The President Page 3

  “Leave us.”

  Dr. Gaffé came to see him every day at the same time, and nearly every day he solemnly took his blood pressure.

  The Premier had asked him once:

  “You think it’s necessary?”

  “It’s an excellent precaution.”

  “You make a point of it?”

  Gaffé had got flustered. At his age he still blushed. He was so much in awe of his patient that once when he had to give him an injection he had fumbled so badly that Madame Blanche had been obliged to take the hypodermic away from him.

  “You make a point of it?” the Premier had insisted. “Well, the thing is . . . ”

  “Is what?”

  “I think Professor Fumet makes a point of it.”

  “It’s he who gives you instructions?”

  “Of course.”

  “And he alone?”

  What was the use of forcing the doctor to tell a lie? Fumet himself must have had orders from higher quarters. Because the Premier, while still alive, had become a historical personage, he wasn’t allowed to take care of his health just as he thought fit. They pretended to obey him, the whole pack of them, but who gave them their real orders? And to whom, God knows when, God knows how, did they report?

  Was it also by order that visitors went to the kitchen instead of ringing at the front door?

  Gabrielle had told the truth: Gaffé’s hands were still cold and the Premier thought he looked ridiculous, squeezing the little rubber bulb and staring very solemnly at the needle on the round dial.

  Because he was cross, he deliberately refrained from asking, as he usually did, out of politeness as it were:

  “How much?”

  Nonetheless, Gaffé murmured, his satisfaction no less absurd than his solemnity:

  “Seventeen. . . . ”

  The same as the day before, the day before that, every day for months and months past!

  “Any pain, any discomfort during the night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And your leg?”

  He was feeling his pulse and the Premier couldn’t restrain himself from glaring resentfully at him.

  “No respiratory difficulty?”

  “No respiratory difficulty,” he replied curtly, “and I may as well tell you at once that I made water in the usual way.”

  For he knew that would be the next question.

  “I wonder if this electric failure . . . ” muttered Gaffé.

  Without listening to him, the Premier was putting on his coat, with the same sour expression, taking care to avoid Madame Blanche’s eye, for he did not want to lose his temper.

  Probably because of the electric failure, the consequent silence of the radio which was his only contact with the outside world, he felt like a prisoner in this cottage flattened on the cliff-top, between the black hole of the sea and the black countryside which was not even dotted any longer with the little twinkling lights that indicated the presence of life.

  The oil lamp in his study, the candle in Milleran’s office, its flame wavering with each draft, reminded him of the stickiest evenings in his childhood, when the houses didn’t yet have electric light and gas had not been brought to Evreux.

  Hadn’t Gaffé said something just now about respiratory difficulties? He might have answered that he suddenly felt as though he were being physically and morally smothered.

  He had been shut up at Les Ebergues and the few human beings who surrounded him had become his jailers, whether they wanted to or not.

  He was forgetting that it was he who had left Paris, swearing dramatically that he would never set foot there again, in a sulky mood, because . . . But that was another story. His reasons were his own business, and everybody, papers and politicians alike, had misinterpreted his retirement.

  Was it he who insisted that this young doctor, a nice young fellow, but a silly greenhorn, should come every day from Le Havre to take his blood pressure and ask him some footling questions, always the same ones? Was it he who was forcing two poor devils of police inspectors to live at the inn at Bénouville, and a third to settle at Le Havre with his wife and children, so as to mount guard under the elm beside the gate?

  All right, so he was in a bad temper. These fits of anger had come over him all his life, just as some people feel the blood running to their heads, or some women grow suddenly depressed. For forty years his rages had been the terror not only of his own staff but of many people in high places, including generals, leading magistrates, statesmen.

  The effect on him was the same as that produced on other people by alcohol, which doesn’t always cloud the intelligence but sometimes stimulates it, and his bouts of ill-temper didn’t throw him off his course. Far from it!

  The electric failure was going to last, he knew it was. He didn’t go so far as to suggest that they had engineered it on purpose, though that would have been perfectly possible.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow at the same time, Premier . . . ” faltered the doctor, whom Madame Blanche was about to escort through the tunnel again.

  “Not that way!” he protested. “By the proper door, please.”

  “I beg your pardon. . . . ”

  “Not at all.”

  It was he who went to the tunnel, and called out:

  “Emile!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bring the car under the window and fix it like last time. You can manage it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Get it going by seven o’clock, if the lights haven’t come on again.”

  “I’ll see to it at once.”

  At that moment the telephone rang. Milleran’s flat voice could be heard saying:

  “Les Ebergues, yes . . . Who is speaking? . . . A call from the Elysée? . . . Just a moment, please. . . . Hold on. . . . ”

  He suspected nothing, let himself be caught, as on previous occasions.

  “Hello?”

  As soon as he heard the voice he understood, but all the same he listened to the end.

  “That you, Augustin?”

  A pause, as usual.

