Louise et Barnavaux 🏰💔: Une histoire d’amour tragique
In this poignant story, Pierre Mille immerses us in the complex world of Louise and Barnavaux, two characters bound by an inescapable destiny. Love and betrayal intertwine as they attempt to navigate life’s tumultuous events. Through their trials, the story invites us to reflect on the sacrifices, choices, and consequences that shape our existence. An immersion in pure emotion, where every decision has its weight and its price. Chapter 1. PLÉVECH DESERTER. Since leaving the neighborhood, Barnavaux and all the others, six in number, re-enlisted in the colonial infantry and having just received their bonus, had already drunk more than their fill from the merchants of Hanoi. But they knew how to carry it, it hardly showed . Even the dinner they had at Lecointe’s, at the café-restaurant on the corner, near the shop of A-Pik, the Chinese shoemaker, finally got their legs back on track. Only their heads were a little delirious. One of the six, I think it was Pouldu, suggested, after we had had coffee: “We must go and finish the evening at Madame Ti-Ka’s.” Barnavaux nodded. But he didn’t like it when his friends’ imaginations left him nothing to invent. He added: “On a day like today, we must go on horseback. It’s more glorious.” An Annamese boy went to look for horses. They were ponies from northern Tonkin. They had slender legs, a rather large neck, a round rump, and their eyes shone beneath their swept-back manes like those of a European boy beneath his disheveled hair. Native sais accompanied each of them, running alongside them. Whatever the pace of the beasts, they matched their speed, without getting out of breath, elbows against their bodies, chests inflated with air. The six porpoises put their mounts into a gallop, holding the bridles with both hands, their heavy shoes buried in the stirrups up to their heels, rolling on their saddles and sometimes getting up with a jerk of the hips, unsteady and intrepid, ridiculous but proud to the depths of their naive hearts. “Yes, it’s glorious,” repeated Pouldu. “You’re right, Barnavaux! The cavalcade had reached the banks of the Red River. A European factory threw up its chimneys, then there was an Annamite house, built entirely deep, showing only a narrow facade on the road , and which, however, had a physiognomy. They looked like those sketches of human figures, both grimacing and synthetic, that children in our countries draw on the walls. Two square skylights formed the eyes. Below, a single window simulated a nose, and the door, at the very bottom, was a mouth without a chin. At the upper skylights, two beams, which supported a very pointed roof, ended in the Chinese style, in commas like ridiculous heart-catchers. As they arrived, the noise of another cavalcade, coming in the opposite direction, echoed on the stones, and eight horsemen sprang from the shadows. Without the sais, the two troops would have crushed each other. But an imperious and shrill whistle, coming from the tight lips of the Annamese riders, stopped the horses dead, as if a brutal hand had sawed off their knees. The shock was so harsh that, on both sides, men were unseated. Barnavaux had saluted up to his horse’s neck . But he stood up immediately to look at everything with his clear eyes. “The American sailors from the Manhattan!” he said. “They’re also coming to Ti-Ka’s. ” “All right!” said Pouldu. He had just drawn his saber-bayonet, and Barnavaux had imitated him. It’s a thing that must be done: when you go, as friends from the same country and the same service, to a house like Ti-Ka’s, you must not let another troop from another country and another service enter. In the shadows, you could see the bluish jackets and berets of the Americans. Sailors don’t have saber-bayonets! So the game was won from the start; Barnavaux laughed. But a voice from among the enemy horsemen commanded: “To the revolvers!” She had said this in French, and Barnavaux, amazed, recognized her. He jumped from his horse, shouting: “Plévech! Is that you, Plévech?” The other had also dismounted, at the same time as his comrades. He answered sullenly: “Yes, it’s me!” And Pouldu again distinguished, among those he had wanted to slaughter, Cloarec, Yves Le Blant, La Pige, all topmen from Château-Renault. “Yes, it’s me,” repeated Plévech. And he added, assuming an air of pride to hide the shame he felt deep in his simple soul: “We took service with the Yankees. And then what? If we had enough of Château-Renault!” Barnavaux did not answer. He had understood. The American navy is short of men, and especially of good pointers. So it recruits them, as it can, from the neighbors, paying dearly for desertion. It is not good for a French cruiser, tied up in one of our colonial ports, to see a warship from the United States arrive. Silently, Pouldu sheathed his bayonet, and Barnavaux did the same. “Peace is signed,” he said. “All we have to do is enter Ti-Ka’s house together. ” He had just entered a sort of ignominious porch, similar to a wide, short corridor closed at one end: a sort of dead end, except, on the left wall, a small door monstrously covered with iron. Plévech also knew the customs of the house well. He kicked this door, crying: “Oh! Ti-Ka!” In the dark ceiling, a trapdoor no bigger than a wicket slowly opened; and one saw gently descend from it, at the end of a string, one of those tin boxes used to contain dry cakes. “Put the money in the box first,” said Madame Ti-Ka’s invisible voice. Such were the customs of the house. Madame Ti-Ka only opened the door after collecting the usual tax from this strange almshouse. The soldiers and sailors knew this rite. Untying a corner of their handkerchief or rummaging through leather purses, they each took two large white coins and gravely placed them in the box of Albert biscuits. Now weighing more than a hundred francs, the box rose up towards the trapdoor, pulled by the string. These drunken men, who just now had wanted to kill each other, watched submissively. Not one of them thought of rushing to grab this treasure and carrying it off: there are things that are done and things that are not done, when one is well brought up. They all boasted of being well-bred: living in a very distant foreign land changes you into brutes, but also into gentlemen. Up above, the piastres could be heard clinking. Madame Ti-Ka was counting. Then someone removed a bar, pulled bolts, worked complicated locks, and the large iron-clad door turned on its hinges. The soldiers climbed a sticky staircase. They crowded together , they tried to shout, but their ride made their limbs a little numb, and they also thought, more than they would have liked to show, of the pleasure they were going to take: a pleasure so rare in their soldier’s life that this very place, despite its horror, seemed to them to have something august. Deep down they remained sad, and a jealousy that had not yet formed or found an object bit at their hearts. Each of the two troops regretted having signed the peace instead of driving the other out to remain masters of the place. But Plévech was especially gloomy, because, alone among them all, he had come having fixed his desire. “You know,” he said to Barnavaux, through clenched teeth, “there’s one, the one called Maô… It’s for me. ” “All right,” said Barnavaux, astonished, “all right, old man.” They were now under the roof of a sort of enormous straw hut, made both like a savage hut and like the dome of a temple. Lamps, which had smoked, gave off a smell of oil and soot, but there was also the scent of bazaar perfumes and real flowers: magnolias, jasmines, sprigs of ylang-ylang, the leaves and corollas were dying in the corners. For wherever there are Laotians there are flowers. These girls from a country of forests and clearings, whose bodies and gestures are all caresses, find themselves in perpetual harmony with what, in things, is only a caress and cannot be defined: the music which is very soft and does not form an air, the muted colors of the fabrics, revived by a flower of a slightly stronger tone in the hair and on the throat, the amorous breath of the blossoms. There were twelve girls there, still very young, whom Madame Ti-Ka had brought from the Upper Mekong. Squatting on the straw mats of a low divan, all around this large hut the color of old gold, their very faces appeared pale gold; there was nothing black in them but their slightly stiff hair and their wild animal eyes; and veils of thick muslin, salmon, pink, or pale green, clothed them down to their breasts. Drinks were brought. Plévech was rich: he offered champagne and drank from Maô’s glass, who was the most beautiful. There was a sort of embarrassment because he showed so quickly that he had chosen. “So, it’s true, Plévech,” Barnavaux asked, “you’ve deserted, you ‘re leaving the Château-Renault? ” “Afterward?” Plévech said roughly. “We’re not slaves, perhaps; we ‘re of our time, unionists and revolutionaries, we don’t give a damn about our country or anything else. Wherever I’m well paid, I’ll go!” The Americans had paid him his hiring in gold: five-dollar pieces , of which he showed a handful. Those in Barnavaux’s group were obscurely jealous. “Plévech,” Barnavaux said again, “you’re married, though; you have a wife in Paimpol?” “Not in Paimpol,” Plévech said, “in Plouha.” It wasn’t only for accuracy that he had straightened out Barnavaux. It was in Plouha that he saw again a low granite house, a vast square with an immense church, and a stream made green by the color of the stones, which runs down to a solitary, horseshoe-shaped beach , where layers of pebbles, laid in tiers by the waves, fall to the imperturbable sea. “We’ll send the housewife some money,” Plévech continued. “She won’t want for anything, nor will the kids. But I don’t want for anything either. I want my life. So, what next? Let me repeat. Who’s here blaming me ? ” The other deserters sniggered. “Who’s blaming us?” they said in turn. Pouldu muttered under his breath: “He’d better send his pay, yes! The family’s grown, over there!” “What are you saying, Pouldu?” asked Plévech, sitting up. “I don’t like people talking about me things I don’t understand, you hear! ” “Well,” said Pouldu ironically, “we’re not waiting for you, go on, you can stay. Your wife has had another child, with someone we don’t know. I know that , I’m from Plouha like you, and I’ve just taken my leave there. There’s another child at your house! ” “You fucking bastard!” shouted Plévech. And Maô gave a loud shout. Plévech had just thrown the empty bottle at Pouldu’s head, which remained stuck by the neck in the straw of the hut, like a shell in a wall. The seven other deserters had risen as one man. So we were going to strike, in the end!” But Plévech was already no longer thinking of fighting, he only wanted to know. All men are like that, they want to know! Barnavaux had taken both his arms, almost tenderly, and was squeezing his knees between his thighs. Plévech fell back onto the mat. “Say it’s not true, Pouldu. You lied, eh! Is it a joke?” Pouldu despised Barnavaux’s look because he was still drunk and still resentful. He raised his right hand and spat. “I swear it!” he said. Then Plévech made the movement with his head and neck of a man who can no longer breathe. Maô saw his grief without having understood all these words; she slid to the ground and kissed his knees. “What does it matter to you, Plévech?” asked Barnavaux, astonished, “since you don’t want to come back, since it’s no longer your country, over there, Now? You just said it. He felt the sailor’s muscles soften, relaxed like those of a man who is no longer angry, but only very ill. Plévech murmured: “Yes, it’s my country! I can see that it’s my country now, since it hurt me that what’s mine was taken from me. I have to go back. You see, I have to go back. It can’t happen like this in my house.” Barnavaux gently ran his hand over Maô’s head, still prostrate: but she understood well that this caress was not for her, that it was advice, a request to be kind to her comrade. She got up to embrace Plévech. The flower of her hair fell on the sailor’s face. He pushed her away. “Yes…” he said. I’d like to, but I can’t. I can’t console myself like that, it’s not possible. It’s the other one, over there, that I need, since I know she’s been taken from me… He added gravely, as if stupefied by the mystery he was discovering within himself: “The one who’s here, it’s as if I don’t see her anymore!” He stood up, feeling his chest like a man surprised to be still alive, and walked toward the dark staircase. “Where are you going, Plévech?” asked Barnavaux. “On board the Château-Renault,” he said in a service voice, completely white. “They’ll put me in irons, and I’ll pass the council. But since I have to go back home, now!” The seven other deserters silently followed him. “And you?” asked Barnavaux. They did not wait for the question, having acted without thinking. “We’re going with him,” one of them finally said, “to the Château-Renault! We can’t leave him: he’s in trouble!” Plévech didn’t know how to write, and to make his wife say, through the pen of a more educated comrade, that he knew what had happened at home, he was too proud. What also bothered him, without his being able to realize it, was that, since the day he had learned of such a great misfortune, and which had changed his soul, things around him had not changed in appearance. On board the Château-Renault, his absence having lasted less than six days, he had not been reported as a deserter, nor passed the council. He had been freed by the irons and the forced labor of punished men. In his mind, these troubles being connected with his obscure suffering, he had chewed them over with a kind of voluptuous fury, and the conviction that he would have to take revenge, because that was part of the account. But
then, during the eighteen months that passed before his leave, the order of service was above him, with the same regularity as that of the seasons and the stars; and to perform the same acts at the same times, to be perpetually commanded, to live under a sky where men, trees, even the roofs of houses, were so different from those of his country, Plévech found himself as if astounded. He could no longer see a truth that existed only at the other end of the earth; he knew it, but did not feel it. That is why simple people need to drink: drunkenness gives them imagination. And Plévech, no longer understanding his situation, sometimes said to himself, seeking his anger: When I thought like that it was because I was drunk! He was doing himself a disservice. He had needed alcohol to be completely himself, a man capable of feeling, of delicacy and of moral pain. But when the Cachar had brought him back to Brest, he felt, from the first hours of his liberation, an immense sadness, the isolation of an unharnessed horse that is not yet in the stable. Women, in the bars, excited his desire only to remind him of the one he was waiting for; and yet he regarded them with a kind of wild exaltation, no longer knowing whether he wanted to take them or to beat them. Then the worry returned to his head of the duty he had to return home to carry out a punishment. The absinthe and the brandy made him at first consider this punishment as a pleasure that he was going to give himself; he laughed to himself. It was in Guingamp, where he had to wait, on the benches of a cold and dimly lit room, for the hour when he could take the train back to Plouha, that wickedness rose to his brain; it is because the hours when drunkenness has just subsided are always full of heart-rending anguish, especially in the dark. One still sees in things all that the excitement of alcohol has shown you there, but in pain, a pain that one can no longer bear without a bitter desire to take revenge. One knows then, to the depths of one’s soul, with the most atrocious certainty, that if one is in pain it is the fault of someone, whom one cannot forgive—for after this impossible forgiveness, there would be nothing left but to die oneself: life would be too hollow and too disgusting. Yes, yes, suicide or murder, these are the acts that seem inevitable and necessary at night, when one is sad, drunk, and sober. Plévech was trembling all over and stiff in his will, frozen in all his limbs and fixed in his vow. It was too contrary to what was owed to him, it was too dirty, what was in him: a child who was not of his own making, a child whom he had been allowed to support with his loan, with his money, while he was at sea, toiling. He had the conception of a dreadful and cowardly injustice that blackened the earth and life, and which had to be erased, for God’s sake! It was seven thirty in the morning when the train took him down to Plouha. It was raining. Plévech mechanically covered himself with his pea coat, put his bag underneath, well protected, like a man careful of his belongings, and walked towards his house. When he was in front of the door, he knocked with his fist three times. And surely Plévech was already up: her busy hands were making noise near the fire and the bowls, and there were also the footsteps of a child. “Who’s there?” she said. “It’s me, Jeannie,” said Plévech. “Open up!” And the tone of his own voice struck him. It seemed astonishing that it could resound like that, outside: since the day before, he had heard only inner voices. “My darling!” cried Jeannie. She didn’t know that Plévech knew the truth, and having to tell it, or even let it be seen, seemed dreadful to her; but she pulled the bolt without hesitation, because he was the master. The children continued to trail behind her, for fun and also out of curiosity, to see the man who was being let in this way. There was Michel, the eldest; the two little ones, Amandine and Léa; but Julot, the bastard, had remained seated, in front of the table, on his straw chair, because of the wooden bar that enclosed him, to prevent him from falling, at waist height. When Plévech saw that the door was beginning to turn, he gave it a push with his shoulder that sent it against the wall; he saw his wife in the doorway. She was standing before him, her body slightly bent forward, her hands clasped, her forehead smooth, her eyes clear, and opening her mouth to say: “So it’s you all the same, our man, now!” But he, without a word, threw a blow with his fist across her face that made the skin burst, on the bone of the cheek, as one would burst the rind of a ripe fruit with one’s finger . He had hit her so hard that she fell straight down, unable to hold herself back, her head under the table and right against Julot’s high chair. She gave a great cry, and all the children began to scream. It was Julot’s voice that pulled her up. Without it she would have played dead, and besides, she felt like vomiting from the pain and the jolt. But the little one, what was her man going to do to the little one? She gave a leap of wild, silent elasticity that lifted her up without anyone being able to see how. In a second she had snatched Julot from his straw seat , turned behind Plévech, thrown the child onto the road, and said to Michel, her elder brother , as she pushed him out: “Run with the little one , run quickly, behind the church, wherever you like! ” And when that was done, she threw her claws forward, like a beast in rage. Plévech began to hit again. Sometimes, when his wife’s fingers came too close to his eyes, he took them in his rough hands and twisted them; she fell to her knees. Then he would knock her to the ground with a blow to the head. Sometimes he would hit her on the shoulders and chest; he was surprised by this sound, so soft that it seemed insufficient for his anger, and, opening his palm, would slap her hard . She screamed out of fear, even more than because of her injuries, believing that he was going to kill her. The two little ones, Amandine and Léa, were silent now, terrified. Only the older one had taken the other in her arms. It is a sign of the genius that is in the sexes, even before they are formed: little boys, if they cannot flee from danger, hold out useless fists; The little girls embraced each other, the older one holding the younger one: they were already doing as they would do later, when they had become men and women. Plévech met them on his terrible road, and kicked them so hard that the group of their bodies collapsed without breaking up. They remained stretched out on the granite slabs, their eyes full of terror. Plévech was troubled by this. He had not intended to harm his own children, and besides, he no longer knew exactly what he had done. It was another man who had struck, while the ordinary Plévech had gone off who knew where. But at this hour he was returning, weak as if after a serious illness, weak enough to complain, to cry, to ask for herbal teas. Yet he kept repeating to himself, to prove to himself that it was he who had done all this, and that he had been right: I have been wronged, I have been wronged! It was as if he had sulked; such a mediocre feeling, after his magnificent fury, humiliated him confusedly. He asked: “Where is he? ” He meant the bastard. But his wife, who heard him, remained lying on the ground, without answering, her face in her hair and in her fingers, which were stained with blood. He shrugged his shoulders as if he were not responsible, and went out. Pouldu’s brother, who is a cattle dealer, had heard of him settling his account, and all those in the street had also left their houses to listen. But when Plévech appeared on his threshold, they went home, except for Pouldu, who showed himself braver, because he knew him better, and who came to him. “It’s you, Plévech,” he said. “Are you back again? We must go and have a drink at Narcisse’s.” They went together to Narcisse Cloarec’s, who runs an inn. “A round of white wine?” said Pouldu. At that moment, Plévech felt the terrible thirst that was devouring him. The saliva seemed to have solidified in his mouth, and was so bitter that he could no longer swallow it. “No,” he said, “a bowlful. Cider, lots of cider.” He spoke these words in an almost plaintive tone, as if he had been lying in bed with a fever. Pouldu pretended not to notice. He ordered some cider, and Plévech began to drink like one who is about to die in the desert. Pouldu remained silent about what did not concern him. He spoke of local affairs and of his own children. He added, however: “Have you seen your guy, your Michel? ” “No,” said Plévech, “he wasn’t there. ” “He’s a fine fellow all the same,” continued Pouldu conciliatorily. “He’s back.
