When he’s alone the miracle happens, everyone starts listening to him, he becomes the epicentre of the whole Seminar, his eloquence carries all before it, it can last for a whole hour of blessed solitude, but this fat German woman is already here in the library. She doesn’t like Moncel, he’s silent, detestable, a megalomaniac, good evening young Moncel, not much is seen of this young French philosopher outside the philosophical sessions of the Seminar, he grunts a reply, he twangs a small elastic band, Madame Merken does not care for grunts, elastic bands or little peacocks, is this what they call French urbanity, young man? he pulls himself together, good evening Madame, it seems young Moncel doesn’t like women, not very much Madame, rather convenient, Madame Merken doesn’t either, especially this evening, Moncel says women are all deceivers, and moreover they’re always trying to belittle us, hmph! I most certainly did not come here to listen to this weedy little Frenchman trot out a string of cliches.
‘And what, young man, about Germans, do you like them? I imagine no more than you like women?’
‘My uncle was killed at Verdun, Madame.’
‘No doubt, like many Germans.’
‘But they weren’t invited, Madame.’
If we’re talking invitations, what on earth does any young Frenchman hope to find in German-speaking Waltenberg? he must surely have observed that there is a great deal of talk about reconciliation, you speak excellent German and you take notes as if your life depended on it every time my husband opens his mouth, this hotel is full of Germans, and women, and yet you come and shut yourself away in here, I think that is very peculiar in someone who doesn’t like us, is young Moncel that keen on suffering?
‘No, I’m here to size you Teutons up, get an idea of your strength, you have surrendered nothing and once more you are attempting to do us down.’
‘Do you down? your African soldiers litter our streets with their bastards, you proclaim your main frontier is the Rhine, and it’s we who are trying to do you down?’
‘And where do you suppose that frontier ought to be, Madame, if it’s not the Rhine?’
La Merken has come closer, voice low, you must calm yourself, young man, here a gentleman does not shout in the presence of ladies, not even German ladies, there is now only one meaningful frontier, there, Madame Merken’s large chin points to the night outside the windows, a frontier lying much further east than is visible to your myopic eye, the frontier which faces the barbarian horses of the Steppes, the vital frontier which your country’s stupidity weakens with every passing day, not the Rhine, no, on the other side, in the East, other great rivers, the Vistula is a frontier, we never speak of it but it is in our thoughts, you should think of it so too, and the irony of History is that by establishing your presence on the Rhine and humiliating us with your Senegalese and Arabs, to contain us as you put it, you have opened the doors of the East to new invasions of hordes which pour into your own towns and cities by the trainful, such smells, the tribal food, the pullulation of squalid infants, got nothing to say for yourself, Moncel? Do you prefer your vermin in the style of Corneille and Goethe?
‘I have never thought that.’
‘Comes to the same thing, and you haven’t seen the worst, when people like that, who overrun you, who live fifteen to a room, who were intended to live fifteen to a room and go round saying that other people aren’t entitled to more, what could be worse than there being fifteen of them in a room, thousands of rooms occupied every day, and there they congregate in tribes and there they reproduce, and you know what is the worst thing of all, Monsieur Moncel, be honest enough to admit it!’
‘The worst thing of all, Madame, is when they go out.’
‘The philosopher speaks! Yes, they go out, they become dressmakers, journalists, restaurateurs, policemen, philosophers, lawyers, sometimes you don’t recognise them for what they are, the worst of them become gynaecologists, they strip us of our wealth, they’re in Berlin, Munich, Paris.’
‘And they buy up estates as far afield as Brittany, where I was born.’
Good old Brittany, such larks, Arthur, the Round Table, the Grail, the only right to the ownership of land should be birth, now the peacock is giving me his full attention, he has stopped fiddling with his wretched elastic band, it is now dawning on him that there are such things as real ideas, and powerful, he knew it; now we, Monsieur Moncel, we say that the strong must work together if they are to resist the domination of the weak, instead of imagining that the frontier should run along the banks of the Rhine, are you making a genuine effort to understand us Germans?
‘You don’t make it very easy, Madame.’
Moncel will never understand the first thing about the Germans unless he can come to understand their attachment to the land, the marriage of river and crag, to emphatic deeds and gentle people, do you know Die Walküre, young man? ‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’, and the song of Brünnhilde? Moncel knows neither, at the seminary he attended opera was not allowed, one of his classmates had referred to Carmen one day to make the point that ‘toreador’ wasn’t an authentic Spanish word, he’d been sent for by the Superior, a month’s penitence, no need for this woman to know that, look up there, young man, those four large volumes, the end one, pass it down to me, the ride and the lyricism, I just ask for your attention for five minutes, no more, and I shall tell my husband to give you the interview you’ve been hoping for ever since you got here, but first I want to make you understand my country!
Moncel has taken half a pace back. He doesn’t want to? You hate us that much? You hate us more than the scum?
‘I didn’t say that, Madame, but I can’t stand…’
‘So you are in favour of these invasions?’
Moncel knows what he can’t stand, the presence of this woman, her fat body, the smell of face-powder and sweet perfume, the underlying acid odours, those eyes, the beefy arms which could reach out and collar him in a flash, the sturdy hiking shoes, a woman a foot taller than him, this woman is in herself her own male, if she attacks him he won’t be able to fight her off, she has positioned herself between him and the door, she could flatten him, crush him, I’d have to grab one of the chairs, put a chair between me and her, she has a mammoth bosom, she’ll punch me and then say she was forced to defend herself, they will believe her, I shall be a laughing-stock, I should have turned tail and fled the instant I saw her here in the library, she’s got fists like giant hams, hands that could wring the neck of just about anything.
She’s quite capable of rushing out of the library shouting Moncel attacked me, like the maid in the presbytery at Rethel, she’d run out into the street, she’d torn the front of her blouse, screamed blue murder, and now she’s bearing down on him, what is it you can’t stand, Monsieur Moncel? A bare thirty centimetres now separate her from Moncel, a smell of sweetness and German sweat, Moncel is forced to raise his head to meet her eye, they say she has a foul temper, whatever you do don’t provoke her, I can’t stand ladders, Madame, I get giddy…