Adam Gould

by Julia O'Faolain

  Anxiously, Adam tried to fasten the casement but, before he could, a hand slid from behind him and pulled it open. ‘Wait!’ Madame d’Armaillé murmured in his ear. ‘He is talking about Mademoiselle Litzelmann. We may learn something of use to the poor creature.’

  She could not have understood. Just as well! But best close the window. A sheltered young woman of her sort would be appalled by what was likely to come next. ‘Smelly orifices’, Adam remembered with a shudder. He grasped the casement, but, when she held on, released it rather than wrestle with her. ‘You may be distressed,’ he warned. ‘He is delirious and apt to use coarse language.’

  ‘I am a married woman, Monsieur Gould.’

  ‘Exactly. I am sure your husband would not want ...’

  ‘Allow me to be the judge of that. My husband is in no way petty. He is a soldier. Fighting in the darkest wilds of Africa.’

  ‘Well, our wilds here are dark too!’ Adam was nettled by her assumption of superior – what? Knowledge? Worldliness? She couldn’t be more than eighteen.

  The sick man was shouting. ‘Three she spawned: Maupassant, Maupassant and Maupassant. Sounds like an undertakers’ firm, doesn’t it? Three guides to the evil passage! The sour and slippery way, haha! Sexual reproduction leads to death. If we never reproduced, there would be room for us all, and we could live for ever. But no! God wouldn’t like that. He enjoys slaughter! He breeds us for it! It’s why he hates us to idealize women and ...’

  Adam snapped the casement to. ‘You do not want to hear,’ he whispered firmly.

  Even now, however, the voice remained audible. ‘God,’ came its cry through the glass, ‘cares no more for the fate of his creation than would some mindless, great fish spawning worlds in space! He has forgotten about us, Baron. You do know that, don’t you?’

  Baron’s mumble did not reach the drawing room.

  ‘We’re nearing the end of our century! The end of our time! Doesn’t that frighten you? This is 1892!’

  Mumble.

  Straightening up, the patient turned a bleared face towards the house. His nose ran unchecked because of his fear that if he blew it his melting brain could fall through. A related dread was that the brain contained a salt-factory worked by flies! Managed perhaps by Beelzebub? A priest, Adam thought, might claim that sending these terrors was the creator’s way of calling back the lost lamb – or ‘ram’ as Guy had been respectfully nicknamed in deference to his well-attested sexual prowess.

  Poor wet-nosed ram! Caught now in a thicket of folly! Poor wounded bull!

  Wasn’t it likelier though that it was the writer who had chosen to summon the creator so as to turn him into a fictional character? This let him release rage at the way his shoddily created brain was letting him down. And putting God in his story gave it magnitude.

  ‘We’re his prey,’ came the shout. ‘What other explanation covers the way things are? Destruction delights him. That’s why he makes pregnant women puff up like frogs. Have you ever seen boys stick a straw into a frog and blow into it?’

  Madame d’Armaillé backed away from the window. ‘That poor woman is better off without him,’ she decided. ‘He’s horrible.’

  ‘But he sees his own horribleness! Most of us don’t.’ Adam’s vehemence embarrassed him. This was the first time he had been in a tête-à-tête with a lady. How pathetic for a man aged twenty-four! Guy, he thought, is my opposite, the side of me I’ve suppressed. And he remembered him looking in the mirror and saying that Adam had stolen his face.

  Madame d’Armaillé shrugged. It was less than a shrug, really. It was a movement so delicate that one could only admire its restraint. Adam, though, seeing it as a rejection, felt obliged to forge ahead and defend poor Guy whom he began to see as a representative of the male sex and so, ultimately, of himself. Something – the port perhaps? – had gone to his head. He pleaded: ‘A disillusioned romantic!’

  ‘Maybe. But horrible too.’

  ‘And yet,’ Adam was now in too deep to withdraw, ‘ I am told on all sides that he was delightful company in his time. And you’ve seen how Tassart worships him. They say no man is a hero to his valet, but Maupassant may be the exception. Maybe he was too sensitive?’

  Disdain congealed Madame d’Armaillé’s haughty face. Maddeningly, this hardness made her look even more classically lovely.