” “What do you say, back?” said Plévech. He was completely dazed, and it seemed to him that the words came from very far away.
“Back from what? ” “You don’t know,” said Pouldu again. “Typhoid, which he had. We thought he’d die from it. The doctor said, at his last visit: They’re poor people, there’s no point in making them pay: he’s lost.” So Mother Le Blant put the pigeon on him. You know? Plévech knew. When people are dying of a bad fever, they cut open the chest of a live pigeon and place the still-quivering creature on the dying person’s head. This is not a cure, It’s a charm, older than the religion of the Christians, a bloody sacrifice to demand a miracle. –… And then, your Michel came back. We thought he would remain an idiot, or mute, as happens. But he came back, with nothing, and so grown up, when he walked, that we didn’t recognize him. Plévech listened, almost without understanding, astonished that a much greater misfortune than the one that had eaten away his soul could have greeted him on his return; and it seemed frightening to him, almost impossible, that his eldest son, Michel Plévech, had almost died. There is no sailor who is not proud of his firstborn, like a prince. –He was so ill, you say, so ill? –Yes, old man. And Pouldu wanted to talk about something else. But Plévech repeated: –Really, so ill? And they put the pigeon in his hand, and he’s got nothing left, at this hour, are you sure? He had fallen into such a deep reverie that Pouldu was bored. “It’s past ten o’clock now,” he said. “I’m going home.” Plévech returned home with his heart so confused that he didn’t feel hungry. His wife had made the soup. Have you seen half-crushed ants still carry their load and finish their task? Housewives are the same. The children waited for the master to return to eat, as respect demands, and Michel, raising his eyes, said clearly: “Good morning, our father.” Then Plévech lifted him from the ground as if to know his weight, put him down, picked him up again, without even wanting to kiss him, but as if surprised, now, that he was still alive. Then he said: “He must eat. We must eat!” Then he heard the light sound of a mouth biting into a buttered slice of toast. It was Julot, hidden between the fireplace and the large oak bed, the same one where he had been born. Plévech made a gesture, and the mother went to stand in front of the child, in silence. But the man said gravely, hesitating a little, like a man who has just discovered things in the universe he had never seen before, and who does not yet know quite how to express them: “All the same, yes, all the same… it’s better than if there were one less!” And Jeannie poured the soup. Her back felt as if it were broken, and her head, hacked by blows even under her hair, was nothing more than a wound. But she hardly felt her pain. Plévech sat down… Chapter 2. THE NIGHT OF BILLY HOOK. Barnavaux never knew, I think, how Plévech’s adventure ended. And, in fact, he didn’t care to know. There is, among old soldiers, for sentimental complications, an indifference, a kind of callousness of the heart, a disdain, which brings them closer in a rather unexpected way to cloistered monks, but especially in the bad aspects. The chaste ignorance of the monks keeps them from a brutal obscenity that Barnavaux did not always avoid. He believed he knew women because he had possessed them. So he wanted to talk about them; and since he only said nonsense, I made every effort not to listen to him. They say that in matters of love every man, sooner or later, has his crisis. I thought Barnavaux would be an exception: in which I was mistaken, as we will see later in this story. But, for the moment, he had his virtue, if I may say so, a sort of inhuman and ugly virtue, which consisted in thinking that the duty, for a healthy and sane man, is to remain perfectly convinced that, in all circumstances, one woman is worth another. It was from this point of view that he considered Plévech’s conduct , when the memory of that night at Ti-Ka’s came back to us; and he then found this conduct incomprehensible and disastrous. His experience, his dreadful and base experience, made him judge that, if one disobeys this principle, something nasty is bound to happen. “There is a man,” he told me one day, “a fellow I knew, his name was Billy Hook, an English supercargo man whom I met on the boat the first time I crossed the Red Sea to go to Tonkin… Well! that man, he hadn’t done it on purpose, choose: and despite that, the greatest misfortunes happened. And the other, it was because there was only one woman in the world for him, that the English hanged him. It happened in Port Said, at the bar—that’s a polite word—of Mrs. Coxon. You know Port Said? What a dirty town, eh, what a dirty town! His face had taken on an expression of contempt, of scandalized horror. Barnavaux scandalized! But I knew, yes, I knew! His expression didn’t surprise me. Things have changed a little in appearance now, in Port Said, because the English have moralized the town. But they have remained underneath what they were, I suppose. To moralize cities is little more than to hide their vices as one dresses bodies, and nothing is changed when one has covered a body with clothes: neither its desires, nor its defects, nor the leap of muscles, nor the sweat that flows, nor the furies that drive it, nor the weaknesses that lay it low. But fifteen years ago, Port Said was hell in the open air, under an eternal light. Under an eternal light, because never, never, does the light of the electric lamps go out in the streets, in the shops, in the cafes, in the bars and gambling houses, and the other dwellings, those that must not be named, as in the centuries of faith it was said of Satan. Consider that new ships arrive every hour before this Mediterranean mouth of the Suez Canal, and that they only want to stay just long enough to fill their bellies with coal, and leave; for time, on these always crowded quays, is made to pay dearly, dearly than elsewhere. Day and night, the coal porters run with their black baskets on their heads, while the sailors, the emigrants, the soldiers, the civil servants, all those who go there, to the side where the sun rises, and those who return from there, rush into the straight avenues, onto the cement sidewalks. They say to themselves: This is still, or already, almost Europe, here! Where you can find everything, everything. They do not worry if the quality is infamous. They are in a hurry. Perhaps they will die. I remember, fifteen years ago! The gambling houses where all the roulette wheels were rigged, where all the croupiers stole; the drunken sailors who continued to drink, when they could no longer remain standing, held on each side, under the arm, by a Negro; the curiosity shops that announced themselves with this black inscription on a long strip of white calico: Ahmed ben Ahmed. Obscene photographs and monuments, in French, in an elliptical and glorious French; and all the women, Spanish, French, Wallachian, German , Negress, Somali, and even a solitary lady, dressed in black and veiled, who was only encountered in a dark corner, always the same one, near the square where there is the statue of M. de Lesseps. She was called the lady of the sailors’ society. She gave the poor devils the illusion of luxury. Already drunk, with her they became even more intoxicated with mystery. –… At the very end of the town, continued Barnavaux, in the middle of a garden reclaimed from the sand, there is Madame Coxon’s bar. You know? The house of the American women, where only rich people go? That was where Billy Hook and I had gone. I never saw him again, Billy Hook, the English supercargo, but he must still be alive : drink had no effect on him, and yet he drank terribly, always calm, clear, lucid, steady, his wildcat pupils only a little enlarged. There are hardly any people left in the world except the English who, when they commit certain acts, have the idea of sin and believe themselves damned. He, Billy Hook, believed himself damned, irremediably, because he was a Protestant, English to boot , and that is a religion and a race where no one believes that one can redeem oneself by confession and repentance. Grace must descend and operate all by itself. Now, Billy Hook believed himself beyond grace , forgotten, lost, and that gave him an extraordinary firmness in bad behavior. I don’t even know, moreover, if he enjoyed himself very much, living as he lived, doing what he did: he had to live like that, that’s all. He remained cold, always cold, like a football captain who wants to win a game. … As we were having a whisky and soda, an Albanian sailor came into the bar: a small, thin man, with crazy eyes . He said to Mrs. Coxon, after ordering a siphon of fizzy lemonade: “Miss Clary? ” “She’s not here, deary, she’s not here,” said the old lady, ” but there are the other ladies. ” The man didn’t answer. He took the siphon and a glass from the bar himself , and went to sit down at a small table at the back of the room. And that restored Billy Hook’s memory. He said calmly: “I must go and join her up there!” It was one of the rules of that house, a very strange rule, but quite common, it seems, in the English countryside. No drinking was allowed in the bedrooms. Mrs. Coxon kept a strict hand on that. Billy Hook had said to Mrs. Coxon: “Clary is mine tonight.” And he had taken her somewhere up there. But every half hour, he would come back down looking quite calm, and drink another whisky and soda, talking about something else, standing at the bar, without worrying about the woman he had paid for, even to offer her a drink. Billy Hook was a man who thought only of himself, on principle. And when he had announced that he was going to join Clary, he seemed hardly in a hurry. It was up to her to wait, and Mrs. Coxon knew that he was a good customer. She didn’t insist. The Albanian sailor remained seated at his little table, in front of his glass of fizzy lemonade. No one had noticed that, since Billy Hook’s last words, he had taken off his shoes. And he was not seen to leave the room. Besides, even if they had seen him: he had paid, he had left, what’s surprising? He had taken off his shoes, that was more curious! But if one had to pay attention to all people’s fancies , one night on watch at Port Said! Suddenly, a scream was heard, one of those long, dreadful screams, longer than a human breath, and resembling—I beg your pardon, but I can’t find any other comparison—the long roar of a locomotive crossing a high trench, hissing its steam. And, suppose then that the locomotive enters a tunnel? The noise doesn’t stop by itself, it is suppressed. That was it! They say that fear sobers you up. It’s a lie. There are drunkards whose hearts she squeezes so hard they fall over, or worse. Of those who were there, two left. There were gasps. The others rushed up the stairs, Billy Hook at the head; and they were mingled with the American women, the beautiful red-haired American women, in ballroom attire, who were screaming. Upstairs, there were numerous footsteps too, bare feet running in the corridors: men’s feet, women’s feet. “It was from my house,” said Billy Hook. His voice was a little shorter than usual, but he had said my house, instead of Clary’s, out of habit of taking everything and being at home everywhere. Yes, it was Clary’s, and she had shouted too late! I can still see it, that room, with its whitewashed walls, against which the colored engravings stood out too loudly; its white and black marble slabs , in a diamond pattern; the copper bed, all turned upside down, and a wicker armchair, lacquered in green ripolin. Clary hadn’t even had time to leave this armchair, where she was waiting… A knife, in a single stroke, had cut her carotid arteries… She was dressed only in a black silk chemise, which clung to her very white body. On her throat, a necklace of Sudanese gold filigree shone in patches amidst the blood. Someone raised their voice to recall the funny eyes of the Albanian sailor, and the sound of his voice. Everyone said: –It’s him… He didn’t have time to come down. He’s in the house. Beds were overturned. Wardrobes were kicked open. People were ripping open mattresses, and nothing was found. Nothing on the terrace either : a sort of cement sheet, completely empty, and bleached white by the moon. But, looking at the balustrade, Billy Hook saw two clenched hands. He bent down. The Albanian sailor was there, hanging, his body in the abyss. Billy Hook took him by the collar of his jacket and hauled! Others tore his hands from the balustrade, and the man who had killed appeared. His teeth were chattering. His cheeks had sunk into his mandibles, as if he had suddenly become very thin and very old. All that could be seen in his face was his thin, very long nose and two pale holes: the look of his fearful eyes in the moonlight. They would have killed him on the spot, and I saw no problem with that, but two policemen from Port Said had arrived: two brown fellahs, dressed as European soldiers: they were proud to arrest a white man! They got their hands on the man. “Is it you?” Billy Hook said to him in English, “did you do that? ” English is a language where one can only say “you” in the greatest crises, and that gives politeness to the words. The other replied: “Yes, it was me… And why didn’t I kill you instead of her?… I don’t know… I don’t know… ” He seemed to understand. He had come to ask for this Clary he loved, already furious that she could not be his immediately. But when he saw, in her form, with her bones and her flesh, the man who was taking her from him, he had pictured the thing more vividly, the thing, the act! So it was she he had killed at the moment he went towards her, perhaps thinking… but it was another idea, without knowing, that had carried him away. Billy Hook said in a rather slow voice: “Yes, why not me! And if I had known that it was the one, the one you wanted! What did it matter to me!” He reflected again, and added seriously: “I beg your pardon, sir; truly, I beg your pardon! ” The two policemen led the man away. Billy Hook whistled between his teeth, then he said to Mrs. Coxon: “Where are the other ladies?” He said that, Barnavaux explained seriously, “because he hadn’t finished his night, and he needed his pleasure. But you see all the misfortunes it causes, to need a woman, especially. And it’s true that if Billy Hook had known… But you never know! Chapter 3. THE CHINESE. –… Look, said Barnavaux, it’s the louf legionnaire lying there again! If the man belonged to the Foreign Legion, one could only tell from the insignia of his white helmet, which almost completely hid his face. For the rest, as he was lying on his stomach, one could not even see the buttons of a rag of a khaki uniform, extremely dirty. He was not asleep, since one could clearly see, almost at ground level, the distinct gleam of his two wide- open eyes which seemed to be searching for something in the grass; and he was not drunk, for one of his hands, which was making a stick perform some strange sort of game, was not trembling. Barnavaux continued, without paying any more attention to him: –It’s not ugly, all the same, the Red River, from here! It was on the supply road, between the Po-Lou post and Lao-Kay. Clear streams tumbled down the slope, making the pebbles in their beds ring; the simple, straight, agile surge of gigantic, slender bamboos threw exaltation and joy into the air; and further away, far above us, climbing gray and blue limestone cliffs, tall trees raised their white trunks, smooth as columns. When there were no more bamboos, wild banana trees invaded the hilly land. Around their round, soft stems, so full of sap that a clear drool when you pushed your cane into it, their enormous leaves lifted symmetrically to surround the drooping stem of a flower longer than your arm, of a dark red, rich and warm like the velvet of a processional banner; and, on this large, tranquil flower, one would have said there were other smaller flowers, redder, almost scarlet, trembling: they were little birds that flew away all together when we passed, little birds drunk on honey! The black soil smelled of decomposition, of fertility, of germinating seeds and of insects–for insects also have their smell, when the summer sun shines, and their almost invisible myriads, among the grasses, and in the sonorous air, and in the deaf earth, fly, crawl, hunt, devour, love, warm their eggs and their chrysalides. Farther away, beyond the surging vegetation, was the Red River, already as wide as the Seine, furious, hiccuping with rapids, soiled with bloody clays torn from the rotten rocks of the highlands, which it carried southward, over there, to the populous delta of Tonkin; and large Chinese junks were making an effort to go upstream. Heavy, vast, low, they patiently went upstream, helped both by a sail of woven straw and by the iron-shod rattans of men who perpetually ran from fore to aft, agile, patient, tireless, their skin a yellow that verged on black and red, so bent that they seemed to be walking on all fours, and shrunk by the distance. “They look like ants!” said Barnavaux. Then the man we had seen lying in the grass raised his head and smiled. He had very strange eyes, a soft brown surrounded by a gray-green circle, on top of a face like a man from the North: very thick blond hair, an extremely coarse blond beard, freckles everywhere there was no hair; it made him look like a big, mad and very intelligent dog. “Yes,” he said, “ants that come from there, from the great anthills that are there!” He searched the north with his eyes: the horizon of mountains beyond which is China, the immensity of the yellow countries. “He’s a former Russian officer,” Barnavaux said in a low voice. “They say he served in his country’s navy, at Port Arthur, during the Great War… And then he deserted and came here to join the Legion. Reasons for that? Perhaps there was no reason: he ‘s crazy, I tell you. That’s all. He’s not the only one.” I think the legionnaire had heard. However, he still smiled: “Look at those, the real ants,” he said. “How similar they are, eh, how similar they are!” And I noticed that he was lying with his head across a path of large red ants. It was over these insects that he was dreaming, like a big, idle child. “Look,” he continued, “there’s one that’s carrying nothing in its pincers, and that’s perhaps lost. I’m teasing it with this bit of straw: how scared it is, how cowardly it is! It’s lost its head, it’s running away like a madwoman. But this one, on the contrary, which is bringing a piece of wood back to the anthill, nothing will divert it from its path, come on! Look, I ‘ll throw a stone at it, and it’s half crushed. What does it care!” She emerges from the disaster with three legs, a flattened belly, a severed antenna, but she hasn’t let go of her straw. And if I try to tear this straw from her, she doesn’t hesitate, she bites, she fights against me, against me, a monster so big that her eyes probably can’t see me all. Don’t you understand what that means? It means that an ant who has found her job is like a sleepwalker. She can no longer conceive of anything but this job, she has lost her will, lost even the instinct of self-preservation. Birds