Of Illustrious Men

II

HE WAS CERTAINLY one of those people who had the least to lose, except his life, but you wondered whether he really cared so much about his life when you remembered All Saints’ Day 1941 and the tall, sad young man in the mourning overcoat leaning over his family grave, incapable of tearing himself away from the magnetic power of the granite tombstone on which the names of his parents were carved on either side of the recumbent cross, together with the guillotine-blade dates of his recent misfortune. Fifteen months had gone by since then, during which he had learned to live alone with his dark memories, when one February morning, on his twenty-first birthday, he received a notification from the Nantes Prefecture informing him that an official committee had detailed him for forced labor in Germany. This was a recent measure. He was one of the very first to benefit from it. Their factories were short-handed, since their workers had been called up to close the gaps on all fronts, so the German authorities had invited the Vichy government to “compile a register of Frenchmen whose work was not of national importance.” The same committee had decided that one person who answered this description was the sad young man who, without any great enthusiasm but because the times didn’t have much to offer and you have to live, was now running the little shop inherited from his parents, which the village could certainly do without.

As if listing a schoolboy’s outfit, the letter specified that he had to take with him: warm clothing, shoes both for “heavy duty” and for “best,” enough provisions for a two-day journey, and the three photographs necessary for a passport. To all this he added as many books as his suitcase could hold, among them The Three Musketeers, an adaptation of which he had staged during this last bleak year. A very free adaptation, on the lines of the plays based on popular novels that the little company of friends had put on over the last few years for their own amusement: The Mysteries of Paris, The Hunchback, The Count of Monte Cristo, and an unforgettable (for those who saw it, and are still talking about it) pastiche of Jules Verne entitled Around the Stage in Eighty Minutes, with a whole lot of complicated machinery — balloon basket soaring up into the flies, magic carpet, trapdoors, disappearing acts, apparitions, backdrops — plus a cardboard elephant and a live camel that the group of friends had gone to fetch from La Baule, where in the summer it roams the long sandy beach giving rides to children and grown-ups, and during the rest of the year vegetates in a garage. They brought it back in triumph, on foot, and the crowd milling around on the night of the performance welcomed it as the star of the occasion, a reception that the great blase camel greeted with a disdainful sneer.

When he had announced that he was going to stage the Dumas book, his friends imagined that he would cast himself as d’Artagnan, or at least as one of the three musketeers, but he told them that if they didn’t mind he would rather be Planchet, the servant, a part he wanted to play for laughs. The project was well advanced, the rehearsals in the parish hall were coming to an end, and the date of the first night (which was only ever intended to be followed by a second, or at the very most a third) was fixed. This departure for Germany was most unfortunate, but how could it be avoided when the missive threatened reprisals in case of defection or evasive action — reprisals that the fate of the fusillés de Châteaubriant compelled you to take seriously. There were only two members of his family left now. His cousin Rémi, with his game leg, didn’t have much to fear, and what was more he was a war orphan, but there was also Aunt Marie, his companion in grief who, since she had been wearing mourning for the last twenty-five years, hadn’t had to make any changes in her meager wardrobe when her last brother died. He was the only one of the three who had come back alive from the agony of the 1914 war, and a few months after the death of his wife he had permanently laid down his arms and let himself die of a broken heart.

And now they were taking her nephew from her. And while she is helping with the preparations for his departure, she expresses her surprise that instead of returning his ration coupons as required by the letter, he has tucked them into the lining of his jacket. But his only reply is to give her his last instructions about the house (she is to live in it), the shop (she is to open it in her spare time, if her teaching duties allow her any, until all the stocks have been sold), and the theater. Because right from the start he had enrolled her in the little company and, flattered that he needed her, she had allowed herself to be persuaded. Not to play the duennas. She found her place at stage level, in the prompter’s box. After their day’s work, the apprentice actors — butchers, charcutiers, cobblers, carpenters, roofers, plumbers, grocers — sometimes found it difficult to learn and remember their lines. Naturally, the parts were as far as possible cast in accordance with their individual talents, but Aunt Marie is the indispensable coordinator between the fellow who takes himself for the actor Jules Berry and reinvents his lines and the one who is capable only of mumbling his way through his bits of dialogue. She stops them from going astray, she brings the ones who get lost back on the straight and narrow, and in her best irritated-schoolmistress tone, she scolds the naughty pupils who have forgotten what they had learned. Since they have all been her pupils and remember how angry she can get, the occasional actresses have gotten their parts down pat and know them much better than the young men, which strengthens her in her conviction of the excellence of her method and encourages her to launch her little prefeminist speech, already delivered a thousand times, about the serious-mindedness of girls and their greater maturity, a speech that could also be understood as a defense and illustration of her celibacy.

On the evening of the first night she was at her post down in her sentry box, having arrived at the theater well before everyone else, all the more concerned that the show should run smoothly because Joseph had handed over the reins to her. She had presided over the last rehearsals as if she were the guardian of the temple, cutting short the au-tonomistic vagaries of the village Jules Berry and urging the rest of the company to respect both the letter and the spirit of her nephew’s work. On his recommendation, for lack of an adequate last-minute stand-in she has turned Planchet into a kind of mute moron and given the part to the gardener at the girls’ school. This worthy had no difficulty in adapting to his new function, as stomach rumblings were his natural form of expression — so much so that she had to act as his interpreter to his fellow actors. She had explained that all he had to do was follow d’Artagnan like his shadow when asked to do so and to answer his questions with a grunt. Did he understand? He grunted. He had just passed his audition with honors.

The hall was full. A few German uniforms were to be seen in the audience. They had arrived one sunny Sunday in July 1940 as the congregation was just coming out of eleven o’clock Mass. The faithful had been standing in the square outside the church, discussing the enemy advance — some people had good news: they’d been halted at Saumur — when a couple of spluttering motorbikes came charging up the village street, effected a perfectly controlled skid, and stopped in front of the main entrance to the church. At the sight of their getup, which made it look as if motorbike and motorbiker formed a single unit that had been dipped into a gray-green sauce, even the least intelligent of the onlookers realized that the Saumur plug had been pulled. And while the man in the sidecar, helmeted and begoggled, was aiming his submachine gun at the parishioners, Maryvonne was heard to sigh “That’s all we needed,” which subsequently was unanimously acclaimed as Random’s first act of resistance.

The second was to be credited to the rural policeman who every Sunday at that hour rounded up the population by beating his drum and then reading aloud the various announcements relating to the life of the village. This unexpected arrival just as he was making his appearance seemed likely to ruin his regular Sunday number, all the more so since the bikers had in the meantime been joined by a cohort of cars and covered trucks, crammed full of men at arms, which had surrounded the square. With his drum slung over his shoulder he advanced toward the officer commanding the detachment, clicked his heels — which didn’t make much of a noise in comparison with the German jackboots — and, saluting, stated his grievances. As an officer himself, only a municipal one, true, but nevertheless a sworn official, it was his duty to inform the citizens of the latest communal decrees. What? What had he said that was so funny? A few words pronounced by the German officer in his own language had been enough to spread instantaneous mirth among the entire soldiery. The natives, however, couldn’t see that there was anything to laugh at. Correct, the occupiers? Presumptuous, rather (they even wanted to invite themselves into the homes of the villagers), and obviously lacking in tact. They had never been so humiliated. This was when the rural policeman saw fit to pull his drumsticks out of the diagonal straps across his chest, to take them in his hands in the correct manner (a different hold for the left and the right hand), and while retreating with circumspection, like a trial run, a surreptitious rehearsal, beat out a short, rhythmical message: ta tataratata, which, according to the version he gave later, was supposed to represent the “Tiens voila du boudiri” in the coarse language of the Foreign Legion, but which other people, perhaps to justify themselves for having lost their nerve, more meanly attributed to the fact that his hands were trembling.

