‘I went to see Geneviève.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you object?’
‘Not at all. I assume you’re joking.’
Antoine bent over Jean, who stared at him with wide eyes, and gently squeezed his cheek. The baby smiled and held out his arms.
‘Extraordinary!’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘Such a difficult child, and look at him smiling at you.’
‘He’s not difficult,’ Jeanne countered. ‘He just doesn’t like everybody.’
‘He’s not wrong!’ Antoine said.
Marie-Thérèse flinched, and said with feigned gentleness, ‘I thought that children could always sense whether you really love them or not.’
Antoinette drew herself up, her eyes thunderous.
‘But Papa does love children!’
Tears welled in her eyes.
‘Don’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Antoine answered, distracted by the appearance of Victoire dragging Michel behind her. He succeeded in wriggling out of her grip and ran to bury himself in his mother’s skirts.
‘Maman!’ he yelled, trembling with fright. ‘I don’t want him to take you away in his car.’
‘There’s no danger of that, my darling. No danger at all!’
‘What an idiot,’ Antoinette said.
Antoine caught the Martiniquan’s gaze. She lowered her eyelids, fringed with long, curly lashes. It was a yes, but he would have to wait until tomorrow morning, at five o’clock, after his bowl of coffee laced with calvados, on the hard day bed in the library. He sighed.
2
I mention 1920 only as a reminder. It no longer interests us. But let us touch briefly on the things that were bothering Albert at that time. Paul Deschanel, preferred to Clemenceau by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate as president of the victorious French Republic, was found wandering in his nightshirt at a level crossing after the official train had passed by. He was suspected of being a delusional lunatic and unfortunately the suspicions proved correct. Forced to resign, he was replaced by Alexandre Millerand. In the United States, matters were no better: the president had disappeared. Intoxicated by the ovations he had received and his own verbal incontinence, Woodrow Wilson shut himself in his room and refused to see even members of his administration. His wife served as intermediary, deciding world affairs between two rubbers of bridge. The League of Nations — upon which, despite the United States’ refusal to join, Albert had pinned his hopes — did not prevent the Soviets from invading Poland, the Greeks from attacking Turkey, or the French from ‘pacifying’ the Rif. Albert lived from one disappointment to the next. When he held young Jean in his arms he sang to him, as a lullaby,
And all you poor girls
who love your young men
if they reward you with children
break their arms, break their legs
so they can never be infantrymen
so they can never be infantrymen.
Jean would never be a soldier. It was a promise, made on oath.
We jump forward then, to August 1923, three years later, to find ourselves again at La Sauveté, one fine afternoon when the sun sparkled on the sea that was visible from the first-floor windows. Monsieur du Courseau had lifted the edge of the lace curtain to admire his garden. Seated in a tub armchair, he kept his leg, encased in its plaster cast, up on a stool. A month earlier, as he had tried to avoid a cyclist without lights in the middle of the night on the waterlogged Tôtes road, he had slid off the carriageway and hit a fence that, fortunately, was made of wood. The car — the new Type 28 Bugatti, three litres, eight cylinders — had not been badly damaged (punctured radiator, bent front axle), but Antoine’s left knee, which was less sturdy, had shattered on contact with the dashboard. At the factory at Molsheim the car was being repaired, and would be delivered back to Antoine at the beginning of September. Even though there was no question of his driving anywhere in the near future, he was suffering from not having his baby in its garage, a loose box adapted for the purpose. He liked to know it was there, even when it was quiet, and he loved its sudden gleam whenever he pulled back the garage’s sliding door to let in the daylight. The bodywork shone a beautiful blue, the chrome flashed in the sunlight. Stuck in bed, then in an armchair, Antoine, deprived of his thoroughbred, felt his loneliness painfully acutely as he faced convalescent hours of desperate slowness. For at least another month there was no question of his being able to escape from his agonising melancholy and take to the road again.
The lifted lace curtain revealed a corner of the park where, at that moment, Albert was watering with an apron around his waist and a straw hat on his head. Sitting in a garden chair a few steps behind him, Adèle Louverture was dozing, her chin tipped forward. Behind her, Michel du Courseau (six years old) was carefully cutting with a pair of scissors the knot of the cotton scarf that held back the girl’s thick hair. When she woke up, her scarf would fall, and her hair would tumble free. From behind the du Courseau boy, Jean Arnaud (four years old) watched him with his hands behind his back and his head on one side. After he had finished cutting the knot, Michel moved over to Albert’s hosepipe. Still armed with his scissors, he stabbed quickly, several times, into the rubber of the hose and ran off, handing the scissors to Jean as he did so. Albert’s flow of water dwindled to a trickle. Turning round, he saw jets of water spraying from the punctured hose and his son holding the scissors. Jean made no attempt even to draw back, taking the two slaps without complaint and running away to cry, pursued by Albert’s curses. Adèle, awakened, raised her head and her scarf fell off.
She saw at once that it had been cut with scissors.
Antoine rang a bell that had been placed there for the purpose. Marie-Thérèse came in. Ever since her husband’s accident, she had lived in a state of devotion and goodness. The tenderness with which she spoke to her friends about ‘poor Antoine’ had left many thinking that he was dying. The more anxious of them came to visit and were reassured: the dying man was doing well, in spite of his immobility. He kept a box of cigars and a bottle of calvados next to his armchair. He still looked fresh. After a period of eating very little, before the accident, he had regained his appetite, although it was an appetite that baffled the Normans who knew him: he ate bread rubbed with garlic, requested bouillabaisses, demanded aïoli with his cod, and chewed olives while drinking a yellow liquid which a few drops of water transformed into a whitish solution with a flavour of aniseed. In short, he was not in Normandy but elsewhere, living in an unknown world of lovers of spicy food. Marie-Thérèse understood perfectly well that he was being unfaithful to her. Her pride would have suffered if she had not been able to console herself that she was hardly the only victim of his infidelity: Joséphine Roudou, Victoire Sanpeur, and now Adèle Louverture had all found themselves in a similar position.
‘Are you feeling unwell?’ she asked, without much hope that he would say yes.
‘No, my dear. Unfortunately I’m not feeling unwell, but I should like to say something to my son.’
‘Michel?’
‘Do I have another?’
She acknowledged that, at La Sauveté at least, he could only mean Michel.
‘I’ll send him to you, but …’
‘But what?’
‘You’re always so hard on him.’
‘Have you ever seen me hit him?’
‘No. You’re worse. Either you don’t speak to him, or you look at him with astonishment, as if he were a stranger.’
‘He is a stranger. He’s the only person in the world who looks at me with terror in his eyes, and occasionally even something close to hate.’