‘If not, we would never have got our young friend of the poets mixed up in this business.’
‘Young friend of the poets?’ Monsieur Carnac said, arching his left eyebrow, as if he was about to screw in a monocle.
Jean felt transfixed by his hard stare.
‘And may one know which poets you honour with your friendship, dear boy?’
‘La Fontaine and Victor Hugo,’ Jean answered, swiftly forgetting Samain, whom Yann had thought fit for idiots.
‘Exactly right,’ Yann said, ‘just earlier on I was reciting those lovely lines from “Crépuscule”:
The dreamy angel of the dusk who floats upon its breezes
Mingles, as it bears them off in the flutter of a wing beat,
The dead’s prayers and the living’s kisses.
Monsieur Carnac burst into sarcastic laughter.
‘Oh, that’s a good one, that is! You’re forgetting — intentionally, I imagine — the first line that rhymes with “wing beat”:
Love each other! ’tis the month when the strawberries are sweet.’
‘Every poet has their weakness!’ Yann said, annoyed.
‘Unforgivable! Unforgivable!’
The abbé Le Couec was in a state of some irritation. The question that was bothering him was not Victor Hugo’s weaknesses, but the stolen bicycle. What were they going to do with it? Monsieur Carnac suggested throwing it in the sea. Jean shivered. The abbé wanted to compensate its owner or return his property to him.
‘Returning it is out of the question,’ Yann said. ‘It would be putting the police on our trail immediately. Let’s write down the owner’s name, and I’ll send him a postal order from somewhere in the north, when we get there.’
The abbé offered to go himself, under cover of darkness, and fling the bicycle into the sea.
‘Details, details, we can deal with all that later!’ Monsieur Carnac said. ‘At this very moment I am dying of hunger.’
Jean’s hopes rose. After the excursion hunger was gnawing at him too. The hot shrimps he had eaten that morning were a distant memory. The abbé opened his wire-mesh pantry door and threw up his hands.
‘A hunk of bread, a pot of cream, butter … but it’s true, I do have some buckwheat flour and a drop of sparkling cider left over from last autumn, two or three bottles.’
‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get the pancakes on,’ Monsieur Carnac said, dropping his jacket on a chair, turning on the stove and starting to prepare the mixture.
‘I can go home to my house,’ Jean suggested.
‘No, you can’t, young man,’ the abbé said. ‘Tomorrow at six you can serve mass.’
‘I haven’t confessed.’
‘I give you absolution. Two Paters and three Hail Marys before you go to sleep. Three because it’s the Holy Virgin who is particularly responsible for protecting us in this undertaking.’
They ate the pancakes off chipped plates with their fingers, standing up next to the range. The cider was undrinkable. The abbé offered calvados, which was refused, so he was obliged to replace the bottle on the shelf without touching its contents, after which he sent Jean to sleep in his bed, the only bed in the rectory.
‘My friends and I have matters to discuss.’
Even though he would have liked to hear what they said, Jean obeyed, and slipped between the abbé’s coarse bedclothes. A strong smell of leather pervaded the room, and when he peered under the bed he discovered an enormous pair of patched work boots, the priest’s pumps, and his seven-league boots that helped him take the word of the Lord into parishes that lacked a priest and to square up to the bishop of Rouen. Spent with fatigue, Jean fell asleep without even trying to overhear what the three men gathered in the neighbouring room were saying.
Monsieur Le Couec woke him up shortly before six, as the sun rose. He himself had slept briefly in an armchair after Yann and Monsieur Carnac had departed.
‘They won’t hear mass?’ Jean asked, disappointed not to see again the two strange characters who stole bicycles and tossed lines from Hugo at each other.
‘No question of mass for them for the moment. They’re in hiding. They’re good Christians. Brave too. Come on. We shall go and pray, you and me, so that they won’t be arrested.’
‘You mean they’re not real thieves?’
‘No. They’re heroes. But you must never talk about them, even if the police start asking questions.’
‘I won’t, ever. I promise.’
‘To anybody?’
‘Not to anybody, Father.’
‘That’s good, it means you’re a man.’
Jean thought that if Monsieur Le Couec were to say these words in front of Antoinette she would no longer think him a child and would let him take the same liberties with her that she had allowed that swine Gontran. But such a thought stained his soul before communion, and he chased it away. He did his best to serve mass well, and afterwards followed the priest into the sacristy, where he helped him take off his chasuble. One of the ladies who lived next to the church brought them bowls of milky coffee and thick slices of bread and butter that they devoured at the sacristy table.
‘Now it’s time for you to go home, my son. Lips sealed.’
He planted a kiss on both of Jean’s cheeks, kisses that smelt of milk and coffee.
