Suite Française

  There were other sounds as well: the steady thud of explosions, rising and bursting forth like flowers and, when the noise stopped, the rattling of every window-pane in the village, the banging of shutters being opened and closed, anxious words flying from window to window. At first, the cat had started every time he heard an explosion, his tail stiff, his fur bristling, his whiskers tense with fear. But he had got used to the way the rumble came closer and closer, no doubt imagining it was thunder. He leapt about in the flower beds, pulled the petals off a rose with his claws (the rose was in full bloom; the slightest breeze could destroy it; its white petals would fall to the ground, like soft, sweet-smelling rain). Suddenly, as quick as a squirrel, the cat darted up a tree, ripping the bark with his claws. Terrified birds flew off. At the end of a branch he began a savage, arrogant dance, taunting in his bold, warlike way, the sky, the earth, the animals, the moon. Now and again he opened his deep, narrow mouth and let out a piercing miaow, a sharp, provocative call to all the cats nearby.

  The birds in the henhouse and the dovecote all woke up and hid their heads beneath their wings, catching the scent of fate and death; a small white hen tentatively climbed on to a metal drinking trough, knocked it over and rushed away, making terrified screeching noises. But the cat had jumped on to the ground now. He stood motionless . . . waiting. His round golden eyes shone in the darkness. There was the sound of leaves rustling and he came back carrying a small dead bird in his mouth, his tongue slowly lapping at its wound. Eyes closed, he savoured the warm blood. He had plunged his claws into the bird’s heart and clenched and unclenched his talons, digging deeper and deeper into the tender flesh that covered its delicate bones with slow and rhythmical movements until its heart stopped beating. He ate the bird slowly, then licked himself clean, polishing the tip of his beautiful bushy tail, which was moist and shiny from the damp night air. He was feeling benevolent now: when a shrew darted between his legs he let it go; he was content merely to swipe at a mole’s head, leaving it only half dead, a trail of blood on its muzzle. He studied the mole with a scornful trembling of his nostrils but didn’t touch it. A different kind of hunger had arisen within him; he arched his back, raised his head and miaowed again, a call that ended in a harsh, imperious cry. An old red pussycat suddenly appeared on the roof of the henhouse, basking in the moonlight.

  The short June night was fading. The stars grew paler, the air smelled of milk and moist grass; now, half-hidden behind the forest, only the pink tip of the moon could be seen, growing dimmer and dimmer in the mist. Tired, triumphant and covered in dew, the cat gnawed on a sprig of grass, then slipped back into Jacqueline’s room, on to her bed, looking for that warm spot near her thin feet. He was purring like a kettle on the boil.

  A few seconds later, the arsenal exploded.

  21

  The arsenal exploded and the horrible echo of the explosion had only just stopped (the air all around them shook; all the doors and windows were vibrating and the small wall at the cemetery crumbled) when a long flame shot up, whistling, from the bell tower. The noise of the incendiary bomb had merged with the explosion of the arsenal. In a second, the entire village was in flames. There was hay in the barns, straw in the lofts. Everything caught fire. Roofs caved in, floors cracked in half; the refugees rushed into the streets while the villagers ran to open the cowsheds and stables to save the animals. The horses were neighing, rearing, terrified by the intensity of the noise and fire; they refused to come out and beat their heads and hoofs against the burning walls. A cow rushed by, bellowing in pain and terror as it frantically tried to shake a bale of burning hay from its horns; pieces of glowing straw flew everywhere. In the garden, the blossoming trees were bathed in a red-as-blood light. Normally, the firemen would have come and people would have calmed down, once the initial fear had passed. But this disaster, happening after so many others, was more than they could bear. Also, they knew the firemen had received orders to leave with all their equipment three days before. They felt hopeless. “If only the men were here,” cried the women, “the men!” But the men were far away and the children were running, screaming, rushing about, causing even greater confusion.

