The President Read online

  Malate had no suspicion that his former Evreux schoolfellow had asked for his police record from the Rue des Saussaies, and he persisted, his letters growing steadily longer and more tedious, or more harrowing.

  He had been inditing such letters, which were nearly all on café notepaper, for over twenty years, sometimes changing his victim, occasionally achieving his aim, and though he had married and was a father, he had deserted his wife and children ten years ago.

  “He’s here again, sir,” the messenger would announce from time to time.

  Malate altered his tactics, taking to hanging around the ministerial building, looking seedy and unshaven, in the hope that his one-time schoolmate would take pity on him.

  One morning his former friend had walked straight up to him and declared curtly:

  “The next time I see you anywhere near here, I’ll have you arrested.”

  In the course of his career he had disappointed other hopes, had shown himself unrelenting to quite a number of people.

  Malate was the only one who had taken a kind of revenge, and the years had not softened his hatred.

  He had succeeded up to a point, for on several occasions the Premier had approached the Rue des Saussaies to find out where he was.

  “I’m in hospital at Dakar with a stiff bout of malaria. But you needn’t gloat. I shan’t peg out this time, because I’ve sworn I’ll be at your funeral.”

  He really was at Dakar. Then in prison at Bordeaux, where he’d been given twelve months for writing rubber checks. From there he had written, on a sheet of prison paper:

  “Life’s a funny thing! One man becomes a Cabinet Minister, another becomes a convict.”

  The word “convict” was exaggerated, but dramatic.

  “All the same, I’ll be at your funeral.”

  The office of Premier didn’t intimidate him, and in fact it was to the Hôtel Matignon that he first began to telephone, giving the name of some politician or celebrity.

  “Xavier here . . . Well? How does it feel to be Premier? . . . All the same, you know, I’ll still be at your. . . ”

  The electric lights had not come on again, and Milleran, too, had an oil lamp now. The treacly-looking circles of light in the dusky rooms recalled his old home at Evreux. The Premier even remembered, all of a sudden, the peculiar smell his father’s clothes used to have when he got home, for, being the local doctor, an odor of camphor and phenol used to trail around with him. Of red wine, too.

  “Call up and find out what’s happening about the electricity.”

  She tried, announced before long:

  “The telephone’s cut off as well, now.”

  Gabrielle appeared, to announce:

  “Dinner is ready, sir.”

  “I’m coming at once. . . . ”

  He didn’t feel he was to blame about Malate, and he was only annoyed with himself for allowing his former friend’s threat to get on his nerves. He, who believed in nothing except a certain human dignity he could hardly have put into words, in freedom too, at any rate in a measure of freedom of thought, was beginning to suspect Xavier Malate of having baleful powers.

  Logically, considering the unhealthy life he had been leading for forty years and more now, the printer’s son should have been dead. Not a year went by without his paying a visit, long or short, to some hospital or other. He had even been found to have tuberculosis and sent to a mountain sanatorium where patients died every week, and from which he had emerged cured.

  He had had three or four operations, the last two for cancer of the throat, and now, going round and round in imperceptibly diminishing circles, he was back at his starting point, Evreux, as though he had decided to die in his native town.

  “Milleran!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Call up the hospital at Evreux tomorrow and ask them to read you the record of a man called Xavier Malate.”

  It was not the first time she had dealt with the matter, and she asked no questions. Through the window Emile could be heard, bringing the Rolls alongside the house. The black limousine, with its old-fashioned wheels, was more than twenty years old, but like so many other things in this place it belonged, as it were, to the Premier’s personality. It had been presented to him by the Lord Mayor of London, on behalf of the citizens of the English capital, when he had been given the Freedom of the City.

  Walking slowly, with his hands behind his back, he went along the tunnel to the dining room, with its blackened beams, where a solitary place was laid on a long, narrow table that Came from some former convent or monastery.

  Here too the walls were whitewashed, as they are in the poorest villager’s cottage, and there was not a single picture or ornament; the floor was paved with the same gray, worn flagstones as the kitchen.

  An oil lamp stood in the middle of the table, and it was not Gabrielle who served, but young Marie, taken on two years ago when she was only sixteen.

  The first day he had heard her asking Gabrielle:

  “What time’s the old boy have his dinner?”

  He would never be anything more to her than “the old boy.” She had heavy breasts, her dress was too tight, and on her weekly day off she made herself up like a tart. Looking out of his window one evening, the Premier had seen her under the elm, her skirts hitched up to her waist, her hands behind her clutching the trunk of the tree, placidly satisfying the needs of one of the policemen. He was doubtless not the only one, and in the overheated rooms she gave off a strong feminine odor.

  “Do you think it’s proper, sir, for you to have a girl like that here?”

  His only answer to Gabrielle’s question had been a rather melancholy:

  “Why not?”

  After all, in earlier days hadn’t he occasionally come across Gabrielle in intimate converse with a delivery man, and once with a policeman in uniform?

  “I can’t understand you. You let her do whatever she likes. She’s the only person in the house who’s never scolded.”

