The President Read online

  The Premier tried to halt his argument, which was making him feel uncomfortable, but he wanted to play fair.

  “Is Chalamont cut out to be a statesman?”

  He hesitated and refused to answer that question, but then it led to another:

  “Which of to day’s politicians would make a better Premier?”

  Oh, very well! He could think of nobody! Perhaps he was the victim of old age, which ends by distorting even the soundest judgment? If so the newspapers seemed to have grown old with him, which was true to some extent, for many of them still had as their editors, or on their board of directors, men whom the Premier had known in those positions thirty or forty years ago.

  However that might be, every time a government fell they, too, would allude to “the great team,” lamenting the dearth of men of the former mold, not merely in France but among the leaders of her allies.

  Had the world really experienced an age of genuinely great men, of whom the Premier was the sole survivor except for Count Cornelio, the Italian, who was ending his days in a mental home outside Rome?

  Again he listened, and this time it was Emile, in the kitchen, who had joggled the bench as he got up. He nearly rang for him, to tell him to go to bed. His thoughts had taken a disagreeable turn, and he was tempted to swallow the pill that lay beside the glass of water.

  Outside, the Antifer light, off Etretat, and the lighthouse of Notre-Dame-du-Salut, above Fécamp, must be sweeping the lowering sky with their beams, which would meet almost directly over Les Ebergues.

  There would be boats out at sea, with men, stiff in their oilskins, wearing sou’westers and rubber boots, standing on slippery decks and hauling at wet, cold tackle. In the village there would be at least one lighted window, that of the room where young Marie’s mother was having her baby.

  He hadn’t had the curiosity, before getting into bed, to find out whether the telephone was working again. Most likely not. Telephone breakdowns always lasted longer than electricity failures.

  It was eleven o’clock. Suppose Chalamont’s car had broken down, too, somewhere by the side of the deserted road?

  Had he really, during the last few years, been attempting to get back the confession he had signed in such dramatic circumstances?

  Save for that paper, already yellowing, there was no evidence against him except the bare word of an old man whom many people now thought of as disappointed, embittered, with a lasting grudge against the world for not allowing him to end his career as President of the Republic.

  Ascain had died in his fine house at Melun, to which he had retired after being heavily defeated at the polls, and where he had presumably spent his last years in playing skittles. He had left no memoirs. He had left no money either, and his two sons, one a vet and the other a traveler in patent medicines, had sold the property that had come down to them from their grandfather, the solicitor.

  Ascain would bring no charge now. As for Lauzet-Duché, he had been the first to go, carried away by a stroke while making a speech at the end of a banquet in Brussels.

  The others didn’t know. In any case, how many still survived, even of the civil servants who had been merely on the outskirts of the affair, each knowing only one small part of it?

  All that remained was a scrap of paper.

  Was that what someone had been seeking at Les Ebergues for several months past? Up and down the house, in other books besides Le Roi Pausole, there were a hundred documents as dangerous to various people as that one was to Chalamont. Anyone who spends a great part of his life, particularly a life as long as his own, not only in the political arena but in the wings as well, is bound to witness any number of cowardly and disreputable actions.

  And if someone were to ask him now:

  “Do you know one single politician who in the entire course of his career has never . . . ”

  He cut his thought off short, as he used to cut off other people’s words.

  “No!”

  He wasn’t going to play that game. He’d been about to fall into his own trap, and with a brusque movement he propped himself on one elbow, seized the pill, and swallowed it with a mouthful of water.

  He needed sleep and wanted to get to sleep quickly, without thinking any longer.

  The last picture to drift more or less coherently through his mind was that of a man, whose features he could not distinguish, lying in a hospital bed. This was supposed to be Xavier Malate, and while a nun was changing him, handling him like a baby, he was tittering and explaining that they wouldn’t get him to die out of turn.

  “Augustin first!” he said with a wink.

  CHAPTER 5

  WITHOUT NEEDING TO OPEN HIS EYES he knew it was still night, and that the little flat lamp was shedding a faint light in one corner of the room, like a tiny moon. He also knew that something unusual was happening, though he couldn’t have said what, something missing, a lack, rather than something too much, and when he had roused up sufficiently he realized that what had disturbed him was the silence surrounding the house after the storm that had been raging for days, as though all at once the universe had ceased to vibrate.

  There was a ray of light under the door into the study, he could see it through the tiny slit between his eyelids. To see the time by his alarm clock he would have to turn his head, and he didn’t feel like moving.

  He listened. There was someone moving in the next room, without excessive caution, not furtively, and he recognized the sound of logs being dumped on the hearth and the familiar crackle of the kindling. When the smell of the burning wood began to reach his nostrils, not before, he called out:

  “Emile!”

  The chauffeur opened the door; he had not yet shaved or put on his white jacket, and the sleepless night had clouded his eyes.

  “Did you call, sir?”

  “What time is it?”

  “A few minutes past five. It suddenly turned cold, late in the night, and now it feels like frost. So I’m starting the fire. Did I wake you?”

  “No.”

  After a short silence, Emile remarked:

  “So you see, nobody came, after all.”