  The refugees were howling in terror. Among them were the Péricands, half-dressed, faces dirty, hair dishevelled. It was the same as when the bombs had fallen on the road: everyone was shouting at once, calling to one another, and the voices all merged into one—the village was reduced to a roar. “Jean!,” “Suzanne!,” “Mummy!,” “Grandma!” No one replied. A few youngsters who had managed to get their bicycles out of the burning sheds pushed them violently through the crowd. Yet, oddly enough, everyone believed that they were remaining calm, that they were behaving exactly as they should. Madame Péricand was holding Emmanuel in her arms, Jacqueline and Bernard were clutching her skirt (Jacqueline had even managed to get the cat back into his basket when her mother had pulled her out of bed and she now gripped it tightly to her). “The most precious things have been saved!” Madame Péricand said to herself over and over again, “Thank you God!” Her jewellery and money were sewn into a suede pouch pinned inside her blouse and she could feel it against her chest as she ran. She’d had the presence of mind to grab her fur coat and the small overnight case full of the family silver, which she’d kept beside her bed. She had her children, her three children! Sometimes a thought shot through her, as sharp and rapid as lightning, of her two older sons, in danger, far away: Philippe and that mad Hubert. She’d been desperate when Hubert ran away, yet rather proud of him. His behaviour had been irrational, wild, but manly. For them, Philippe and Hubert, she could do nothing, but her three little ones! She had saved her three little ones! She was sure she’d had a premonition the night before; she’d put them to bed half-dressed. Jacqueline didn’t have a dress on but a jacket covered her naked shoulders; she wouldn’t be cold; it was better than wearing just a blouse; the baby was wrapped up in a blanket; Bernard even had his beret on. She herself had no stockings, just red slippers on her bare feet, but gritting her teeth, arms tight round the baby, who wasn’t crying but whose eyes were rolling wildly with fear, she made her way through the panic-stricken crowd, without the slightest idea where she was going. The sky above seemed filled with countless planes (there were two) flying back and forth with their evil buzzing, like hornets.

  “Please don’t let them bomb us any more! Please don’t let them bomb us any more! Please . . .” These words went round and round endlessly in her bowed head. Out loud she said, “Don’t let go of my hand, Jacqueline! Bernard, stop crying! You’re behaving like a girl! There, there, baby, don’t worry, Mummy’s here!” She said these words mechanically, while silently continuing to pray: “Please don’t let them bomb us any more! Let them bomb anyone else, dear God, but not us! I have three children! I have to save them! Please don’t let them bomb us any more!”

  They finally made it out of the narrow village street; she was in the open countryside; the fire was behind her; the flames fanned out across the sky. Scarcely an hour had passed since dawn, when the bomb had struck the bell tower. They were passed by car upon car fleeing Paris, Dijon, Normandy, the Lorraine region, France itself. The people inside them were numb. Sometimes they raised their heads to look at the fire in the distance, but their faces were indifferent. They had seen so many things . . .

  Nanny was walking behind Madame Péricand. She seemed mute with terror; her lips were moving but she made no sound. She was holding her fluted bonnet with its cotton ties, newly ironed. Madame Péricand looked at her indignantly. “Really, Nanny, couldn’t you have found something more useful to bring? Honestly!” The old woman made an extraordinary effort to speak. She went red in the face, her eyes filled with tears. “Good Lord,” thought Madame Péricand, “now she’s going mad! Whatever will I do?”

  But the harsh voice of her mistress had miraculously returned the gift of speech to Nanny . . . She replied in her usual tone of voice, simultaneously respectful and bitter: “Madame didn’t think I woul
d leave it behind? It’s valuable!” This bonnet was a bone of contention between them: Nanny hated the hats she was forced to wear—“so suitable,” Madame Péricand thought, “so appropriate for a servant,” for she felt that each social class should wear some sign indicative of their station to avoid any misconceptions, just as shops displayed price tags. “You can tell it’s not she who does the washing and ironing, nasty old bag!” Nanny would say as she worked. Her hands trembling, she put the lace butterfly of a bonnet on over the enormous nightcap she was already wearing.