that make their nests, birds that raise their young, for them, it’s very probably the same thing; and that’s what we call instinct: a command that is above the individual. Well, these yellows, this billion yellows, They are like ants and like birds: they have the somnambulism of their task, and that is why they frighten me! Suddenly, an expression of terror so painful passed over his strange dog-man face that it made me want to flee. “I was on the Petropavlovsk,” he said, “I was on the Petropavlovsk… ” “The battleship that Admiral Makarof commanded at Port Arthur, and that blew up,” murmured Barnavaux. “Poor fellow! I understand, now, I understand why…” And he touched his forehead. “The horror of it,” murmured the legionnaire, “the horror of it! Don’t put on a mysterious air about my head being sick. It’s no use, I won’t get angry.” You’re only making a small mistake: I have a very strong head, it’s my nerves that are out of whack, my nerves and… and maybe my morale. I can’t hear a door slam behind me anymore, and when someone puts a hand on my shoulder I feel like falling. But my memory works well and my brain isn’t affected. I remember everything. But what I do remember is something you don’t imagine: I’m afraid for later, afraid for all our races. Are you there? … The admiral didn’t want to engage in combat. He had gone out to drill the crew, and especially the officers; he wasn’t counting on anything serious, when the big shells began to fall. The enemy’s fire was so badly aimed, apparently, that it didn’t do us any harm. And even when we began to be hit, there remained in front of us, respected by this rain of large steel spindles which made the sea spurt like a pool under hail, a sort of channel of calm water. It was the ruse, it was there that they wanted us to pass; but no one understood, they steered towards this calm water. We had barely left the pass, the arms of the semaphores could be clearly seen with the naked eye . The enemy fire increased in intensity. A shell fell on the signal mast, breaking it. The lookout officer was killed outright and I remember, yes, I remember… part of his entrails and his diaphragm, a sort of whitish and translucent rag, remained attached to the debris: butcher’s meat dressed for sale, that’s what it looks like! There were also things that were no longer working, the ship’s members paralyzed; the electricity cut, the freight elevator blocked, bent, out of order. The admiral gave orders; but who was in charge of the electricity, who was supposed to take care of the freight elevator? Was it you, Piotre Ephimovitch? Was it you, Serguieev? We didn’t know anymore, I don’t think we ever knew. Ah! That was shameful, shameful, I tell you: no one knew what to do, we were left with our arms hanging. And suddenly, coming from the land, a small boat appeared, a dirty little Chinese boat, manned by two men, who were maneuvering to cut our route and join us. It was where it was passing that death on the sea fell more. Bursting shells, above it, scattered their pieces and their fire; other giant shells sank in front of him, behind him; and this absurd nutshell kept going, very gently, very gently, with its two oars scraping the water very regularly. But what did he want, what did he want! He was bringing a message, that was certain; these two men could only have risked death to fulfill a sacred, pressing, obligatory duty. We stopped, the boat stopped by our bow, and a man got in. He was a Chinese, carrying a basket of woven rushes, quite heavy. He placed it on the deck and made his salute very low, his hands placed on his chest… A projectile exploded on the port bow, very close to him, and four men fell dead, torn to pieces. He made a second salute, the Chinese. And nothing extraordinary appeared on his face. A rifle officer who was there, Stepanov, rushed towards him. –What is it, he said, why have you come, from where? Hey, speak! The Chinaman made his third bow, and said in pidgin, that I roughly translates: “Ma commandant, I have some to bring back officer’s linen. Very much in a hurry.” He opened his basket as if it had contained the holy host, and false collars, pajamas, white dolmans, white trousers, shirts, appeared, neatly arranged, in separate packages for each of the customers. It was the laundress! He had been told to bring the linen by ten o’clock, and when he arrived, boatloads of them had cleared out. So, he had taken a boat with his son, with his son, you understand! Since he had been told to bring the linen by ten o’clock! He took from the basket some wooden pegs marked with notches, all like those of the bakers of Europe. “Who here counts laundry?” he said simply. We had just entered this channel I told you about, this kind of avenue of calm water where nothing fell anymore, and we looked at this Chinese man, amazed by his courage, by his heroism, by his unconsciousness… no, all that is European words, words that are not true; we were terrified, humiliated, because he had done, without thinking of more, what he had to do. While we, woe! The iron hurricane was only passing to our right, to our left; we were all saying to ourselves, drunk with the anguish we had gone through, our brains in mush: It’s over, it wasn’t for today, we’re out. And then, the others, and perhaps I too, began to laugh around the Chinese man, because we thought we were saved, because we were happy, because we were embarrassed in front of him. He said again, politely: “Where are some laundry counters?” And taking his wooden cards, he called out. “Lieutenant Piotre Ephimovitch! ” “You want to see Piotre Ephimovitch,” someone said. “Look, there he is!” And he raised his hand toward the signal mast. “The one where that horror was , you know! ” The Chinese raised his head, and I don’t know what he would have said. I don’t know, nor anyone, nor he, because we had just hit the trap, the trap into which we had been led, the two torpedoes anchored between two waters!… We didn’t suffer much, it was only, after all, as if our hearts were falling out. I saw the water rise in great jets on the side of the sea where I was looking, and then the boat didn’t come up. He was cut in two… That’s what the life of fifteen hundred men is like: it doesn’t take long for it to become nothing, nullity, rottenness. I was fished out by chance… “And the Chinese?” I asked. “How do you expect me to know!” said the legionary in a suddenly furious voice, “and what does that matter to you? There are still too many of them, eh, too many! Six hundred million in the anthill! And all of them sleepwalkers, when they have their task, like real ants: blind, deaf, insensitive, nerveless. There will always be too many, I tell you. ” He tried to give a firmer look to his lost animal eyes. “I came to the legion because of the discipline. I want to learn discipline. Without it, what! What will happen to us Europeans?” Chapter 4. FOR A THOUSAND PIASTRES. Ti-Soï knew very well where he was being taken: the very day before, he had been taken out of prison, wearing a cangue around his neck, to dig his grave. This is a custom that still exists in Tonkin; when a man has been condemned to die by the native tribunal, following the law of the ancestors, he digs his own grave, helped by a few fellow prisoners, the canha-pha where one is fed, by marvelous indulgence, at the government’s expense. So, Ti-Soï had not found this extraordinary or wicked. Only, he knew what was going to happen to him. But a great indifference had come over him. Perhaps it is a mistake of civilized people to believe that by reducing the length of the wait one lessens the pangs of the end. And what if it were the opposite? What if the soul, the mind, the brain, call it what you will, needed time to get used to it, the body a kind of fatigue and boredom? To know in advance a fate inevitable, this mysteriously dissolves the very desire to escape it. We are no longer like those who die naturally, we are more worn out, we abandon ourselves, we live only half and elsewhere, like a sick Christian when he has received absolution, communion, the holy oils. That is what is needed! And no doubt it is there that we must seek the cause of the apparent insensitivity of the condemned Annamese: for if they can escape danger in a battle, a fire, a shipwreck, look at them: they are more afraid than we are, they chatter their teeth, they look cowardly! While they are brave at the supreme hour, when we are not. Ti-Soï therefore carried with a very gentle step the head that the executioner was going to blow off. Yet he saw him very clearly, the executioner, walking alone behind the crier charged with announcing, with a roaring trumpet, the crimes and the condemnation of this man named Ti-Soï, pirate, rebel and smuggler: he was a man in a red smock, with beautiful bare, well-muscled legs, small, but strong, with a thick neck, and who was leaning on his shoulder an enormous broad-bladed saber; and the round handle of this saber was trimmed with green cords to make it fit better in the hand. That was how Ti-Soï was going. The escort of Annamese riflemen was gaited with bands of yellow canvas, dressed in khaki; under the black chignons and pointed hats, they looked like a troupe of women dressed for a circus pantomime, or like vicious urchins. Then came the mandarin judge, very handsome, very grave, dressed in a violet dalmatic like a kind of bishop, seated under a green parasol, followed by his pipe-bearers and his guards, whose square blouses proclaimed, in Chinese characters, all scarlet, the name and titles of Monseigneur their master. Flags flapped, red, blue, and yellow; gongs sent deep notes into the air, which drove one mad. And to the right and to the left, on each side of the flat road, gorged with invisible water, the still young rice paddies shone as far as the horizon. They were a very soft green, monotonous, but pleasant. Sometimes, in a ditch, women paddled, probing the fish-filled mud with woven rush nets. They went in almost up to their necks, then, at the sound of the terrible horn, came out covered in a breastplate of fresh mud, the color of gold. And they ran to stare at the prisoner. But they remained silent, their curiosity expressed only in a slightly indiscreet eagerness, and Ti-Soï, whose walking straight was being hampered by one of them, said politely: “Excuse the little one, venerable lady!” He bowed by bringing his two fists together on his chest, and she returned the bow. Ti-Soï had done this without thinking. He was now only making the gestures he had been taught when he was little. The procession stopped near the empty tomb. They couldn’t cut off Ti-Soï’s head while his neck was caught in the cangue: a thing made like two rungs of a ladder, with the uprights. Then the executioner set about cutting one of these bars with a matchet, a kind of large dagger whose edge he sharpened against his saber, like a butler rubbing his carving knife against another. This operation took a long time because the wood was very hard. Barnavaux smoked a cigarette, without saying anything. He saw that I was quite pale. “Do you want to leave?” he said to me. “It’s not clean, is it?” But at that moment Ti-Soï’s face lit up. He was looking at a young woman who had stood in his way. She had two chains around her neck, one of amber beads, the other of silver beads, and her blue tunic was brand new, as if for a wedding. There is something so frail about this Annamite race that if the men look like women, the women look like children. She prostrated herself five times before the condemned man, but without a single feature of her face moving. Perhaps many feelings were stirring in her breast, but she did not should at that moment show only respect. It was a ritual greeting, it was obvious. Ti-Soï, on the contrary, put his hand on this prostrate head, smiling. Barnavaux whistled. “What is it?” I asked. “This isn’t ordinary,” Barnavaux said between his teeth. “No, this isn’t ordinary! This woman is Ti-Haï, his congaye, his wife, and it was she who delivered him. ” “The one who received the thousand piastres of the price?” I said, astonished. “Yes,” said Barnavaux. The executioner was still working on cutting the cangue, and Ti-Soï was helping him. I mean, he was doing everything possible not to hinder him: he was naturally afraid that the matchète would hurt him. If you have ever seen, in France, the fearful submission of a future guillotine victim when his shirt collar is cut, you will understand what I mean. Very close to him, the executioner’s assistant planted a stake in the ground. I saw later what the stake was for. “These are things,” said Barnavaux, “that are not understandable. For a thousand piastres, – that makes two thousand five hundred francs, – she gave up her man, the bitch! And now here she is, making him lais with necklaces , a new kékouan, a whole outfit that he is going to pay for with a blow of a saber on the back of the neck. And he seems to find it completely natural, he laughs, he no longer even thinks of his death when he looks at her! He said, discouraged by reflection: “You only see that among savages!” Then, Hiêp, an old linh-cô, that is to say a militia cavalryman, a man who understood French because he had re-enlisted twice, dared to say with an air of blame: –You’re in trouble. Congaye Ti-Soï beaucoup tot. Usually, he was already quite like an old woman, because of the wrinkles all over his face, and his chignon which was turning gray under his helmet ; and at that moment he looked, as he spoke, like a devout woman to whom someone is speaking ill of the good Lord, as she is leaving mass. He was scandalized. –What does he say? I asked. –He says, by Jove! Barnavaux translated with repugnance, that I am mistaken and that Ti-Soï’s woman is very chic. Public opinion is on her side, moreover . She is not treated like a nha-quoué,–a peasant. She is a lady. Look! It was true: there was an atmosphere of deference around her. “It’s because she is rich!” explained Barnavaux: “she has the thousand piastres. Filthy people!” Then, Hiêp spoke again: “You don’t know,” he said, “and you white people, no one knows. Congaye Ti-Soï, much earlier, same thing Madame Bouddha (he meant like a goddess). To be a pirate, before, in Tonkin, there was a lot of good: to earn sapèques, to earn piastres. Nhaquoués give rice, fish, and la-bouzie (candles), and tea, and oil-lamp. Mandarins give cake and rifle cartridges. Now, there is no good, there is no gain. Bad, bad! “I know that,” said Barnavaux proudly: because of the Larchant columns. He meant the military operations that had been underway for a year against the pirate. “Larçant columns,” replied Hiep, “are good. But there’s no way to get much good. Resident roads, there’s good, but there’s no way to get much good. Missionaries, there’s good, but there’s no way to get much good. But all that together, gained much good: pirate starved to death! Slowly, I understood his thinking: the columns that had harassed the pirate; the roads, traced by the resident, that had allowed the columns to march more quickly, to tighten the net; and the missionaries, with patient discretion, soliciting information from their flock, suggesting that since Ti-Soï was no longer the powerful man, it was pointless to give him anything. ” “And Ti-Soï can’t find a way,” continued Hiep, “no way to eat, no way to get cartridges, no way to sleep, never a way. His stomach, same thing, a hole; legs, arms, back, same thing, old dead man without meat (a skeleton). And a large sign nailed to the trees: Sell Ti-Soï, win a thousand piastres. Who’s going to win a thousand piastres? Nguyen-Tich, Huong-Tri-Phu, Luong-Tam-Ky? A lot of bad guys, all bastards, Ti-Soï’s enemies. So, Ti-Soï, one evening, went in to enter his wife’s house. Ti-Haï, congaye, to play laïs, very sad, very happy. And spoke to him: –Playing pirate, finished-screwed. And who’s going to win the thousand piastres? Nguyen-Tich, Huong-Tri-Phu, Luong-Tam-Ky: a lot of bastards, a lot of dirty guys. Bad… Where’s the kid? Kid Ti-Soï lying on the mat, lying down to sleep: little, little, not yet known how to walk, not known how to talk. Ti-Soï looked at the kid, said congaye: –You’ve got some to make him win a thousand piastres. Much good money for the ancestral altar! So, Ti-Haï, congaye, again to make laïs, to cry, and to say: Me, very happy! Barnavaux was a little moved all the same. He said to me: –Do you understand, now? They were in cahoots, him and her. I didn’t reply. It was too heroic, too much above words. And Ti-Soï had done that not for his wife, not for his son, but for his own soul, which would return happier to sleep in the tablets of a beautiful ancestral altar, well maintained, in a rich house. The cangue was broken. By the middle of the body, Ti-Soï was tied, his hands behind his back, to the stake. That’s why there was a stake. Then they unwound his chignon, the executioner grabbed his black hair with both hands. His neck stretched… The executioner now held his sword in both hands. And he swung on his beautiful legs… –Han! Ti-Soï’s body remained standing, stuck to the stake. And two jets, emerging from the carotids, rose for a moment, blooming above the neck, into the clear air. Chapter 5. DEPARTURE. My life, my free Asian life was about to end. From the depths of the province where I had long stopped, I crossed Annam to embark at Tourane. It was the time when poor natives, by the hundreds, had preferred to let themselves be massacred, with empty arms, without weapons, rather than continue to live an existence that the weight of taxes made unbearable for them. The roads were no longer safe, the administration had all convoys escorted by the military. Barnavaux, who was indifferent to these political events, was happy because it allowed him to accompany me to the coast. And I wanted to take advantage of my visit to Hué to see again the tombs of the emperors of Annam. From the Elysian Fields on earth: the tombs, as vast as cities, of Gia-Long, of Minh-Mang, of Tien-Tri, of Tu-Duc, all had as their object the realization of this ideal dream. In a solitary and blessed place, specially designated, after long research by scholars learned in the rites, two large pine groves were planted on two wings of buildings, because the foliage of this tree is noble, and its branches are agitated by a perpetual quivering. Between these two forests of living pillars, rise the funerary palaces, themselves leaning against the wild hill which serves as their background. It is especially that of Minh-Mang which realizes in all its rigor this religious and magnificent plan. By terraces with successive staircases, passing through a bronze arch, one reaches three porches covered with a red lacquered roof, and, on the central porch, reserved for the sovereign, a five-clawed dragon swims in pale gold. Then, it is the king’s house, his human house, where his shadow comes to rest. A large paved courtyard follows this residence, and on each side wait, standing and frozen in granite, the horse, the war elephant, and the ministers themselves, the very wise old men of the Komat, who continue in eternity their services to the master of the Empire. At the top of a kind of pyramid framed by pylons, symbol of resurrection and fertility, springing from among the black trees, then stands a large stele in dark marble, engraved with glorious characters. This is the room of the throne, and this stele represents the king, in the acts of his government. Finally, further still, beyond rounded basins, filled with black water, beyond new bronze arches and new terraces, appears a wall, a straight wall, terrible, completely bare, pierced by a single door. No one goes further. The door is clad in iron and sealed. When one climbs the eminence which dominates this sacred retreat, one realizes that it contains only two small chapels coupled together, devoid of any ornament. It is there that the ghost is supposed to sleep, beside the bride of his first marriage. But the coffin itself is not there. To avoid desecration, it has been hidden far from these great tombs which lie, in a mysterious place known only to a priest, charged with transmitting the secret. It would be necessary to divert a river, raze a mountain, transform a province into precipices, before discovering this tiny, useless , and dirty thing, these few bones… Barnavaux was there. He didn’t understand, and shrugged his shoulders. But there is nothing as dangerous as the anger of a dead man, especially if this dead man is a powerful king. There are still a billion yellow-faced men who think like that: Confucius grafted himself onto the man of polished stone. It is so difficult, for a child and for a barbarian, to conceive of the definitive disappearance of the phenomena they are accustomed to contemplating. For a beast even, perhaps!