The Tyrant

His bones are full of the sin of his youth…

DURING THAT TIME, a demonstration was held at the Gymnase, one which had everybody in the region talking and gave Monsieur Grapp lasting fame. For different reasons, the demonstration was to change Jean Calmet’s life.

It had all started at the cathedral, during the graduation ceremony, which marks the promotion of hundreds of boys and girls from secondary school to the Gymnase. While in the very solemn pulpit to recite a poem, a student seized the opportunity to criticize the system roundly, to question the curriculum, make fun of his teachers and persuade his classmates not to stand for any more.

Frightful scandal.

At the graduation, and in the hallowed pulpit of the cathedral, a radical student, a leftist, had insulted the authorities! As the newspapers played up the incident, the whole region reacted: the countryside jumped at the chance to criticize a school that turns out nothing but leftists all year long, the cities were divided equally between the pseudo hard-liners of the right and jokers with socialist tendencies, parents wrote vengeful letters to the editors and fought to have their sons’ hair cut.

Monsieur Grapp and the Board of Education made a spectacular decision: the speech-maker was suspended, so that instead of coming to school in April, he would not return to the Gymnase until September. This provided the excuse, at the end of April, for all sorts of goings-on, which the left-wing groups stirred up ceaselessly: parades with cloth and cardboard signs, impromptu gatherings on the little squares of La Cité, daily flyers from La Taupe, Spartacus, La Ligue Marxiste or Rupture, speeches by the suspended youth before the Board of Education. Let Pierre Zwahlen back in, was the slogan they chanted on the Place de la Barre; mingling with the happy, colourful crowd were lots of tramps, drunkards and phoney legionnaires, denizens of the quarter and its two broken-down cafés. It was on a fine spring afternoon, the leaves crowned the little trees of the Place de la Barre with a light fuzz and the great chestnut tree looked one hundred years younger. Gesticulating and laughing, the young people had come out of the Rue de l’Université in a disorderly procession where they danced, where they sang. Girls had flowers in their hair, pansies stuck in their braids, little roses; others brandished bouquets of tulips that they had picked in the public parks, in Ouchy, in Montbenon, since it all belongs to everyone! The flowers are ours, the festival is ours. Nothing was missing. Cheerful placards: “Make love”, “Bawl out your teachers”, “Change the school”, “Your parents are morons” and “Love again”, “Freedom”, as in a poem by Éluard. Long dresses, bare feet, jeans, all the uniforms left at the river’s edge by the Confederates at the end of that fateful day of 6 April 1865, and then pretty songs again, ‘Le Partisan’, ‘L’Internationale’, ‘Bandiera rossa’, ‘Le Temps des cerises’, and dumbfounded people on the pavements, the local alcoholics whose three-day beards are like thistles, old prostitutes delighted by all that clamour, three drunken chimney sweeps who throw their top hats into the air, a nasty grocer who wanted to call the cops but who winds up singing ‘Le Temps des cerises’ with the others, a midget projected like a cannonball from the Café du Pavement, he has a hard time stopping, he crashes into a group of flowered girls, squeezes himself against them, stretches his outsized arms, clutches a long orange skirt, seizes a waist in both hands and starts to go round and round, dances, spins with the beautiful, the tall, the sublime adolescent of all his dreams.

Jean Calmet watched the spectacle with intense pleasure. He was sitting on the little wall that bounds the car park of the police barracks, at the foot of the Chatêau, he liked the colour of the sky, that intense blue against the farandole, he was having fun listening to the slogans repeated through the megaphone, the milling of the crowd, the clamour, and when Zwahlen gave his speech, he listened to it and was gladdened by it. Suddenly, he became gloomy again, and anguish brought a lump to his throat: he had just noticed, in the middle of a moving group of girls and boys, a little round basket that reminded him pointedly of Red Riding Hood’s offering. He stared at the group: the basket appeared between two hips, half-hidden now by canvas and cardboard signs. But all of a sudden Jean Calmet made out a head of golden hair that streamed down from a yellow and white fur hat: Thérèse. And who is holding her hand? That young man with long hair? It is Marc, that melancholy boy Marc, the fiancé of the dead girl of Crécy, Marc-Orpheus with the beautiful hair who had his picture taken on the cold stone slab with the translucent Eurydice at the Gates of Hell. Marc is holding Thérèse’s hand. A whirlwind of dresses and ribbons. Shouts. Bursts of laughter. Then the megaphones incite the crowd to gather at the Place du Tunnel and, in a few minutes, the Place de la Barre is deserted, the chants can still be heard, fading into the distance, spring remains master of the field.

Jean Calmet met Thérèse at the Café de l’Évêché: she told him about the demonstration without mentioning Marc. She had started again at the École des Beaux-Arts, Thérèse; she wanted to be an interior decorator, it’s quicker than becoming a teacher. No, she had not gone back to Montreux. She would spend the weekend there. Montreux: Jean Calmet saw the clumps of palm trees before the purple lake, under the battlements of Gothic hotels on the gulf of molten gold.

“Will you come and pick me up Sunday evening?”

“Where will you be?”

“At the Café Apollo, I think. Take a look and see if I’m there. I’m not going to spend the whole day with my mother. Yes, go by the Apollo around six o’clock. We’ll have a drink and go back to La Cité. D’ac?”

“D’ac,” said Jean Calmet. She always said d’ac for d’accord. He began speaking the way she did. “Do any work today?”

No answer. Evasive gesture. Smile wiped off by her tongue, oh cat, cat with the transparent blouse, cat with leather and copper necklaces, with Arab and Afghan rings; cat between whose thighs the hair is like frizzy bronze turnings from which emerge the sweet wings of passion and desire sputtering in the wet darkness.

Then they leave each other, Jean Calmet goes home to mark homework papers, he goes to bed early, he sleeps. In the morning he gets up reminding himself of Sunday’s rendezvous in Montreux.

It was eight o’clock when he arrived at the Gymnase. He parked his car at La Mercerie, and, as soon as he got out, he sensed that something strange was happening. Spotting him, a fellow whose face was unknown to him ducked behind a wall. Cardboard signs on sticks were heaped up on the benches of the promenade. Young teenagers – apparently schoolboys or kids in the first year of their vocational apprenticeships – were smoking cigarettes, leaning against the front window of the Café de l’Évêché.

At that little green hour of the dawn when the first male pigeons of the cathedral give their first beak-to-beak kisses to their Ronsardian hen pigeons, Jean Calmet, the nice young teacher, would never have guessed what the morning had in store for him, and the fatal effect which that discovery was to have on his own life, already worn away by a number of onslaughts and moods severe enough to drive him mad.

But it was the time for reading La Tribune. Jean Calmet, sipping a tepid ristretto, glanced over the newspaper, marvelling at the amount of rubbish that graced its greyish pages.

A second ristretto scarcely warmer. Arrival of some hurried students. Cigarette smoke. Cups of Ovaltine. School bell perceptible through the open door.

Suddenly, the carnival.

About a hundred teenagers come running up from the Rue de la Mercerie and sit down in the lower courtyard of the Gymnase; they laugh, they shout slogans. It is a sit-in: as on an American college campus, they are seated, they are having lots of fun, the teachers step over them to get into the building. Gesticulating, about fifty boys rush into the upper schoolyard. A megaphone calls on the students of the Gymnase to rebel against the decision of the principal and the Board. Milling of the crowd. Shouts. Groups prepare to enter the Academy building. All of a sudden, there is silence, everyone stands petrified: in the doorway of the Academy, massive, immense, skull shining, his nose fitted with his fearsome dark glasses, Monsieur Grapp appeared, contemplating the adversary, almost dreamily. But despite the concentrated strength that he embodies, there is something else that stupefies the onlookers: in his hand – a new monstrosity, an object emerging from earliest times, an aggressive, dominant symbol, as astonishing as an archaic beast – Grapp holds a whip, a long cannoneer’s whip as curly as a snake ready to strike, a long thong of braided leather gushing from a shank gleaming and thick as a truncheon. A moment of amazement, a boy gives a shout, the megaphone takes up his refrain and the crowd of demonstrators marches on the main door. Grapp raises the whip, makes it whistle and springs at the besiegers. Bewildered, the boys fall back. Later on, they will explain why: it is not fear, or respect, it is shock that made them yield. They are confused, flabbergasted, several laugh nervously. Alain and Marc take pictures. But the whip still whistles, Grapp moves forward, all of a sudden the whole group starts running away, reaching the main gate in disorder. Then Grapp no longer restrains himself, he runs from one to the other, the whip on high, he overtakes the fugitives, he bounds up to the wooden barracks at the western entrance, he comes leaping back, the whip still raised, whistling, he goes through the gate, he pursues the survivors into the Rue de la Cité-Devant, he retraces his steps, he seizes the venerable gate, he heaves the iron grille shut. The courtyard is empty. Monsieur Grapp is master of the field.

