Their quarrel, as some people called it, or, as others put it, the hatred between them, was well known, but a variety of theories existed as to its origin.
An explanation favored by young parliamentarians, those of the new generation, was that the Premier accused his former colleague of having been the mainspring of the plot that had kept him out of the Elysée.
In the first place, that credited Chalamont with an influence he was far from possessing; in the second place it revealed ignorance of the fact that for certain definite reasons it would have been political suicide for Chalamont to have taken such an attitude.
The Premier preferred not to dwell on that episode of his life, even though his motives had been very different from the ones attributed to him.
He had been at the apex of his glory in those days. His energy, his uncompromising spirit, and the measures he had relentlessly adopted had saved the country from the very brink of the abyss. His photograph, surmounted by a tricolor cockade or ribbon, was enshrined in the shop windows of every town in France, and allied nations were inviting him to triumphant receptions.
When the Head of the State died, he had been on the point of retiring from political life, in which he had spent long enough, and it was neither vanity nor ambition that had made him change his plans.
He had talked about it to Fumet one day later on, when he was dining with the Professor in his flat in the Avenue Friedland. He’d been in a good temper that evening, though still with the slightly crabby undertone that characterized his personality.
“You see, my dear Doctor, there is a fact which is overlooked not only by the public, but by those who shape public opinion, and it always bothers me when I read the life of a famous statesman. People talk about the leader’s interests, his pride or his ambition. What they forget, or refuse to see, is that beyond a certain stage, a certain level of success, a statesman is no longer himself, he becomes the prisoner of public events. Those aren’t quite the right words . . . ”
Fumet, who had a nimble mind and who was the doctor, and in most cases the personal friend, of everybody who was anybody in the country, was watching him through a cloud of cigar smoke.
“Let’s put it this way, that there comes a moment, a rung of the ladder, at which a man’s personal interests and ambitions become merged with those of his country.”
“Which is tantamount to saying that at a certain level treason, for example, becomes unthinkable?”
He had sat for a moment in silence. He would have liked to give a definite, clear-cut reply, and he followed up his thought as far as he could:
“Sheer treason, yes.”
“On condition, I take it, that the man is worthy of his office?”
At that moment he had thought of Chalamont, and answered:
“Yes.”
“And that isn’t always the case?”
“It always would be, if it were not for certain forms of cowardice which are to some extent collective, and above all, for certain kinds of indulgence.”
It was in this spirit that he had felt it his duty to stand for the Presidency of the Republic. Contrary to the rumors that had been spread, he had had no intention of changing the Constitution, or of reducing the prerogatives of the executive.
He was perhaps said to have brought a rather sterner spirit into politics, and those who knew him best had spoken of his secular Jansenism.
He hadn’t gone to Versailles himself. He had stayed in his flat on the Quai Malaquais, alone with Milleran, Chalamont’s successor.
At the luncheon that followed the opening meeting his chances were already being discounted, and with a few words over the telephone he had withdrawn from the contest.
Three weeks afterwards he left Paris, a voluntary exile, and though he kept his bachelor flat he hadn’t set foot in it since.
Had his departure made Chalamont think he could get forgiveness more easily, and that the road was at last open? The Deputy for the sixteenth arrondissement had put out feelers, and his way of doing it had been typical of the man. He hadn’t written, or come to Les Ebergues. The frontal attack was never in his line, and his schemes were usually very long-term affairs.
One morning the Premier had been surprised to see his son-inlaw, François Maurelle, arrive at Les Ebergues, by himself. He was a nonentity, colorless but conceited, who had been working as a surveyor somewhere outside Paris when Constance first met him.
Why had she chosen him? She wasn’t pretty, a bit on the masculine side, and her father had always regarded her with a curiosity in which there was more surprise than affection.
Maurelle’s own intentions had been clear; less than a year after the marriage he had informed his father-in-law that he intended to stand for Parliament.
He had been defeated twice: the first time in the Bouches-du-Rhône, where he had been ill-advised to stand at all; next time at Aurillac, where at a second attempt he had finally worn down the voters’ resistance.
The couple lived in the Boulevard Pasteur, in Paris, and spent their summer holidays in the Cantal.
He was a big, flabby chap, always dressed up to the nines, always with his hand held out and his lips ready to smile, the kind of fellow who won’t express his views even on the most harmless subject without first peering at you to try to guess what yours may be.
The Premier had done nothing to help him, merely staring at him as malevolently as if he’d been a slug in the salad.
“I was at Le Havre, after driving a friend to the boat, and I thought I’d just like to drop in on you . . . ”
“No.”
That was an unpopular trick of his. His “no” was celebrated, for he brought it out frequently, without anger or any other inflection. It wasn’t even a contradiction: it simply took note of an almost mathematical fact.
“I assure you, my dear Premier . . . ”
The old man waited with a faraway gaze.
