“I need to leave tomorrow,” he said as they walked together toward an open set of doors.
“That’s not possible,” replied Jean Valette. He said this decisively, as if the matter were entirely up to him. Hart was stunned. He stopped and looked straight at him.
“Are you telling me that I’m a prisoner here?”
“Not to me, to necessity. Where would you go? What chance would you have?” he asked with an impatience which, when he realized how it must sound, changed into a look of sympathy.
“I can’t stay here forever,” protested Hart. “I have to do something to clear my name.”
“We’ve taken a major step in that direction,” Jean Valette assured him. “You just need to give it a few days. Carlyle will be back in New York tomorrow. He’ll write his story. With the proof I supplied, Russell will have to leave office and Hillary Constable’s political career will be over. But as to your other point,” he continued with a smile that seemed to carry a challenge, a dare he was fairly certain his guest would never take, “you could stay here forever, or as long as you like. I would enjoy the company: someone interested in serious things, someone with whom I could actually carry on a conversation without having to hide the meaning of everything I say. And of course you would not be alone. It would not be difficult to make arrangements to have your beautiful wife come to join you.” With an expansive gesture, he invited Hart to consider the possibility of life in the chateau. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’m not sure I’ve seen every part of it. The two of you can use however much of it you wish.”
Beneath the haughty exterior, the studied condescension of his manner, the attempt to make an extraordinary offer seem a matter of no importance, Hart thought he could detect a strange hope that he would take him up on it. It was a hope Jean Valette would never express. He had too much pride to admit he had any need he could not satisfy without the help of others.
“Carlyle’s story will help clear me, but if I don’t go back and find out who was behind the assassination-whether it was Russell or Constable’s wife-a lot of people will still think that what they’re saying is true: that I murdered him because he was sleeping with my wife.”
“What does it matter what others think?” asked Jean Valette with a sharp turn of his head. “You know the truth. You’re not responsible for the ignorance of people who believe you capable of murder.” As he lifted his chin, his eyes became cold, distant, and defiant. “I learned contempt at an early age. It was a gift, if you will, from my father, when he played the part of a collaborator for the French resistance. I was with him, a young boy, one day in the street when there were no Germans around, no one the crowd had to be afraid of. These people, none of whom, you understand, had the courage to be in the resistance themselves, surrounded my father, pushed him, kicked him, spat in his face, called him a traitor, a coward, a rich bastard who had sold out his country for money. And the whole time they were doing that, trying to humiliate him, he was looking at me, his only son, only four years old, trying to tell me with his eyes that none of it was true, that he was not what that mob said he was. But I was a boy, a child, and all I heard were the words, and the look of hatred in their eyes. Later, my father told me that it was not true, that he was not any of the things they had called him. But of course he could not tell me the real truth, that he was in the resistance, and so I thought-and you can see how awful this is to admit-that my father had lied to me, that he was the collaborator all those mindless people thought and said he was. So, no, Mr. Hart, I’m not much persuaded by what the crowd might think, and, frankly, after what you have now learned about how easily the crowd can turn, neither should you.”
He paused, and with a confidence so complete as to leave no room for disagreement, made a remark that caused Hart to wonder whether Jean Valette’s claim to see the broad outlines of the future was less the result of study and intelligence than the madness of a completely disordered mind.
“That will be especially important for you to understand when the same people who are now condemning you give you their support, when Russell is gone and Hillary Constable can’t become president, when both of them are facing criminal charges and the country turns to you. You’re going to be the next president, Mr. Hart. There really isn’t any doubt about it.” He seemed to laugh in silence at some private joke. “I don’t imagine you would believe me if I told you that I saw that this would happen the day I discovered that Robert Constable believed in nothing but his own importance. But enough of this,” he said, turning on his heel. “We have more serious matters to discuss.”
The long silk robes worn by Jean Valette swept across the floor as he led Hart through the entrance into an enormous square room with a ceiling at least three stories tall and bookshelves covering all four walls. A double landing, connected to each other by staircases in two different places, gave access to the higher regions of a library that could easily have held twenty, or even thirty, thousand volumes. The shelves, however, were almost all of them empty; the only books, three or four dozen volumes, some of them tattered and torn, threadbare with frequent use, sat an ungainly medley on a few shelves directly behind a desk that not only caught Hart’s eye, but held it there. Like so much else in the chateau, it was obviously hundreds of years old, an ancient, hand-carved piece of furniture, constructed by the finest craftsmen at no doubt prohibitive expense, but still looked new.
“A gift,” explained Jean Valette. “From Louis XIV. He said it was in return for the hospitality of his trusted friend, Monsieur de la Valette, and it may have been, if you include in that description the willing eagerness of the young and ravishing Madame de la Valette to exchange the bed of her husband for that of their sovereign.” Jean Valette scratched the side of his face, an idle gesture of wistful curiosity. “In those days, no one could be too sure of their fathers, and as someone-I think it was Tocqueville-pointed out, they enjoyed themselves in ways we can no longer imagine or appreciate. It isn’t the kind of desk I would have chosen, but by some miracle the library and everything in it escaped the flames when the chateau was put to the torch in the early days of the Revolution, and so, like my father before me, I use it now whenever I am here, when I get away from work, and sit up all night reading, studying, what I should.”
Hart could not stop looking at all the vacant shelves, hundreds of them, towering high above and circling all around, not a bit of dust on them, polished to a deep luster as if they had just been built and were waiting for the next morning when, one by one, each of them first catalogued, each priceless volume would be added until all the shelves were filled.