Jean Calmet saw the whole scene from a window of the teachers’ room. He, too, is stupefied. In the days that follow, the students will give him details which he could not catch from the floor above: Monsieur Grapp drooled and foamed at the mouth as he ran, he uttered inarticulate cries, a student caught a whiplash in the eye… Nothing can heighten the panic created by the spectacle of that colossus armed with the hideous, deadly braid. In the days that follow, caricatures, photos, messages will rain in. Grapp will be written about in Le Monde: his portrait, armed with the whip, will appear in Le Canard enchaîné: glory, and forced laughter, black humour or red humour, once more the people in the region are divided and cursing at one another.

What is a whip? Jean Calmet mused on the instrument and its powers. The whip of the executioner, the whip of the lover, the whip of humiliation and pleasure. Whip up the blood. A whiplash. The whipping post. Whip a disobedient child. You’ll get a whipping! A whipping father. And Grapp was immediately nicknamed le Père Fouettard by everyone. But in the photos, in the newspapers, the dark glasses, the dented baldness and the rictus sternly rectified anything good-natured that those words might suggest. On the contrary, that nickname, “Père Fouettard”, had a sadistic air, and the man’s stature, his enormous shoulders, his thick neck, his hairy hands gave him tremendous support. Seeing the newspaper pictures that the printer’s ink darkened and simplified in a sinister way, even people who had never met Monsieur Grapp sensed his irascible strength, violent-tempered, concentrated, as an almost unbearable fact. Like a kind of obscenity.

One night, Jean Calmet saw the whip in a dream; he cried out, he awoke, angry at his fear and promising himself to keep watch over himself. It was no use: Grapp’s size had increased even more since the incident, and the grotesqueness, the buffoonery, the madness of the scene had served only to increase, mysteriously, the irrational, brutal authority that Jean Calmet saw in him. He realized, in the conversations that he had almost every day with his students at the Café de l’Évêché, that they had reacted and were continuing to react exactly as he had: they had been subjected to the whip as a paternal warning willed by destiny. Exasperated, furious, or simply ironic, they had given ground, they had fled under the threat of the terrible thong. But rather than to it and its whistling, gleaming leather, they had yielded to its authoritarian symbol, to the symbol of the Father, to the sceptre of order, and that hierarchic fatality comforted them obscurely, deeply, as much as it annoyed them on the surface. Authority had manifested itself, glorified by its badge of office: all was well. They could go on being children since the Father was in power. Since he was watching. Since he had shown himself in all his stormy, domineering magnificence.

Zeus! Jupiter thundering! Paternal analogies emerged from the depths of the ages. And the lieutenant of the Creator, the King-God, the father of the State, the prince-father of his subjects, all the hypostases of the paterfamilias, stern and punishing in his rough benevolence.

In class, one of those mornings, The Golden Ass was neglected for talk about the event, and Jean Calmet became aware once more of the attention that all of his students had given to it. It was not so much because dozens of posters and piles of handbills bore witness to its impact. It was more serious: like the discovery of the Dependence, and they were curiously relieved and comforted by it.

That morning, from his desk, Jean Calmet was watching Marc particularly – Marc who was fleeing him. Marc is sitting at the back of the classroom, in the corner opposite the windows, next to Sandrine Dudan. They get on well together, Marc and Sandrine, they back each other up, they cheat together, they draw, they make movies. Sandrine is small, dark, quick, a she-goat of the scree slopes. Marc was fleeing him… Something was bothering Jean Calmet: since the first demonstration, Marc had been leaving more and more frequent traces around Thérèse’s place: first, it had been a loose-leaf book, a scarf, then his assignment book and, with a kind of provocative audacity, the Romans grecs et latins de la Pléiade that Jean Calmet had lent him. From the doorway, Jean Calmet had recognized the thick green book, on the only chair, at the side of the unmade bed.

“Who gave you that book?” Jean Calmet had asked, gasping. He had not even greeted Thérèse, had not taken her in his arms, nor placed a brief kiss on her sparkling temple.

“It’s one of your students – Marc. I wanted to read The Golden Ass. Since the time that you spoke to me about it…”

“You could have asked me for it.”

Jean Calmet was going to ask the question that was choking him:

“He brought it to you here?”

“He forgot to take it when he left. Does that bother you?”

The tramp. Well, that’s that. It’s all over. Now I don’t have anything. Marc… Jean Calmet sees the handsome, insolent face, the forelock down over the nose, the eyes that burn with soft fire, the slow strides and the movements, so tender, so plain on the grave at Crécy… He feels the rending to the bottom of his soul.

“He spent the night here?”

“Goddamn it, Jean! I’m nineteen years old! I do what I please – understand? What I please!”

Her eyes full of lightning. The Cat Girl spits, she pulls back, she is going to spring. Marc on the gilded bedspread. Marc and the little coffee cups. Marc in the hollow of the bed. Marc crucified, Thérèse crawls over him, adorable succubus, ghoul on the move, vampire coiffed with light gold. Oh the little room is a castle on a forested mountain, an accursed fortress into which the bad genie draws the unfortunate passers-by! Witch, executioner, wicked fairy, the Cat Girl has the neighbourhood boys delivered, she grinds up their flesh, she feeds on it, she thrives on it, that blood-covered creature!

Thérèse does not fly at his face.

Jean Calmet walks to her.

Thérèse welcomes him, opens her arms, rubs her mouth against his throat, where his beard scratches a little, draws him onto the unmade bed. It is five o’clock, the end of the afternoon, the streets must be full of busy people. She puts Jean Calmet to bed like a baby, removes his clothing without haste, covers him with the sheet and the thick eiderdown, she undresses in her turn, lies down on him, encloses him like a sun shower. Marc’s gaze is still fleeing. Fascinated, Jean Calmet could not take his eyes off the handsome, dark face, the restless forelock… Where was he last night? In the little room on the Rue de la Cité-Devant? It’s a sure thing that they made love. All I have to do is turn my back and they get together. Marc, eighteen; Thérèse, nineteen…

The classroom was seething with excitement. The students interrupted one another. Tempers were rising. Their cheeks grew flushed with excitement. Jean Calmet was no longer trying to referee the debate. He was leaning at the back of the classroom, right next to Marc, with his elbow he was touching his thick woollen sweater and the boy did not move away, as if he were stupefied by fatigue. He woke up at the Café de l’Évêché, while the bells of the cathedral were striking noon, at Jean Calmet’s table, when Thérèse, who had stopped on the threshold a moment, in the light, as if she were at the mouth of a shadowy grotto, spotted them and came towards them, laughing.

“Good morning, mister teacher, sir. Good morning, Marc.”

She wore a white and yellow cashmere kerchief over her hair, like an icon. “Good morning, Marc…”

All three knew. Jean Calmet watched their eyes. Happy children. A boy from the Gymnase and a girl student at the École des Beaux-Arts. The three ate, Thérèse, Marc, Jean Calmet, then the children went back to school and Jean Calmet, who was off, returned to his residence, where he had letters to write and papers to mark.

