Franck looked at Camille with his teeth clenched.
You’re so cute when you’re angry, you really are. You’re so handsome when you start to lose it. Why can’t I let myself go with you? Why do I make you suffer? Why do I wear a corset beneath my suit of armor and two cartridge belts across my chest? Why do I get hung up on the most trivial details? Take a can opener and pry me open, for Christ’s sake! Look in your little knife case, I’m sure you have something in there that could help me breathe . . .
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.
“Your name. The other day I read in an old dictionary that an estafier was a tall footman who followed a man on horseback and held the stirrup for him.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“A doormat, in other words.”
“Franck Lestafier?”
“Present.”
“When you’re not sleeping with me, who are you sleeping with?”
No answer.
“Do you do the same things to them as you do to me?” she added, biting her lip.
“No.”
They held hands as they rose to the surface.
Hands are good.
Not too much is required of the one giving, and the one on the receiving end feels a great sense of calm.
The venue was pretty gloomy.
There was an air of outmoded beards, warm Fanta and fading dreams of glory. Day-Glo yellow posters announced the triumphant concert tour of one Ramon Riobambo and his llama-skin orchestra. Camille and Franck took their tickets and had a superabundance of seats to choose from.
Gradually the hall filled with people. It felt like a cross between a country fair and a youth club. Mothers were all dressed up and fathers double-checked their camcorder batteries.
As was his tendency whenever he was agitated, Franck began jiggling his foot. Camille put her hand on his knee to calm him.
“To think our Philou is going to have to get up in front of all these people—it kills me. I don’t think I can take it. What if he blanks out, forgets something? What if he starts stuttering? God. We’ll have to pick up the pieces.”
“Shh. It will be fine.”
“If one single person giggles, I swear, they’ll be toast.”
“Calm down, now.”
“Calm down, calm down! I’d like to see how you’d be in his shoes! Would you get up and prance around like a clown in front of all these strangers?”
The children came out first. If you were in the mood for Scapin, Queneau, the Little Prince and the Wizard of Oz, you could have it all.
Camille didn’t manage to draw anything, she was having too much fun.
Then a cluster of gangling teenagers who were in the middle of an experimental rehabilitation program rapped out their existentialism, shaking heavy gold-plated chains.
“Christ, what have they got on their heads?” said Franck. “Panty-hose or something?”
Intermission.
Shit. Warm Fanta and still no sign of Philibert on the horizon.
When darkness fell again, an unbelievable creature of a girl made her appearance.
She was a pint-sized young woman, in pink custom-made Converse, multicolored striped tights, a green tulle miniskirt and a little bomber jacket covered in pearls. Her hair matched the color of her shoes.
An elf. A handful of confetti. The sort of touching, extravagant little child you love the moment you set your eyes on her—or that you’ll never understand.
Camille leaned over and saw that Franck had a silly smile on his face.
“Good evening. So, uh. Anyway. I-I have given a lot of thought to the way I might introduce the . . . the next act and in the end I-I thought that . . . the best would be to-to tell you how we met . . .”
“Uh-oh. Stuttering. Here comes our bit,” Franck murmured.
“So, uh . . . It was last year, roughly . . .”
The girl was nervously waving her arms every which way.
“You know I’ve been organizing workshops for children at Beaubourg and, uh . . . I noticed him because he was always going around his stands to count his postcards over and over. Every time I went by, I’d sneak up on him and it never failed: he was always counting his postcards and sighing. It was . . . Like Charlie Chaplin, d’you know what I mean? With that sort of grace that grabs you by the throat . . . When you don’t know whether you should laugh or cry . . . When suddenly you’re clueless. When you stand there like a fool and your heart goes hot and cold. One day I gave him a hand and . . . I really liked him, simple as that. You will too, you’ll see. You can’t help but like him. This boy is—he is—he’s all the city lights, all by himself.”
Camille was kneading Franck’s hand.
“Oh! And one more thing. When he introduced himself for the first time, he said, ‘Philibert de La Durbellière,’ so trying to be polite I tried to reciprocate, ‘Suzy, uh, de, you know, from Belleville.’ ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘You must be a descendant of Geoffroy de Lajemme de Belleville who fought the Habsburgs in 1672?’ Oh, my gosh! ‘Nah,’ I garbled, ‘from Belleville in Paris.’ And you know the most amazing thing of all? He wasn’t even disappointed.”
She gave a little hop.
“So there we are, that’s it, I’ve said it all. And please applaud very loudly.”
Franck whistled through his fingers.
Philibert came in, heavily. In a suit of armor. With his coat of mail, a plume in the breeze, a long sword, a shield and all the clanking hardware.
Tremors in the audience.
He began to speak but you couldn’t understand a thing.
After a few minutes a little boy went up to him and, standing on a stool, raised his visor.
Philibert, imperturbable, was finally audible.
Faint smiles.
Hard to tell yet where all this was headed.
