It was a genuine Bugatti Royale, a coupe de ville. I don’t know if that means anything to you, Monsieur; it’s quite understandable if it doesn’t. Albert and I went to fetch it, in a little garage on the Quai d’Anjou, behind a wooden door opening onto a courtyard as musky as an English house, with the Seine running below. Albert couldn’t believe his eyes. “It’s impossible,” he said, “impossible,” caressing the long, tapering fenders; I don’t know whether you get the idea, but the Bugatti has something of a woman’s body about it, a woman lying on her back with her legs out in front of her. It was a superb specimen, the body in excellent condition, the damask velvet upholstery in fairly good shape aside from a few moth holes and a single tear. The main problem — at least at first sight — lay in the wheels and the exhaust pipes. The engine seemed unaffected by its long idleness and in need only of being roused from its slumber. We roused it successfully and drove it to the shop. The elephant on the hood was missing, and this was an unpleasant surprise, because you can’t take a Bugatti Royale to a rally without its elephant. Perhaps you didn’t know, but at the top of the radiator the Royale had a silver elephant sculpted by Ettore Bugatti’s brother, Rembrandt. It wasn’t just a trademark like the Rolls Royce’s Spirit of Ecstasy or the Packard swan, it was a symbol, undecipherable, like all symbols; an elephant standing on his hind legs, with his trunk upraised and trumpeting, in a gesture of attack or mating. Is it too glib to say that these two go together? Perhaps so. But just imagine this: a Bugatti Royale on its haunches, climbing a slight incline, with fenders flared, ready to gather speed and intoxication, with power throbbing behind a fabulous radiator grille and, atop it, an elephant with upraised trunk.
I wanted to stay on the sidelines. Albert called the Countess at the Hotel de Paris to find out if she knew what had become of the elephant. It had simply disappeared; in any case, it was lost, he reported. The car had been standing too long; she says to make a copy. And so we had three weeks to do something about it, while we were touching up the engine and the upholstery. One cylinder needed adjusting, but that was not a big job. The upholsterer was a wily young fellow with a shop on the Rue Le Peletier, who sent antique fabrics to be repaired by the nuns of a certain convent. There’s nobody like a nun for a painstaking job, believe me, and their mending was invisible; it was all done on the reverse side, where it left a network of threads like a telephone exchange. The worst thing was the elephant. A sculptor of sorts offered to make a clay copy to be covered with metal, but bumps and jolts would soon have caused it to crack. Finally Albert thought of a cabinetmaker from Lorraine — this story is full of Lorrainers — who had a shop in the Marais, an old fellow who carved wood in naturalistic style. It was easy enough to find a photograph of the elephant, which we took to the old man, together with the exact measurements, telling him to make an identical copy. After that we had to see to the chrome plating, and that came out satisfactorily. Of course, if you looked at the figure when the car was standing still you could see that it was a fake, but in motion it seemed like the real thing.
The morning of our departure was quite an event. Albert had fallen completely into the role of father, and kept asking whether I needed this or had forgotten that. The day before I’d bought a leather suitcase — the car and the trip deserved nothing less — as well as a cream-colored linen jacket and another in leather and an Italian silk scarf. When I got to the Hotel de Paris a liveried doorman opened the car, and, feeling like the Marquis of Carabas, I told him to call the Countess. A porter came with a valise and a vanity case; she arrived, on her husband’s arm, greeted me distractedly and got into the back seat. Here was the first surprise of the day. I had been fearful of seeing the Count again because I didn’t exactly like him, but he spoke to me as if we’d never met, playing the part to perfection. It was a Monday towards the end of June. “We’ll meet in Biarritz a week from today,” he said affably to his wife. “If you like you can send your driver to pick me up at the station — my train gets in at eight thirty-five in the evening; otherwise we’ll meet at the Hotel des Palais.” I went into first gear, and she gave a brief wave of her hand through the open window.
The second surprise was her telling me to take the Route Nationale 6, and her tone of voice, a dry, decisive tone which seemed to reflect a strong will or else some sort of phobia. I objected that this wasn’t the shortest way to Biarritz. “I want to take another route,” she said sharply, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t argue the point.” And there was a third surprise as well. When I first met her at Chez Albert she was so defenceless and such an open book that I thought I could read her whole life on her face; now, instead, she had withdrawn behind a mask of distance and reserve, like a real countess. She was beautiful, and that was no surprise, but now she seemed to me of an absolute beauty, because I understood that no beauty in the world is greater than that of a woman, and this, you’ll understand, Monsieur, put me into a sort of frenzy. Meanwhile the Bugatti glided over the gentle, inviting roads of France, up and down and along level stretches, the way our roads go, bordered by plane trees on either side. Behind me the road retreated, before me it opened up, and I thought of my life and the boredom of it, and of what Albert had said to me, and I felt ashamed that I’d never known love. I don’t mean physical love, of course, I’d had that, but real love, the kind that blazes up inside and breaks out and spins like a motor while the wheels speed over the ground. It was like that, a sort of remorse, an awareness of mediocrity or cowardice. Up to now my wheels had turned slowly and tediously over a long, long road, and I couldn’t remember a single landscape along the way. Now I was travelling another road, which led nowhere, with a beautiful and distant woman who was escaping or fleeing from I knew not what. It was a useless race across France, I felt quite sure, on a road as empty as those that had gone before. Those were my exact thoughts at that particular moment. Limoges was not far, we were deep in the countryside, where farmers were working among their fruit trees. Limoges, I thought, what does Limoges have to do with my life? I drew the car over to the side of the road and stopped. Turning towards her, I said: “Look here…” Before I could say any more she laid a finger gently across my lips and murmured: “Don’t be a fool, Carabas.” Without another word she got out and came to sit beside me. “Go on,” she said, “I know that we’re taking an absurd route, but perhaps everything’s absurd, and I have my reasons.”