He went out again about five o’clock and drank a beer. At the Brasserie de la Sallaz, before the window, a young man was making notes in a Bible. He was a bearded fellow, a shade over twenty, broad-shouldered, thoughtful, bespectacled, he read, he entered things in a notebook, he continued his reading, and, with a slim silver pencil, he made notes in the margin of the text and underlined long passages with the aid of a little ruler like those mathematicians and surveyors have. Jean Calmet looked at that bearded fellow with envy: despite the hubbub, the boy was absolutely isolated in his reading, absorbed in the text, possessed by the words like a hermit in his cell. He gave off an impression of compact strength and serenity. He went on writing in the margin of his Bible, underlining, writing briefly and carefully in his memo pad. Who was he? A theology student or perhaps some young probationary pastor in one of the parishes of La Sallaz or Chailly? It was Friday. No doubt he was preparing his Sunday sermon. Or was he one of those countless evangelists who scour the region, draw in young people and found disorganized communities which they hasten to leave for stable places? This fellow seemed too serious for the role. Perhaps a teacher then? Chaplain at an institution? At the House of Training in Vennes, for example? Jean Calmet shuddered. The House at Vennes had hung like a threat over his whole childhood. If you aren’t nice, we’ll put you in Vennes!… Oh, that kid, said the mother of one of the doctor’s patients, a labourer at Paudex harbour who had trouble with his boy: he’s at Vennes, of course! In those days, they used to speak of the “Reform School”: Jean Calmet imagined the place full of naked children covered with welts, and brutes armed with birch rods and whips. As in an English print, which Jean Calmet had seen in one of the doctor’s old books, the boys were tied to their beds, fastened to the wall with iron rings, beaten with riding crops, at the far end of the dormitory, by enormous, mirthful guards.

But there was nothing of the torturer about this bearded fellow. He read diligently with manifest serenity, and Jean Calmet wondered at the way that, thousands of years ago, the speeches of Moses, David or Solomon could captivate and fill a heart with fresh strength; that a parable of Jesus was capable of teaching the most everyday truth; that the accounts of the disciples or the letters of St Paul were as comforting as plain, solid dwellings, as actual facts. A breath passed over the tables of people drinking beer and white wine. A very ancient murmur haunted the café: God the poet, the God of words, was sending his Word through that little garnet Bible open beside a mug of beer, and millions of clamouring voices from the Old Testament repeated in their turn the Lord’s word, the laments and praises of the Gospels sent back the echo of His voice.

Dumbstruck, Jean Calmet yielded to a catastrophic ecstasy, as if he had expected it for months. A brushwood bush blazed. Flowers filled up with blood. Armies of frogs invaded the streets and went into the houses. Clouds of mosquitoes came out of dust on the ground. Venomous flies emerged. The herds of May died at the side of the roads, the Jorat was nothing more than a stinking charnel house. Ulcers, pustules covered the limbs of all those that Jean Calmet had ever approached from far or near, as if they had to be punished for having met such a hopelessly guilty person. A huge cloud of hail suddenly burst over the region, massacring the already tall grass full of bellflowers and the orchards with shining petals. Then the whirling foehn threw tons of locusts on the towns and villages, they adhered to the ears and eyes of those who still dared to go outside. Jean Calmet’s relatives, students – all the people he knew – were half-dead, on their knees, weeping and begging for mercy: a night thick as pea soup covered the land completely. It was sticky, it hung heavily, and when all the firstborn died at the same hour, Jean Calmet finally rejoiced at being the Benjamin of the tribe and at escaping for once the Lord’s anger.

The fellow with the beard was still reading his Bible.

Jean Calmet had long since finished his beer. Where was Marc? Where was Thérèse? Were they making love under the gold-coloured bedspread? Naked, sweating, nimble, they traded their saliva, their young breath, and, from their bed, they heard the bells of the Gymnase every forty-five minutes. Jean Calmet bore them no grudge. He suffered. A needle pierced his heart when he imagined the embrace of shoulders and arms, Marc’s black armpits glued to Thérèse’s blonde armpits. A knifepoint drilled a hole in his skull when he remembered the smooth area, curved, evenly silvery around the childish little navel of Thérèse. The blade of an axe came down on his wrists, shearing his flesh to the bone the moment he remembered the very delicate toenails on the foot that Thérèse stretches towards him, from the far end of the bed: “Bite me,” she said, “take my toes in your mouth, that’s how it was when I was little, with my father, ‘I want to eat you up,’ he used to shout, it tickled, he would put my foot in his mouth, he used to bite, ‘Ah, I’m hungry, I’m hungry,’ he used to say, I really thought that he was going to swallow me whole!”

The picture brought back strange memories to Jean Calmet. It was a very old game, he must have been three or four years old, and he never remembered it without feeling again, shivering, the kind of horror with which the sound of the knife on the rough stone filled him. The doctor had just come home from his rounds, his face red, bathed in sweat, or his hair plastered down by the rain. They had finished supper, the older children had gone back up to their rooms, the maid was washing the dishes, Jean Calmet and his mother were the only ones left at the big table downstairs. The child was colouring pictures, humming, Madame Calmet was knitting. Suddenly, the car! The slamming door, the heavy, hurried footfalls on the gravel. The front door, noise in the vestibule, and the father comes into the room. His place is set at the head of the table, before the clock taller than him. He pats his wife’s shoulder, he picks up Jean Calmet, turns him upside down, roughhouses with him, kisses him, corrects his drawing with one stroke, makes fun of him, kisses him again, puts down the child, who remains standing before the famished diner. Madame Calmet brings meat, pours another glass of wine.

“Why are you standing there before me?” exclaims the doctor, who stares into Jean Calmet’s eyes while chewing his meat with gusto. A silence, during which the ferocious eyes do not leave him.

“I’m going to eat you up if you don’t run away. I’m going to eat you for my supper, my little Jean!”

Jean Calmet cannot run away. Neither does he want to. He knows what comes next, he is waiting for it. He quivers with pleasure and fear thinking about it.

“So you don’t want to hide! All right, you’re going to see what you get!”

The doctor seizes the carving knife in his right hand and brandishes it before him; the blade sparkles. In his left hand he has his table knife, and slowly, carefully, he sharpens the two blades, rubbing them vigorously one against the other, while he makes cruel faces, rolls his eyes, shows his teeth, runs his tongue over his mouth.

“Ah! Ah!” he cries, making his voice deeper. “Ah, ah, ah, I’m going to eat you, Tom Thumb, I’m going to add you to my supper! See? I’m sharpening my big knife!”

And Jean Calmet looks with wonder at the blade shining and flashing under the lamp.

“Listen, the steel is growing sharper. Listen to that pretty concert!”

And Jean Calmet marvels at the hideous hissing of the two blades.

“Ah, ah, ah, the big man is going to eat the little boy who’s dawdling in the forest!”

The doctor is still grinning. All of a sudden, with incredible agility, he throws out his paw, catches Jean Calmet by the nape of the neck, pulls the boy to him, bends him over his knees and places the cold blade on his throat.

“Well, now, my lamb!” cries the doctor. “We’re going to cut his gullet! We’re going to bleed this little fellow!”

The knifepoint pricks the skin, the doctor bears down a little, that is the game; the steel is driven a fraction of an inch into the skin, where a few little blood vessels yield almost at once. The doctor’s left hand grips the frail shoulder. The right runs the knife over the white neck. The executioner growls and grumbles. The victim gives himself up and swoons with pleasure. At the far end of the room, in the dark, Madame Calmet, motionless, contemplates the ritual scene with an expressionless stare.

Now the doctor has released the child, he finishes his supper as if nothing had happened. There, it is all over. Besides, it is time to go to bed. Fearfully, Jean Calmet places a kiss on his father’s cheek. And his mother takes him to his room upstairs, puts him to bed after a quick wash… Jean Calmet paid for his beer and left. The street lights went on. Thérèse and Marc might have fallen asleep. Jean Calmet returned home and sat dreamily at his desk: by an ironic coincidence, on the pile of papers to be corrected, Marc’s was the first. Jean Calmet read aloud: Marc Barraud, Latin translation, Classics 2G. M.T. Cicero: De finibus. He took the exercise, placed it before him, and, with a weary pen, he began to cross out in red the mistakes and mistranslations that the fatigue of love had prompted his blissful student to make.

