Like all the others, the Michauds started walking. It was a warm June evening. In front of them a woman in mourning, wearing a black crêpe hat askew over her white hair, stumbled on the stones in the road and, gesturing like a madwoman, muttered, "Pray and give thanks that we're not fleeing in winter… Pray… Just pray!"
9
Gabriel Corte and Florence spent the night of 11 June in their car. They had arrived in the town at about six o'clock in the evening and the only accommodation left was two hot little rooms right under the roof of the hotel. Gabriel strode angrily through the rooms, pushed open the windows, leaned out for a moment over the bright safety rail, then pulled his head back in, saying in a curt voice, "I am not staying here."
"We have nothing else, Monsieur, I'm very sorry," said the manager, his face pale and exhausted. "Just think, with all these crowds of refugees, people are even sleeping on the billiard table. I was trying to do you a favour!"
"I am not staying here," Gabriel repeated, stressing each word as he did at the end of discussions with editors when he shouted at them from the doorstep: "Under these circumstances, it will be impossible for us to reach an agreement, Monsieur!" The editor would then weaken and increase his offer from 80,000 to 100,000 francs.
But the manager just shook his head sadly. "There's nothing else, nothing at all."
"Do you know who I am?" Gabriel asked, dangerously calm all of a sudden. "I am Gabriel Corte and I'm telling you that I would rather sleep in my car than in this rat hole."
"When you leave, Monsieur Corte," replied the offended manager, "you'll find ten families on the landing, begging on their knees for me to rent them these rooms."
Corte let out a loud laugh, overdramatic, icy and scornful. "I certainly won't be fighting for them. Adieu, Monsieur."
To no one, not even to Florence who was waiting downstairs in the lobby, would he ever admit the real reason he had turned down the rooms. In the fading light of the June evening, he had seen a petrol depot from the window; it was close to the hotel and, a little further away, what looked like tanks and armoured cars were parked in the town square.
"We'll be bombed!" he thought, and he started trembling all over, so suddenly, so profoundly that he felt ill. Was it fear? Gabriel Corte? No, he couldn't be afraid! Don't be ridiculous! He smiled with pity and scorn, as if replying to some invisible person. Of course he wasn't afraid, but as he leaned out of the window once more, he looked up at the dark sky: at any moment it could rain fire and death upon him, and that horrible feeling shot through him again, first the trembling right down to his bones, then the kind of weakness, nausea and tensing in the stomach you feel before you faint. He didn't care whether he was afraid or not! He rushed outside, Florence and the maid following behind.
"We'll sleep in the car," he said, "it's just one night."
Later on, it occurred to him that he could have tried another hotel, but by the time he'd made up his mind, it was too late. An endless, slow-moving river flowed from Paris: cars, trucks, carts, bicycles, along with the horse-drawn traps of farmers who had abandoned their land to flee south, their children and cattle trailing behind. By midnight there wasn't a single free room in all of Orléans, not a single bed. People were sleeping on the floor in cafés, in the streets, in the railway stations, their heads resting on suitcases. There was so much traffic that it was impossible to get out of the city. People were saying that a roadblock had been set up to keep the road free for the troops.
Silently, with no lights on, cars kept coming, one after the other, full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof. They looked like mountains of fragile scaffolding and they seemed to move without the aid of a motor, propelled by their own weight down the sloping streets to the town square. Cars filled all the roads into the square. People were jammed together like fish caught in a net, and one good tug on that net would have picked them all up and thrown them down on to some terrifying river bank. There was no crying or shouting; even the children were quiet. Everything seemed calm. From time to time a face would appear over a lowered window and stare up at the sky for a while, wondering. A low, muffled murmur rose up from the crowd, the sound of painful breathing, sighs and conversations held in hushed voices, as if people were afraid of being overheard by an enemy lying in wait. Some tried to sleep, heads leaning on the corner of a suitcase, legs aching on a narrow bench or a warm cheek pressed against a window. Young men and women called to one another from the cars and sometimes laughed. Then a dark shape would glide across the star-covered sky, everyone would look up and the laughter would stop. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fear, rather a strange sadness-a sadness that had nothing human about it any more, for it lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them.
