It became confused and tumultuous. In the hubbub, one could no longer discern the words that were hurtling from mouths, as round and black as bowling balls. Only the President, Crépin, and the Prime Minister, Martory, were maintaining, the one his icy sadness, the other his nonchalant grace. They were consulting the double-faced clock that was set between them in the middle of the table. The session had lasted four hours. With common accord, they would resume it the following day.
The Council had decided nothing.
Nor had Arnage.
Chapter II
(Tuesday)
On the afternoon of the day when the Government had suddenly convened, two men were walking slowly side by side on the terrace that overlooks Paris from the heights of Bellevue.
The older of the two, Pierre Contal, the author of Génie antique, had determinedly evoked the past in his books, whose incomparable form was admired the world over. With his bushy white beard, jet black eyes and sober stature, he wore his seventy years well. His son-in-law, François Thibault, the famous inventor of the Starter, was with him. Twenty years earlier he had discovered a practical means of dissociating matter, thus endowing humankind with an inexhaustible and gratuitous source of energy. The middle-aged spread padding his tall figure and his forceful but tender features gave him the appearance of a debonair giant.
The brief report circulated after the Council meeting betrayed the confusion of the ministers, their inability to muzzle their appetites, to hold back stupidity. The two strollers were commenting thus in prudent terms, for they were aware of the antagonism of their tendencies and wanted to spare one another. In the thirty years since François Thibault had married Pierre Contal’s daughter, the two men had been fencing with blunted foils, equally careful not to wound one another and not to give ground. Their affection matched their tolerance.
François Thibault had been supported throughout his research by his faith in the future. Convinced that humans would never cease to improve their condition, he even believed that the limitless force with which he had endowed them would ensure the planet a literally eternal life. The race would never disappear; it would tend toward the divine...
To tell the truth, that hope of immortality had never made any impression on the crowd. It honored François Thibault as the inventor of the Starter, but, indifferent to the idea that the human species might one day die out, it did not particularly glorify the man who had been the first to promise the Earth eternity.
Pierre Contal, by contrast, was convinced that human beings would never change, that their false progress was merely progressive forms of barbarism, and that they would disappear from the surface of the globe as wretched as they had appeared. To be sure, he was sincerely anxious about the threat of conflict, but he was one of those who professed that “there will always be wars,” and he did not hold back from observing that events were justifying his anticipations.
“Alas, my poor friend,” he sighed, “destiny is cruelly proving me right. Here we are on the eve of war. You thought you would make people happy by lightening their burden, but as you see, they remain what they were.”
François Thibault shrugged his strong shoulders. “I never thought that humans would improve in twenty years. I know full well that evolution is a slow process. I know that the slightest change, for humans as for all of nature, requires thousands of millions of years—but I don’t despair of humans, even on the brink of conflict. Besides which, the catastrophe hasn’t been unleashed yet.”
“What miracle are you expecting?” Pierre Contal interjected. “Can’t you see, in the two camps, the disarray of the diplomats and governments, the resignation of the crowds, the calculated madness of the press, the impatience of the armaments-manufacturers, the sly preparations that surpass one another in the dread of being surpassed? Don’t you sense that unbearable tension, that atmosphere of firedamp, at the mercy of the slightest flame? I repeat, my friend, that the catastrophe is inevitable...”
“War is never inevitable,” François cut in. “It’s precisely our sluggishness that renders it fatal. It’s necessary to fight it inch by inch, as one fights a fire, a flood or an epidemic. It’s necessary to bar the road to it until the last moment, by any means possible. As for me, I’m ready for it...”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“I have a meeting with Arnage. I’m due to see him in an hour. He’s in the government. At Briolle, we were good neighbors. I have some influence over him. He’ll tell me what the people who matter are planning...”
“But those wretches don’t know anything. They only have official information. They’ll be carried away by the hurricane, like dead leaves.”
“So I’ll only interrogate Arnage as a matter of conscience. What I expect from him, primarily, is that he’ll give me complete freedom to talk to the microphone.”
“What? You want to talk?”
“This very evening. The professional orators have had their turn. It’s now that of the men of action, who, by their endeavors, have truly served the cause. Their achievements will give weight to their words. They’re the ones who’ll make the language of reason heard.”
“Too late—no one’s listening any longer.”
“Well,” said François Thibault, forcefully, “I won’t abandon the game. I’m going to play my last card.”
“What card?”
“I’ll tell you later...” He interrupted himself. His powerful and benevolent features brightened. His son Claude had emerged from the Laboratory and was coming toward them. He had his father’s tall stature, the same thick hair, like the edge of a forest, the same blue eyes, soft and clear, but he had youthful slimness, a slender figure and a tight abdomen. His calm gestures had the exquisite grace that athletes acquire in slow-motion films.
Claude worked with his father at the Bellevue Centre for Studies in Physics, where the Starter had been born twenty years before. That communal labor was very welcome to François Thibault. It compensated for the absence of his daughter Lise, who, having married an American, now lived in the United States. In addition, at twenty-three, the boy showed signs of an astonishing talent for discovery. His work on the electrification of air promised prodigies.