The next day, which was a Saturday, an especially urgent and solemn teachers’ conference took up the whole morning. Monsieur Grapp had convened it in response to the unrest that the recent events had spread among the teachers, staggered by the speed of the reactions of students and their overexcited parents. A painful session for Jean Calmet, who was struck dumb by a feeling of guilt at the back of the vast room, wainscoted and austere like a parish hall of the Église du Réveil. On their chairs – lined up as for a show – nearly a hundred fellow teachers were seated gravely. Even the youngest ones looked stern and tense. All of them were married or engaged; the few women in the gathering were unequivocally proper. Jean Calmet, for his part, was the rival of one of his students over a girl from the École des Beaux-Arts. Hubbub. Chairs pulled over the floor. At exactly fourteen minutes past eight, the Director made his entrance, and silence settled over the room. Monsieur Grapp took a seat at the big table that faced the rows of chairs, in the middle of the deans and the secretary, who was already busying himself with his papers.

Monsieur Grapp presided in a loud voice, and, on that morning, the memory of his still recent act charged his speech with convincing emotion. As he spoke, recounting the event in detail, analysing the circumstances, judging the reactions of the authorities and the public, he gained added sway over the assembly, where the sneers and sceptical looks of the leftists and the hotheads gave way to the worried faces of serious times. Member of the Vaud Council, staff colonel, Grapp was skilled at handling an assembly, and his stature – he was standing behind the table, dominating the room with his two hundred and twenty pounds – discouraged any uproar. Panic-stricken under an impressive face, Jean Calmet pondered the gulf that separated him from that man and from most of his fellow teachers. Here, everyone was in the service of order, which tolerated no deviation… And who am I? thought Jean Calmet. I’m adrift. I’m floundering. I’m going under. I’m hanging around. Exactly what my father used to say. I’m in love with a kid who’s half my age. I’m fighting over her with a student. That’s all it would take to ruin me for ever in the eyes of this assembly and the sacrosanct Board. And what a kid! Rather loud, and with the freedom of a tart. I’m in a mess again. What am I doing among these people? I’m fooling them all. I’ll be punished. Besides, Grapp hasn’t stopped looking at me. Why are people turning around to stare at me? They see my fears. I must be livid, yes, smeared with vile guilty fear. Guilty of what? After all, Thérèse is nineteen. So I’m a bachelor? It isn’t against the law. So I eat at the Café de l’Évêché with students? I don’t do them any harm. On the contrary. But where does this fear of mine come from? I’ve been caught in the wrong. Found out. The principal’s eyes on me. He has removed his dark glasses, he’s holding them in his hand; I see his eyes that don’t let me go. It’s for me that he’s speaking so loudly. It’s me that he’s warning, threatening! It’s true – I must be filthy and slobbering with terror like a drunk who has just vomited and still has the puke on his lips, on his chin; when he opens his mouth you smell the sour odour of his debauchery, and it makes you want to vomit too. I stink with fear. That’s my fate… And Jean Calmet, who does not recall that he is a good Latin master, that his students like him, that he serves the Gymnase perfectly, accuses himself and flogs himself at the back of the room, while his principal responds to the questions of the conference.

Sylvain Gautier, the fine Latinist, took the floor in his turn. A person with a white moustache, bent on convincing. There’s a man who doesn’t yield to anyone! Jean Calmet had him for a teacher at the secondary school, he knows his character – a solemn old Roman with a madness for integrity. When Sylvain sets eyes on him, Jean Calmet loses his composure and splutters just as in the small classroom, at the blackboard, during those terrible interrogations on Virgil or on Cicero. Then Verret, who does not talk much, let fly a few funny remarks. Little Beimberg, the aggressive mathematician with the curly brow of a ram, launched into a tribune’s diatribe. Hulliger, the handsome Hellenist, summarized the situation very calmly. The ladies admired his silvery temples; and when Jaccoud asked for the floor in his turn, when he rose, glasses sparkling, chin thrust forward, canary-yellow vest, orange jacket, everyone imagined him, with his self-confidence and peremptory tone, in the role of the next principal. Jean Calmet admired and remained silent. They voted over and over again. Charles Avenex, a breezy hidalgo with the long neck of a sophisticated writer, rose to say that he understood nothing of what was transpiring. Jean Calmet smiled several times but he did not dare speak; his head aches, he is sweaty, he is bored to death; in the last row of the solemn room he ponders what it is that separates him from these people of faith.

The session lasted the whole morning. At noon, exhausted, Jean Calmet went home to bed, he slept and he had bad dreams. On waking he remembers one of them: he is naked, he is running in the courtyard of the Gymnase, the superintendent overtakes him and carries him gesticulating to the teachers’ room, where, still naked and terrified with shame, he is forced to speak before their eyes, which will never forget his humiliation. Then Grapp shuts him up in his office, contemplates him affectionately and lends him an officer’s overcoat to go home in.

Sunday, Montreux. Towards the mountains pigeons plunge into the green, towards the lake swans and gulls wage war on the water crested with gaseous foam by the north wind. An ominous arrival: beginning in Clarens, the mythological buildings, the towers, the battlements, the watchtowers, the balconies hung over the gardens of palm trees, Hôtel Rousseau, Hôtel Tilda, Lorius Hôtel; to the left, the Montreux Palace dotted with Swiss flags that are waving, behind them the snow of the mountains makes intense silvery stains, then there are more hotels, to the right the Casino and the skyscraper of the Eurotel, to the left the Hôtel de Londres, the Hôtel du Parc, to the right the Joli Site and the Métropole… The middle of town.

Jean Calmet parks his car at the covered market: a kiosk of metal, pipe scaffolding, bolts like hilarious faces, slopes of aluminium and cast iron, which recall an operetta railway station and a humbled pagoda. Jean Calmet walks along the embankment: low palm trees with fronds erect as brooms, magnolias in blossom, star-shaped daffodils, mimosas that move about like chicks at the end of their slender branches, pink gravel, tulips of a coaly mauve, and suddenly, leaning against a Bernese chalet with rustic, overhanging eaves, a mosque covered with blue and white tiles that brings into this bay of Nice a bedlam of panic-stricken camels, curved-knife vengeance and holy war against a background of the sandy, illiterate Middle Ages. The edifice displays its name over the door: Le Hoggar. Jean Calmet enters, climbs a few steps, makes his way into a cathedral of decorated nougat, with a ceiling like an immense ray of white honey, from which hang wire-bound brass lamps. The floor is a kaleidoscope nocturnal and cool with stars, moons; tender, welling drops of water on the deep green, like eyes that do not let it fall. Pieces of Turkish delight are lying on trays. In niches gleam water jugs painted yellow and blue. Round chapels open out at the back, behind portcullises. Reedy music sustained by tambourines fills the establishment with an unbroken monotony. Without malice, from a heavily veiled girl whose fingernails, painted a purple that is almost black, make him think of the tulips along the embankment, Jean Calmet orders the worst thing in the world: a barely potable mint tea that he forces himself to ingurgitate with a gloomy, sickeningly sweet hunk of Turkish delight.

When he goes out again, on the canal which runs along the western flank of the mosque, he sees a black woman with a red turban walking on the arm of a boxing champ from Montreux whom he knows by sight. Jean Calmet thinks that, in the grey of the canal protected from the light of the lake, the black woman is bearing the disc of the setting sun balanced on her head.

Towards Savoy, the sky is silky, dazzling.

Gulls soar, lines of molten metal. A flock of pigeons with flapping wings circles between the ugly old buildings with Neapolitan tiles over the sewery water of the canal. Few passers-by. The woman and the boxer are sitting on a bench near the clumps of palm trees. The lake is turning green. The glacial north wind whips up the waves like small Alps among the red and blue hulls of boats, all of whose registration numbers begin with the victorious V of the canton of Vaud. In the distance the tiny steamer slides before the French coast. On the rooftops of hotels, the wind bites into the banners of Swiss crimson with the white cross. Coots scream, plunge, scream again. Jean Calmet is not impatient. He has a date with Thérèse at six o’clock.

