Hope, too, could be destabilizing. Its trust in the power of human reason led to high-handedness. Look how parliament had banished God from the schools of France in just a few years! ‘Laicizing’! At the same time – a mean turn of the knife – it had made attendance obligatory! This in a country which had sixty-four million Catholics and hardly two million dissidents! Mad, thought Belcastel. Parliament, in the name of progress, was trampling the sensibilities of families who saw the new measures as a theft of their children’s souls. He had seen grown men shed tears of rage over this: fathers offended in their natural prerogatives, sons offended by the offence to their fathers. They felt martyred and murderous, and so did the nervously adamant deputies.
Faith and hope had turned poisonous. Charity was the rare, good virtue and, to the monsignor’s surprise, Dr Blanche had it.
To his further surprise, Belcastel relished his retreat from the irksome angers outside. It was not a total retreat of course. People visited.
The maison de santé was run as a blend of nursing home and private house. Patients, when well enough, ate with distinguished guests, and there were some whose status shuttled between the two. It was a fashionable place. Even during Belcastel’s stay, famous wits had come to dine, exchanging banter with the sick, and he had seen the verbal fireworks which can precede breakdowns dazzle visitors. This phenomenon, Dr Blanche explained, was called ‘the fastigium’. The coherence of lunatics’ visions could be startling.
The doctor had a wide circle of well-connected friends, and so had his son, Jacques-Emile, a successful painter, who had a studio in the grounds. So all sorts of people visited. Gentle and simple. When not at meals, the monsignor avoided them all. He arranged for his own guests to call in the afternoon, considering them to be a liability and best kept out of sight.
Ironically, he, the asylum inmate, was level-headed, while his visitors, many of them scions of inbred families, cherished hopes as obsolete as the beasts on their escutcheons. Hopes he could handle. What worried him were plots. Taking the blame for these had landed him in here, but when he complained, the plotters’ peace-offering was to elect him to be the spider at the heart of yet another web of madcap schemes.
‘Mad as hares,’ was what he thought of them all! ‘Dreamers and botchers to a man! Brave, yes, gallant, yes, but, oh dear! Tous des exaltés! Oh Lord,’ he prayed, when he had the heart to do so, ‘deliver me from loyalty to men of too much faith.’
Yet how could he refuse them? If they went elsewhere for advice, who knew what harm might be done? Just now, while laying out the ritual objects he kept for visits, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. As he unwound its white wrapping from the portrait of the uncrowned King Henry V of France, alias the comte de Chambord, now dead these dozen years, he sighed for the meanings of white flags. The comte’s refusal to adulterate his notion of himself as God’s appointed and swap his royal white flag for the tricolour had driven supporters crazy. In the secrecy of their dreams and in safe company they might insult the flag – ‘drapeau de mon cul’ – threaten to wipe themselves on it and rage at their leader’s obstinacy. Publicly, they brought their keenest eloquence to the attempt to make him budge. ‘For your own sake, Sire,’ they had pleaded, ‘for your followers’ sake, for France and for the Church, will you not sacrifice the symbol and grasp the reality? To win votes? To take power?’ The word intoxicated them. ‘Power,’ they cajoled repetitively while imploring him to show some flexibility. ‘Wisdom! Statesmanship! Remember your great predecessor and namesake, Henry IV! Was he wrong to compromise? He wasn’t, was he? So follow his example! Help God to help us!’ But no. He wouldn’t – and lost at the ballot box. He, as he saw it, owed it to God not to alter one tittle of his prerogatives and was as ramrod stiff as – well, as today’s visitor. Recalled to what was going on at this very moment outside the asylum gate, Belcastel laughed at the neatness with which it summed up his dilemma.
‘With all due respect to the First Commandment,’ he told himself, ‘it is an omen!’
What had happened so far was this. His visitor, the vicomte de Sauvigny, had tried to climb the tall asylum gate and got stuck. It was a handsome, old, wrought-iron gate made up of curls and coils, and the toe of the vicomte’s boot had got caught in one of them. The foot inside this boot was on the outside of the gate, and by putting his weight on it, the vicomte had managed with some difficulty – he was forty-two and stiffer than he had supposed – to swing his other leg over the top, turn it and find a toe-hold on the inside. His two feet were now pointing in opposite directions, but he could liberate neither. He hadn’t the strength to swing back the foremost one, and his hind leg was held firmly in the coil of an iron curlicue. Possibly his enraged exertions had caused it to swell.
