January 1892
Passy, like its neighbouring district, Auteuil, is a leafy area full of mature trees and high-walled gardens which slope down to the River Seine, and though the doctor’s establishment really is, as he claims, an asylum from the world, it is haunted too by some of the world’s grimmer ghosts, being housed in what was once variously described as a château or hôtel belonging to Queen Marie Antoinette’s close friend, the princesse de Lamballe. She perished almost exactly a hundred years ago, in the September massacres of 1792, when, according to some, her head along with more delicate parts of her anatomy was paraded on pikes outside the windows of the imprisoned queen. Did this really happen? How to be sure? It may well be happening now in inmates’ dreams, for monarchist propaganda keeps such stories alive. After her death the princess’s estate became a pleasure garden, and later a place of ill repute which had to be closed down.
Piquantly, dubious heads now hide here again, and the latest arrival is the fashionable, forty-two-year-old fiction-writer, lady-killer and journalist Guy de Maupassant, whose misfortune – he was delivered some weeks ago in a straitjacket – arouses the malign curiosity of his one-time professional colleagues. Journalists are an envious breed because their currency – fame – is one which they themselves rarely enjoy. Guy, though, did enjoy both fame and its fruits until last 2 January, when his maladies finally got the better of him. He had been baffling them for some time, growing ever more desperate as he went from doctor to doctor and from spa to spa, sampling every sort of cure while raging at his clouded vision, migraine headaches, toothaches, hallucinations, weight loss and memory lapses.
For a man who had always prided himself on being an athlete, these afflictions were painful. To the darling of Paris’s racier drawing and bedrooms, they were like Samson’s loss of hair. Compared, though, to his inability to write, they were less than gnat bites. For years he had swum, hiked, rowed, sailed, cuckolded and rutted with endurance and skill, but writing was what had quickened his élan vital. It had prolonged the fleeting moment, kept sensations quick, allowed him to relive his life and try to understand it.
Now it no longer did. His master-talent for pinning perceptions to the page was drying up! He dreamed of dried inkpots. Sticking his pen in them. Failing to. The inkpots then turned into women who – how dull the world was! – were dry too. Impenetrable! He couldn’t ... Merde! Was the dullness the world’s fault or his? His of course! His! His brain had grown sluggish, his mind – what? Babbly? Babel-y? Or did he mean ‘blurry’? More and more often now, words evaded him. And what you couldn’t say, you ceased to see. Was ‘blinkered’ the word he wanted? ‘On the blink’? Tantalizing syllables shifted shape in his fumbling brain. ‘Blll ... ank’? That was it! Blanked! No, blanched mind? Doctor Blanched? Might it be the morphine? Thoughts, jumbling like broken type, scattered and escaped his grasp. Helpless, when he needed most to take control, he heard himself, once or twice, spout rubbish.
At lunch, last New Year’s Day, at his mother’s villa at Nice, this happened. When it did, the shock on his relatives’ faces so shocked him that, to spare them further pain, he jumped from his chair, tore his napkin from his neck, stuffed it in his mouth and ran from the house. The last thing he heard was his mother screaming entreaties that he stay. He doubts he’ll see her again. Or write again. Ever.
He loves her more than anyone in the world. Always has. Always! Which is why he didn’t turn back. It is also why, in the shuddering small hours of the next morning, he put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He was a lucid pessimist who had read his Schopenhauer and took pride in confronting life’s nastiness head – ha! – on. His own life had been more benign than he could have hoped it would be, but now, prematurely, at the age of forty-two, the good times were so clearly over that he pulled the trigger, felt the hot burn of gunpowder on his temple and – and that was all! Nothing more. The magazine was empty. No bullets! His valet had removed them! Baffled, then enraged, but still intent on doing what he had set out to do, Guy put his fist through a windowpane, located his carotid artery and, using a splinter from the broken pane, began to cut his throat – only to be rescued, farcically, all over again, by the kind, dim and obtusely devoted valet.
All that sangfroid for nothing! That effortful screwing up of courage! No wonder Guy went mad. He was caught in what could have been a script for a child’s puppet show. ‘Bang, I’m dead! No! Haha! Here I’m back. Thwack! Thump. Fizzle! Hack the artery! Ow! The splinter broke! Merde! Shit and re-shit!’ ‘Life’, like puppet shows, ‘consists,’ as Guy himself wrote, warningly, not all that long ago, to a very young woman, ‘of boredom, wretchedness and farce.’ Misère!
Did he believe it then? No. Now he does, for all three have caught up with him! Farce first! Farce and indignity! Those are what take over when you lose control!
Crunching up and down the frost-glazed paths of Dr Blanche’s gardens, he breaks ice shards under his boots. They mimic the bright splinter in his memory. In clear-eyed moments he can see his madness. When he does he is free of it: sane, distanced and in control. He can’t be sure he is seeing it, though, or which memories to trust. Lucidity trembles. Fiction is on the loose. With any luck his worst memories may prove to have been hallucinations.
The scar on his throat, though, is real enough. And so is the warder who is keeping watch on him. So he knows that he has ended up where he had planned never to be, and wouldn’t be now if that interfering fool hadn’t foiled his plan. He curses wellwishers!
On the other hand, could the valet have been right? Might a cure be effected? Even now? It is not five years since this same man, François, was marvelling at his master’s stamina in bed and at his desk. What an appetite in those days! What industry! While now ... François too is keeping watch, but furtively lest the sight of him upset poor Monsieur Guy.
‘Don’t let him see you,’ is Dr Blanche’s order. The mad, he explains, can ‘associate their trouble with the very people who try hardest to help them. They don’t like doctors either,’ adds Blanche. ‘We put up with that. It’s part of our vocation.’
So François hides indoors, peering through the slats of a shutter at his frail, hoop-backed, thin and diminished master who until recently drew women the way honey draws flies. Maybe the greedy creatures did for him! Sucked the life out of him as they sucked his juices! Like ticks! Right from the start François feared just this. He’d have shoo’d them away if it had been up to him which, unfortunately, it never was. Judging by their insistence, there must have been a sad dearth of men ready and able to satisfy the harpies! Reminiscently, he shakes his head. The things they got up to! François, who is just a bit younger than Monsieur Guy, was pleasantly shocked. Some of their practices, well ... In Belgium, which is where he comes from, he doubts if anyone ever saw the like! Or heard of it! Woman after woman used to come to Monsieur Guy’s door, heavily veiled, propelled by uterine ardours, sly but avid, pushful, yet always afraid to show her face! Titled ladies in some cases, and almost certainly married! Working for Monsieur Guy taught you a thing or two about human nature and the ways of our betters. Oh indeed! Some left clues: coded notes, impudent or carelessly forgotten visiting cards and gifts with indiscreet endearments. Underwear. More than once, when there was no time to lace them back into their corsets, these got left behind and had to be hidden, since it wouldn’t do for one lady to find another one’s under things. Not that some weren’t ready to engage in parties carrées and the like! Foursomes! The trysts were in the garçonnière, in one of Monsieur Guy’s yachts and in out-of-the-way hotels. François kept a half-anxious count and worried even then that his master was wearing out his health. But in the old days the writing too went ahead. Thirty-seven handwritten pages in one day! François noted those numbers approvingly. Good stuff too. That was the year Monsieur Guy published that cruel but moving novel Pierre et Jean, which he based on a news item he’d found in the press.
