Julien saw him as he stood there, blinking in the bright early sunlight. The youth looked at him, wondering whether he was a person to ask for directions, then walked into a shop. Julien watched him waving his arms as people do when they cannot speak well. He pointed, first in one direction, then in another; the shopkeeper pointed as well. He pointed to some bread and was given it, tried to give some money in exchange, but the shopkeeper waved him away, would not take it. An ambiguous gesture, not friendliness, not disdain, a cautious mixture of both that acknowledged the occupier while also taking account of the news that the fortunes of war were swinging, that the air of invincibility was fading. He mentioned the incident to Julia later: hardly the embodiment of military prowess, he said. Difficult to imagine that the defeat of France had been encompassed by such a figure.
The soldier walked back to his truck, looked around, then drove off. Julien watched that as well; he had not moved once. Julien said so, and described every movement to the investigators who came a few days later, trying to find out who stopped the truck six miles down the road, made the youth get out, then butchered him and left him to die while they stole the supplies he was transporting.
THE PLAGUE sent men mad; this is known, indeed it is a
commonplace that extreme circumstances produce behavior that seems scarcely comprehensible to those more happily situated. During the plague and for more than a century afterward, the dance of death became a leitmotiv of European art; men and women naked and dancing frenziedly with monsters and devils, embracing the things they loathed more than any other. It was a representation of the mind, for people threw aside normal restraint and embraced joy and life so eagerly and with so little caution that it crushed them.
One such was Isabelle de Fréjus, whose absurd passion for Pisano provided all the proof necessary that love is a sickness, a dangerous disease that corrupts and destroys all around it. Since he had sketched her and addressed her by the walls of the town, he had grown in her mind until he towered over all other thoughts. She dreamed night and day of him, imagined being held by him and submitting to him in a way which revolted her when she thought of her own husband. Initially she tried to pray that the thoughts would leave her alone, but soon she stopped; the madness took hold and she no longer wanted them to leave. Where the lurid visions came from she did not know; how they arose unsummoned was also mysterious, but soon she stopped fighting them and began to summon them like an incubus to come and comfort her.
Then she passed from mere daydreaming. The longing was so great there was nothing—no action, no distraction—that could shake it from her mind. She had no respite from the moment she woke until the moment she submitted to her dreams at the end of the day. And when it was announced by her husband’s chamberlain that they were now to leave Avignon and head west into central France in the hope of outrunning the sickness, she became sick herself. What if her painter should die? What if she never saw him again? Could she live, how would she die if the thing she desired most of all had slipped through her hands? The morality she had learned from the priests had no power against such thoughts. The sanctity of her vows before God meant nothing to her. She would willingly trade her life and her soul, joyfully submit to an eternity of torment to lie in his arms for one single night, to have that release he alone could provide, which she had imagined so often.
This fever of the mind, this plague of the soul, gripped her and twisted her until all she dreamed of, all she desired was to sin. And the night before she was due to leave, she could abide it no longer. As the servants and members of the family bustled about—those left, for the plague had already struck the house, killing six servants and her own grandmother and sister—packing cases as quickly as possible to make their escape, Isabelle put on her cloak and slipped through the door.
“I’m going to say goodbye to my friends. Who knows, we may never meet again,” she said. It was another sign of the times that she was allowed to go unchaperoned.
Pisano lived in a mean area that had the great virtue of being inexpensive, for Avignon had learned to love greed, and the influx of the papal court forty-three years before had created such a need for space that despite the injunctions about fair price, even cardinals sometimes had to live in houses scarcely fit for priests. Only the areas so low in reputation even the most desperate shunned them could still be afforded, and here, cheek by jowl with the city’s Jews, settled first one Italian painter, then nearly all the rest who came to try their luck.
The area was not entirely unknown to Isabelle; the city was not so big, nor women so protected. She had been to the Jews’ quarter on many occasions, but never alone, and never at night. Huddled in her best cloak, with no one to light her, she walked swiftly through the streets, her sense of unease mounting as they became smaller, more crooked, darker and meaner. Finding the Italian’s lodgings was not easy; she had to ask several times. Getting into the house was more difficult still as it was already boarded and barred to the outside world; she had to knock loudly on the thick oak many times before she heard the noise of feet coming down the stairs.
It was not what she had imagined; in her mind she had thought of a discreet arrival, wafting into the Italian’s room, his arms and his bed with no one else even aware of her presence. Then home again before dawn, through deserted streets, with only her flushed cheeks and look of content hinting at what had taken place. Instead half a dozen people—the housekeeper, servants, people in the streets and the houses opposite—had seen her and must have noted her, for she did not dress, walk, or behave like someone from the quarter.
A less courageous, less mad woman would have taken warning and gone home before irrevocable damage was done. But she had only one idea in her mind, and she never even considered turning back. She knocked on the door until she was let in and the landlady, cursing wildly, came and hammered on the door of the room. Olivier emerged, yawning from tiredness, then came down. He had spent the evening with his friend, and had been up talking too late; he was locked out of the cardinal’s palace, which now shut its doors the moment dusk fell. Those outside would now have to take their chances. So Olivier had begged a space on Pisano’s pallet and was the first to hear the knocking. He woke up swiftly when he saw the woman at the foot of the stairs; he knew from her eyes he would be having to find somewhere else to sleep that night.
They whispered together, so the landlady, notoriously inquisitive, should not hear. Then he took her upstairs.
“You must be crazy coming here,” he said as he led the way. She didn’t reply. All she had said was that she had to see her Italian.
“You should go home. I will accompany you. It’s not safe.”
“No, thank you.”