Now, when the heavy red curtain went up after the traditional three knocks, he was there in the middle of the stage with his avenging drum. It was only his uniform that had changed: it now transported the audience three centuries into the past, to the time of Richelieu’s cats. All the little seamstresses in Random had donated their time and talents, ransacked their attics, and salvaged the slipcovers from discarded chairs and the lace from old-fashioned dresses. Reconstituted, the illusion of velvet and guipure was complete. Behind the rural policeman, now transformed into a herald in his cardboard boots with their wide turn-downs and his battered felt hunting hat adorned with cocks’ feathers, was a backdrop painted in ochers and pinks that represented something like the Place des Vosges in trompe l’oeil — for the near-sighted, at least. Descending from the flies on a couple of ropes was the pediment of a porch on which a station signboard announced MEUNG-SUR-LOIRE, which merely had to be altered according to the place changes, which, given the geographical complexity of the story, allowed the action to move on from one scene to the next, as the decor of the rechristened square stood for every other square. The props were minimal: stage left, a horse trough; stage right, an inn table with wooden benches around it and above it an imitation wrought-iron inn sign: HÔTEL DU FRANC MEUNIER. Opinions were already divided in the audience, and subdued murmurs began to be heard. Was the “Franc” to be seen as the declaration of a claim to their French identity under the very nose of the occupier, and did the “Meunier” — the Miller — mean that the country was being put through the mill? Soon, though, a few local scholars spread the word that no, no, it really is called that in the novel. And anyway, after he had executed a whole lot of rat-tat-tats and tried out some unprecedented drum rolls, Louis XIII’s rural policeman pulled a scroll out of his game bag, untied its red ribbon, held it at arm’s length, and began to read: “Oyez, oyez, take notice! Any resemblance to true facts and to characters now living or who have previously lived is in no way attributable to the adapters of this historic play, but to the true facts and to characters now living or who have previously lived.” There followed a short introduction describing the young d’Ar-tagnan’s departure from his parents’ house, armed with the letter of introduction from his father to Monsieur de Tre-ville, the captain of the king’s musketeers. “And now, let the show commence!” The rural policeman had taken it into his head to dramatize his number by twirling his drumsticks in his fingers, but at the last rehearsal one of them had landed down in the prompter’s box and our little aunt had come within an ace of having an eye gouged out, so she had decided that enough was enough.

Even when she was perched on two fat dictionaries, her eyes barely came up to the level of the boards. Clutching the edge of the stage, with the pages typed by her nephew spread out under her nose, she mouthed all the actors’ dialogue as they spoke it. When one of them forgot his lines she made her voice heard in her own particular fashion — inherited from her years of practice of saying prayers and going to church — which was to speak loudly in a low voice, so that she could sometimes be heard by the audience, who now and then joined in in chorus as the actor spoke his words.

There were now three people on stage. Watched by a pretty blonde, the apprentice musketeer was clashing swords with a gentleman. Since the swords were made of wood, the director had asked his pal Andre to sharpen two big butcher’s knives against each other in the wings. The success of this sound effect depended on perfect synchronization. It had been decided that they would exchange thirty thrusts. So as not to spoil his effect, the young man with the trembling hands, who already overindulged in wine, asked Aunt Marie to count with him. She was afraid of a thirty-first thrust, which would have ruined the scene but which didn’t happen. Everything would have been perfect if Andre, who was playing the innkeeper, hadn’t made his entrance carrying his knives — to the great delight of the audience.

In spite of its brocades and laces, Milady’s green gown was not guaranteed to be of the correct period, but the palpitating young bosom swelling its décolleté was of a universal nature. A fact that didn’t escape her fellow actors. Hidden in her prompter’s box, our little aunt was keeping a weather eye open and casting an occasional glance over her spectacles. When the gentleman-carpenter got a little too close to the graceful young woman, she discreetly called him to order by tapping her pencil on the boards. In his departing instructions her nephew had made no allusion to it, but she was not unaware of the fact that the beautiful Milady was his unofficial fiancée.

She came from a nearby village. They had met at a wedding. In rural communities, wedding processions are the most efficacious of all matrimonial agencies. Both families take a lot of trouble in matching the couples. These two families had thought that the tall, sad, recently bereaved young man might find some sweet consolation in the beautiful, radiant sun taking his arm. At any rate, he had found his Milady in Emilienne.

Because the young starlet had absolutely no acting experience, an occasion presented itself for her to try out her talents in a Passion play put on in Random by the assistant priest. This was an unusual kind of exercise, closer to an Easter reading than to theater proper, but it had the advantage of entertaining the faithful while at the same time offering them an edifying spectacle. Nevertheless, the project came up against a veto from the bishop of Nantes, who had forbidden mixed performances ever since Saint Veronica had given birth to a child whose paternity was much disputed between the apostles in one of the communes in his diocese. This affair had created a great stir among the right-thinking, “THE RETURN OF SODOM” was the headline of one article in Le Phare, which then began: “When shall we see a Virgin Mary who has been made pregnant by her son?” The young assistant priest, who was far more frightened at the idea of the women being played by men in drag, leaped courageously to his own defense. He managed to get an appointment at the bishop’s palace and pleaded his cause. “Again!” thundered the bishop, suddenly abandoning his preliminary unctuousness (“Well, so you’re at Random. Do you like it? Good, good,” all the time rubbing his hands in a circular movement. “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”). “No, no, NO! — you’re at least the tenth person to ask me the same thing. No mixed performances of Passion plays.” But the young abbe had not embarked on his appeal without due preparation: “No doubt, Monsignor, but have you considered the disastrous effect on our faithful, accustomed to the beautiful madonnas in our churches, of an imperfectly shaved Virgin, with hairy hands and size ten shoes?” His argument registered, and after a few objections that were soon swept aside, the bishop surrendered: “Very well, but in that case I will only allow you three women — the Virgin Mary, about fifty years old, which is to say the right age for the part [which reduced the risks], Mary Magdalene [no instructions; a sinner has to be allowed to sin], and the wife of Pontius Pilate.” The abbe thanked his superior warmly and, while he was kissing the purple stone at the extremity of the arm stretched out toward him, vainly racked his brains to find any trace of a wife of Pilate he might have come across in his reading of the gospels. But that was how Emilienne inherited the nonspeaking role created by episcopal fantasy.

Dressed in a long white tunic girdled with a golden cord, she illuminated the Passion play with her presence. When she gave her husband the towel to dry his hands on, the men in the audience felt their palms grow moist. Their attention was so riveted on her golden tresses and her curves that the priest was the only one to tear his hair when Christ on the cross, in the center of the darkened stage, with only his face visible in the spotlights, suddenly declared in a voice full of conviction, as if he’d just finished a hard day’s work in the fields, “I’m parrrched.” It’s true that there was nothing in that to shock an audience accustomed to speaking and hearing the local patois.

Previously unknown in Random, Emilienne was known from then on as “Pilate’s wife,” a pseudonym that stuck. This training in perfidy as the consort of the most famous of all lily-livered hygienists, reinforced a few months later by her character of Milady, would, it seemed, decide her fate. Jesus reincarnated as d’Artagnan (in both cases, the young farm worker had owed his role less to his acting talents than to his mop of wavy hair), had also been touched by grace. Speaking from the horse trough into which the gentleman had knocked him, he addressed the gentleman in scathing tones: “Monsieur, you are as cowardly as Madame is beautiful.” Then, when he turned to the winsome lady, words failed him. “And vice versa,” our aunt prompted him, which was supposed to mean “Madame, you are as beautiful as Monsieur is cowardly.” But the flustered gallant could no longer marshal his thoughts. And, as the beauty was growing impatient, he addressed her in a mumble: “And vice versa,” and then, blushing, pretended to faint.

Our little aunt probably raised her eyes to heaven, which, for her, came to the same thing as calling on God to witness her earthly woes, and then turned them anxiously toward the wings, from which Planchet was supposed to make his entrance. She had entrusted him with the job of changing two of the signboards: MEUNG-SUR-LOIRE to PARIS, and HÔTEL DU FRANC MEUNIER to POMME DE PIN. Even though his role had been thoroughly slimmed down, the gardener had given her plenty of headaches during the final rehearsals. The most difficult thing had been to stop him from punctuating his grunts with long brown jets of spittle. Not that he was suffering from a blockage of the bronchial tubes, but he chewed tobacco and spat out his used quid into his beret, which never failed to intrigue the uninitiated. Maryvonne, the wardrobe mistress and makeup artist (she who never wore anything but overalls, and who contented herself with a little pink face powder on Sundays), had suggested that he might expectorate into a handkerchief, which she would embroider with his stage name. Such a tactful thought: he promised to try.

While the others, on the days before the performance, were conscientiously rehearsing their lines, the gardener would be practicing targeting his spittle into a crumpled square of cloth held in the hollow of his hand. The latest news was that his aim was accurate, but our little aunt, with her nose at stage level, was always afraid of being hit by the spray. Her anxiety grew even greater when she discovered that Planchet, who had just entered, had in the meantime grown a whole head taller. He was wearing a tow wig, his outrageously rouged cheekbones made him look like a clown, but that great height, that way of imitating the humble valet, gauche and servile, ever ready to bow down to the ground … “Joseph, is that you?” she said. And the docile Planchet repeated, “Joseph, is that you?” The darkened murmurs coming from the other side of the footlights suddenly gave way to silence. Judging by the voice, there was no longer any doubt. “Joseph, you’re mad.” He repeated, “Joseph, you’re mad.” A stupefied “Oh!” rippled through every row. “Joseph, be careful, there are Germans here.” And he, addressing the audience, “The Cardinal’s spies — here?” All heads anxiously turned toward the German soldiers. However, not understanding the language, they obviously didn’t realize what was going on, and the audience began to chuckle. The murmurs grew louder, laughs rang out, and a wave of applause greeted the intrepid revenant. A few scenes later, the theater was in an uproar. Just as d’Artagnan was setting sail for England to recover the queen’s diamond studs, Planchet came rushing in brandishing two fishing rods. “I’m taking deux gaules” he announced. The house went wild, and as the two companions-in-arms, perched on a little cardboard boat, were crossing the stage against the background of a raging sea, Planchet, as a figurehead, hoisted his two fishing rods as high as his arms could reach, where, against the blue of the backcloth sky, they formed an enormous V.