  Perhaps that was because he didn’t expect her to be faithful or devoted, only to do the heavy work for which he had engaged her. Perhaps, too, because she was eighteen years old, healthy, sturdy, and common, and the last person of that type that he was likely to have about him?

  She represented a generation about which he knew nothing, to which he was and would remain just the old boy.

  His dinner was always the same, having been prescribed once and for all by Professor Fumet, and Marie had found that astounding, too: a poached egg on dry toast, a glass of milk, a bit of cottage cheese, and some fresh fruit.

  He had ceased long ago to feel this as a privation. He even felt surprised, almost disgusted, at the thought that intelligent men, with serious problems to solve every day of their lives, could bother about food and, in the company of pretty women, so much enjoy talking about it.

  One day when he had been walking with Emile down a street at Rouen, he had stopped short outside a food shop and gazed for a long time at the trussed fowls, a pheasant en geleé still decked with its many-colored tail, a ewe-lamb lying on a bed of fresh, costly greenstuff.

  “What do you think of that?”

  “They say it’s the best shop in Rouen.”

  He had spoken for his own benefit, not for Emile’s:

  “Man is the only animal who finds it necessary to decorate the corpses of his victims in order to whet his appetite. Look at those neat rounds of truffle slipped under the skin of the capons to make a symmetrical pattern, that cooked pheasant with his beak and tail so artistically put back in place. . . . ”

  It was twenty-five years since he had last smoked a cigarette, and only rarely was he allowed a glass of champagne.

  He didn’t rebel, felt no bitterness. He obeyed his doctors, though not for fear of dying, for death had long since ceased to frighten him. He lived with it in an inti
mate relationship which, if not cheerful, was at least resigned.

  He had been mistaken just now in thinking that he and Xavier Malate were the only survivors of their generation. Unless Eveline had died since his last birthday. She was a sort of counterbalance to the printer’s son. His recollection of her was rather vague, although he’d been in love with her when he was about twelve years old.

  Her father had kept the ironmonger’s shop in the Rue Saint-Louis, nearly opposite the lycée, and she’d been two or three years older than himself, so she would be about eighty-five now.

  Had he ever spoken to her? Two or three times, perhaps. He wasn’t even sure, at that, that he wasn’t mixing her up with sher sister or some other little girl in the district. On the other hand, he was positive that she’d had red hair, fiery red, was thin and lanky, with two pigtails hanging down her back, and wore a pinafore with small red checks.

  She had waited before writing to him, not only till he became a Minister but until he was Prime Minister, on the eve of an international conference where the destiny of France was at stake, or so people believed, as they always do. Didn’t he believe so himself at the time?

  Eveline didn’t ask him for anything, but sent him an envelope containing a little medal from Lourdes, with a note saying:

  “I shall pray that you may succeed in your task. This will help you to save the country.

  “The little girl from the Rue Saint-Louis—

  “Eveline ARCHAMBAULT.”

  She had never married, presumably, for Archambault was the name he could see in his mind’s eye, in big black letters above the ironmongery. When she sent him this little token she was well over fifty, and the address on the back of the envelope showed that she still lived in the same street, the same house.

  She was there to this day. He sometimes imagined her, a little old woman dressed in black, trotting along, close to the house walls, on her way to early mass on some gray morning.

  Since that first medal she had formed the habit of sending him birthday wishes every year, and the envelope always contained some pious object, a rosary, a religious picture, an Agnus Dei.

  He had made inquiries through the Prefecture, learned that she was quite well provided for, and had sent her a signed photograph.

  The glass panel in the door between the dining room and the kitchen was covered with a red-checked curtain, in the style of a village inn. He could see Gabrielle’s shadow moving to and fro on the other side. Madame Blanche had already left, for it was Emile who helped the Premier to get to bed. The telephone had been installed in the house where she lodged, at the near end of the village, and she took her meals at Bignon’s inn, known nowadays as the Hôtel Bignon, where the policemen put up.

  He heard Emile’s footsteps, then caught sight of his shadow against the curtain, as he came into the kitchen from out of doors, announcing:

  “All right now! It’s working.”

  “What’s working?” Gabrielle mumbled.

  “The radio.”

  The old cook wasn’t interested in the radio; she went on grilling herrings for the servants’ supper, while Emile slumped down on the bench and poured himself a glass of cider.

  Since five o’clock the Premier had been deliberately avoiding the thought of Chalamont, who had been mentioned in the Paris-Inter broadcast, and the telephone call had come like a dispensation of Providence to take his mind off the subject. In any case he had trained himself to accomplish that feat easily: to turn his thoughts in a given direction and prevent them from straying in any other.

  It was too soon to think about Philippe Chalamont, for there were only rumors so far, and even if the President of the Republic asked him to form a Cabinet, Chalamont would not necessarily agree.

  Young Marie stood behind him, vacant-eyed, watching him eat; she could hardly have looked sloppier, and it was obvious she would never learn, but would end up sooner or later in her right place, as a barmaid in some harborside café at Fécamp or Le Havre.

