IV
Lanny learned more about this underground literature when he went out for his week-end at the Château de Bruyne. Both sons were gone; Denis fils was a staff officer at a headquarters near the Belgian border, and Charlot was an officer of reserves behind the Belfort fortifications. The elder brother had made up his mind that the war had to be fought, whatever the political outcome; but Charlot was still the Fascist rebel, completely untamed; he was bent upon appeasement, and if that was impossible he wanted a Hitler victory, as a means of putting down the labor movement and putting the Right people in control of France. That was a pun which was valid in the French language as in English; you spoke of les hommes du droit, and you meant that the people of honor and decency were those of your own political way of thinking.
Robbie Budd had written to his business associate, saying that Lanny was to serve as a wartime messenger between them; so Denis talked freely, expounding his carefully considered ideas. Civilization in France must be saved by the same method which had been used in Spain; the corrupt and vicious “Third Republic,” a creation of mob violence, must be overthrown, and a Catholic dictator like Franco must take charge of the country. This war now under way was not a foreign but a civil war, as in Spain. Hitler and Mussolini had helped there, and would help here, that being the only way the job could be done. The fact that Hitler had made a deal with the Reds meant nothing except that he wished to have his eastern frontier safe for the duration. The Führer was the implacable foe of Bolshevism, and would not delay to put it down, the moment his hands were free. Denis had received personal assurances of this, from Kurt Meissner and Otto Abetz and Graf Herzenberg and other Germans of culture and tact who had been making their homes in Paris.
What especially interested Lanny was Denis’s revelation of his younger son’s activities. Charlot’s army post was close to the Swiss border, and this was no accident, but had been planned. Some five hundred officers had been involved in the Cagoulard conspiracy of a year or two ago, and many of these were now conniving at the smuggling of German-printed leaflets and pamphlets across the Swiss border and their distribution to the troops. Said Denis: “The Reds have had their ‘underground’ in Germany and have been sending in literature from France for the past six or seven years. Now we have taken a leaf out of their notebook.”
A dangerous business in wartime, Lanny opined; but the father said, No, they had grown too strong to be prosecuted; they had too many friends in Parliament and in the Cabinet. The authorities had arrested Marcel Déat for circulating anti-war literature but hadn’t dared bring him to trial. Several high-ranking generals were sympathetic to the rebels, including Marshal Pétain, who was now in Madrid as French ambassador, trying to work out with the German ambassador there the terms on which this idiotic war might be brought to an end. Once that was done, the overthrow of the government would be easy.
V
Lanny gave close attention to this suave and elegant Frenchman, a member of whose family he had been for almost two decades. Denis was past eighty, aged and shrunken, his face lined with care—but still no one ever saw him that he was not a model of the tonsorial and sartorial arts. He had greatly increased his wealth since Lanny had known him, and apparently his public standing had not been injured by some months of martyrdom in prison. Lanny wondered, had age diminished his interest in his peculiar sexual pleasures? He would make reference to the affairs of other men, and his bright dark eyes would twinkle and the lines about his mouth deepen into a grin. He had taken these pleasures as his right, just as he took his wealth, and his position as the head of one of the “two hundred families” which governed France. An odd thing, he knew that these families existed, and would talk about them freely, but he took the phrase as an insult, a device of hated class enemies, moved by the basest impulses of envy and greed.
Denis de Bruyne had broken the heart of his gentle-souled and lovely wife, and then left it for Lanny Budd to repair the damage to the best of his ability. When Marie had told her husband that she had taken a lover, he had been upset, but not for long; as a sensible Frenchman of the world he had come to the conclusion that it was better for the mother of his sons and keeper of his home to be cheerful and contented rather than glum and resentful. So he had accorded to the good-looking young American the status of an honored guest, and little by little, of a friend. Such a relationship was difficult for an American to imagine, but the French had a name for it, la vie à trois—life in threes—and there were numerous instances of it in the history books, notably Anatole France and his amie, Madame de Caillavet.
Lanny looked back upon those years, first as a lover and later as a sort of supplementary widower and foster-father to the sons. He hadn’t been able to do for them what he would have wished to do; but then, he reflected, Marie wouldn’t have liked it if he had. She had been Catholic and conservative, and if she had lived, he would have had to keep his dark secret from her. When she died, he and Denis had walked side by side at the funeral, both of them sartorially and socially correct; they had spoken words of proper grief, but Denis had spoken no word of remorse, and in the years of friendship and business association which had followed, Lanny had never heard from the aging man one word of personal emotion—grief, fear, shame, despair, even depression. Anger, yes, and of the bitterest sort, but always political, having to do with the protection of his fortune and the social mastery it gave him.