  Adam wished he had never begun to argue. ‘His late work,’ he told her meanly, ‘rages against women’s beauty. He came to see it as one of God’s sinister tricks.’

  ‘So he is – or was – a puritan?’

  ‘Or a hedonist who can’t bear to die.’ But it now struck Adam that Guy’s ranting was more likely to be a cover for guilt over failing to face up to his mother and acknowledge his children. The thought was depressing and so was Adam’s fear that he had let words run away with him: an Irish habit which mentors frequently deplored.

  ‘Billiard ball!’ the sick man shouted suddenly and pointed to an upstairs window. ‘Bald heads look like billiard balls! Give me a ball, Baron, and I’ll score a hit!’

  ***

  Standing at that window, in the last of the daylit clarity, the vicomte de Sauvigny ran an irritable hand over his bald head. For the last hour he had been trying to fathom Monseigneur de Belcastel who, though talkative, seemed reluctant to be fathomed. Sauvigny knew the strategy. It was one he had seen used by a fox to confuse hounds by crossing and recrossing its own trail.

  ‘Where is this taking us?’ he begged.

  ‘We are at a crossroad,’ said the reverend fox, ‘and the advice from on high is that we should tread with discretion.’

  The vicomte could not remember a time when advice from ‘on high’ – code for Rome – had been any different. ‘And stick together,’ he checked, ‘for God and King?’

  Belcastel tightened his lips. ‘God should come first.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But in practice,’ the monsignor heckled, ‘that only happens when it’s time to pay for our allies’ mistakes. The monarchists sacrifice God.’

  The vicomte felt hurt. ‘I ...’ he burst out indignantly.

  ‘I don’t mean you!’ skirmished the monsignor. ‘You were a Papal Zouave and did your bit! I mean monarchist laymen here in France. Look what that connection costs the Church. It enrages Republicans who make the clergy pay. In the last twelve years,’ Belcastel spread, then, one by one, folded five slim fingers, ‘they tried to expel Him from the schools and hospitals of France, forced seminarians to do military service and brought in divorce. When members of the clergy protested, their pay was docked.’ The hand was now a fist which the monsignor sheathed in the darkness of his joined sleeves.

  Sauvigny tried to suppress a fear that the priest was turning his coat. Testingly, he asked: ‘Are we still allies?’ and prayed for a plain answer. None came.

  If the monsignor had been a fox and gone sneaking back to his hole, the vicomte would have sent a terrier after him. Blocked up all exits but one. Then in with the dog.

  ‘Together?’ he hoped. ‘Our alliance still holds? You, I am sure, are not about to join the renegades?’ The vicomte laughed thinly, then, reproving himself for his distrust, managed a hearty cackle. ‘You,’ he challenged, ‘are not that kind of man.’

  Belcastel wasn’t. Indeed, he could be described as a living martyr who, at the cost of his career, had taken the blame when well-born blowhards had put the Cause at risk. That, one should remember, was why he was in a madhouse. He had raced through flames to rescue compromising papers which the plotting blue bloods had left behind and, when their plot was discovered, had taken the blame. If you couldn’t trust him, who could you trust? Sauvigny sighed. Maybe you could trust no churchmen now? The old alliance felt frail. There was a danger that the present pope – ironically, he had taken the bold name of Leo! – might become reconciled with the modern world.

  His predecessor, Pius, had stoutly condemned ‘errors’ such as ‘progress’ and ‘modern civilization’ and, if alive today
, would have fulminated against the godless French Republic. Pope Leo’s statements were subtle, and the vicomte distrusted subtlety. Morale suffered while people wondered which way the lion planned to pounce. Up until now Leo’s one telling pounce had been to order Catholic journalists to stop exasperating the French Republic. Why should they stop? The presage was worrying – and there had been others.

  Not fifteen months ago, His Eminence, Cardinal Lavigerie, a respected and, till then, an ardent monarchist, had given in to the spirit of the age and advised Catholics to accept the Republic! Devastating though this was, worse could well follow. The renegade could be a stalking horse. Others could be creeping up behind him. It was even whispered that Pope Leo ... but the vicomte refused to pursue that line of thought. Moving closer to the window, he stared into a web of thickening dusk. Lozenges of light fell through it from casements below, and in their lambency he could make out two figures whose faces were tilted upwards as if watching him.