It was a triumph. But when the actors came on to take their bows, the hero of the evening had once again disappeared. The moment the curtain fell, our little aunt rushed backstage. “Where is he?” she asked Maryvonne. “Gone,” replied the grocery lady, pointing to the stage door. Hadn’t he left a message? Yes, this letter for Emilienne. But for his aunt, who was all the family he had, who was running his business, who had staged his play, and who worried herself sick about her nephew, nothing?

The young men were herded together on the station platform, surrounded by soldiers, waiting for the train that was to transport them to Germany. In spite of the mildness of this steely blue March morning, tempered by a chilly little wind enfilading the tracks, they were warmly equipped in preparation for the harsh climate they had been told to expect. Each man was dressed according to his condition in life, his overcoat more or less well fitting, more or less threadbare; the more humble of them had piled on as many clothes as possible under a tight little jacket whose buttons were feeling the strain. At their feet was a suitcase containing everything they had been ordered to bring with them: a change of clothes, of shoes, either “heavy duty” or “best” (depending on which pair they had put on that morning), and enough provisions to last over a long two-day journey. Some of them had added a knapsack that revealed the neck of a bottle of wine with its cork sticking out — a miraculous commodity in these difficult times. When they extracted their bottle and took a swig, the most swashbuckling among them would first belch, and then boast, “That’s another one the Germans won’t get,” or “Like in 1914, it’s wine that’ll win the war,” which in the circumstances raised no more than a halfhearted smile. Most of them remained silent, like on your first day in a new class at school when you don’t yet know each other, when you’re sizing each other up, hoping to see some signs of fellow feeling. When a distant hissing sound announced the arrival of a train, they turned their resigned faces toward the wide curve in the track around which the expected locomotive would suddenly appear in a cloud of steam.

The most ardent desire of the man who was a head taller than all the rest was to escape attention. This was the moment of truth. When the letter arrived he had known at once that this was not going to be the way he would discover Germany. And as he had had his call-up papers duly stamped, and therefore felt he no longer needed to worry about his aunt, what he had to do now was find some way of giving his companions the slip. Would he wait until he was on board and then jump from the moving train? Or could he manage to escape by unobtrusively sliding under the cars? He was bending over to glance under the train standing at the other platform when a suspicious soldier came up and pushed him back into the ranks with the barrel of his submachine gun. “Cigarette,” he said, pointing to a butt opportunely thrown on the ballast, and he jumped down on the track, retrieved it, and immediately started smoking it with relish to prove his good faith. At least he had seen what he wanted to see. It was possible to creep under a car with his suitcase, and later emerge on the opposite platform — hoping to avoid any unpleasant surprises on that side. All he had to do now was wait for an auspicious moment, stepping back a few paces to try to merge into the crowd of his companions in adversity, coming to terms with his mounting fear, and answering one of the men who suggested making a dash for it by raising his eyebrows questioningly.

When, in a cacophony of connecting rods, pistons, brake shoes, and bursts of steam, the train slowly drew up at the platform, there was a mad rush for the doors in search of seats, since the young men leaning against the windows, having got in at Saint-Nazaire, had announced that there wouldn’t be enough for everyone. While the sentries were fully occupied in restoring discipline by giving gruff orders, he slid down with his suitcase between two cars, worked his way beneath the couplings, and crept under the other train. Lying flat on his stomach across the railroad ties, his heart beating frantically, for an eternity of seconds he awaited the shouts and hysterical activity that would certainly ensue if his escape had been noticed. Every time a whistle blew to signal the departure of a train, he tightened his grip on his suitcase, ready to spring, reproaching himself for having loaded it down with so many books, although not for a single moment did it occur to him to abandon it. As the minutes passed and the normal frenzy of the occupants sounded no more alarming than usual, he began to crawl forward a few yards, all the time keeping a watch on the feet clomping along the platform above him. Even more than a pair of boots, what he dreaded to see were the four paws of a German shepherd, whose nose would certainly have condemned him, whose fangs would have torn him to pieces. But neither boots nor dog appeared. All that was to be seen through the narrow gap between the bottom of the carriage and the edge of the platform was the heartrending procession of miserable substitutes for shoes. Old, worn-out, patched-up shoes, complete with wooden or cork soles, or even with a bit of carpet. He himself, in preparation for his getaway, had made a deal with the postman, who got preferential treatment, and had acquired a pair of sturdy leather shoes. He had remembered a remark made by a prisoner who had escaped from a stalag: “The secret of an escape is shoes.”

For the time being, though, a blacksmith’s apron would probably have served his purpose better, as he made his way along under the train, bumping his suitcase over the ties in front of him. Another thing he feared was that the train above him would pull out. He could imagine the tragicomedy of the scene, with him on all fours in the middle of the rails, his pathetic surrender and its terrible consequences. What could he pretend to be looking for? The cigarette butt story wouldn’t work a second time. But anyway, this was it, this was the end of his disappearing act: a slight jolt, an imperceptible gliding movement — though his temporary shelter hasn’t budged. A comparison of the position of the wheels with a fixed point is enough to reassure him: it’s the train transporting the forced laborers that is pulling out, on the other track. And he aims a relieved little smile at the ties and axles: the contingent bound for Germany is leaving without him.

By now he has reached the end car and, flat on his stomach, takes stock of the situation: cars waiting or abandoned on a siding, a railwayman pulling up a lever at the points, some workmen chatting by a shed, a contemplative seagull perched on a rail, sparrows hopping up and down. The track on this side crosses the west side of the town. If he were to walk along it, with that wire fence between the station and the avenue, he could hardly escape notice. Should he cut through the marshaling yard to get down to the river? Too many pitfalls, and he would be almost certain to come across a patrol. Wait until it gets dark? Without a secure hiding place, he wouldn’t like to bet on his chances until then. All that remains is the station. And he leaves his cover, bending double as he crosses the rails, as if his great height made him too conspicuous, pausing, crouched down under the end of the platforms, risking a glance, but still squatting there on the lookout for the arrival of a train that would allow him to melt into the crowd of passengers. Dusting off his overcoat to improve his appearance, he notices that it has lost a couple of buttons, one of which has taken a bit of cloth with it. There are greasy patches that refuse to come off, and he even adds a bit of blood to them, which to his great surprise comes from his hand. While he is examining his wound, a few drops of rain fall on his open palm. He looks up. The sky has taken advantage of his sojourn undercover to muster up some dark, heavy rain clouds, which precipitate a splendid deluge. The master of the elements is generous: the rain, which reduces people’s ardor, will be an invaluable ally. The watchdogs aren’t going to look twice, being more interested in finding shelter.

The rain is now pelting down on all sides, creating a halo of vapor above the steaming locomotive, which has just appeared around the wide curve. It seems to be trying to find its way among the points, and then passes within a few inches of him, spitting sparks. He nimbly hoists himself up on the platform and is soon just one of a group of passengers. In spite of his fears, he doesn’t stand out too much in his shabby getup. War doesn’t make it any easier for people to buy new clothes, and some have great difficulty in disguising their destitution. He is even amused at the way the women have drawn a thin pencil line over their tea-tanned calves to simulate the seam of imaginary silk stockings. But his anxiety grows when he notices several people staring at him, as if his new condition of a man on the run had branded a star on his forehead. “I’ve had it,” he says to himself, and he feels an icy liquid piercing his heart. He walks more slowly and, to keep up his courage, lights a cigarette. When the flame reflects his face in a train window, he realizes that what had caught their attention was the streak of black oil covering his nose. The very thing for daytime camouflage.

