The President Read online

  As usual, Emile walked on the Premier’s left, ready to prop him up if his leg gave way, and Madame Blanche, obeying the orders he had given her once and for all, followed a few paces behind.

  This daily walk had also been publicized by the press, and in summer a tourist agency at Fécamp would bring busloads of excursionists to watch from a distance.

  A narrow lane, starting from behind the house, wound through the fields till it joined the coast-guard path, at the very edge of the cliff. The land belonged to a local farmer who turned his cows out to graze there, and from time to time the ground would crumble beneath the hoofs of one of the beasts, which would be found three hundred feet below, on the rocks of the shore.

  He knew he was wrong to go out in bad weather. All his life he had known when he was wrong, but all his life he had persisted, as though challenging fate. Had he done so badly, after all?

  The drifting sky was low. One saw it moving in from the open sea, bringing dark clouds that broke into tatters, and the air tasted of salt and seaweed; the same wind that was whipping up evil-looking white horses on the surface of the water was storming the cliffs to fling itself savagely on the countryside.

  Through the roar he heard Madame Blanche’s voice coming faintly from behind:

  “Sir . . . ”

  No! He had made up his mind to go to the edge, to watch the wild sea, before going back to be an invalid in the Louis-Philippe armchair.

  He was being careful about his leg. He knew it well, better than Gaffé, the young doctor from Le Havre who came every day to see him, better than Lalinde, the former staff doctor, who paid a “friendly visit” from Rouen once a week, better even than. Professor Fumet, who was only sent for on serious occasions.

  It might happen any moment. Since the attack three years ago, that had kept him in bed for nine weeks, and then on a chaise-longue, his way of walking had never been quite natural. His left leg seemed to float, as it were. It seemed to take its time about obeying, and whenever it moved forward there was a slight sideways motion, at each step, that he couldn’t prevent.

  “I waddle like a duck!” he had said jokingly at the time. Nobody had laughed. He’d been the only one who’d made light of the business. And yet he followed, with almost impassioned interest, everything that went on inside him.

  It had begun one morning when he was out for his walk, just like today except that in those days he used to go farther, as far as the dip in the cliffs which was known as the Valleuse du Curé.

  He’d never had a moment’s anxiety except about his heart, which had played him a few tricks, and he’d been advised to take care of it. It had never occurred to him that his legs, let alone his hands, might let him down as well.

  That day—it was in March; the weather was bright and cold; the white cliffs of England had been visible in the distance—he had felt in his left leg, beginning at the thigh and creeping slowly downwards, a skin-deep warmth accompanied by the prickly sensation that one feels, for instance, after sitting for a long time beside a stove or in front of a log fire.

  With no uneasiness, curious as to what was happening to him, he had gone on walking, his faithful stick in his hand (his pilgrim’s staff, as the papers called it), until, without thinking, he had rubbed his thigh with his hand. To his stupefaction, it had been rather like touching another person’s body. There was no contact. He was touching his own flesh, pinching it, and he felt it no more than if his flesh had been cardboard.

  Had that scared him? He had turned around to tell Madame Blanche about it when, all of a sudden, his leg had given way, slipped from under him, and he had found himself huddled up at the side of the path.

  He felt no pain, had no sense of any danger, was simply conscious of his ridiculous posture and the rotten trick his leg had so unexpectedly played him.

  “Help me up, Emile!” he had said, stretching out his hand.

  In the Chamber of Deputies, where everyone, or almost everyone, uses “tu” and affects Christian-name terms with everyone else, he had never addressed anyone in that way; nor did he even use “tu” to his cook-housekeeper, Gabrielle, who had been with him for more than forty years. He called his secretary by her surname, Milleran, as if she were a man, without ever using “tu,” and Madame Blanche was always Madame Blanche as far as he was concerned.

  “You didn’t hurt yourself?”

  He had noticed that the nurse, bending over him, had turned pale, for the first time in his acquaintance with her, but he hadn’t attributed any importance to it.

  “Don’t get up for a moment,” she had advised. “Tell me first of all whether . . . ”

  He was struggling to stand up, with Emile’s help, and then his eyes had, despite himself, become a little set, his voice had been slightly less assured than usual, as he observed:

  “Funny thing . . . It won’t take my weight any more. . . ” He had lost his left leg. It wasn’t his, any longer. It refused to obey him!

  “Help him to sit down, Emile. You’ll have to go and fetch . . . ”

  She must have known, just as the others knew later on. Fumet, who understood his character, had offered to tell him frankly what had happened. He’d said no. He refused to be ill. He didn’t want to know his illness, and not for a moment had he been tempted to open one of his medical books.

  “Can you carry me, Emile?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Madame Blanche protested. He didn’t give in. It was impossible to bring the car along that narrow path. They’d have to fetch a stretcher, probably from the priest, who doubtless kept one in reserve for burials.

  He preferred to cling with his arms around the neck of Emile, who was strongly built and had firm muscles.

  “If you get tired, put me down in the grass for a bit. . . . ” “It’ll be all right.”