  One shouted, ‘See! Another baldy! They all look like billiard balls! Have you noticed how many there are here, Baron? This place destroys hair. Even my poor François is losing his!’

  A lunatic! The other man must be his keeper. His hand hovered by the madman’s elbow.

  ‘We need billiard cues,’ the lunatic shouted. ‘Shall we use these?’

  Abruptly, a shower of small sticks arched, flew, struck and rattled the window just inches from the vicomte’s face. Luckily, none broke the glass. They were shaped like arrows and, as Sauvigny faced them, he saw himself, for a mocking moment, back in the army under fire. The old battle fever fizzed through his blood, reminding him that, instead of pussyfooting here, he could, even at his age, join up again. Go to Africa, perhaps, where the Zouaves were making themselves useful. Why not? The small confrontation with the lunatic had raised his spirits.

  ‘Are you all right, vicomte?’ the monsignor worried. ‘Are the windowpanes cracked?’

  ‘Nothing’s cracked,’ cried the exuberant Sauvigny. ‘Only that crackpot down there.’

  ‘Be careful. He throws billiard balls. One struck a man last week.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Monseigneur,’ the vicomte insisted. ‘You mustn’t worry so much. You and I make an excellent team. Have you forgotten how neatly we settled Cardinal Lavigerie’s hash?’

  ‘Hush!’ Belcastel’s voice shook. ‘Better come away from the window.’

  ‘You surely haven’t forgotten our little conspiracy? The old letter? How ...’

  ‘Please, old friend! I implore you not to mention my part in that to anyone.’ The monsignor looked as if he were on the rack.

  Remorse, the vicomte wondered? Or new, contradictory orders from Rome?

  ***

  It was now over a year since that November afternoon when, at a banquet in his episcopal palace, Cardinal Lavigerie, Archbishop of Carthage and Algiers, rose to his feet and spoke words which would scandalize the Catholic world. Forty of his guests were officers from a French naval squadron, then at anchor in Algiers harbour, and the rest were officials en poste in Algeria. The governor was away. So, when pudding was served, the cardinal, as senior dignitary, proposed a toast to the navy and read a speech which, by the time he had finished, so stunned his more attentive listeners that their leader, Admiral Duperré, sat down without responding. The rest of the company followed suit. There was no applause. Nobody raised a glass. Guests who had been woolgathering must have marvelled at the admiral’s breach of etiquette.

  Officers were traditionally royalists and unlikely to have caught the cardinal’s drift at first. Having rejoiced to see men from the French civil service, judiciary and armed forces united at his table, he had expressed a wish that a similar union might soon prevail in France. Even now, the steel pricking through his rhetoric may have passed unnoticed. The Church’s dearest wish, said His Eminence, was to see all good citizens united.

  All! To the alert the word was an alarm signal. Some of the less fuddled nudged brother officers.

  ‘Wake up, man! Where’s the old sky pilot headed? Wants us united with everyone, does he? Is that to include the Republican rabble which murdered our relatives back in the 1790s and again twenty years ago, when – has he forgotten? – Reds shot the Archbishop of Paris in cold blood and spattered his brains on a prison wall? A chap I knew saw them. He said the bish had been a bit too much of a democrat, and the brains were pinkish.’

  ‘Like our host’s?’

  ‘If he means what we think.’

  The first accounts to reach France were confused. Listening to the cardinal was like joining a paperchase where the clues were too obscure for laymen to pick up.

  ‘... when a people’s will,’ he read on in a melancholy tone, ‘has been clearly asserted, when a government’s form is not, as Pope Leo XIII recently proclaimed, contrary to those principles which favour the survival of civilized and Christian countries ... then it is time to bury our differences and sacrifice ... all that conscience and honour permit.’