As Jean reached the doorway, the priest called to him.
‘Tell me, these stories about girls that got you such a wigging? There wasn’t anything in them, was there?’
‘Oh no, nothing, father … nothing at all.’
Pedalling home in the glorious morning, Jean told himself that in fact his stories with girls were nothing at all, that real life was the life that men like Yann and Monsieur Carnac led, heroes who moved in the shadows. Everything else was childishness, kids’ games with little hussies. Gontran could indulge himself with Antoinette all he wanted. He wouldn’t be challenging him for her.
At La Sauveté he found Jeanne and Albert at the kitchen table, their bowls of coffee in front of them.
‘At last!’ his mother said.
‘I served mass at six o’clock.’
‘Oh, that is a fine way to start the day!’
Albert grumbled that no priest should be disturbing the good Lord’s rest at such an hour. It was in poor taste.
‘Don’t listen to your father!’ Jeanne said. ‘He served mass more often than his turn and now he’s just talking big.’
‘It’s not about talking big. I’m for freedom of conscience!’ Albert said, with a mouthful of bread and kidney beans.
Perhaps for the first time, Jean realised his father was talking nonsense, and it pained him, in the way it pains us when someone we admire suffers a humiliating defeat. Antoine du Courseau had disappointed him in a similar way: how could you be so removed from life, so distracted? It felt like a sort of resignation, when men like Yann and Monsieur Carnac were living life’s great adventure. One day he, Jean Arnaud, would defy the forces of the law for a noble cause which was yet to reveal itself, but which the grave events announced by Albert would doubtless make sure they brought about.
Jean never discovered the reason why Yann and Monsieur Carnac had been forced into hiding. The secret has stayed well kept. We may nevertheless advance a hypothesis by consulting the newspapers of the period. During the night of 6–7 August, in other words two days before the arrival of Monsieur Carnac at Tôtes, a person or persons unknown had blown up the monument erected at Rennes for the quatercentenary of the union of Brittany and France. This act of vandalism could have been justified on aesthetic grounds: the work of one of those sculptors much cherished by the Third Republic of Doumer and Lebrun, the monument symbolised the triumph of overblown pomposity. It showed Brittany on her knees before the king of France. The clandestine nationalist movement Gwenn ha Du had been determined to demonstrate with maximum impact against the visit of Édouard Herriot,8 who in turn had responded with more modest impact by refusing to attend the mass said at Vannes by Monseigneur Duparc, bishop of Quimper and Léon. Were Yann and Monsieur Carnac numbered among the perpetrators of that act? It is possible, even probable, but nobody knows any more today than they did then, and we leave the reader entirely at liberty to imagine other hypotheses that justify the attitude — singular for a priest — of the abbé Le Couec. What is certain is that, overnight, Jean Arnaud matured by several years, learning that a priest may also be a plotter, and that without being thieves or murderers men might have to hide from the police because they were defending a noble cause. The world was not built of flawless blocks, of good and bad, of pure and impure. More subtle divisions undermined the picture he had so far been given of morality and duty. For another boy than Jean, this discovery would have been dangerous. It was only useful to him because his innocence kept him out of temptation’s way better than all the lessons he had been taught. He therefore decided, in the days that followed, not to punch Gontran Longuet in the face the next time he saw him, and to forgive Michel du Courseau his spiteful nastiness towards him. What had Gontran really done, apart from make the most of what he was offered and would have been a hero of Spartan self-denial to refuse? And if Michel loathed him, it must be because Michel had guessed a long time ago, with remarkable intuition, that one day Chantal de Malemort would elope with his rival. And if Antoinette found it hard to keep her knickers on, it was a quality she had inherited from her father, about whom there was enough gossip among the locals for Jean to be fairly fully informed. In short, the world was not just full of guilty parties, and if you looked hard enough, you could find an excuse for everything. This philosophy has no technical name. For young Monsieur Arnaud it is called the Arnaud philosophy, for Jean Dupont it is called the Dupont philosophy. Each practitioner shapes it in the way that works for him or her, with personal variations. It was in this state of mind that Jean, with a return ticket from Dieppe to Newhaven in one pocket and a thousand-franc note in another, both given to him by Antoine du Courseau, wheeled his bicycle on board the ferry at the end of August 1932, en route for London. His fingers also frequently felt for the visiting card that Antoine had given him, to make sure it was still there. It was for Geneviève, Antoine’s daughter, and had these few words written on it: ‘Here is Jean Arnaud, whom I spoke about in my letter. A few days in London will complete his education. Be kind and look after him, and send him back to us at the end of the week. With love from your affectionate father, Antoine.’