And very racy they were for a major’s very Catholic wife, words expressing the thing, compared with them Caillaux’s letters were elegant froth. But nothing had happened, nothing at all.
The major’s wife had never answered any such letters and had never met the man. The sister showed Max the letters, well she did not show them exactly, she said they were in the black box on the table. She left the room, I’ll be back in a moment, I want you to tell me if the letters are genuine, my sister always told me that nothing had happened, with me she just laughed about them, I never read the letters, she left them all with me for safe-keeping, except for the last one, but I never wanted to read them, Lieutenant, to read them was a sin.
Imagine that, my friends! the widow had never read them, that was her sister’s mortal sin: to have read them. She told me I cannot entirely rule out the idea that my sister lied to me, I feel the presence of the Devil, I myself have lied to my confessor, I told him I hadn’t found the letters, he wants me to hand them over so that he can destroy them, my sister is innocent, all she did was read them without telling her husband, she was afraid of being suspected of wrongdoing.
Maybe too the major’s wife wasn’t all that put out to find in the man’s letters a reference to doings no one had ever taught her — ‘darling, how I loved yesterday afternoon and the way you let me take that virginity of which even married women never speak, for they are only supposed to have one’ — yes, the letters were the most awful rubbish, and he signed them ‘Honoré, who loves you’, which he had crossed out and corrected and given what he’d said, he felt justified in putting ‘your darling Honoré, who loves you madly’.
Well, I’ll spare you the boring details, oh no, Max, details are what makes the paper they’re written on worth while, God is in the details, they’re the reporter’s first duty, I’m not sure the woman they were intended for understood them fully, they even mentioned such practices as a Cuban embrace and a crab’s claw, the man had smothered everything with a sentimental Musset-type sauce, a lot of rubbish words.
In less than a week, the woman was dead of a nasty bout of bronchitis.
The major had found one of these racy missives in the deceased’s writing desk and ‘darling Honoré’ had received a military sword full in the throat.
The major had saluted the witnesses, the man had died for something that really wasn’t worth it, died for a joke, dear friends, Max would say, and many died for another joke, a joke on an altogether larger scale, on the evening of 29 July 1914, between Moscow and Berlin, it wasn’t letters that were sent but telegrams, and these last official telegrams exchanged between the two empires bring war, one signed ‘Your uncle Willy’ and the other ‘Your loving Nicky’, war: a great big joke played by old men.
We even have photos dating from before the war in which Nicky and Willy, so fond of each other, are playing croquet, all very pally, with the façade of a château in the background, great game, croquet, very character-forming, they also go bicyle-riding, their majesties ride the first freewheel bicycles, freewheeling being designed to relieve the velocipedist’s legs, such a devastatingly droll expression, so ‘pre-war’: ‘to freewheel’.
The brasserie on the Boulevard des Italiens is enormous, noisy, hot, friendly, it is newly decorated, in the American style, large panels of dark wood, great stretches of light-coloured wall, it is the triumph of the panel and is echoed even in women’s dresses, one panel fore, one panel aft, tall mirrors everywhere, very bright electric light, 1920s styling, no fancy curlicues, huge chandeliers but not of dangling crystals, made entirely of huge, clear prisms, and real live sparrows which nest above them and chirrup from one chandelier to another.
At a table just behind them, a woman stares at Max, Max sees her from the front and also from the side in one of the mirrors, he can see himself in another mirror, he can pretend he’s not watching the woman, that he’s looking at something else, and he can see her while she watches him talking. At the same time he can observe his own face, which he doesn’t much care for, cauliflower ears, round head, flat profile, eyes slightly staring, a comic valet, the main thing is to keep talking, apparently when he becomes animated people don’t notice how ugly he is, from time to time the woman seems interested, at least more than she is by her own table companions.
Fantastic face, thinks Max, high cheekbones, large eyes, not French, and not because of the cheekbones and the abundant brown hair, it’s rather the way she is, it’s the face of someone who does other things in life than try to please men, she’s beautiful but she doesn’t give a damn, her bearing is both restrained and free, is she powerful? A banker maybe? She gave a start when Max said the only ones left standing will be the arseholes, a foreigner who speaks French fluently then, get up? No, wait until she gets up, very grande dame, distinguished, make contact, whisk her off in a taxi, in taxis all women become tarts, and this one isn’t likely to go at it in a half-hearted way, such a contemptuous way of looking at the people at her table, no not contemptuous, she wouldn’t be so obvious, but her mind’s not elsewhere either, she’s there all right but no one’s got her attention, in the back of the taxi, backside, lips, the lot, then get out and leave the taxi to her.
At Monfaubert, the dragoons thrust and slash and fall, and have gone much too wide on the left of the target of the charge, those dove-grey dreams of the Germans, riders carried by their momentum to the other end of the encampment, and the eight German dreams remain intact, it was easier on the Marne, two years before the war, Verzy, another war, a war fought with chamber pots, a charge through the streets of a small town, peasants panicking, the women especially, not afraid of animals, give the flat of the sword to a woman who’s thwacking your horse’s legs with a big stick, or the charge at Carmaux, it was miners that time, and ten or so dead.
In this clearing there are no chamber pots but there are rifles, bayonets and two, maybe three Spandau guns which have cut clear swathes in the first three troops, only just under half the riders have managed to traverse the enemy camp but without doing much real damage, too far to the left of those German dreams, the other half of the dragoons have been unseated, the relatively unscathed try to make it back to cover, a few Germans begin to gather their wits and shoot them down like rabbits.
There are also Germans lying on the ground, but their dreams are intact.
Then the lieutenant of the French dragoons who have been held in reserve in the woods orders his fourth troop to charge — to make the most of the enemy’s disarray — a support troop which is in turn decimated by the tap and rattle of the sewing-machine while fifty dragoons who survived the first charge have wheeled round at the far end of the field, their dander up once more, a gallop, less than seven hundred paces a minute, two charges by wounded riders in a pincer movement that encircles the Germans, now to recreate the shock which spikes the guns, a mass moving forward at great speed in a century of speed, a steel pincer which is about to bite on the steel of German dreams.