  Gabrielle watched them coming, standing in the door of her kitchen. This was before he’d taken on young Marie to help her.

  Less than half an hour later, Dr. Gaffé, who must have driven like a lunatic, was by his bedside, and almost at once he rang up Dr. Lalinde at Rouen.

  It wasn’t till about four o’clock that, glancing at his hand, the Premier noticed it looked funny. He moved his fingers playfully, like a child, and these fingers didn’t take their usual positions.

  “Look at this, Doctor!”

  It hadn’t surprised Gaffé, who had not gone home to Le Havre for lunch, nor Lalinde, who had arrived about two o’clock and had afterwards made a long telephone call to Paris.

  Later on, he learned that for several days one of his eyes had been fixed, his mouth twisted.

  “A stroke, I suppose?”

  He could hardly speak. They hadn’t answered him, one way or the other, but the professor had arrived that same evening, followed by an ambulance which, a little later, took the lot of them off to Rouen.

  “I give you my word, my dear Premier,” Fumet said, “that you won’t be kept in the clinic against your will. It’s not a matter of getting you into hospital, only of taking X rays and making tests that aren’t possible here. . . . ”

  Contrary to his expectation, it wasn’t an unpleasant memory. He remained very detached. He watched them all: Gaffé, who hadn’t begun to breathe more freely until Lalinde had arrived to share his responsibility; Lalinde himself, sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, with bushy eyebrows, trying to give an impression of self-confidence; then Fumet, the big man, used to distinguished patients and to the little court of admiring disciples that followed him from bed to bed as he made his rounds.

  When they felt obliged to withdraw into corners to talk in low tones, he amused himself by studying the characters of the three men, and the idea of death didn’t even occur to him.

  He’d been seventy-eight years old at that time. The first question he had asked at Rouen, while he was being undressed and the X-ray apparatus was got ready,
was:

  “Did the inspectors come along behind?”

  Nobody had paid attention, but they were surely there, or one of them at least, and the alarm had certainly been given to the Ministry of the Interior.

  There had been some unpleasant moments, particularly when he’d been given a lumbar puncture and again when they’d taken an encephalogram. But he had never stopped joking, and at about four in the morning, when they were busy in the laboratory, he asked whether someone could get him a quarter bottle of champagne.

  The funny thing was that they’d found him one, in a rather shady Rouen night club that was still open, and probably it was one of the policemen, one of his watchdogs, as he sometimes called them, who had been sent on the errand.

  That was a long time ago, now. It was no more than a story to tell. For two months the village of Bénouville had been invaded by French and foreign journalists determined to be in at his death. In the newspaper offices the obituary notices had been written, blocks made of photographs with some claim to be historic, and the printers stood by ready to set it all up.

  Wouldn’t the same articles be used sooner or later, with a change of date and a few details, for he had taken no part in politics since then?

  He’d never fallen again, like a tripped hare, but now and then, though less acutely, he’d had the feeling that his leg was taking its time to obey him. It sometimes came over him at night, too, in bed, a sort of cramp, or rather, a numbness that didn’t hurt at all. When it happened out walking, Emile would notice almost at the same time as himself. A kind of signal passed between them. Emile would come closer and the Premier would clutch his shoulder, stand still, though without taking his eyes off the landscape. Madame Blanche would come up then, and hand him a pink tablet, which he would swallow without a word.

  The three of them would wait in silence. It had happened once in the middle of the village, when people were just coming out of mass, and the peasants had wondered why they stood riveted to the ground like that, for the Premier didn’t appear to be in pain, or out of breath, and he made it a point of vanity to keep smiling vaguely all the time.

  He hated it to happen on days when Madame Blanche had urged him not to go out, and so this morning he’d paid more attention than usual to the behavior of his leg. For fear of putting the nurse in the right, he had not stayed out long; all the same, he had sneezed twice.

  When they got back he had flung at her triumphantly:

  “You see!”

  “Wait till tomorrow to find out if you’ve not caught a cold.”

  That was her way. One had to take her as she was. Whereas Milleran, the secretary, never resisted him, was so unobtrusive that he hardly noticed her presence in the house. She was pale, with soft, blurred features, and anybody who had only seen her two or three times would probably not have recognized her again. All the same she was efficient, and at this moment, for example, he felt sure she had her eye on the little clock in her office, waiting to come in on the dot and turn on his radio.

  The ministerial crisis had lasted a week, and as usual the Republic was said to be in danger. Cournot, the French President, had sent for about a dozen political leaders in succession, and didn’t know where to turn next.

  He’d known Cournot as a very young man, fresh from Montauban, where his father sold bicycles. He was a militant Socialist, one of those who sit in gloomy offices, dealing with tiresome secretarial work, and are seldom heard of except at annual conferences. He hardly ever spoke in the Chamber, and when he did it was usually at night sittings, to almost empty benches.

  Had Cournot realized, when he chose that self-effacing line, that it would lead him one day to the Elysée, where his two daughters, with their husbands and children, had moved in at the same time as he did?

