Then one morning, everyone seemed to be in a particularly sombre mood. The Lieutenant cleared his throat: ‘Lamballe, we need you to carry out an assassination.’ I took this statement calmly as though I’d been expecting it for some time. ‘We’re counting on you, Lamballe, to take down Normand and Philibert. Choose the right moment.’ There was a pause during which Saint-Georges, Pernety, Jasmin, and the others stared at me with tears in their eyes. The Lieutenant sat motionless at his desk. Corvisart handed me a cognac. The last drink of the condemned man, I thought. I could clearly see a scaffold in the middle of the room. The Lieutenant played the role of executioner. His recruits would watch the execution, smiling mournfully at me. ‘Well, Lamballe? What do you think?’ ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ I replied. I wanted to burst into tears, to confess my tenuous position as double agent. But there are some things you have to keep to yourself. I’ve always been a man of few words. Not the talkative type. But the others were always eager to pour out their feelings to me. I remember spending long afternoons with the boys of the CKS. We would wander through the streets around the Rue Boisrobert, near Vaugirard. I would listen to their rambling. Pernety dreamed of a just world. His cheeks would flush bright red. From his wallet, he would take out pictures of Robespierre and André Breton. I pretended to admire these two men. Pernety kept talking about ‘Revolution’, about ‘Moral awakening’, about ‘Our role as intellectuals’ in a clipped voice I found extremely irritating. He smoked a pipe and wore black leather shoes — these details still move me. Corvisart agonised about being born into a bourgeois family. He wanted desperately to forget the Parc Monceau, the tennis courts at Aix-les-Bains, the sugarplums from Plouvier’s he ate every week at his cousins’ house. He asked whether I thought it was possible to be a Socialist and a Christian. As for Jasmin, he wanted to see France fight harder. He had the highest esteem for Henri de Bournazel and knew the names of every star in the sky. Obligado published a ‘political journal’. ‘We must bear witness,’ he explained. ‘It’s our duty. I cannot stay silent.’ But silence is easily learned: a couple of kicks in the teeth will do the trick. Picpus showed me his fiancée’s letters. Have a little more patience: according to him, the nightmare would soon be over. We would be living in a peaceful world. We’d tell our children about the ordeals we had suffered. Saint-Georges, Marbeuf, and Pelleport graduated from the academy of Saint-Cyr with a thirst for battle and the firm resolve to meet death singing. As for myself, I thought of Cimarosa Square, where I’d have to turn in my daily report. They were lucky, these boys, to be able to daydream. The Vaugirard district encouraged such things. Tranquil, inviolate, like some remote hamlet. The very name ‘Vaugirard’ spoke of greenery, ivy, a little stream with mossy banks. In such a haven they could give free reign to their heroic imaginations. They had nothing to lose. I was the one they sent out to battle with the real world, and I was flailing against the current. The sublime, apparently, did not suit me. In the late afternoon, before boarding the métro, I would sit on a bench in the Place Adolphe Cherioux and, for a few last moments, soak up the peace of this village. A little house with a garden. A convent or maybe an old folks’ home? I could hear the trees whispering. A cat padded past the church. From nowhere, I heard a gently voice: Fred Gouin singing ‘Envoi de fleurs’. And I would forget I had no future. My life would take a different course. With a little patience, as Picpus used to say, I could come through this nightmare alive. I’d get a job as bartender in an
auberge outside Paris, BARMAN. Here was something that seemed to suit my inclinations and my talents. You stand behind the bar. It protects you from the public. Nor are they hostile, they simply want to order drinks. You mix the drinks and serve them quickly. The most aggressive ones thank you. BARMAN was a much nobler profession than was generally accepted, the only one that deserved comparison with police work or medicine. What did it involve? Mixing cocktails. Mixing dreams, in a sense. Antidotes for pain. At the bar they beg you for it. Curaçao? Marie Brizard? Ether? Whatever they want. After two or three drinks they become maudlin, they reel, they roll their eyes and launch into the long litany of their sufferings and their crimes, plead with you to console them. Hitler, between hiccups, begs your forgiveness. ‘What are you thinking about, Lamballe?’ ‘About flies, Lieutenant.’ Once in a while he would invite me into his office for a little tête-à-tête. ‘I know you’ll carry out the assassination. I trust you, Lamballe.’ He took a commanding tone, staring at me with his blue-black eyes. Tell him the truth? But which truth? Double agent? Triple agent? By this time even I no longer knew who I was. Excuse me, Lieutenant, I DO NOT EXIST. I’ve never had an identity card. He would consider such frivolity unpardonable at a time when men were expected to steel themselves and display great strength of character. One evening I was alone with him. My weariness, like a rat, gnawed at everything around. The walls suddenly seemed swathed in dark velvet, a mist enveloped the room, blurring the outlines of the furniture: the desk, the chairs, the wardrobe. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ he asked in a faraway voice that surprised me. The Lieutenant stared at me as he always did, but his eyes had lost their metallic gleam. He sat at the desk, head tilted to the right, his cheek almost resting on his shoulder, in the pensive and forlorn posture of Florentine angels. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ he asked again, in the same tone he might have said: ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ His eyes were filled with such gentleness, such sadness that I thought for a moment Lieutenant Dominique had understood everything and had forgiven everything: my role as a double (or triple) agent, my helplessness at being a straw in the wind and whatever wrongs I had committed through cowardice or inadvertence. For the first time, someone was taking an interest in me. I found this compassion terribly moving. In vain, I tried to say some words of thanks. The Lieutenant’s eyes grew more and more compassionate, his craggy features softened. His chest sagged. Soon, all that remained of this brimming arrogance and vitality was a kindly, feeble old grandmother. The crashing waves of the outside world broke against the velvet walls. We were sunk down into darkness, into depths where our sleep would be undisturbed. Paris, too, was sinking. From the cabin I could see the searchlight on the Eiffel Tower: a lighthouse guiding us to shore. We would never come ashore. It no longer mattered. ‘Time for sleep, son,’ the Lieutenant murmured, ‘SLEEP.’ His eyes shot a parting gleam into the shadows, SLEEP. He glanced one last time into the shadows. ‘What are you thinking about, Lamballe?’ He shakes my shoulder. In a soldierly voice: ‘Prepare yourself for the assassination. The fate of the network is in your hands. Never surrender.’ He paces the room nervously. The hard edges of objects had returned. ‘Guts, Lamballe. I’m counting on you.’ The métro moves off again. Cambronne — La Motte-Picquet — Dupleix — Grenelle — Passy. 9 p.m. On the corner of the Rue Franklin and Rue Vineuse, the white Bentley the Khedive had lent me in return for my services was waiting. The boys of the CKS would not have been impressed. Driving around in an expensive car these days implied activities of questionable morality. Only black marketeers and highly-paid informants could afford such luxuries. I didn’t care. Exhaustion dispelled the last of my scruples. I drove slowly across the Place du Trocadéro. A hushed engine. Russian leather seats. I liked the Bentley. The Khedive had found it in a garage in Neuilly. I opened the glove compartment: the owner’s registration papers were still there. It was clearly a stolen car. One day or another we would have to account for this. What would I plead in court when they read the charge sheet of the many crimes committed by the ‘Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo’? A gang of thugs, the judge would say. Profiting from other people’s suffering and confusion. ‘Monsters,’ Madeleine Jacob would write. I turned on the radio.