Such was the “polite” world, in which the conduct of human beings had been rehearsed for centuries, and all actions, all gestures conventionalized and fixed. In such a world, morals tended to become manners, and nobody asked what was going on in your soul, they only asked that you should behave according to their expectations, and not trouble them with your troubles. They didn’t even ask if you meant what you said; on the contrary, they were apt to take it for granted that you didn’t, and that you would be somewhat bête if you did. All the world was a stage, and men and women played exalted and dignified roles upon it; what they were in their hearts, and what they did when they retired to their dressing rooms, were matters upon which you did not intrude.
Marie had told Lanny that her husband was one of those unfortunate men who “had to have virgins.” In the years that had passed Lanny never once asked where he got these virgins, or what he paid for them, or what steps he took to make sure he was getting what he paid for. He knew that Denis was a Catholic, and bringing up his sons to be the same; but never would Lanny ask how he reconciled his practice with his creed, or what he said in the confessional. Lanny knew that Denis’s creed damned Lanny Budd, a Protestant, to eternal fires; but it would have embarrassed Denis to have that referred to, so Lanny didn’t.
Before a log fire in the drawing-room of this ancient red stone villa called a château, they talked about the activities of the British fleet, which Denis rather resented, because it made more difficult the program of appeasement upon which he had set his heart. They talked about the personalities of the political and financial and social worlds, for the code of politesse did not forbid gossip but made it, on the contrary, one of the social enjoyments. If it chanced that one of the persons you were talking about dropped in for a call, you changed the topic without embarrassment. Lanny would listen, and if he found that the new caller was one who hated the Germans and wanted to win the war, he would guard his conversation and avoid embarrassing his host.
VI
Lanny returned to Paris and took his place in la haute société, the people who knew what was happening because they made it happen. Men were scarce, and he was invited to receptions and dinners and dances. He was still remembered as the husband of a great heiress, and it was assumed that he would be looking for another; meantime, there were many lonely ladies looking for consolation. This war, which few wanted and none knew how to get out of, had unsettled the smart world and brought the women to a state of hysteria. Never before had Lanny found it so difficult to keep them talking about public questions; never before had he had the experienc
e at a dinner party of moving his knee to escape the pressure of the lady on one side, only to discover that he had encountered the pressure of the lady on the other side. He made note of the covers of magazines and the posters on the kiosks, and thought that never had he seen so much of what the French called la belle poitrine, and what current American slang knew as “cheese-cake”—meaning the semi-nude bodies of young females. He had the idea that it heralded the downfall of the nation or social class in which it prevailed.
Lanny observed the working out of the French governmental custom whereby a new member of the Cabinet celebrated his triumph by choosing one of the ingénues of the Théâtre Français or a chanteuse of the Opéra as his amie. It was the way these young ladies made their careers—both the great institutions being under government control. Of course each lady had to have furs and jewels to correspond to her new station, and that was why French politicians were so eager in collecting “envelopes,” and why so many popular leaders turned into reactionaries. Public policies were determined by ladies ardently promoting the careers of their chosen statesmen, and hating those ladies who espoused the measures of rival statesmen.
In la belle France in the midst of dire peril and supposed to be getting ready to fight for her life, the head of the government was enjoying the friendship of that lovely blue-eyed daughter of a sardine-canning magnate and wife of a French marquis named de Crussol. The Premier’s most active rival for the place of honor was a lawyer who had chosen a wealthy contractor’s daughter married to a comte named de Portes. So the Marquise Jeanne and the Comtesse Hélène hated each other and denounced each other in public, and wherever one favored a man or a measure the other automatically labored to keep the measure from being adopted and the man from being promoted. The situation was complicated by the fact that Hélène de Portes was an ardent appeaser, while her lover, Paul Reynaud, was attacking Daladier for his lack of ardor in the conduct of the war. Hélène, tall, aggressive, hollow-eyed and singularly unattractive, would announce at a dinner table that she intended to change her lover’s views. “Vous verrez! Vous verrez!” You shall see!
At present, smart society in Paris was repeating what it considered a delicious anecdote concerning these two rivals. Hélène wanted to marry her Paul, but the French law forbade her to do so until three years after a separation de corps; this law might be rescinded by the Minister of Justice as an emergency measure, but this Minister was Paul Reynaud, and it wouldn’t look just right for him to take such action in his own favor. So Hélène swallowed her pride and went to her hated rival, the friend of Edouard Daladier. All the world knew that “Dala” wanted to get rid of Bonnet, his pro-Nazi Foreign Minister, but didn’t dare because of the votes he commanded in the Chamber. So now, said Hélène: “Why doesn’t Edouard take the post of Foreign Minister himself, and put Bonnet in the post of Minister of Justice, where he will be less harmful? He can make my Paul the Minister of Finance, which will satisfy Paul, and Daladier will no longer have to fear him as a rival.”
The Premier found that an excellent scheme, and made the shifts; whereupon Hélène went to call on Odette, wife of Bonnet, saying: “Daladier was determined to get rid of your husband, but I persuaded him to make him Minister of Justice instead. Now your husband may do me a favor in return, by changing the divorce law so that I can marry Paul at the end of a year?”