It was the press which used to provide him with raw material, with work – he often produced so much of it that he’d have to sign his stories with different names – and, of course, with fame. His novel Bel-Ami was about a journalist and, just as the book showed up the newspaper world, that world has now started sinking its claws into him. With his own eyes, François has seen newsmen hanging about the village of Passy, asking questions and buying drinks for locals. Vultures! He has warned Dr Blanche, who says he’ll take measures. Given half a chance, François himself would like to wring their prying necks.
L’Intransigeant
12 January 1892
Is there really no better way to stop Guy de Maupassant taking ether and opium than by handing him over to the three-star doctor who is getting enormous publicity from all this? Won’t any benefit the writer gains from sobering up be undone by the shock of finding himself interned in a well-known lunatic asylum?
The press went to town on the thing. Perhaps it amuses Monsieur Guy’s confrères to use his own weapon against him? It is a fiction to call him a drug addict. His use of ether was medicinal! He took it for his headaches.
This morning Dr Blanche called a staff meeting. It was attended by his assistants, Drs Meuriot and Grout, along with a warder called Baron who looked after Maupassant, and by Adam Gould who, thanks to two years’ diligence and the goodwill inherited from Uncle Charles, was fast becoming the aging neurologist’s right-hand man.
The director was indignant. Something must be done about the press. Here. Read that. He laid a bundle of papers on the table: Le Gaulois, Gil Blas, Le Figaro, L’Écho de Paris ... Flicking through them, he said he was less bothered by the lies than by the accurate bits. Some unnamed doctor – who? – had clearly discussed our new patient with unbuttoned candour to the hacks. Here, listen to what was picked up by L’Écho de la semaine. ‘He keeps asking for his thoughts,’ the leech had told the Écho, ‘and rummaging for them as one might for a handkerchief. “My thoughts,” he begs. “Has no one seen them?” They have escaped him and fly about like butterflies whose flight he cannot track.’
‘That,’ said Blanche, ‘is more or less exactly what Maupassant is saying. He talks about butterflies and the difficulty of pinning them to the page. Someone from here must have leaked gossip. I don’t for a moment believe that it was anyone in this room. It could be a gardener or a chambermaid or, although I hope not, it could be one of the warders. But talking to the press has to stop. Is that clear? Yes? Well, until further notice, nobody is to go in or out without good reason, and the gates must be kept locked. It would do our patient no good at all to read this sort of thing in the papers. And we can’t refuse to let him see them. Other patients get them, so how keep them from him? I’ve been wondering whether we should appeal to the editors to show more discretion? And sympathy? After all Maupassant did good work for them!’
Dr Meuriot had a wry smile for this. As Dr Blanche’s second-in-command, he made a point of not being a yes-man. Indeed, he exuded authority, for his face, already enlarged by a fuzz of mutton-chop whiskers, was gaining height as his hair receded. ‘I,’ he said, ‘favour lying low. A row could bring this establishment into disrepute.’ He dismissed Dr Blanche’s idea of printing a statement to the effect that Maupassant was well enough to read what was written about him. ‘Our good-hearted director underestimates the scribblers’ venom,’ he opined. ‘Not everyone is as open-minded as he. We could easily get their backs up.’
‘No reproach need be implied,’ said Blanche, ‘if we print it as a news item. We needn’t make a direct appeal. Just say he reads the papers. You don’t think they’d twig?’
‘Oh, I do think they’d twig,’ cried Meuriot, ‘and feel challenged and reply, and what good would that do us?’ He sighed, then lowered his voice to say he hoped the director would take in good part what he felt obliged to say now, which was that friends could be the source of the leak. Dr Blanche frequented drawing rooms, did he not, where old acquaintances of Maupassant’s asked him for news? Unsuspecting as he was, he probably supplied it. ‘That could be where the papers got their facts.’
There was an embarrassed pause.
Then Dr Blanche said, yes, he too must be more careful, and Dr Meuriot made appeasing hand gestures while the others looked at their feet and said nothing, being in doubt as to who exactly was in charge. Dr Blanche, like his father before him, was the nursing home’s director. Distinguished but unworldly, he had never bothered to buy the premises in which his family and patients were housed, then one day found to his shock that, behind his back, Dr Meuriot had done so ‘for a song’. That was some time ago; the shock had faded, and the two managed to jog along, collaborating more or less amicably, but moments like this put a strain on their goodwill.
Employees too felt the strain. Adam especially, since he had no particular training and knew that once the director retired there would be no place here for him. And Dr Blanche was seventy-two.
As they left the meeting Dr Blanche drew Adam aside and asked him to spend time with Maupassant, who was in a black despair and needed company.
‘You’re young and that’s in your favour. Try your charm on him. Soothe. Joke. Tell him stories. Have you read any of his books? You have? Jolly good! Praise them. We’re trying to give him fewer sedatives. Monseigneur de Belcastel is expecting a visitor this afternoon, so you’ll be free. A vicomte de Sauvigny.’
By now Adam was used to the monsignor’s ways. The prelate – lean and handsome despite his scar – must once have been gregarious. Even now he received visits, often from men who looked like ex-officers and no doubt shared a common allegiance since, when they were expected, a scatter of objects was apt to transform his room. A silken-tasselled, showily scabbarded sword, inscribed in one of the less familiar dead languages, would be lying conspicuously about, while on his prie-dieu a missal bound in blue and stamped with royal lilies invariably spilled a stream of devotional pictures no bigger than playing cards; a crown of thorns embraced the royal arms of France; the limbs of a crucifix sprouted further lilies; portraits of the last – now dead – legitimist Pretender and of the live, but less loved, Orleanist one flanked those of a weeping Virgin and bleeding Sacred Heart. Seen through the bars of a cage, the late pope, portrayed as a prisoner of the Italians, figured among the suffering. After each visit, the props would disappear.
Belcastel did not hide these, but neither did he want help with their arrangement. His ritual was private.
It interested Adam, for, in his Irish childhood, politics and religion had blended in just this way. Back then, sprigs of withered ‘palm’ – actually spruce – locks of hair and the like had been as apt to commemorate patriots as saints, and so the monsignor’s display revived memories as cosy as old toys. Some were a touch sardonic, for Adam’s papa, a pugnacious man who had sat as an MP in the Westminster Parliament, had been prone to mock the glorification of failure – and here it was again.
This father had been an impressive figure in his son’s early years. He was fearless on racetrack and hunting field, and, when electioneering, could discomfit most hecklers. Inured to long odds, he tried during the land war, which broke out in 1879, to speak both for his fellow landlords and their increasingly desperate and turbulent tenants. Neither group trusted him of course. Mating nags and thoroughbreds, mocked indignant friends, might get short-term results when breeding horseflesh, but in politics it amounted to disloyalty. He remained unabashed.