The exit toward which the crowd of passengers is moving is under strict surveillance. In view of the increasing number of assassination attempts and acts of sabotage, the German police, backed up by the recently created militia who, so it is rumored, are even more to be feared, have intensified their control with the frenzy of lost causes. For the tide is beginning to turn against the upholders of the new order. He can see them barring the exit, suspicious, touchy, irritable, impatient, checking papers, opening bags and suitcases, and for no apparent reason picking on one man, who casts a fearful glance around him, and pulling him to one side. Should he cut across to the station restaurant? He has to be on his guard against plainclothes policemen and informers who lean on the bar pretending to be unconcerned but then suddenly abandon their drinks and start following you. Arrests of this type, muttered conversations have reported, are the most pernicious, because they also affect the friend who is hiding you, and sometimes lead them to pick up a whole Resistance network. As he catches sight of the waiting room, he remembers a Latin translation from his school years where a crafty shepherd spirits away some oxen by pushing them out of a cave backward, which causes some incredulity in their owner, Hercules maybe, who is misled by their footprints. But that would mean passing the ticket collector in the opposite direction. So he goes up to him and, covered in confusion, putting on his Planchet act, explains that he doesn’t know the time of his connection at Angers for Sable, changing at, that’s just it, he’s forgotten where: could he possibly go back to the information office? “Make it quick, then,” grumbles the official, irritated that he doesn’t know the answers by heart.

In the waiting room, apart from the passengers actually waiting, there are quite a few passersby who, caught in the shower, have hurried in to dry, still out of breath from their little sprint, wringing out their hair and shaking their overcoats. Others, crowding into the doorway, are waiting for the sky to clear and indulging in inspired comments: “The English are at it again,” someone hazards, while the rain buckets down even harder on the cobblestones.

The tall young man with the suitcase has worked his way into the front row, deaf to the protesters standing on tiptoe watching the vagaries of the sky over his shoulder. He shivers in the moist breeze brought by the shower and pulls his coat collar tighter around his neck. The stream flowing in front of him, a former branch of the Loire recently filled in to prevent spring floods, seems to have reverted to its original state. The running water glistens like a great river, froths up in the gutters, and rushes down the gratings into the drains. It is as if the rain has the deserted town at its mercy and has brought it to a standstill. The comments become rarer, more laconic, everyone is plunged into pleasant contemplation. A kind of inner peace is achieved. The tall young man has taken off his glasses and is rubbing the top of his nose. He can be seen to be of two minds about whether to put them on again but then slips them into his pocket. Why does he need to see clearly in this murky atmosphere? The haze that now surrounds him seems to keep danger at arm’s length, to attenuate it, like the massive towers of Anne of Brittany’s castle, which he can see in the distance through the mists. And, benefiting from what might be taken for blind confidence, the ultimate negligence, he suddenly dives out into the cover of the liquid canopy.

The kindly rain even makes it possible for him to walk more quickly without his haste appearing suspicious: after all, he is merely a simple pedestrian who refuses to submit to the dictates of the heavens. He is getting farther away from the danger zone, but he still doesn’t allow himself to look over his shoulder, or give way to the delirium of joy overwhelming his final reservations. His sturdy shoes make a mockery of the puddles and seem like seven-league boots; his suitcase no longer weighs down his arm. He will have plenty of time to read, now, and he no longer regrets having filled it so full. At last he looks behind him. No one is following him. And, under the protection of the mighty ramparts of the ducal castle, he allows himself to take his first deep breath as a free man.

His friends would probably not be expecting him so soon. He was already savoring the moment when he would knock at their door, they would open it, and, with a mischievous grin, casually adjusting his glasses behind his ears, he would simply say to his astonished hosts, “I missed the train.” He had planned his escape down to the last detail. All he had to do now was cut across to the harbor, walk along the Quai de la Fosse of ill repute, where sailors’ bars were now operating in the basements of the charming but dilapidated old mansions, and climb to the Butte Sainte-Anne, where one of his old schoolfriends lived over his father’s carpentry workshop. In the not so distant past, when he was a boarder at the Catholic school in Chantenay, one of the poor suburbs of Nantes, just a few steps away, he had many times benefited from the generous hospitality of the Chris-tophes, who already had so many people to cater to that one extra didn’t make the slightest difference. There were three generations under one roof, and his schoolfriend Michel was the eldest of twelve children. He suffered from being an only son, and when they put up a cot for him in the workshop he loved to feel part of this turbulent throng who seemed completely indifferent to material difficulties. The recipe was simple, even though it lacked variety. Madame Christophe, whose figure had become somewhat problematic after her repeated pregnancies, had no rival in praising in every possible way the virtues of the potato, which the family cultivated on a vast scale in their land allotment on the outskirts of the town. It was with her in mind that he had refused to return his ration card (as well as his tobacco card, but in this case he was thinking more of himself), although his call-up papers had demanded that he hand it in to the appropriate authority. He would give his hostess his weekly sheet of J3 food coupons, the special ones for young men over thirteen that entitled them to more liberal rations. She would start by exclaiming, “But Joseph, you’ll need them yourself, you’re only here for a few days,” but he would have plenty of arguments to persuade her, and in the end she would accept them and confess that they would help to butter a few parsnips, although for a long time no one had been able to find either the one or the other. “Save bread,” the wall posters adjured the populace, “cut it in thin slices and use all the crusts for soup” — as if the workers’ families were in the habit of throwing away the leftovers.

During the day, he would join Michel and his father in the workshop, as he had always done when he visited them before. His talents as a cabinetmaker had become apparent very early. When he was only twelve he had turned his cradle into a small table, although he’d made a pretty good hash of it. Next he had made an armchair; it had massive curves, but its seat was too narrow because he had forgotten to include the thickness of its arms in his calculations. At sixteen he had taken some friends on board a long canoe he had made and christened the Pourquoi-Pasf in memory of Captain Charcot, which didn’t evince any great optimism when you remember how its illustrious eponym had ended up, crushed to bits by the ice floe. This marked preference for working in wood was no doubt inherited from his wooden-clog-making ancestors, who had been established for centuries in the heart of the Foret du Gavre, from where the last of the line — his grandfather, whom he hadn’t known — had emigrated to open a little shop in Random, which had developed into a wholesale business after he cut off one of his fingers, and it was to this fatal, unfinished, rough-hewn wooden clog, emerging from a chunk of wood like a kind of sacrificial chopping block, that our family owed its conversion to the porcelain business. But the tools of our mutilated ancestor’s trade still hung in our workshop: the knives, chisels, and gouges with which Father had carved out the arms and back of his armchair.

Under the guidance of his hosts, the young autodidact had become a skilled worker. He had even developed his own speciality: staircases. These demand a combination of dexterity, knowledge, and improvisation: in some cases, no two steps are alike. He may even have dreamed for a moment of making them his career. On one of the false identity cards dating from his underground period, made out in the name of Joseph Vauclair, born in Lorient, Morbihan (the town had been demolished in the bombings so its records had disappeared), on February 22,1925 (by making himself three years younger, he was no longer eligible for forced labor in Germany), his Profession was given as Carpenter. This was a tribute to his adopted family and an insurance against being caught red-handed as a manifest incompetent if some foxy investigator asked him out of the blue: What’s a trying plane, a marking gauge, a molding plane? And if any such catechist, mistrustful of the tall young man’s appearance, were to suspect him of having gained his knowledge purely from books, he would only have to show his hands, which had already been hardened by farm work. Since at the end of his two weeks with the Christophes, it had been arranged that he would go and lie low in the countryside, where people of all sorts ultimately came together: volunteers, recalcitrants, outcasts, members of the Maquis, black marketeers. In this way they partially agreed with the marshal, who wanted people to go back to the land, even if the nation in peril was in the event primarily interested in the peasants’ larders and their conveniently isolated villages.

But in the meantime, between the carpenter’s shop and the farm, he had planned a detour to Random to make an unexpected appearance and perform his own kind of impromptu, in comparison with which the famous “Indian trunk” disappearing act would be no more than a feeble illusion. While everyone believed he was a forced laborer in Germany, he would reappear on stage as Planchet and brandish his fishing rods under the very nose of the occupier, only to vanish again like a latter-day Judex, leaving the astonished spectators momentarily converted to the Resistance. Momentarily, because immediately after the war was over, those very same people lost no time in refusing to consider any of the candidates who had belonged to the Resistance, preferring to reelect the existing municipal councilmen who had written such charming letters to the marshal congratulating him on his action and exhorting him not to forget Random.

The Christophes had tried to dissuade him: “Joseph, The Three Musketeers, whether there’s one more or one less, and no one even knows exactly how many they were, but in any case they can get on perfectly well without you. You’d be taking too many risks for nothing much.” But the “nothing much” in question was also called Emilienne, and that’s the kind of risk that for a twenty-year-old justifies certain extravagances.