  Madame Péricand looked at her, thought there was something odd about her but couldn’t say exactly what it was. Everything seemed incredible. The world was a horrible dream. She dropped down on to the verge, put Emmanuel back into Nanny’s arms and said as vehemently as possible, “Now we have to get out of here,” and remained on the ground, waiting for some miracle. There was none, but a donkey pulling a cart passed by. When she saw the driver slow down at the sight of her and her children, Madame Péricand’s intuition took over—the intuition innate to the wealthy who can always tell when and where something can be bought.

  “Stop!” Madame Péricand shouted. “Where’s the nearest railway station?”

  “Saint-Georges.”

  “How long would it take you to get there with your donkey?”

  “Well, about four hours.”

  “Are the trains still running?”

  “I’ve heard they are.”

  “Good. I’m getting in. Come on, Bernard, Nanny, bring the baby.”

  “But Madame, I wasn’t going that way and what with going and coming back, that’ll be at least eight hours.”

  “You’ll be well paid,” said Madame Péricand.

  She climbed into the carriage, calculating that if the trains were running normally, she would be in Nîmes the next morning. Nîmes . . . her mother’s dear old house, her bedroom, a bath; she nearly fainted at the thought. Would there be enough room for her on the train? “With three children,” she said to herself, “I’m sure to manage it.” Because of her position as the mother of a large family, Madame Péricand was usually treated like royalty and came first wherever she was . . . nor was she the kind of woman who allowed anyone to forget what was rightfully hers. She crossed her arms and studied the countryside victoriously.

  “But, Madame, what about the car?” Nanny moaned.

  “It’ll be reduced to ashes by now,” replied Madame Péricand.

  “What about the trunks, the children’s things?”

  The trunks had been loaded on to the servants’ van. Only three suitcases were left by the time disaster struck, three suitcases full of linen . . .

  “I’ll just have to do without them.” Madame Péricand sighed, looking up at the sky, picturing once more, as in a wonderful dream, the deep wardrobes in Nîmes with their treasured cambric and linen.

  Nanny, who had lost her big trunk with the metal bands and an imitation pigskin handbag, began to cry. Madame Péricand tried in vain to make her see how ungrateful she was being towards Providence. “Remember that you are alive, my dear Nanny; nothing else matters!” The donkey trotted on. The farmer took small side roads thick with refugees. At eleven o’clock they arrived at Saint-Georges and Madame Péricand managed to get on a train heading in the direction of Nîmes. Everyone around her was saying the armistice had been signed. Impossible, some said. Nevertheless, there was no more gunfire, no bombs were falling. “Could this nightmare finally be over?” thought Madame Péricand. She looked again at everything she had brought, “everything she had saved”: her children, her overnight case. She placed her hand over the jewellery and money sewn into her blouse. Yes, during this terrible time she had acted with determination, courage and composure. She hadn’t lost her head! She hadn’t lost . . . She hadn’t . . . Suddenly she cried out in a choked voice. She clutched her throat and fell backwards, letting out a low moan as if she were suffocating.

  “My God, Madame! Madame, what’s the matter?” exclaimed Nanny.

  “Nanny, my dear Nanny,” Madame Péricand finally groaned in a barely audible voice, “We forgot . . .”

  “What? What did we forget?”

  “We forgot my father-in-law,” said Madame Péricand, dissolving into tears.

  22

  Charles Langelet had driven all night long from Paris to Montargis and so had shared in the general misfortune. Nevertheless, he demonstrated great strength of character. In the hostelry where he stopped for lunch, the groups of refugees around him were complaining about the horrors they had encountered on the journey. They looked to him for confirmation, saying, “Isn’t that so, Monsieur? You saw it too, didn’t you? No one can accuse us of exaggerating!” but he merely replied, drily, “I didn’t see anything.”

  “What? No bombs?” asked the surprised owner.

  “No, Madame.”

  “No fires?”

  “Not even a traffic accident.”

  “Well, lucky you,” the woman said after thinking for a moment and shrugging her shoulders doubtfully, as if to say, “He’s peculiar!”