The plane above their heads had appeared suddenly; they could hear its thin, piercing sound fading away, disappearing, then surging up again to drown out the thousand sounds of the city. Everyone held their breath. The river, the metal bridge, the railway tracks, the train station, the factory's chimneys all glimmered; they were nothing more than "strategic positions," targets for the enemy to hit. Everything seemed dangerous to this silent crowd. "I think it's a French plane!" said the optimists. French or enemy, no one really knew. But it was disappearing now. Sometimes they could hear a distant explosion. "It didn't hit us," they would think, sighing with happiness. "It didn't hit us, it's aimed at someone else. We're so lucky!"
"What a night! What a terrible night!" Florence groaned.
In a barely audible voice, which slipped through his clenched lips with a kind of whistle, Gabriel hissed at her as you would to a dog, "I'm not asleep, am I? Do what I'm doing."
"For heaven's sake, we could have had a room! We had the unbelievable luck to find a room!"
"You call that unbelievable luck? That disgusting attic, which reeked of lice and bad drains. Didn't you notice it was right above the kitchen? Me, stay there? Can you picture me in there?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Gabriel, don't be so proud."
"Leave me alone, won't you! I have always felt it, there are nuances, there is a…" he was looking for the right word "… a sense of decency which you simply cannot feel."
"What I can feel is my painful arse," shouted Florence, suddenly forgetting the past five years of her life and slapping her ring-covered hand vigorously against her thigh in the most crass way. "Oh, for goodness sake, I've had enough!"
Gabriel turned towards her, his face white with fury, nostrils flaring. "Get the hell out! Go on, get the hell out! I'm throwing you out!"
At that very moment a bright light lit up the town square. It was a missile shot from a plane. The words froze on Gabriel's lips. The missile disappeared but the sky was filled with planes. They flew back and forth above the town square in a manner that seemed almost lazy.
"What about our planes, where are ours?" people groaned.
To Corte's left was a miserable little car carrying a mattress on its roof, along with a heavy round guéridon table with vulgar bronze mounts. A man in a peaked cap and two women were sitting inside; one woman had a child on her lap and the other a birdcage. It looked as if they had been in an accident on the way. The car's bodywork was scratched, the bumper hanging off and the fat woman holding the birdcage against her chest had bandages wrapped round her head.
On his right was a truck full of the kind of crates villagers use to transport poultry on Fair days but which now were full of bundles of old clothes. Through the car window right next to his, Gabriel could see the face of an old prostitute with painted eyes, messy orange hair, a low angular forehead. She stared at him long and hard while chewing on a bit of bread. He shuddered. "Such ugliness," he murmured, "such hideous faces!" Overcome, he turned round to face inside the car and closed his eyes.
"I'm hungry," Florence said. "Are you?"
He gestured no.
She opened the overnight case and took out some sandwiches. "You didn't have dinner. Come on. Be sensible."
"I cannot eat," he said. "I don't think I could swallow a single mouthful now. Did you see that horrible old woman beside us with her birdcage and bloodstained bandages?"
Florence took a sandwich and shared the others with the maid and driver. Gabriel covered his ears with his long hands so he couldn't hear the crunching noises the servants made as they bit into the bread.
10
The Péricands had been travelling for nearly a week and had been dogged by misfortune. They'd had to stay in Gien for two days when the car broke down. Further along, amid the confusion and unimaginable crush, the car had hit the truck carrying the servants and luggage. That was near Nevers. Fortunately for the Péricands, there was no part of the provinces where they couldn't find some friend or relative with a large house, beautiful gardens and a well-stocked larder. A cousin from the Maltête-Lyonnais side of the family put them up for two days. But panic was intensifying, spreading like wildfire from one city to another. They had the car repaired as best they could and set out once more, but by noon on Saturday it was clear the car could go no further without a thorough overhaul. The Péricands stopped in a small town just off the main highway where they hoped to find a room. But all sorts of vehicles were already blocking the streets. The sound of creaking brakes filled the air and the ground next to the river looked like a gypsy camp. Exhausted men were sleeping on the grass, others were getting dressed. A young woman had hung a mirror on a tree trunk and was putting on make-up and combing her hair. Someone else was washing nappies in the fountain.