He left Nantes by stealth and pedaled hard through the growing dusk, his suitcase fastened to the carrier, his fishing rods strapped to the crossbar. He rode without lights to avoid attracting attention — he had removed the red reflector from the rear mudguard — diving behind a hedge with his bike every time some vehicle’s headlights pierced the darkness — with a curfew in force, it could only be someone undesirable — stopping at a signpost to read it by the flame of his lighter since he had taken so many detours that he had finally gotten completely lost, arriving just as the show was about to begin, sneaking into the wings where while awaiting his entrance he put on his makeup and borrowed the poor gardener’s wig, promising to give it back before the end of the show, which he did immediately after the scene of the embarcation for England. For this was no time to hang around. He wouldn’t wait for the reward of his brilliant feat. And yet with what enthusiasm the company would have welcomed its hero. But the alarm might already have been raised. When he confided to Maryvonne, as he gave her a letter to pass on to the proper quarter, that he intended to call at the house to collect a few things and some more books, she told him that the Germans had commandeered his aunt’s little cottage and that she, as he had requested, was camping in the big house with a group of students she had taken in as boarders so that any authoritarian squatters would come up against what might be seen as a “No Vacancies” sign. Three of these would-be squatters, kept at a respectful distance by this obstinate little force, had had to squeeze into the tiny little hermitage in the garden. So he abandoned his plan and set off once again on the road to Riancé. For a few kilometers he was seized with remorse at not having spared a little time for his courageous aunt. Why hadn’t he at least left her a note? She, the ever-faithful, betrayed by her swaggerer of a nephew. All at once he felt less proud of himself. Soon it began to rain, a fine, insidious rain that, together with the coldness of the night, obliged him to look for shelter. He was far enough away, now. He spotted a barn, hid his bike, and went and curled up in the hay where, tired out, he fell asleep.

Very early the next morning he got off his bike outside the shop of Monsieur Burgaud, ladies’ and gentlemen’s tailor at Riancé, a firm founded in 1830 according to the aristocratic gilded coat of arms above the shop window. While waiting for the shop to open, he did his best to make himself presentable, extracting bits of hay from his clothes, wiping the lenses of his glasses, and running a comb through his hair, hoping for the best. Two girls passed him, giggling. They walked through the garden around to the back of the house and shortly afterward one of them began to crank up the shop shutter, once again looking curiously at the half-frozen young man rubbing his hands and stamping his feet on the pavement outside. Since there weren’t any customers, he pushed the door open, and the little copper rods hanging above his head began to jingle. He was immediately enveloped in a warm smell of cloth, which consoled him for his night of vagrancy. The small glass window of the stove cast a flickering orange gleam on the floor. He was scrutinizing the piled-up lengths of cloth wound around their boards, admiring as a connoisseur the long, ornate counter with the square-sectioned wooden measure lying on it, when a woman came in from the back of the shop. By her slightly lopsided gait, which corresponded to the description he had been given of her, he recognized her as Madame Burgaud. “What can I do for you, Monsieur?” she asked suspiciously, keeping her distance from the tall young man who stank of hay. A lot, but he thought it would be more seemly to begin by introducing himself. No doubt she knew all about it — he had been sent by her daughter Marthe and her son-in-law Etienne, who, when they were first married a few years before the war, had gone to live in Random and taken over a firm dealing in grain.

It was Etienne, in whom he had confided after he received his call-up papers, who had advised him to go to Riancé. For the best of all reasons: you never saw a single German there. And then, another advantage in these days of shortages, the town was surrounded by forests that abounded in game, all the more so in that shooting was forbidden, so the most princely supplementary rations were available. Poaching was rife, and on some Sundays it wasn’t unusual for venison to be served at the Burgauds’ table. And anyway, since life in Random had become too difficult, that was where Etienne had sent his wife and three children. There was a warm welcome to be found at the house of his parents-in-law. Alphonse Burgaud knew all the peasants in the region, having at one time or another made suits for them — either for a funeral or a wedding — and he would certainly be able to find a farm willing to harbor the fugitive.

Madame Burgaud asked the tall young man to follow her, took him into the living room-dining room, invited him to sit down in spite of her fears that the tenacious smell of hay might contaminate her armchair, and went to fetch her husband. Three steps inlaid with mosaic led up to this room, which occupied a wing recently built on to the house. Lighted by large picture windows at an angle to each other, it looked out on a little enclosure where a tiny goat was prancing around untethered. Coming back unexpectedly, Madame Burgaud anticipated the question of the young man looking pensively out of the window and, pointing at the animal, said, “With his very unusual business sense, my husband is going to turn us all into goats.”

As the peasants were short of liquid assets, the tradition being that money only came in at the end of the harvest — and a suit sometimes didn’t have the patience to wait — Alphonse Burgaud accepted without haggling whatever he was offered in exchange for his work. A goat for the biggest jobs, some butter and eggs for the more modest ones, and even “You can pay me next time,” if his debtors were too hard up. The first kid of a long and already ancient line of descendants ended up on his table. When the three little girls of the family, from whom the truth had been concealed, recognized in various roasts their playmate of the last few weeks that had inexplicably disappeared, they began to sniffle, then great big tears fell on their plates, and soon, in a chorus of sobs, they refused to touch their food, whereupon Alphonse declared that he wasn’t hungry either. At which Claire, his wife, since that was the way it was, grabbed the dish and tipped all its contents, plop, into the garbage. The goats that followed — there had been as many as four in the fenced enclosure in which there was a log cabin — were allowed to take their time to grow up and die a natural death, to the great displeasure of Claire, who asked her husband to bring them to her as single components in future. In spite of its size, it was a long time since the last one had been a kid. A pituitary deficiency, no doubt, but whatever it was it had allowed the peasant to drive a hard bargain, because, honestly, all those yards of organdy, those dozens of hours spent in plying the needle and ruining one’s eyesight, those long fitting sessions to ensure that the bride would finally look like a fluffy liiftle cloud — all this was worth more than a dwarf goat.

The moment he came into the room, very dapper in a three-piece suit, his pepper-and-salt hair closely cropped, his mustache Chaplinesque, Alphonse Burgaud recognized his visitor and went up to him with outstretched hand. It had been just over two years ago, the sky was as gray as it should be on All Saints’ Day, when the tailor had gone with his daughter Marthe to the cemetery in Random to visit the grave of her firstborn son, a short-lived little Jean-Clair. As he was making his way along a side path arm in arm with his daughter, he had noticed a tall young man in glasses supporting his forlorn father in front of a tombstone covered in flowers. From the abundance of flowers it was easy to guess the recent date of the tragic event, and from the prostration of the father, the magnitude of his grief. A year later, at the same memorial pilgrimage, the same tall young man was there alone. Bending over his family tombstone, he looked as if he was about to lie down on it. The prostrate father, overwhelmed by the intensity of his sorrow, had wasted no time in joining his wife under the gray granite tombstone, demonstrating by his haste a disconcerting fidelity from which he seemed to exclude the young man who, after all, had been the incarnation of his love. And now it was the turn of the abandoned son to weigh the idea of joining them, of resuming the warm place between father and mother of the miraculous child he had been — miraculous in that he had lived, after a long succession of stillborn babies. And that was the moment when Alphonse Burgaud had witnessed a kind of life-saving operation: a little white-haired lady, dressed all in black, her head sunk between her shoulders — an aunt, the most extraordinary schoolteacher in the Lower Loire department, if Marthe was to be believed — trotted up to the despairing young man, tugged at the young man’s coat, rescued him from the hypnotic power of the recumbent stone, finally prevailed, and went off with him along the central path toward the cemetery gates.

By a strange quirk of fate, it was into his hands that this tall young man was now entrusting his safety, as if, pursued on all sides, he no longer knew what to do with the life he had so miraculously been granted. From the moment Etienne had appealed to him to play a part in this saga, which had already fascinated him as an onlooker, Alphonse Burgaud had started looking for a farm where the rebel could be hidden. He had found one at the edge of the forest, on the estate of the Count de la Bregne, the head of one of the most ancient families in France, which is to say neither more nor less ancient than any other but one that was able to trace the continuity of its name throughout the centuries, or at any rate to trace its zigzagging reputation back to an origin that distance rendered more prestigious, and which prompted a marchioness of the ancien regime, contesting the titles of a general of the empire, prince of this and duke of that, to say to him, “Yes, but you have no ancestors.” To which the general, just as covered in glory and in wounds as the lowborn crusader who had been the founding father of her noble line, had magnificently replied, “But Madame — we are the ancestors.” Although this wasn’t very kind to his father, either, who may have been a simple innkeeper, a caste that has no pretentions to ancient lineage, unless of course among innkeepers themselves.

The Riancé tailor was made welcome at the castle. All he was required to do was turn up with his professional expertise and his sewing kit, because the Count had his suit fabric specially sent from the Shetland Islands. This greatly impressed Alphonse Burgaud, whose apprentice years with Paris couturiers had taught him to appreciate fine cloth and light, comfortable materials, such as a particular cashmere overcoat whose virtues he demonstrated by feeling its weight with his little finger. Taking for granted the Count’s affinities with the British, he had at first intended to inform him that his tenant farmers might perhaps soon be called upon to harbor a defaulter from the forced labor system. But after the Count had made a few disagreeable remarks about a certain French general who broadcast on the English radio (though in fact the Count’s only objection to him was that his name had a “de” in it yet he in no way belonged to the nobility), Alphonse Burgaud had thought it wiser to say nothing and to keep his own counsel.