  “Xavier here. . . . You’d better hurry, old chap. . . . Don’t forget I’ve promised to be at your funeral, and here I am in hospital again. . . . ”

  A whinnying laugh. Silence. At last, a click.

  Milleran had understood.

  “I beg your pardon,” she stuttered, taking the blame on herself and fading into the semidarkness of her office.

  CHAPTER 2

  HE HAD A BOOK ON HIS KNEES, the Memoires de Sully, but he was not turning the pages, and Milleran, her ear cocked in the next room, was about to come in and make sure the oil lamp was giving him enough light, when he spoke to her. He would sometimes keep silent for two hours and then give her an order or ask her a question as though she’d been sitting in front of him, and he felt so sure of her that he would not have forgiven any lapse in her attention.

  “Ask the post office where that call came from.”

  “I’ll do it at once, sir.”

  Still staring at the page of his book, he heard her at the telephone, and she soon informed him, without leaving her chair:

  “Evreux.”

  “Thank you.”

  He had suspected as much. Yet Xavier Malate’s last call, two months earlier, had come from Strasbourg; the previous one, much further back, from the Hopital Cochin in Paris.

  In the whole course of his life the Premier had avoided forming an attachment to anybody, not so much from principle, or from hardheartedness, as to safeguard his independence, which he prized above all else. The only woman he ever married came into his life for a brief three years, long enough to bear him one daughter, and that daughter, now a woman of forty-five, married, with a son in his first year of Law School, had always been a stranger to him.


  He was eighty-two years old. All he wanted now was peace, and that he thought he had attained. Strangely enough, the only human being who still clung to him and had the power, at a distance, to disturb him so much that he couldn’t read, was a man for whom he cared nothing, now or at any other time.

  Was this Malate’s importance due to the fact that of all the members of his own generation with whom he had had any degree of intimacy, he was the sole survivor?

  Malate used to declare confidently, as though announcing a certainty:

  “I’ll be at your funeral.”

  He himself had been in hospital a dozen times, in Paris and elsewhere. A dozen times the doctors had given him only a few weeks to live. Each time he’d bounced up again, returned to the surface, and he was still there, with his obsession about outliving his old schoolfellow.

  A long time ago somebody had said:

  “He’s a harmless imbecile.”

  The speaker, whoever he was, had been astonished by the reaction of the Premier, whose cordiality had suddenly vanished as he answered curtly, as though touched on the raw:

  “There is no such thing as a harmless imbecile.”

  After a pause he had added, as though he had been wondering whether to speak his mind to the full:

  “There is no such thing as an imbecile.”

  He had proffered no further explanation. It was difficult to put into words. Underlying a certain kind of stupidity, he suspected something Machiavellian that frightened him. He refused to believe it could be unconscious.

  By what right had Xavier Malate irrupted into his life and stubbornly kept his place there? What feelings or thought processes prompted him to the tricks, never twice the same, that brought his boyhood friend to the telephone to listen to the mean message he delivered in his harsh voice?

  The Premier knew the hospital, in the Rue Saint-Louis at Evreux, from which this latest call had been made. It was only a few yards from the house where Malate’s father had had his printing works, at the corner of the next street, to be precise.

  He and Xavier had been at the town lycée, in the same form; and it must have been in the third form, when they were both a little over thirteen years old, that the thing had happened.

  Later on, Malate had claimed that it was the future Cabinet Minister and Premier who had had the original idea. That was possible, but by no means certain, for the Premier himself could not remember making the suggestion, which didn’t seem like him.

  All the same, he had joined in the conspiracy. At that time they had an English master whose name he had now forgotten, like those of at least half his schoolmates, in spite of the important part the man had played in his life for four years.

  He could still see him pretty clearly, however, short, badly dressed, always wearing a black jacket too big for him and shiny with age, his hair hanging in gray elf-locks under his bowler hat. He reminded one of a priest, especially as he was a bachelor and was perpetually reading a black-bound volume of Shakespeare that looked like a breviary.

  He seemed very old to the boys, but he could not have been more than fifty-five to sixty, and his mother was still alive; he used to visit her at Rouen from Saturday evening to Monday morning.

  People called him an imbecile too, because he conducted classes without appearing to see his pupils, for whom he seemed to feel a lofty contempt, if not a measure of disgust, and his only reaction if one of them grew restless, was to give him two hundred lines.

  It was too late to find out what he had really been like, what he used to think.

  The practical joke had taken some time to prepare, for success depended on the most careful planning. With the help of an old workman employed by his father, Xavier Malate had undertaken the hardest part, the setting up and printing of about fifty invitations to the teacher’s funeral, on paper with a deep black border.

  These had been posted one Saturday evening, for delivery on the Sunday morning, for in those days letters were still delivered on Sundays. They had made quite sure that the English master had set out by train for Rouen, whence he would return at seven minutes past eight on the Monday morning, in time to drop his bag at home before his first lesson at nine o’clock.

