Placide chats away like a cantankerous magpie. Whereas Pierre has spent his thirty-five years getting steamed up, his colleague, rival and friend has spent twenty-eight doing very little. Pierre’s dark hair blows in the wind, whereas Placide is bald. Pierre thinks straight, sees straight, walks straight; Placide, who has become short-sighted and stooped through reading, moves in zigzags: he has small, shaky feet, puzzled hands and a mischievous face. Pierre has an instinct for things and Placide is highly erudite. Pierre became involved in Roman art at the age that Placide was leaving the École des Chartes.1 Pierre drives and Placide is driven.
“I’m looking forward with much impatience to our meeting this evening,” says Placide. “The owner of the chapel, Monsieur de Boisrosé (armorial bearing of Santo Domingo), is an elderly Creole preoccupied with his health and self-preservation; he’s so slow he’s unable to complete his sentences; neither are you, you’re so quick. It will be a treat for me to see you together.”
“So convey to me still further what you know of this matter, my dear.”
Placide speaks as Madame de Sévigné writes, and Pierre, who is a tease, replies in the same vein, when he is in a good mood.
“We were disinclined to sell, but the local maidservant appears to have had her say.”
“I should be extremely happy to cast my eyes over her, this girl, however fearful she may be.”
Placide shrugs his shoulders:
“She is. It will teach you to make fun of me.”
With his little finger in the air, Pierre, out of pique, pretends to take a pinch from an imaginary snuffbox.
“Well, no actually. The maidservant is extremely pretty and you will be delighted to make her acquaintance,” Placide retorts. “But I am fearfully anxious that M. de Boisrosé may change his mind,” he adds treacherously, thinking solely of spoiling his friend’s pleasure.
“The main basis upon which I build my hopes is the care they have taken to call us by telegram, even though the word telegram sounds offensive here!”
And Pierre laughs, pressing his foot flat on the accelerator.
“Can we not stop soon? I’m so hungry,” Placide sighs.
“It’s impossible if we want to be in the Var by this evening. I fully intend to become the owner before dinner! When I do something foolish, I like to plunge in head first.”
Placide sighs in desperation:
“You think of yourself as punctual,” he says, “but you’re missing what’s important, which is the punctuality of the stomach.”
“It’s because I need you to be light, so that we can refuel en route.”
Placide adopts a tight-lipped expression:
“I had thought, dear friend, that you were taking me along as an expert in Roman art and not as the speedster’s mechanic. What a mad obsession not to stop at a petrol station!”
“Ah no! That’s not all. The woman in a nurse’s blouse, with her big red stick, irritates me; she’s a chatterbox and never has any change. The petrol pipe she brandishes is always too long or too short; it’s also ridiculously narrow; the air goes into the tank while the petrol spills on the ground. It’s stupid! The pipes are always too narrow, whether it’s a pipe that drains out, a pipe that pumps in water or the neck of a bottle, a human larynx, or an oesophagus tube. Come on, get a move on, there’s not a drop left in the tank.”
“You’re going to make me reach out over the hood at a hundred kilometres an hour and risk breaking my neck… It’s cruel and dangerous. Slow down, for goodness’ sake, slow down!” yells Placide.
“Me! Slow down!”
“My cap!”
“So, are you sitting in the dickey-seat? Fine. Now, listen to what you have to do: the fifty-litre can is under the back seat. Found it? Fine. I’m watching you in the rear-view mirror: take the funnel. Have you got it? That’s perfect! So, third step: lean out over the right-hand side of the car. You’re right’s not on your left! Don’t fall out! Unscrew the cap. No, of course there’s no danger! Just hold on with your foot and cling on with your left hand while you’re in space… Well done! You see, Placide, saving ten minutes is child’s play!”
Placide crawled back to his seat with some difficulty and sat down again beside Pierre, his face white from fear and the wind, his ears as red as a clown’s.
CHAPTER III
“FROM HERE ON, the road is no longer suitable for cars,” said Placide. “The gravel crumbles beneath the wheels and if we go any further we’ll risk thousands of punctures.”
They step down and stride over the roots of a carob tree laid bare by the rain. The pitted track has become a stream. Pierre runs, followed by Placide who, in the woods, with his large head framed by a blond beard, looks like one of Snow White’s dwarfs, though without their lightness of foot.
“I feel as though I’m in a Turkish bath. I’m sweating like an alcarraza.”
“Onwards!” yells Pierre.
“Let me stop for a second.”
“Must one stop over so minor a matter, Marquise? Onwards!”
The cork oaks, stripped to a man’s height of their outer layers, display the red innards of their robust bark. Their cracked crusts, with their spongy slabs rounded like tiles, are piled up at crossroads.
“A forest that’s ripe for a fire. All you need is a match,” hints Placide, annoyed at having to do up his buttons again as he runs.
“If my house burns down, so much the better! It’s unusual for a landlord to have a Wagnerian death.”
The harbour at Hyères rises up to meet them through the pine grove. Lizards rush out, stopping right in front of them, on slabs of pink sandstone. A flock of red partridges, the same colour as the sandstone and the cork, cross over the stream and retreat into the oleander bushes that have reverted to the wild. Lizards and partridges are the only recognizable creatures encountered during the first thirty minutes of their climb, spent stepping over heather, laburnum and clumps of rosemary.
“Let’s keep Gratteloup hill to our right. We’re on the right track, assuming there is a track,” said Placide. “I remember noticing those veins of white marble in the sandstone.”
Small clouds scurry above them, floating over the lighthouse and dissolving far away in the sea mist. The woods scramble across the hilltops, those fiery, twisted, miserable woods of the Midi, those small forests that never grow to their full height, but repay their sparse nourishment with balsam and perfume. Far below, between the trunks of the trees, the golden curve of a beach can be seen: it is Le Lavandou, and behind it lies Cap Bénat with its scrubland; in the background are the Îles d’Hyères, which the setting sun is lulling to sleep in a crimson light fringed with violet.
“Oh! How beautiful it is!” Pierre cries out. “My God, it’s beautiful. Here’s my hermitage, I recognize it. Here are the two cypress trees marking the entrance, on either side of the cart track. My plane flew over this precise point!” he exclaims in his enthusiasm.
Apart from a ring of agaves and prickly pears, the building, constructed of such a brightly coloured stone that it looks as though it were new, stops beside a drop. It clings to the slope; it cleaves to some splendid thick rows of Aleppo pines in one of those luminous landscapes that rarely experience the splatter of rainfall. The olive trees have taken it upon themselves to settle around the oil mill; they display their greying leaves crowned with tender green shoots at a time of the year when the young, bitter olive has not yet turned a shade of violet. The cicadas can be heard… A Galilean peace.