He finds her at the Café Apollo. When he enters, she is already seated close to the front window; he notices that she is outlined against the lake and the pink sky just at the level of the roof of the covered market where pigeons pursue one another. The little round wicker basket lies next to her on the bench; she has her iconic kerchief; she is reading a paperback.

Jean Calmet draws near, she raises calm, green eyes to him, he brushes her lips with a kiss, he sits down beside her, he places his hand on the round basket.

“Your mother all right?”

“You know,” she said, “I didn’t see much of her, it’s always the same, she complains about not seeing me all week, and as soon as I’m here, she disappears, she sees friends, it seems like she takes advantage of the weekend to run every which way…”

“And what did you do, Thérèse?”

“I slept, I read, I ate, I went for a walk around Montreux. I always feel funny being in Montreux. I feel like a child again. I went walking in the yard of the Collège. It’s stupid, right? I guess I’m really sentimental… And then I made a drawing. Here, I brought it for you.”

She unfolds a white paper that she has slipped among the pages of her book, she sets it before Jean Calmet. It is a cat drawn with a green ballpoint pen – two immense, staring cat’s-eyes that transpierce Jean Calmet with their white fire. For a moment he sees only those dilated pupils, those irises that search him. Cat-Inquisitor. Cat-Judge. He hates it instantly. Then he sees the cat’s feathery cheeks, its pointed ears, its forked moustache: the green ink has striped, pricked, scratched the picture with slight wounds that spread in a star towards the edges of the paper like explosions or rays, which the eye follows almost painfully. Wicked cat. Something is written in tiny letters under the vile beast. Jean Calmet has trouble making it out, for the fur and its crackling halo mingle with the text. He manages to read: One night in Montreux – done in the morning before the open window, and he wonders immediately what those innocent words conceal. At any rate, the cat is detestable: without saying anything, Jean Calmet folds it into quarters and slips it into his wallet.

“Excuse me a moment,” says Thérèse, who gets to her feet and heads for the toilets.

Jean Calmet is alone, he places his hand on the little round basket. With his palm, he tests the gentleness of the wicker flanks, the roundness of the lid secured to the basket by a loop. With his fingers, he follows the stalks of wicker, goes down into the hollows, comes back up, runs under another strand, returns to the first; he thinks about Little Red Riding Hood in the woods, about the basket hung over the little girl’s arm; it is a tender, heart-rending picture, the gift, a dream sprung from the bottom of childhood under the pine trees, where the night thickens, the little boots creep along the path, one hears the more and more hurried breath of the girl who rushes into the twilight… How many fresh little baskets are crossing how many forests at just this moment. How many wolves lying in wait. The child starts to run, she pants. The cottage is still so far away! Jean Calmet sees the child’s clear eyes, the blue gaze, the black gaze that becomes anxious, the little nose that wrinkles up, the mouth lacking a tooth, which has just fallen out, the angel’s mouth in which a sob is rising…

Thérèse still does not come back. Jean Calmet takes the little basket on his lap, he opens it, he glances into its disorder. Right on top is a wrinkled handkerchief marked “M.B.” This handkerchief wounds Jean Calmet. He takes hold of it: the handkerchief is compact, as if starched. He lifts it to his nose: the handkerchief smells of dry sperm. That odour of rancid milk, dried fish, feverish night… A handkerchief full of sperm. Marc’s sperm. His student in Classics 2G. Marc Barraud, eighteen years old, Avenue de Beaumont, 57, Lausanne. Jean Calmet puts back the stiff handkerchief, he closes the lid, he sets the basket on the bench beside him.

Thérèse comes out of the toilets, she smiles at him from afar; he sees her litheness, her loose-limbed movements, her long hair that streams down over her delicate shoulders. She sits down.

“What if we take a walk?” she asks.

Now Jean Calmet’s voice is hoarse.

“Seen Marc this weekend?”

“He came by to say hello yesterday. Saturday is fun. There’s dances, merry-go-rounds…”

She has not lied. She speaks with a naturalness that pierces Jean Calmet’s heart. He has lost her. He knows it. He knows that he will remember hideously that moment when the ground gives way. He will remember, as he falls, that through the café window he notices:

an ice-cream vendor with a little white cart
a Mercedes with German plates that is moving at six
miles an hour looking for a parking space
a meter inspector with a pencil behind his ear
a boxer dog pissing against a hydrant
the palm trees on the embankment
the greyish roof of the covered market
the disc of the sun perfectly red in the orange sky.

Thérèse falls silent. Jean Calmet does not speak any more. He pays, he gets to his feet, he holds open the door, he follows Thérèse onto the square. The car is a two-seater. During the ride, Thérèse hugs the little basket to her like a baby that she is protecting. A half-hour’s ride and Jean Calmet drops her off at La Cité. Her eyes are full of tears.

“Want to come up for a minute?”

He melts. He is saved. He locks the car, he follows Thérèse up the narrow staircase. Her door. Her key. They enter. In the room she sets the basket down on the floor; quickly she lights a candle, and the bedspread radiates with all its gold in the semidarkness.

They stretch out one against the other, and on the moss of her temples, in the labyrinth of her ears, on the smooth areas of her neck, Jean Calmet breathes the perfume of cinnamon, of very faint perspiration, of a flowering swamp in the noonday light: in her hair he finds the odour of the amber-coloured flint that they look for in the quarries, that they strike against a twin rock; a small column of smoke rises from the shock, and the stone that they lift to their nostrils begins smelling of tepid fire like a memory of the planet’s first cataclysms.

The pink obscurity closed in, a draught made the candle flame tremble.

Sweetness. Jean Calmet crucified flat on the bed, once again, Thérèse lies down on him, draws him into her, for a long, long time devours him with tenderness, then she raises herself, slides out of the embrace, she straightens up, she is kneeling, her thighs parted, she leans out of the bed, even if he closes his eyes he knows that she is reaching out gropingly, she finds the little basket, she opens it, she takes Marc’s handkerchief, she leans back a little and wipes herself quickly – the handkerchief makes a brittle sound in the wet night.

Marc. Jean Calmet will have him for the first hour tomorrow, they will read the rest of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Thinking about Marc does not hurt, just now. And Thérèse, the Cat Girl, the witch, the succubus, the terrible silky fairy lies down beside him again, she places the handkerchief under the pillow; with his finger Jean Calmet tests it – rigid, gluey, flattened under the head with the radiant hair. The candle is still burning. Jean Calmet draws her to him, blows out the flame; given off at once is the odour of the hot wax and of the wick that is charring: the smell of Christmas! says Thérèse. They fall asleep. Tonight Jean will have no nightmares.

Some time had gone by since Jean Calmet had seen his mother, and it made him suffer like he had committed an act of cowardice. As he was off the following Thursday, he went down to Les Peupliers to pay her a visit. They talked for an hour; Madame Calmet wanted to know how Jean was living, where he took his meals, if he gave out his laundry to be done. She told him about his brothers and sisters, she babbled a little, she looked like a grey mouse, her small round eyes without expression. While she was making tea in the kitchen, Jean Calmet came across an open newspaper in the middle of sewing boxes, on the veranda: The Cremation, “organ of the Cremation Society of the Canton of Vaud, published four times yearly.”

“What’s this rag?” he asked his mother, intrigued.

“I’ve been getting it since Papa died. I joined the Society, you know. You pay only twenty francs a year and they handle all the formalities, the crematorium, settling all the bills. Can you imagine that? Instead of having to pay eight hundred or a thousand francs, like everyone else, you pay only twenty francs a year, it’s quite a saving. Pity we didn’t know about it for Papa’s death. It was after the ceremony that they came to talk to me about it…”

Jean Calmet felt acute discomfort. He opened the newspaper, instantly spotted the Society’s device – the same as the one which decorated the pediment of the crematorium with its big Roman letters:

PER IGNEM AD PACEM

and a sinister vignette showed flames spurting from a kind of alcohol-fried chafing dish against a black background.

“You read this in detail?” he asked.

“From cover to cover,” replied his mother. “It’s very interesting and thorough.”