  He lived in a humble street, on the first floor, above one of those local grocer’s shops whose windows display jars of sweets, tinned foods, a few vegetables, and whose door rings a bell as it opens.

  The funeral invitations had said that the coffin would be fetched at half past eight, and they had managed, heaven knows how, to get the hearse used for paupers’ burials in front of the house on the minute.

  Some ingenuity had been displayed in selecting the people to whom the invitations were sent: several town councilors, other local authorities, some shopkeepers who supplied the lycée, and even the parents of a few younger boys, who were not in the secret.

  The conspirators had not been there, since they had a class at eight o’clock. What exactly had happened? The Premier, though he remembered the preparations in some detail, had entirely forgotten what occurred afterwards and could only depend on what Malate had told him, years later.

  In any case there had been no English lesson that morning. The master had stayed away for over a week, ill, so they said. The headmaster had opened an inquiry. Malate’s guilt had been easily proved, and for several days there had been speculation as to whether he would give away his accomplices.

  He had held his tongue, thus becoming a kind of hero. A hero never seen at the lycée again, by the way, for in spite of wirepulling by his father, who was the printer of the little local paper, he had been expelled and sent to boarding school at Chartres.

  Was it true that he had run away from there, been found by the police at Le Havre, where he was trying to stowaway on board a ship, sent as an apprentice to an uncle who had an import business at Marseilles?

  It was perfectly possible, and of no real importance. For the next thirty years, as far as the Premier was concerned, Malate had ceased to exist, like the English master and so many of his other schoolfellows.

  He had met him again when he was forty-two years old, a Cabinet Minister for the first time, at the Ministry of Public Works in the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  Every day for a week, at about ten in the morning, the office messenger had brought him a slip bearing the name X. Malate, with the space left for the purpose of visit filled in by the words “Strictly personal,” underlined twice.

  In his memory the name was vaguely associated with a face, hair that needed cutting, and thin legs, but that was all.

  Seven times running he had told the messenger:

  “Say I’m at a meeting.”

  The eighth time he had given way. As a Deputy, he had learned by experience that the only hope of getting rid of a certain type of pest is by seeing them. He remembered an old lady, always dressed in black, with a wheezy dog tucked under her arm, who had haunted various government offices day after day for two years, trying to get her brother into the Académie Française.

  Malate had come into the rather austere-looking office, and the thin, knobby-kneed lad had grown to be a tall, fat man with the unhealthy red face of a heavy drinker and bulging eyes. Very much at ease, he held out his hand as though they had seen each other only the day before.

  “How are you, Augustin, old boy?”

  “Sit down.”

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “I do.”

  “Well then?”

  His eye had a slightly aggressive glint, which meant, of course:

  “So now you’re a Minister you cut your old pals?”

  At ten o’clock in the morning he already smelled of drink, and though his suit was well tailored it showed traces of the kind of bohemian negligence that the Premier detested.

  “Don’t be frightened, Augustin. I’m not going to waste your time. I know it’s valuable
, and I’ve not got much to ask you. . . . ”

  “It’s true, I’m extremely busy.”

  “Heavens! I realize that all right. Since we left Evreux, I first, you’ll remember, a lot of time has gone by and we’ve grown from kids into men. You’ve done well, and I congratulate you. I’ve not done so badly either, I’m married, I have two kids, and if I can get just the slightest bit of help, everything will be grand. . . . ”

  In cases like this the Premier turned to ice, not so much from hardness of heart as from clear-sightedness. He had realized that, whatever one did for him, Xavier Malate would all his life be in need of just a bit more help.

  “A contract for enlarging the harbor at Algiers is to be given out next month, and it just so happens that I work in a big engineering concern in which my brother-in-law is a partner. . . . ”

  A surreptitious touch on the bell warned the messenger, who promptly opened the door.

  “Take Monsieur Malate to see Monsieur Beurant.”

  Malate must have got the wrong idea, for he broke into effusive gratitude:

  “Thank you, old man. I knew I could count on you. You realize, don’t you, that if it hadn’t been for me you’d have been expelled from school too, and then you’d probably not be here now? Ah, well! Honesty is the best policy, whatever they may say. I suppose it’s practically in the bag?”

  “No.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “That you must put your case before the head of the contracts department.”

  “But you’ll explain to him that . . . ”

  “I’m going to ring through and ask him to give you ten minutes. That’s all.”

  He had eventually used “tu” to him, after all, and regretted it as a weakness, almost a piece of cowardice.

  Later on he had received nauseating letters in which talked about his wife, who had twice attempted suicide, and so he daren’t leave her alone any more, his children who hadn’t enough to eat and couldn’t go to school because they had no decent clothes.

  He had stopped asking for a government contract, but was pleading for help of any kind, for a job, however humble, even as a lock-keeper or as watchman on road works.