Philibert began a brilliant striptease. Every time he would remove a piece of metal, his little page shouted out the designation of the object, good and loud:
“Helmet . . . basinet . . . gorgerin . . . breastplate . . . brassards . . . cubitieres . . . g auntlet . . . cor selet . . . cuisses . . . kneeca ps . . . greaves . . .”
Completely deboned, our knight eventually collapsed and the little boy removed his “shoes.”
“Sollerets,” he announced at last, raising them above his head and holding his nose.
Genuine laughter this time around.
There’s nothing like some good slapstick to warm up an audience.
Meanwhile, Philibert Jehan Louis-Marie Georges Marquet de La Durbellière, in a flat and droning voice, detailed the branches of his family tree, enumerating the armed exploits of his illustrious lineage.
Granddaddy Charles against the Turks with Saint Louis in 1271; Grandpa Bertrand gone to glory at Agincourt in 1415, Uncle Whats- hisname at the battle of Fontenoy, Granddad Louis on the banks of the Moine at Cholet, Great-uncle Maximilien at Napoleon’s side, Great-grandfather on the Chemin des Dames; and his maternal grandfather imprisoned by the Krauts in Pomerania.
With a wealth of detail. The children were silent as lambs. The history of France in 3-D. Sublime art.
“And the last leaf on the tree,” concluded Philibert, “here it is.”
He stood up straight. All white, skinny as could be, clothed in nothing but a pair of white boxer shorts with a fleur-de-lys print.
“Here I am, do you see? The fellow who counts his postcards.”
His page brought him a military greatcoat.
“Why?” he asked. “Why, goodness me, does the scion of such a great convoy stand there counting and recounting bits of paper in a place he abhors? Well, I shall tell you why . . .”
And then the wind shifted. Philibert told the story of his birth—chaotic because he presented in the wrong position (“Already doing things wrong,” he sighed) and his mother refused to go to a hospital where they practiced abortions. He told the story of his childhood—isolated from the world, he was taught to keep
his distance from the common people. He told the story of his years in boarding school with Liddell and Scott as spearhead, and the innumerable mischievous and malicious pranks to which he fell victim—this boy who knew nothing of power struggles beyond the ponderous movements of his tin soldiers.
And the audience laughed.
They laughed because it was funny. The one about the wee-wee glass, the taunting, the eyeglasses thrown into the toilet, how he was goaded into jerking off, the cruelty of the Vendée peasant children and the dubious consolation offered by the supervisor. His mother’s directives about the white dove, the long evening prayers to forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation and his father asking every Saturday if he had maintained his rank and been worthy of his ancestors while he wriggled and writhed because, yet again, they were washing his penis with soft soap.
Yes, people were laughing. Because he was laughing, and they were with him on this one now.
All of them princes . . .
All behind his white plume . . .
All of them touched.
He talked about his obsessive-compulsive disorder. His tranquilizers, the papers from the social security where his name never fit on the forms, his stuttering, the muddles he would get in whenever his tongue got bogged down in his distress, the panic attacks in public places, his root canals, his balding scalp, the stoop he was developing, and all the things he’d already lost along the way by virtue of being born in the wrong century. He’d been raised without television or newspapers, without experience of the outside world, without humor, and above all, without ever witnessing an act of kindness toward the world around him.
Philibert gave lessons in deportment and the rules of etiquette, to remind people about good manners and other ways of being in the world, and he could recite his grandmother’s manual by heart:
“ ‘Generous, delicate persons never, when in the presence of a servant, use a comparison which might be injurious. For example: “Whats- hisname behaves like a lackey.” Great ladies in times gone by were scarcely so considerate, you might say, and I do know that there was indeed a duchess in the eighteenth century who was in the habit of sending her people to the Place de Grève at every execution, and she would say, roughly, “Go to school!”
“ ‘Nowadays we show greater care for human dignity and the righteous vulnerability of the small and humble; it is the honor of our era.
“ ‘But nevertheless,’ ” he insisted, “ ‘the politeness of masters toward their servants must not degenerate into a base familiarity. For example, there is nothing quite so vulgar as listening to the gossip of one’s servants.’ ”
And the smiles continued. Even if it was not really a laughing matter.
Finally, he spoke some ancient Greek, recited prayers in Latin to his heart’s content, and confessed he had never seen La Grande Vadrouille, because they made fun of nuns in the film . . .
“I think I must be the only Frenchman alive who has never seen La Grande Vadrouille, don’t you think?”
And kind voices reassured him: No, no, you’re not the only one.
“Fortunately I . . . I’m better now. I’ve lowered the drawbridge, I believe. And I . . . I have left my lands behind to embrace life. I have met people who are far more noble than I am and I . . . Well . . . Some of them are here in the room and I would not like to make them feel uncomfortable but . . .”
Because he was looking at them, everyone turned to Franck and Camille, who were desperately trying to swallow the lumps in their throats.
Because this fellow who was talking now, this beanpole who made everyone laugh when he told them about his misfortunes, was none other than their own Philou, their guardian angel, their fairy godfather SuperNesquik. The one who had saved them, closing his long skinny arms around their dejected shoulders . . .