  Langelet took a bite of the omelette he’d just been served, pushed it away mumbling “inedible,” asked for his bill and left. He got a kind of perverse pleasure from depriving these good souls of the satisfaction they hoped to attain by questioning him, for they—vulgar, vile creatures that they were—imagined they were feeling compassion for all mankind, while in reality they were merely thrilled by base, melodramatic curiosity. “It’s unbelievable how much vulgarity there is!” Charles Langelet thought sadly. He was always pained and scandalised when he encountered the real world full of unfortunate people who had never seen a cathedral, a statue, a painting. What was more, the happy few, among whom he flattered himself he belonged, displayed the same spinelessness, the same stupidity in the face of misfortune as these common types. Lord! Just think of what these people would make of this “exodus,” “their exodus” later on. He could just hear them: “I wasn’t afraid of the Germans, not me,” an old bag would whine, “I went straight up to them and said, ‘This house belongs to the mother of a French officer’—and they didn’t say a word.” And another woman would say, “Bullets were flying all around me, but it’s funny, I wasn’t scared, not a bit.” It was understood that everyone would embellish their tales with terrifying scenes.

  As for Charles, he would simply reply, “That’s odd. Everything seemed quite normal to me. There were a lot of people on the road, but that’s all.” He imagined their surprise and smiled, feeling smug. He needed to feel smug. When he thought about his apartment in Paris, his heart broke. Now and again he turned round towards the back of the car to look lovingly at the crates containing his porcelain, his greatest treasures. There was a Capodimonte group he was worried about: he wondered if he’d put enough wood shavings and tissue paper round it. There wasn’t much tissue paper left by the time he’d finished wrapping everything. It was a centrepiece for a table: young women dancing with cupids and fawns. He sighed. In his mind, he thought of himself as a Roman fleeing the lava and ash of Pompeii, abandoning his slaves, his house, his gold, but taking with him, in the folds of his tunic, some terracotta figurine, a perfectly shaped vase, or a bowl modelled on a beautiful breast.

  He felt simultaneously comforted and bitter at being so different from other people. He looked out at them with his pale eyes. The wave of cars was still moving and all the anxious, sombre faces were the same. What a sad breed! What were they thinking about? What they would eat, what they would drink? He was thinking about the cathedral in Rouen, the châteaux of the Loire, the Louvre. A single one of those venerable stones was worth more than a thousand human lives. He was approaching Gien. A black spot appeared in the sky. In a flash he realised that the stream of refugees near the level crossing would be a sitting target for an enemy plane so he pulled off on to a side road. Fifteen minutes later, there was a crash only a few metres away from him. Other cars also trying to avoid the main road collided with each other whe
n a terrified driver took a wrong turn. They rebounded off each other into the fields, shedding luggage, mattresses, birdcages, injured women. Charlie heard confused sounds but didn’t turn round. He headed at full speed towards a thick wood. There he stopped his car, waited a moment, then set off again through the countryside. The main highway was clearly becoming too dangerous.

  He stopped thinking about the dangers the Rouen cathedral might face for a moment to imagine very precisely what was threatening him, Charles Langelet. He didn’t want to dwell on it, but the most unpleasant images filled his mind. His large, delicate, slim hands clenched the steering wheel, trembling slightly. There were few cars and houses where he was, and he had no idea were he was going. He had always had a bad sense of direction. He wasn’t used to travelling without a chauffeur. For a while he got lost in the outskirts of Gien, becoming ever more agitated for fear he might run out of petrol. He sighed and shook his head. He had predicted what would happen: he, Charles Langelet, was not made for this uncouth existence. The thousand little pitfalls of daily life were too much for him. The car stopped: out of petrol. He made a small gracious gesture to himself, as one bows before the inevitable. There was nothing to be done, he would have to spend the night in the woods.

  “You wouldn’t possibly have a can of petrol you could let me have?” he asked a passing driver.

  The man said no and Charlie smiled, depressed and bitter. “Well, that’s the human race for you! Egotistical and mean. In times of misfortune, no one will share with his brother, not a crust of bread, not a bottle of beer, not a pathetic little can of petrol.”