“As a matter of fact . . . Though in any case I’d have come specially . . . It just so happens that the day before yesterday I was talking about my trip to a bunch in the Chamber . . . ”
“To whom?”
“Give me a little time . . . And please don’t think I’m trying to influence you. . . . ”
“That would be impossible.”
“I know. . . . ”
He smiled, and if one had slapped his face one’s fingers would perhaps have got stuck in those plump, flaccid cheeks.
“I suppose I ought not to have done it—I hope you don’t mind. . . . I only promised to give you the message. . . . It’s from somebody who used to work with you and who’s very much upset about a situation . . . ”
The Premier had picked up a book from the table and seemed to be absorbed in it, paying no further attention to his visitor.
“As you’ll have guessed, it’s Chalamont. . . . He doesn’t bear you any grudge, he realizes that you acted for the best, but to quote his own words he thinks he has perhaps been sufficiently punished. . . . He’s not a young man now. . . . He could aim very high if you . . . ”
The book snapped shut.
“Did he tell you about the luncheon at Melun?” asked the Premier as he rose to his feet.
“No. I know nothing about the business. I suppose he did something he shouldn’t, but it’s twenty years ago now . . . ”
“Sixteen.”
“Excuse me. It was before I was in the Chamber. Do you think I may tell him . . . ”
“That the answer is no. Good evening.”
With that, leaving his son-in-law stranded, he had gone into his bedroom and shut the door.
This time Chalamont wouldn’t rest content with sending him a fellow like Maurelle. This was not a question of some secondary post in a Cabinet. The stake now was the ambition he’d been pursuing all his life, the part he’d been rehearsing since he was twenty years old,
and which he’d at last been invited to play.
The years he had spent as the Premier’s secretary, or rather as his fervent disciple, his marriage to a rich woman, the humdrum work he had done for various committees, the elocution lessons he had taken, at the age of forty, with a teacher from the Conservatoire, and the three languages he had mastered, his tremendous erudition, his foreign travels, his entire life, private and social, all of this had been undertaken solely with a view to the high office to which he would one day accede.
And now, as he stood in the courtyard of the Elysée, under the rain that was making its cobbles glisten, someone had asked him an innocent yet terrible question:
“Aren’t you intending to spend the night on the road?”
The man who put that question had known that it would fling Chalamont into confusion.
At this moment the arbiter of his fate was an old man, cut off from the outside world even more completely than usual owing to an electric failure and a telephone breakdown, who sat in a Louis-Philippe armchair, with the sea beating against the cliff hard by and squalls of wind threatening, at ever-diminishing intervals, to carry away the roof of his house.
Twice, three times, the Premier muttered to himself:
“He won’t send anybody.”
Then, hesitantly:
“He’ll come. . . . ”
At once he would have liked to take back his words, for he was not so sure. At forty years old, or at fifty, he had still believed himself to be a good judge of men, and would pronounce his verdicts without hesitation or remorse. At the age of sixty he had already been less sure of himself, and now he did no more than grope in the dark for momentary truths.
The definite fact was that Chalamont had not refused the Head of State’s invitation. He had got himself a breathing space. But that couldn’t mean that he intended to defy the taboo laid on him by his former chief.
So he hadn’t lost hope. . . .
A cracking sound from outside the house—a branch being maltreated by the wind—roused a doubt, a suspicion, in his mind, and although he had already made his daily inspection he got up and walked through Milleran’s office, where the lamp threw a dim light into the two rooms beyond. He went to the fourth room, the farthest from his bedroom; here were the books he never opened, but kept because they were presentation copies with inscriptions, or because they were rare editions.
He was no bibliophile and had never bought a book for the sake of its binding or its rarity. He had never indulged in any passion, craze, or hobby, as the English call it, holding aloof from fishing, shooting, and all other sports, sailing and climbing, novels, paintings, and the theatre, and he had wanted to reserve his whole energy for his duties as a statesman, a little as Chalamont, his pupil, had tried to do.
He had not even wanted to be a father, his married life having lasted hardly three years, and though he had had mistresses he had only looked to them for relaxation, an interval of charm and elegance usually, with just a touch of affection, and had never repaid them with anything more than brief, condescending attention.
In this respect, too, legend was far from the truth, especially on the subject of Marthe de Créveaux, the Countess as she was called at the time, and as her faithful admirers continued to call her after her death.
Would he go on to the end of his notes, his genuine memoirs, which in a way were corrections, or would he leave behind him, uncaring, the image that had grown up by slow degrees and had so completely ousted the real person?
Before bending down to the lowest shelf he crossed the room and drew the curtain, for he never allowed the shutters to be closed until he was getting into bed. Once they were closed he felt as though he were shut up in a box, already removed from the world, and the irregular throbbing of his heart would sometimes seem to his ears like an alien sound. Once, in fact, he had listened more attentively, convinced that it had stopped beating.
