Monsieur Bourcier glanced over the class with a look that was sad, unreadable, and stood there for a while without speaking, his eyes moving from one to another, as if hesitating over his choice of victim. He created the atmosphere, but his victim was obvious to him, and finally he settled his heavy gaze on Gentric.
“Monsieur Gentric?”
Gentric straightened up like a soldier on guard, and his heels clacked disrespectfully.
“You’re put in detention for all of Thursday,” the dean said slowly. And his eyes widened under his heavy eyebrows.
Gentric smiled. Monsieur Bourcier looked at Cripure, who shrugged slightly.
“Very well, Monsieur Gentric,” said the dean in a changed voice, one ready to shout, “Since that makes you smile, you’ll have two days detention instead of one. Are you smiling now?”
Furious at being beaten, he could barely contain himself. “No, Monsieur Dean.”
The insolence of this reply was made even greater as Gentric fought the crazy urge to burst out laughing.
“Watch yourself, Gentric—the next step after detentions is getting kicked out of class, do you understand?”
“Unequivocally, sir.”
“All right, that’s the last straw!”
Gentric gathered his things, and made a show of leaving the room, closing the door calmly behind him.
“There’s a fine one for you,” Monsieur Bourcier finished.
He turned toward the others and threatened harsh punishments at the slightest sign of disrespect. He would defeat this detestable attitude of insubordination and unruliness that was spreading among the youth and—be warned! He would show the ringleaders no mercy.
He finished his lecture by reminding them of the sorrowful circumstances France was facing.
“It would be cowardly for you all to abuse the liberty granted to you in your fathers’ absence.” That sentence, which these dunces had heard a million times, signaled to them that the harangue was over. Ite missa est. The dean turned toward Cripure, who lowered his head.
“Crack down on them, Monsieur Merlin.” And he went out quickly, without ever taking off his hat.
The silence stretched out for a moment after he left. Then loud, ironic oufs brought Cripure out of his reverie. “Where were we?”
“. . . an art which teaches men how to conduct their lives.” “Fine. Let’s continue. Title: Individual Morality and Social Morality. Write that down!”
His back arched, his hands deep in his pockets, he continued the dictation in a voice that was jerky and irritated, a tone that went against everything he said. His eyes, dull behind his pince-nez, looked toward the light like a memory—as if he were a fat, trapped fly bumping against a window. In the silences of the dictation, his mouth tightened, and his thin lips seemed to vanish, swallowed by the lifted point of his chin. The pens scratched. He continued: “A question arises: that of knowing whether individual morality should be subordinated to social morality, or vice versa, the social to the individual, or if both moral standards should be juxtaposed to benefit each side equally. For some philosophers—”
“The bell’s ringing, Monsieur,” one of Gentric’s followers interrupted. And without waiting for Cripure to give the word, the schoolboys raced for the door all at once in a furious mob, jostling him as they went by so they could stealthily pull out big tufts of goat hair.
•
He rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers—the tic—adjusted his pince-nez, and, with the hesitant movements of a man who expects the roof to fall in at any moment, he left the classroom, double locking the door behind him. Monsieur Babinot, his hands crossed under the lapels of his jacket, his head bent, his big spiked boots ringing out on the flagstones, was grumbling to himself. Seeing Cripure, he rushed over.
“Guess what?” he said. “Can you guess what I’m thinking? About me! About that horrible I the philosopher speaks of! Well then, when I say the I, it’s a missing person I’m talking about. The war effort, the danger to France, the national resistance—”
Cripure was already far away. His direction: the bar.
•
Streets, for a change. Familiar torment. It would take him half an hour more at least to reach Café Machin. Dragging along. He hated the houses. Man’s great struggle for so many centuries just to build these hideous boxes! What prevented them from putting fountains everywhere, and gardens, and palaces? Why not the palaces from A Thousand and One Nights? Why can’t I at least be blind?
He was only nearsighted.
Someone passed and, seeing Cripure, murmured his pity.
