Jean is a few kilometres from them, sitting on a milestone. He jumps up and sticks out his thumb in the direction of Aix every time a car or truck comes past. Let us leave him there for a moment and not forget Mireille completely, even though her part in the story is coming to an end; as you will have guessed, it is far from easy to get rid of someone so overwhelming. She hangs on like a leech, shouts, weeps, scratches, flies into terrible rages, then sinks into despondency before terrorising everyone around her.
When she came back that evening, she could not find Jean and thought he must be at Menton, although she had never known him go there, and then suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, she opened the drawer of the till in which her lover had left a receipt for the sum that she owed him. The scene erupted in the kitchen, where Tomate greeted her with admirable coolness.
‘Gone? Well … it’s better that way. You were going to kick him out, weren’t you?’
‘Kick him out? Me?’
‘I swear you were.’
‘What do you mean, you swear? It’s me who knows.’
‘And what about me, then? Forget it, let’s have a pastis together.’
The waitresses came in and out, looking poker-faced and sending the patronne into a fury. She was about to throw out several customers who had already arrived, but Tomate just managed to stop her.
‘You’ll regret it tomorrow. A fuck’s only for the night, but the restaurant’s your life.’
She drank two pastis in succession that were so strong she became instantly drunk and burst into tears. Once the explosion had occurred, Tomate clammed up and went back to his corner. Eyes drooping, slack-jawed, he watched his stoves, glass in hand. Alcohol had at least had the virtue of confining his interest in Mireille to two nights only, a fact on which he congratulated himself. Now he could treat her like a grumpy father. Mireille locked herself in her bedroom, came out a dozen times to make sure that Jean had not left a message with anybody, attempted to arouse Tomate’s interest in her distress but did not succeed. The chef was back at his cooking, an ethereal realm where her problems had no purchase. Left to herself, she measured the extent of the disaster, which was not just emotional. Jean’s young, pale, gilded body materialised in her dreams. She hugged him frenziedly to her without either of them coming to orgasm. In a decision worthy of antiquity she resolved to sacrifice the prefect to her vanished lover, hoping that by some magic this offering would bring young flesh back to her. Out of the futility of this sublime sacrifice she conceived a great bitterness and fastened more than ever onto Stefano, whose regular appearances helped make the excessively long nights bearable. She took a long time to recover, discovering in the process that excesses of sexual passion involve dangers that are sometimes fatal. Stefano saw nothing of this, or perhaps pretended to see nothing. He was a more mysterious character than one at first gave him credit for. Mireille should have expected it: he read books! Nearly four years after these events, at the end of June 1940, when Italian troops, thanks to the armistice, entered Menton, he turned up as an officer in the bersaglieri, with a captain’s pips, and it rapidly became known that from his command post he controlled the intelligence service for the region. Since his affair with Mireille he had been covering the area with a close network of spies. Mireille and he renewed their relationship and, thanks to his influence, the restaurant at Roquebrune lacked for nothing during the four years of occupation, until suddenly the Italian soldiers — whose kindness and genuine distress at being involved in this absurd adventure against the French south, to which they felt so close, had not been sufficiently appreciated — were replaced by field-grey uniforms who began fortifying the hillsides against an enemy as yet invisible. Mireille hid Stefano for several weeks until he was able to join a group of partisans in the Abruzzi. At the liberation the French Forces of the Interior set up their command post inside the restaurant. Mireille was locked in the cellar, where at first, as she satisfied her new guests’ urgent needs, she thought briefly that she might succeed in extracting herself at this lesser price, but the appearance of a rival group put paid to that hope. She was tried, and hanged from a tree. But not any tree, no! The oldest known olive tree in the world, planted nearly two thousand years before by the Romans. For two days her corpse swung there in the gentle summer breeze, until some sensitive souls found her a burial place in the cemetery next to her father and her mother.
That is it for Mireille. I am sorry: she will not reappear, a victim, like Ernst, of the Manicheanism of the times, the haphazard fortunes of good and bad. Stefano returned to Roquebrune and learnt of his girlfriend’s fate. He had been responsible. Should he not have stayed to protect her? A great remorse grew in him; he thought of taking holy orders, hesitated and got married. On the day I write these words, he is a handsome old man who owns a thriving haulage business. From time to time, if there is a strike or a driver is off sick, he will still take the wheel and head onto the autostrada, without stopping, as if he were going to meet Mireille Cece again. In darkness pierced by the blinding beams of headlights, he sees again the irresistible body of the woman who waited for him on the bend at Roquebrune and whose fidelity he never had any reason to doubt. And when he does so he no longer feels alone, but drives on towards her and has the impression that nothing has changed, that the hair at his temples has not gone white and that pleasure awaits at the end of the road.
Let us return to Jean on his milestone in the Massif des Maures. He had been sitting there for two hours when a Renault Primaquatre driven by a commercial traveller stopped. The driver was bored and would happily have picked up a cow, so long as he could tell it about his problem, namely the sale of Isabelle chocolate below cost in the southern departments. Isabelle chocolate, in bars and in powder form, was not reaching its public. The company was skimping on advertising and counting on its sales representatives being everywhere. But in one of those irrational acts that demonstrate that managers inhabit another universe, far from the lives of those who actually have to work, Isabelle SA had just cut its sales force’s expenses. Jean tried hard to follow the monologue of his travelling companion, a short, fat man with podgy fingers and clearly a lover of good eating, as he frequently broke off from his lament to give marks out of ten to restaurants in the villages they passed, accompanied by brief and very specific notes: an excellent saddle of hare there two years ago, a coq au vin as tough as old boots in that pretentious joint last month, or a lovely vin de pays at this bistro which doesn’t look anything special, does it? These mindless ramblings about Isabelle chocolate and gastronomic preferences, which were enough to make an empty stomach turn over, nevertheless distracted Jean from what, or rather who, he was leaving behind him. For two hours, sitting on his milestone as he waited for a sympathetic driver to offer him a lift, he had thought of nothing but Mireille. He would have given anything to go back to her, but an invisible force pressed him into the seat of the noisy Renault, which had to change down to second at the slightest gradient. The soft shapes of the Maures near Saint-Maximin made him think of naked women, offering their round breasts up to the burning sun, and those clumps of black cypresses the tufts between their thighs or under their thrown-back arms. Tomate had been right, and he might even have been too late. Jean should have fled before he was overcome by Mireille’s obsessive nocturnal habits. Would he ever escape from her? She was like a stain on his body and his thoughts … The commercial traveller kept on with his grievances against Isabelle SA, a handful of ambitious, mean capitalists exploiting some grandmother’s recipe, which was actually fortunate, in fact, because Isabelle chocolate, in bar and powder form, was the best France had to offer, perhaps even the best Europe had to offer. Jean nodded. You don’t disagree if you don’t know anything. And he knew nothing compared to such a man. A copy of L’oeuvre was lying on the back seat, the daily paper Albert sometimes read in addition to Populaire for its articles by Michel Déat and the columns of Georges de La Fourchardière, whose caustic plain-speaking made him smile. Jean answered that he had heard this was true from his father, who read L’oeuvre.