The Roi Pausole was in its place, a very handsome edition illustrated by distinctly licentious drawings; the artist had sent him this inscribed copy when he was Premier. It was printed on handmade Japanese paper, in unbound sections, each followed by its set of loose-leaf illustrations, and protected by a gray cardboard case.
Would it occur to anyone, when he died, to leaf through his books, one by one, before sending them to the Salle Drouot to be scattered by auction?
His daughter, from what he knew of her, wouldn’t open them. Nor would her husband. They might perhaps keep a few as souvenirs, but certainly not this one, for the illustrations would shock them.
It was amusing to imagine the fate of documents of the greatest importance, carried by the chances of an auction into the hands of people who hadn’t even known they existed.
Not long ago he had moved Chalamont’s confession, written in a feverish hand on paper with the heading of the Prime Minister’s office, and had put it into this book by Pierre Louÿs, He had chosen that particular book because he had suddenly noted a resemblance between his one-time secretary, now that he’d put on flesh, and the King of Boeotia as depicted by the illustrator.
Several of his hiding places had been selected owing to equally unexpected comparisons, many of them humorous. As for the celebrated memoirs, they were not in the form of a connected manuscript, as everyone imagined; they were simply notes, explanations, and corrections, in tiny writing, in the margins of the three volumes of his official autobiography. Only instead of the French edition he had used the American one, which stood on the shelf side by side with the Japanese edition and some twenty other translations.
The paper he was looking for was in its place, in the second section, between pages 40 and 41, and the ink had had time to fade a bit.
“I, the undersigned, Philippe Chalamont . . . ”
Hearing a sound, he started and put the book back in place, as furtively as a child surprised in a prank. It was only Emile, turning down his bed for the night, and Emile could not see him from the bedroom.
Had the man been surprised at not finding him in his study, and had he glanced into Milleran’s office? If so, was he wondering what the Premier could possibly be up to in the semidarkness of the fourth room?
Had Chalamont tried to telephone from Paris? Had he set out, with his chauffeur? In that case, even with the bad weather, it would hardly take him more than three hours.
“Young Marie wants to know if she can go to the village.”
He replied indifferently:
“Let her go.”
“She says her mother’s going to have a baby during the night.”
Young Marie already had six or seven brothers and sisters, he wasn’t quite sure how many, and it didn’t matter anyhow. But an idea did occur to him.
“How will they let the doctor know?”
The nearest doctor was at Etretat, and it would not be possible to telephone to him.
“It’s not the doctor who’s delivering her, it’s old Babette. . . . ”
He didn’t ask who Babette was. He’d only meant to offer the car. But if they didn’t need it . . .
“Will you be going to bed as usual?”
“Yes, at ten o’clock.” He had no reason for making any change in the pattern of his life. He invariably went to bed at ten o’clock, whether tired or not, and invariably got up, winter and summer alike, at half past five in the morning.
The only member of the household who’d protested against this timetable had been young Marie, although before coming to work for him she’d been a farm-hand and used to get up at four to milk the cows.
“Shall I make up the fire?”
The Premier was edgy, impatient, and this made him angry with himself, for he considered it humiliating to be affected, however slightly, by other people’s actions or opinions.
If at the age of eighty-two he still was not secure from outside influences, what hope was there that he eve
r would be?
This reminded him, for a second, of the death of one of his friends, also an ex-Premier, the most ferocious anticlerical of the Third Republic, who to everyone’s astonishment had sent for a priest at the last moment. . . .
He sat down in his usual place and opened Sully’s memoirs, while Emile went back to the kitchen, whence he would return in due course to put him to bed.
He didn’t read, however. He felt obliged to run over the Chalamont business again, as though searching his own conscience. He always thought of that chapter as entitled “the luncheon at Melun,” and there were at least three people, apart from himself, for whom those words had the same sinister ring.
It had happened in June. The weather was bright and hot. Cars were rushing out of Paris, three abreast, toward the Forest of Fontainebleau. The Parisians were off for a day in the country, all unaware of the drama in progress, or else telling themselves, out of habit or from laziness, that those whom they had elected for the purpose would bring it safely to an end.
The financial crisis was probably the blackest the country had been through since the assignats of the Revolution. Every expedient had been attempted and they had gone almost hat in hand to beg the help of foreign governments. Every day the country was being drained of its substance, like a body bleeding to death, as the newspapers put it, and the outlook could hardly have been gloomier.
Three weeks earlier the Chamber had granted full powers to the government, after a stormy and inglorious night sitting. Every morning since then the papers had been asking:
“How are they going to use them?”
The Governor of the Bank of France was sending hourly messages, each more alarming than the last. Ascain, the Finance Minister, who had known, when he accepted that office, that it would bring him nothing but unpopularity and might mean the end of his political career, was conferring every morning with the Premier.
After the disastrous experiments made by previous governments, which had lived from day to day, robbing Peter to pay Paul, the only solution was a large-scale devaluation. And even that, if it were to be effective, must happen at the right moment, abruptly and unexpectedly enough to prevent speculation.
The President Page 6