Olivier showed her in, thought of going in as well to remonstrate with Pisano, but then decided to leave well alone. He dressed himself at the top of the stairs, wrapped himself up in his cloak, for the night air was cold, and walked up and down the street. While he marched he cursed friendship and women and Italians with all the venom only the truly poetic can manage.
ISABELLE STAYED nearly two hours, then Pisano let her out again, and she began to walk home, a sane person once more in a mad world. The madness had protected her, given her immunity from harm. Now she was herself again, she knew she was vulnerable. She accepted it almost as her punishment, and was not surprised when she turned down a blind alley, totally lost, then heard footsteps behind her.
The comte was also in the grip of the devil; he had seen the look on her face as she slipped out the door, and was aware she had never looked that way for him. He followed her, all the way to the moment that she knocked on the door of Pisano’s lodging. While Olivier was pacing up and down the street, he stood silently in a doorway, waiting, his fury and torment rising to such a pitch that he thought he would burst. And when Isabelle came out of the house, he followed her again until he was sure no one was nearby.
She scarcely had time to realize what was happening, and was so weak and puny, with her well-bred arms that had never lifted a weight and soft legs that had never been forced to run. Nor did she have time to scream, for his strong fingers tightened around her windpipe the moment he came close enough.
She had half-turned when she heard the footsteps, but did she see who dragged her into the dark doorway of an abandoned house to squeeze the life out of her in his blind fury? Did her eyes beg for mercy as she sank to the ground, before they glazed over? Certainly she was unconscious before the knife stabbed time and time again into her body, and felt nothing as it slashed, one final time, across her throat in the last, extinguishing burst of rage.
The count threw the knife onto the ground beside her and stood for a few moments, heaving from the exertion. Then he walked off, pulling his cloak up above his head as he rounded the turn into the main street. But not fast enough to avoid the eyes of Olivier as he walked up and back in the cold one last time.
TWENTY-SIX WERE arrested because of the murdered
soldier; the strange mind of German military authority had decided on the number—precise, and not to be violated—for reasons not even they understood.
A town that previously had seen little of the war suddenly felt it in its full barbarity; its feeling of vague security because of its presence comfortably in the Italian zone was abruptly destroyed. There was a list, drawn up in advance, as there always was in these circumstances, but no attention was given to such precision anymore. Once, such things were carefully, meticulously done; notables—doctors, lawyers. Two masons. Three shopkeepers. Four artisans. One person who might have been a communist. Two good Catholics. People from the town and from the outlying villages. No women, no children, no one whose death could lead to accusations of being unfeeling or brutal. Such was the original pattern before civilization really crumbled. But this sort of care was in the past; there was no time for precision anymore. The revenge alone was the point. The trucks swept into the town and rounded up the first twenty-six people they saw; herded them together and marched them off to the school, which had pupils and teachers evacuated at five minutes’ notice.
Hector Morville was not a man for such a crisis. He was deputy mayor of Vaison for no reason at all except for the fact that people liked him, and he so obviously enjoyed the little drip of honor that it brought. His wife had died, it was the town’s way of sympathizing. Doing something to bring him out of himself. The mayor often feigned illness before meetings—he was a lazy, if healthy man—so that Hector could wear the full insignia of office and swell up with pride as he sat at the head of the table. No one made fun of him, though it would have been easy to do so. His pleasure was too simple, too pure, to be spoiled by cynical laughter.
Now he was terrified by the sudden burdens of office, petrified by the danger overhanging his friends, people he had known for years. The crisis aged him within hours from being plump and shiny—like many, his family had a small farm that had turned to producing remarkable amounts of food under the stimulus of shortage—to being gray and stooped. An old man suddenly, with all the doubts and hesitations of the elderly.
And so he consulted Julien, his childhood friend, when he bicycled into town that evening to find out what was going on. Elizabeth Duveau was one of those arrested, bundled into the truck merely because she was walking across the main square of Vaison after buying some cloth in a shop. It had received a supply of cotton; every woman for miles around had heard of the event and had come to Vaison to see what might be had. When she did not return, the village of Roaix had collectively turned to Julien to do something about it. Julien came to the deputy mayor to discover the details, such as he knew them.
“They have not been harmed?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they want?” he asked. “Tell me, what do they want?”
“I imagine they want the people who killed that soldier.”
“Do we know?” asked Julien, who knew very well.
Everyone knew. The moment the town heard of the murder, they knew who had been involved. The two men had been seen near the town that evening, then had disappeared altogether when the body was found and had not been seen since.
No one could guess where they had gone; they had long practice in making themselves scarce. They were not the most admirable citizens of the town, one in particular was a known drunkard, but they had their own robust courage. When the order came for them to submit themselves and go to work as laborers in a German factory, they talked together and decided to refuse. They had never been disciplined, never been good at school or good workers. They had never learned to obey orders. Wartime turned these traits into virtues. One night they disappeared into the hills and woods that they knew so well, and the police and soldiers knew not at all.
After a while more people joined them and they became resisters, sometimes without even being aware of the transformation. Some were heroes, some were trying to escape the German factories. Some were idealists, some patriots, some joined because they loved violence too much, some because they abhorred it completely. Some had clear political objectives, some merely wanted to defeat the Germans, or to bring down the current government of France. Some fought for country, some for God, some for their families, and some for themselves. All were prepared to fight, although how they were to do so, and who they considered their enemy was not always clear. It was groups like these that Bernard was supposed to weld into an effective force capable of doing real damage to the Germans, and groups like these that so terrified Marcel.
“We cannot have these people in this town murdered because of them,” said Hector.