‘Will you come out, Monseigneur?’ The man who had come to report on all this asked Belcastel. ‘To calm him down?’
‘Yes, yes, of course I will!’
Belcastel had immediately gone to look for his cape. Of course he’d come! The words ‘calm’ and ‘down’ were worrying. Things could turn nasty. Balm had better be poured! Head inside his opened wardrobe, he had begun poking speedily and impatiently through a smother of cassocks and batting away assaults by increasingly lively lengths of recalcitrant black wool. They all looked the same. Back and forth he went but, to his annoyance, failed to find the cape. Adam would know where it was, but where was Adam? Ah, he’d sent him away. Mm. Was that the cape? No. Belcastel’s irritable gesture sent something swinging, which returned and hit his nose rather hard. It was the sword which he had planned to lay casually on a side table. It was a ceremonial one which had been presented to his father in recognition of his gallantry at the battle of Castelfidardo. Fighting for the pope. ‘See,’ the sword was meant to have reminded the vicomte, ‘I, Belcastel, son of the hero of Castelfidardo, have every right to take issue with you. My loyalty is incontrovertible.’ In fact, of course, it was not – or rather, yes, it was, but subtlety, not swords, was Belcastel’s weapon. If the object of one’s loyalty were to split, what then? Just now there was a painful but vital matter to be addressed, which ... Never mind that. Find that cape! No point going out without it and getting pneumonia. Was his nose bleeding? God knew what was going on at the asylum gate. The monsignor was well aware how unbridled monarchist outbursts could be. Bad language would be the least of it. Seditious comments were likely, given the vicomte’s rheumatism and hot temper. Both had been contracted in 1870 when he had fought with the Papal Zouaves to save the pope’s territory from Garibaldi. They failed, of course! An utter débâcle! While the whole Catholic world watched! Defeat had rankled and left the vicomte thin-skinned. He wouldn’t relish being made to cool his heels outside an asylum since, as he frequently put it himself, he had suffered enough affronts in his life and ‘swallowed enough toads.’ He’d surely have made his seditious comments by now. Insulted the French Republic and the government of the day. Annoyed the servants. Embarrassed everyone.
‘Say you couldn’t find me,’ decided Belcastel. ‘ Say I’ve gone somewhere quiet to read my office.’ He closed the wardrobe door and picked up his missal. ‘By the time you say it, it will be true.’ No point, he thought, in losing face – in so far as he had any left to lose.
‘He’s in a right stew.’ The man had already explained that the vicomte had climbed the gate because the porter’s delay in opening it had kept his carriage waiting. ‘Would I be right in guessing,’ he asked, ‘that he’s a military gentleman? Used to being obeyed pronto? We thought as much! Very hot under the collar he got straight off. So you can imagine what he’s like now. The porter didn’t have the key because Monsieur le Directeur is keeping it himself. He wants to make sure that none of those newspaper fellows sneak in. We tried to explain this, but Monsieur le Vicomte thought we were defying him. He called us Republican scum.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘We can’t open it now anyway. Not while he’s stuck on top. Moving it will be a jerky business. The
ground’s hard, you see. Frozen hard, and he might slip and fall or end up hanging from one foot. Break a leg maybe.’ Did the man’s eye have a wistful glint? ‘And if one of us went up to try pulling his foot out, we might get a kick. Or get stuck ourselves. Do you see, Monseigneur?’
Belcastel did. ‘Ask the Irishman to deal with him,’ he advised. ‘Monsieur Gould. Tell him it’s a delicate matter and that I’d be grateful if he could help the vicomte to climb down.’
***
A question startled Adam.
‘Do you know what my name means?’
Reflections from the fire reddened Maupassant’s eyeballs, and if he had seen himself he might have screamed. His skin too was red. Adam wondered about sedation, though the patient hated it and had complained just now that the place was infested by insects armed with morphine syringes. A joke? Here in the asylum jokes rarely worked. There was no norm to bounce them off. Maybe the query about his name was a joke too?
