Authors: Michel Déon
‘Cape Horn! Know it by heart. And I tell you: there’s no love lost between us.’
Jean was enchanted by it all: the politeness of the tourists he accompanied, the Côte d’Azur’s beauty before the July and August crowds, the inconsequential singsong charm of the accents he heard. He forgot his sorrow, and the sharp memory of Chantal’s disappearance, even though he would have liked to have her beside him to share the new, wild beauties of this coast. Unthinkingly, he went on wishing that Geneviève would come. Salah told him that the prince, who was feeling stronger, had dissuaded her from joining him. The former chauffeur frequently came to fetch Jean for lunch. One day brought up the subject of Palfy.
‘I know he is your friend, but I don’t understand him. What is he doing here? One sees him everywhere. One sees him too much. If the scheme he is setting up here is as shady as the one he set up in England, he’ll have problems.’
‘Salah, I don’t know. I like Palfy. He’s a happy rogue. He makes genuinely grand gestures. I shall never be like him, and perhaps I ought to regret that.’
‘No. Don’t regret anything. One needs to be better armed than you are to ward off his wiles.’
Jean closed his eyes in vain, he could not ignore everything. Madeleine moved out of the hotel and up to a studio on the hillside, which she would have liked to decorate with prints and pompoms on the lampshades. Palfy forbade it. He chose the furniture, the curtains, the carpets, the prints. She understood none of it, and acquiesced
with a humility learnt from years in men’s company. She was his creature now.
The reader, better informed than the hero of this story, will be surprised that Jean has not made the connection between Théo’s hotel and Antoine du Courseau, especially after the information Antoinette had given him. Antoinette,
Toinette
, Chez Antoine – Mireille Cece’s as well as its Saint-Tropez counterpart, not to mention the garage at Aix – there were enough clues there to put any detective wise about Antoine’s whereabouts. But Jean had loved that good, generous, absent man. The idea of pursuing him to his hideaway did not even cross his mind. He would have considered it a betrayal of their ancient, secret pact, and of that last night spent together at an empty, echoing La Sauveté. At the beginning of July, nevertheless, the Toinette arrived at Cannes with an extra crew member on board: a slim girl of fifteen with light-coloured eyes and chestnut hair. She spoke with the same appealing singsong accent as her father. To be fifteen in 1939 was still to be a young girl, to lower one’s eyes without shame, not to speak until one was spoken to. She looked after the bar, the picnic on board, the children and the old ladies. When she was there Théo stopped swearing and telling tales of round-the-world voyages.
‘Have you seen many as beautiful as her?’ he asked, over and over again.
Business remained good until the beginning of August, and then there was something in the air that was not yet anxiety, nor simple worry, but more a sort of instinctive, animal-like drawing back. Only the British seemed not to share it. They came in organised groups,
got themselves sunburnt and drunk on rosé wine from the Var, were enraptured at the slightest treats offered by the agency – the bus excursions, boat trips, evenings out at the Palm Beach casino – and had a flutter at boules. Jean, who had not had any news from Ernst for a long time, opened a letter one morning in which his friend imparted some disturbing information.
Dear old Hans, I’m writing to you on a Sunday afternoon, during our six hours of weekly rest. There’s a thousand of us, boys my age, in a wonderful camp in the Black Forest, living close to nature while we undergo intensive training. Yes, these are university holidays, and I’m using them to do basic military training. It’s very exciting and we all feel it gives our life a meaning when our country is so threatened by Poland’s constantly aggressive stance. We turn our thoughts towards our German-speaking brothers living beyond our frontier under the insolent tyranny of Colonel Beck. For now it’s just humiliations and skirmishes. Tomorrow there could be a massacre. Poland must know that the Reich will not sit idly by while genocide is committed. Our Führer has warned the Poles. Dantzig is German at heart and in spirit. The present injustice is too blatant for our young hearts to accept it. Do not let any of this disturb you! The new Germany only wishes France well … And even Great Britain. There will be no war in the West. The Munich agreement is signed and sealed, on the honour of two veterans of the last war, who knew the horror of the trenches: Daladier and our Führer. Send me your news. How are your studies going?