And that was why, a few weeks later, the Count was surprised to come across a strange-looking cowherd on his land, a cowherd sporting a tight jacket and black corduroy trousers much too short for someone of his height, trying to keep his feet in his wooden shoes as he walked with the herd, an open book in his left hand, which from time to time he stopped reading to give a lazy cow a little tap on the rump with his switch. For the young man had accepted the farmers’ generous offer on condition that he would be allowed to work for them as a simple farm laborer. He got up at dawn to do the milking, which he said is much more of a skilled job than it seems. It isn’t enough to tug at the poor animal’s udders, pretending to be a bellringer, if you want the jet of hissing, creamy milk to come gushing down in great bubbles against the metal sides of the pail, its warm steam misting up the milker’s glasses as it descends. He had worked for a long time to master the alternate movement, right hand, left hand, the calculated pressure of the fingers, the thumb and forefinger ringed round the teat so as to function like a valve and contain the flow of the milk before expressing it. This apprenticeship, under the critical and amused eye of the farmer, had not been without the odd mishap. For it is a risky maneuver. When the animal realizes she’s in the hands of a clumsy incompetent, she will manifest her displeasure by flicking her tail — usually far from clean — in the face of her torturer, unless she suddenly skips sideways and knocks him — and his pail with him — over backward into the manure. With his cheek flattened against the animal’s flank, precariously balanced on the three-legged stool that was far too low for his height, it was difficult for him to accommodate his long legs on either side of her distended belly, so that as soon as he was allowed to do the milking on his own, he invented the idea of tying up the cow’s tail and muffling his head in a jute sack, and didn’t hesitate to adopt unorthodox positions, such as sitting sidesaddle, to avoid a kick from a bad-tempered beast, a bluish memento of which he still bore on his tibia.

From the spring sowing to the autumn plowing, he followed the complete cycle of the work of the farm laborer. He harrowed, scythed, harvested, sheafed the corn, garnered, hoed, weeded, paid special attention to the few tobacco plants intended for domestic use, and even took to pipe smoking, which he didn’t like because the smoke went cold in the stem. He wielded the fork and the spade, mucked out the cow shed, filled the wheelbarrow with straw for the animals’ litters, chopped the wood, held the pig down firmly while the farmer slaughtered it, almost passed out at the sight of its spurting blood, asked no more than to be excused from stable duty and from looking after the two heavy cart horses after one of them nearly amputated his finger while he was trying to put the bit between its teeth. (Years later, linking this episode to the memory of his father, he confessed that he would have made a deplorable dragoon.) The rest of his time he spent in being bored, reading, doing odd jobs, putting up shelves, repairing the handle of a plow, and sometimes disappeared for days on end when there wasn’t enough work to make his presence indispensable. On some evenings he got on his bicycle and announced that he’d be back at dawn in time for the milking, and in fact they found him at his post, having barely taken the time to change his clothes, as if nothing had happened. His behavior never gave his hosts any clue to his secret activities, and anyway, rather than look for complications, wasn’t it simpler to imagine there was a girl involved? After all, that was only natural at his age, and for a virile young man this cloistered life was no life at all. But he didn’t give them the slightest hint, except on one occasion, after he’d been away for several days, when the farmer’s wife who was sweeping out the yard saw him return, throw himself off his bike, rush into his room, and immediately start burning some papers in the fireplace and later go and scatter the charred remains on the compost heap. As it was getting close to noon, the only words he spoke were to say he didn’t want any lunch because he wasn’t hungry, and then he went up to his room. A little later, the farmer’s wife, worried that he’s so silent, knocks on his door to offer him a cup of so-called coffee, a revolting liquid made from roasted barley, and, getting no answer, feels justified in going into his room, which is that of her son who’s a prisoner in Germany. She finds it empty, the window wide open on the sounds of the summer and the green mass of the trees, and is only half surprised because she knows he is in the habit of climbing over the rail so as not to disturb them when he comes back from his nocturnal expeditions; then she catches sight of him lying under a tree at the edge of the forest, his head in his folded arms, a cigarette burning itself out between his fingers.

It had depended on a mere nothing — lazy pedaling, an overlong detour, a few minutes trying to find the meeting place, but without that saving delay he would have been with his comrade Michel Christophe, who had been arrested almost under his very eyes, shoved into a car, driven to Nantes, tortured at the Kommandantur — headquarters — imprisoned, and then deported to Buchenwald. When he came back after the war was over he was so terribly thin — almost as if he had no skin covering his head and bones — that when his mother met him on the station platform she didn’t want to throw her arms around her poor son’s body for fear of reducing him to dust, as sometimes happens to mummies that are handled without due care when ancient tombs are opened. “Is it really you?” she asked, not to convince herself that it really was he — even mutilated or disfigured, how could she not recognize this part of herself? — but the way people marvel at the metamorphosis of someone they know well: Is it really you? — we didn’t know you were capable of such an extraordinary feat: Is it really you? — walking that lethal high wire? And day after day she fed him like a child with purees and minced meat, respecting his silence. And when he began to regain his strength, when his gaze began to seem less remote, he started to tell her about the suffering of the body: hunger, lice, vermin, dysentery, cold, fever. But how was it possible to explain that particular kind of hunger to people who in return talked about their own hardships; to describe the kind of itching that made you scratch until you drew blood and nearly went mad to people who complained that soap was a rare commodity and never lathered, or that kind of cold to people who had shivered for four winters, or that kind of fever to people who had piled blankets and eiderdowns on top of themselves? So he kept the rest to himself, and it was only very much later that he confided to his friend Joseph something he had witnessed and had been tormenting him day and night ever since his return: five hundred little gypsy children, aged between five and twelve, had been executed by lethal injections, one after the other, lying on a table unable to move while a pseudo-surgeon, a lift attendant in civilian life, stuck a long needle into their hearts, filling them with a yellowish poison that caused instant death. And his friend Joseph, remembering how slowly he had ridden his bicycle, and the stroke of luck by which he had avoided sharing the same fate, refrained from asking him whether he had been one of the men who had held the little martyrs down by force.

On Sundays, at Alphonse’s invitation, he often spent a good part of the day with the Burgauds, where there were always several guests. The tailor prided himself on being generous and hospitable. His intellectual curiosity had earned him the friendship of a theologian and a Dominican friar — from which friendships it might be deduced that he was assailed by metaphysical doubts — and allowed him to keep that of the companions of his apprentice years in Paris when, as poor young provincials, they used to chase all over the City of Light to take part in the claque in exchange for a seat at a concert. Two of these friends, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and a journalist, who had later made their way in the world, still came to visit their humble friend, and even more frequently nowadays since life in occupied Paris had become really difficult. They would all, and others as well, in particular a Chinese student — no one could imagine how he had landed there — come together in the big house in Riancé. The tall young man had been reluctant to join in their animated conversations ever since Alphonse, without naming him, had put him on his guard: the tailor had reported that the Count had told him of his amazement at seeing a copy of Balzac’s Louis Lambert on the bookshelf at the farm, and that he found it hard to believe that such a book was his farmers’ bedtime reading. This incident had prompted the theologian to call attention to the volumes on the living room bookshelves that were banned, and even to attack some right-thinking bourgeois authors. “Not all Bordeaux is fit to read,” he had declared, and this was enough to make you tremble, for if Henri Bordeaux, that fervent advocate of the moral order, the faith, and the family, was to be consigned to the forbidden books department, about the only thing left was The Imitation of Christ. This warning implied a serious threat for the future life of the master of the house, but he consoled himself by leaning back voluptuously in his big patinated leather armchair and enjoying the Havana cigar brought by his journalist friend, the founder-editor of La Revue des Tabacs. For Alphonse Burgaud was so constituted that he wavered between the sacred and the profane, being capable of going on retreat for a week with the monks at the abbey of La Melleraye, sharing their Spartan meals, attending their services, but also of disappearing for several days on end without anyone ever discovering where or with whom — which was no doubt not quite so blameless. But in both cases the result more or less came to the same thing: it was always a way of escaping from the house.

His love of music bridged the gap between the two sides of this waverer. Alphonse had won a first prize for violin playing at the conservatory in Nantes, and he had even studied harmony and counterpoint at the one in Paris, so music played a big part in the lives of the Burgauds. One friend brought his flute, another his viola, a third his cello; it was all the same to Alphonse whether he sat down at the piano or took up his violin, and the evening continued to the strains of this improvised chamber orchestra whose sounds, in the summer, could be heard through the open window and provided an accompaniment to Riancé’s nightly slumbers.

Claire Burgaud was somewhat less than enchanted by these meetings. Apart from the fact that she saw them as yet another way for her husband to exile himself, she admitted — perhaps as a reaction — that music got on her nerves.