Jean Calmet shivered. He began to perspire on the veranda overheated by the afternoon sun; the heavily sweetened tea nauseated him. He skimmed through the newspaper, he read:

In case of death outside the Canton of Vaud, in Switzerland or abroad, our society gives the family a reimbursement equal to the amount that it would have spent if the incineration had taken place in the Canton, i.e. cost of incineration, cost of coffin, shipping charges from the border of Vaud to the nearest crematorium, organist’s services.

With regard to the shipping of ashes, it is possible to send these to Switzerland, by mail, without difficulty…

and he imagined the postman’s face when, on the arrival of the bound parcel, a thin trickle of velvety ash begins to run, and he instantly gathers it up and brings it to the deceased’s family. He had to make an effort to remind himself that his father’s ashes were shut up in an urn behind the padlocked grating of a columbarium guaranteed by the police administration. He went back to the newspaper. On the first page, a member had sent in a little poem, ‘The Last Fire’, which ended with these lines:

If by fire we are consumed,
Then ashes suddenly are we!
But in earth where we lie buried,
What shall we be next summer?
Let us not impose gardening
On those who have seen us die!

Jean Calmet dropped the horrible sheet, but his mother picked it up, folded it respectfully and set it clearly in sight on the table. In spite of himself, from his seat, he read another fragment of an article that was bathed in the yellow four-o’clock sun:

First, we’ll talk about France. In Paris, the hall of ceremonies comprises two hundred seats (chairs and armchairs). It is sumptuously decorated with mosaics and a sculptural composition: ‘The Return of the Eternal’. One of the clauses of the decree of 31 December 1941 expressly states: “Immediately after incineration, the ashes are to be gathered in an urn in the presence of the family.” The persons attending the services do not leave the crematorium before the restitution of the ashes. This waiting period varies from fifty to sixty minutes.

He paused, took a sip of tea, resumed reading the paper:

Strasbourg – There are two chapels: one with three hundred seats and the other with eighty. The main hall has an organ, the small one a harmonium. The ceremonies are identical, regardless of which hall is used.

The day before or two days before the service, the coffin is generally placed in the refrigerated cellars of the crematorium. An hour before the beginning of the ceremony, the coffin is set on a catafalque, the latter being covered by a pall embroidered with gold. A podium is available to any speakers for religious or secular speeches. A charge is made for the use of the organ or harmonium. Strasbourg has no columbarium.

He became excited, he turned the page. The doctor’s silhouette appeared, massive, before the big clock.

Marseille – The coffin, covered with a black pall with gold fringe, is placed on a catafalque in the centre of a large hall furnished with benches. Two hundred persons can be seated there. A well-placed rostrum allows any speakers to make themselves heard easily. No music is possible. The coffin is brought by pallbearers into the adjacent room, where the ovens are located.

The persons attending the services may then leave, but they may also wait (about an hour) for the return of the urn, either remaining inside the crematorium or going out into the neighbouring cemetery. Covered with the pall, the urn is borne on a small litter, then placed in the columbarium or transported to another place…

That was too much. Furious, Jean Calmet crumpled the crackling double sheet, made it into a ball and hurled it into a corner of the veranda, behind a colony of green plants.

“What’s wrong with you?” Madame Calmet said timidly. “Did something offend you?”

What was the good of replying? He was humiliated by his act. He looked at the bent old woman in anger; it grieved him that she was his mother, that she must die, that she too would be reduced to ashes before he could tell her at least a part of what had been oppressing him for years. Did she suspect anything? Had she guessed, deep in her heart, the anguish of her Benjamin, his terrors, his need for affection, that hunger torturing him body and soul? Then Jean Calmet did something that he had never done, that he had never even dreamt of doing: he rose, he walked towards his mother, he lifted her from her armchair, and he embraced her, pressed her against him, slight, bony, he hugged the ridiculous little being who did not struggle, who did not react; she simply allowed herself to be squeezed to the point of breathlessness, she puffed harder, Jean Calmet thought of Thérèse’s panting under the golden bedspread. You, too, have been Ophelia, he pondered, hugging the emaciated body; you, too, have enchanted, soothed, cherished, you were Circe, Melusina, you were Morgana, you were all the fairies in the tales, and now your bones jut out and the wrinkles lacerate your face!

Suddenly Jean Calmet remembered a boarding house in Corbeyrier, where he had spent a few weeks in the winter with his mother when he was small. They would gather in a tidy, low parlour, on straw chairs; groups of ladies and bronchitic kids played cards, the golden crusts of the leftovers from supper and café au lait still lay about under the chandeliers of the glass-enclosed dining room. Papa would send postcards from Lutry. On the morning of 1 January, the owner had executed a wildcat with buckshot in the snow-covered hedge. He had aimed at it for a long time. Jean Calmet was seven years old, he could not turn the rifle aside; the animal, wounded in the throat, fell on the ground, plop, they had picked it up from the frozen gravel that stuck to the earth and they had thrown it into an open garbage can in front of the pension. Jean Calmet used to cough at night. His mother would get out of bed; the chafing dish was out, she would give him what was left of the cold cough mixture. He used to dream of a poster for Player’s cigarettes that showed a blond, pasty-faced doll-woman in the snow; such faces are seen, even nowadays, on the mannequins of cheap clothing stores. In the afternoon, after the midday nap, a little girl – also seven – would pee in a chamber pot without closing her door. Jean Calmet waited for the ceremony of the toilet paper, the cotton underpants and the gaiters…

“You’re angry about the newspaper?” asked a frail voice. Jean Calmet had felt the weak torso vibrate with the tremor of the voice.

No, he wasn’t angry. He was shocked, uneasy. He was no longer thinking about it. His mother’s small body, her protruding shoulder blades, the rabbit’s ribs had filled him with another anguish. He bent down, he brushed his lips over the forehead criss-crossed with tiny star-shaped wrinkles. Towards her temples, a lock of white hair stuck out and tickled his lips unpleasantly.

“You know, since Papa was burned, I get a pile of things that I knew nothing about. And I’ve joined the Society, thinking that I’ll be needing it before long.”

A silence. The pair were still standing in the light that was turning brown.

“Staying for supper?”

The voice trembled. It was a humble query, an entreaty, she did not dare believe that he would: Jean is wild, Jean always runs away; even when he was a child she used to call him the little Cat that Walked by Himself… Poor old voice. Poor bent skeleton, poor imploring face, poor gaze dimmed with tears, vacant, grey, bluish, washed out by the years of obedience. She would die. You, too, my beloved, at the crematorium…

God is a bastard.

Jean Calmet left Les Peupliers before supper. He would not have had the strength to eat sitting across from this old woman with her slow movements: this hand that can no longer cut the meat, this mouth that drools a little, that hisses when chewing, this noisy mouth…

While he was going back up to town, he was followed by the worn-out gaze as by a very old reproach: the iris that had been forget-me-not blue and that had faded, that had grown pale, that had begun to resemble the gaze of the blind – but perhaps it is because the heart now sees into it clearer and deeper than any eye? Jean Calmet mused and saw again scenes of his childhood. Then he recalled the knots of arthritis on the old hands, brownish speckles, nearly violet stains. Soon she will lose her memory, she will confuse everything, she will no longer be able to find her way about alone… Her master is dead. She must die. Who will close the eyes of the poor shrivelled-up thing on her pillows? Jean Calmet choked at the wheel of the Simca, which moved ahead ten yards at a time in the crowded streets of the evening.

During this time, the Gymnase had set up a day for study trips all over the country, and 2G, Jean Calmet’s class, wanted to go to Bern, a bit derisively, a bit out of an old, atavistic respect, but also an ironic way to make fun of the Swiss capital, its banks, its big hotels, its stodginess, its dialects that resemble Dutch.

“Can we take along friends?”

Jean Calmet had agreed.

They were to meet in the main terminal of the Gare de Lausanne. One fine morning at the end of May, they assemble wearing cowboy hats, Indian neckerchiefs, boots; they carry US Army knapsacks full of comic books and cartons of cigarettes. A few guests in the bunch: boys from the École des Beaux-Arts, two girls from the École Normale… A few yards away, François Clerc assembled his students.

“Where are you going?” asks Jean Calmet.