Naturally the small Adam coveted his approval and tried to be like him. He inherited his bent for mockery, then – oh horrid irony! – found cause to turn it on his papa himself. Their most aching failures were with each other. Thoughts about this were unmanning, and Adam sometimes felt as if he were walking on ice, while, deep below, intractable memories lurked. He dared not confront them lest they make him want to bang his head on the ground and behave like the more hopeless inmates of this place.
So he held in his mockery when looking at Monseigneur de Belcastel’s exhibits and, although his practised eye picked up the – surely spurious? – implication that the uncrowned King Henry V of France was a Catholic martyr, the sham struck him as harmless. It was certainly less harmful than the claims of samplers praising Home Sweet Home. Or so it seemed to him, given what could happen to homes and had to his. His mother had embroidered charming samplers in her day. One featured a Gaelic motto to the effect that there’s no hearth like your own. Not long after she finished it, Adam’s father informed her that his hearth was no longer to be hers, and a few months later, she was dead and Adam in exile.
He could see the green, silky Gaelic words in his mind’s eye: ni’l aon teinteán mar do theinteán féin.
Best thrust that memory back under the ice.
He did not believe that the monsignor or his associates had started the fire in that château two years ago.
‘Never worry,’ he remembered his father saying, ‘about the man who sings loudest about Ireland’s ancient wrongs. Ten to one, that’s all he’ll do. It’s the fellow who tips his cap to you who’s apt to take a potshot from behind a hedge and agitate for the confiscation of your property.’
‘Just as the affectionate father,’ Adam sometimes answered in his mind, ‘is the one who’ll unexpectedly disinherit you.’
Belcastel never wanted Adam to be present when he had a visit, and today, as usual, chose to receive his guest alone. So Adam went to see the new patient.
Maupassant, a red-eyed, stubbly-bearded, wasted-looking man, was standing in front of a mirror examining a scar on his neck. He did not turn when Adam came in, but addressed their joint images in the mirror.
‘Sometimes there’s no reflection. Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen no one? Just emptiness. Silvery. Like a pond. I can’t be sure if it’s my eye trouble.’ He touched a finger to the glass. ‘That isn’t me. That,’ pointing to Adam’s face which had appeared behind his shoulder, ‘is!’ He grinned, then grimaced. ‘But it’s defying me. See! When I laugh, it doesn’t! Maybe you’ve taken my face. You look the way I used to: young, raw, a bit coarse, but pleasing. Women always liked my face. Give it back.’
‘It’s the mirror,’ Adam told him. ‘It’s a bad mirror. We’ll get Baron to take it away. Meanwhile,’ he took off his jacket and put it over the glass, ‘let’s cover it.’
‘My moustache,’ said the patient, ‘used to be as light as foam on my lip. Airy as beer foam and the colour of beer! I always brushed it up and back against the grain. Women loved it. And my hair, which is now falling out in handfuls, was as thick as a hedge. Curly! Hard to get a comb through! A bit vulgar according to the Goncourt brothers, who couldn’t bear my success. Do you know them?’
‘I don’t need to,’ Adam drew the patient across the room. ‘Come and sit by the fire. I know about mean remarks. I have been called a half-peasant, and my hair is like a furze bush.’
The patient pushed a finger into Adam’s quiff. ‘Mmm. It is dense. I had a she-cat once, a tabby, whose fur I used to comb backwards with a fine comb I had bought in Italy. Sometimes she would squeal and purr with pure pleasure and sometimes she would run away. Her pleasure became so acute it was like pain! She didn’t know what she felt and that reminded me of me! I am a bit feline myself. Contradictory. Mixed. Like a bastard! I wrote a lot about bastards, yet, do you know, it was only quite recently that I understood why. It was because my mother kept hinting that I was one.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Oh most insistently. And it is not true. These things are easily checked. She is not a liar, you understand. It’s more that she arranges things to look a certain way. She would like people to think I am poor Gustave Flaubert’s son, but the truth is she slept with Jesus Christ. So I am his: the bastard’s bastard.’ Maupassant’s gaze locked on to Adam’s. ‘God,’ he told him, ‘is to make an announcement about this from the top of the Eiffel Tower. I am the only begotten son of the only begotten son!’ For moments his gaze hardened, then he burst out laughing. ‘You’re not sure how mad I am or if I mean it! True?’
Adam said, ‘Yes, it is.’
‘I’m not sure either. But what is sure and certain is that my mama has ideas above her station. The Eiffel Tower is quite close to here, but I haven’t been out lately to look at it. Is it still standing?’
‘Yes.’
‘It is a monstrosity and should be pulled down. Some of us protested when it was put up, you know. It is like a gigantic, rotted phallus! A dildo! Or the skeleton of a giraffe! Ugly, ugly, ugly!’ Suddenly worried, he asked, ‘Did I say all that before? I mean just now. You must stop me if I repeat things.’
‘Shall I make us some tisane? To get warm?’
‘No, just sit with me here. Put on another log. Stay close. If I feel I’m losing control and ask for a strait waistcoat, you must bring it fast. I am worried sick about my mother. Poor woman, she has had a hard life. I was supposed to make everything up to her and now look where I am!’ He shivered. The fire didn’t seem to warm him.
Adam put on a log, blew until the flame caught, closed the fireguard safely and asked, ‘Why were you to make things up to her?’
The sick man looked vague. ‘How do ideas get going? Maybe this one started as an excuse? A fig leaf and reason for not getting tied up with other women? Yes. Other women!’ Now, as though he had slid onto a familiar track, he was speaking in a rush. ‘It’s hard to stay free, as you’ll discover! Show tenderness and you’re done for. Women cling, the race works through them, and its will to endure makes us sniff around their smelly orifices. Like dogs. The God who created sex is a cynic. Am I depressing you?’
Adam shook his head. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘has a racing-stable, so muck doesn’t disgust me the way it does you. I remember a cunning story of yours, an amazingly brilliant feat in a way, because ...’ He paused with some cunning of his own, to see if the writer was enjoying this praise. But Maupassant’s attention seemed to have lapsed. Best perhaps to plod on. ‘The end of this story of yours had me in tears,’ Adam told him hopefully, ‘even though, earlier on, it had seemed icy with disgust and rage. It starts with an account of pigeons pecking seeds from dung.’ He waited for a sign of pleasure, but his flattery seemed to have fallen flat. ‘Do you remember,’ he coaxed, ‘which of your stories starts that way?’
‘How?’
By now Adam too was losing the thread. ‘With seeds,’ he reminded them both. ‘In dung.’
‘Dung?’
‘Yes.’
Minutes passed. The patient’s breathing grew heavy. His head sank to his chest, then suddenly rose.
‘Seeds in dung,’ he exclaimed as if he had all along been pondering this. ‘That’s it. That is how our mothers had to take our fathers’ seed, and why mine tries to pretend I’m a bastard. All our mothers – yours too, Gould, depend upon it – would like us to suppose that the Holy Spirit visited them. My mentor, Flaubert – a truly great man by the way – was the nearest mine could come to imagining a spirit. I don’t blame her. Telling stories is a comfort. Did I tell you that I don’t drink? Nothing but water. Thinking up stories is what I do instead. I don’t read much. I look. I like to see things with my own eyes. I try to see quite small, ordinary things precisely and coldly and find a significance in them that nobody else has seen. That’s the way to write.’