  One eyelid slightly raised, his hands still folded on his stomach, sitting stiff-backed in the Louis-Philippe armchair, he was watching the clock, like his secretary next door; but his clock, presented to him by the President of the United States during a state visit to Washington, was a historic piece, which would end up in some museum.

  Unless Les Ebergues were itself to become a museum, as some people were already suggesting, and everything should stay in its place, with Emile as custodian.

  He felt sure Emile had been thinking about it for several years, the way another man might think of his pension. Wasn’t time beginning to drag for him, as he looked forward to the little speech he would make to visitors, to the tips they would slip into his hand on leaving, and the souvenir postcards he might perhaps sell?

  At two minutes to five, fearing Milleran might be the first to move, he put out his hand noiselessly, furtively, and turned the knob on the radio set. The dial lit up, but for a few seconds no sound came. In the next room, for there was no door between it and the Premier’s study, the secretary got to her feet and at the very moment when she came tiptoing in, music blared out, a jazz tune in which the trumpets seemed to be challenging the noise of the storm.

  “I’m sorry . . . ” she murmured.

  “You see, I wasn’t asleep!”

  “I know.”

  Madame Blanche, in such circumstances, would have smiled, sarcastically or disbelievingly. Milleran simply vanished as though she had melted into thin air.

  “At the third pip it will be precisely . . . ”

  It was too early yet for the proper news bulletin, which would be broadcast at a quarter past seven, but there was a short summary of the latest headlines, between two musical programs:

  “This is Paris-Inter calling . . . After devoting last night and this morning to consultations, Monsieur François Bourdieu, Leader of the Socialist Group, was received by the President of the Republic at three o’clock this afternoon and informed him that he was giving up his attempt to form a Cabinet. . . . ”

  The Premier’s face betrayed no sign of his feelings, as he still sat motionless in his armchair, but his fingers were clenched now and the tips had gone whiter.

  The announcer had a cold and coughed twice over the microphone. There came a rustle of papers, then:

  “According to unconfirmed rumors circulating in the corridors of the Chamber, Monsieur Cournot is said to have requested Monsieur Philippe Chalamont, Leader of the Left Independent Group, to visit him late this afternoon, and to be intending to ask him to form a coalition government. . . . Argentina . . . The general strike which was called yesterday at Buenos Aires, and which had brought out about seventy per cent of workers . . . ”

  The voice broke off without warning in the middle of a sentence; at the same time the lights in the study and the neighboring rooms went out, and now there was nothing except the sound of the wind, the dancing firelight.

  He didn’t move. Milleran, next door, struck a match, opened the drawer where she kept a supply of candles, for it was not the first time this had happened.

  There was a brief flash as the lights seemed to be coming on again, the bulbs gave out a cloudy glow, like those of certain night trains, then they faded slowly and it was complete darkness.

  “I’ll bring you a candle at once. . . . ”

  Before she had had time to stick it upright on a china ashtray, a light appeared, moving along a passage that connected the former cowsheds with the kitchen and the rest of the house. This passage, which had not existed in the old days and which the Premier had had built, was known as the tunnel.

  It was Gabrielle, the old cook, who was coming through the tunnel now, brandishing a big oil lamp with pink flowers painted on its globe.

  “The young doctor has just arrived, sir,” announced Gabrielle; she always referred thus to Dr. Gaffé, who was just thirty-two, to distinguish him from Dr. Lalinde.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the kitchen, with Madame Blanche.”

  This made him suddenly angry, perhaps because of the name that had been mentioned on the radio and
the news that had been broadcast.

  “Why did he come in by the kitchen?”

  “Well now, I never asked him!”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re having a chat, while the doctor warms his hands at my stove. After all, he can’t touch you with icy-cold hands.”

  He loathed not being informed of comings and goings in the house.

  “I’ve told you a hundred times . . . ”

  “I know, I know! It’s not me you ought to tell. It’s the people that come; I can’t shut the door of my kitchen in their faces.”

  There was a front door by which Milleran was supposed to let in visitors. It was perfectly visible, being lit by a lantern. But more often than not people would persist in coming in through the kitchen, whence a murmur of unknown voices would suddenly become audible.

  “Tell the doctor I’m waiting.”

  Then he called:

  “Milleran!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is the telephone working?”

  She tried it.

  “Yes, I can hear the click.”

  “Ask the electric company how long it will take them to repair . . . ”

  “Very good, sir . . . ”

  He received Dr. Gaffé in a cold, unsmiling silence which made the doctor, who was shy by nature, feel more awkward than ever.

  “Madame Blanche tells me you went for a walk this morning?”

  The young doctor made this remark in a casual tone while opening his bag, and he received no answer.

  “In weather like this,” the doctor went on, embarrassed, “it was perhaps a little unwise . . . ”

  Madame Blanche came forward to help the Premier out of his coat. He stopped her with a glance, took it off himself, rolled up his shirt sleeve. Milleran’s voice could be heard on the telephone, then she came in to announce:

  “They don’t know yet. There’s been a general breakdown. They think it’s the cable that . . . ”