The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (14 page)

He tried to laugh, but sounded
desperate.

‘Nine years! Almost ten! I was
left all alone, with no money, no job …'

He was talking to himself, probably
unaware that he was staring hard at the figure drawing of the nude with that bare
flesh …

‘Ten years of slogging away, every
day, with difficulties and disappointments of all kinds, but I got married anyway, I
wanted kids … I drove myself like an animal to give them a decent life. A
house! And the workshop! Everything – you saw that! But what you didn't see is
what it cost me to build it all, and the
heartbreaks
 … The bills
that kept me awake at night when I was just getting started …'

Passing his hand over his forehead, he
swallowed hard, and his Adam's apple rose and fell.

‘And now
look: I've just had a baby girl and I can't remember if I've even
seen her! My wife is lying in bed unable to understand what's going on, she
sneaks frightened looks at me, she doesn't recognize me any
more … My men ask me questions, and I don't know what to tell
them.

‘All gone! Suddenly, in a few
days: wrecked, ruined, done for, smashed to pieces!
Everything!
Ten years
of work! And all because …'

Clenching his fists, he looked down at
the gun on the floor, then up at Maigret. He was at the end of his rope.

‘Let's get it over
with,' he sighed, wearily waving a hand. ‘Who's going to do the
talking? It's so stupid!'

And he might have been speaking to the
skull, the heap of old sketches, the wild, outlandish drawings on the walls.

‘Just so stupid …'

He seemed on the verge of tears again,
but no, he was all done in. The fit had passed. He went over to sit on the edge of
the divan, planted his elbows on his bony knees, his chin in his hands, and sat
there, waiting.

He moved only to scrape a bit of mud off
the bottom of a trouser leg with a fingernail.

‘Am I disturbing you?'
asked a cheery voice.

The carpenter entered, covered in
sawdust, and, after looking around at the drawings decorating the walls, he
laughed.

‘So, you came back to look at all
this?'

No one moved. Only Belloir tried to look
as if nothing were wrong.

‘Do you remember about those
twenty francs you still owe me for that last month? Oh, not that I've come to
ask
you for them. It just makes me
laugh, because when you left without taking all this old junk, I recall you saying,
“Maybe one day a single one of these sketches might well be worth as much as
this whole dump.” I didn't believe you. Still, I did put off
whitewashing the walls. One day I brought up a framer who sells pictures and he went
off with two or three drawings. Gave me a hundred sous for them. Do you still
paint?'

It finally dawned on him that something
was wrong. Van Damme was staring stubbornly at the floor. Belloir was impatiently
snapping his fingers.

‘Aren't you the one who set
himself up in Rue Hors-Château?' asked the carpenter, turning to Jef Lombard.
‘I've a nephew worked with you. A tall blond fellow …'

‘Maybe,' sighed Lombard,
turning away.

‘You I don't
recognize … Were you with this lot?'

Now the landlord was speaking to
Maigret.

‘No.'

‘What a weird bunch! My wife
didn't want me to rent to them, and then she advised me to throw them out,
especially since they didn't pay up very often. But they amused me. Always
looking to be the one wearing the biggest hat, or smoking the longest clay pipe. And
they used to sing together and drink all night long! And some pretty girls would
show up sometimes … Speaking of which, Monsieur Lombard, that one there,
on the floor, do you know what happened to her? …

‘She married a shop walker at Le
Grand Bazar and she lives about two hundred metres down the street from here. She
has a son who goes to school with mine …'

Lombard stood up, went over to the bay
window, and
retraced his steps in such
agitation that the carpenter decided to beat a retreat.

‘Maybe I am disturbing you after
all, so I'll leave you to it. And you know, if you're interested in
anything here … Of course, I never held on to this stuff on account of the
twenty francs! All I took was one landscape, for my dining room.'

Out on the landing, he seemed about to
start chatting again, but was summoned from downstairs.

‘Someone to see you,
patron
!'

‘Later, then, gentlemen. Glad to
have met—'

The closing door cut off his voice.
Although inopportune, the carpenter's visit had eased some of the tension, and
while he'd been talking, Maigret had lit his pipe.

Now he pointed to the most puzzling
drawing on the wall, an image encircled by an inscription that read:
The
Companions of the Apocalypse
.

‘Was this the name of your
group?'

Sounding almost like himself again, it
was Belloir who replied.

‘Yes. I'll
explain … It's too late for us, isn't it – and tough luck for
our wives and children …'

But Lombard broke in: ‘Let me tell
him, I want to …'

And he began pacing up and down the
room, now and then looking over at some object or other, as if to illustrate his
story.

‘Just over ten years ago, I was
studying painting at the Académie, where I used to go around in a wide-brimmed hat
and a
lavallière
 … Two others there with me were Gaston Janin,
who was studying sculpture, and little Émile Klein. We would parade proudly around
the
Carré – because we were
artists
, you understand? Each of us thought he'd be at least
another Rembrandt!

‘It all started so
foolishly … We read a lot, and favoured the Romantic period. We'd
get carried away and idolize some writer for a week, then drop that one and adopt
another …

‘Little Klein, whose mother lived
in Angleur, rented this studio we're in, and we started meeting here. We were
really impressed by the medieval atmosphere of the neighbourhood, especially on
winter evenings. We'd sing old songs and recite Villon's
poetry …

‘I don't remember any more
who discovered the Book of Revelation – the Apocalypse of John – and insisted on
reading us whole chapters from it.

‘One evening we met a few
university students: Belloir, Lecocq d'Arneville, Van Damme, and a Jewish
fellow named Mortier, whose father has a shop selling tripe and sausage casings not
far from here.

‘We got to drinking and wound up
bringing them back to the studio. The oldest of them wasn't even twenty-two.
That was you, Van Damme, wasn't it?'