… I once cruelly killed a cat that filled my garden with its cries of desire. For two days and two nights its female watched over it, perpetually touching it with her timid paws, with her loving body . She didn’t understand. Primitive men don’t understand either. Here is a man who spoke, walked, loved, had passions, virtues and vices, the power of evil and good. And he no longer moves. It is impossible that he will never move again! This would break the idea we have of him. In one way or another, we will have to imagine that he lives, that he walks and that he acts. It will be an almost material shadow. Only, it is quite logical to suppose that it will be similar to the living, at the last time when we knew him. It will be part of the sick, the old man, the soldier killed in war; there is every chance that it will be suffering, unhappy, irritable, irritated. His fury is much more to be feared than his paternal and royal indulgence is precious. This boneless ghost, who is part dead, part sick, part alive, loves respectful attitudes, kind words, the objects that belonged to him, but also rest, silence, waters without waves, fresh landscapes full of trees and wind, everything that a proud master would like, but thirsty for peace, tired of noise, such as when he died. This is why, when a king of Annam dies, they build him a city, a house, a kiosk for his baths, from where he can see his wives swimming. And all his wives are indeed transported there, alive: in this dead city, in this sumptuous, silent, dreadful city. They
are still there, the wives of Minh-Mang, the youngest at the time of his death, those who had time to grow old without dying yet! They have become a kind of ghosts who wait, beside the made bed, for the ghost of their husband, prepare his food, take care of his clothes, the silver vase from which he drew betel, and—why not say everything?—make every morning the gesture of emptying his eternally empty chamber pot ! It is for all these things that they remain there, humble and sublime servants of an immortal love, and which, even during the lifetime of the husband, had never had anything but a miserable reward. But Barnavaux suddenly said: “That’s good, that’s very good. That’s as it should be. ” “What is good, Barnavaux? ” “That these women are there, still there. Countries where women are like that, they last. It is we who will pass away, because… because we no longer know what is good for lasting. Then, they will have their revenge, They just have to wait, go! Three days later, the railway, still under construction, being impassable, our convoy left for Tourane by the Col des Nuées. In the evening, the mountains which come towards you are as if draped in a sky of Chinese silk, green and pink, dotted with clouds; the dunes take on a pale glow, and the sea of Tourane an extraordinary inky color, so strong that this flat water seems to rise like a slope on the horizon. We cross arroyos, we climb, we descend, by endless bends, slopes bristling with granite; for hours we do not leave the same cove of the same bay, we do not move in the horizontal direction, we circle like a pigeon returning to the ground. The clouds trail, cling to the rock, to the trees which have become gigantic, condense, fall back in cascades. When you arrive at the pass, it is still the sea that you find at your feet, the untamed sea of Annam, so furious that despite the height you can hear it fighting against the cliffs, expanding its demolition sites with a roar. And beautiful trees always, dark, smooth and straight; or hairy banyans , twisted, throwing out aerial roots everywhere, pillars as for a house that is never finished building, branches that twist around other branches like vines. Then there are other arroyos, other lagoons, other isthmuses of sand where men sink… Yet it is the main road, that of the mandarins of old, of the civil servants now. The entire surrounding population has been enslaved, for centuries, to the job of beast of burden, they drag trunks, crates, dignitaries, yellow or white, in sedan chairs . The needs increased, the corvée became more crushing, the European travelers more numerous, more vulgar, too, more brutal. I saw some brandishing revolvers. Then the porters disappeared; they defended themselves from the violence by fleeing. I felt my regret at leaving this country diminish. I suffered from having my responsibility in these things, and from seeing them. “Barnavaux,” I said to him, “will you return to France, too? ” “France,” he replied, with an astonished air, “France? But it’s not a country where one can live! ” And he slapped a porter who was dragging his feet. “A country where there are only whites,” he explained: “we are not served!” And I understood that he no longer understood, from France, neither the women nor the men, that he disdained their humble life, because, under new skies, he had tasted power. PART TWO Chapter 6. QUININE. Time passed. I was in France, my visions from there had become memories. It’s a painful transformation, and one that one is afraid to acknowledge. One descends into one’s past: one finds nothing there but mummies! I did not despair, however, of seeing Barnavaux again: in his turn, like all the others, with the relief. And he would return thus, no doubt, periodically, until the day when death would place him in a cemetery on barbaric soil; or else as an adjutant of the Civil Guard, the desired end of all old soldiers who do not wish to die in their country. He had never considered anything but these two hypotheses; they seemed to him almost as natural, and, all things considered, as happy. Yet he got ahead of himself. One morning, in my mail, I found a letter from him, and it did not bear a colonial stamp. Barnavaux, assigned to the Paris garrison, was at Val-de-Grâce for inveterate malaria and tropical anemia. He gave me this news in his ordinary handwriting, which is quite good, clean, rounded and diligent, and in his personal spelling, which readily changes past participles into infinitives. It’s for the pleasure of your visit, he added bluntly. He knew very well that I would come! Immediately, I ran to Val-de-Grâce. Barnavaux was not in bed. I found him sitting on a bench in the old garden, dressed in the sinister gray greatcoat of the military sick, wearing the ungainly cap of cotton. Why do we impose these degrading and sad costumes on those whose weakening strength or fear of death already makes them melancholic and discouraged ? Isn’t this a medical error, isn’t this a crime against humanity? Barnavaux watched hundreds of unfortunate people like himself pass by without seeing them; he was in full sunlight, and one could guess that he was reproaching the pale sun of this nasty summer for not having more light and warmth . He was shivering! However, he smiled bravely at me, he held out his hand. Have you known that feeling of anguish that one experiences upon finding a hand that was once strong, tanned, blackened, working, all white? Women perhaps go to the sick frankly, with the generous impulse of their maternal soul. But us! We are afraid as if we were savages, before beings who do not resemble us, to whom we do not know, to whom we cannot speak! But Barnavaux said to me calmly: “I see. You think I look awfully old. It always has the same effect. It was true. You would have said he had shrunk. That’s what made him look old.” He took from his pocket one of those little round mirrors that shoe merchants, I don’t know why, give away free as a bonus to their customers. Old soldiers are like tramps: they always carry their comb, their looking glass, and their knife. “The funniest thing,” he said, looking at himself, “is that when you have a fever, you start to look like the natives of the countries where you get it. If I don’t look like an Annamite now!” On that too, he wasn’t mistaken. Oh! that thin, shriveled face , with its yellow and earthy complexion at once, how sadly it recalled the small yellow and earthy faces of the races of the Far East, how it made the same grimace! And the irises of his eyes, singularly enlarged, gave him something drunken and mad. But he laughed, his teeth chattering. “Don’t beat yourself up. It’s a cold. But we’ll get through it: the quinine is there for a blow!” He got up as best he could. “He had been my son, I wouldn’t have supported him more tenderly, in truth!” And that was how he got back to his bed on the first floor. “Blankets,” he said, “lots of blankets!” Over his legs, whose knees were knocking together, three or four of those brown blankets, terribly heavy, which are prescribed, were thrown, and the nurse gave him an injection of quinine hydrochloride. “That’s better than pills,” Barnavaux said with a knowing air. “It cuts off the attack, that’s for sure… For the moment, leave me alone. I’m good for nothing, I’m disgusted with myself. ” I pretended to obey him, but I came back towards evening. The orderly was changing his sheets, which were soaked with sweat. “That’s it,” he told me. “I’ve sweated. Now we just have to wait for the next time.” Like all old malaria sufferers, he was used to it; he himself predicted, with almost certainty, the onset and duration of the attacks. As he had said earlier, he didn’t beat himself. He only complained that the major didn’t want to add a good dose of ipecac to his treatment. It makes you feel better right away, according to him. It was, in fact, the old method, and Barnavaux is no longer young: he holds to the old methods. He deigned to acknowledge, however: “It’s a good drug, this quinine, it’s a good drug. If we didn’t have it, what would become of us? It would be like in Réunion, the first time the fever came. ” He saw that I didn’t know what had happened in Réunion, and his dilated pupils became proud, as always when he can teach me something. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a story I was told in Tamatave, back in the day, when I arrived there with Gallieni. And it goes back a long way. Until that time, perhaps before the war of 1870, the fever had never come to Réunion. No one on the island knew what it was, except for those who had gone to Madagascar to get it. And even then, those, once they returned home, they almost always recovered. And then one day it fell, after a cyclone. At least, that’s what they say in Réunion, the blacks, the mixed-race people, the Tamils who emigrated from India. Serious people and doctors didn’t want to believe it; but now that we know that it’s mosquitoes that cause fever, maybe they’ve changed their minds. How long does it take for those crazy, strong winds to carry the nasty flies from Madagascar to the islands? Less than a day, right? They are carried away with the dust, with the bird feathers, with the winged seeds, which sometimes stop, having come from so far away, on Mauritius and Bourbon. And they don’t go absolutely at random. When these storms, which break everything, which demolish the roofs of houses with the boats they throw onto the overflowing sea, when these filthy hurricanes carry them over land, they know how to let themselves fall. They close their wings, and that helps fate. And then we started to die, to die! Especially the little children: men and women, those who have finished growing tall, it doesn’t often kill them at first, the fever, it goes slowly, it does the same as for me. As for me, you understand what I mean: it eats them little by little, and in the end, we burst with something else . Don’t say no, don’t say no! It will happen to me one day or another. And then, after that? I’ve lived my share, I know what it is like for men, women especially, countries and things. But children, very small children! What stupidity, what horror, what injustice, let them die! Huh?… Huh?… Huh?… He had hooked my arm with his thin arm, and I felt that he was beside himself. It didn’t surprise me. I know them myself, the end of malaria attacks. It’s not exactly delirium , but it’s as if one had taken absinthe too quickly, on a day when it’s too hot. “Children!” repeated Barnavaux. “I tell you that those filthy flies killed them as quickly as they die. And the pharmacists earned what they wanted. Just think! They don’t stock up on quinine in countries where there is no fever. They keep what is needed for… for toothaches, you know! What can there be , at this moment, in a good, healthy little provincial town in France, somewhere in the Alps or the Pyrenees? But if something happened, they would have what was needed delivered within twenty-four hours. Whereas there, at the time I’m talking about, it took more than a month! So the price of quinine went up and up! The pharmacists were very happy. One, especially, the one who was already doing the best business. The only thing that bothered him was that he also had a little one, his only one, a kid who wasn’t even ten months old. But he did what rich people do: he sent him with his mother and his black nurse to the hills, up in the hills, to a place where fever doesn’t rise . After that, he was more at ease and he continued to sell his wares. When a customer came along and said to him: My little one—or my little one—is very sick, he thought that he, at least, had taken precautions and that his child, later on, would be a great man of the earth, a man who would have gone to study in France because his father had had the means. He hadn’t thought of one thing. These black nurses, they’re all the same: they have to have a lover. This one pretended to go out to walk the child, just to walk him, and she went to the plain to find her black friend, her bounioul! So he caught a fever like all the others, this little one! There are misfortunes that you can’t avoid. The mother called a doctor, who said: “He shouldn’t be malarial, it’s unreasonable! But he must have caught the disease in the lowlands before coming up here.” quinine, we can cut that. So the mother thought there was no point worrying her husband by letting him know that the little one was sick, since he would recover. She had the quinine brought by someone the pharmacist did n’t know, some black man. And he, the pharmacist, only received good news, they lied to him and he continued to put money on money and think: How happy he will be later, my son! Meanwhile, the doctor came back to see the child every day, and he said: “It’s not right, it’s not right! And it should be right, though! We must double the doses.” They doubled them. But, despite that, the little one took the attack almost every day. Do you know what it is like when children lose weight? It ‘s heartbreaking! Me, the fact that I look old at forty, the state my fever puts me in, already frightens you, I can see it well, don’t hide it , it’s not worth it! But the kids, those poor little pieces of nothing at all, who have no bones, that is to say! When they lose weight, you would think they were a shortened caricature of a ninety- year-old man. They become ugly, and it’s unfair, that they become ugly, it’s a punishment they don’t deserve, they didn’t do anything for it! He was vomiting, he had convulsions. Maybe it’s because they ‘re very strong; without anyone realizing it, children, they have convulsions. All the life they should still be living stirs in their little bodies, an enormous life, struggling, crying: They don’t have the right to throw me out! The doctor realized that it was time to warn them. He said: “We must send for the father. It will be better.” And he thought: “If he hurries, he might see his son still alive.” The father came. He hadn’t been worried too much. His wife had only written to him: “The baby is a little unwell. But it will reassure me to see you, and when you arrive he will no doubt be well.” He reached the hills quite calmly. The doctor was waiting for him and told him what is usually said: encouragement to resign himself, the duty to hold firm against his pain so as not to increase his mother’s. He replied: “What, what are you talking about? He’s not dead, come on!” But the doctor bowed his head and led him into the house, under the veranda. The little one was there, lying in his cradle, and so reduced, so reduced! Almost nothing to bury. His flesh had already evaporated; the illness had burned it in eight days. The father cried: “How did this happen? It’s not possible!” And the doctor himself didn’t understand it. The fever shouldn’t have come on so quickly, as if nothing had been done to bring it down. He said: “It’s extraordinary! Things didn’t happen at all as I had predicted. The quinine had no effect, none at all! And in the end I was making him give it up to eighty grains a day.” The pharmacist’s eyes popped out. “Was it from me that you had the quinine brought to me?” he said, “from me? ” “Why, yes,” said the doctor, “of course!