And deaf!
He bravely continued on his way.
As he passed, he glanced at the prefecture—a spiritual monument in its way. He always trembled when he had to brave those bars, as if he worried they would close behind him, finally taking away his escape.
Flee!
He went on towards the square.
Somewhere a horn was blaring endlessly—it could have been in the Square, or maybe on the moon. Cripure was still walking when, realizing there was a car rushing at him from less than a meter away, he leapt, jerking aside, almost knocked flat on the ground.
The effect was undoubtedly quite comical, since, as soon as he regained his senses, still panting, a great burst of laughter rang out. He turned around—the car had paused. A young officer in fancy dress was holding the wheel in both hands.
Cripure was breathless with anger. But before he could say a word, an officer with a monocle and soft leather boots got out of the car with his gloves in his hand and came toward him.
“Faurel!” It was the deputy, no less, a staff officer.
“Excuse me my dear professor,” said Faurel. “I had nothing to do with this odious joke. I was half-asleep in the back of the car—we were traveling all night. And then this trumped-up idiot woke me with his brakes. I didn’t have time—But just look at him! What a laugh! Corbin!”
At the wheel, this “trumped-up idiot” smiled behind his hand.
“That’s enough,” Faurel ordered dryly. “Come excuse yourself.” He turned to Cripure, “Please forgive him, my dear professor. He’s still a kid. It hasn’t been long, you’ll remember, since he was your student—”
Cripure slowly pulled himself together. He adjusted his pince-nez and glanced toward Corbin. Oh these bastards—this was how they wanted to crush him! It had reached a new level—first the bikes and now a car.
“As a matter of fact, I remember Monsieur . . . Corbin quite well,” he continued, looking at the chauffeur who had finally come down from his seat. “But I wouldn’t have recognized you in that astonishing uniform. No I wouldn’t have seen anything of my old philosophy student in you—it’s been what, two years?”
Corbin, standing as if on guard, replied, “That’s right, Monsieur Merlin.” Not a wrinkle had moved in that knife-blade face.
“Well then?” said Faurel.
“My dear Monsieur Merlin, please pardon me. I didn’t mean to cause harm. It was just my excitement at seeing you again.”
Faurel raised his eyebrows. “That’s all?”
“I only make fun of people I respect—or love.”
This outrageous lie didn’t prevent Cripure from shaking Corbin’s offered hand. He smiled. “Youth does have its privileges.”
“For now, it has the privilege of putting the car away,” said Faurel.
Corbin saluted and disappeared.
Cripure and Faurel walked on slowly, the deputy taking the arm of his “dear old teacher.”
Faurel’s face showed traces of weariness that weren’t only due to his long journey, but which had been intensified by the trip. His cheeks, carefully shaved, were slack, gray, and framed with crows’ feet; his big eyes bluish and troubled. His mouth, below a thin, still-black mustache, expressed the kindness typical in men who value pleasure—and don’t always encounter it—and made up for the raw sensuality of his aquiline nose and the tic of his constantly twitching nostrils.
His body beneath the uniform was slender and energetic as ever. But whether he wore his uniform or civilian clothes, everything about him betrayed Faurel as a man who’d spent his life among women.
“This is a strange place to meet you, my dear professor,” said Faurel, in the tone of tactful distance which was natural to him, but which signaled a sincere respect for Cripure. “These aren’t your usual haunts, these bastions of government,” he said, gesturing toward the prefecture. “And how is Madame Merlin?”
“Why, very well,” Cripure replied, genuinely touched that someone had asked after his companion. That happened so rarely!
“You’ll give my best regards to her?”
“You’re too kind.”
“We had such good times at your cottage,” replied the deputy. “I remember it like yesterday.” Faurel thought of himself as someone who loved ideas, and he was curious about people. He recognized Cripure’s talents, and was always asking him about his little projects, especially The Wisdom of the Medes. That book had astonished Faurel. He also loved to ask Cripure about the intricacies of Sanskrit—the deputy would have loved to learn Sanskrit!