It was doing Lombard good to talk. His
movements were less abrupt, his voice less hoarse, but his face was still blotched
with red and his lips swollen from weeping.

‘I think it was my idea to found a
group, a society! I'd read about the secret societies in German universities
during the eighteenth century. A club that would unite Science and Art!'

Looking around the studio walls, he
couldn't help sneering.

‘Because we were just full of that
kind of talk! Hot air
that puffed up our
pride. On the one side were Klein, Janin and me, the paint-pushers: we were Art! On
the other side, our new university friends. We drank to that. Because we drank a
lot … We drank to feel even more gloriously superior! And we'd dim
the lights to create an atmosphere of mystery.

‘We'd lounge around right
here, look: some of us on the divan, the others on the floor. We'd smoke pipe
after pipe, until the air became a thick haze. Then we'd all start singing.
There was almost always someone feeling sick who'd have to go and throw up in
the courtyard. We'd still be going strong at two, three in the morning,
working ourselves up into a frenzy. Helped along by the wine, some cheap rotgut that
upset our stomachs, we used to soar off into the realm of metaphysics …

‘I can still see little
Klein … He was the most excitable one, the nervous type. He wasn't
well. His mother was poor and he lived on nothing, went without food so he could
drink. Because when we'd been drinking, we all felt like real geniuses!

‘The university contingent was a
little more level-headed, because they weren't as poor, except for Lecocq
d'Arneville. Belloir would swipe a bottle of nice old Burgundy or liqueur from
his parents, and Van Damme used to bring some charcuterie …

‘We were convinced that people
used to look at us out in the street with fear and admiration, and we chose an
arcane, sonorous, lofty name:
The Companions of the Apocalypse
. Actually, I
don't think any of us had read the Book of Revelation all the way
through … Klein was the only one who could recite a few passages by heart,
when he was drunk.

‘We'd all decided to split the rent for the room, but Klein was allowed
to live here.

‘A few girls agreed to come pose
for us for free … Pose and all the rest, naturally! And we tried to think
of them as
grisettes
from
La Bohème
! And all that half-baked
folderol …

‘There's one of the girls,
on the floor. Dumb as they come. But we painted her as a Madonna anyway.

‘Drinking – that was the main
thing. We had to ginger up the atmosphere at all costs. Klein once tried to achieve
the same effect by pouring sulphuric ether on the divan. And I remember all of us,
working ourselves up, waiting for intoxication, expecting visions … Oh God
Almighty!'

Lombard went over to cool his forehead
against a misty windowpane, but when he came back there was a new quaver in his
voice.

‘Chasing after this frenzied
exaltation, we wound up nervous wrecks – especially those of us who weren't
eating enough, you understand? Little Klein, among others: a poor kid going without
food to over-stimulate himself with drink …

‘And it was as if we were
rediscovering the world all on our own, naturally! We were full of opinions on every
great problem, and full of scorn for society, established truths and everything
bourgeois. When we'd had a few drinks and smoked up a storm, we'd spout
the most cock-eyed nonsense, a hodgepodge of Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Moses, Confucius,
Jesus Christ …

‘Here's an example: I
don't remember which one of us discovered that
pain doesn't
exist
, the brain's simply imagining it. One night I became so
enthralled with the idea that, surrounded by my excited audience, I stabbed myself
in the upper arm with a pocket knife
and forced myself to smile about it
!

‘And we had other wild
inspirations like that … We were an elite, a coterie of geniuses
who'd come together by chance and were way above the conventional world with
its laws and preconceived opinions. A gathering of the gods, hey? Gods who were
sometimes dying of hunger but who strode through the streets with their heads high,
crushing passers-by with their contempt.

‘And we had the future completely
in hand: Lecocq d'Arneville would become a new Tolstoy, while Van Damme, who
was taking boring courses at our university business school, would fundamentally
redefine economics and upend all the accepted ideas about the social workings of
humanity. And each one of us had a role to play, as poets, painters and future heads
of state.

‘All fuelled by booze! Or just
fumes! Because by the end we were so used to flying high here that simply by walking
through that door, into the alchemical light of the lantern, with a skeleton in the
shadows and the skull we used as a communal drinking bowl, we'd catch the
little fever we craved, all on our own.

‘Even the most modest among us
could already envision the marble plaque that would one day adorn this house:
Here met the famous Companions of the Apocalypse
 … We all
tried to come up with the newest great book or amazing idea. It's a miracle we
didn't all wind up anarchists! Because we actually discussed that question,
quite seriously. There'd been an incident in Seville; someone read the
newspaper article about it aloud, and I don't remember any more who shouted,
“True genius is destructive!”

‘Well, our kiddy club debated this
subject for hours. We
came up with ways
to make bombs. We cast about for interesting things to blow up.

‘Then little Klein, who was on his
sixth or seventh glass, became ill, but not like the other times. This was some kind
of nervous fit: he was writhing on the floor, and all we could think of any more was
what would happen to us if something happened to him! And that girl was there!
Henriette, her name was. She was crying …

‘Oh, those were some nights, all
right … It was a point of honour with us not to leave until the
lamplighter had turned off the gas streetlamps, and then we'd head out
shivering into the dreary dawn. Those of us who were better off would sneak home
through a window, sleep, eat and more or less recover from our nightly excesses, but
the others – Klein, Lecocq d'Arneville and I – would drag ourselves through
the streets, nibbling on a roll and looking longingly into shop windows …

‘That year I didn't have an
overcoat because I wanted to buy a wide-brimmed hat that cost a hundred and twenty
francs, and I pretended that, like everything else, cold was an illusion. And primed
by all our discussions, I announced to my father, a good, honest man, a
gunsmith's assistant – he's dead, now – that parental love is the worst
form of selfishness and that a child's first duty is to reject his family.