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.