And to make her point perfectly clear, on the day when Marthe was giving birth to her third child, irritated beyond measure that anyone could indulge in such a futile activity while her daughter was suffering the pains of parturition, she burst into the living room, snatched the flute from the lips of a salesman of ladies’ lingerie whom Alphonse had made a special journey to fetch from the station at Ancenis, and broke it over her knee as if she were breaking a branch. She had then handed the two halves of the flute back to the unfortunate musician and announced, “It’s a boy.” These outbursts of hers were legendary. She boasted that she had used up two veils on her wedding day, having torn the first one when it got caught in a door she had just violently slammed. (It must be said in her defense that this event could certainly not have been the happiest in her life, as their marriage had been more or less arranged by their respective families.) Her abrupt manner had once even caused her to impale her hand on one of those spike things that people keep on their desks to stick their bills on, much as Pascal piled up his Pensées. At the same time it perforated the paper it went right through the palm of her hand, leaving the impatient woman with a brown spot like the ones old people have on their hands, and when she did get older you couldn’t tell the difference. There was an underlying bitterness in the way she did everything in double-quick time, as if everything was a boring chore to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. Even her declared aversion to music actually went back to a frustrated vocation. As a girl, she had spent hour after hour practicing, but her father had been so exasperated by the fact she didn’t do anything else that he had taken his ax to her grand piano, and now all that remained of it was the little mahogany table in a corner of the living room.

* * *

This was how the tall young man made the acquaintance of Marthe’s two younger sisters. Anne, the middle one, was discreet, graceful, with a long, delicate nose, as slender as a Tanagra figurine (the Burgaud girls were all small: Anne, the tallest, was barely five foot), and seemed to hold herself aloof from the turbulence of the household, remaining silent, embroidering, strumming on the piano, always ready to join her father in his workshop and help the seamstresses with their sewing and machining. Lucie, the youngest sister, was still adolescent, slightly plump, always lively, quick to flare up, and had immediately offered her services to take his letters to him at the farm. He watched her arriving on her bicycle, always at top speed, cutting through the forest, less to shorten the journey than to add spice to her secret mission, bumping over the cart tracks, crouched over her handlebars, and still out of breath when she handed him the envelopes that he glanced at rapidly, turning them over and over as he looked for the longed-for handwriting, and as he slid them into his pocket she could read the disappointment on his face. “The letters aren’t getting through,” she would say, to soften the blow and suggest a reason for this unbearable delay. He would nod sadly. “The war always gets the blame,” he would reply, as a way of casting doubt on the selective delivery of the mail that allowed his aunt’s letters through and merely kept back those from his beloved. Although he had never mentioned it in her presence, Lucie knew his story. She had even considered writing to that Emilienne herself, to get her to break the silence in which she had been keeping her unofficial fiance. But from what she had managed to gather from Etienne — although she hadn’t been able to glean all the facts — it rather looked as if the blond Milady had been acting out her role in real life. Had the rumor reached Joseph? One day he put his letters in his pocket without even looking at them.

By way of consolation, whenever she got a chance Lucie would smuggle a little treat among the books he asked her to bring him — a bar of chocolate, which, as he always liked to say, was his vice. For this kind thought he nicknamed her “Little Red Ridinghood.” And since on that day the messenger happened to be wearing a blue-hooded cape, perhaps wanting to bear a closer resemblance to the young man’s description, she blushed.

He had now exhausted both the possibilities of the Bur-gauds’ library and the dividends of life in the open air. When the harvest was over, he announced he was going to leave. He offered to fill the gap Michel Christophe had left in his father’s workshop. And that was how he came to be under the roof of an old apartment block, strengthening its framework, on September 16,1943, when the siren reverberated over Nantes — the howling of a terrified animal that the inhabitants had learned to take in their stride. The alerts had been almost continuous for several weeks with no other damage than an enforced break of an hour or so. People immediately stopped whatever they were doing and rushed down into the shelters in the cellars buried deep under the old city. The stone vaults that had already withstood three or four centuries were once again pressed into service. The knowledge of the cathedral builders was considered more reliable than that of the most out-and-out modernists.

A smell of mold greets these people voluntarily burying themselves, crowding together in a free-for-all on the benches, playing an original variant of musical chairs, ex-soldiers and the disabled — who are often one and the same — brandishing cards adorned with their photos and demanding priority, thinking that their past exploits justify a moment of weakness. The people who make a point of standing up wish to vindicate them, and are not so much offering them their seats as teaching the others a lesson. Reclaimed from the banks of the river, the alluvial subsoil releases its excess moisture through the crumbly stone walls. The people who have to stand don’t like to lean against them, oozing as they are, and here and there covered in saltpeter like a harbinger of what is about to take place above their heads. A naked lightbulb hanging on its wire communicates everyone’s fears to everyone else. Some people prefer to stay in the half-light and keep to themselves what the lighted arena so crudely reveals. Eyes meet, avoid each other, establish a short-lived complicity, and look away just before any secrets are confided. The proximity of death is no excuse for any lack of decorum. Keeping their legs tightly together, the women pull down their summer dresses, which reveal their knees and have never been so abbreviated. There’s something to be said for shortages, after all, when a saving on materials is also easy on the eye. One man, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs, wouldn’t exchange his seat for anything in the world. With an air of profound anguish, his eyelids half lowered, his field of vision takes in his neighbor’s crossed legs. Yet this would be the right moment to put an arm around her trembling shoulders, to press her frightened hand with his as a comforting gesture, for their terror is sometimes so extreme that people’s hair stands on end, or even turns white between the beginning and end of an alert.

They all wonder whether their neighbor’s place might not be a better guarantee of survival than their own. Which way lies salvation? Over there, rather than here? On this side where the vault is low, or in the doorway? Which future victim’s number has already come up in this funereal lottery? When specks of dust start falling off a vault and sprinkling a head, its owner gives a start, raises his eyes to check the origin of this micro-earthquake, and without a word goes and picks another place. Although there are plenty of candidates, no one takes his seat. The people on either side of it automatically move apart, leaving a kind of well between them that is presumably the prime target for the disaster, as if it were possible that that little space marked by a handful of chalky dust could encompass the entire accumulated ruins of the ancient residence of the dukes of Brittany.

A great many of the refugees have come from the nearby moviehouse, the Katorza, in the street of the same name, between the rue Scribe and the place Graslin, where they are showing The Count of Monte Cristo with that good-looking actor Pierre Blanchard in the title role: two hours of the implacable vengeance of a rancorous maniac who hasn’t an ounce of pity in his makeup. After the first part of the program, which consists of a documentary and the newsreel (a loathsome voice trumpeting a victorious advance of the Axis forces and a shot of the Marshal kissing a little girl waiting to greet him with flowers as he gets off a train), and after the intermission, just as the credits are coming up on the screen, over and above the sudden music, or rather as if it were the amplification of a cancerous note, a long, crescendo lament that has nothing to do with the score brutally interruptes the projection, makes the lights come on again, and sends the cheated audience rushing toward the exit. Commenting on the event in the long, low vaulted cellar, someone says, “Avez vous vu Monte Cristo?” to which others reply with a knowing smile that “Now, Us n’ont vu monter personnel Then the conversations tail off, and waiting takes over. The silence floats up and curves around the vaults, arches its back, and is only slightly perturbed by the quickly stifled sound of a child’s sob.

“Joseph, aren’t you coming down?” No, he prefers to stay where he is. He feels safer under the roof timbers than in an underground shelter at the mercy of a random check for identity papers and no possibility of escape. Then, if anything actually did happen, he has no wish to be buried alive — or for that matter to be buried dead, either — and what’s more, under a false name. Who would claim the body of Joseph Vauclair, carpenter, born in Lorient? Who would weep for him? Anyway, there have already been plenty of alerts, but nothing has in fact ever happened. The bombers content themselves with flying over the town at a great height and save their lethal cargo to release over the industrial banks of the great river or a bridge upstream. One evening, when a pilot had been shot down and he was helping him to cross the Loire, he had watched this spectacular “son et lumiere” show, the horizon churned up by great geysers of fire, the golden pointillist reflections of the machine guns glinting in the water, and, through the screen of the night, the sweeping searchlight beams scouring the darkness and planting a very ancient idea of evil in the illuminated eye of a cockpit. “All right, see you later then, Joseph, but do take care.” With the flat of his hand, Joseph pats the piece of the framework they’ve been restoring. “Don’t worry, Monsieur Christophe, this is good and solid.”