  The old man repeated:

  “Nobody came, you’re right.”

  “Would you like your tea right away?”

  From his bed he could watch the flames leaping in the study fireplace.

  “Yes, please.”

  Then, as Emile reached the door, he called him back:

  “Open the shutters first, if you don’t mind.”

  Just as, in the evening, he liked to cloak himself in solitude, in the morning he was eager to resume contact with life, eager in an anxious, almost frightened way.

  Day was still far off, there was no sign of dawn, and yet the night was not black but white, and a light, pale-colored vapor, which was actually fog, had time to float into the room while Emile leaned out to push back the shutters.

  “The cold’s as sharp as midwinter, and later on, with this damp rising as though the ground were a sponge, we shan’t be able to see as far as the garden gate.”

  During this brief contact with the outer world they had heard the foghorn wailing, muted, in the distance. At some point during the night the wind had fallen to a flat calm, but ordinary life, in abeyance during the tempest of the last few days, had not yet got under way again and the countryside still lay, as it were, in limbo.

  “I’ll bring your tea in five minutes.”

  Coffee had been forbidden, and now he was only allowed weak tea. Of all the privations he had to endure, this was the only one he found painful, and he sometimes went into the kitchen, while Gabrielle was getting breakfast for the staff, just for a whiff of the coffee they were to drink.

  Chalamont hadn’t come, but it was too soon to think about that, nothing definite being known as yet. But not to have received the visit he had regard
ed as almost certain was a disappointment, though still vague and unacknowledged. He felt ill at ease, anxious, as though he, too, suddenly lacked something, as though there were something missing in life.

  Sitting up in bed, he drank his tea, while Emile prepared his linen and his suit, for he was always fully dressed first thing in the morning, and very few people could boast of having seen him with his toilet incomplete. Even a dressing gown, he considered, belonged to the privacy of the bedroom, and he never wore one in his study.

  On his way to take a shower—he had had to give up baths—he glanced out of the window and saw the glowing tip of a cigarette close to the house.

  “Is that still Aillevard?”

  “No. Rougé took over from him just before two o’clock, about the time when the weather changed, and I gave him a cup of coffee a while ago.”

  The house was starting to stir again. There was a light in Gabrielle’s room—she’d be coming down to start her fire—and in Milleran’s as well. Water was running through a pipe. A cow mooed in the nearest barn and another answered it from farther off, more faintly. While the storm lasted not a cow had been heard.

  He took his shower, tepid and very short, as he had been advised, after which Emile helped him to dry himself and get into his clothes. Emile smelled strongly of cold cigarette, especially in the early morning. It made the Premier feel queasy, but he didn’t like to ask the man to stop smoking.

  “If you don’t need me I’ll go up quickly to change and shave.”

  Usually this, too, was an hour he enjoyed. In summer it was already light and he could see children taking cattle to pasture in the fields along the cliff-top. Closer to him the house would be gradually waking up and he would stroll about idly, without impatience, in the four low-ceilinged rooms, going from one shelf to another, pausing, moving on, halting on the threshold to sniff the smell of damp soil and grass which, only quite recently, had gone back to being the same as in his childhood.

  In autumn and winter he watched the slow dawn breaking, and there was nearly always a thin mist rising from the ground, in a sheet of unequal density, pierced with holes through which one sometimes glimpsed the church belfry.

  Today the dawn was colorless, sketched with white gouache and charcoal, and only the whiter glow of the thickening fog showed that the light was strengthening.

  The others were in the kitchen, eating. The tree near the front door was growing visible in misty outline, with its trunk that leaned eastward because of the sea wind and its leafless branches which all stretched eastward too; then the dim, ghostly figure of the policeman on guard came into view beside it. He seemed very far away, in another world, and even his footsteps were inaudible, as though the fog was muffling sounds as well as blurring forms.

  Now and again the Premier looked at the time, then at the little white radio set on his desk. Before the moment had come to switch it on, he saw young Marie advancing through the fog, growing gradually taller and clearer, her red jersey striking the only note of color in the landscape.

  Tiny drops of moisture must be clinging to her untidy hair, as they did to every blade of grass she walked over. When she noisily opened the kitchen door, exclamations could be heard, laughter from Emile. Her mother must have had the baby, but he didn’t call her to make sure.

  He was counting the minutes now, and he turned on the radio too soon, had to put up with a stupid popular song followed by the whole of the weather report, to which he paid no attention. Thursday, November 4th. Feast of St. Charles. Paris market prices. Fruit and vegetables. . . .

  “And here is our first news bulletin. Home news. Paris. As we anticipated yesterday evening, there was considerable activity all night in the Boulevard Suchet, where Monsieur Philippe Chalamont, entrusted by the President of the Republic with the task of forming a Cabinet on a multi-party basis, was visited by a number of prominent politicians belonging to various parties. Leaving the Deputy for the sixteenth arrondissement’s flat at about four o’clock this morning, Monsieur Ernest Grouchard, leader of the Radical Party, whose visit had immediately succeeded that of the leader of the Socialist group, declared his satisfaction at the way the negotiations were proceeding. It is thought that Monsieur Chalamont will go to the Elysée fairly early in the morning, to give the Head of the State his definite reply, as promised. Marseilles. The Mélina, a liner belonging to the Messageries Maritimes, on board which . . . ”

  He switched off, without noticing that Milleran had come into the study. His reaction was a gloomy amazement, a sensation of emptiness not unlike what he had felt earlier when the noise of the storm had suddenly given out.