‘Things like seeds in dung?’
‘Yes. If I could still do it I might recover my wits. But François has stolen my manuscript with all my ideas, so how can I?’
‘Don’t you mean that he took your bullets?’
‘Do I?’ The patient looked puzzled. ‘Maybe I do,’ he admitted. ‘Poor old François.’
The two stared a while into the fire’s smoulder. Aerated by the bellows, it had settled to hollowing dry logs into flights of tiny, red arcades which, now and then, flared up, then collapsed in smothers of pallid ash. Adam hoped the writer wasn’t seeing bad omens here.
Monsignor de Belcastel’s mind was on omens. Belief in these was forbidden by the First Commandment, and very wise too! His opinion had been confirmed by seeing how fellow inmates were driven to scrutinize imaginary signs and meanings. These could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. In chicken entrails, their own shit, or the postman’s failure to arrive. Faith in creation’s concern for us turned the world into an animated hoarding, pulsing with tip-offs. Excess of faith was, Belcastel had come to think, the bane of our time. He fought the idea, though, for it smacked of apostasy. Words like Turncoat and Mason came to mind. Anarchist! And, to be sure, the great argument for the true faith was that it kept false ones in check. Even it, though, could become unstable.
Hope, too, could be destabilizing. Its trust in the power of human reason led to high-handedness. Look how parliament had banished God from the schools of France in just a few years! ‘Laicizing’! At the same time – a mean turn of the knife – it had made attendance obligatory! This in a country which had sixty-four million Catholics and hardly two million dissidents! Mad, thought Belcastel. Parliament, in the name of progress, was trampling the sensibilities of families who saw the new measures as a theft of their children’s souls. He had seen grown men shed tears of rage over this: fathers offended in their natural prerogatives, sons offended by the offence to their fathers. They felt martyred and murderous, and so did the nervously adamant deputies.
Faith and hope had turned poisonous. Charity was the rare, good virtue and, to the monsignor’s surprise, Dr Blanche had it.
To his further surprise, Belcastel relished his retreat from the irksome angers outside. It was not a total retreat of course. People visited.
The maison de santé was run as a blend of nursing home and private house. Patients, when well enough, ate with distinguished guests, and there were some whose status shuttled between the two. It was a fashionable place. Even during Belcastel’s stay, famous wits had come to dine, exchanging banter with the sick, and he had seen the verbal fireworks which can precede breakdowns dazzle visitors. This phenomenon, Dr Blanche explained, was called ‘the fastigium’. The coherence of lunatics’ visions could be startling.
The doctor had a wide circle of well-connected friends, and so had his son, Jacques-Emile, a successful painter, who had a studio in the grounds. So all sorts of people visited. Gentle and simple. When not at meals, the monsignor avoided them all. He arranged for his own guests to call in the afternoon, considering them to be a liability and best kept out of sight.
Ironically, he, the asylum inmate, was level-headed, while his visitors, many of them scions of inbred families, cherished hopes as obsolete as the beasts on their escutcheons. Hopes he could handle. What worried him were plots. Taking the blame for these had landed him in here, but when he complained, the plotters’ peace-offering was to elect him to be the spider at the heart of yet another web of madcap schemes.
‘Mad as hares,’ was what he thought of them all! ‘Dreamers and botchers to a man! Brave, yes, gallant, yes, but, oh dear! Tous des exaltés! Oh Lord,’ he prayed, when he had the heart to do so, ‘deliver me from loyalty to men of too much faith.’
Yet how could he refuse them? If they went elsewhere for advice, who knew what harm might be done? Just now, while laying out the ritual objects he kept for visits, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. As he unwound its white wrapping from the portrait of the uncrowned King Henry V of France, alias the comte de Chambord, now dead these dozen years, he sighed for the meanings of white flags. The comte’s refusal to adulterate his notion of himself as God’s appointed and swap his royal white flag for the tricolour had driven supporters crazy. In the secrecy of their dreams and in safe company they might insult the flag – ‘drapeau de mon cul’ – threaten to wipe themselves on it and rage at their leader’s obstinacy. Publicly, they brought their keenest eloquence to the attempt to make him budge. ‘For your own sake, Sire,’ they had pleaded, ‘for your followers’ sake, for France and for the Church, will you not sacrifice the symbol and grasp the reality? To win votes? To take power?’ The word intoxicated them. ‘Power,’ they cajoled repetitively while imploring him to show some flexibility. ‘Wisdom! Statesmanship! Remember your great predecessor and namesake, Henry IV! Was he wrong to compromise? He wasn’t, was he? So follow his example! Help God to help us!’ But no. He wouldn’t – and lost at the ballot box. He, as he saw it, owed it to God not to alter one tittle of his prerogatives and was as ramrod stiff as – well, as today’s visitor. Recalled to what was going on at this very moment outside the asylum gate, Belcastel laughed at the neatness with which it summed up his dilemma.
‘With all due respect to the First Commandment,’ he told himself, ‘it is an omen!’
What had happened so far was this. His visitor, the vicomte de Sauvigny, had tried to climb the tall asylum gate and got stuck. It was a handsome, old, wrought-iron gate made up of curls and coils, and the toe of the vicomte’s boot had got caught in one of them. The foot inside this boot was on the outside of the gate, and by putting his weight on it, the vicomte had managed with some difficulty – he was forty-two and stiffer than he had supposed – to swing his other leg over the top, turn it and find a toe-hold on the inside. His two feet were now pointing in opposite directions, but he could liberate neither. He hadn’t the strength to swing back the foremost one, and his hind leg was held firmly in the coil of an iron curlicue. Possibly his enraged exertions had caused it to swell.
‘Will you come out, Monseigneur?’ The man who had come to report on all this asked Belcastel. ‘To calm him down?’
‘Yes, yes, of course I will!’
Belcastel had immediately gone to look for his cape. Of course he’d come! The words ‘calm’ and ‘down’ were worrying. Things could turn nasty. Balm had better be poured! Head inside his opened wardrobe, he had begun poking speedily and impatiently through a smother of cassocks and batting away assaults by increasingly lively lengths of recalcitrant black wool. They all looked the same. Back and forth he went but, to his annoyance, failed to find the cape. Adam would know where it was, but where was Adam? Ah, he’d sent him away. Mm. Was that the cape? No. Belcastel’s irritable gesture sent something swinging, which returned and hit his nose rather hard. It was the sword which he had planned to lay casually on a side table. It was a ceremonial one which had been presented to his father in recognition of his gallantry at the battle of Castelfidardo. Fighting for the pope. ‘See,’ the sword was meant to have reminded the vicomte, ‘I, Belcastel, son of the hero of Castelfidardo, have every right to take issue with you. My loyalty is incontrovertible.’ In fact, of course, it was not – or rather, yes, it was, but subtlety, not swords, was Belcastel’s weapon. If the object of one’s loyalty were to split, what then? Just now there was a painful but vital matter to be addressed, which ... Never mind that. Find that cape! No point going out without it and getting pneumonia. Was his nose bleeding? God knew what was going on at the asylum gate. The monsignor was well aware how unbridled monarchist outbursts could be. Bad language would be the least of it. Seditious comments were likely, given the vicomte’s rheumatism and hot temper. Both had been contracted in 1870 when he had fought with the Papal Zouaves to save the pope’s territory from Garibaldi. They failed, of course! An utter débâcle! While the whole Catholic world watched! Defeat had rankled and left the vicomte thin-skinned. He wouldn’t relish being made to cool his heels outside an asylum since, as he frequently put it himself, he had suffered enough affronts in his life and ‘swallowed enough toads.’ He’d surely have made his seditious comments by now. Insulted the French Republic and the government of the day. Annoyed the servants. Embarrassed everyone.