… And I tell you, I had it administered in massive doses, such as I have never done to a child. ” Then the pharmacist cried: “Oh! Doctor! Doctor! It was I who killed him!” And he began to laugh, to laugh! He was mad. I don’t know if he’s still crazy. … You understand, added Barnavaux, lowering his voice, he was out of quinine, that pharmacist. His supply was exhausted. And he had put anything in his pills to keep selling. “Barnavaux,” I said to him, “Barnavaux?” “Huh, what?” he said, shivering. “Who taught you to talk about children like that? ” “Me? I suppose everyone talks about them like that! It’s natural, it’s the way… what does it matter to you? ” “Oh! nothing. How old are you? ” “Forty! You must know… ” I hissed through my teeth and spoke of something else. If he, too, was going to have his crisis, the terrible crisis in which an aging man yearns to a woman, to children, children who extend him and outlive him? But him, Barnavaux! He was the last of the men one would have supposed him to be. I doubtless had too much imagination… Chapter 7. THE ROAD. Nothing, in fact, when he left Val-de-Grâce to resume his place at the barracks of New France showed me that he had robbed the old man. He was a soldier, nothing but a soldier, who expects to pay, one day or every day, with his feet that walk, his back that carries the sack, and his whole chest offered, the right not to look for his bread, to sleep under a roof or a tent, and to never have to worry about anyone, not even himself. His impartiality of observation, his way of dominating things, not from a high place, certainly, but dominating them, were personal to him, but came from there all the same: he had the time! For the rest, he was definitely a professional soldier, a guy who disappears. And I thought I knew everything about professional soldiers. It was he again who saved me from my error. It was a Sunday morning, and I had come to pick him up, before soup, to offer him lunch. One of those cars with this disturbing inscription on their chocolate-brown painted body: Ministry of the Interior. Prison Service, had just entered the courtyard. These long rectangular boxes, without openings except for narrow side shutters and a grilled door that reveals the darkened profile of a gendarme or a Paris guard, have a particularly sinister appearance. To think that they are stuffing living people into them who need air, like everyone else, one experiences, in spite of oneself, a feeling of disgust and anguish. It is not only that one imagines them containing the beginnings of a mystery, an accused, a criminal or perhaps an innocent, in short, misfortune. But they are ugly! They look terribly like those funeral vans used to transport the dead to distant stations or cemeteries . They seem to smell bad, and especially as if the prisoners they contain are already like the coffins’ occupants. The municipal officer on duty in the car took his keys, unlocked the bolts, unlocked the locks; and we saw a colonial infantry soldier stagger out, his face so terribly abject and desperate that Barnavaux himself—and he is tough, he knows the ravages drunkenness, madness, and the collapse that follows bad blows received and dealt—was stunned for a moment. He let out a low whistle. “He’s in bed!” he said. The soldier was shivering like a dying animal. His gray, leaden face, soiled with all the poisons that an old, rancid, unhealthy, and painful drunkenness leaves in the skull and veins, was still covered with a damp grime that looked like mud. “He’s a real drunk!” I said. “No,” said Barnavaux, suddenly interested, “he’s not drunk. He was… he was chilled during his drunkenness!” And as I didn’t understand, he added: “Look at his greatcoat, it’s all wet. His trousers too. He ‘s dressed in sponges, the poor fellow. And the effect that produces when you’re drunk!” The municipal officer held out his service sheet. “Attempted suicide,” he said. “He was fished out of the Quai de la Mégisserie. It’s the infirmary at the Depot that’s sending him back. ” “Good,” said Barnavaux, “I’m there now. It’s the eighth in the last two weeks.” Funny, isn’t it, this epidemic? “What are we going to do about it?” I asked. “Twenty-four hours in the infirmary, if he doesn’t catch pulmonary congestion , and thirty days in prison. That’s the price. And it won’t stop him from doing it again. It’s always the same people who get killed. ” “Heartache?” I asked. “Heartache,” Barnavaux said indignantly, “heartache!… No. These guys are too serious. It’s the government’s fault: they’re getting bored…” “Obviously, that’s a reason to commit suicide,” I replied. “But I don’t see the government’s fault in it. ” “You think that!” Barnavaux shouted. “The government no longer wants to send colonial infantry soldiers to the colonies. It says that French blood isn’t made to be shed in overseas adventures. That’s the line in the newspapers. But why did these guys sign up, why did I sign up, if it wasn’t to see the country, to walk the road? They’re not people like you, they’re not people like everyone else who come to the corps, sometimes. They’re… they’re, as you might say, poster men.” He saw that I didn’t understand and grew impatient because the words would n’t come to him to explain. “Yes,” he said, “poster men, sandwich men, if you prefer , those who walk between two billboards for forty sous a day. There are some who do it for the money, but there are others too: for them, it’s a vocation or an illness, I don’t know. They have to walk! For tramps, sometimes, it’s the same thing: they act like wandering Jews. When they stop or when they’re forced to stop, there’s something I don’t know that breaks in their hearts or their heads; they want to vomit or die. And in Paris, in all the big cities, there are many more of them than you think who are like that.” So, it seems so good, so convenient to be a soldier, especially now that we no longer learn prayers at school, and it has become more difficult to become a bush priest, a Vincentian brother or layman, as they say, with the White Fathers. We are dying of hunger: we will have enough to eat. We do not know where to sleep: the fatherland gives you a bed, more impressive than those in asylums, and without the obligatory shower. We only wash if we want to. We do not know what to do with ourselves, we have no idea: there are officers who think for you, go right , go left. Nothing but gestures, like in church, and to walk the road, to the porpoises, there was the earth: it is big! The trouble is that once you’re housed, fed, clothed, and bedded, and you don’t have to worry about all that anymore, if you don’t leave right away, you get a brain disease. The friend you saw, and the seven others, they enlisted a year ago because they were pretty sure they’d be sent to Morocco. And instead of going to Morocco, they stayed here, like idiots . It destroys their temperament. So they destroy themselves. He dreamed for a moment. “It’s so long ago,” he said, “that I barely remember. The three Zephyrs I saw at the court martial, fifteen years ago, it was just the same. They didn’t want to believe them, and I didn’t believe them either . I didn’t know everything I know now; I was a rookie. Their names were Bargouille, Coldru, and Malterre.” But it was Bargouille, the main accused. He had strangled his comrade Bonvin, who was locked up with him and the other two in the same silo, at the Aïn-Souf camp. At that time, they still put punished men in silos: a kind of bottle- shaped hole wider at the bottom than at the top , where the natives hid their grain. Now it’s forbidden. Malterre and Coldru were considered accomplices; they said they had only been witnesses and that they had nothing to say, except that they had seen Bargouille strangle Bonvin. But when they were asked why, they shrugged their shoulders. “They must have disliked each other,” they said. I was on the council duty picket, and now that I think about it, I can still see their brown greatcoats, from which they had torn off all the buttons. I didn’t know why then, nor did anyone else. Before the judges, they behaved dazedly, but perfectly proper. They didn’t act stubborn, they answered very gently; but it was as if, inside, they had been happy and it was no longer their business what was being done. Bargouille kept repeating: –I sure killed him, Bonvin, that’s sure, and, if I have to say it, I regret it, in a way. Malterre and Coldru, they only watched, we can’t prosecute them. That’s all I have to say. But the captain who was the public prosecutor ended up insinuating that it was for moral matters that Bargouille had killed Bonvin. In the life of a zephyr, there are almost always little affairs like that. It’s not their fault, is it? They’re all alone among themselves, among men, for years and years that their sentence lasts, and they’re young, aren’t they, and they’re not sent straight from their mother’s house to the public works. It’s full of guys, scamps, murderers and other kinds of scoundrels. The captain’s supposition wasn’t surprising . And what would it have mattered to Bargouille, to admit that or anything else? To die is still to die, you have to go through with it. But the idea of death puts ideas into people’s heads that you wouldn’t believe they could have. Bargouille suddenly started yelling: “It’s not true, no, it’s not true! I’m happy to be shot, I’m not protesting; I accept, it’s weighed, it’s sold. But I don’t want anyone to say that! I don’t want anyone to say that to… well, at my house, in my neighborhood.” I felt that if he had dared, he would have said: “I don’t want anyone to tell Mom!” His parents were butchers in the Mouffetard neighborhood; but we have modesty. And then, saying certain words makes you lose your cool, that’s not what you should do. Then Malterre suddenly said: “Yes, it’s not fair. We swore not to talk, but it hurts him too much. Go on, Bargouille, talk to yourself as you like, it’ll be worse for us, but it doesn’t matter, talk about it. Hey, Coldru, can he talk?” Coldru was more relaxed: he was afraid of the consequences. But he said nevertheless: “If you’re both for it, it’s the majority. We have to go.” Bargouille thought for a moment and said: “I can’t say that myself, it’s more embarrassing. I’d rather it be you, Malterre. You’ve got courage and more manners. ” “Well,” Malterre explained, “that’s how it came about: We’d been in the hole for two weeks.” A bucket, a jug, four guys, and bread for three and a quarter. The first few days, all the same, we sang, we tried to laugh, and we played blockade with the uniform buttons. I learned the custom later, explained Barnavaux. We searched the men, of course, before taking them down to the silo; we took their card games. What was the point? They became kids again and played marbles, blockade, even or odd, with their uniform buttons. That’s why those ones didn’t have them anymore. Malterre continued: “It was still difficult because, in the silo, everyone had irons: double irons. But anyway, by putting in the effort, we managed . Only, I will allow myself to point this out to the gentlemen officers,” he said these words elegantly, “because of the thing that Bargouille is accused of; It would have been difficult, given the situation. It was Bonvin who started to cut back. He slept instead of playing. When he wasn’t sleeping, he said he had a fever. Everyone has a fever. A fever is like hunger, it’s natural, it’s regular, it comes and goes, we don’t care, it’s a good thing. But Bonvin, he cried about it. That proves there was something else, and that thing, we felt it with him. There were the chains and the botheration. Bonvin finally said: “It’s too dark in here, for God’s sake!” It wasn’t quite dark, since the silo was open at the top. Only, the color of the day in the silo was awfully dull, perhaps because of the smell, because the sight and the smell mix, but also in comparison with the sky, which we could see from the top of the hole. It was clear, when you looked up, it was clear, as if you had flown right into it, with a pair of wings. And when We were looking at his feet, naturally, we couldn’t see them anymore, it was getting darker. Coldru was the one who continued. He said: “It’s true! I have worries. ” “For your future?” Bargouille said, laughing. “No,” said Coldru. “In the legs. It’s not surprising that we have worries in our legs, with the irons.” Everyone felt them when he spoke about it, but not only in the kneecaps or the buttocks. You can’t believe that you feel the pain in your legs in your head, but it’s the truth. I said: “It’s still cool here. ” “Cooler than outside, when the sun is shining, when the stones are cracking in the sun!” All four of us began to think about the sun. It was like a firework, and we ran mentally after it. We also imagined everything we see in broad daylight in the southern countries: the track that winds through the dunes; a date palm, when it’s on the plain, planted all alone to serve as a surveying aid, the officers claim; the camels that graze the blue grass with their juicy, horny tongues, and sometimes a lice-ridden Bicot sitting sideways on his donkey, which he beats with both feet, like an old woman working at a sewing machine; but above all, in the evening and in the morning, red and gold in the whitened sky, while we drag, one, two, one, two, on thirty-two shoe nails. The road, what, the road and the wedding! That’s what we were created for. Coldru asked: “When are we going to get out of here?” Bonvin replied: “If we get out, we’ll start breaking stones again. It’s worthless.” They all thought like Bonvin. I spoke out of habit: “Damn! Class! ” “There’s no class left for us,” said Bonvin. “We’re convicts . Don’t act like a clown. ” “So,” said Bonvin, “there isn’t. I’m asking to go to the council! ” “What would be the point?” I asked. But everyone, at the same time I spoke , saw the blow. If we went to the council, we’d get out of the hole.
“How far is it from here to the council?” asked Bargouille. “The council,” replied Malterre, “is in Sfax: 180 kilometers; nine stages. We could have walked the road for nine days! Ah! That was chic, that was pure! It seemed to me I heard music, I was carried away! No one spoke again all day. We looked at each other. I don’t know who said at the end: “One of them must be dead. We’ll pass the others on to the council. ” “That’s how,” Malterre continued, “we did it at the bar, to see who would be dead. It didn’t take long: Bonvin was the one who lost. He said: “I’m unlucky! I’m always the one who pays for the drinks!” After that, he closed his eyes while we were leaving to see who would do his bidding. It was Bargouille who lost. He only said to Bonvin: “I’m going, my poor old man. Don’t blame me.” But Bonvin didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to. He let it happen without saying a word. And the two of us, Coldru and I, I swear we didn’t move. Say, Bargouille, have we moved? “Not moved,” Bargouille affirmed, spitting on the ground. “I said it was me. It’s me. There.” Barnavaux had finished. I asked: “What did they do with Bargouille? ” “They shot him, naturally,” Barnavaux said, “and the others got ten years. It was planned, they didn’t care, they had walked the road: nine days in the sun. They knew the price; they didn’t complain. ” “And you, old people, if you stay at the marsouins, is it to walk the road? ” “All of you, more or less!” he affirmed, with a confident air. I drove him back that evening, to Faubourg Poissonnière. “Are you free Thursday night?” I asked him. “Midnight permission!” but you shouldn’t come looking for me here: rue Gourié, in Plaisance! –Is it a bar? –A bar! No, he said, it’s a People’s University. It amazes the bosses, when you go to the Popular Universities, they think you’ll find political protectors there. So, in the neighborhood, they leave you alone! It’s a trick I learned in Toulon, back in the day. And they know how to do it, in Toulon, you can believe it. –Will there be ladies there too? –I suppose so, said Barnavaux… There always are… However, he changed the conversation. This attitude made me think: in the past, he would have replied that women’s affairs, it’s useless to talk about them, because they always get out. Chapter 8. THE ODYSSEY. That’s why, the following Thursday, I didn’t forget to go and join him, around ten o’clock, at the Popular University. It’s in an old, half-ruined pavilion, at the bottom of a remnant of a garden where three or four acacias are dying, their trunks all cracked with misery, their foliage all pale with anemia; because modern houses have grown up around them, grown much higher than their clipped, bruised peaks. But they are beautiful all the same, sadly, through the energy of not wanting to die. And in the house, at the UP headquarters, as they say, one sees nothing but the signs of a somewhat fierce poverty: a library full of mismatched brochures, a room that smells bad, and is called a dispensary, no doubt because of a few stray vials on a shelf; and finally a larger room, which a platform of a few planks and a curtain passed over a rod allow to be transformed into a theater. This Saturday, a poster announced it, Mr. Ledoux, professor at the University, was giving his third and last lecture on the Odyssey. And they were all there, the regulars of the house, to listen to the conference: the small families of pusillanimous rentiers, at once furiously anticlerical and stupidly conservative, who always attend, and from the outset, the most revolutionary meetings: a phenomenon that would seem incomprehensible, if one did not consider that it is only a matter of saving the four cents of oil from a home vigil; the poor old women who go to these chats as they would go to church, because they continue to need a church, a place where one listens, with a respect that rests, to words that one does not understand: some beautiful girls too, who have become a little anarchist by gender and virtuous in their own way, which is sublime, after all: for to remain virgin and solitary is perhaps not so difficult as to accept love and motherhood, and to continue to work for a living; and a few young people who were beginning to believe themselves to be revolutionaries and anti-patriots, figures of modern Calvinists, disinterested, fierce, ardent, and hard. One of them had remained in the library during the conference. Bending over his head, I saw that he was patiently taking notes on a mismatched volume of Jomini, bought at a second-hand bookseller. “Yes,” he said, raising his burning eyes to me; “we are anti-militarists; but we will have to know how to wage war, one day, against the bourgeoisie!” And it pleased me, you know, that this child who believed himself to be an anarchist and anti-patriot dreamed at heart of nothing but being a leader of men in arms, a fighter and victorious! The essential thing is to love war, that’s the only healthy thing. The enemy doesn’t matter. And meanwhile the lecturer continued to speak, also convinced of his apostolate, haughtily proud to descend to the people, and showing with every word that he understood them a hundred times less well than the least little parish vicar with six months of service, or even any non-commissioned officer after eight days of major maneuvers. He spoke, he always spoke. He said things that were exceedingly interesting and perfectly incomprehensible. He described a Mycenaean palace, in connection with the Phaeacians; he explained why Hermes was called the Killer Messenger of Argos, and finally he almost wept while speaking of the Greek miracle, which is that the Greeks have makes beauty without anyone knowing why. When he had finished crying, he stopped: that was his last effect, crying. And then, except for him and the small rentiers, everyone went to the wine merchant’s. That’s where the real popular university is held: at the wine merchant’s. I went there too. One of the beautiful girls who had accompanied us took a cherry in brandy. She said thoughtfully: “He said that thing was very beautiful… the Odyssey. But no one can understand why it’s beautiful. We can’t see clearly. The other day we read Paul and Virginia, there’s a shipwreck, the little girl drowns… I still get a shiver down my spine, it’s chic, that, it’s very chic. But the Odyssey! Even the names, we can’t remember them.”
