by Michel Déon
‘What are you looking at?’ Madeleine asked, curious at his sudden silence.
‘Julius, in a mirror.’
She clasped her hands.
‘I daren’t do anything without him,’ she said, sighing.
Her immaculately made-up face betrayed a moment’s weariness. Her easy, sheltered life had relaxed her. The resurgence of problems hollowed her features, emphasising a dark shadow under her eyes.
‘Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I tell myself it’s not real and that if I pinch myself the dream will evaporate,’ she added.
With a gesture she took in her thirty or so guests, who in truth cared little for their hostess and spoke a language that was still largely foreign to her, though she tried valiantly to understand them. Yet she clung to them, for they symbolised her social rise. The dry pop of a champagne cork, eased out by the butler’s fingers, attracted attention. Two couples rushed to the buffet, jostling Madeleine, as indifferent to the mistress of the house as if she had been the lavatory attendant.
‘Nelly didn’t come,’ Madeleine said awkwardly.
Generously he lied.
‘She’s working tonight.’
‘Well, of course, that’s more important than anything … What’s she performing?’
‘Musset.’
Madeleine was not very sure whether Musset was a play or an author. She made a note to ask Blanche next day and assumed a knowing and admiring expression.
‘Are you and she still getting on?’
‘Yes, very well.’
He pictured Nelly in a restaurant on Rue de Beaujolais, for that was where she was, opposite Jérôme Callot who had managed to get away to see her for an evening. It was good that she had found an opportunity to be alone with her ham of a co-star and to see him in real life, away from the theatre, in his tight-fitting suburban clothes. She needed to be disappointed. She would be. Afterwards everything would be better.
‘I invited her,’ Madeleine went on. ‘Despite Blanche. Blanche thinks I mix anybody and everybody. It’s true that Nelly’s not always easy. She says quite impossible things. People get very annoyed. A month ago she took out General Köschel’s monocle and pretended to try it out, you know …’
‘In front or behind?’ Jean asked mechanically.
‘In front. She claimed her “brown eye” was short-sighted.’
Jean laughed. General Köschel was considered an utter fool, and an unpleasant fool to boot. Nelly’s aim was good. Nothing scared her.
‘It’s like Marceline,’ Madeleine added, enjoying a chance to confide. ‘I like her. She always amuses people, and Julius and Rudolf both say they never get bored when she’s here. For me it’s different: I don’t laugh at the strange things she says. I’d still be saying those things myself if I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet Julius. The truth is, I know all that too well … Oh, I don’t mean I worked like that … far from it … Anyway, you know all that … you! It’s impossible to imagine her as anything other than a madam. It’s written all over her red face. But she’s good-hearted and innocent, so innocent she’s like putty in Constantin’s hands.’
Julius released Palfy, who was left alone in the middle of the drawing room. He turned round, caught sight of Jean and Madeleine, and winked at Jean. Polo came up to him, frowning.
‘That Polo person is vile,’ Jean said.
‘Yes, that’s what I think, and I don’t know why.’
‘He’d sell his mother.’
‘Julius says he’s very intelligent.’
‘Success can turn the lowest of the low into a superior being.’
‘Do you think so?’
Jean sensed that these people intimidated Madeleine and that she would have given anything to send her guests away and stay on her own with Julius that evening, by their radio, listening to music. Julius genuinely loved music. As a young man he had played the organ. What had life made of this enthusiastic player of Bach? A conqueror, a businessman, and the beloved lover of a woman who had led the hard life of the street. Madeleine made Jean’s heart ache when he glimpsed her fear that she was not what Julius dreamt of. She had by no means forgotten the past and quaked at the thought of her salvation being taken away from her. It was a terror and it paralysed her. Her second destiny was imperfect, for it was always overshadowed by her first. She could not get used to it. Yet no one had had the nerve to remind her of it. Besides, who, apart from Jean and Palfy, knew? No one here, not this evening.