‘Say you couldn’t find me,’ decided Belcastel. ‘ Say I’ve gone somewhere quiet to read my office.’ He closed the wardrobe door and picked up his missal. ‘By the time you say it, it will be true.’ No point, he thought, in losing face – in so far as he had any left to lose.
‘He’s in a right stew.’ The man had already explained that the vicomte had climbed the gate because the porter’s delay in opening it had kept his carriage waiting. ‘Would I be right in guessing,’ he asked, ‘that he’s a military gentleman? Used to being obeyed pronto? We thought as much! Very hot under the collar he got straight off. So you can imagine what he’s like now. The porter didn’t have the key because Monsieur le Directeur is keeping it himself. He wants to make sure that none of those newspaper fellows sneak in. We tried to explain this, but Monsieur le Vicomte thought we were defying him. He called us Republican scum.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘We can’t open it now anyway. Not while he’s stuck on top. Moving it will be a jerky business. The ground’s hard, you see. Frozen hard, and he might slip and fall or end up hanging from one foot. Break a leg maybe.’ Did the man’s eye have a wistful glint? ‘And if one of us went up to try pulling his foot out, we might get a kick. Or get stuck ourselves. Do you see, Monseigneur?’
Belcastel did. ‘Ask the Irishman to deal with him,’ he advised. ‘Monsieur Gould. Tell him it’s a delicate matter and that I’d be grateful if he could help the vicomte to climb down.’
A question startled Adam.
‘Do you know what my name means?’
Reflections from the fire reddened Maupassant’s eyeballs, and if he had seen himself he might have screamed. His skin too was red. Adam wondered about sedation, though the patient hated it and had complained just now that the place was infested by insects armed with morphine syringes. A joke? Here in the asylum jokes rarely worked. There was no norm to bounce them off. Maybe the query about his name was a joke too?
As it happened a similar one had come up earlier in connection with the reprinting by this morning’s Figaro of one of Maupassant’s stories. It had been published for the first time seven years ago and was about a killer-demon called the Horla (hors-là?) whose name meant ‘out there’. But what did that signify? Coming from a monkish writer, it might have meant ‘the world’. Or ‘death’? Dr Blanche, though, had a more comforting suggestion. The Horla, he remembered, was the name of a gas balloon which the writer had paid for, named after his story and travelled in from Paris to the Belgian coast.
‘At a height of 8,000 metres. So “Horla” just meant “up in the air”. It was a publicity stunt, and Maupassant had come in for a lot of teasing. People said he was trying to raise his image!’
The reddened eyeballs were still expectantly fixed on Adam.
‘What does your name mean?’
‘Yes. “Mau” or “mal” means, of course, “pain” or “evil”. So Mal passant is sinister, don’t you think? A hard death perhaps? An evil passage? A bad passer-by.’
Adam managed to laugh. ‘Why not “a passing trouble”?’ he asked bracingly. ‘Something like a cold. Or a cold sore.’ ‘Keep the laugh going,’ he told himself and thought of the cold water one throws on hysterics.
‘And would you bet I’ll get over my passing ill?’
‘Why not? I’m no doctor, mind.’
‘But as a betting man?’
‘Yes.’
‘My brother died in a madhouse three years ago. Badly! Horribly! When I saw the name on his tomb stone: Maupassant ...’
‘Better not think of it. You’re wallowing ...’
‘What?’
‘In despair. They called it that in my seminary. Also “the sin against the light”: the unforgivable one.’ Adam shrugged. ‘They saw us as an army. Despair is desertion.’ I, he was thinking privately, did not despair. What I did was leave and lose all my friends. ‘Priests can be tough.’ For a moment his sadness was for himself, but he refused to indulge it. Perhaps he needed cold water thrown over him? He wished he could have supplied the man before him with even a false hope.
The vicomte’s niece had been waiting in the cold for what seemed an age outside the asylum gate. ‘Is anything happening’ she felt like asking the coachman. This would have been an oblique sort of protest, but she didn’t make it for she had been bred to show restraint, and, besides, it was clear that nothing was happening. Uncle Hubert had stepped out of the carriage, climbed the gate and got stuck. That was all. She might have giggled at his rashness if there had been anyone to giggle with her, Gisèle say, or some other friend from school. But she had seen none of them since her wedding, so she sat back in the shadows, tucked the rug around her knees and reflected on how, by rights, it should be her turn to be rash. Instead, here she was hiding in embarrassment while her uncle made an exhibition of himself and called people ‘Republican scum’. She had just heard him do this.
She was not yet twenty, and her husband, whom she scarcely knew, was off in darkest Africa, trying, poor lamb, to make their fortune, which he had better do fast because his family, like her own, was penniless. This was why she was now staying with her aunt and uncle.
‘Our friends’ Uncle Hubert liked to explain, ‘have been out of power for too long. Six decades!’ Poverty, he sometimes added, became a badge of honour when you saw how many had turned their coats and joined those who controlled patronage. ‘Poor France!’ he would exclaim, and shake his head. Danièle always imagined a soft-fleshed lady being martyred in some bloody way: la France.
‘I should have married a Republican,’ she would tease to cheer him. He liked to be teased. ‘Or a Bonapartist. Even an Orleanist would have more hopes.’
‘We are all Orleanists now,’ was Uncle Hubert’s stock reply. ‘Willy nilly! The Legitimists died out. Soon we may all have!’
Danièle wished she had brought her embroidery. Or a charcoal foot-warmer. Life was humdrum. She yearned for something unexpected – not Uncle Hubert’s sort of scrape but something tenderly frivolous and – yes – rash. Perhaps she was just missing her husband? The word pleased her: ‘husband’. It was still quite new. Unused. She had been married for well over a year now. But very little of that time had been spent with Philibert, whose letters from the Congo could have been from a stranger. She found it hard to reply.
‘His last letter,’ she had told her aunt, ‘says that cannibals break their victims’ legs several days before killing and eating them. It makes the flesh sweeter. They do the same thing with fowl.’
Her aunt crossed herself. She was a nun and had been granted leave by her convent to chaperone Danièle who might not otherwise be allowed to share a house with Uncle Hubert.
‘Don’t you miss your friends in the convent?’ Danièle had worried.
But her aunt said that looking after a vulnerable young woman was a corporal work of mercy; so, while engaged in it, she was, spiritually speaking, close to her sisters in Christ.