  He had been waiting for Chalamont, almost certain he would come. Had he been secretly hoping for the visit? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know, especially not just now.

  While he had been imagining his former subordinate driving through the rain and wind, and had even gone so far as to think he might have had a breakdown on the way, Chalamont had been in his flat in the Boulevard Suchet, coldly playing the game, receiving the political leaders, one by one.

  It was so unexpected, so monstrous, that he could not shake off his stupefaction, and at one moment he put the tip of his first finger to the corner of his eye, which was slightly moist.

  Realizing that his secretary was standing in front of him, he asked her, as though collecting his thoughts from a great distance and resentful of her intrusion:

  “What is it?”

  “I wanted to ask whether I should ring up Evreux tight away.”

  He took a little time to remember, while Milleran went on:

  “A hospital is open night and day, so perhaps there’s no need to wait till nine o’clock?”

  He still sat sluggishly in his armchair, and his set, vacant stare began to worry Milleran, though she knew from experience that she must pretend not to notice it. Simply to break the silence, she announced:

  “Young Marie has a little sister. That’s the fifth girl in the family.”

  “Leave me alone for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  “May I go into my office?”

  “No. Somewhere else. Wherever you like.”

  There remained one explanation, on which he pinned his hopes: that Chalamont’s confession had vanished. To check this theory, he was sending Milleran away, and as soon as she was in the kitchen he went to the farthest bookcase and, with a feverish hand, pulled out Le Roi Pausole in its heavy cardboard case.

  At that moment he was hoping . . .

  But the second folder opened of its own accord at page 40, and there lay the sheet of paper with the heading of the Premier’s office, ironical, looking no more important than an old love letter or a four-leaf clover forgotten between the pages of a book. And indeed it was of very slight importance, despite its dramatic statement and the care he had taken of it, for it had not prevented anything.

  “I, the undersigned, Philippe Chalamont . . . ”

  With a gesture of impatience such as he had rarely indulged in during his life, and of which he was at once ashamed, he hurled the book to the ground, so that he suffered the humiliation of being obliged to get down and pick up the scattered parts, the loose engravings, the original drawings.

  Because of his ex-secretary, he was reduced to watching the door, for fear someone might suddenly come in and find him on all fours on the floor. And he’d look even more ridiculous if his leg suddenly played him one of its tricks while he was in this position!

  Milleran waited in the kitchen, unaware of what was going on, listening hard, and it was at least ten minutes before the bell recalled her to the study.

  The Premier had gone back to the Louis-Philippe armchair. His strained manner had disappeared, replaced by a calm that she found uncomfortable because it was obviously artificial, like his voice, which had an unaccustomed, unnaturally suave note when he said:

  “You may telep
hone now.”

  He cared nothing for Malate just then, but it was important for life to go on as usual, for the little everyday events to follow one another in the expected order. That was a kind of moral hygiene and the only way of keeping a cool head.

  If the paper had disappeared from the Pierre Louÿs book he would have understood Chalamont’s behavior, accepted it, perhaps even approved it, and it would not have affected him personally.

  With the document still in his hands, things were different. That meant that his former secretary had reached the cynical conclusion that the way lay open, that the obstacle that had delayed him on his way up the political ladder had in his opinion ceased to exist.

  The old man was still living, of course, on the top of some cliff in Normandy, but the scrap of paper he had brandished for so long had lost its value as a scarecrow, just as the ink of the writing on it was fading.

  Chalamont was behaving as though the Premier were dead.

  He had made his decision during the night, with his eyes open, knowing what he was about, weighing the risks, foreseeing every eventuality.

  It had not occurred to him to call up. The breakdown had nothing to do with his silence. He had not set out for Les Ebergues, had sent nobody, this time, to plead his cause or negotiate on his behalf.

  “Hello? Is that Evreux hospital?”

  Was the Premier really going to bother about that maniac who had been haunting him for so many years? Had he come down to that? He was tempted to rush into the next room, take the telephone away from his secretary and ring off. Everything was annoying him, including the fog, too motionless and stupid, which was pressing against the window and making the outside world look unearthly.

  “Yes . . . You say he’s . . . I can’t quite hear you, mademoiselle . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . That’s better . . . You didn’t know how long he’s been there? . . . I understand . . . I shall probably ring you again later . . . Thank you. . . . ”

  “Well, so what?” he snarled, when Milleran came in, looking embarrassed.

  “Dr. Jaquemont, or Jeaumont, I couldn’t get the name clearly, is operating on him now. . . . He went into the theater at a quarter past seven. . . . They expect it to take a long time. . . . It seems that . . . ”