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I knew they were going back to Paris the next day, or the day after, to pack up for their move. Now that the ‘broad republican front’ had formed its coalition, the results of the run-off were no longer in doubt, and neither was their retirement. After I sincerely congratulated Marie-Françoise on her culinary talents, I said goodbye to her husband at the door. He had drunk almost as much as I had, and still he could recite whole stanzas of Péguy by heart. I had to admit, I was impressed. I wasn’t really convinced the republic and patriotism had ‘paved the way’ for anything but a long succession of stupid wars, but in any case, Tanneur was far from senile. I wouldn’t mind being that sharp when I was his age. At the bottom of the steps that led to the street, I turned and said, ‘I’ll go to Rocamadour.’

~ ~ ~

It wasn’t peak tourist season yet, and I easily found a room at the Beau Site Hotel, agreeably located within the medieval citadel. The restaurant had a view overlooking the Alzou: the site was, in fact, impressive and received plenty of visitors. After a few days watching wave after wave of tourists from all four corners of the earth, each tourist different, each the same, camcorder in hand, roaming amazed over the jumble of towers, parapets, oratories and chapels that climbed the side of the cliff, I felt as if I had somehow stepped out of historical time, and I barely noticed when, on the evening of the second electoral Sunday, Mohammed Ben Abbes won by a landslide. I had drifted into a dreamy state of inaction, and even though here the hotel Internet worked fine, I wasn’t especially worried not to have heard from Myriam. In the eyes of the owner and his staff, I was a type: a bachelor, rather cultured, rather sad, without much in the way of distractions — all of which was an accurate description. In the end, I was the kind of guest who never gives you any trouble, which was all that mattered.

I’d been at Rocamadour for a week or two when finally I got her email. She had lots to say about Israel, about the special atmosphere she felt all around her — extraordinarily dynamic and lively, but with an undercurrent of tragedy. It might seem strange, she wrote, to leave a country like France because you were afraid of hypothetical dangers, only to emigrate to a country where the dangers weren’t the least bit hypothetical. A Hamas offshoot had just launched a new series of attacks, and practically every day some bomb-wearing kamikaze blew himself up in a restaurant or on a bus. It was strange, but now that she was there she understood: since Israel had always been at war, the attacks and the battles seemed inevitable, in a sense, natural. They didn’t keep people from enjoying life, at any rate. She attached two photos of herself in a bikini on the beach in Tel Aviv. In one of the photos, a three-quarters rear view of her running towards the sea, you could really see her arse and I started to get a hard-on; I wanted to touch her arse so badly my hands tingled with pain. It was incredible how well I remembered it.

Closing up my computer, I realised that she hadn’t once said anything about coming back to France.

Early in my stay I fell into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady. Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin — the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem. The baby Jesus — who looked nothing like a baby, more like an adult or even an old man — sat on her lap, equally erect; his eyes were closed, too, his face sharp, wise and powerful, and he wore a crown of his own. There was no tenderness, no maternal abandon in their postures. This was not the baby Jesus; this was already the king of the world. His serenity and the impression he gave of spiritual power — of intangible energy — were almost terrifying.

This superhuman image was a world away from the tortured, suffering Christ of Matthias Grünewald, which had made such a deep impression on Huysmans. For Huysmans the Middle Ages meant the Gothic period, and really the late Gothic: emotionally expressive, realistic, moralising, it was already closer to the Renaissance than to the Romanesque. I remembered a conversation I’d had, years before, with a history professor at the Sorbonne. In the early Middle Ages, he’d explained, the question of individual judgement barely came up. Only much later, with Hieronymus Bosch for example, do we see those terrifying images in which Christ separates the cohort of the chosen from the legion of the damned; where devils lead unrepentant sinners towards the torments of hell. The Romanesque vision was much more communaclass="underline" at his death the believer fell into a deep sleep and was laid in earth. When all the prophecies had been fulfilled and Christ came again, it was the entire Christian people who rose together from the tomb, resurrected in one glorious body, to make their way to paradise. Moral judgement, individual judgement, individuality itself were not clear ideas in the mind of Romanesque man, and I felt my own individuality dissolving the longer I sat in my reverie before the Virgin of Rocamadour.

Still, I had to get back to Paris. One morning it hit me that it was already the middle of July, and that I’d been there for more than a month. The truth was, I had no pressing reason to go back. I’d received an email from Marie-Françoise, who’d been in touch with other colleagues: no news from the administration. We were all in limbo. In the larger world, the legislative elections had been held, with predictable results, and a government had been formed.

The town began to hold organised events for the tourists. Mainly these were gastronomical, but some were cultural, and the day before I left, as I made my usual visit to the Chapel of Our Lady, I happened on a reading of Péguy. I sat in the next-to-last row; attendance was sparse. Most of the audience was made up young people in jeans and polo shirts, all with those open, friendly faces that for whatever reason you see on young Catholics.

Mother, behold your sons who fought so long.

Weigh them not as one weighs a spirit,

But judge them as you would judge an outcast

Who steals his way home along forgotten paths.

The alexandrines rang out rhythmically in the stillness, and I wondered what the patriotic, violent-souled Péguy could mean to these young Catholic humanitarians. In any case, the actor had excellent diction. I thought that he must be a well-known theatre actor, a member of the Comédie Française, but that he must also have been in films, because I’d seen his photo somewhere before.

Mother, behold your sons and their immense army.

Judge them not by their misery alone.

May God place beside them a handful of earth

So lost to them, and that they loved so much.

He was a Polish actor, I was sure of it now, but still I couldn’t think of his name. Maybe he was Catholic, too. Some actors are. It’s true that they practise a strange profession, in which the idea of divine intervention seems more plausible than in some other lines of work. As for these young Catholics, did they love their homeland? Were they ready to give up everything for their country? I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but in general. I was in a strange state. It seemed the Virgin was rising from her pedestal and growing in the air. The baby Jesus seemed ready to detach himself from her, and it seemed to me that all he had to do was raise his right hand and the pagans and idolators would be destroyed, and the keys to the world restored to him, ‘as its lord, its possessor and its master’.