The time was long past when, in that same spot, François had held three-year-old Claude in his arms and jokingly pretended to explain the changes that the Starter would bring to the physiognomy of Paris. Already, some of those new features had appeared in reality. The city unfurled as far as the eye could see like a verdant park sown with villas. The sky was striated by swift airships, as numerous as flocks of swallows. And to think that over that animation, over that life, over that peace, the threat of death was hovering—the atmosphere of firedamp that Pierre Contal had mentioned. No, no, it wasn’t possible. The firedamp would not ignite. He would not permit that to happen...
He questioned his son enthusiastically: “Well, you’ve made your telephone calls?”
“Yes, Papa,” Claude replied, like a good little boy.
“Tomsk, Tokyo, Ottawa?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Your airmails have arrived?”
“Yes, Papa.”
Then François Thibault turned to Pierre Contal and rubbed his powerful hands. “Come on—the city isn’t at war yet...”
Chapter III
(Tuesday)
The beautiful May dusk was falling over the main square in Briolle. Perhaps it would be the last evening of peace for the little town. The chestnut-trees on the esplanade, whose flowers were still impregnated with brightness, shone for a moment longer in the twilight, like giant candlesticks, Christmas trees strayed into spring. Then they went out.
Noblemain lingered on the threshold of his garage, under the lamp suspended from the lintel. The raw light fell in a flood over his luxuriant curly hair, his powerful shoulders and vast paunch. There was perhaps no one in Briolle more popular than that plump, eloquent, generous, helpful and plain-speaking man, with the honest face. He was also r
eputed to be highly skilled in his trade. In spite of his obesity, he knew how to roll briskly under a chassis. At the end of his muscular arms there were precise and delicate hands—the hands of a surgeon.
Noblemain was waiting for nightfall. All the shops clustered around the square had been shut for some time. Only the café of the Hôtel Moderne was still illuminated, but its last regulars were coming out. And while their footsteps echoed in the empty streets, the façade went dark. Then the garage-owner put out the lamp over his door and set off slowly beneath the chestnut trees, in the opaque shadows.
He was genuinely generous by nature; he was impulsively drawn toward misfortune and against injustice—but he suffered from a secret vice: envy. The happiness of others distressed him. If he learned of a stroke of good luck it dug into the fat man like a needle into a pincushion. Even when he thought he had forgotten it, he still suffered from it. He asked himself: “Why am I sad? What’s bothering me?” He searched—and remembered that the pharmacist had received an award, or that the bookseller’s son had passed his baccalaureate, or even that a postman a hundred leagues away had won a million in the lottery—for local gossip and reading the newspapers had the same effect on him.
He envied good luck even in the form of merit. To have merit is still a kind of luck. Every success brought him distress—even that of an actor in the cinema, a singer, a gymnast or a clown. He even envied the talents of which he was scornful.
But the most atrocious things about that unfortunate man was that he had to slake his rancor. He relieved it basely. By night, he wandered around town. Sometimes he went as far as the neighboring vineyards, where the citizens possessed little bottle-taps. Making sure that he was alone, he would slip a folded sheet of paper into a letter-box, or write three lines in pencil on a door. It was always some perfidious slander. Was it true? Was it false? It mattered little to the envious fat man. The essential thing, for him, was to pour his poison. He had, for a time, vented his spleen, purged his bile.
Noblemain advanced slowly through the trees. In addition to the closed shutters, a few windows were still illuminated. He soon identified them, for he knew that square intimately, where the life of Briolle was concentrated, and on the edge of which he dwelt. He judged his neighbors according to his dual nature, alternately compassionate and jealous. He sympathized with those he did not envy. He knew their worries and their dreams, and also their rivalries, their amours, their friendships, their jealousies, their resentments—all the passions that intersected between the four faces of the square, bumping into one another like fish in a pond.
One the first floor of the Hôtel-de-Ville, an open window permitted a glimpse of a ceiling illuminated by a roseate glow. Mademoiselle Surène was still at work. Although she was not yet thirty, the secretary of the Mairie was the real sovereign of the town; she ruled her administrators with a rod of iron. Harsh and bitter, she rebuked them, molested them, and treated them as intruders from behind her desk. She was certainly not unaware of any of the regulations, but she applied them with an inhuman rigor. People trembled at the thought of confronting her. Her injurious manners contrasted with her beauty, for she had soft and delicate features, and large, slightly-veiled eyes, which always seemed to be dreaming behind their tender lids.
Noblemain felt an indulgence toward Jeanne Surène. Perhaps she was avenging herself on the public for private disappointments. She was certainly in love with the mayor, the opulent Marigot, and he found her to his taste. They liked one another; their conversations, longer than the interests of the town necessitated, testified to that. But she was not a girl to give herself away, and he was not a man to marry beneath himself. The idyll seemed hopeless.