Fortunately the conversation took a different turn. “You’re still hunting?”
“Once in a while—”
“That cottage!” murmured Faurel, turning sentimental.
“Yes,” said Cripure, smiling to think about it. His little cottage!
He spent the summers there and long stretches of the winter as well.
“The winter is just as lovely.”
One evening, with Faurel, they’d walked up the road. They’d climbed to an inn where two paths crossed, arm in arm, as they were that moment. What had they talked about?
“Do you remember that conversation about Rousseau, Professor?” Did he remember! “I do, as if it were yesterday. Before going out, we reread that astonishing page together, you recall, from the Dialogues,
where he’s about to take his manuscript to Notre-Dame. Such a moving passage—maybe the most intense pathos in all his work, including the Confessions. Such beauty—electrifying, wasn’t it?”
He must have said the same things, that night. Faurel pictured Cripure’s gesture, standing in the street. He’d stretched out his arms, as though to measure the spaces of shadows. The waves echoed in the distance.
Cripure remembered it too. The voice of the sea, mingling with theirs like the chorus in theater, had shaken loose a tenderness. Precious moments when his inner voice, suddenly freed, had found its match in the voice of the world—or in a face!
“Times have certainly changed,” he said.
But even that night, there had been some ugliness. They’d touched on the prickly question of bastard children. Cripure had stuck with Rousseau and Faurel had gotten angry. True, Faurel hadn’t abandoned Corbin, as Cripure had abandoned Amédée.
This unhappy memory broke through the charm.
“Yes,” said Faurel, “they certainly have. What do they think of the war here?”
“From this point of view, you know, it’s nothing but a fairy tale. A bloody fairy tale, but a story all the same.”
The deputy closed his eyes and shrugged. Scornful and resigned. “Pathetic human psychology,” he said.
“Biology,” said Cripure, forcing a laugh.
“When it’s going so poorly!”
“Truly?”
“Oh! If I could tell you—”
Bah! thought Cripure, when are the depths of war really known? Was it possible to comprehend the details of something so fucked? Maybe he didn’t want to. Not only did he want to be fooled, but with an air of mystery. “What can we think of a human race completely engrossed in destroying itself?”
“It probably doesn’t deserve anything better.”
That made Cripure laugh, genuinely this time. Confronted with that thought, he felt right at home. “Humans aren’t necessary,” he said.
Another pleasant idea. His eyes shone with the malice of someone who’s just uncovered a plot.
“One couldn’t say it’s going very well, but it’s going all the same,” the deputy continued. “We’ll soon redress the moral wrongs, but what a cost!” He looked skyward.
“It seems we may be quite close to a revolution,” said Cripure.
“Right on the verge. It’s almost come to that,” said Faurel, clicking a nail under his tooth. “Inside the lines, there’s nothing much going on anymore. Some very small incidents, some noise at night on the trains for furloughed men. Nothing next to what we had seen! Not even close. The major-general asked for carte blanche in dealing out punishments and setting examples.”
“Many?”
“Alas! You know, my dear professor, I’m a little bit of a revolutionary. At heart I am, and I’ve always been a good liberal, a good patriot. But to see that! There have been horrible things. Even so, that’s too much. I know how serious the situation is, and that we can’t let the army go to waste. Keep the spirit alive, my friend, but know that there were five whole divisions almost completely contaminated.”
“As many as that!”
“Maybe more. I told you, the situation was extremely dangerous. Especially if you take the political climate in Paris and within the region into account. May first, there was a strike in Paris. June second, more than three thousand women on strike demonstrating for over two hours on the Champs-Élysées. The Tonkinese fired on the crowd at Saint-Ouen.[8] And then others. And to think that no mutineers have been pardoned.”
“And of course,” said Cripure, “those are the purest of them, the ones with integrity who take the blame for it.”
The deputy let his arms fall to his sides in agreement.
