still tapping.
“And your charming . . .your exquisite young lady?”
“Very well, thanks.”
“Lucien?”
The dean stopped tapping. His face twisted into a sort of quick groan. “Lucien’s fine.”
Nabucet easily hid a venomous look, and said in an innocent voice, “Lucien will be among us, won’t he? We’re counting on him.”
The dean’s answer made Nabucet gape with shock: “Yes.”
This way, thought the dean, he’ll leave me alone. “Bravo,” said Nabucet. “He’ll be our best addition. A real wounded soldier. I thought he would be the one to pin the cross on Madame Faurel . . . if the general hadn’t been able to come . . .”
But the dean had gotten up. He pulled his pince-nez, which he used like a handheld magnifier, from their holder. “Perfect . . . these flowers mixed in with the flags, that’s perfect. These statues, perfect.” And turning back to Nabucet, “all this is perfect, my friend.”
“You think so?”
“Without a doubt. It’s perfect.”
“This . . . this pastel?”
“Ah, the pastel,” said the dean, moving toward the fireplace. He looked for a long time at the art teacher’s masterpiece.
“Perfect.”
“You know who made it?”
“Who?” He let the hand holding the pince-nez drop.
“Monsieur Pullier.”
“Ah? Monsieur Pullier? Oh, I didn’t know. It’s very good, it’s perfect,” he said, bringing his pince-nez back to eye level . . .
“And the statues?”
“Excellent idea.”
“In conclusion, Monsieur Dean, you’re in agreement with everything?”
“Well . . . everything is perfect, my friend.”
“But didn’t you read the banner?”
“Where?”
“Above the door.”
He raised his nose, adjusted the pince-nez, and spelled out “. . . The Just War . . . It’s perfect.”
“A quote from Monsieur Poincaré.”
“Oh! Perfect.”
He walked around taking little steps, still looking through the pince-nez. “Say, my friend,” he hesitated, “what about the Russian flags?”
Nabucet jumped slightly. “I’m sorry?”
“Nothing has changed, has it? Officially? We still use the eagles?” He slipped his finger over the glasses, turning them.
“But what are you saying!” cried Nabucet. “My goodness! You’re not thinking we should hang the Maximalists’[7] flag in here?”
“Of course not,” said the dean, chastened. “I didn’t say that.” “Lenin’s flag! That miserable red scrap! See, my dear friend, officially nothing has changed. Officially, we have to keep the eagles.”
“Very well. Besides, it’s obvious, and that’s what I was saying . . . If it’s a red flag,” he continued, waving his arm vaguely . . .
“You doubt it?”
“Me?” He read the papers, of course. He wasn’t that dumb. Who did he think he was talking to? “I know—”
But Nabucet interrupted him: “Because,” he said, pointing his index finger, “if you had any suspicions in the slightest, there’s someone here who could tell you all about it.”
Nabucet’s attitude, the ambiguous way he said it, the look that accompanied these words—the dean’s ears pricked up.
“Here?”
“Even here.”
“In this institution?” Where was all this going?
Nabucet spread his arms, lifted his palms—a priest’s gesture, which made his manner of half closing his eyes even more emphatic—and said with a sigh, “I didn’t want to believe it either. But I had to pay attention to the evidence. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.”
“But really, what do you mean? That someone’s writing defeatist propaganda here?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Since you ask,” replied Nabucet, “I think it’s time I told you that it’s Francis Montfort.”
“Are you kidding?” said the dean, bowled over. He knew Montfort was a weirdo, but to go so far as to call him defeatist?
“He’s a problem,” Nabucet continued. “He spends his time writing so-called revolutionary poems that are about nothing. But the serious part is that he reads them to the students.”
“You don’t say.” The dean turned purple. Things were definitely going poorly.
“Would I lie?”
“And I wasn’t informed!” cried the dean, raising his arms to the sky. “That’s unthinkable! Unthinkable!”