‘I don’t feel vulnerable,’ Danièle objected.
Her aunt agreed that she probably wasn’t, but said one must avoid giving scandal.
‘So it’s the scandalmongers who are vulnerable?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell me about your monsignor,’ asked Maupassant. ‘That is a burn-scar on his cheek, isn’t it? He’s been through fire! Like the demon in one of my stories whose victim becomes so terrified that he is driven to trap him in his own house then burn it down. Naturally the demon escapes. Why do you look worried? I’m talking about a story.’ The patient’s tone was ostentatiously sane. A teasing gleam flickered across his features. ‘You don’t burn a demon, but the victim had lost his head.’ He cocked his own head sideways. ‘Perhaps you’ve read it?’
‘The Horla? I just did. I was thinking of it just now.’
‘I thought you might have. It was in this morning’s Figaro. I wrote it at a time when I could still control my demons.’ Smiling. This was a joke. ‘Perhaps your monsignor too is a demon and that’s why he didn’t burn, or only in one spot? You don’t know what to think, do you? You think I’m odd. What about him? Is he odder than I am?’
‘Who knows? He’s certainly more secretive. I’ve learned more about you in an hour than he let out in two years.’
‘So you are unable to tell me his story.’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Tell me something else then. Something to blot out what is in my head. What is the worst thing in yours, Gould?’ The patient’s smile had an airiness which might once have been second nature. Was he mimicking it now? Adam suspected that he was. Suave and amused, it might have been his drawing room smile. Quick and overly responsive, it conjured up alcoves and secrets. ‘Others’ troubles bring relief.’ Briefly the smile slipped, revealing that Maupassant was in the grip of some sort of pain. An intimate, inner one, Adam surmised, in some private part of himself. The slippage, though, was suspect for, after all, this man had been a notorious charmer. Maybe what had softened women was that they had sensed that pain? Maybe he had learned to let them? Well, he wasn’t in control of it now. As he sat, his hands kept moving from hip to knee like trapped crabs: back and forth, hip, knee, hip, as though measuring the length of his thighs. His knees too jigged. You could feel the vibration. ‘The whole reading public knows my stories,’ he told Adam. ‘Tell me one of yours. Something private. Tell me about, oh, I don’t know ... your mother.’
‘My mother died when I was twelve. She wasn’t yet thirty.’
‘I’m sorry. Illness, was it? Or an accident?’
‘It may have been suicide. Actually, it must have been.’
‘Ah, I’ve been intrusive! Sorry! I really am. Oh lord! You mustn’t think of it, Gould. Think of ... Look, I’ll tell you a thing about my mother which I hate to tell. I’ve written about it, but that’s different. Putting things in a story makes them seem like – well, a story. They become easier to forget. Talking is harder, but here goes. When I was ten I saw my father beat her savagely. I saw him grab hold of her neck with one hand and hit her face with the other. With all his strength. Again and again! He seemed to have gone mad. Her hat fell off. Her hair fell around her. She raised her arms to defend herself, but couldn’t. And neither, to be sure, could I. There I was, ten or maybe less, maybe nine years old, watching my sweet, clever, elegant Mama be assaulted by my father. It made no sense. It was as if the world were coming to an end and normal expectancies had collapsed, but there we still were! What could I do? To whom could I turn? I screamed, but he paid no attention. I rushed out and hid in the garden. I spent the whole night there in a kind of agony. The next day – this was somehow worse and more baffling than the scene itself – they behaved just as they always did.’ The patient was panting. Saliva dripped from his chin. He didn’t wipe it. His head was like an outsize but shrivelled pomegranate, ridgy and crimson with dry, bald patches. ‘They went on in their ordinary way.’
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘The ordinariness is what destroys you.’
‘You’ve known that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aren’t you going to accuse me of wallowing?’
‘But you didn’t, did you? You survived and grew up and wrote and helped people survive their own horrors. You’ve just helped me.’
‘Have you noticed how calm I am? Maybe it’s done me good to tell you?’ The sick man’s fingers, though, were flexing and making fists.
‘I suppose he wanted money from her? Scenes like that are usually about money, aren’t they? A lot of your stories are about it.’
‘You’ve read them?’
‘I’m reading them now. So are the doctors. From duty, but also pleasure. Some are painfully harsh, but we admire them.’
‘So tell me a story about someone you know. Not your own. My mother used to find incidents for me, kernels of narrative which I could develop. She was good at it. You find them in the oddest places.’
‘Like the pigeons pecking seeds out of dung?’
‘That’s it! Dung, sewers and I suppose madhouses are what people try not to see, but looking at them can be instructive and ...’
Adam laughed. ‘I’m not flattered then that you come to me for a story!’
The sick man produced his sanest smile. ‘My dear fellow ...’ But before their conversation could go any further a message arrived that Adam was wanted at the gate.
‘I’ll stay with Monsieur,’ said the man who brought it. ‘You’d best hurry,’ he warned Adam. ‘There could be an accident.’
So far nothing at all had happened at the gate on which Uncle Hubert was still stuck like one of those culled animals which gamekeepers hang on fences to prove their diligence. He must be frozen! Poor, dear, foolish uncle! No doubt someone would eventually bring a ladder and get him down. Meanwhile thank goodness he was wearing gloves. Inside the carriage Danièle too was cold. She kept shaking her hands to help the circulation and occupied her mind with its best memories which, in spite of everything, were of her marriage. She had happy childhood memories too, of course, but now that she was grown up, they seemed to belong to someone else.
Her husband’s name was Philibert d’Armaillé and they had met first at her mother’s funeral. A bony Belgian cavalry officer with knifing eyes, he condoled with an intensity which took her aback, for she was not feeling intense. Her mother’s decline had been punctuated by so many unconsummated deathbed scenes that the family’s grief was depleted long before she died, and Danièle’s mourning was to consist of willing herself to forget how sickness had winnowed away her mother’s character, leaving her as simple as a leech.
‘I am so sorry,’ the tall officer had said and stabbed her with his gaze. ‘I remember my own father’s end vividly.’
Then he named his father whom she recognized as the subject of one of Gisèle’s bits of choice gossip. He was, said Gisèle, a notorious groper and had been seen, bare bum, riding a parlour maid in a moonlit shrubbery. The inappropriate memory got in the way of Danièle’s response to Philibert. So did shame. Whose? This was unclear. A mould of it furred her mind. Perhaps it made her seem deceptively docile at the receptions which her brothers, once the mourning period was over, decided to arrange. Pliant – did he think her tender? – she may have seemed to lead d’Armaillé on.
‘You need taking out of yourself,’ said the brothers, who were surprised to find how long they had left her alone with their mother in that mausoleum of a house. Two years? Three? ‘We must make things up to you.’ But they, of course, had their own lives to lead. Both were bachelors and soldiers, and neither could have her with him.
I am a mole, she told herself. Dazzled. I have been living in the shadows and mustn’t leap to conclusions about anything.
‘You should get married,’ said the brothers. ‘Order new clothes. Try rubbing geranium petals into your cheeks.’
