My father would visit between trips to Brazzaville. He didn’t drive, and since someone had to bring him from Paris to our town, his friends would pick him up by turns: Annet Badel, Sasha Gordine, Robert Fly, Jacques Boudot-Lamotte, Georges Giorgini, Geza Pellmont, fat Lucien P., who would sit on an armchair in the living room, and each time we were afraid the chair would collapse or split beneath him; Stioppa de D., who wore a monocle and a fur coat, and whose hair was so thick with pomade that it left stains on the couches and walls against which Stioppa leaned his neck.
These visits occurred on Thursdays, and my father would take us out to lunch at the Robin des Bois inn. Annie and Little Hélène were out. Mathilde stayed home. Only Snow White would come to lunch with us. And sometimes Frede’s nephew.
My father had been a regular at the Robin des Bois a long time ago. He talked about it during one of our lunches with his friend Geza Pellmont, and I listened in on their conversation.
“You remember?” Pellmont had said. “We used to come here with Eliot Salter …”
“The chateau’s in ruins,” my father had said.
The chateau was at the end of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, across from the Jeanne d’Arc school. Attached to the half-open gate was a rotting wooden sign, on which one could still read, “Property commandeered by the U.S. Army for Brigadier General Frank Allen.” On Thursdays we’d slip between the panels of the gate. The overgrown field of grass came to our waists. At the far end rose a Louis XIII — style chateau, its façade flanked by two detached houses standing forward from it. I later learned that it had been built at the end of the nineteenth century. We flew a kite in the field, a kite made of blue-and-red canvas and shaped like an airplane. We had a hard time getting it to soar very high. Farther on, to the right of the chateau, was a knoll with pine trees, and a stone bench on which Snow White sat. She read Noir et Blanc or else did her knitting, while we climbed into the pine branches. But we got dizzy, my brother and I, and only Frede’s nephew made it to the top.
Toward midafternoon, we followed the path leading away from the knoll and, along with Snow White, we penetrated into the forest. We walked all the way to the Food Hamlet. In autumn we’d gather chestnuts. The baker at the Hamlet was my schoolmate’s dad, and every time we went into his shop my friend’s sister was there, and I admired her wavy blond hair that fell to her ankles. And then we went back by the same path. In the twilight, the façade and two forward-projecting outbuildings of the chateau looked sinister and made our hearts pound, my brother’s and mine.
“Shall we go see the chateau?”
From then on, these were the words my father spoke at the end of every lunch. And just like the other Thursdays, we followed Rue du Docteur-Dordaine and slipped through the half-open gate into the field. Except that, on those days, my father and one of his friends — Badel, Gordine, Stioppa, or Robert Fly — came with us.
Snow White went to sit on the bench at the base of the pines, in her usual spot. My father approached the chateau, contemplating the façade and the tall, boarded-up windows. He pushed open the main door and we walked into a grand entrance hall, whose tiling was buried under rubble and dead leaves. At the back of the hall was an elevator cage.
“I used to know the owner of this chateau,” said my father.
He could see my brother and I were curious. So he told us the story of Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, who, at the age of twenty, during the First World War, had been a flying ace. Then he’d married an Argentinian woman and become the king of Armagnac. Armagnac, said my father, was a liqueur that Salter, the marquis de Caussade, made and sold in very handsome bottles by the truckload. I helped him unload all those trucks, said my father. We counted the cases, one by one. He had bought this chateau. He had disappeared at the end of the last war with his wife, but he wasn’t dead and someday he’d be back.
Gingerly my father peeled off a small notice affixed to the inside of the front door and gave it to me. Even today, without the slightest hesitation, I can still recite what was written on it:
Seizure of illegal gains
Tuesday, July 23, at 2:00 p.m.
At the Food Hamlet
Magnificent property
including chateau and 750 acres of forestland
“Keep an eye on this place, boys,” said my father. “The marquis will be back, and sooner than you think …”
And before getting into the car of whatever friend was driving him that day, he bid us good-bye with a distracted hand, which we could still see waving limply through the window as the car headed off to Paris.
We had decided, my brother and I, to visit the chateau at night. We had to wait until everyone in the house was asleep. Mathilde’s room took up the ground floor of a tiny cottage at the back of the courtyard: no danger of her hearing us. Little Hélène’s room was upstairs in the house, at the other end of the hall, and Snow White’s was next to ours. The hall floor creaked a bit, but once we made it to the foot of the stairs we’d have nothing to fear and it would be clear sailing. We would pick a night when Annie wasn’t home, as she went to bed very late — a night when she was crying at Carroll’s.
We’d taken the flashlight from the kitchen cupboard, a silvery metal flashlight that produced a yellowish beam. And we got dressed. We left on our pajama tops under our sweaters. To keep awake, we talked about Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade. Taking turns, we came up with the wildest tales about him. On the nights when he visited the chateau, according to my brother, he arrived at the local station on the last train from Paris, the eleven-thirty-three, whose rhythmic rumbling we could hear from our bedroom window. He liked to avoid drawing attention to himself and so didn’t park his car in front of the chateau gate, which would have aroused suspicion. Instead, it was on foot, like a simple pedestrian, that he went to his property for the night.
We were both convinced of the same thing: on those nights, Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, stayed in the great hall of the chateau. Before his arrival, someone had swept up the dead leaves and rubble, and afterward they would put it all back to cover every trace of his passage. And the person who made these preparations for his master’s visit was the gamekeeper. He lived in the forest, between the Food Hamlet and the edge of the Villacoublay airfield. We often met him during our walks with Snow White. We had asked the baker’s son for the name of this faithful servant who hid his secret so welclass="underline" Grosclaude.
It was no coincidence that Grosclaude lived there. We had discovered, in that area of the forest that bordered the airfield, an abandoned landing strip with a large hangar. The marquis used that landing strip at night, to head off in an airplane toward some faraway destination — an island in the South Seas. After a while, he would return from there. And on those nights, Grosclaude would set out small light signals so the marquis could land more easily.
The marquis was sitting in a velvet armchair in front of the massive fireplace where Grosclaude had lit a fire. Behind him, the table was set: silver candelabras, lace, and crystal. We entered the great hall, my brother and I. The only light was from the fire in the fireplace and the flame of the candles. Grosclaude saw us first and came charging up to us, with his boots and riding breeches.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
His voice was threatening. He’d surely give us both a couple of slaps and throw us out. It would be better if, when we entered the hall, we went straight up to the marquis de Caussade and talked to him directly. And we tried to plan in advance what we would say.