So it was that cabinets were formed and laws were made in la grande nation; and so it was that no pro-German could be punished, because the Minister of Justice was one of them. Indeed, the wits of Paris had a saying—that Georges Bonnet was in the service of every government in Europe except the French!
VII
Kurt Meissner and his entourage had gone back to Germany; so had Graf Herzenberg with his—and that included Marceline. She was dancing at one of the more expensive night spots in Berlin, and that circumstance had been noted by the Paris press, with comments according to their politics. Lanny found the circumstance convenient, for it helped to establish him as an appeaser, and gave him a topic of conversation leading in the direction he desired. Chatting with the very elegant mistress of one of the steel kings, Lanny would defend the right of his, half-sister to do what she could to maintain, cultural relations between the two greatest peoples of Europe; the lady would agree, and in return Lanny would agree as to the right of the steel king to ship half a million tons of Lorraine ore into Belgium every month—even though it was finding its way into Germany. Les affaires sont les affaires!
Lanny celebrated his fortieth birthday by a flying trip to Madrid. He landed at the same field where he had left Alfy three years ago. He passed through the streets where he had driven Raoul Palma, at a time when artillery shells were crashing and hostile planes, including a few Budd-Erlings, were dropping bombs. It was almost unendurable pain to see this great city, so dreadfully wrecked and with no efforts at restoration. Generalissimo Franco was a soldier, a crusader for Christianity as he conceived it, but he was a poor administrator and no economist; his only conception of government was to kill all the people who did not agree with his ideas, or at least to shut them behind bars and feed them very badly. Carpenters and masons, steelworkers and miners, were dead or dying by the thousands, and did not contribute to the restoration of the shattered cities of Spain.
Lanny’s errand was to interview Marshal Pétain, ambassador of France in Madrid. Lanny had come at the suggestion of Denis de Bruyne, and brought the highest credentials. The hero of Verdun was now eighty-three, a wrinkled little figure wearing his uniform and decorations; his body was feeble, but his mind still operated within the narrow limits of his ideology. He received the visitor in the splendid palace which was both his residence and headquarters—Lanny thought of it that way, rather than as an office, there being so many military uniforms about. It was the same all over the city, a concentration camp rather than a center of industry and trade.
Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain took a paternal attitude toward the people of France; he loved them, and knew what was good for them, and had been divinely appointed to tell them what to do and see that they did it. The old gentleman was as pious as Franco himself, and according to the same creed of Holy Mother Church. He was the well-nigh unanimous choice of the factions which sought to overthrow the evil, atheistic Republic; the Croix de Feu, the Jeunesse Patriote, even the Cagoulards operated in his name, and looked to him to take charge and rule. Like Franco they had a hanging list, or shooting list—or perhaps they would bring out Madame Guillotine again, if there was time. They would make a clean sweep of all republicans, the democrats, the Socialists and Communists, Syndicalists and Anarchists, atheists and Freemasons, and la patrie would once more become pious and happy, as she had been two centuries ago.
The old hero talked freely in his quavering voice. He was filled with a sense of destiny, the consciousness that the fate of Christian Europe hung upon the negotiations he was carrying on with the German ambassador. Matters were urgent—for of course the Führer could not be expected to wait indefinitely. The Germans were being fair, even gracious; they were not standing upon formalities or prestige. France didn’t have to sue for peace, didn’t even have to propose peace; all that was wanted was that sensible men should settle the basis upon which two great powers were to live together in future. Britain was not excluded; on the contrary, the same fair terms were being offered to her, here in Madrid and through other channels. The integrity of the British Empire would be guaranteed forever, and all that was asked was recognition that Eastern Europe constituted Germany’s sphere of influence.
Lanny had his own story to tell; he was a personal friend of the Führer and of his Number Two and Number Three. He mentioned his recent visit to Berchtesgaden—nothing about the spirits, of course, since Holy Mother Church calls them creatures of the devil. Retro me, Satanas! Lanny’s story warmed the chilly heart of this military patriarch, and he talked to the Franco-American agent as if he were a son, introduced him to several of his advisers, and gave him
the entree to the Franco-German-Hispano junta which was pouring Nazi-Fascist propaganda into the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, as well as the United States.
VIII
So when Lanny flew back to Paris, he had a real report to make. He had been mailing them about twice a week to Bullitt—without Lanny’s name, of course. It was quite amusing to meet the ambassador at a smart reception, and to be coldly rebuked for his pro-Nazi sentiments, rumors of which had reached Bullitt from several quarters, he said. Lanny smilingly denied that he was pro-Nazi—he was an art expert and lover of beauty, also he was looking out for the interests of Budd-Erling Aircraft, which played no favorites, but sold to those who had the cash. “A merchant of death, eh?” said the wealthy Philadelphian. He had grown rotund and partly bald, but in the old days he had been quite a “radical,” and had written a novel about the ruling class of his native city in which leading personalities had believed they could recognize themselves.