Until the age of thirty-five, our guide said, the chatelain had liked to entertain. On Friday nights he would invite acquaintances, for they were never true friends, from the village to sample the exquisite vintage wines in his vast cellar, bottles amassed by relatives over the decades. Before long, the contents of his entire cave were depleted, and while drinking down the wine, it was said a favourite pastime was to toss eighteenth-century Meissen plates into the air and shoot at them with an antique rifle, shards of porcelain flying asunder. Other family heirlooms met a similar fate.
In those years the chatelain of Challement kept a flock of sheep on the grounds, twelve creatures to which he was famously attached, but one January he slipped into a three-day alcohol coma and when he resurfaced he found them all dead, frozen into different poses, some belly up in the snow with their hooves skywards as if already on their ascent towards animal heaven. He dug a trench, penitently gloveless as he worked, and buried them near his parents.
The years wore on. Marc Cointe grew a beard, stopped washing, and inched closer and closer to clochard-dom, our guide continued. His entire inheritance had vanished in drink and nothing remained for the heating or upkeep of the chateau. His cousin, who since childhood had had his sights on the family home, despaired, but there was no legal way of intervening.
The chatelain lost interest in human company. He withdrew from the world and stopped receiving people. Cigarettes, budget wine and round-the-clock fires became his favoured companions. Now wary of everyone, even the master of keys of the canal lock, he rarely answered the door and when he did would be clutching a rusty shotgun. Excursions were limited to weekly visits to the village, where he ran up enormous tabs. The shop owners took pity; some had known him as a child.
Good use was made of all the magnificent fireplaces in the chateau, our guide went on, encouraged by how intently we were listening. The following winter, having already sacrificed two dozen oaks from the estate to make fires, the chatelain began to chop and burn his own furniture. At night the villagers could see steady threads of smoke emerging from the chimneys. After the furniture came the window frames, every door except the main one, and the wood panelling. Then the family portraits. And, finally — he had no choice — the library, until all that was left were a few sacred volumes. Hundreds of books, part of centuries-old collections bound in leather, went up in flames. He had to keep warm.
Over the past few months, the guide said, his descending tone signalling he was nearing the end of his tale, Marc Cointe no longer had a bed (the wood from his four-poster lasted nearly three days) and would sleep inside a mattress in one of the fireplaces. That was where I’d seen him emerge, roused from his slumber, most likely, by our sounds.
I had listened in fascination, and Daniel too, neither of us stirring, oblivious to the cold that penetrated coats and walls.
It was only once the guide finished speaking that we realised Pierre was no longer with us. After a startled exchange of glances the three of us searched the rooms downstairs with a growing sense of alarm. We peered through doorways and windows, tapped the scarred walls as if they might give way to secret passages. Dust reconfigured wherever we went. In the peaceful garden a large magpie had come to perch on one of the bare lindens, but no Pierre. Nor was he in the car. Our guide suggested we try upstairs.
Back up the tight stairwell, this time Daniel leading the way, I grabbed on to the balustrade with a sense of urgency but, feeling it falter, withdrew my grip. I could tell by the near disappearance of his limp that Daniel was starting to panic but fortunately we did not have to look much further, for there in the first large room to the right, the one with the metal crib, stood Pierre face to face with the chatelain.
It was like a scene from a dark children’s book. Pierre in his suit with his hair perfectly combed, his expression undisturbed, looking straight at the chatelain, who only a few inches away stared back at him with sunken eyes, his cheeks caved inwards, the hollowness that consumed his face and body scarcely hidden beneath his baggy, rumpled clothes. His coat reached down to the floor; it was impossible to tell whether he wore shoes. An intriguing scar ran down the length of his right cheek, a ruin within a ruin within a ruin.
The noble poet and the noble clochard, awake at the same time. Pierre with the ring on his little finger and Cointe with coal-black grime under his long split fingernails. Pierre with his white, clean-shaven, heart-shaped face, a dandelion from the garden emerging from his lapel, opposite the chatelain’s angular diamond face, lost in the foliage of his beard. The heart and the diamond, a final hand in a game of cards.
‘Pardonnez-moi?’ Pierre was saying.
‘Hic, hic, hic,’ said the chatelain.
‘Pardonnez-moi?’ Pierre repeated, leaning forward.
‘Hic, hic, hic.’
Pierre produced his cigarette case and held it out. ‘Fumez-vous?’
‘Hic, hic, hic,’ the chatelain said a third time, and grabbed a cigarette, one more thing to burn.
He shoved it between his lips and was turning towards the door when he spotted me. To this day I find it hard to describe the look in his eyes as he took in my presence, as if in my face he’d caught a glimpse of someone from his past and was perhaps reliving a moment that struck out from the others. It was an expression of astonishment and nostalgia, of someone faced with a sight he’s no longer used to beholding, and he went completely still, staring at me as if he had never seen a woman in his life.
And I couldn’t help but stare back, twin currents of excitement and terror braiding through me as I registered his face more closely. His high forehead, marked by pensive grooves, rose proudly away from the cavernous eyes, penetrating in their gloom, and his finely drawn mouth twitched a little at the corners. It was hard to know what to focus on, the combination of his features or on each individually, the same crisis I used to have with paintings. Landscape or detail; in this case, they were equally compelling.
All of a sudden Marc Cointe turned and hurried out of the room, his steps scarcely audible on the stone floor. Without a second thought I ran after him, leaving the others behind. The fugitive black figure moved almost soundlessly, his laboured breathing louder than his steps, a great ball of dust tearing through the darkened rooms of his home, fleeing me and whatever else he might’ve imagined was chasing him.
I had rarely felt so catalysed, the whole of my being driven by a surge of morbid desire, desperate to be face to face again with this man and see what would happen. And so I pursued him from room to room, through doorways and past walls with cracks, gouges and burns, never losing sight of my target as if my life depended on it, stumbling once over a raised tile but quickly regaining my balance, and when he took a sharp turn round a corner into a small annex containing a narrow tower, I followed.
He was about to start climbing, one foot already on the pitted stair, when I reached out and grabbed the back of his coat. The look of terror when he turned around was horrific, as if I had shattered a hard-won peace and now the entire façade would splinter into a million pieces and scatter on the stone around us. His thin lips were tightly pursed; the cigarette must have dropped out during our chase. The moment I saw his expression I released my grip on his coat, so sooty it had already turned my fingers black, and took a step back, renouncing my pursuit.
Yet before disappearing into the dusk of the tower, the chatelain thrust out an arm, releasing a wave of dust, and scratched my face. One deep scratch with the claws of a frightened cat, yet they weren’t claws but long, grimy fingernails that dug into my right cheekbone and dragged their way down. And then he was gone.