The little anarchist who had taken notes on Jomini shrugged his shoulders. He affected to attend only the chemistry and exact sciences classes: the poor must not even know that there is beauty . It’s softening. They need to hate, to fight, and to take, that’s all. But Barnavaux said, searching for words: “I think I’ve understood that story, the one about Ulysses. It’s too long the way it’s been told to us; everything gets complicated because it’s a journey: on a journey things always happen that shouldn’t happen, you get lost, you get lost. But the bottom line is so clear! ” “What’s clear, Barnavaux?” I asked. “You know better than I do,” he said, looking embarrassed. “Ulysses is a soldier who is bored with his wife. That’s the whole story.” I understand how it happened, because it always happens like that. He had gone very far away, to wage war on people who didn’t speak his language, savages, guys you have the right to plunder, and at every stopover, on the way back, there were others besides his own, women, who stopped him. First there was the great lady, the one who lived deep in a magic cave, on an island, and who was so rich, and who was so beautiful. And he had found it good at first, Ulysses, the love of a great lady. She gave him all the best there was to eat, wine every night. The lady had beautiful hair, she loved him. You can see that she loved him when she gets angry with those who say to her: Send him away, he can’t stay here. But I heard his thoughts clearly: he slept next to her, and did not love her! His country was not so beautiful as the lady’s country. In the lady’s house there were very fresh rivers, meadows, poplars, fields of violets.
Ah! you don’t know how rare it is, water, and trees, and very green grass, in the middle of the sea! I have been to Crete; I know how hot the sun is there! Then the lady put her arms around his neck, she said to him: I have always given you all your wishes and you will never see a prettier woman. Stay with me. Will you find anything like this anywhere else? But he replied: You are too high for me. There, you see, I have a wife who will always be my true wife: when I speak to her, she obeys! That is why, in the end, he escaped on a raft. He must have been very scared, on the raft, in the open sea. When you’re in a boat that’s too small, the waves always seem to crush you, you’re beneath them, they turn black, they get tangled, they swell; it looks like buffalo hair, where it gets tangled, above the withers, near the neck. “…Poseidon with blue hair!” I murmured. Barnavaux didn’t understand. He looked at me with an astonished air, and continued: “So he was shipwrecked, off another island, and he found another woman, who was better than the first. Ah! that one! You see, I’m sure she was his real temptation, and that’s why he didn’t dare say it and she felt it in her heart. Just think: he was already almost old, and she was very young, and he had seen her naked, playing ball, under silver-colored trees, near a river; and she too had seen him naked, in his strength; she had understood then that he was a leader, a man whom his parents had known how to raise properly: only among savages, I know, do they know what actions are decent when one is naked; and he, Ulysses, he knew how to behave. That is why this girl… “Nausicaa,” I said. “Yes, Nausicaa… she recognized that he was a nobleman, a leader who had been taught the ways; slaves do not know that they are naked, because they are never looked at… They loved each other, that is certain, and to have won the love of a little girl, for a strong man, is like a victory! It is screaming, it is loud, it is enough to make one weep with joy. Yet he said nothing to her, and she, then, dared not say anything to him, except: When you are in your own country, remember me. And he only replied: I will think of you as of the Virgin! That is not quite the text. In Homer there is: As to a goddess, I will address vows to you. But Barnavaux did not see the difference. He only searched for his words, once again. –So, he left. I know very well what his island is made of. We read that he said: It comes out of the sea, on the side of the night. I understand! When I was there, in the Far East, that is how I saw France: a country placed behind the side of the sky where the sun falls. When one has traveled one knows the shapes that the earth takes. He left again, Ulysses, to fight against the scoundrels who wanted his wife, to risk death, he who would have been so happy elsewhere, if he had wanted. But he could not want to. No matter what he did, he saw only that woman in the world, his own, because she was the first to make his bed, to light the light in his room, and the fire in his hearth, and not only did she speak his language, but the words, all the words had the same meaning for her and for him. Barnavaux breathed, tired of having spoken for so long, on such a difficult subject. Everyone paid their dues, even the ladies, because it was a rule in society. They stood up. One of the beautiful girls, in a light pink bodice, brushed a bare arm against Barnavaux’s neck. Then he took her by the waist, and I saw that this soldier who had seen so much, in so many countries, had only thought of all this because he was thinking of her. The girl shivered like a big cat. On the dark road, he, who was carrying her off, looked like a thin tiger. Chapter 9. LOUISE. I was to see her again very often, that tall, lithe girl, with long legs, and who had a man’s eyes. Have you perhaps noticed? In Paris, now, among the girls of the people, there are many who have those eyes. It is not the look of those who sell pleasure, as best they can, in the street or elsewhere: insolent, lascivious, or hunted, because there are other women, who have it in for them, and men, who must be caught, and morals, which must be avoided. Nor is it the look of women who have a husband, or even a man, quite simply, and who are happy or unhappy like that. It is something else, virile, I tell you, in which there is a lot of frankness, decision, freedom, but very little innocence and no submission. For forty years, France has made new men and women, who have other qualities, other faults—as for vices and virtues, I fear that they are always the same, since the dawn of humanity—as those of yesteryear, who are dead, and ourselves. And we do not know how to see them, and we do not know how to speak to them: we at this hour almost their ancestors, and who remain their guides. It is a situation which is becoming a little dangerous. That one had chosen Barnavaux, and Barnavaux had chosen her. That is all. The customs of their world required that they not make a big noise about it, that they would seem to find it very simple. One must not to show that one is amazed, renewed, rejuvenated by the most eternally young feeling in the world: old immortal love. This ingenuousness is beginning to go out of fashion, even among the people. There were once many more couples than today, who walked along the night streets with their arms laced around their waists, taking very small steps, not breaking their embrace if some stranger came to meet them. Now, almost immediately, lovers have to make old households, very decent. Besides, they did not become lovers so quickly. The courtship that Barnavaux paid to Louise, whose surname I did not learn until much later—she had not thought to tell me, I had not thought to ask her —the way in which Louise accepted these advances had a discreet appearance. I would have believed, in truth, that I was among people of the world. And this again proves that, being a very old people, we are in the process of creating a people of aristocrats, of forty million aristocrats , all with their pride, their needs for leisure, their restrained impulses, their reticence. There is only one thing that veils this phenomenon: bad education, harsh words, an obscenity that has no excuse for being unconscious: but aristocrats can be badly brought up, that has been seen. And what was also very aristocratic was the intimate, naive and completely irrational conviction that Louise shared with Barnavaux, of being of the same rank as anyone in France, and of a higher rank than all foreigners. With Barnavaux, nothing could be more natural. He had spent his life dominating, he had been a white man in the colonies, and armed. Therefore, a kind of knight. But Louise didn’t think differently, this Louise who went in the evenings to meet anarchists at the Université Populaire. And that’s even why she went there! Her pride was nourished there, her unrecognized rights were affirmed. A singular consequence of the humanitarian or individualist teachings of good bourgeois dreamers or unbalanced autodidacts : she had only become excessively aware of her worth, she had collected titles of nobility, and acquired this idea, now that of all Frenchmen, previously that of only gentlemen, that the State, the government—once one would have said the King, that’s the whole difference—owed her something, by reason of her quality. But in the meantime, as she received nothing, she worked in the purses, ten hours a day, invariably cheerful, tireless, and brave. And if she had enjoyed a prebend, she would have worked all the same, out of a need for activity, a desire to be better, a fierce will to owe nothing to anyone, not even to Barnavaux. In the bourgeoisie and among the peasants, women have a dowry. Among the working class, they toil to earn their living. And the result is always the same: in no country are they, more than in ours, the equals of men. Louise’s modesty, or rather her dread of the male, but also her desire, were instinctive feelings. She put off the inevitable moment, giving as a reason that then she would have to leave her family, have a room, a bed, furniture, a home of her own; and that money was needed. But I heard her confide to a friend: We need that, yes, we need all that! But if things don’t get sorted out within two months, it will be all over the place! Yet, when Barnavaux spoke of his savings, of his re-enlistment bonus, she refused to listen. And for a long time I believed that it was only her virginity, her fearful virginity, that was defending itself: it wasn’t that simple! There isn’t a woman, or even a man in the world, who has become absolutely like an animal. We would know it better, if we weren’t spoiled by a hundred years of anti-human literature . I saw it clearly, the day when the very small thing, which is so great, and which is not to be laughed at, happened. And it happened, as usual, for apparent, purely external reasons. Barnavaux, until then quartered in New France, was sent with his company to the fort of Palaiseau. Far apart, seeing each other less often, they felt the irresistible need to see each other differently. One day, at the meeting the three of us had arranged on Boulevard Montparnasse, Barnavaux announced, pushing Louise in front of me: “Madame Barnavaux!” Such was his tact. I write this sentence without irony. In the colonies, he would have added many other things. But Louise lowered her eyes: they had lost their manly gaze. And later she said to me: “I didn’t think it was so little—and such a small thing, like that… we should be married, you see!” That was her entire complaint, which I never heard again. But I understood that the thousands of years of patient efforts made by women to ensure their happiness, and the lives of their children, of religious faith, too, have not been in vain, and how wrong those are who do not want to take this into account. Barnavaux, too, was no longer the same. He still assumed a detached air when speaking of Louise, he tried to keep his old voice, his voice from back there, to say: my mousso or my congaye: but Louise was neither a black mousso, nor a yellow congaye, he knew that well. She was white, and he respected her. He even respected her more than anyone else would have done, someone else who had not seen the world, and owned little slaves. He was aware of what she was: a woman of his blood. He was moved by it; his face changed before her. And the soil, at the same time as the woman, had won him back: he was afraid to leave again. However, he knew well that he would leave again. She had no more doubt about it. That is why, courageously, they never spoke of the future. He only said. –If I knew a trade, good God!… Chapter 10. BARNAVAUX ON GUARD. At both ends of the pewter counter, the small spoons with very long handles, gathered in sheaves in ribbed glass vases, looked like poorly made artificial flowers with too harsh a shine. There were also red eggs in baskets, and almost every minute a customer brought his glass of absinthe under a very thin tap , placed at the top of a fake silver fountain, isolated like an island in the middle of a kind of basin. From a great height, the water fell on the liquor, which first became a hideous, spoiled green, then a precious, pale hue. Droplets bounced off the sides of the glass, splashing the basin, and finally the man drank, almost always with that air peculiar to true absinthe lovers, who seem not to be quenching their thirst, but to appease a hunger from which they are fainting. Up to the middle of the street floated a smell of alcohol and anise, a mixture of finesse and brutality, which vaguely brings to mind other impressions at once repugnant and voluptuous: the smell of flowers in a room where someone has smoked, the appearance of certain women, the sight of blood. Barnavaux said to me: “Hey, the owner of the bar knows his stuff? When the basin was filled with water tinged with absinthe, the waiter would scoop some out with a tin measure and go off to sprinkle the sidewalk. That’s where that penetrating and seductive smell came from: to attract customers, the owner would spray absinthe! At last, a man came in and had the beverage poured for him, which was sold almost exclusively in that place. All those who had passed by the counter were workers, soldiers, or girls.” But he, to the less discerning eye, appeared to be a wretch of another sort, and more horrible, dressed in ruinous black trousers, a gray jacket covered with infamous stains. There are wounds that one dare not look at because they are, in truth, too ugly and dishonoring; they inspire no pity, only disgust. The features of this man, above a very dirty false collar and a sticky regatta, his forehead of a coppery color with patches of pale pink under a whitening and rough eight-day beard, a nose of a pale swelling, inspired a similar feeling. This living statue of abjection wore gloves. She advanced towards Barnavaux with a smiling air that revealed hideous teeth . The man offered a drink to Barnavaux and his company, but the latter looked away and said to me in a hesitant voice: “Shall we leave?” Generally, Barnavaux is less delicate about the choice of his acquaintances, and the man, I was convinced, was going to offer a round. But I didn’t push him to explain; it wasn’t the right time. I paid our bill and we left in silence. “Does this man know you?” I asked finally. “Yes,” said Barnavaux. “Only, I thought he was dead. It disgusts me, it pains me that he’s still alive, it’s not fair. If you knew what he lives on! And he wanted to offer a drink, with that money.” We can’t accept it, you see! It’s very rare to see Barnavaux go through a moral crisis. I know him: he’s above vulgar prejudices. However, I waited for him to speak for himself. He took longer than I expected. Things were difficult to unravel, because they contained an element of abstract horror that seemed indefinable to him. He has no words for what is abstract. That’s not his style. “You didn’t know,” he said, “Father Bordieux, the governor of the Grain Coast: he had left when you arrived in Boké; but you have heard of him. He was a simple little man, with a serious expression and the eyes of a child. Imagine a missionary who had been given a frock coat on the pretext that he was anticlerical.” I suppose it was because of this priestly air that they called him Father Bordieux, although he was not more than a thirty-year-old. At that time, Boké was not the beautiful city it is now, built in the American style, with its boulevards and avenues that intersect at right angles, its cement sidewalks on which Negroes, all day long, push wagons, and its fountains. But it was Bordieux who designed it, it was he who found the money to make it, by dint of saving first… It seems that in his offices, when an employee needed a new pencil, he had to go to the governor, who signed him a voucher for five centimes, with job specialization. But there were hardly any employees. At the beginning, you could have counted them on the fingers of one hand: the secretary general, the police commissioner, and the head of the militia, who was also cemetery guard and gravedigger. Father Bordieux did everything himself, or almost everything, like a kind of king of Yvetot; he ran his colony like a large landowner who had farms. Every morning he made his tour of the town, stopping at the smallest as well as at the largest , the rich who trade in rubber by the thousands of balls, and those who start out with a large box, which they spread out on the ground, and in which there is everything: old trousers, alarm clocks that don’t work but ring very loudly, fake amber , and glass beads. In general, these are Maltese or Syrians, dirty as combs and thieves like carrion eagles. But he spoke to everyone. Come on, are things going as you wish? he said. And when there were mistoufles, he arranged them himself, in his own way. He was a kind of Saint Louis, sitting under a green umbrella, because there were no oaks. That’s how Boké became the big city you saw, with its European-style houses, built right into the bush in places where there were still no roads. A lot of people came , and lots of women, of course: little black girls from Sierra Leone, who pretended to sell oranges and who still went to the English temple on Sundays; others who had escaped from the school of the Sisters of Saint Catherine; six Japanese women, two Wallachians and some French women. Father Bordieux didn’t ask them: That Is he going as you wish? But he let it be. I suppose it was because of his respect for the freedom of trade. Sometimes , however, he would say: Poor women, poor women: it’s only them and I who won’t get rich here, go on! It’s certain in any case that there was no personal interest. In Boké, if people talked about him, it was because of his virtue, which made people laugh. That’s why people were so surprised the day Father Bordieux rented a tiny house near Pointe-aux-Douaniers, furnished it, hired a boy and a black cook; and the bed, the polished wicker armchairs, the sofa for napping, the hangings, I was told that he felt all that like a lover. The following month, the Maritime Transport liner disembarked a blonde lady who was no longer very young, and who immediately asked to be taken to the governor’s house. I don’t know what they said, because they locked themselves in, but what everyone knew was that the governor ordered his carriage, he who always walked, even at siesta time, and drove the lady, without hiding, to the little house he had rented for her. No one thought of saying anything, because everyone in the colonies has the right to arrange their life as they see fit; and perhaps he had known this woman when he was very young, very young, and she, who was now beginning to turn white, was not yet old. But Father Bordieux, on leaving the house, had himself taken to the president of the court—I told you that Boké had grown up, there was a court—and said to him quite simply: “It’s my mother who has just arrived. I beg you to announce her. She will not receive officials and will not lodge at the government. I am an illegitimate child, and she had a lot of trouble raising me. She was a very poor, very poor woman.” I don’t know why he used the same words to speak of her that had come to his mouth when speaking of the others. I suppose it was by chance, and no one in the colony wanted to worry about it, because Father Bordieux was very fond of him. He very often went to dine or spend the evening at the lady’s house, and sometimes she came to visit him. And you know, wherever she was seen, she was greeted right down to the ground. If she had wanted to play the governor’s mother , perhaps it would have been different, very different; but she was so shy, she spoke to so few people, and it was so clear that it was out of fear, not pride. You can imagine that there were still people who tried to employ her, who came to see her, who asked her for services, for a fee: the governor’s mother! She received them in such a way that they didn’t come back. Only, sometimes, she was walking through the city, and her eyes would become wide with joy, or else quite moved, you could see it. I’m sure she had in mind: It’s my son who did all these things, and it’s me who raised him, all by myself! A feeling like that! A feeling like that! One would want to be a woman for the chance to have it. It’s the fullest, richest thing in the universe, there’s nothing higher. Louise looked at Barnavaux, and nodded. She understood that. He continued: “But one day when I was on guard at the government gate, I saw a European arrive whom I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell you if he was well or badly dressed. In these hot countries, all white people are dressed the same: white linen trousers and dolman, and a white helmet. Besides, it wasn’t up to me to receive or dismiss visitors. I was on guard, I tell you, with a rifle and a saber-bayonet, consequently perfectly useless, except in the case of something that never happens, an assassination or a riot. The European therefore entered the vestibule without asking me anything, and he said to the black employee who was there: “I’m arriving from France on today’s steamer, and I want to speak to the governor.” Father Bordieux received everyone, even the Negroes. This one was a white man. They brought him up at once. Bordieux must not have remembered ever having seen him, for I heard him say: “I beg your pardon, sir, I don’t know you. ” “But I,” said the other, laughing, “I recognized you! When the worst of the heat had passed, as was the case, the governor was working under the veranda of the first floor, to catch the sea breeze, and I could hear everything. ” “You recognized me!” he said, “the poor governor. What do you mean? ” “I’m your father!” replied the other, as insolent as a butcher’s boy in a carriage. “What does that mean?” asked Bordieux. “I don’t understand.” But I understood very well from his voice, which was already completely changed, that he was afraid to understand. The man continued: “Yes, your father, your father, your father! Do you want me to shout it? I don’t mind shouting it, it’ll even please me: you’re a son who does me honor. That’s why I recognized you. Here, here’s the copy of the deed: private signature and then transcription in the civil registers. When I learned that you were governor, I thought it was worth the expense, and the trip. I’ve found myself a family: at my age, and when one hasn’t been happy, it’s lucky!” The governor murmured something I didn’t hear. The other shouted louder: “An action for disavowal of paternity? Try it! You’ll lose… She’s here, isn’t she? We can ask her.” Give me her address so I can go see her! I don’t know what gesture Bordieux made, but the man suddenly said, in a vile voice, with fear all the same between each syllable: “You’re not going to kill me? It wouldn’t do.” Then I understood the idea that had crossed Father Bordieux’s mind, the gesture that had terrified the other for a moment, and I found them perfectly natural. I swear to you that if he had ordered me to take up arms, as I was, I… I don’t know what I would have done! But he was a governor, a man who had functions, duties, a goal in life—and then what! He lacked courage because he had virtue. At last, I heard him ask: “What do you want? You don’t want to stay here, you can’t stay here. ” “What do I want?” said the man. I want maintenance. I have the right to alimony , it’s the law, an honorable alimony. “Honorable!” said the governor. “Yes, honorable, proportionate to your rank, so that I can maintain mine. It’s the law, I repeat. You know it well, come on!” After that I heard nothing more. But what is certain is that the man took the next boat with what he wanted: he was drunk and lost since that day, he had to be carried. “And,” I asked after a long silence, “is this the man we saw?