Fortunately Blanche is there to watch over her. She corrects her blunders, points out the way forward. She may have spoilt her own life, but she will make sure Madeleine succeeds, and beyond her expectations. It is her cherished ambition. At this sort of evening she is like a chair attendant in the park: invisible and swooping down on the prey that fortune offers her. She has just noticed that Madeleine and Jean are having a private conversation. She whispers in Madeleine’s ear, ‘The lady of the house belongs to all her guests.’
Madeleine follows her meekly, ready to obey. She has not offered to help Jean, and he has not insisted. Let us watch her once more as she joins the prefect of police, who is getting bored talking to a German official with mediocre French. Her dressmakers and new young hairdresser (sought-after throughout Paris) have fashioned a new woman with such skill she cannot be taken for anything other than a lady. And as only appearances matter, she is actually in the process of becoming one, of erasing her past. We have mentioned that she was accomplishing her second destiny. She has a third she is not expecting, of which she remains unaware. As we shall not see her again, better to speak of it at once and salute this modest woman to whom Palfy gave her start in life, who has no other ambition than to feel secure, and whom Blanche will push to become what she herself can never be. In fact, Madeleine is to carry on living happy and carefree with Julius until that dawn of 21 July 1944, when the SS raided their apartment in Avenue Foch. The previous day, von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life had failed. The repression had begun. Julius, who had played the Wehrmacht card, was in the first wave. He was shot the same afternoon. Madeleine shut up the apartment, leaving it in the butler’s care, and fled to Montfort-l’Amaury and the house Julius had bought for her. Let us remember the dates, which are important: the Allies are still in Normandy but Paris’s liberation is not far off. The German army is packing up. Polo has already left for Spain with his treasures; Palfy is married and living in Switzerland, free from want; Rudolf von Rocroy, posted to the front, has managed to get himself rapidly taken prisoner by the British. One society is scattering, and a new one has yet to take its place. Madeleine, who in her innocence has committed to neither side, awaits in starry-eyed trepidation the arrival of the officers in crepe soles. One of these, a major commanding a parachutists’ unit, purposely seeks her out to inform her that he is the owner of the Avenue Foch apartment. He is deeply sorry to hear of the death of Julius, his friend of pre-war days, and reassured to know that nothing has been stolen. The only damage that occurred was when the SS raided the apartment and stupidly broke a Chinese vase.
‘It’s the price of war,’ he says. ‘I should like you always to consider that apartment your own. Julius was my business partner. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have nothing left. Whenever you come to Paris, you must make yourself at home.’
Madeleine does not hesitate. Major Bernstein is a gallant officer. So gallant that she marries him, partly to be back among the same servants, rather more in order to survive, because Julius had no time to leave her anything. She can return to Paris, head held high, under her new name. Her third act has begun, leaving her former life, her depressing Montmartre existence, far behind in the past. Now, when she talks about her memories, she feels no need to delve into her Pigalle period. She has another past to replace it with, that of her Avenue Foch years with Julius, her musical evenings among friends. At the same time she is able to negotiate the ordeal of the purges unscathed. Who would think of making trouble for Madame Bernstein, whose husband
is fighting at Bastogne with his regiment of parachutists? Major Bernstein is, in short, an ideal husband, so undemanding in every way that he dies discreetly from a bullet in his abdomen in February 1945, leaving Madeleine a widow, Madame Bernstein, and in possession of a fortune large enough for her to live without cares from that day forward. In truth she would happily have retired to the countryside, the dream of city dwellers who have pounded the streets in their younger years, but Blanche is there, pushing her to become the muse of a small artistic clique. And so Blanche fulfils herself through another woman whom fortune has smiled on more broadly than her. Madeleine will enjoy an affair more intellectual than physical with a poet who makes frequent retreats to Solesmes. From it she will gain a discreet and fashionable glory. Ten years later, her Tuesdays will be the most sought-after in Paris. Every August she will sponsor an annual music festival in an ancient abbey. Age will suit her very well, and in her sixties she will take to wearing a velvet choker that hides the wrinkles on her neck. Need we add that Blanche will not leave her, hating her a little more each year and concealing it very well, wounded in her self-esteem to the point of feeling poisoned, to see Madeleine succeed where she herself has failed …? Madeleine will only become aware of Blanche’s hatred in the last moments of her life, laid low by a fatal bout of influenza in 1970, when Blanche tears from her ring finger a large emerald given to her by Major Bernstein on the last night of his final leave. She sees Blanche’s mad stare in a face disfigured by greed and a haste to see her benefactress dead and buried. La Garenne had been right to mistreat his mistress and demand lewd favours from her. He would have made her a saint. Freed from his clutches, she stole from Madeleine, blighted her final moments with hatred, and discovered that when she in turn wanted to invite artists and writers to her own Tuesdays, not one of them was at all interested in her.