“Not one pardon!” Cripure continued. “But—Poincaré?”
“You don’t know that man. When Painlevé asked him to pardon two mutineers, he replied that ‘this wasn’t the moment for weakness.’ God, when will this end?”
They both sighed, walking a moment side by side without saying anything.
“That’s all so tragic,” said Cripure.
“But all the same it has a comic side—would you believe that Pétain asked Madelin to research cases of mutiny from the Revolution before coming up with ways to repress the current trouble? And then he consulted that grammar buff Henri Bordeaux!”
Cripure burst out laughing. “Priceless, that’s what that is,” he said, “ah, ha! I couldn’t make up a more cheerful story. All the same, this loony stuff does some good.”
And the conversation took a joyful turn, almost fanciful.
“I heard that they’re decorating Madame Faurel?”
The deputy frowned a little. He knew what Cripure thought of decorations and how they were gotten. “I’ve got to howl with the pack,” he said.
“But, it’s very nice,” said Cripure.
“What is? That they’re decorating my wife?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Oh, all right—in that case, if Cripure was going to take it that way. “Between us, my friend, I’m more towards your point of view. It will be one well-deserved trinket. But it certainly isn’t necessary. They insisted, you know. And my wife, good sport that she is, didn’t want to tell them that she couldn’t give a—damn. I was about to say something even less—academic.”
“Come now! When someone exposes themselves to risk as she did—”
“Yes, that’s true.”.
“I’ll make a point of being there.”
“Why, that’s very kind. I’m touched. I mean it, you know. And she will be too. She cares very much about you. I’m touched.”
Cripure took his hand. “Come, come, my friend.”
“But I am. Very much—”
“I wouldn’t dream of missing it.”
“It’s this—decoration that brings me back here,” Faurel continued, “and the need to recover, to forget a little. The horrible things one sees! I’d like to go lie down in a field, to nap in the good air for a while. But I’ve got to pay a visit to my tenant farme
rs. That’ll be a rest. I need one. Oh if only I had a little more time. I’d ask to stay in your little cottage for a day or two. But I’ll have to be happy with what time I’ve got. Isn’t it already so wonderful to run into you just as I arrive, even though,” he said, pointing to the prefecture, “we’re nearing a place where you never set foot? These official buildings!”
“You mean, don’t you, that I avoid them?”
“You’re a wise man, and I don’t just say that to flatter you. No!” and Faurel made a gesture to indicate that he was through with all the flattery, all the intrigues he’d fought through all his life, that he was simply tired. “Yes, what I wouldn’t give,” he continued, “to spend a day with you at the cottage, as we used to do, to talk over a few ideas. But it’s impossible.”
“I know, I know, my friend.”
“I sense you doubt it? Farewell my friend! You’re the only man I’ll be pleased to see here, but it’s the prefect who’s expecting me. He’s not expecting you, I hope,” Faurel added, finishing the conversation on a joking note.
And he disappeared with a wave of his gloves.
NOT FAR from Simone’s house, the prefectural chauffeur stopped. Léo turned toward the backseat, his face battered, copper-colored, with almost no nose and a Buddha’s lips. His eyelids, with their strange, white lashes, lifted to reveal murky gray eyes.
“Getting out?”
“Just a moment—”
And Kaminsky, still holding Simone’s hands in his, continued, “My darling—what will you think of me if I ask you to consider things a bit more before making such a serious decision? If I turn into Father Prudhomme[9] and start giving you wholesome advice? To leave your family! And go to Paris with your lover! That’s called throwing your life under the wheels. What do you think?”
She laughed. Her hands quivered in Kaminsky’s.
“I think—I think the same thing you do.”
“And that means?”
“That you’re teasing me.”
“Why not at all!” He cried. “Not for a second. How could I? Coddled as you are by your father, by your mother—in light of the jangling pockets of comfy notaries. You have everything you need to be happy, my dear Simone. Won’t you think about it?”
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