“To Payerne. The Abbey Church, you know, the museum, then a walk over the hills…”

François smiles when Jean Calmet tells him that he is going to Bern.

“You’re going to steep yourself in the Federal mystique?”

To be sure, this Bernese project makes everyone laugh. Jean Calmet is somewhat stung, even if he is having fun, even if he is laughing, too. He knows all too well that Bern vaguely intimidates him: the authority of Bern, its history as father and cement of the Confederation, its military power, its alliances, the execution of its enemies in the subjugated territories, the mystery, too, of those phrases so often repeated on the shores of Lake Léman and in such a tone of respect and childish irritation: “They decided, in Bern… Go ask Bern for it… The Federal Council has voted… Bern demands…”

He came back to his students, counted them with a discreet glance. Marc was missing. Would he come? Jean Calmet was getting ready to go to Platform I when, at the last minute, a very handsome couple came through the great glazed portal: Marc and Thérèse. Jean Calmet gulped, a lump came into his throat; he began to tremble, but his eyes did not leave the couple that came dancing across the waiting room, which was full of noise.

They were holding hands.

They had no bags.

Marc, thin and long, the lock of hair on his cheek, his face and hands tanned, his body lithe, and his legs slim in the patched trousers!

Thérèse had untied her braid. The copper flood fell in two cascades on her bare shoulders. She was wearing a little white blouse with gold thread; her thighs, her legs stretched the cloth of the jeans at every step.

They come up to Jean Calmet smiling with graciousness. They shake hands with him, talk to him!

Jean Calmet mumbles words of greeting, nervously counts his tickets again, it seems to him that he is unsteady, that he may faint on the spot: “Let’s go,” he says in the black light.

Platform brutally light, big green train, stamping of feet along the walkway, reserved coach, bounding onto the platform, races, cries, calls. Jean Calmet was pinned between Béatrice and Daisy; across from him Christophe unwrapped packs of chewing gum and offered them all around. Jean Calmet has closed his eyes, he plunges into opaque birdlime, he chokes. Marc and Thérèse. The whole day. They get out of bed. They come gambolling down from the Place de la Cité to the station. Hand in hand. Radiant in the early morning, in the wind from the lake still cool from the mountain night of Savoy and from the flatlands on the banks of the Rhône. And he, Jean Calmet, lonely and glum before them! He felt spite and anger. Towards them, towards himself, towards the light and towards the wind that was flying through the compartment, all the windows of which were open. For a moment, he was away in the acrid mud. He splashed and floundered. He sank into it. He died of shame…

When he reopened his eyes, the train was crossing the green plateau before the Bernese Alps, which were all white like the ones on wrappers of chocolate: meadows, villages, blue woods, more pastures, huge, flowered, overgrown, and the emerald shadow at the edges of the fields. Marc and Thérèse were standing at a window, their hair mingling; Marc had put his arm over her bare shoulders. He squeezed that sweetness against him, he screwed up his eyes against the wind, he would often place his head on the neck of Thérèse and caress his forehead, his nose, his lips against her skin streaming with the morning air.

“Deer! Deer!”

Three animals had bounded out of a wood; they skirted the edge of the fields with great leaps, disappeared in the brush.

Marc and Thérèse raised the window and sat, one against the other, their legs stretched out, feet up on the seat across the way. How good-looking they are, thought Jean Calmet. How innocent they are. Marc is the lover of Thérèse. When I tried to love her, I was impotent and ridiculous. Im-po-tent. I’m miserable. I’m jealous. My God, what have I done that you take everything from me? I’m wrapped up in myself, separated from the others, deprived, guilty, because of Your Law, which I submit to like a humiliated child. Will the barrier fall? Will sweetness be given to me, rendered up to me, before the final plunge into darkness?

They reached Bern.

At once, the city seemed solemn and in good health. A weight fell on their shoulders: eight centuries of power and indestructible vigour. They did not sing any more. It took a few moments to recover from the shock. They reached the heart of town: Marktgasse, Bärenplatz; all of a sudden the cupolas of the Federal Palace shone in the blue sky. Columns, monumental staircases, high walls, outbuildings, verdigris roofs; with absolute certainty the edifice expressed strength, perpetuity, faith in democratic virtue, domestic wisdom, contempt for fashions. All of it squat, close-set, and breathing at the same time, flanked by huge, solemn banks, the health of an old man vigorous and thriving on his heap of gold.

That power irritated Jean Calmet. Now his students had begun to laugh again. They deciphered, amid gibes, the patriotic devices and the cantonal coats of arms of the ornamental pediments. Some of them intoned revolutionary songs, into which they mockingly slipped fragments of hymns of sacred Switzerland; others essayed a dance step, miming drunkards stunned by so much splendour. The mirth was at its height when a detachment of cadets, led by a little captain of dragoons, came out on the square at a ceremonial step. “Zu miiin’ Befehl, halt!” Forty stiff caps, visors pulled down over their domes, forty uniforms gleaming like pistachio candy, then the “Attention!” that cracks and echoes several times among the colonnades of the holy square. Thirty yards away, Jean Calmet and his class heard the guttural dialect of the officer, who became ecstatic and revealed the endless mysteries of the Palace.

They walked, they went down little arcaded streets, they took a break under a clock from which emerged and strutted characters in costumes of pomp and coupled wagons. They went past still other banks, which mystically reproduced the pediment-cupola-column style of the Federal temple; they stopped in front of embassies, whose iron gates, coats of arms and armoured limousines with whitewall tyres in the courtyard of honour had them dreaming up parodies of espionage films. They bought beer and frankfurters at refreshment stands, they ate and drank in the open air, congregating on the green benches of a mall overlooking the Aar, they threw their empty bottles into the river, they got themselves bawled out by the park attendant who called them “Frenchy students,” they sang a stanza of ‘L’Internationale’ at the top of their lungs right in the face of the very sheepish, shocked old man; finally they arrived at the Bear Pit, and they were happy at once, they enjoyed themselves with genuine pleasure that seemed to come from their very recent childhoods. It was a broad stone-walled pit, divided into several airy territories, at the centre of which a big, dry tree that was scratched all over stood like a tortured prisoner. At the bottom of the pit, in the first cavity, a very tall, very dark, plump bear, his shoulders humped with fat, stood and implored the spectators, making a comic imitation of a man who is praying, who clasps his hands, who spreads them apart, who again makes a gesture of supplication. He rolled his round eyes, but his defiant, cruel bearing, his sharp teeth, the thread of drool on his long, mobile snout, his claws above all, long and curved like blades of black steel, gave him a look of paradoxical, comic ferocity. He danced, he grunted, he waddled about on his formidable hind legs. A fellow tossed him a handful of carrots; the bear dropped back down with suppleness, they heard his claws lacerate the ground, he ran to the feast, he gobbled up the carrots noisily. Jean Calmet remembered what they had told him, as a child, one day when he had come to see the Pit with his parents: a kid had fallen into it, the keeper had gone away to do some shopping, nobody had been able to act, the child had been devoured by the huge bear under the horrified gaze of his parents and the crowd! The doctor had not spared him a single detail, boasting of the bear’s speed, its extraordinary voracity. “And you know,” he had added, staring curiously at his own son, “he devoured the boy whole; at the end of the meal there was nothing left but his two shoes.” The doctor once more. His father once more. Could it be he, that muscular, insatiable male at the bottom of the pit? Had he reappeared once more, to oppress his youngest child? Nothing but his two shoes! Terror-stricken, Jean Calmet relived the paternal narrative, re-experiencing his terror of that day, despite himself seeking on the cobblestones – covered with fresh excrement and the remains of vegetables – traces of the horrible meal, bloodstains, and the two innocent little shoes that the animal had not wanted.

But his students gave admiring shouts from the other side of the ramp. The girls called to him; he went around the pits and joined them before an odd and cunning spectacle that made him forget the image of the bloody scene. A big she-bear good-naturedly nudged three cubs with her snout. The white-collared cubs trotted, rolled over, jumped on one another, tripped one another, abruptly ran away, galloped, came back under the paws and snout of their mother with obvious pleasure. The she-bear swung her head right and left, watching over her offspring, apparently laughing. Yes, everyone could see it: she was laughing, her muzzle opened for a blissful enchantment that delighted the onlookers. A swipe of her paw sent one of the young flying like a ball against the sandstone: astonished, perhaps in pain, the cub gave a raucous bellow and sat, dazed, in the sun, when its mother called to it with a kind of plaintive bleat.