While people were applauding, Philibert finished getting dressed. He was now wearing a top hat and tails.
“And there we are. I think I’ve told you everything. I hope I haven’t troubled you unduly with these dusty old trinkets of mine. If such were, alas, the case, I beg you to forgive me and to present your grievances to this loyal damsel with the pink hair, for she is the one who compelled me to appear before you this evening. I promise you I will not begin again, but, uh . . .”
He waved his walking stick toward backstage and his page reappeared with a pair of gloves and a bouquet of flowers.
“Have you noticed the color?” he asked, slipping on his gloves. “Fresh butter. Dear Lord, I am hopelessly traditional. Now where was I? Oh, yes! Pink hair. I . . . I . . . know that Monsieur et Madame Martin, the parents of the young maiden from Belleville, are in the theater and I—I—I—I . . .”
He went down on one knee: “I—I do stutter a b-b-bit, d-don’t I?” Laughter.
“I stutter and it’s perfectly normal for once because I am here to ask for the hand of your dau—”
At that moment a cannonball flew across the stage and knocked him over. His face disappeared behind a corolla of tulle and all you could hear was:
“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, I’m going to be a marquiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!”
His glasses all askew, Philibert stood up and lifted Suzy in his arms:
“A marvelous conquest, don’t you agree?”
He smiled.
“My ancestors can be proud of me.”
94
CAMILLE and Franck did not attend the troupe’s year-end party because they couldn’t afford to miss the last train at two minutes to midnight.
They sat next to each other this time, and were no more talkative than on the way out.
Too many images, too much excitement.
“Do you think he’ll come back tonight?” asked Franck.
“Mmm. She doesn’t seem to be particularly burdened with a sense of propriety, that girl.”
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Completely crazy.”
“Can you imagine the look on Marie-Laurence’s face when she sees her future daughter-in-law?”
“If you ask me, it won’t be anytime soon.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know . . . Female intuition . . . The other day, at the château, when we went for a walk with Paulette after lunch, Philou said—and he was trembling with rage—‘Can you imagine? It’s Easter and they didn’t even hide any eggs for Blanche . . .’ Maybe I’m wrong but I got the impression that that was the straw that cut the apron strings. They made him go through all sorts of stuff and he never took offense, or hardly at all, but this time . . . Not hiding any eggs for the little girl, that was just disgraceful. Pathetic. I got the feeling he was venting his anger and making some dark decisions at the same time. So much the better, you might say. You were right: they don’t deserve him.”
Franck nodded and they spoke no more of it. Had they pursued the issue, they would have been obliged to speak of the future in the conditional (and what if Philibert and Suzy get married, where will they live? And where will we live?) and they weren’t ready for that discussion. It was too treacherous to head down that path.
Franck paid Madame Perreira, while Camille broke the news to Paulette; then they had a bite to eat in the sitting room, listening to bearable techno.
“It’s not techno, it’s electro.”
“Ah, excuse me.”
Philibert did indeed not come back that night, and the apartment seemed horribly empty. They were happy for him, and unhappy for themselves. The familiar aftertaste of abandonment welling up in their throats . . .
Philou . . .
They didn’t need to pour their hearts out to communicate their distress. They really could read each other’s thoughts loud and clear. Their friend’s marriage became a pretext for opening the strong liquor, and they drank to the health of all the orphans on the planet. There were so many of them that Camille and Franck had to bring the evening to a close by getting utterly and superbly wasted.
Superbly, and bitterly.
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95
PHILIBERT Jehan Louis-Marie Georges Marquet de La Durbellière, born September 27, 1967, at La Roche-sur-Yon (Vendée), married Suzy Martin, born February 5, 1980, at Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) at the town hall of the 20th arrondissement in Paris on the first Monday of the month of June, 2004, beneath the emotional gazes of his witnesses, Franck Germain Maurice Lestafier, born August 8, 1970, in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), and Camille Marie Elisabeth Fauque, born February 11, 1977, in Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine), and in the presence of Paulette Lestafier, who refused to give her age.
Also present were the bride’s parents and her best friend, a tall boy with yellow hair, scarcely more restrained than Suzy herself . . .
Philibert was wearing a suit of magnificent white linen, a pink handkerchief with green polka dots tucked in his pocket.
Suzy was wearing a magnificent pink miniskirt with green polka dots, with a bustle and a train over two meters long. “My dream!” she said over and over, laughing.
She laughed all the time.
Franck wore the same suit as Philibert, of a more caramel hue. Paulette was wearing a hat which Camille had made, a sort of little pillbox nest covered with birds and feathers going in every direction, and Camille wore a white tuxedo shirt that had belonged to Philibert’s grandfather and which went down to her knees. She had knotted a tie around her waist, and inaugurated a pair of adorable red sandals. It was the first time she’d put on a skirt since . . . Gosh, longer than that, even.