Later there was a squabble followed by a duel. A rumpus. An enemy insulted Philibert and was challenged. The cause was complex. It involved family honour, but since parts of it were not for her ears, she never got things straight and hesitated to judge.
‘Spiritually, we are all one family,’ said Philibert to her on the eve of his duel. Her younger brother agreed to be his second. The other disapproved and held aloof.
She feared he might be killed. Instead he killed his opponent whom he should not – it was, she learned, widely felt – have challenged since he himself was a crack shot. The press made a scandal of the thing, describing him as a murderer and the motives as risible. He then challenged a newspaper editor, whereupon his superiors let him know that they would have to court-martial him if he didn’t leave fast for the new Congo Free State where a ragtag force was fighting black Arab slave hunters. The Force Publique. No, Philibert, it was not the sort of outfit cavalry officers joined, but it was that or face a court martial. Seriously, said his well-wishers, you’d better forget horses. Sell yours. So he did and went. Frankly, he told Danièle, he wasn’t sorry to be leaving for a place where a man could test himself. Saving savages from slavers was a noble cause. And so was teaching them to work, which he understood to be part of the plan. On the eve of going he asked her to marry him and she, in a confusion of feelings, encouraged, it should be said, by a belief that her brothers wanted her settled, said ‘yes’. It was all very quick. The honeymoon was in France so as to get Philibert off Belgian soil.
She helped him prepare for his African journey, and together they studied maps on which vast areas were still blank. Philibert was to join an expedition which would fill in some of these. There were no roads. Only a web of rivers with great drumming names which ran through tangles of rain forest. Slidy syllables rippled on his tongue: Congo and Lualaba, Sankuru and Lomami. She came to think of her husband’s penetration of her body in terms of maps showing pale, virginal spaces, thinly streaked with black. Nestling under his shoulder, she felt him ride her dark rivers. Her Congo and Lualaba, her drumming conduits.
But she did not get to know him, for they had little time, and besides, she had neither standards of comparison nor any knowledge of men. ‘Teach me some bad words,’ she challenged. ‘When you and my brothers crack jokes, I feel a fool. Don’t you want me to be able to laugh with you?’
Indulgently, he gave her lessons, un cours de polissonnerie, which opened up a province of the mind where she must disport herself secretly, since she was not, he warned, to let anyone know what she knew. Be sure and remember that, Danièle. It’s our secret, private, just between us! Then he left.
And began sending her coltish letters. All about ambushes and skirmishes and swiftly built bridges which, as often as not, got swept away at once, toppling ‘our men’ into rivers from which there was no rescuing them. They were not, of course, Belgians but locally recruited tribesmen who fell like ninepins. Arms and legs could be seen swirling past in the boiling current. Enemies’ heads were delivered in baskets. Bodies with ‘steaks cut from their thighs and upper arms’ strewed pathways and Philibert’s prose. She guessed that he was using her as a witness and his letters as a diary. She must not, he admonished, throw them away. They were also, she understood, an effort to continue their bedroom intimacies, a purging of his own horror, an attempt to keep her close. He was expanding the cours de polissonnerie, sharing – but the traffic was too much one way, and what had she to tell in return? Nothing. Nothing comparable. She couldn’t even bring herself to comment, since the hot confidences had cooled when they reached her. They were months old and, for all she knew, came from a dead man. Dead and maybe chopped into steaks? So she read them uneasily, searching for the man behind the playmate whom she knew. It was surely too late now for play? His airy irresponsibility upset her badly. Why couldn’t they build proper bridges? Did he feel no concern for ‘our men’ when they fell off them? Or for the ‘friendlies’ or ‘faithfuls’ whose fate seemed still more precarious and whose habit of eating each other when fate struck he recorded with a shock which came close to gusto. How reconcile all this with his enthusiasm for ‘our civilizing mission’?
Once – no, several times! – she dreamed that he was eating her, and woke up shaking. In the dark this seemed more memory than dream. By the time she had found matches and struck them, it had grown less compelling but still hung, like a shadow, in her mind. She had been brought up with rigid propriety, then given a playful cours de polissonnerie. The forbidden had become a joke. And now there were these letters. So was anything truly taboo? Even her religious practices now seemed strange, even the Eucharist, that pallid, paper-thin and ‘tran-substantiated’ substance. What old, sly, bowdlerized lore did it really commemorate?
Shocked to find herself thinking such thoughts, Danièle began to fear that the time spent nursing her mother had spoiled her for matrimony, and that almost three years of taking decisions had quite banished her readiness to let a husband think for her. Her docile airs had misled Philibert who, sooner or later, was in for a bad surprise. Meanwhile, so was she.
For the scandal of the duel did not go away and the newspapers which continued to air the thing claimed that Philibert had wilfully provoked his opponent. Baited and run him down as if practising a blood sport, wrote the indignant journalists. The words ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘barbarian’ left her shaken. Moreover – she only saw this now – the cours de polissonnerie had left her unenlightened as to what it – what Philibert? – was all about.
Was it love that she felt for this man, she wondered? Or fear or pity? Her doubts were licensed by knowing that he might not come back. Mortality was high – his letters made this clear – in the swamps where hostile natives waited up to their necks, heads hidden behind some tuft or tree until the Belgian-led column appeared, its men holding their guns above their heads to keep them dry and offering a perfect target to spears. Small, insidious irritations could be lethal too: hookworm, mosquitoes, boils that never healed and the constant hot humidity which caused belts and boots to mould. The odds against his survival seemed greater by the day. It was even possible that she was by now a widow!
Shocked by the wily stealth of her own resignation, she shook herself into action and began, first, to say prayers for him, then, so as to reinforce the prayers’ protection, to invent benign superstitions. She would will his safe return. By sheer attentiveness and concern, she would magic him back. One of her practices was to try visualizing his entire face precisely and all at once. This was difficult, for her memory’s straining made the face shimmer like a reflection in water, so that some parts shone too brightly and others blurred or disappeared. It was as if moths had nibbled holes in it. Or leprosy! Oh dear! Oh Philibert! In flurries of pity, she moved her would-be remedial scrutiny over his poor pocked image, trying to heal each wounded section as it steadied. She was engaged in doing this, when someone knocked at her window. On the street side of the carriage, hidden from the group at the gate, a small woman wearing a hat with a grey veil was trying to attract her attention. Danièle opened the window and the woman raised the veil. Her hands were shaking. She looked about thirty.
‘Madame,’ she begged in a low, furtive voice, ‘forgive my importuning you. I wouldn’t if I weren’t desperate. Will you let me into your carriage for a few minutes? Please. I need to get inside the villa to see my husband, but the doctors won’t let me. He is a patient. I need to talk to him for a moment. Just a tiny moment! If he is as mad as they say he is, I shall leave. I cannot get past the servants on foot, but if I were with you ...’ Gloved fingers pressed the cold window and the woman’s breath was white.
She talked on, and Danièle thought, ‘No!’ Then: ‘Why no? She is not mad. She is not an inmate here, or if she is, she is trying to get in, not out!’ Then, ‘Be careful!’ Then, ‘What can she do to me with all these people within earshot?’ By now she had opened the door.
