‘I’m wondering how you managed to find her.’
‘It wasn’t too hard. I had dinner one evening with a Lebanese banker. I talked about her to him. He supplied the key: Gstaad. A little bit of heaven on earth!’
Allée des Acacias was almost deserted, its trees frozen, cold and grey on this January morning. Palfy liked this walk. It reminded him of his childhood Sundays, of his father and mother driving there in their Renault open tourer. The car would roll down the avenue, crowded with residents from all over the 16th: young girls in wide-brimmed hats, bare-headed boys, riders and a few remaining carriages conveying old ladies, their faces caked in cream and powder, their laps covered with real or imitation sable. He even claimed to have seen, on one of his last outings around 1921 or 1922, Mercedes del Loreto. His Sunday mornings belonged to the past. The only people to be seen now were women dressed like tramps, in worn greatcoats, stooped, shuffling, grey-faced and guilty-looking as they collected firewood, or riders in uniform, sitting stiffly as if at riding school, their boots black and gleaming. One greeted Palfy with a discreet movement of his hand.
‘You know all the Germans in Paris,’ Jean said.
‘No. A modest few. That was Captain Schoenberg, the blue-eyed boy of one of the generals. He won’t go to Russia. He’s been given the job of overseeing the national stud farms. Pleasure can’t go completely by the board — the French would revolt. By the way, while we’re on the subject, Rudolf von Rocroy’s got problems. The one time he’s ever shown any courage — to help your Claude — and they’re threatening to send him to the Eastern Front. It’s mayhem. Don’t worry, he won’t talk. I’ve got him under control. In any case he only needs to dig himself a tiny bit deeper into his racket to be forgiven …’
Claude. Jean hesitated. He had come to meet Palfy to confide in him, but Palfy’s blithe self-assurance silenced him.
‘It’s bizarre, I can tell you, how far one feels from all that at Gstaad, even though Switzerland’s the only place where rationing is actually enforced. No strawberries and cream. Meat twice a week. The restaurants are quite inflexible and the Swiss are very disciplined. But I didn’t go there to eat …’
‘What did Geneviève say?’
‘She’s bored. She’s rented a floor of a country hotel, brought in a gramophone, made a place to read. She reads all the time when she’s not listening to music. The hotel’s stuffed with foreigners, who play cards while they wait for the motor shows and carnivals by the sea to resume, the selfsame world they knew before the war. In one sense, Geneviève’s isolation and loss of her little train of admirers has done her good. I found her a bit less of a bluestocking. You don’t feel you’re taking an exam every time you talk to her these days. And we talked … oh yes, non-stop. In her room, out walking, or on the sleigh. Ah, the sleighs of Gstaad! I never suspected I’d fall for their romance. A fat driver with a red nose and a leather apron tucks you in like babies. The horse wears ice shoes and trots as if there weren’t any ice. I had the great pleasure of holding Geneviève’s hand to keep it warm …’
‘That’s the first time I’ve seen your lyrical side!’
Palfy looked embarrassed.
‘Listen, my dear boy, I can only say this to you …’
‘Are you telling me you’re in love with Geneviève? Don’t make me laugh. You’ll never love a woman …’
Jean was mistaken. If Palfy was not yet in love he was soon going to be, and at the age of thirty-five, just when he thought he was safe, his whole life, his unusual sense of right and wrong and his cynicism and scorn were about to be changed for ever. We can sense just how incredible this transformation is. Palfy himself cannot foresee its repercussions. He imagines one can let oneself be attracted to a woman like Geneviève while remaining as one was, and will find out — with a mounting sense of wonder — that, on the contrary, to love and be loved by her one must become more like her. That is how one deserves her. It is no longer a matter of surveying life with a cold and sarcastic eye, with the gaze that has so long served him as judge and defence; it is a matter of being worthy of Geneviève. Palfy cannot yet see where this metamorphosis demanded of him will take him. He will not be a second prince, for his contempt for humanity is of a lower quality, and in particular more greedy and opportunistic. The prince never experienced the vulgar temptation to become rich, for the simple reason that he always was rich. On the other hand, despite his generosity, he did not throw away his fortune and, however wise and unusual he was, it is doubtful whether he would have accepted his ruin with the elegance Palfy has displayed on several such occasions.
Palfy is still looking for that pedestal from which he can defy his critics. He knows that once a certain level of success is achieved, impunity follows. Doors open wide, respect is blind. He has been admitted to this privileged circle two or three times. Without his appetite for risk, he might have stayed there. Deep down he loves starting again from nothing, disconcerting those who have believed in him. As we now see him on this January morning in 1942, in Allée des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne, walking briskly, his arm in Jean’s as if the better to persuade him of his sincerity, Palfy knows nothing of what awaits him. An inexpressible joy that he finds hard to contain, indeed is allowing to brim over, has taken possession of him. We have already guessed that he — the Palfy who has never felt a single moment’s tenderness — will shortly reproach Jean for not devoting his life to the delights of love. He believes his task is to be intelligent and insensitive. Geneviève will convince him that he is not as intelligent as he thinks he is and that he is almost bursting with sensitivity.
Such a revelation, naturally, is not the work of a day. It will need many journeys to Switzerland, many sleigh rides and, that summer, a visit to Lake Lugano during which they will witness from a balcony Italy falling apart on the far bank. Geneviève will not tell him her life story; she has no need to. It will be his job to tell her his, and entertain her. Revealed, stripped naked, he will be in her power. He will be jubilant as he relinquishes his old self. For a moment he will lose his poise, that marvellous passport that has helped him so much in his life. Geneviève will smile. She will have won, and as the price of her victory she will give him back — albeit attenuated and civilised — the confidence in himself that he lost in an upsurge of passion.
I’ll say it again: nothing can astonish us more than this metamorphosis. It is so unexpected that it surprises us as much as its victim, whose destiny seemed preordained. We had already interned him when France was liberated, ruined him, thrown him out on the street and, since his boats had been burnt all over Europe, watched him leaving to attempt some fabulous new fraud in South America. Indeed, that was certainly what awaited him, and in a sense Palfy’s good luck had always been his bad too, compelling him to resort to his genius for mystification. We are delighted to announce instead that this time, at last, Fortune is on his side, and not, as one might crudely think, Geneviève’s fortune of which he has no need, but that ravishing figure, her form barely veiled beneath a transparent tunic, who awakens those infants slumbering incautiously on the coping of a well. The tiny wings on her back do not allow her to fly to the aid of everyone. She must choose her targets. Seductive and seduced, she attaches herself to those who will not let her go. Why should it surprise us, then, that in her generosity to a few, she is cruel to the greater number? She will desert Salah and only much later pay any attention to Jean Arnaud, after he has endured those tests inflicted by Sarastro on Tamino in The Magic Flute.
For the moment we are still on Allée des Acacias, where it is necessary to walk briskly to keep out the dry cold of the winter of ’41–’42, which marks the decisive turning point of a war we have spoken little about, since it is happening far away and its impact on the majority of the French population is mainly the problem of finding enough to eat.