” “Yes,” said Barnavaux, “that’s the one. ” “He’s a real scoundrel!” said Louise. And she said nothing more for the whole walk. She was thoughtful. As she remained behind for a moment to look at a little child’s condom on a stall, Barnavaux said to me: “Perhaps I was wrong to tell that in front of her.” I looked at him. He looked very serious. “Yes,” he continued, “the gratitude, the illegitimate child, in short, everything!” He took a few more steps, his teeth clenched, unable to hide his concern any longer. “She’s pregnant!” Chapter 11. A MEMORY. It was because of Müller. Barnavaux had sent word that the friend was in distress and needed distractions. And I knew well what kind of distress he might have. I had already met him, you may remember, on the wide earth: he had always been sentimental, and one of those whom Barnavaux despises. But anyway, that’s why, pushing Louise a little, who was becoming heavy, we had summer lunch, just below the Fort d’Issy, at the cabaret of Mother Mahieu. Before us was the valley of the Seine, from Saint-Cloud and Mont-Valérien to Paris. Everything conspires to make it ugly, and it is still beautiful, more beautiful than ever, than in the wild times when its inhabitants were still only fierce tribes. In front of trees that are no longer pruned, remains of an old massacred garden, trains pass over bold arches. Towards the West, on two rows of hills, there is a striped, barbaric, sparkling mixture of houses and woods determined to live; before us, factory chimneys, an army, a formidable army of factory chimneys. And the backgrounds are so beautiful, yet there are at the foot of these chimneys such magical blue patches—painted palisades, when you look—these great gray plumes mingled so well with the luminous mist, with the dappled clouds, that day, that nothing in the world, none of the most beautiful landscapes I had seen under the sky, could have given me such exaltation. One felt also that it was full of men. But Müller said nothing. He was a man stubborn in his boredom, he didn’t want to pay attention to the pleasures of existence. When someone spoke to him, if it was me, he fell into the depths of timidity; if it was Barnavaux, he shrugged his shoulders. And Barnavaux said to him, “Why did you go after that woman, too? She didn’t want you.” The first thing when you go after a woman is to know if she wants you, if she can want you. But every time, you ‘re like that: you always go after the wrong one. Müller shrugged his shoulders again. He seemed to be saying that you don’t do as you please. “Yes,” said Barnavaux, “you can do as you please. You just have to know when to do it. And it’s a lack of tact not to know. Me…” He paused for a second, looking at Louise, and continued: “Yes, it almost happened to me! And I was younger than you, I had more right not to know. It was at the end of my first leave, when I was Andral’s orderly.” She had been told to go to the seaside for one of her children, and so the whole family left for Bray-Dunes, a small village near Dunkirk, right on the Belgian border. I’ve seen countries since then, you know if I’ve seen them; and yet, this one still does something to me, thinking about it! Nothing resembles anything else, neither the land nor the people. They
say that a long, long time ago, an Italian ship grounded on the coast and the shipwrecked remained there, mingled with the women; and since then they are no longer Belgians, they are no longer Flemish, they are a people apart, not like the others. And I believe that they built their houses, their gardens, their fields, their canals and their boats to please them, to suit their ideas. Look: there are houses with green shutters everywhere in Flanders, and just as clean, there are hedges in almost every country in the world; but in Bray-Dunes, every Saturday, on these big green hedges, as high as walls, they hang everything they’ve washed, cleaned, brushed: white linen , red and blue clothes, pewter dishes rubbed with sand. And it’s not done at random, it’s like a review of equipment, yes, but also like an exhibition of paintings. What do you want me to tell you? We saw that: well, we were moved! The men? The whole time I was there, I didn’t see them. From March they go fishing in Iceland, and don’t come back until August or September. Only the women remain, and then, think about it! Counting nine months, exactly, that puts the births in May or June. And there’s not one of them missing a baby. Today it’s Maria, tomorrow it’s Jeanne or Julie. In front of all the doors there are cradles , and on the road to the church, good God! it’s like a procession, women and more women, carrying on their backs a wicker basket, with a sleeping or crying child as a garnish. But after, eh, after? After, all these women think: They’ll come, they’ll come! Our men will come! Ah! their eyes! But no, it’s not their eyes, they’ve stayed the same. It’s their gaze that has changed: so pale, so clear, so washed, so burning, because every woman is new, who has had a new child, and her desire for love, at that moment, is so strong, so harsh and so beautiful! And they are all like that, all together, and at this season, when there are large yellow sunflowers above the hedges, roses that you can smell from afar, the yellow sea, the sand that roasts your feet when you walk and your bottom when you lie down on it! And they all make themselves beautiful. Not only their bodies, but their homes. They’re the ones who paint red diamonds on the green shutters, they’re the ones who invent extraordinary designs for the rims of the beautiful round wells: they ‘ll come, just think, they’ll come! And meanwhile, damn it! I was the only man in the country. You know what it’s like, if you hear a whole crowd singing, it takes you away. I was taken away, and I said to myself: But I’m here, me, yet I’m here! The most beautiful was Lisa. Lisa Debauve, she was called by all her names. She was the one I wanted. Almost every day I saw her leaving for fishing for goats, her red skirt raised over a kind of striped flannel underpants, short enough that her legs, her knees and the bottom of her thighs were completely bare. When you begin to want a woman, there is always something in her that you love and desire particularly, something that you see first, when you think of her, even in her absence… At that moment Müller, who had not seemed to be listening, suddenly nodded . He had felt that, too, he approved. “Well, for me,” Barnavaux continued, “it’s my knees that do that to me. All the rest of the Lisa, I could, even now, tell you what I know about it. I remember! How it was all gently rounded and flowing under her skirt, in front, from the waist down; and then the thinning after the loins, and then the breasts, a little wide under her jacket, and above all the strong, straight, hard, superb neck, which supported her calm head and her twisted hair, red above, blond below, like the color of the rings that African blacksmiths make of two golds. Yes, of course, there was all that and it was beautiful, but the knees, the knees! They looked so fragile and yet so vigorous, those ones, with that kind of dimpled chin , and the movements they had in walking, those movements which make a knee alive, they vary, they are like the features of a face. Barnavaux stopped to think something almost impossible to express: –Yes, well… men and women, you know, they are the only animals who walk on only two legs, and it is the way their knees are positioned which does that. There is nothing else like it in the world. Monkeys have hands: they have no knees! As soon as Lisa came out of the water, she let her red dress fall back down over her legs, but I followed her, always keeping my mind on it, I continued to see! And I spoke to her softly, kindly, first so as not to frighten her, then to restrain myself: words are like commands, and depending on the tone you use when you pronounce them, you let yourself be carried away, or you hold yourself back. I don’t want to boast; for skin matters, such a small thing, boasting, what a misery! I’m not young enough anymore, I’ve come around to it. All I want to say is that Lisa had clearly noticed what I wanted, and that I was counting on it. Eh, come on! Me, the only man in the village, all these women in a fever, and it was she that I desired! It must be flattering, it’s tempting. There came a time of the month when the tide didn’t come in until very late. It was getting dark when the fisherwomen returned with their nets. I I didn’t pose for the man who wants to show himself with a woman, I didn’t act smart. I waited at the top of the dune, on the little path where I knew Lisa would pass alone, with no one to accompany her. And I shouted from afar, when I saw her shadow, blacker than the black of the night: –Good evening, Lisa! There must have been a change in my way of speaking, at last, because I suddenly felt quite different, and very bold. And Lisa herself had something in her throat when she answered me: –Good evening, Barnavaux! Feet don’t make noise in the sand! The next second I was against her, and I had my arm around her waist. –Ah! There, she said, there, now! It had to happen. And she began to shout, without struggling, in a beautiful, completely clear voice, and proudly, towards the house, above: –Na… oh! Na… oh! I was so surprised that I let go of her waist. “What?” I asked. “Who is it you call that? ” “My little girl!” she said quite simply. ” When women bring their children over just when you want to talk, it’s already a bad sign.” I remarked, a little dryly: “That’s a funny name for a little girl. ” “Ah!” she said, “that’s what I call it for Christina. ” “Christina? ” “Yes. The name of someone my husband goes to see when he’s in Iceland. His wife from there, you know!… So I thought it would please him if we gave the same name to the little one. So I said, without hesitating for a moment: “Oh! That’s good, Lisa, that’s very good, Lisa. Good evening, Lisa. Would you like me to carry your peach? ” “No,” she said, “it’s not necessary. We’ve got farther to go now.” …And I left, concluded Barnavaux, I left, you understand, and I arranged for myself never to pass where she passed. Müller looked at him, astonished. “Why is that?” he asked. “Because I understood,” said Barnavaux. “A woman who has done that is because she belongs only to her husband. There’s nothing to be done. ” “There’s nothing to be done!” repeated Louise with conviction. Chapter 12. THE TORNADO. What Louise did during her pregnancy, I presume that a hundred thousand women of the people, wives or abandoned, are in Paris every year to accomplish it. Only, I hadn’t seen it yet. And the eyes of the mind are too weak eyes, we always lack imagination. First, she announced the news to her mother-in-law. I didn’t know that her father had remarried, and that she had a mother-in-law. I knew this from then on, because it was discussed at length in the conversations she had almost every evening with Barnavaux. I then expected heartbreak: the situation was dramatic. But if the moral question was broached in the family—I suppose so, because Louise often had red eyes and a heavy heart at that time—no one ever admitted it to me: she was modest about such feelings. What she stirred up above all, and what stirred her up, was the matter of settling scores . Since she was abandoning her family, she claimed that she no longer brought them what she earned. And the family replied that nothing would have been more legitimate if she had made, with the consent of her family and at the appointed time, an honorable establishment: but that it was quite different since it was a matter of a whim and a heartfelt decision, something irregular: in other words, she owed compensation, since they had been entitled to count on her salary for some time yet . Louise ended up accepting this settlement, established on a fair basis, and, she told me, in accordance with custom. They agreed on the weekly compensation, which was moreover conscientiously paid. But from then on she gave up making purses. I thought it was to rest, because Barnavaux had kept his promises. The small apartment, the furniture, he had paid for them from his own money, but Louise was thinking of that! She was now living only for another , nothing existed in her eyes but the one who was going to be born. In those moments when those women who could waited without moving for their deliverance, with sacred self-respect, Louise had voluntarily condemned herself to the galleys. From five to seven in the morning, she carried newspapers. Then, until noon, she did housework, at thirty-five centimes an hour, one at the home of an employee of the Hôtel de Ville, the other in a sculptor’s studio. There she lit the fires, wet the rough clays, did a little cooking, which allowed her to avoid paying for her lunch. From there she went to sew for a lady who was going to have a baby. And I haven’t quite managed to understand if it did her good or bad to cut and sew the layette of this other little one who was going to come.