Nabucet poured some salt in the wound. “By all means,” he said. “Even more so because it’s a source—I’d almost say—of scandal.”
“But see here,” exclaimed Monsieur Bourcier, “that goes without saying. If he truly read the students defeatist poems . . .”
“Their parents would have a right to complain.”
“That’s clear as day.”
“As for the rest,” said Nabucet, pulling a paper folded in four out of his pocket, “read this.”
“What is it?”
“Read, read! That’s the damning evidence.”
The dean took the paper, adjusted his
pince-nez and read:
“Comrade, soldier, brother
Hear the bugle call!
Rise, soldier, rise, RISE!
Take your gun and roll YOUR cannon: and FIRE
On the REAL enemies.
Sever your ties shackled like slaves
By your own hands
Around your Hercules neck
Or would you rather die AGAIN? Again and again your blood on the field. Your chest hacked open.
Your fist ripped off.
Your kidneys burned.
A clod of earth between your teeth, With a cross of honor?
RISE! RISE! RISE!
Soldier, my brother, That’s the wake-up call ringing
FOR YOU. FOR US ALL.
“I throw up my hands,” sighed the dean, handing the poem back to Nabucet, who put it back in his wallet with the trembling gesture of a miser hoarding a bank note. “And he read that to the students?”
“Exactly.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Where?”
“In study hall.”
“But my dear Nabucet, how did you come to have this paper?”.
“Oh! Our glorious revolutionary is also a glorified blockhead. He leaves his masterpieces lying around. Others collect them. Masterpieces! The poor boy thinks he’s talented! A new modernism! What a fool.”
“We have to nip this in the bud,” said the dean.
“I think so too. By the way, the principal has been informed.”
“Oh yes?” “Yes. I don’t know how he found out . . . since yesterday, he was in the know. And I know he means to have a word with this young . . . idealist, maybe even today.”
“Perfect,” said the dean in a glacial voice. He was outraged. They acted without him, they hid things. Well, God knows, if they wanted things to work under this roof, they had better decide to act in agreement with him. “I’m going to go find . . .” He quickly stopped himself.
“What was that?” said Nabucet, all ears.
A huge burst of laughter shook a nearby classroom.
“My word,” the dean muttered, “there’s a real ruckus for you.”
“Does Merlin have class this morning?”
“Yes, but later.”
The laughter increased. And since Merlin didn’t have class then, the ruckus could only be coming from the English teacher Philippon’s room, or the old astronomy teacher, Monsieur Laplanche.
“That must be Philippon,” said Nabucet. “Poor man! He can’t control the class anymore.”
“I’m going,” said the dean. Everything really was heading toward anarchy.
AFTER Étienne left, Cripure threw himself on the sofa, in the grip of a fit of fury. In his rage, he chased off the little beasts, who were shocked to find him so brutal—he was usually so kind, so tender with them, capable of petting them for whole hours at a time and murmuring all kinds of sweet nothings in the pretty spaniel’s ear, words he wouldn’t and couldn’t have said to any human. But even pretty Mireille hadn’t been spared. She had gone, ears drooping, following the cortege of the others to the end of the garden, meditating on the passions of humans. Cripure rolled around on the couch, suppressing his cries with great difficulty, crazed with helplessness.