  What did that mean? That churchy rigmarole? Did it mean anything at all? Both Sauvigny and Belcastel quickly received first-hand reports. A naval cousin of Sauvigny’s had actually been present at what was soon known in barracks and presbyteries throughout the hexagon as ‘the Algiers toast’. The cousin must have dozed off during the speech, for all he could be persuaded to recall with any assurance was the glare from reflected sunlight – the reception was a lunchtime one – easy laughter, the gleam of buttons and epaulettes, initial disbelief. ‘A row was the last thing on our minds,’ said this cousin, and mentioned arranging to visit local brothels which, he had been told, offered curious and unusual pleasures. ‘Jewish women, young Arab girls ...!’ He had been excited at the prospect. Then someone struck a glass so that it began to sing, and there was a half-serious outcry, since if the singing wasn’t stopped pronto a sailor must die. A naval superstition! After that his mind must again have wandered, for the next thing he knew they had all stood up, then inconclusively sat down again! ‘I told myself, this is a rum go!’ said the cousin, making a late claim to discernment.

  Sauvigny ignored it. Clearly the event had been premeditated. The speech carried signals both to Republicans – conciliatory – and to the French Church: ‘watch your step, brothers in Christ’. To monarchists the message was so unwelcome that some tried to dismiss it. The vicomte heard it described as ‘senile’, the coinage of a rogue cardinal with a grudge, at best ambiguous, at worst gibberish. If it was none of the above, then it was a slap on their collective face, not to say a brutal kick in their massed behinds. France, the eldest daughter of the Church, the land once ruled by men like Charlemagne and St Louis, was being urged by that same Church to embrace the godless Republic. But was this true? And had the cardinal acted off his own bat? Or had he been sent to test the waters? If he had, then we, Sauvigny realized, must act fast to stifle support for his policy among the French clergy. Rouse bishops. Remind them where money for their charities and pet projects came from! Not from the Mason-ridden state which merely paid their meagre salaries! Nor from Rome which needed money itself! No! It came from the great houses of France whose owners would expect them to condemn the Algiers toast, and whose donations, if they didn’t, would dry up. Lavigerie’s own ambitious good works could be starved out! Best remind him of that! And best remind others that St Peter’s Pence could dry up too. If Pope Leo’s head was in the clouds, he had better know that the economic ground could be cut from under his feet.

  But now, fourteen months on, all this had been done, and still Rome was silent. Its newspapers were wilfully enigmatic. ‘Enlighten the pope,’ prayed royalist nuns. (The vicomte had his sources.) ‘Enlighten him or else take him to Yourself!’ It was not quite a murderous prayer. Pope Leo, after all, was over eighty. Still, he was surprisingly vigorous, having led a salubrious life. One had to reckon with him. So for a year now augurs had been tracking straws borne on the winds from Rome. Foremost among these was the arrival of a new nuncio who was worryingly frie
ndly with the turbulent cardinal.

  The augurs’ main target, to be sure, was still Lavigerie himself. He was aged sixty-five, a priest of enterprise and vision, with a faintly elusive gaze and a range of ambitions. He had founded a missionary order, launched a crusade against slavery, built, dabbled in archeology and wine-production and shown himself politically flexible and astute. He had been a Bonapartist under Napoleon III, a legitimist in that brief moment in the early seventies when the comte de Chambord looked like taking power and now – well, what was he saying now?

  When copies of the speech were obtained, two items attracted particular attention. One was the claim: ‘I speak with the assurance that no authorized voice will contradict me.’ Was Lavigerie hinting that he had papal support? Several French monarchists, both clerical and lay, crossed the Alps in person to urge Pope Leo to disown the cardinal – and got no satisfaction. However Lavigerie – thought to be by now desperate for papal support – got none either. Spies – everyone was a spy – reported that the cardinal was sick with anxiety. From the moment when Admiral Duperré sat down without raising his glass to him, he had been confronting widespread hostility. His fear must be that the pope – if he had indeed been behind him – would now abandon him. Peter, after all, had disowned Christ.

  ‘Admiral,’ Lavigerie had begged in consternation, on that first day, as he stood alone, feeling the first shocked blast of disapproval, ‘will you not respond to my toast?’

  Only then did the admiral grudgingly raise his glass and say with wintry courtesy, ‘I drink to His Eminence and to the clergy of Algeria.’

  Then, as the guests took their leave, children from the cardinal’s local orphanage struck up the ‘Marseillaise’. The ‘Marseillaise’! To the visitors from France it was almost inconceivable that they should have to listen to the bloodthirsty tune which had been played when priests and nobles were being carted to the guillotine!