We have finished with Madeleine and Blanche. They have just spoken to Jean for the last time, and now he is aware of exactly how alone and ignored he is in this gathering. The author would like to add a footnote here. It may be, in truth, that we have shown a Jean too composed and too sure of himself. Let us not forget that he is only twenty-two and that he has already had his fair share of struggles, been aided by fortune, harmed by misfortune. He is beginning to form a more accurate idea of the world confronting him, and in which he must, at this moment, survive. He has responded to Julius’s judgement on him with impudence, but impudence cannot hide an intelligent anxiety about his fate. His throat is tight. He has never found himself in such a tight spot, and is thinking about everything that will soon change around him, about Claude whom he will be forced to abandon, about Nelly whom he will not be able to see again, at the same time as scanning the room for the man who is responsible here for carrying out Julius’s orders. We shall add that he has no regrets. It was a fine adventure, and he has savoured the trips to Portugal, even Urbano’s unexpected friendship. But everything is crumbling: the way to Claude is barred to him, Nelly at this precise moment is perhaps already in bed with her fool, and he will never see the money he carefully deposited in a secret account in Lisbon.
He drank several glasses of champagne and thought of Antoine du Courseau and their last night before abandoning La Sauveté to the Longuets. Palfy touched his elbow.
‘Are you dreaming?’
‘I’m afraid my goose is cooked.’
‘Marceline will be here in a minute. I’ve just telephoned her.’
‘Then what?’
‘We’ve confected a little stratagem. Be patient. Talk to someone. Julius is watching you.’
Palfy left him. The only person Jean felt like talking to was the butler, the one person worthy of the occasion, but the butler would not compromise himself by mixing with the guests. Polo walked over and collected two glasses.
‘So, Monsieur Arnaud, you look rather out of sorts.’
He rolled his ‘r’s. It was an accent he claimed to have acquired as a boy, in his primary school in the Auvergne. He even occasionally came out with a ‘Fouchtra!’ which he felt sounded very local, but which left any listener who really came from the Auvergne baffled.
‘No, I feel excellent, thank you. I just know hardly anybody here.’
‘Ah, the who’s who of Paris! So difficult to break into!’
‘Even more so if you can’t really be bothered.’
Polo looked surprised. Since his ascent he felt at ease everywhere. This young man looked unconcerned.