No sooner has the sound of the carpenter’s footsteps disappeared down the stairs than a rumble, like the sign of an impending storm, can be heard in the distance, it grows louder, swells inordinately until it has invaded the whole universe, and soon covers the whole town with a dome of thunder, a mighty, deafening, mechanical drone, which prompts the tall young man to hoist himself up through a skylight to the roof, where he lies down flat on the slates, his face turned up to the sky, a front seat to salute the noble action of the liberators bathing so high up there in the blue empyrean, well out of reach of the reprisals of the antiaircraft batteries, by which everyone recognizes the nonchalance of the Americans, because the English pilots, perfect gentlemen, take every risk and dive-bomb in order to gain precision and to be sure not to miss their target. And there are so very many bombers that they cast a shadow over the setting sun on this late summer evening, they form a black, shifting, perforated cloud, suddenly connected to the earth by a curious Jacob’s ladder, its rungs crazily disintegrating as the bombs come tumbling down, whistling, from the open bomb bays, letting all hell loose as they crash on the ground near the rond-point de Vannes, their explosive chain advancing toward the place Bretagne, sending a series of columns of black flames swirling up and swelling above the roofs, which are perforated like cardboard boxes, now reaching the place du Pont-Sauvetout, so close that a conflagration hurls the observer up against a chimney stack, which thereby loses its cowls but nevertheless stops him from toppling over into the void, so the daredevil hastily retreats back into the attic, bruised and with his shoulder half dislocated, descends the stairs hunched up with his hands cupped over his ears, this pathetic gesture being all he now has to protect himself from the terrifying din, and it’s useless to shut his eyes to try to lose himself in the contemplation of that star-spangled retinal darkness, with every detonation his body feels the vibrations of the ground and the walls, but he hangs on to the strange idea that he can’t die under a false name, although he is still reluctant to go to the shelter the carpenter has told him about, under the Cafe Moliere, just a stone’s throw from the Katorza, but it’s too late now, the tragic work of the plow is eviscerating the place Graslin, sowing murderous seeds that come as a total surprise to the incredulous passersby, who are like the villagers who heard the little shepherd boy cry wolf so often that they refused to believe him, up till then the alert had merely been a convenient excuse to leave their office, shop, or factory and saunter over to the shelters, but now they’re rushing around madly in every direction, crying babes in arms whose faces are distorted by terror, with toddlers in tow, these in their turn trailing a toy or a teddy bear, swerving to avoid bombs and craters, knocked over by a shock wave, picking themselves up, starting to run again, putting off until later the thought of worrying about the trickle of blood coming from one of their temples, and on all sides there are shouts, exhortations to keep together, officials yelling out the names of the shelters, one explosion follows another, thousands of bombs fall on Nantes that afternoon, in the midst of which flares shoot up from the huge gashes in the pavement, severed gas pipes transformed into flame-throwers, as if the underworld inferno were joining its malevolent forces with the celestial wrath, and the heat is so intense around the Pharmacie de Paris, all its five floors ablaze, that the silver dishes in a nearby jeweler’s are reduced to a mercurial sauce, yawning gaps appear along the building line where apartment blocks have been reduced to rubble, sections of walls slowly begin to wobble and then collapse in an avalanche of stones that close the streets, redrawing the plan of the town, and, together with the torn-up cable car lines, the girders, the skeletons of cars and the bits of mangled furniture, forming pathetic barricades against the insurrection of the heavens, the buildings open up like dollhouses, with their beds alfresco, their fallen chimneys jammed up against a gable, their wall lamps going into a nosedive but restrained by an electric wire, wallpaper suddenly laid bare, as immodest as women’s underwear, the miracle of an unbroken mirror hanging over the void, and already, under the piles of stones, crushed, mutilated corpses, both of human beings and of cab horses imprisoned in their shafts, heartrending cries calling for improbable help drowned in the colossal din, and outside the Katorza, in a cloud of dust and smoke, wild-eyed, terrorized, the middle Burgaud daughter, the frail Anne, the pretty Anne, who — and this is a first — has cut her Thursday lesson to go to the three o’clock performance with her cousin, and she relates that without Freddy she would have died on that September 16,1943, bombed or killed by shrapnel, but she would have died at twenty-one, an incredible punishment for having preferred the beautiful, vengeful eyes of Pierre Blanchard to her accounting lesson — oh Mother, keep close to your cousin, he lives in Nantes and knows the shelters, don’t stay there petrified on the pavement in the middle of that deluge of stones of fire, you must be very much alive and still as beautiful, when you seal a love pact — and it will be quite soon now — with the tall young man you were hoping for who is gambling his life in the neighborhood, your eyes have already met on those Sundays he spends with your family, you have detected an underlying sadness, whose cause you can guess, in his gentle smile, you have enjoyed his conversation — he has read a lot and he knows thousands of things. You may even have noticed that for some time now he has been trying to attract your attention by a friendly word, by his considerate behavior, but you must admit that — like everyone else, actually — you are susceptible to his charm, his high spirits, his kindness, you have observed his good manners — and for you, they count — his natural elegance, his way of holding his cigarette between the tips of his yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, or of inclining his tall frame when he’s shaking your hand to say good-bye, obliging you to look up at him, but it’s common knowledge that tall men often marry short women, you’ve seen him, so skilled with his hands, repairing the doll of a little girl who has been evacuated to Riancé with her mother and handing back to the overjoyed child that miracle of plastic surgery, its eyes back in its orbits, its arm mended. You are not unaware that he has evaded forced labor and has been hiding at a farm in the vicinity — he’ll be going back there for a few days for the autumn plowing — but don’t go jumping to any hasty conclusions because we’re talking about a brave man — do you know his nickname in the Resistance? Jo the tough guy, yes, you’ve certainly heard it, but he won’t boast about it, it will come to light in a letter written at the end of the war by the head of the Neptune network, which he belonged to for a time, testifying to the fact that he carried out several dangerous missions and that his conduct and courage were always deserving of the highest praise, but he can’t put up with any authority for very long, that’s a trait of his character, you’ll have to get used to it. And he changes groups the way he will later change employers, the next network is called Vengeance — rather a grandiloquent name, but you can understand — and after that we find him as an agent in the Intelligence Service, a volunteer liaison officer with General Patton’s army, and incidentally it was then that he performed a most heroic feat of arms (and of love) in diverting the American convoy he was supposed to be guiding so that it passed through Riancé — to kiss whom, do you suppose? And then there’s the famous episode of the motorbike later described by Etienne, with the Allies making their way toward Paris and the eastern frontiers, not bothering about the remains of the German army, which, cut off from its bases, has entrenched itself aggressively in what are later called pockets, and the one near Saint-Nazaire, which includes Random, is one of the most formidable as it won’t surrender until the day after the Armistice, but the tall young man who has taken part in the liberation of his sector is not aware of this situation and is making a beeline for his family perched on the motorbike behind Etienne, whose head is eight inches below his, his inevitable beret pulled down to his ears, both of them drunk with the wind and their newfound liberty, which they celebrate in their own fashion as they speed through the villages hooting and zigzagging all over the road without rhyme or reason, and then at the bottom of the hill leading up to Random there’s a German roadblock, he grabs his two pistols, one in each hand, preparing for them to force their way through, “Joseph, you’re crazy,” yells Etienne, who prefers stratagem and slows down as if he is going to comply but then abruptly steps on the gas, bullets come whistling all around them as, bent low over their machine, they suddenly plunge down a steep path on the side of the road, abandon the bike in a bog — the next day Etienne will innocently report that it’s been stolen — but this time also our tall, brave young man gets away with it, and you too, Anne, you have the best reasons in the world to take great care of yourself, for yourself, for him, for us, so as not to die before someone has said a few words about us, we aren’t important enough for anyone else to take on the job, we’re too humble, too hardworking, and if you die on this dark day, what becomes of us? who will project us into the light? will you leave us, poor little things of naught, in the antechamber of life’s rejected candidates? have faith, we shall win, Freddy is our only chance of emerging as a unit, as a loving family, from anonymity, Freddy, for whom a tragic stroke of misfortune is reserving a dreadful fate in Dresden, among the two hundred and fifty thousand victims of that old-style Hiroshima, but hurry up and take shelter, do we need to convince you by describing the photo that will soon be taken on your engagement day? you are walking arm in arm down a little country lane, you so small in spite of your wedge heels, radiant in your elegant suit, its collar trimmed with black velvet, and with your elaborate hairstyle, the sun behind your backs casts your twin shadows, looking at that dazzling demonstration of grace and youth, how can there be any doubt? it’s quite certain, you will be happy, you will live ten thousand years, your path will be strewn with rose petals, so don’t just stand there petrified with terror on that murderous pavement, at your side a woman has collapsed and her guts are gushing out of her open belly, this is our chance, your scream alerts your kindly cousin who finally spots you through the cloud of smoke, pulls you by the hand, and runs with you to the cellars of the Cafe Moliere, while at that very moment, in the ruins of the moviehouse, the blazing screen is spewing out its final flames — phew, we’re saved.