Jean Calmet stopped looking at the animals to turn towards his students. Leaning over the edge, glued to the stone, their nails instinctively digging into it, they followed the animals’ movements with extraordinary curiosity. Suddenly Jean Calmet felt himself grow pale; he was cold, nausea hurled a handful of acid into his stomach: on the other side of the Pit, outlined against the sky, intertwined, marvellous, Marc and Thérèse had appeared. They stood there, hugging each other; their hair streamed in the breeze, their well-attuned bodies looked alike, their heads leant one towards the other before the sparkling sky… Jean Calmet was unsteady. He closed his eyes. He opened them again. The couple was still there, as if to remind him of his failure the first time that he had slept with Thérèse. As if to remind him of his age. To keep him away from the little room in La Cité. To forbid him to see the girl again…

Despondent, he felt in his heart and his mind all the knives of jealousy. It made him ashamed, because he was really in love and because he had tender feelings towards Thérèse and Marc. Yes, he was ashamed, that shame grieved him, but a confused clamour within him cried things that grew distinct, that became hard, that solidified disgustingly: “Impotent! Useless! Jealous! What are you waiting for to get out of the way once and for all?” He staggered under the insults. “To get out of the way! Do you hear, imbecile? You should have got it through your head long ago!”

They gathered, they started to walk again through the little streets. The afternoon was turning a sepia gold: in the sky a tint of brown sugar, heavy, a bit soporific. They were about to reach a bridge guarded by obelisks when the class stopped and stared at a stupefying monument. Shouts and laughter mingled. Jean Calmet, who had been walking like a somnambulist for a moment, lifted his eyes and was struck with amazement: an Ogre was sitting at the top of the shaft of a fountain, devouring an already half-swallowed child whose bare buttocks and little dimpled thighs thrashed about on his bloody chest! Jean Calmet screwed up his eyes to see better: the scene was dreadful. Thick-set, his face broad, his mouth distended, immense, his wide-spaced teeth planted in the child’s back, the Ogre showed mute pleasure, and his flat nose, his blue eyes, the whole rictus of his face insulted the passers-by compelled to witness his crime. One realized, to see him so sure of himself, greedy and vigorous, that nothing could stop his odious banquet. The monster was comfortably seated, wearing a blood-red tunic and green breeches spotted with horrible, rust-like spatterings. His right elbow raised on high, with his huge paw he held the naked kid in his gaping, crimson mug. Under his left arm, a supply of fresh flesh: a plump little girl with long hair, her face distorted by screams and tears; poor little victim, all ready to be gobbled up at the next meal. In the Ogre’s belt, still on the left, a sack from which emerged the torsos of crying boys and girls. They were very pale, and their skin made a strange contrast with the killer’s coppery hide. The little boy had managed to get out of the basket as far as his belly, he was trying to escape, he made a terrific effort, he clung to the Ogre’s leg to help himself, and this useless attempt, the tears, the little body that was writhing added to the horror of the giant, whose feast nothing could stop. Another kid was hung from his belt, to the right, next to the butcher’s knife. This child also struggled, lashing out with his little legs against the knee of the monstrous character, who must have liked this gesticulation, who enjoyed it, who was impatient to taste that nice living flesh which was twisting in its bonds and in its baskets: that is why he always had his larder with him, securely lashed to his belt; the fresh meat lived and moved on his own hip, against his own skin, whetting his appetite, provoking his laughter. The Ogre’s mirth! For Jean Calmet had just made an appalling discovery: the Ogre looked like his father. Could the Ogre be his father, a new image of his father risen up from the crematorium to warn him again and persecute him? It was the doctor all right, those broad shoulders, that strong back, that jovial, cruel thickness of his whole body. It was him all right – that confidence in the face of disaster, that insolent voracity, those blue eyes defying the world like all-powerful fires, that laugh on his face and on his wide-spaced teeth under his big lips. Jean Calmet remembered the evening ritual, the hissing of the sharpened knives one against the other:

“That child is so cute I’d eat him. I’m going to gobble him up raw!”

And the grunts, the drools, the mimicry of impatience and appetite accompanied ferociously the sharpening, and the doctor’s big hand squeezed Jean Calmet’s throat, immobilizing him on knees as hard as those of the dirty statue…

Jean Calmet realized that he had forgotten his students. They were having fun splashing one another with the water from the fountain; others, at the stand across the way, were buying postcards of the scene: Kindlifresserbrunnen they spelled out diligently. The Fountain of the Devourer of Small Children! The Fountain of the Cannibal! And Jean Calmet remembered Chronos, who had devoured his offspring alive, the fantastic Saturn swallowing his offspring alive, Moloch thirsty for the blood of innocent young men, the terrible tax of fresh meat that Crete paid to the divine Minotaur at the bottom of his labyrinth streaming with haemoglobin. Jean Calmet’s father had devoured him, too. Wolfed him down. Reduced him to nothing. He was filled with violent hatred for the Ogre-doctor, for all the other ogres who had massacred their sons, their children, the tributes constantly renewed with young flesh, minced meat, flesh of pleasure, cannon fodder, all that flesh that they had appallingly sacrificed generation after generation to live on, to enjoy, to thrive on, to aggrandize themselves! Gilles de Rais! Elizabeth Báthory, marten thirsty for wailing! And you, huntsmen of Leipzig and of Mayence, lying in ambush in your haunts and staring at the night with a pink eye; you, the cutters of girls, the prowlers of operating rooms, the robbers of children, whom you shove into your game bags in the dusk of the evening! You, marrow-swallowers, blood-suckers, all the vampires, all the butchers, dismemberers, sawyers, cutters of chubby big-bottomed kids, lickers of bloody dimples, slaughterers of angels, disembowellers of virgins sticky with vermilion! Staring at the statue of the killer, Jean Calmet saw stretching out a whole gallery venomous and foaming with red. And his father was the last monster of that abominable line! And Jean Calmet had had to be handed over as youngest son, bound hand and foot, completely at the Ogre’s mercy, weak, motionless, impotent!

Impotent.

That was it all right. By terrifying him, devouring him, seizing him like an object that he ground up, that he bled as he pleased, the doctor had tried to sterilize him to keep his potency as father, as hard authoritarian chief, which he had to retain at any cost. His brothers had fled. His sisters had fled. He had remained in the Master’s power, he, Jean Calmet, and he had been murdered.

Now the young people were growing impatient; evening was falling on the city. They headed back to the station. Turning around, Jean Calmet threw a last look at the Ogre, who went on imperturbably with his ignoble feast.

His heart was full of bitterness and rage. What an indignity. Thérèse and Marc were walking ahead of him. They had their arms around each other’s waists. Jean Calmet watched their slim buttocks move in their identical jeans, their slender, muscular legs, their tread. For a moment, he imagined the two young people handed over to the priests of Moloch or Baal. He saw Thérèse, half-naked, gesticulate in the Ogre’s wicker pack. He heard Marc’s cries as the giant squeezed his throat, crushed it, as Saturn does in his cavernous maw! The boy’s legs moved grotesquely in mid-air; streams of his precious blood ran over the tunic of the famished executioner! And if he doesn’t die as an executed prisoner, he will wind up as dust, like the others, or in a hole, rotten; his limbs will come off and sink in the wet earth. Poor Marc. It’s just a question of years. Baal or the scythe…

With these sad thoughts, Jean Calmet recognized his jealousy, and he was humiliated by their baseness. Thérèse had not said a word to him all day. Nor given him a single look. He came back to his loneliness as to an inborn defect. Who would ever give him back his life? He became an ogre in his turn. He began to muse over sacrifices, he heard the cracking of the bones of the ones who had rejected him, he buried them nastily… He was afraid, he was cold. They reached the station. The street lights went on. The beautiful children sang as they boarded the train.