Who on earth could keep his sangfroid after learning that such a plot had been hatched against him, since he was neither a slave nor a tyrant—and no Socrates either—and that this murderous impulse hadn’t come from jealousy or vengeance, and barely from hate? He was sweating and trembling at the thought of that fall—as surely fatal as dropping from the basket of a hot air balloon, or from the moon—which had been avoided by such a lucky coincidence. And yet, and yet! What better death could there be for him: killed, rejected in both soul and body, spat out, spit up by society in one giant gob of blood. A splendid death. To think that if, even in the instant it was occurring, he’d still been capable of a flash of consciousness, such a death would have seemed without a doubt—without a shadow of a doubt—like a compensation that was a thousand times too generous for all he had suffered in his life, the proof to end all proofs that this band of dunces . . .“But that’s just it,” he cried in his fury, getting up—Maïa was in her kitchen, and he spoke only to himself—“but that’s just it, not a simple scheme, was it? But a scheme in the first degree. They had ringleaders . . . a ringleader: Nabucet, not a shadow of a doubt about that. Oh! That man!” And to be unable to speak, to be unable to tell anyone, not even Maïa. Since he had read so clearly in others’ eyes that they took him (yes, Cripure!) for a poor sick man caught in a delusion of harassment.
Drunk with sorrow, his head in his hands, he began spinning around the office, crying “Maïa! Maïa!”
What? What did he want now? This comedy wasn’t done yet? Couldn’t she get a minute of peace, to finish working on his dressy clothes? “What? What’s it now?” When he saw Maïa, his bout of rage took on a whole new life. He had cried, threatened, spoken of a faction—just what was that anyway?—determined to destroy him, of a black fist . . . Maïa hadn’t lost any time. She took him solidly in her grip, and run along, there’s a good man, let me help you get a move on. He wasn’t such a loony as all that? A black fist? What was the point of going looking for gobbledygook like that? Go on! Get along my man . . . enough of that trash! And in less than ten minutes, faster than ever before, Cripure found himself washed, dressed from head to toe, brushed, polished, wrapped in his goatskin and sent on his way with marching orders, a prediction that the fresh air would set him straight, and a word of advice, repeated a thousand times, not to say all that nonsense if he ran into anyone. After a few steps, the air had its desired effect on him, in just the soothing way Maïa had predicted, and he wasn’t ten minutes into the walk when he started to see the story in a completely different way. In the end, he’d perhaps been wrong to get carried away. That Nabucet was a cunning one, it was true, a real rogue, and they’d be decorating him one of these days too, but all the same, to think he was a criminal! Yes, perhaps he had been mistaken. It wasn’t reasonable, wasn’t wise. Nabucet must have other things on his mind besides bikes. He must be thinking of his theater company—what a good excuse to feel up the girls!—and the next productions he’d put on to benefit “our dear wounded.” He must be thinking of Madame Faurel. The bastard! And to think that I once wandered into his living room! For hadn’t he also hosted a salon in the years before the war? Of course, he hadn’t waited for deputies’ wives to decorate in order to exercise his zeal. Everyone in the town—Nabucet called it the city—who counted as literary, artistic, or even scientific characters met at his place every Friday from five to seven. Nabucet was trying to prove that Paris didn’t have all the culture, he wanted—so he said!—to combat the dangerous centralization that would make all the provinces into poor relations, since they were just as capable, if not more capable than Parisians when it came to independent thought, and Cripure had heard that the motto of that bootlicker was: Others over self. It was enough to make you writhe, to make you die laughing ah, ha, ha! And this was supposed to be doing his part.
