Wherever we stopped we were given an extra special welcome, which gave us the feeling of being considerable personalities, and we were told in confidence, as proof there was nothing to hide, a few fragments about his nomadic life. Our informant would come up to our table just as we were starting on the dessert and inquire, “Is everything all right?” — which was all the more self-assured in that he knew he had looked after us very well. He would tell us of an unusual man who on some evenings would stay behind to chat, pulling several tables together, inviting people on their own to join him, suggesting a game of cards, but who on other evenings would go up to his room early to bring his order forms up to date or simply to read, if he felt tired. We were confirmed in what we already knew, that he avoided political discussions. When people ventured to ask him his opinion, he would answer, “My politics is sport,” which was less a profession of faith than an elegant, and perhaps evasive, way of cutting short the kind of debate in which passions get out of hand and vows of friendship are smashed to smithereens. He would invariably put an end to such differences of opinion by saying “There are better things to do,” in which we recognized him as we knew him, because he had spent his whole life doing things — doing things, making things, achieving things. He made his first piece of furniture when he was twelve; he made a magic lantern to amuse his friends, tracing on grease-proof paper several of the adventures of the mischievous comic strip character Bicot, playing all the parts himself; he did a circus turn with Flip, a black and white ratter, the companion of his adolescence (famous photo taken during a youth club entertainment in which, with glasses on their noses and cigarettes in their mouths, they are both reading the same newspaper). He produced children (three of whom survived); he covered kilometers (fifty thousand a year); he founded associations. At thirteen he was already the treasurer of the Random Soccer Club, which he and some of his pals had started. The pals — as he captioned a later photo in which a group of beaming boys are posing in total chaos, some in shorts, others with their trousers hitched up to their knees, and all fighting to get hold of the ball. He stands behind them, dressed in a suit and tie, holding a cigarette between his fingertips with the elegance of James Bond holding his revolver. He is smiling, amused, quite simply happy to have worked toward the success of this instant. His round-rimmed spectacles, the kind worn by severe intellectuals, seem to keep him aloof from the general euphoria, as if he were afraid they might get broken in the merrymaking. According to the date written on the back of the photo he was sixteen, and already just over six feet tall, which makes him tower over the group.
Did the elegant young man with the cigarette suffer from not feeling quite at home in this remote part of the countryside where he was born, did he suffer from forcing the friendship of his companions in an effort to convince himself of the opposite, and from trying to deploy his enormous talents within the very little that life was prepared to grant him? Did the thought sometimes cross his mind that if he had been better served by events and by the accident of birth he would have deserved a better fate? Looking at him in this photo, you find yourself dreaming of a glorious future for this handsome, enterprising young man, now that Munich has dispersed the clouds, that the specter of war is retreating, and that peace has been guaranteed for a thousand years. But for the moment it seems that the most important thing for him is not to be alone. There are quite a few who remember painfully that he can’t bear to be called an only son — perhaps the only occasion on which he used his fists. He thought of his stillborn or miscarried brothers and sisters as if such an insult was a reproach to him for having survived this child carnage. Did he feel so much an orphan that throughout his life he tried so hard to become part of a family? Later, he set up a theater company, whose crowning achievement was the memorable performance of The Three Musketeers in occupied Random. After that he organized the reunion of the “forty-year-olds,” and for this, so that all his age group could take part, so that no one should be excluded, not even the least presentable, the inveterate alcoholics or the near-tramps, he put his hand in his own pocket and paid for the traveling expenses and meals of the most indigent among them. Andre and his wife, two magnificent wrecks who had met and found the consolation of love while being dried out at the Pont-de-Pitie Hospital, and who are standing next to him hand in hand in the souvenir photo of the group of these new forty-year-olds, looking older than their age, of course — every year of hardship counts double — but radiant, Andre seigneurial, looking like a responsible man, in a check suit and with his hair tousled, Odette, with a coquettish look in her eye but with the gaps in her teeth revealed by her big smile, in a jersey dress whose shabbiness is betrayed by the bulges beneath her knees, wearing what is probably her only piece of jewelry, her First Communion crucifix no doubt, because for such an event even the poorest don’t consider the expense, both of them proud of the respect shown them by Joseph the Great, under his protection recognized, adopted — part of the family, in short. He, Joseph, a whole head taller, is wearing an open-neck shirt, which makes him look relaxed, and his smile is just the same as it was twenty-four years earlier although less reserved, as if he had decided that his place was here, among these people — and anyway, he’s considering the proposition of the director of the little Random hospital who is just coming up to retirement age and has suggested him as his successor — smiling one of his last smiles that hasn’t been distorted by suffering.
After the chocolate mousse, we got back into the Dyna and drove off in the direction of Malestroit, where we wandered about among the old Gothic and Renaissance half-timbered houses with the grotesque carvings on their facades, one with a strange pelican, like in the comic strip we delighted in, and then stopped at the convent where we admired the little Lord Jesus as he appeared to a novice in ecstasy: pink, wearing an exiguous diaper, and with Alexandrian curls over his forehead. Lying on his golden straw, he is opening his arms like His Holiness the Pope and raising his head, which demands a strenuous effort of the back of the neck and the abdominal muscles of which only babies with a great destiny in store seem capable. At the entrance, we bought a postcard, which when we got home Father presented to his pious aunt, our universal Aunt Marie, who lost no time in inserting the beloved image into one of her innumerable prayer books. Perhaps he was forestalling the reproaches that she would not fail to heap upon him when she discovered what we were bringing back, what in fact had been the reason for our journey: our loot.
We had started off again through the labyrinth of the Breton countryside. The powerful bulldozers on this Sunday “day of rest” were getting their breath back near a hedge they had flattened, their shovels resting on the ground, their red mass standing out like great bleeding gashes against the dark green of the landscape. The sky was overcast; it was drizzling. Through the regular to-ing and fro-ing of the windshield wipers, the driver pointed to a chapel spire rising up from the yellow palette of a field of colza. The roar of the engine rendered explanations impossible, but by the way he emphasized his gesture we realized that we were reaching our goal.