The President Read online

  Gabrielle, whose surname was Mitaine, and who came from the Nièvre, had been married. Widowed at forty, left with one little boy, she had come into his service, and even now she went once a month to Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, to see her son, who was now a man of forty-nine, married, with three children, and worked as head steward in a dining car on the Paris-Ventimiglia line.

  Gabrielle was just turned seventy-two. Didn’t the thought of death probably haunt her far more than it did her master?

  As for young Marie, she would hardly remember the years she had spent working for the “old boy.”

  Perhaps it would be Madame Blanche who’d remember him longest, although he was more often gruff with her than with any of the others.

  In point of fact there were just two people with whom he was on close terms, to whom he really mattered, two who were poles apart and offset each other, so to speak: Xavier Malate, who pursued him with a hatred as tenacious as unrequited love, and was clinging to life so as not to leave it before he did; Eveline, the sandy-haired girl in the Rue Saint-Louis, who, after losing sight of him for sixty years and more, was now sending him consecrated medals every year.

  His daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandson didn’t count, they had never been part of his existence. They were outsiders, almost strangers.

  As for Chalamont . . .

  Was he really driving toward Le Havre at this moment? Was the Premier right to be going to bed, when he might perhaps have to get up again at any moment?

  “If they come, what room shall I show them into?”

  He hesitated for a second. He didn’t want to leave Chalamont alone in the studies. This house was not a Ministry, there were no ushers and no waiting room. When a visitor arrived, Milleran left him to wait in one of the book-lined rooms.

  At least one visitor came almost every day. Usually only one was allowed, on Professor Fumet’s advice, for despite his apparent coldness he exerted himself too much for his guests.

  Milleran would say warningly to the newcomer, the moment she let him in:

  “Don’t keep the Premier for more than half an hour. The doctors say he mustn’t tire himself.”

  Those who arrived like this, or at least those who gained admission, were statesmen from almost every country in the world, historians, university professors, students.

  They all had questions to ask. Some of them, those who were writing a book about him, or a thesis, brought along imposing lists of specific questions.

  Almost invariably he began the conversation grudgingly, finding it irksome, and seemed to withdraw into his shell.

  Then, after a few minutes, he grew lively, and not every visitor noticed that he was now asking the questions instead of submitting to them.

  Some people, when the half-hour was up, would conscientiously prepare to take their leave. Or Milleran would appear, silently, in the doorless opening between the two studies.

  “We shan’t be a minute. . . . ”

  The minute would stretch out, the half-hour would become an hour, two hours, and sometimes one of these passing visitors, much to his surprise, would be asked to stay to lunch.

  This exhausted the Premier, but it cheered him up, and when he was alone again with Milleran he would rub his hands gleefully.

  “He came here to pick my brains, and I’ve been picking his!”

  At other times he would inquire jokingly, before an appointment:

  “Whom am I to put on my act for today?”

  There was some truth in the jest.

  “I have to take care of my statue!” he had declared once, in a gay mood.

  Without admitting it even to himself, he did take an interest in the impression he was to leave behind him, and there were occasions when the surly retorts for which he was celebrated were not entirely sincere, but formed part of his act. At such times he wouldn’t have Milleran around, for he felt rather ashamed of himself in front of her, just as in front of Madame Blanche he felt ashamed of his weakened body.

  “Do you need anything else, sir?”

  The old man glanced around him. The bottle of water and the glass were in the usual place; so was the sleeping tablet he took every night. The tiny, flat light was switched on. The oil lamp was ready to replace it if need be.

  “Good night, sir. I hope I shan’t have to disturb you before morning. . . . ”

  The central light went out, Emile’s footsteps drew further away, the kitchen door opened and closed again, and the room was left to silence and solitude, rendered almost intangible by contrast with the storm outside.

  Since he had grown old, he scarcely felt the need of sleep, and for years he had lain in bed like this, for two or three hours every evening, quite still, his eyes shut, in a state of suspended animation.

  It was not exactly insomnia. He felt neither annoyance nor impatience and it was by no means disagreeable. Far from it! During the day he sometimes thought with pleasure of the moment when he would thus be left to his own company.

  Now he had taken to the little glowing disk it was still more pleasant, for its pinkish light helped, even through his closed eyelids, to create an atmosphere of secret, inner life.

  At such times everything softened and mingled, the walls, the furniture, every gleam on which was known to him, the familiar objects he saw without looking at them, whose weight and substance even seemed palpable, the wind, the rain, the cry of a night bird or the sound of the waves at the foot of. the cliff, the creak of a shutter, the movements of somebody undressing in one of the bedrooms, everything, even to the stars twinkling in the silent sky, played its part in a symphony of which he, as he lay apparently inert, was the center and to which his heart beat time.

  Was this how death would come, taking him unawares on some not far-distant night? He knew that everybody in the household was expecting to find him, one morning, cold and stiff in his bed. He knew, too, that old people often did die in their sleep, unawares.