Jean showed the letter to Salah when he came to the agency later that day. He read it, handed it back and said, ‘It confirms everything the prince has predicted. In any case, we are leaving for Lebanon tomorrow. Madame is arriving this evening.’
Geneviève in Cannes! Jean felt his legs turn to jelly. At a distance Geneviève was an abstraction, a practically imaginary person who spoke into telephones and only appeared trailing a shimmering, mocking light in her wake. Close to, she would really exist again, and despite holding out no hope that temptation would spark off its simultaneous awkwardness and pleasure between them, he had had a febrile fear of it, ever since Palfy’s whispered warning.
‘I won’t manage to see the prince, after all,’ Jean said.
‘You’ll see him this very evening. That’s why I came to the agency. I’ll take you to him.’
At the Carlton Jean looked anxiously for Palfy, but the Austro-Daimler was missing from its usual parking space. They went up to the fourth floor, and Salah asked Jean to wait in a small anteroom. Five minutes later he reappeared, standing back from a door that opened into a bedroom with half-drawn curtains that let in the ochre light of late afternoon. An indefinable scent permeated the room. Was it medicine, or some subtle, oriental perfume? He could not tell. Sitting at a small desk by the window, the prince closed a folder. The transparent and waxy skin of his face was attached to a death mask in which there lived, velvety and shining, two heavily lashed eyes which seemed enormous beneath the broad, low projection of his brow, crowned with grey hair full of blue glints. All Jean could see of the rest of him was a torso enveloped in a garnet-coloured silk jacket and a neck delicately protected by a white scarf knotted like a hunting tie.
‘So here is Jean, my friend Jean from the hill at Grangeville, from Rome and London and Cannes … a boy who has grown up greatly, seen many things, and works valiantly.’
He held out a cool, thin hand that felt weary and that Jean merely brushed for fear of breaking it.
‘I have wanted to see you for a long time, Monseigneur, but Salah told me you have been too tired. I’m happy you’re feeling better.’
‘I’m not better, but we must leave. War will be declared within
a month. I do not get involved in such quarrels. But you? It worries me. You will be sucked into this great machine. You will have to survive, Jean. It’s too ridiculous to die at twenty. For nothing, so that the world of tomorrow can be worse still than that of today. I cannot take you with me, you would be a deserter, but I want to do something for you. Here is a sealed white envelope. You are to open it only in case of extreme need. Inside it there is a second envelope, with a name and address. You can at any time present yourself to the addressee and give him the second,
sealed
envelope. If, at the end of the war, you have not needed it, destroy it in its entirety, without ever seeking to know to whom I was directing you. I have been glad to see you, Jean. There is a good chance that it may be for the last time. You cannot imagine how cruel it is to say farewell to objects and people and to repeat to yourself: this is the last time. There are so many pictures of which one would like to preserve a memory … But I am very calm and I am ready. The war will seem long to a man who is weary, very weary.’
‘Monseigneur …’
‘Goodbye, Jean.’
He extended his hand, which Jean pressed gently, trying to convey his emotion. Salah made a sign, beckoning him to the door. The prince was already opening his folder again.
In the Carlton’s lobby Salah took hold of Jean’s arm.
‘Come over here. I have something to say to you.’
They sat on a sofa next to a window, through which cars could be seen stopping and guests coming and going. The luxury hotel resembled an anthill, animated by unceasing movement: the ants arrived with their suitcases and left again with their hands free, while doormen channelled this ebb and flow of motion, running to the cars, opening doors. Dusk was falling red upon the sea. In the middle of the bay a cruise ship was switching on its deck lights.
‘Never speak about that envelope,’ Salah said. ‘I say that in deadly
earnest. It’s your secret, your talisman. Even your best friend must know nothing about it.’
Jean realised that ‘best friend’ meant Palfy, the very person whom he feared might materialise at any moment and swoop down on them.
‘We don’t know if Monseigneur can survive the voyage. I hope he can. Madame’s arrival will help him, but it will be a great shock for her. He has hidden his state of health from her.’