As it happened a similar one had come up earlier in connection with the reprinting by this morning’s Figaro of one of Maupassant’s stories. It had been published for the first time seven years ago and was about a killer-demon called the Horla (hors-là?) whose name meant ‘out there’. But what did that signify? Coming from a monkish writer, it might have meant ‘the world’. Or ‘death’? Dr Blanche, though, had a more comforting suggestion. The Horla, he remembered, was the name of a gas balloon which the writer had paid for, named after his story and travelled in from Paris to the Belgian coast.
‘At a height of 8,000 metres. So “Horla” just meant “up in the air”. It was a publicity stunt, and Maupassant had come in for a lot of teasing. People said he was trying to raise his image!’
The reddened eyeballs were still expectantly fixed on Adam.
‘What does your name mean?’
‘Yes. “Mau” or “mal” means, of course, “pain” or “evil”. So Mal passant is sinister, don’t you think? A hard death perhaps? An evil passage? A bad passer-by.’
Adam managed to laugh. ‘Why not “a passing trouble”?’ he asked bracingly. ‘Something like a cold. Or a cold sore.’ ‘Keep the laugh going,’ he told himself and thought of the cold water one throws on hysterics.
‘And would you bet I’ll get over my passing ill?’
‘Why not? I’m no doctor, mind.’
‘But as a betting man?’
‘Yes.’
‘My brother died in a madhouse three years ago. Badly! Horribly! When I saw the name on his tomb stone: Maupassant ...’
‘Better not think of it. You’re wallowing ...’
‘What?’
‘In despair. They called it that in my seminary. Also “the sin against the light”: the unforgivable one.’ Adam shrugged. ‘They saw us as an army. Despair is desertion.’ I, he was thinking privately, did not despair. What I did was leave and lose all my friends. ‘Priests can be tough.’ For a moment his sadness was for himself, but he refused to indulge it. Perhaps he needed cold water thrown over him? He wished he could have supplied the man before him with even a false hope.
***
The vicomte’s niece had been waiting in the cold for what seemed an age outside the asylum gate. ‘Is anything happening’ she felt like asking the coachman. This would have been an oblique sort of protest, but she didn’t make it for she had been bred to show restraint, and, besides, it was clear that nothing was happening. Uncle Hubert had stepped out of the carriage, climbed the gate and got stuck. That was all. She might have giggled at his rashness if there had been anyone to giggle with her, Gisèle say, or some other friend from school. But she had seen none of them since her wedding, so she sat back in the shadows, tucked the rug around her knees and reflected on how, by rights, it should be her turn to be rash. Instead, here she was hiding in embarrassment while her uncle made an exhibition of himself and called people ‘Republican scum’. She had just heard him do this.
She was not yet twenty, and her husband, whom she scarcely knew, was off in darkest Africa, trying, poor lamb, to make their fortune, which he had better do fast because his family, like her own, was penniless. This was why she was now staying with her aunt and uncle.
‘Our friends’ Uncle Hubert liked to explain, ‘have been out of power for too long. Six decades!’ Poverty, he sometimes added, became a badge of honour when you saw how many had turned their coats and joined those who controlled patronage. ‘Poor France!’ he would exclaim, and shake his head. Danièle always imagined a soft-fleshed lady being martyred in some bloody way: la France.
‘I should have married a Republican,’ she would tease to cheer him. He liked to be teased. ‘Or a Bonapartist. Even an Orleanist would have more hopes.’
‘We are all Orleanists now,’ was Uncle Hubert’s stock reply. ‘Willy nilly! The Legitimists died out. Soon we may all have!’
Danièle wished she had brought her embroidery. Or a charcoal foot-warmer. Life was humdrum. She yearned for something unexpected – not Uncle Hubert’s sort of scrape but something tenderly frivolous and – yes – rash. Perhaps she was just missing her husband? The word pleased her: ‘husband’. It was still quite new. Unused. She had been married for well over a year now. But very little of that time had been spent with Philibert, whose letters from the Congo could have been from a stranger. She found it hard to reply.
‘His last letter,’ she had told her aunt, ‘says that cannibals break their victims’ legs several days before killing and eating them. It makes the flesh sweeter. They do the same thing with fowl.’