‘I’m delighted to have bumped into you – I wanted to give my wife a little painting. A very little one. On canvas. That you can roll up. I’ll drop into your gallery tomorrow. I’m sure you can find something suitable for me. And don’t fleece me on the price; I’m a friend of Julius’s and Constantin’s …’
He moved away, smiling, happy to have revived the young man’s gloomy spirits with the thought of a painting. A very small painting that could be rolled up and slipped in a handbag for a journey to Switzerland or Spain. There was a stir: Marceline was entering the drawing room, a head taller than the women and almost all the men. In recent weeks she had filled out and looked practically voluptuous in a blue satin dress, in her hand a very large bag that she left on an armchair before walking over to Madeleine and saying in a voice both earnest and joyful the phrase Palfy had taught her and that people now expected from her, while restraining themselves from giggling: ‘My own two in your dear ones,’ and shaking both hands as she did so, surprising those who did not know her and were astonished by this impulsive irruption of a she-bull in a china shop. Jean did not smile. He had a soft spot for the ridiculous Marceline, so at ease with herself. After gushing greetings to Madeleine and others she moved in his direction, picking up a glass of champagne from the butler on the way. She smelt strongly of a cheap perfume that Palfy had identified as patchouli. Crossing the drawing room, she ignored Blanche, who was looking daggers at her. From her private convictions Madame Michette derived a poise that nothing could alter. Her activity, hilarious to start with, then by chance branching into genuine clandestine undertakings, had developed and magnified her authority. In all innocence she had believed she was working for Palfy from the moment she had informed him of her desire to serve, and it had not occurred to her for a second that he might have launched her on an unsuspecting Paris as a joke. That evening she was about to play her most important role: to extricate Jean from this trap, to spirit him away from Julius’s agents.
‘I’m getting you out of here, young man,’ she said, speaking out of the side of her mouth, as if the slightest word might be read on her lips and give them away.
‘How?’
‘Go into the hall, discreetly. I’ll be in Madeleine’s bedroom. But quickly. There’s no time to lose.’
He would have believed anyone at that moment. He slipped out without being seen and found Marceline in the bedroom. She was already undressing. She was wearing two dresses, one on top of the other, two pairs of stockings, two necklaces.
‘Put these on!’ she ordered.
In her bag she had a pair of high heels and a floppy hat.
‘I’ll never be able to walk in these.’
‘I’ll tell them you’re drunk.’
He did as he was told, hid his suit in Madeleine’s wardrobe, and let Marceline apply lipstick and eye shadow.
‘For once it’s useful to be a pretty boy,’ she said.
Looking at himself in Madeleine’s mirror, he felt he looked grotesque, no better than a clown.
‘I shan’t fool anyone.’
She placed a wig on his head and the floppy hat. She stood back.
‘Perfect!’ she announced. ‘Time to slip away.’
She took his arm, supporting him as if he were a tipsy girl, and they reached the street door. There were cars lined up along the pavement. In one of them sat four men in black. The driver turned to look at them, but Avenue Foch was deep in shadow and he saw only two women built like prizefighters.
‘Female wrestlers,’ he said to his
companions, whose laughter wounded Marceline enough for her to hesitate, on the point of turning round and slapping the man. Her sense of duty won out. She shrugged, pulling Jean along with her. His ankles were buckling. They crossed the Étoile and turned into Rue Troyon. Two prostitutes stationed outside a dingy hotel sniggered.
‘Look at the queens!’
Marceline retorted with an obscenity so vulgar that the girls, awestruck, were silenced.
They walked for five minutes more, until they arrived at a barred gate opening onto a private path that led to small ivy-covered houses like the one where Claude’s mother lived. Marceline knew the way. In the darkness she located a well-concealed entrance. She knocked three times and the door was opened by a man in braces, his feet in worn slippers. A dim light lit a table at which a woman put down her crochet work to observe them.
‘He’s a friend,’ Marceline said. ‘He needs a quiet place for the night to sort out his next move.’
‘Has she got coupons?’ asked the woman.
The man dismissed the ill-mannered question with a gesture.
‘I said a man friend,’ Madeleine corrected her, lifting off Jean’s hat and wig.
Their host burst out laughing.
‘Well, well, well!’
Marceline modestly acknowledged her success. Jean stood, embarrassed and conscious of how ridiculous he looked.
‘He can sleep in the storeroom back there,’ the woman said, getting to her feet with difficulty, her legs swollen by poor circulation.
‘We’ll make a bed up for him. Has he eaten?’
She could not bring herself to address him directly.
‘Yes,’ Jean said, ‘thank you. Foie gras and cold veal. But I’ve been drinking champagne so I’m a bit thirsty.’
‘We only have water.’
‘There’s nothing better.’