  He sensed that Milleran’s fear was rather that it would happen at nightfall, while he sat, dozing as it seemed, in his armchair, hands folded on his stomach.

  In bed, too, he took that position, the attitude of a dead man prepared for his last journey, and he didn’t do it on purpose, but because his body had gradually come to find it comfortable and natural.

  Was that a portent?

  He didn’t believe in portents. He refused to believe in anything, even in the value of his lifework. At least ten times in the course of his life he had felt bound to make a superhuman effort, believing it to be indispensable, and for weeks, months, years he had led a hectic existence, pursuing his objective in the teeth of universal opposition.

  On those occasions his energy, his vigorous metabolism, which used to amaze Professor Fumet, would spread not only to his immediate collaborators and to the Chamber, but to the whole country, to the invisible nation, which, after a period of mistrust and uncertainty, would be surprised to find itself following him blindly.

  Because of this almost biological faculty, it was always at difficult, desperate moments that he was called in.

  How often he had heard the same words uttered by a Head of State driven to the last ditch: “Save France . . . ” or: “Save the Republic . . . ” or perhaps: “Save freedom . . . ”

  Every crisis had found him with faith unimpaired, for without that he could have done nothing, a faith so firm that he could sacrifice everything for it, not only himself but others, which had often been harder.

  Cold sweat broke out on him even now, he still felt physically unwell, when he recalled his first action as Minister of the Interior; he saw himself, in a black, relentless setting of coal mines and blast furnaces, holding a final parley, all alone between men on strike, whose leaders had turned them into rioters with hate-filled hearts, and the soldiers he had called in.

  All the time he was trying to make himself
heard, his voice had been drowned by jeering. Then, when he had stopped, a somber and probably grotesque figure, his arms falling helplessly to his sides, there had been a long, vibrant silence, betraying irresolution, hesitation.

  The two camps were watching each other closely, defying each other, and suddenly, as though at a signal—it was proved afterwards that there actually was a signal—bricks, cobblestones, and scraps of cast iron came flying through the air, while the soldiers’ horses began to whinny and paw the ground.

  He knew he would be blamed for his decision to the end of his life, that tomorrow, and for many a long day, most of his countrymen would curse him.

  He knew, too, that it was necessary.

  “Colonel, give the order to charge.”

  A week later there were posters on the walls showing him with a hideous grin and with blood dripping from his hands, and the government was overthrown.

  But order had been preserved.

  Ten times, twenty times, he had withdrawn from the limelight in this way, having completed his task, and had sat, grumpy and silent, on the opposition benches, until he was needed again.

  On one occasion some man or other, a nonentity, a kind of Xavier Malate, had come to ask him for a job to which he had no right and, on being refused, had put a bullet through his head in the waiting room, as he left his office.

  For some time now, on the advice of his doctors—his Three Musketeers—he had been taking a light sedative at bedtime, which didn’t send him off to sleep at once, but brought on a gradual, delicious drowsiness to which he had grown accustomed.

  Sometimes he didn’t swallow it immediately, but gave himself the pleasure of prolonging, for half an hour or more, his clearheaded wakefulness, his conversation with himself. He had begun to hoard his life. He felt he had a whole lot of problems left to solve, not only with calm and composure, but in the completely dispassionate mood that he could achieve only at night, in bed.

  This was the most secret of all his tasks, concerning no one except himself; he would have liked to finish it before taking his departure, leaving nothing obscure, looking everything straight in the face. Was it not to help himself in this that he had begun to read so many volumes of memoirs, confessions, private diaries?

  Coming to the end of one of these books, he was invariably disappointed, irritated, feeling the author had cheated. He wanted pure truth, truth in the raw, as he was trying to find it in his own case, even if it turned out to be sickening or repugnant.

  But all the writers he had come across had arranged their material, he was far enough on in life to know that. All of them held, believed they held or pretended to hold, a truth, and he, despite his grim search for truth, had not found it.

  Just now, hearing Chalamont’s voice over the radio, he had been compelled to brace himself. Had he felt any doubt about being in the right when, in his office in the Hôtel Matignon, he had dictated that letter of infamy which his assistant, bathed in sweat so that the whole room stank of it, had taken down, to the last word, and signed?

  If he had needed further proof than that submissiveness, he received more than enough in the next few days, when discreet investigation by the Ministry of Finance revealed the fact that Vollard’s Bank had been behind the last-minute speculation which had cost the country thousands of million of francs.

  Vollard’s Bank, in the Rue Vivienne, little known to the general public, was a private firm, working in close co-operation with one of the biggest financial concerns in Wall Street, and Etienne Vollard, its Chairman, was Chalamont’s father-in-law.

  Didn’t the Premier, aware of this family connection, bear a heavy responsibility for taking his assistant to the luncheon party at Melun and insisting that he should be present?