Her aunt crossed herself. She was a nun and had been granted leave by her convent to chaperone Danièle who might not otherwise be allowed to share a house with Uncle Hubert.
‘Don’t you miss your friends in the convent?’ Danièle had worried.
But her aunt said that looking after a vulnerable young woman was a corporal work of mercy; so, while engaged in it, she was, spiritually speaking, close to her sisters in Christ.
‘I don’t feel vulnerable,’ Danièle objected.
Her aunt agreed that she probably wasn’t, but said one must avoid giving scandal.
‘So it’s the scandalmongers who are vulnerable?’
‘Of course.’
***
‘Tell me about your monsignor,’ asked Maupassant. ‘That is a burn-scar on his cheek, isn’t it? He’s been through fire! Like the demon in one of my stories whose victim becomes so terrified that he is driven to trap him in his own house then burn it down. Naturally the demon escapes. Why do you look worried? I’m talking about a story.’ The patient’s tone was ostentatiously sane. A teasing gleam flickered across his features. ‘You don’t burn a demon, but the victim had lost his head.’ He cocked his own head sideways. ‘Perhaps you’ve read it?’
‘The Horla? I just did. I was thinking of it just now.’
‘I thought you might have. It was in this morning’s Figaro. I wrote it at a time when I could still control my demons.’ Smiling. This was a joke. ‘Perhaps your monsignor too is a demon and that’s why he didn’t burn, or only in one spot? You don’t know what to think, do you? You think I’m odd. What about him? Is he odder than I am?’
‘Who knows? He’s certainly more secretive. I’ve learned more about you in an hour than he let out in two years.’
‘So you are unable to tell me his story.’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Tell me something else then. Something to blot out what is in my head. What is the worst thing in yours, Gould?’ The patient’s smile had an airiness which might once have been second nature. Was he mimicking it now? Adam suspected that he was. Suave and amused, it might have been his drawing room smile. Quick and overly responsive, it conjured up alcoves and secrets. ‘Others’ troubles bring relief.’ Briefly the smile slipped, revealing that Maupassant was in the grip of some sort of pain. An intimate, inner one, Adam surmised, in some private part of himself. The slippage, though, was suspect for, after all, this man had been a notorious charmer. Maybe w
hat had softened women was that they had sensed that pain? Maybe he had learned to let them? Well, he wasn’t in control of it now. As he sat, his hands kept moving from hip to knee like trapped crabs: back and forth, hip, knee, hip, as though measuring the length of his thighs. His knees too jigged. You could feel the vibration. ‘The whole reading public knows my stories,’ he told Adam. ‘Tell me one of yours. Something private. Tell me about, oh, I don’t know ... your mother.’
‘My mother died when I was twelve. She wasn’t yet thirty.’
‘I’m sorry. Illness, was it? Or an accident?’
‘It may have been suicide. Actually, it must have been.’
‘Ah, I’ve been intrusive! Sorry! I really am. Oh lord! You mustn’t think of it, Gould. Think of ... Look, I’ll tell you a thing about my mother which I hate to tell. I’ve written about it, but that’s different. Putting things in a story makes them seem like – well, a story. They become easier to forget. Talking is harder, but here goes. When I was ten I saw my father beat her savagely. I saw him grab hold of her neck with one hand and hit her face with the other. With all his strength. Again and again! He seemed to have gone mad. Her hat fell off. Her hair fell around her. She raised her arms to defend herself, but couldn’t. And neither, to be sure, could I. There I was, ten or maybe less, maybe nine years old, watching my sweet, clever, elegant Mama be assaulted by my father. It made no sense. It was as if the world were coming to an end and normal expectancies had collapsed, but there we still were! What could I do? To whom could I turn? I screamed, but he paid no attention. I rushed out and hid in the garden. I spent the whole night there in a kind of agony. The next day – this was somehow worse and more baffling than the scene itself – they behaved just as they always did.’ The patient was panting. Saliva dripped from his chin. He didn’t wipe it. His head was like an outsize but shrivelled pomegranate, ridgy and crimson with dry, bald patches. ‘They went on in their ordinary way.’
Adam Gould Page 3