It had depended on a mere nothing — lazy pedaling, an overlong detour, a few minutes trying to find the meeting place, but without that saving delay he would have been with his comrade Michel Christophe, who had been arrested almost under his very eyes, shoved into a car, driven to Nantes, tortured at the Kommandantur — headquarters — imprisoned, and then deported to Buchenwald. When he came back after the war was over he was so terribly thin — almost as if he had no skin covering his head and bones — that when his mother met him on the station platform she didn’t want to throw her arms around her poor son’s body for fear of reducing him to dust, as sometimes happens to mummies that are handled without due care when ancient tombs are opened. “Is it really you?” she asked, not to convince herself that it really was he — even mutilated or disfigured, how could she not recognize this part of herself? — but the way people marvel at the metamorphosis of someone they know welclass="underline" Is it really you? — we didn’t know you were capable of such an extraordinary feat: Is it really you? — walking that lethal high wire? And day after day she fed him like a child with purees and minced meat, respecting his silence. And when he began to regain his strength, when his gaze began to seem less remote, he started to tell her about the suffering of the body: hunger, lice, vermin, dysentery, cold, fever. But how was it possible to explain that particular kind of hunger to people who in return talked about their own hardships; to describe the kind of itching that made you scratch until you drew blood and nearly went mad to people who complained that soap was a rare commodity and never lathered, or that kind of cold to people who had shivered for four winters, or that kind of fever to people who had piled blankets and eiderdowns on top of themselves? So he kept the rest to himself, and it was only very much later that he confided to his friend Joseph something he had witnessed and had been tormenting him day and night ever since his return: five hundred little gypsy children, aged between five and twelve, had been executed by lethal injections, one after the other, lying on a table unable to move while a pseudo-surgeon, a lift attendant in civilian life, stuck a long needle into their hearts, filling them with a yellowish poison that caused instant death. And his friend Joseph, remembering how slowly he had ridden his bicycle, and the stroke of luck by which he had avoided sharing the same fate, refrained from asking him whether he had been one of the men who had held the little martyrs down by force.
On Sundays, at Alphonse’s invitation, he often spent a good part of the day with the Burgauds, where there were always several guests. The tailor prided himself on being generous and hospitable. His intellectual curiosity had earned him the friendship of a theologian and a Dominican friar — from which friendships it might be deduced that he was assailed by metaphysical doubts — and allowed him to keep that of the companions of his apprentice years in Paris when, as poor young provincials, they used to chase all over the City of Light to take part in the claque in exchange for a seat at a concert. Two of these friends, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and a journalist, who had later made their way in the world, still came to visit their humble friend, and even more frequently nowadays since life in occupied Paris had become really difficult. They would all, and others as well, in particular a Chinese student — no one could imagine how he had landed there — come together in the big house in Riancé. The tall young man had been reluctant to join in their animated conversations ever since Alphonse, without naming him, had put him on his guard: the tailor had reported that the Count had told him of his amazement at seeing a copy of Balzac’s Louis Lambert on the bookshelf at the farm, and that he found it hard to believe that such a book was his farmers’ bedtime reading. This incident had prompted the theologian to call attention to the volumes on the living room bookshelves that were banned, and even to attack some right-thinking bourgeois authors. “Not all Bordeaux is fit to read,” he had declared, and this was enough to make you tremble, for if Henri Bordeaux, that fervent advocate of the moral order, the faith, and the family, was to be consigned to the forbidden books department, about the only thing left was The Imitation of Christ. This warning implied a serious threat for the future life of the master of the house, but he consoled himself by leaning back voluptuously in his big patinated leather armchair and enjoying the Havana cigar brought by his journalist friend, the founder-editor of La Revue des Tabacs. For Alphonse Burgaud was so constituted that he wavered between the sacred and the profane, being capable of going on retreat for a week with the monks at the abbey of La Melleraye, sharing their Spartan meals, attending their services, but also of disappearing for several days on end without anyone ever discovering where or with whom — which was no doubt not quite so blameless. But in both cases the result more or less came to the same thing: it was always a way of escaping from the house.
His love of music bridged the gap between the two sides of this waverer. Alphonse had won a first prize for violin playing at the conservatory in Nantes, and he had even studied harmony and counterpoint at the one in Paris, so music played a big part in the lives of the Burgauds. One friend brought his flute, another his viola, a third his cello; it was all the same to Alphonse whether he sat down at the piano or took up his violin, and the evening continued to the strains of this improvised chamber orchestra whose sounds, in the summer, could be heard through the open window and provided an accompaniment to Riancé’s nightly slumbers.
Claire Burgaud was somewhat less than enchanted by these meetings. Apart from the fact that she saw them as yet another way for her husband to exile himself, she admitted — perhaps as a reaction — that music got on her nerves.
And to make her point perfectly clear, on the day when Marthe was giving birth to her third child, irritated beyond measure that anyone could indulge in such a futile activity while her daughter was suffering the pains of parturition, she burst into the living room, snatched the flute from the lips of a salesman of ladies’ lingerie whom Alphonse had made a special journey to fetch from the station at Ancenis, and broke it over her knee as if she were breaking a branch. She had then handed the two halves of the flute back to the unfortunate musician and announced, “It’s a boy.” These outbursts of hers were legendary. She boasted that she had used up two veils on her wedding day, having torn the first one when it got caught in a door she had just violently slammed. (It must be said in her defense that this event could certainly not have been the happiest in her life, as their marriage had been more or less arranged by their respective families.) Her abrupt manner had once even caused her to impale her hand on one of those spike things that people keep on their desks to stick their bills on, much as Pascal piled up his Pensées. At the same time it perforated the paper it went right through the palm of her hand, leaving the impatient woman with a brown spot like the ones old people have on their hands, and when she did get older you couldn’t tell the difference. There was an underlying bitterness in the way she did everything in double-quick time, as if everything was a boring chore to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. Even her declared aversion to music actually went back to a frustrated vocation. As a girl, she had spent hour after hour practicing, but her father had been so exasperated by the fact she didn’t do anything else that he had taken his ax to her grand piano, and now all that remained of it was the little mahogany table in a corner of the living room.