The woman stepped in quickly, closed it, then, flattening herself against the carriage upholstery, shrank as unobtrusively as she could, into the corner furthest from Danièle. She was respectably dressed, pretty, a little faded, decent, but clearly neither a lady nor a Bad Woman. Danièle felt exhilarated by her own daring and soon found her exhilaration turning to benevolence. The woman began to talk of her three children, of how it was for their sake that she had been so forward, and of how God would reward Danièle for her charity.
Danièle’s benevolence flinched a little. Talk of God’s rewards was apt to herald further requests, but, when none forthcame, it struck her that she was performing a corporal work of mercy and laying up divine indulgence for her own and Philibert’s needs. This was a spiritual investment and insurance against possible ill fortune. Good, she thought, good, and graciously introduced herself. She was Madame d’Armaillé.
Her guest said she was Joséphine Litzelmann and that the man she aimed to see was her children’s father, Monsieur Guy de Maupassant who, to be quite honest, Madame, was not precisely her husband. This revelation was made in a low and breathy tone and only half caught Danièle’s attention, for something was at last happening outside, where the servants, who had been stamping about and slapping themselves to keep warm, were now gathered close to the gate. A tall young man, who had just arrived from the villa, had climbed up it and, with the porter’s help, managed to disentangle Uncle Hubert, ease his foreleg back over the crest of the gate and get him first halfway down, then all the way. Moments later Danièle’s uncle and his rescuer were in the carriage, taking up most of the room, smelling of mud, rubber and damp trousers, exclaiming, rubbing cold hands – Uncle Hubert’s were quite blue – and describing with zest how they had managed the descent. Neither took exception to Joséphine Litzelmann’s presence. If they noticed it at all, the young man, who introduced himself as Adam Gould, probably took her for a member of Uncle Hubert’s party, while Uncle Hubert must think she worked here. They tapped a message to the coachman: drive on in. So in he drove them through the opened iron gates, spattering crisp, confetti-like gusts of ice flakes from under the carriage wheels and smuggling the anxious little woman into the villa. She had again lowered her veil and, as the carriage drew up to let them out, Danièle felt a cold, cotton-gloved hand clutch her own in a tight, nervous grasp.
Monsieur Guy’s manservant saw them arrive. He was again watching from a corridor window, for Monsieur Guy would not let him into his room and seemed to feel no gratitude for the years of care François had lavished on his health – all those lovingly prepared eggnogs, purées and feather-light custards, all the concern and vigilance seemed forgotten. Well, if he must. François could put up with that. He could put up with anything if only his patience would help cure his master, who was a man in a thousand: a great, good, generous, amusing man whose needs François understood! As he had told Dr Blanche, his master’s mother agreed that her son would be better off if only they could get him home.
‘Not home to her,’ he had spelled it out for the doctor when they spoke this morning, ‘home to me. She is far too far away. In Nice. And she’s not well herself. But our flat in the rue Boccador is restful. I have it spick and span now – more so than when Monsieur Guy was there, for he lived like a tornado, wet towels everywhere, stacks of papers all over the place. Now that I have it ready and welcoming, it would surely soothe his spirit to be among his own things, poor gentleman.’
The doctor shook his head. ‘My poor François, he needs constant supervision. Else he might try suicide again. That wouldn’t help his mother’s health, now would it?’
François detected a reproach: he, for all his devotion, had not been able to keep a constant watch.
‘Of course,’ a warder confided later, while he and François drank their mid-morning bowls of milky coffee in the kitchen, ‘suicide is the doctor’s great bogy. Especially by famous patients. Those journalists out there are on the watch for just that. A good story ...’
‘Good?’
‘Well,’ the warder removed the skin from his café au lait and laid it in a shrivelled puddle on his plate, ‘your master wrote stories, didn’t he? For money? Some, it seems, were about people he’d read about in the papers. So if he were now to be in one, it would be a case of the biter bitten, wouldn’t you say?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
François grimaced. He could not think of Monsieur Guy as a biter. He thought of dogs. He thought of a pony biting the one in front of it – gnyam! Full in the buttocks. Rolling back its wicked lip and snapping wasp-yellow teeth. Those were biters, not Monsieur Guy whose high spirits shed – well, used to shed – radiance on whatever he touched. Whether he was showing you how to prepare for a boat-trip, make lead bullets for pistol-practice, exercise his pretty gun dog, or restock the aviary in his Norman garden, the task became a pleasure. ‘It’s fun, you’ll see!’ was how he would introduce a new one. And, sure enough, you often found yourself enjoying it. Life brightened around him. Everyone said so. Even the tradesmen who supplied his food read his stories. Even the butcher. Why, last week when this man heard the news about poor Monsieur, he’d had to dry his eyes, while his wife marvelled, ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen him cry.’ As for the stories, François himself had had a finger in several. He’d learned how to reconnoitre and ferret out facts about an interesting household and had heard Monsieur Guy tell his mother how useful he found his valet’s powers of observation. Did that make François a biter too? Did it? Irritably, turning from the warder, François smeared honey on a heel of bread, dipped it in coffee and bit into it. Gnyam! Golden honey-eyes floated in the bowl. It was his own honey. Intending it for Monsieur Guy, he had made a special trip to the market to find the girl who brought it up from Provence. Monsieur always used to say that eating it brought back the fragrance of thyme and fennel and the high times he enjoyed whenever he moored his yacht near Cannes, and society ladies came to visit. Today though he had screamed that he couldn’t eat the honey because the bees had gathered it from digitalis: foxglove, a poisoned source.
‘François wants me dead,’ he had screamed. ‘Get him out.’
Wanted him ... Flinching, the manservant’s attention swerved to the scene below his window where two women had now stepped from the carriage. One looked familiar. He tried to place her, then gave up as the memory of his master’s ravings rang in his ears and distracted him. Back and forth his mind flickered, and he shook his head to empty it of hurt. For how could he hold poor Monsieur Guy’s rages against him? That they were mad rages was plain from his gentleness with others, while only François got the rough side of his tongue. Maybe this was because Monsieur knew he could rely on him no matter what? In some part of his moithered mind, he surely knew that. It was possible too that he meant the opposite of what he said. He had always been a great one for reversals and practical jokes, as François should know, for he had often had to set them up. Nine years François had been with him. He had cooked for him, travelled with him, helped him move house a number of times, organized decorators – Monsieur’s taste was opulent – nursed him with massages and cold showers and fallen in with all his whims. Some of these could be embarrassing. On one occasion, François had been required to deliver a covered basket of live frogs to a society lady and, on another, a container full of jacks-in-the-box. There had been other japes. With Monsieur Guy you had – though not everyone twigged this – to stay on the qui vive. When he flattered the titled ladies who visited his yacht, it was his valet, not they, who saw the irony behind his charm. He could be quite brusque too, and women who tried to breach his privacy got short shrift. Perhaps – it struck François as he stared out at that veiled lady whom he had better head off – in the end he himself had got too close to Monsieur Guy, one of whose fears was of meeting his double? Better think about that.
First things first though. Who were those two women? And how had they got in? No question but that they needed brusque treatment. François started for the stairs.