‘Does he love her?’
‘Immensely.’
Jean felt profoundly uncomfortable. In his appetite for life, and in the muddle of his feelings, he had, in his imagination, betrayed the prince, a singular man who had shown him nothing but goodness. Was every life subject to this series of temptations that couldn’t be kept in check, from which only happenstance or some ruthless decision could save you? He felt ashamed and promised himself that he would spell out his resolve to do better, in black and white, that evening in his notebook.
‘Lastly, there is another thing,’ Salah said in a different voice, as if he wanted to inject a more serious note of warning into his words. ‘Yes, one other … I doubt you will understand, but you’ll pass on the message, I’m sure. You are to warn your friend, “Baron” Palfy, that he is involved in a much more dangerous game than a person of his sort should be. If he weren’t your friend, he would already have found himself in serious trouble. Some well-informed people have granted him a reprieve. But it is only a reprieve.’
Salah saw that his words had disturbed Jean, and he placed his hand on his arm to reassure him.
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you. Now let us talk about something else. When this war is over and Monseigneur and I come back to Europe – or perhaps I alone – I should like to see you. Paris and London are both enormous. We could pass each other a hundred times without seeing each other.’
Jean thought hard. The only lasting affections that he could count on were those of the abbé Le Couec and Antoinette. Albert would not survive a war that had insulted his only article of faith: peace at any price.
‘I think you could always write to Antoinette du Courseau, Geneviève’s sister. She will know where I am.’
Salah wrote the address in a notebook.
‘Do not let us lose sight of each other, my dear Jean. How the time here has flown past! I’ve hardly seen you. We haven’t talked about anything. I would have liked to share my admiration for a marvellous poet with you … You must have heard of him, and you must not make fun of me because I am completely self-taught. I have had to go a long way on my own down a path along which you were guided at a very young age.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Paul-Jean Toulet.’
‘I’ve never read him.’
Salah raised his arms.
‘You fortunate man! You have a delightful writer to discover. I envy you. Tomorrow I’ll send a copy of his
Counter-rhymes
to you at the agency. I’ll leave you the joy of hunting through bookshops for the rest:
The Stripling Girl, The Misses La Mortagne, Monsieur du Paur, Public Figure.
Reading him, you will think of me, and above the fray we shall maintain a Touletian friendship.’
A bellhop appeared in front of Salah.
‘Monsieur … The prince is asking for you. Urgently.’
Jean walked out of the hotel. Night was falling. He did not know where to go in this elegant and handsome town that was so cold in the evening, without secrets and so aloof that to encounter it in the darkness was to feel immediately uneasy. His solitary evenings usually ended in a small restaurant at the port where Palfy sometimes joined him, but mostly he returned to his hotel room to read. He had
started on a reading list of epic proportions: Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
, Roger Martin du Gard’s
The Thibaults
, Jules Romains’
Men of Goodwill.
Many of his nights were now spent with his nose in a book, and whether excited or disappointed, he felt that his life was gaining a new dimension as his curiosity was awakened and he measured the narrowness of his own experiences against other destinies of so many different stamps. At twenty, he felt he had seen nothing. His work at
La Vigie
, his six months in London, his job at the agency were dead ends. He would have given anything to go to Lebanon with the prince, and then maybe to Egypt. At least war – if there was going to be war – would make some space and movement. For a short time that evening he wished it would come, in the form in which it is often imagined by naïve eyes: a masculine adventure that disrupts the monotony of a cowardly and gloomy world in which boys of his age encountered only brick walls to bang their heads against.
Palfy did not turn up at the restaurant, and when Jean called Madeleine the telephone rang vainly in an empty apartment. He left a message at the Carlton, went to bed, read, and slept. The next day Palfy remained untraceable, but when he called Madeleine again she answered immediately.
‘Yesterday night? I must have gone out for five minutes to get cigarettes. I don’t leave the apartment for anything else, as you know. It must have been you I heard – around nine? – as I had my key in the door. I ran, but I was too late. I was afraid it might be Palfy. He would have been furious.’
‘Why?’
‘He likes me to be at home then.’