"That's not true. You know very well it's not true. I got married because I was a little goose, because Papa said, 'He's a good man. He'll make you happy.' I never imagined he'd start being unfaithful to me with a hatmaker from Dijon as soon as we got married!"
"What?… What on earth are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about my marriage," Lucile said bitterly. "At this very moment a woman in Dijon is knitting Gaston a sweater, making him sweetmeats, sending him packages and probably writing 'My poor sweetheart, I'm so lonely without you tonight, in our great big bed.'"
"A woman who loves him," muttered Madame Angellier, her lips becoming as thin and sharp as a razor, and turning the colour of faded hydrangea.
"At this very moment," Lucile thought to herself, "she would cheerfully kick me out and have the hatmaker here instead," and with the treachery present in even the best of women, she insinuated, "It's true he loves her… a lot… You should see his chequebook. I found it in his desk when he left."
"He's spending money on her?" cried Madame Angellier, horrified.
"Yes; and I couldn't care less."
There was a long silence. They could hear the familiar sounds of evening: the neighbour's radio sending out a series of piercing, plaintive, droning notes, like Arab music or the screeching of crickets (it was the BBC of London distorted by interference), the mysterious murmuring of some stream hidden in the countryside, the insistent croak of a thirsty frog praying for rain. In the room, the copper lamp that hung from the ceiling-rubbed and polished by so many generations that it had lost its pink glow and was now the pale, yellow colour of a crescent moon-shone down on the two women sitting at the table. Lucile felt sad and remorseful.
"What's wrong with me?" she thought. "I should have just let her criticise me and said nothing. Now she'll get even more upset. She'll want to make excuses for her son, patch things up between us. God, how tedious!"
Madame Angellier didn't say a word for the rest of the meal. After dinner they went into the sitting room, where the cook announced the Viscountess de Montmort. This lady, naturally, did not associate with the middle-class people of the village; she wouldn't invite them into her home any more than she would her farmworkers. When she needed a favour, however, she would come to their homes to make the request with the simplicity, ingenuousness and innocent superiority of the "well-bred." The villagers didn't realise that when she dropped by, dressed like a chambermaid, wearing a little red felt hat with a pheasant feather that had seen better days, she was demonstrating the profound scorn she felt towards them even more clearly than if she had stood on ceremony: after all, they didn't get dressed up to go to a neighbouring farm to ask for a glass of milk. Her deception worked. "She's not stuck-up," they all thought when they met her. Nevertheless, they treated her with extraordinary condescension-and they were just as unaware of it as the Viscountess was of her feigned humility.
Madame de Montfort strode into the Angelliers' sitting room; she greeted them cordially; she didn't apologise for coming so late; she picked up Lucile's book and read the title out loud: Connaissance de l'Est by Claudel.
"Very good indeed," she said to Lucile with an encouraging smile, as if she were congratulating one of the schoolgirls for reading the History of France without being forced to. "You like reading serious books, very good indeed."
She knelt down to pick up the ball of wool the elder Madame Angellier had just dropped.
"You see," the Viscountess seemed to say, "I've been brought up to respect my elders; their background, their education, their wealth mean nothing to me; I see only their white hair."
Meanwhile, Madame Angellier, with an icy nod of the head, barely moving her lips, invited the Viscountess to sit down. Everything inside her seemed silently to scream, "If you think I'm going to be flattered by your visit you're mistaken. My great-great-grandfather might have been one of the Viscount de Montmort's farmers, but that's ancient history and no one even knows about it, whereas everyone knows the exact number of hectares of land your dead father-in-law sold to my late husband when he needed money; what's more, your husband managed to come back from the war, while my son is a prisoner. I am a suffering mother and you should be showing respect to me." To the Viscountess's questions she replied quietly that she was in good health and had recently heard from her son.
"You have no hope?" asked the Viscountess, meaning "hope that he'll soon come back home."
Madame Angellier shook her head and raised her eyes to heaven.
"It's so sad," said the Viscountess and added, "We're going through such hard times."
She said "we" out of that sense of propriety which makes us pretend we share other people's misfortunes when we're with them (although egotism invariably distorts our best intentions so that in all innocence we say to someone dying of tuberculosis, "I do feel for you, I do understand, I've had a cold I can't shake off for three weeks now").
"Very hard times, Madame," murmured Madame Angellier coldly. "We have a guest, as you know," she added, indicating the next room and smiling bitterly. "One of these gentlemen… You're putting someone up as well, no doubt?" she asked, even though she and everyone else knew that thanks to the Viscount's personal contacts there were no Germans at the château.
The Viscountess did not reply to this question, but said indignantly, "You will never guess what they have had the nerve to request… Access to the lake for fishing and swimming! And I, who love the water so much, will be forced to stay away all summer."
"Are they forbidding you to use the lake? Well, that's a bit much," exclaimed Madame Angellier, vaguely comforted by the humiliation inflicted upon the Viscountess.
"No, no," she insisted, "on the contrary, they behaved quite correctly. 'Please tell us when we may use the lake so we will not disturb you,' they said. But can you imagine me running into one of those men in my bathing suit? You know they even eat half naked? They take their meals in the courtyard of the school with bare chests and legs, and wearing a kind of jockstrap! The older girls' classroom looks out over the courtyard so they have to keep the shutters closed so the children don't see… what they shouldn't see. And you can imagine how pleasant that must be in this heat!"
She sighed: she was in a very difficult position. At the beginning of the war she had been passionately patriotic and anti-German, not that she particularly hated the Germans (she felt the same aversion, defiance and scorn towards all foreigners), but there was something wonderfully dramatic about patriotism and hatred of the Germans, as there was in anti-Semitism or, later, devotion to Maréchal Pétain, that sent chills down her spine. In 1939 she had organised a series of easy-to-follow lectures at the school on Hitler's psychology, which she had delivered to an audience of nuns, village gentlewomen and rich farmers' wives, and in which she had depicted all Germans, without exception, as madmen, sadists and criminals. Immediately after the defeat of France she had maintained this stance, mainly because it would have taken the kind of flexibility and sharpness of mind she clearly lacked to change camp so quickly. At the time, she herself had typed and distributed several dozen copies of the famous prophecies of Sainte Odile, who predicted the extermination of the Germans at the end of 1941.
But time had passed; the year had ended; the Germans were still here and, what's more, the Viscount had been appointed town Mayor, thus becoming a public official, forced to embrace the government's views. And so, with each day that passed, the Viscount leaned more and more towards what was called the policy of collaboration. As a result, Madame de Montfort found herself forced to water down her comments on current events. Now, once more, she remembered she mustn't show any ill will towards the conqueror and so said with tolerance (and anyway, Jesus wanted us to love our enemies, didn't he?), "I do understand they have to wear light clothing after their tiring exercises. After all, they're just like any other men."