  “Will Monsieur take a tisane?”

  “I always take a tisane.”

  He went off, with hunched shoulders, not knowing what to do with his arms, which, now that his body had shrunk, had become too long. He used to say to himself:

  “If man is descended from the apes I must be returning to my origin, for I look more and more like a gorilla.”

  Emile had put the loud-speaker on the table, with the extension cord going out through the window frame and connected up with the car radio. When the time came for the news, he would only have to switch on. Emile had thought of this himself, during their first year at Les Ebergues. With a storm just like tonight’s blowing, the electricity had failed in the middle of an unusually violent debate in the U.N.

  The Premier, furious, was prowling around his office, lit, as now, by an oil lamp, except that they hadn’t yet found a globe for it, when Emile had knocked on the door.

  “If you will allow me, sir, I would like to make a suggestion. Have you thought of the radio in the car, sir?”

  On that occasion he had gone out in the dark, swathed in a rug made of wildcat skins—it was a present from the Canadians—and sat in the back of the Rolls, with the dial of the radio as his only light, until the midnight news.

  Since then Emile, who enjoyed playing the handyman, had improved the system, bought a second loud-speaker which only needed connecting with the radio set.

  There was no electric failure in Paris, and they probably didn’t realize that in Normandy the storm was bringing down trees, telegraph poles, and chimneys. Journalists and photographers were mounting guard in the courtyard of the Elysée, where it was raining, and in the corridors and bar of the Chamber little knots of overexcited Deputies were forming in the window nooks.

  An anxious calm would be reigning in the Ministries, where every crisis improved or endangered the prospects of promotion of hundreds of civil servants, and the Prefects, each in his own fief, would be waiting with equal anxiety for the seven-fifteen news.

  For forty years, on such occasions, it had invariably been his name that had been put forward in the last resort. He had usually remained secluded in his flat on the Quai Malaquais, the one he had moved into when first called to the Bar.

  Milleran had not been his secretary in those days. She was still a little girl, and in her place, waiting silently in the room with him, ready to jump on the telephone, there had been an ungainly young man with a pointed nose, whose name was Chalamont.

  There was a difference of twenty years in their ages, and it had been curious to see how the secretary took on the gait, voice, posture, and even the mannerisms of his chief. Over the telephone it was so marked that most people were taken in and addressed him as “Minister.” Wasn’t it even stranger, perhaps, to note that the face of this lad of twenty-five was as impassive as that of a middle-aged man who had had many years to harden him?

  Was it because of this mimicry, because one could feel that his admiration was intensely sincere, that the Premier had kept him on, carrying him along from one Ministry to the next, first as attaché, then as secretary, finally as Principal Private Secretary?

  Chalamont was now Deputy for the sixteenth arrondissement, and lived with his wife, who had brought him a large fortune, in a flat overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. He didn’t need to make a living out of politics, but he stuck to the political world from choice, some people said as a vice, for he was a savage fighter.

  And yet, though he was the leader of quite a large group, he had only once been in the Cabinet, and then only for three days.

  Wasn’t it characteristic of him that on that occasion he had chosen to be Minister of the Interior, and have the police records at his disposal?

  What the public, and a good many political men, did not know was that during those three days there had been an almost uninterrupted series of telephone calls between Les Ebergu
es and Paris, and that Bénouville had noticed an unusual number of cars whose number plates indicated that they came from the Seine Department, all making for the house on the cliff.

  On the morning when the new government had presented itself in the Chamber there had been no electric failure, and the old man of Les Ebergues had been listening, with a gleam of ever-increasing satisfaction in his eyes, to the course of the debate.

  The proceedings had lasted just three hours, and the newborn government had been defeated before Chalamont had even had time to move into his office in the Place Beauvau.

  Was the Premier still as powerful as that today? Hadn’t people rather forgotten the statesman who had retired haughtily to the Normandy coast and whom children, learning about him at school, imagined to have died long ago?

  “May I go to dinner, sir?”

  “By all means, Milleran. Tell Emile to turn on the radio at ten past seven.”

  “Will you need me?”

  “Not this evening. Good night.”

  She had a room between Gabrielle’s and Emile’s, above the kitchen, and young Marie slept in a small ground-floor room, once a storeroom, which had had a window put in its outside wall.

  Alone in the book-lined rooms, only two of which had any light this evening, the Premier moved slowly from one to another, scrutinizing certain shelves, certain bindings, now and then running his finger along the top of a volume. One day young Marie had caught him at this kind of suspicious inspection, and she had asked:

  “Have I left some dust?”

  He had turned slowly toward her, had given her a long stare before replying briefly:

  “No.”

  It might be she, it might be Milleran, or even Emile, and he wouldn’t allow himself to suspect one of them rather than another. He had known about it for months, and felt sure there must be at least two of them hunting, one inside the house and one outside, possibly one of the detectives.

  He had been neither surprised nor annoyed, and at first it had rather amused him.

  For a man who had nothing left to do except die in a manner worthy of the legend that had grown up around him, this was an unhoped-for diversion.