In fact, Nabucet had played one. Cripure felt the effects of that salon. Over a cup of tea, in winter, before a crackling wood fire, what “charming” gatherings! The school inspector had regaled them one evening with his theory of Spain, which he’d rushed through on his last vacation, alas! without having the chance to participate in the running of the bulls (corrida). Another evening, Doctor Blanc gave a whole lecture on the ways to prolong your life that was so convincing, it had seemed to everyone afterwards that living forever was, as the doctor had put it, only a matter of technique. Finally, one evening Nabucet had watched Cripure himself arrive. Awkward and timid, not even thinking to remove his goatskin, he sat defensively on a chair like a huge porcupine. What a victory, what a triumph for Nabucet to have brought this rebel to such a place! It was like he was laying down his arms. Cripure came of his own volition, uninvited, and, all things being equal, he could have easil
y had the pleasure of turning him away. Nabucet had considered it for a moment, entertained by the thought that such a perfect chance for revenge had arisen, and from whom? From the victim himself. But he had decided it was better to host this loony at least once, to let him show his true colors. Excellent strategy. Cripure had disappointed them all by speaking too excitedly about a foreign writer, a certain Ibsen he was totally obsessed with. Even then, as was the case these days, praising a foreigner like that had seemed inappropriate to them. It indicated feelings of hostility toward French culture. Why the hell should they have anything to do with the Swedes and all those other hacks? “Thank goodness,” Nabucet had exclaimed, “we’ve got everything we need within our borders, and we’ve so far surpassed these barbarians who have nothing to teach us.” But why argue? Wasn’t it true that in literature, as in everything, these people were just dull copycats of France? Didn’t the French always innovate and other people profited from those innovations? What! But really now. He’d had the bad grace, that Cripure, to talk about a certain Nietzsche—a German—which had made Monsieur Babinot’s ears prick up, as it always did when anyone mentioned “those barbarians” in front of him. In short, Cripure, who had doubtless made his way there under a spell of ennui that was worse than usual, had been defeated in the bloodiest way possible under the watchful eye of Nabucet, who let Cripure dig himself in deeper and deeper. And he’d do the same thing at this party if he got the chance, thought Cripure, walking down the street.
With his little cloth hat sagging over his eye, his goatskin cape floating, his cane clutched like a sword, and the so painful effort he made with each step to pull, as though from sticky mud, his wide cripple’s feet, Cripure had the air of a sleepy tightrope walker. His nearsightedness exacerbated the shocked look on his face, giving his movements the hesitant indecision of a drunk or someone playing blindman’s bluff. He always seemed to be battling a gust of wind down the sidewalk, running his hand over the walls, the point of his beard like a spur, his cane whipping the air behind him as if to keep the invisible monsters on his heels at bay. His lips trembled like those reciting prayers, or even exorcisms. And beneath his elbow he held a black satchel, his old schoolboy satchel, which had become a teacher’s briefcase, a precious object, which that morning held not only student papers and necessary books for his upcoming course, no not only those, but also the bonds he was going to take to the bank, and a pile of banknotes. Though Maïa had really made him move it, he’d managed to remember the precious satchel, packed last night it was true, and he hurried, wanting to pass by the bank before school. But try as he might, today wasn’t the day he’d be spared the torture of hearing people walk up behind him, come close, and pass him by. If they came from far off they always passed him anyway, even the old men. Oh Christ! Maybe—since he’d have to leave the bikes alone now—he’d decide to buy a little car, an alibi on wheels. Hum . . .which could be stalled no doubt by similar tools. But the idea was tempting, provided of course that someone who knew about these things, Basquin for example, could check the engine beneath all its covering, and failing that—otherwise he’d let himself be fooled again like a poor sucker—he’d have to look into it. And in the meantime, he could afford to pay a cab, make an arrangement with the old coachman, Père Yves. He was the only one left in town. Père Yves could come drive him to school in the mornings. He’d really be playing the pasha then, would he? The tsar in his sled? Then what? Then at least he could stop fighting these streets—dear God!—these sleepy streets, breeding grounds for cloppers, factories for woodlice, the sight of which sometimes seized his heart like a bout of shame, which threw him into total panics he would wake from as if from a dream, but to real unhappiness. The grass grew here at its ease, as it did in ruins or prison courtyards; and no doubt the hearts of the people who lived behind these blind façades were also overgrown. Two men playing cards in silence behind a half-closed curtain. A street gray with rain, and at the end of that street, the furtive shadow of a louse. Somewhere, behind tight-shut blinds, the high voice of an older woman singing Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” her “young” daughter accompanying her on the piano, while in the kitchen next door you could hear the silverware falling piece by piece into the drawer as the housemaid polished it! It was enough, some evenings, to make him almost shiver with horror, almost weep before this forsaken squalor.
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