A weak light was discernible behind the mayor’s closed shutters. It was not evidence of his presence. He left a night-light on all night to inform burglars that the house was occupied. The precaution was wise, for Marigot sometimes kept large sums of money at home. It was said that the cunning rounding out of the fortune he had obtained by heritage was not only assisted by his work as a stockbroker but by loans and commissions.
Even though he had no luxurious tastes, Noblemain envied the rich ferociously. But he did not pause on that threshold; tonight, it was not for the mayor that his venom was reserved.
The transom of Truchard’s shop cut out a rectangle of electric blue light in the darkness. Undoubtedly, in spite of the late hour, Truchard was lovingly manning one of these “talking and seeing” machines in which he dealt, which bore the mark of his genius, but from which he always hesitated over separating himself when the time came to sell them. His machines were so sought-after that he could not satisfy the demand, and yet, he was heading for ruination. That was because his wife’s health cost him dear; an inexplicable illness was drying her up like an autumn leaf. To save her, he had called upon the aid of everyone from great pontiffs to charlatans. He had tried all the cures: spas, the sea, the sun, altitude, electricity. Remedies and consultations emptied his purse without bringing relief to his wife.
His son Emile ought to have been helping him, but the boy, twenty years old, led a mysterious and incoherent life. He stayed in Paris for weeks on end, and then reappeared in Briolle. At six o’clock, when the regulars came to Truchard’s to listen to the latest news and watch the latest projections transmitted by wireless, he could be seen in a corner of the shop, slumped in a chair, his expression dark, gazing into infinity. It was said that he was affiliated to secret societies, that he was involved in obscure conspiracies. In sum, he was no help to his father.
Oh, that one Noblemain pitied with all his heart. How many times, recently, he had furnished him with labor and parts gratuitously, and even slipped him small sums of money. Vain bounty. The poor fellow was deep in debt. His creditors, alarmed by the rumors of war, were going to press him, make him go bankrupt. He was doomed.
Noblemain had reached the extremity of the square opposite his garage. Here there was more light, and only one shadow, one total solitude. That was the corner of the privileged, of the elect, of those who not only had wealth, like Marigot, but also renown or power.
At the back of a garden, to the left, stood the Thibault house. For centuries, the Thibaults had been the lords of the vine—and their dynasty had ended with that François Thibault, whose celebrity surpassed in history those of Pasteurs, Edisons and Einsteins. After his death, a marble plaque on one of the pillars of the gate would identify the house where he was born to passersby. His statue would surely be erected in the center of the square one day—and Noblemain suffered from that glory; it oppressed him; it crushed him as if he could feel the weight of the bronze monument on his shoulders.
To the right, there was a little door discreetly framed in the wall of the park. It permitted the inhabitants of the château direct access to the square. For ten years that estate had belonged to the Arnages. Noblemain hated Pierre Arnage. He detested not only his free and easy, impertinent way of turning on his heel, of sketching protective salutations with his hand. He took umbrage above all at the importance that little man had acquired in the State, the prestige that bowed heads, flattening the crowd in front of him.
But he was about to be shown that he was just a poor human being, as vulnerable as the rest. Why the devil did that Monsieur have a chauffeur? One can find out anything from a chauffeur, especially when one knows how to inspire confidence in him by means of cordiality, good humor and an honest face. The man who drives a closed vehicle hears everything that is said, and sees everything that is happening behind him in his rear-view mirror. Sometimes, he finds a forgotten letter in a glove compartment. No matter how little natural malice he has, he is the ideal informer.
Now, at the end of that afternoon, Jérôme, Arnage’s chauffeur, had spent some time with the garage-owner. That very morning, he had been obliged to drive his boss to Paris, where he had been abruptly summoned to a meeting of the Council. During the long wait in the courtyard of the Élysée, he had arranged the papers that the Minister
, doubtless troubled by events, had left in disorder. He had even scanned them. A certain letter, sent from Geneva, had astounded the worthy fellow. That comedy of love, so many of whose scenes had been played behind his back for two years, was definitely turning into a drama...
Noblemain stooped in front of the little door. He melted into the shadows. With the gesture of a stage magician, he took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. It comprised a few lines addressed to Madame Arnage, produced on a typewriter. They began with a couplet:
The lady of the house regrets not having a child.
The man of the house would like to be able to say the same.
A few precise details followed.
It was mediocre and it was base—but when he had slipped his piece of paper into the letter-box, Noblemain felt relieved.
Chapter IV
(Wednesday)
“How calm it is!” said Jean Liseray. “How far away we are from everything. How good it is. Don’t you think so, Marilène?”
They were sitting side by side in the stern of a ferry-boat that was heading directly from Geneva to Lausanne. A light blonde mist, spangled with sunlight falling from the sky, was blurring the mountains around the lake. Nothing could be heard but the dull and muffled beating of paddle-wheels—the Lac Leman fleet still consisted of paddle-boats—and nothing was breathed in but the keen scent of the stirred-up water.
Marilène was dreaming. He took her by the arm and shook her cheerfully. “Well? Don’t you think so?”
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