* * *
This was how the tall young man made the acquaintance of Marthe’s two younger sisters. Anne, the middle one, was discreet, graceful, with a long, delicate nose, as slender as a Tanagra figurine (the Burgaud girls were all smalclass="underline" Anne, the tallest, was barely five foot), and seemed to hold herself aloof from the turbulence of the household, remaining silent, embroidering, strumming on the piano, always ready to join her father in his workshop and help the seamstresses with their sewing and machining. Lucie, the youngest sister, was still adolescent, slightly plump, always lively, quick to flare up, and had immediately offered her services to take his letters to him at the farm. He watched her arriving on her bicycle, always at top speed, cutting through the forest, less to shorten the journey than to add spice to her secret mission, bumping over the cart tracks, crouched over her handlebars, and still out of breath when she handed him the envelopes that he glanced at rapidly, turning them over and over as he looked for the longed-for handwriting, and as he slid them into his pocket she could read the disappointment on his face. “The letters aren’t getting through,” she would say, to soften the blow and suggest a reason for this unbearable delay. He would nod sadly. “The war always gets the blame,” he would reply, as a way of casting doubt on the selective delivery of the mail that allowed his aunt’s letters through and merely kept back those from his beloved. Although he had never mentioned it in her presence, Lucie knew his story. She had even considered writing to that Emilienne herself, to get her to break the silence in which she had been keeping her unofficial fiance. But from what she had managed to gather from Etienne — although she hadn’t been able to glean all the facts — it rather looked as if the blond Milady had been acting out her role in real life. Had the rumor reached Joseph? One day he put his letters in his pocket without even looking at them.
By way of consolation, whenever she got a chance Lucie would smuggle a little treat among the books he asked her to bring him — a bar of chocolate, which, as he always liked to say, was his vice. For this kind thought he nicknamed her “Little Red Ridinghood.” And since on that day the messenger happened to be wearing a blue-hooded cape, perhaps wanting to bear a closer resemblance to the young man’s description, she blushed.
He had now exhausted both the possibilities of the Bur-gauds’ library and the dividends of life in the open air. When the harvest was over, he announced he was going to leave. He offered to fill the gap Michel Christophe had left in his father’s workshop. And that was how he came to be under the roof of an old apartment block, strengthening its framework, on September 16,1943, when the siren reverberated over Nantes — the howling of a terrified animal that the inhabitants had learned to take in their stride. The alerts had been almost continuous for several weeks with no other damage than an enforced break of an hour or so. People immediately stopped whatever they were doing and rushed down into the shelters in the cellars buried deep under the old city. The stone vaults that had already withstood three or four centuries were once again pressed into service. The knowledge of the cathedral builders was considered more reliable than that of the most out-and-out modernists.
A smell of mold greets these people voluntarily burying themselves, crowding together in a free-for-all on the benches, playing an original variant of musical chairs, ex-soldiers and the disabled — who are often one and the same — brandishing cards adorned with their photos and demanding priority, thinking that their past exploits justify a moment of weakness. The people who make a point of standing up wish to vindicate them, and are not so much offering them their seats as teaching the others a lesson. Reclaimed from the banks of the river, the alluvial subsoil releases its excess moisture through the crumbly stone walls. The people who have to stand don’t like to lean against them, oozing as they are, and here and there covered in saltpeter like a harbinger of what is about to take place above their heads. A naked lightbulb hanging on its wire communicates everyone’s fears to everyone else. Some people prefer to stay in the half-light and keep to themselves what the lighted arena so crudely reveals. Eyes meet, avoid each other, establish a short-lived complicity, and look away just before any secrets are confided. The proximity of death is no excuse for any lack of decorum. Keeping their legs tightly together, the women pull down their summer dresses, which reveal their knees and have never been so abbreviated. There’s something to be said for shortages, after all, when a saving on materials is also easy on the eye. One man, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs, wouldn’t exchange his seat for anything in the world. With an air of profound anguish, his eyelids half lowered, his field of vision takes in his neighbor’s crossed legs. Yet this would be the right moment to put an arm around her trembling shoulders, to press her frightened hand with his as a comforting gesture, for their terror is sometimes so extreme that people’s hair stands on end, or even turns white between the beginning and end of an alert.
They all wonder whether their neighbor’s place might not be a better guarantee of survival than their own. Which way lies salvation? Over there, rather than here? On this side where the vault is low, or in the doorway? Which future victim’s number has already come up in this funereal lottery? When specks of dust start falling off a vault and sprinkling a head, its owner gives a start, raises his eyes to check the origin of this micro-earthquake, and without a word goes and picks another place. Although there are plenty of candidates, no one takes his seat. The people on either side of it automatically move apart, leaving a kind of well between them that is presumably the prime target for the disaster, as if it were possible that that little space marked by a handful of chalky dust could encompass the entire accumulated ruins of the ancient residence of the dukes of Brittany.
A great many of the refugees have come from the nearby moviehouse, the Katorza, in the street of the same name, between the rue Scribe and the place Graslin, where they are showing The Count of Monte Cristo with that good-looking actor Pierre Blanchard in the title role: two hours of the implacable vengeance of a rancorous maniac who hasn’t an ounce of pity in his makeup. After the first part of the program, which consists of a documentary and the newsreel (a loathsome voice trumpeting a victorious advance of the Axis forces and a shot of the Marshal kissing a little girl waiting to greet him with flowers as he gets off a train), and after the intermission, just as the credits are coming up on the screen, over and above the sudden music, or rather as if it were the amplification of a cancerous note, a long, crescendo lament that has nothing to do with the score brutally interruptes the projection, makes the lights come on again, and sends the cheated audience rushing toward the exit. Commenting on the event in the long, low vaulted cellar, someone says, “Avez vous vu Monte Cristo?” to which others reply with a knowing smile that “Now, Us n’ont vu monter personnel Then the conversations tail off, and waiting takes over. The silence floats up and curves around the vaults, arches its back, and is only slightly perturbed by the quickly stifled sound of a child’s sob.