  Not for an instant had it occurred to him that Chalamont might betray him. In Ascain’s garden, whether before the skittle game or afterwards, he had felt as sure of his assistant as of himself.

  Looking at it more closely, his confidence had been in the mission rather than the individual. It all tied up with what he had said to Furnet, in the Avenue Friedland. He had felt certain that Chalamont had once and for all crossed the invisible frontier beyond which the individual man ceases to count, all that matters being the task he has set himself.

  That day, the day of the dictation, the Premier’s world had tottered and almost collapsed.

  He remembered how, the letter written, his Secretary had made for the door and clutched the handle. The idea that he might commit suicide, as the unsuccessful petitioner had done, had not occurred to him and would anyhow not have influenced him.

  “Stay here!”

  Chalamont still had his back turned, would not wheel around and face him, but he did stop where he was.

  “It is impossible for me at present, and will be for some time, to accept your resignation or to kick you out.”

  He spoke rapidly, in an undertone, jerking out the syllables.

  “Imperative reasons make it impossible, unfortunately, for me to bring you into the courts, with your father-in-law and his accomplices.”

  It was true that legal proceedings, with the resultant scandal, at such a moment, would have destroyed public confidence and led to even greater tragedy.

  That, much more than the personal disappointment he had suffered, was the reason for his resentment against Chalamont. The latter knew that whatever might happen, they would have to shelter him, keep quiet, cover up the matter. Vollard’s Bank had been gambling on a certainty, and Etienne Vollard, with his pearl-gray top hat, would be seen tomorrow in the owners’ stand at Longchamp or Auteuil, where he had horses running. If he won the President of the Republic’s Stakes the week after next, the Head of the State could hardly avoid shaking hands with him and congratulating him!

  “Until further notice you will carry out your duties as usual, and in public there will be no change in our relationship.”

  This strain had gone on for a fortnight, though the Premier had been so busy that he could give little thought to his assistant.

  When they were alone he avoided speaking to him and, if forced to do so, gave him his instructions in an impersonal tone.

  On several occasions Chalamont had opened his mouth as though tormented by the need to say something, and at such times he would gaze pathetically at his chief.

  He was no longer a boy, a young man, or even what is known as a budding politician. He was a mature man, his face already lined, and this made his humility disgusting rather than tragic.

  How was he behaving in the evening, at dinner with his wife? What had he said to his father-in-law and his partners? What thoughts were revolving in his head when he got into his car and told the chauffeur, seated in front of him, to drive to the Hôtel Matignon?

  One morning the Premier found on his desk a letter addressed in his Principal Secretary’s writing, and as Chalamont was not there, he left it untouched until the man came in; then he picked up the unopened envelope, holding it between finger and thumb, and tore it into small pieces which he dropped into the wastepaper basket.

  Now they were to have their last conversation. It was brief. Without deigning to glance at the other man, as he stood at the far side of the desk, he said:

  “From now on you are relieved of your duties with me.” Chalamont did not move, and his chief, picking up a file, added:

  “I was forgetting. . . . You can consider our acquaintance at an end. . . . You may go now.”

  He had opened the file and picked up the red pencil he used for making notes on documents.

  “I said, you may go now!”

  “You absolutely refuse to listen to me?”

  “Absolutely. Leave the room, please.”

  Lying in bed, he started, for he heard a noise outside. Straining his ears, he recognized the footsteps of one of the policemen, who was stamping his feet to warm them.

&nbs
p; During the last week poor Cournot had appealed to all the political leaders in succession. Some had refused outright. Others had opened negotiations which had dragged on for a day or two. On those occasions arrangements had taken shape, names had been mentioned, lists of probable Ministers had even been put forward, but then each time the structure collapsed at the last moment and the party leaders again began to file through the Elysée.

  But where others had failed, Chalamont had a chance of success. His group was a small one, but influential because of its position, halfway between the center and the left, and it had the further advantage of not being committed to any hard-and-fast policy. Moreover, at a time when the different parties held divergent views about economic questions and about wages, the public found something reassuring about the Left Independents.

  Among Chalamont’s other trump cards were his adaptability, his skill in trimming his sails, and the fact that at the age of sixty he was beginning to count as one of the old guard at the Palais-Bourbon, where he could rely on long-standing friendships and on a network of connections built up by services rendered and minor compromises.

  What would the Premier say now, then and there, if they came and asked him:

  “Do you think Chalamont can find a way out of the crisis?”

  Would he venture to keep silent, or would he frankly say what he thought:

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think that his coming to power would prevent the general strike that is threatening the country?”

  There again, the answer was undoubtedly:

  “Yes.”

  When Chalamont had been his right hand he had twenty times helped him to settle disputes with the unions, and although he was the son-in-law of a banker, lived on the edge of the Bois, and sat in the Chamber for the wealthiest arrondissement in Paris, he could handle the workers’ representatives as no one else could do.