I think it depended a little on the day, because in the evening, under the lamp, when she had made us coffee, sometimes Louise would work for her, saying: It’s a model I got from Madame Bacot. And then she would be happy. Or on the contrary she would remain with empty arms, looking at engravings of children’s fashions and sighing a little: then she had to find something else: something else that wasn’t so expensive… But in this way she made her four francs a day, and Barnavaux, who discreetly took the soup at Palaiseau, except on Sundays, cost her almost nothing. On those Sundays, when I invited myself over, I would bring dinner. Barnavaux, generously, provided the wine. And he was so happy, so changed… “You find it funny, don’t you,” he said to me, “one of those evenings, to see me with a white woman… I mean,” he said, reflecting, “a white woman who is only mine: as if she were my lady! ” It wasn’t I who found it funny, it was he. Every man willingly places in the minds of his fellow men the memories that haunt him, the ideas that astonish him. Barnavaux knows that I have remembered the names of the women who, without being able to fix them, have crossed his already long life; seeing me before him, it was them that he saw, a flock sometimes plaintive and sometimes without alarm: Madame Edmée, Marie-Faite-en-Fer and little Fatouma from the coast of Guinea, and Kétaka the Malagasy, with her braided braids , and so many others, so many others, taken and left, dead or returned to their race. “It’s not the same thing,” he said, “it’s not the same thing… Now, here was Louise, as one would say his lady: this courageous little Parisian girl, who had worked all day on her housework and sewing, and just now, when he took the train to return to the fort of Palaiseau, would faithfully await his return the next day, would sleep alone, like a true wife. On the oilcloth of the table he crushed a drop of coffee with his thumb, stood up, thoughtful and proud, and suddenly, turning behind the slender feminine figure, kissed her on the nape of the neck, where the blond hair was now nothing more than a short, voluptuous down. “My Louise!” he said. He was almost ashamed, in my presence, of the sound of his voice. Men who are getting old don’t like to seem too much in love. He repeated, as if to apologize: “It’s not the same thing: first of all, there’s the hut!” He cast a proud glance at everything around him. Ah! What a small thing it was, though! Louise had cooked on a small Prussian stove, in the same room where the bed and chest of drawers were, the single room that made up Barnavaux’s hut. But he had paid for this furniture with his re-enlistment bonus; it was his! And on the wall, one could also see a Moorish saber in its red and yellow leather scabbard, a Bambara dance mask, fierce and black, bristling with a six-pointed crown, truly demonic. And, painted on a silk fabric, to see boats arriving on a river with blue waters, rowed by other pale, thin Chinese women, their long fingers tight on the thin oars, a Chinese lady leaned the red flower of her updo over the balusters of a terrace: all the delicacy, all the spirituality of the art of the old Empire brought there from the pillage of Peking, a priceless masterpiece that Louise disdained without understanding it. She wasn’t even looking at Barnavaux at that hour; all languid with fatigue, with her condition, with the soft vanity of being like a bourgeois and having a home of her own, she was reading the newspaper, her elbows on the table and her hands on her forehead, with the idea that her day was over, that she was resting and that the things men said couldn’t interest her. “What are you reading?” asked Barnavaux. “Another agent has been wounded,” she replied. “Ah! They’re chic, all the same.” She repeated the word she had just read: “… Heroes! ” “Of course,” said Barnavaux indifferently, “of course! His carelessness astonished me. He knew his stuff, though!” “You,” he said to Louise, “you: a little anarchist…” But Louise had forgotten the past, she was unfaithful to the memories of the People’s University of Plaisance, where Barnavaux had met her: since she had an interest in the defense of society, now! She even felt a sense of pride, realizing that she had quite naturally, without trying, taken on conservative opinions. Barnavaux protested. “Heroes! That’s what you say when someone has done something that harms them, that helps you, and you don’t understand why. Do n’t you think it would be more interesting and more useful to know how heroism comes about?” Barnavaux knew what he meant. But, as usual, only examples and images came to mind, not abstract terms. The time for his train was approaching. He buckled his belt, and I drove him to the Port-Royal station. “Those words bother me,” he said, resuming the conversation. “They’re too abbreviated: so, they impress, like everything that’s abbreviated: there’s no need . I’ve seen some heroism, eh? So, I can say… Look, once, I was in a barge on the Débo. I was accompanying the tax in kind: rice that was being brought into Timbuktu. You know the Débo, don’t you? I met you nearby, in 1904; you were going to Kabara. It’s not a lake, it’s a sea! Just think that at high water, the Niger, when it falls there, is a league and a half wide: that’s enough to fill a hole!” And the hole is deep, and it’s not the only one: there’s the Tenda, the Korienzé, and others, I don’t remember anymore… I was told there are thirty-four; I couldn’t remember! I have the idea that it must have been a real sea, in the past, that country; otherwise, it wouldn’t be natural. On top of that , at the time of the floods, all that is melted together, you don’t recognize yourself anymore, you don’t know where you are. They put sailors there today, real sailors from the navy to command the steamers: but they imitate everyone else; when that time comes, they don’t act smart, they let themselves be guided by their black pilots, the Somonos, who were born there; and that’s the wisest thing to do. Sometimes , it’s large sandstone pebbles that hide under the water, and that burst the hulls. Sometimes, a kind of green strips, ridiculous plants, which begin to grow from the bottom, as tall as trees. It is not water or earth: we float on grass, absurdly, on fields of grass which swim, unroll, curl, tangle, bloom into flowers: large white cups, like chalices for saying mass; others, smaller , pink, and still others, almost blue, like the mauves of my country. That is what we go on, on these grasses and on these flowers, and that is how I went, me and my eighteen barges loaded with rice: in a massacre of flowers! You remember them, those barges of Niger. What they most resemble is sabots, in speed and in shape: a narrow hull covered with a roof at the front, as if to hold the tip of the foot of a giant. That’s where we sleep, and there’s just enough room to stretch out. As soon as the sun stops beating down on our helmets, we go up onto the roof, we play the pasha, we get some fresh air, we look at the landscape; and, during this time, the Somonos push their boat hooks: twelve men, arranged in two teams, who run on this roof and on the sacks of rice, twelve blacks recruited from the fishing villages on both banks. And they shout, without stopping, they sing shouts! Only three notes: it’s like the bells of a cathedral for high mass. And they jump on their boat-hooks, they dance, you could say, they dance completely naked, except for the dirty laundry that passes between their legs: twelve black devils, with strong thighs, legs without calves, a big neck full of muscles under their beast-like mouths, and eyes that you would think were popping out of their faces, because of the effort, and they have almost no nose. I was the only European to command the eighteen barges; this country is so quiet, now: I prefer to go to Kabara than to Pantin. And, naturally, I did not speak to my boatmen: they seemed to me like boat-hook-pinning machines: you might as well make conversation with a paddle wheel! There remained, as distractions: shooting hippopotamuses,–it’s exciting, you always miss them,–diverting movable objects from their intended purpose, making a coffee pot with a pot and water closets with a set of calabashes,–and singing sentimental romances or Derrière l’Hôtel-Dieu, which is not sentimental: but the young ladies you meet on the banks of the Niger don’t understand. Basically, what I liked best was my dinner. The barges stopped at a small beach, on the mainland when you could find it, most often on an island. The notables brought chickens, fish, sometimes a sheep; I paid them according to custom and I ate while my boatmen swallowed their millet porridge, but above all danced. For they had danced on their barges; but, once on land, they danced better! Most of the time, I didn’t even deign to get off my boat. I was served like a prince, on the roof of the barge, and I contemplated the spectacle from the height of my grandeur. One evening, I was watching this little celebration as usual. It was beautiful; it amused me. My boatmen had put their boubous back on for the magnificence: long pale blue or white cottons, and they sang, their mouths wide open. A white bar in a black ball: these were the teeth. There were children too, galloping around the gourd-drums, their backs too hollow, their bellies protruding , and girls, five or six beautiful girls, tall, with yellow and white checked loincloths on their hips. They were almost naked, I tell you; they were leaping, and in the leaps they made their hard breasts barely moved, like arrows stuck in a wooden door. Suddenly,–ah! It was quick, almost instantaneous, like the start of an electric train—a great wind fell upon me from the sky. A slap in the face! Rain that slashed at me like a whip, and thunder, and the whole world, black as ink between the flashes of lightning: the tornado, what! You know how it comes, in summer. A first noise, coming from the water: it was my folding table flying off and falling back into the lake with the glass, the enameled iron plate, the bottle, a quarter of mutton: ruin, total ruin! At first I thought of nothing else. And then, the sound of the water continued: toc, toc, toc, boom, flouc! The waves, playing against the sides of the barge: I was already in full Débo, adrift. My first thought was : It’s lucky the waves didn’t put me in! The second: It might have been better to bathe near land. Any further away and it would be unhealthy! I was already soaked to the skin. I went back down under the previous roof to take shelter. A sort of small dark ball rolled between my legs. It was the kitchen boy, a twelve-year-old kid, who had stayed in the barge to keep the fire going. His lips were all gray, he was trembling all over , he was scared, scared like an animal, in a disgusting and ugly way that I slapped my hand in his face: he made it clear to me that the situation was serious. In the middle of the lake, there is a large sandstone peak, which falls into the water, as steep as a dike. I couldn’t see it : we couldn’t see anything. Besides, I had a good chance of not sticking to it, and I almost regretted it. After all, it was still earth, and there might have been a way to hang on! But the pebbles hidden under the water, but those devilish weeds! For a moment the barge got tangled up in them from the front. Then, it turned as if to waltz, dived, took on a ton of dirty water and freed itself. The rice was heavy in that boat: the bags rose, at the back, higher than the roof. I didn’t think for a minute about throwing a single one out. I did n’t think about it, I tell you: I had to bring back the count. And yet I was thinking all the time: If I scrape on a rock, or even in the mud, with this load, I’m done for! Flouc! The barge stopped. I shouted to the boy—someone to talk to, it’s a relief: That’s it! We’re at full! It wasn’t a shoal, but a doubalel, a kind of giant fig tree, submerged by the flood, and whose branches barely emerged from the water. I thought at first that they were in bloom, and then I thought: It ‘s not possible, there are too many colors. They were little birds, blue birds, green birds, red birds. They were afraid, too, and the wind was so strong that they preferred not to fly. I only saw white egrets passing above me, rowing with their soft wings in the storm, like pieces of canvas torn from a hedge: they would reach the land, those ones; they were lucky! At that moment, the barge, tangled in the branches, under the violence of the waves and the wind, tilted on its side. Sacks of rice collapsed, and I swore. It was certain shipwreck! But suddenly it righted itself, and I saw two hands, then four, and then still others on the gunwale, and eleven heads, eleven heads of Negroes: eleven of my canoeists out of twelve! They climbed over the boat, and the team leader said simply, seeing that I was there: “All right!” The boat hooks were stored under the roof, and the kitchen boy was sitting on them, dazed. He made him change his position with a kick—what a blow he took that day, the young martyr!—distributed them to his men and began to push vigorously. There was so much depth that they were on their knees three-quarters of the time. But they sang their three notes all the same, according to sacred custom. Look! But one was missing, on one side, from the team. I asked: “Where are some of them, Samba Laôbé?” The team leader simply replied: “Samba Laôbé didn’t win by swimming. The weeds were very bad.” They had swum to the barge, they had caught it while it was going out on the lake, to the right, to the left, at random in the tornado. And one out of twelve had drowned. They seemed to think that was not much! Do, re, sol, han! Do, re, sol, han! That’s all, and they went along the road, splashed by the waves. Ah! the good people, the good people! And, when we were lined up along the edge, the black women began to dance again, twisting their behinds, with new words for their song: The white man is back! He’s not dead, he’s a big white man, a very good fetish! That’s what they were saying, the kitchen boy explained to me. However, Samba Laôbé had drowned, he hadn’t had a good fetish. But, that, there was no question of that in the report! The next day, on the calmer waters of the lake, the body of the canoeist was found . It wasn’t that they were looking for him. No! But there was already a band of scavengers and two seagulls eating off him: he was easy to see. I had it pulled from the lake and put in the stern, to be buried at the stopover. And, speaking of reports, it occurred to me that I had to give an account to the administration. I owed them that much, my canoeists. We would give them five cents more or an extra ration. That is why, while they were sticking their sticks in the Débo, I took a sheet of paper and began to write on my knees, since I no longer had a table! It is not my job, and it absorbed me. Suddenly, however, I realized that we were no longer making progress. I raised my nose, and I saw the team leader in salam, his arms outstretched and looking annoyed, annoyed! He begged: –It’s not good to say commander! It’s not good! What! I was trying to think of phrases to say that they had saved my life, and they didn’t want to know! I thought they didn’t understand, so I tried to explain. The team leader shook his head in despair: “No good, paper, commander!” And the kitchen boy, who had two or three more words at his disposal, elaborated: “Somonos canoeists, there are some who always stay on the barge. White man on the barge, Somonos on the barge. Always, always! Don’t you get it? That meant that canoeists must never abandon the boat until the white man has gotten out. And they had jumped ashore to dance, they were at fault. At fault? What would we have done to them? We would have cut them eight days’ pay, four francs. We couldn’t kill them, even if I was dead, eh?” But there was the order: We must not… They had risked their lives to catch up with the order, and one of them drowned, the one whose carcass was swelling in the sun, at the stern. Even if they hadn’t all died, it would have been a miracle. But that was something that wasn’t in their brains. That’s what heroism is, concluded Barnavaux. You don’t do it on purpose. You think there’s no way to do it otherwise, you’re not its master! There’s the order, and the disciplinary punishments. It makes a daily habit that prevents you from thinking about yourself. “A daily habit that prevents you from thinking about yourself?” I said. “Do you know that this little Louise… our little Louise… ” “It’s still true!” said Barnavaux. “My word, I wasn’t thinking about it!” The station clock marked the hour, one minute to. He rushed down the stairs. Chapter 13. THE HARE. Walking beside a pretty, elegant, and very slender blonde woman, who was holding his elbow, a man still quite young passed by, very handsome, dark- skinned, with very soft yet very bright eyes, and that something in the carriage of his head and torso that betrayed the officer. He looked at Barnavaux, and I saw that Barnavaux recognized him. But the soldier did not make that gesture so common among subordinates who meet a superior dressed in civilian clothes and begin, out of habit, without finishing, the standard salute. It was exactly the opposite. Barnavaux seemed to be looking at something, with hypocritical attention, in the window of a shop. And the officer continued on his way without perhaps distinguishing anything extraordinary in this scene. “Yes,” said Barnavaux, answering my question, “he’s in my battalion, but he’s in civilian clothes: so I don’t have to recognize him, do I? ” “Was there a fault between you?” I asked, knowing that Barnavaux is not easy to lead. “A fault? Never anything. Only, he’s a bounioul: a Negro, if you like. ” “Come on!” I said. “He’s as white as you and me. ” “That doesn’t matter,” persisted Barnavaux, stubbornly: “he has black blood! I would never have suspected in Barnavaux’s soul the same racial prejudices as among the North Americans, and I told him so with forceful words and an expression of generous indignation. “He’s a man like you,” I added. “Only, he’s more pleasant to look at and better brought up. ” “No!” replied Barnavaux roughly, “he’s not a man like me.” What you’re saying is just a philosophical story, and therefore jokes, nothing but jokes. The truth is that white people, for thousands of years, have been moving in a direction that wasn’t the one for black people. With their heads, their hearts, their bodies, they’ve searched to invent things. Sometimes it was good; sometimes it was bad. But there was more good than bad, eh? Without that, there wouldn’t be those mechanical trams in the streets, and white women would still be doing like those in the Congo: they would breastfeed their children until they were five, and then they would file their upper teeth down to dog teeth, because that’s better for eating humans. Well, when you make mixed-race people, you bring together what should be more and more different, and that’s a mistake, you see. And the Americans you speak of are right to punish those who make mistakes, for the same reason that we are right to punish soldiers who make mistakes, even without ill will: because it is so that nothing bad happens to the army! “But,” I asked, “would something bad happen to the army, I mean to the whites, in this case? That is precisely the question. ” “Something bad could happen,” replied Barnavaux, “and that’s enough: we must avoid running the risk. If you want to do experiments like that, go to the moon. But not here: it would be too expensive if it went wrong. ” He continued, searching for his words: “It’s true that it’s difficult to think like that, to have the courage to think like that when you haven’t seen black people in their own country, when you don’t know what they are. You, when you meet one in Paris, you only have the idea of a man who is not the same color as you. I imagine huts of earth or straw, circumcised males, who dance, in the evening, in front of everyone, with gestures that you would not make, in a closed room, in front of the woman who is yours, and black women who respond to these gestures! I imagine what they eat and how they eat, I also imagine what they all do , yes, all of them, even my friends the Senegalese soldiers, when they are not prevented, to the enemies they have killed. Yet they are good, in their own way; they are courageous, they are docile, we must love them, guide them. But to imagine that they are like us, to imagine that they leave nothing of themselves in the mixed-race people who come from their race, you have to have never left home to believe it. I remember! In Rochefort, or rather in the surrounding area, there was a white man-like-that-even, who lived in a castle. You don’t know what a white-as-that-is is? It’s a word they use around Tamatave, and I think it’s roughly translated from Malagasy. It means a white person who isn’t quite white, although it looks like it, and at first glance you’d be mistaken. This one, his grandparents had adopted him, recognized him, they had done everything necessary with the law so that he would inherit. What do you want? He was the son of their son, who hadn’t had time to make another one before dying there, where I come from, in Africa. They were noble, these old people, and very proud people, but they wanted to make their name last and they said, by way of excuse, that their grandson was noble not only through them, but through his mother, who was a signare, that is to say, a descendant of the children that the first white men of Senegal, the lord-officers of the old days, who all had a de before their name, had had with chief’s daughters . And then, I must nevertheless confess the truth: if there ever was a good boy and a handsome man, it was he! All the men loved him, in the country, and how they would not have loved a real white man, for he was more generous. He gave, he gave,—I know it now, he gave like the chiefs of Niger and Falémé, because giving is about the only proof of wealth, and also for praise,—and when there was a hunt, a fishing, a feast, he had to go ahead, he had to do more than the others. So, if the men followed him like that, think of the women! You understand: there wasn’t one of them who didn’t have their head turned, just by looking up at him. Dressed, he looked naked; one would have said that one could see his limbs, his muscles rolling, and that beautiful swelling of the chest, when one breathes and takes more joy in feeling oneself alive with each breath; and he was always dressed like a prince, with something dazzling, remarkable. With that, blue eyes, that bounioul, two flowers in a golden skin, under eyebrows and eyelashes as long as grass, eyes so tender that the women naturally wanted to say to him: Look at me again, look at me while I live and tell me where I must go, at what time: I will go! He had… he had all the ones he wanted: the peasant girls, the girls from Les Sablaises, the girls who are in the café-concerts and the theaters, and others too, married, who were hiding. Perhaps they lent him some; it’s always like that. The opinion is that they couldn’t resist him. And it’s true that Colonel Andral’s daughter hardly resisted him either . When I speak like that, you have to understand me. She was a good little girl, honest as gold, and she wouldn’t have wanted to give him that outside of marriage, unless, unless… well, you never know, women are women. But what’s certain is that she was crazy about him and wanted to marry him. What I’m telling you goes back a long way. I had just enlisted, it was my first leave, and I was the colonel’s orderly. I didn’t know what I know now, I was a novice, and that Andral refused to give his daughter to this handsome devil, so truly young, so lively, so fresh, it seemed stupid to me, it seemed revolting to me, especially when she cried, the little one, and she cried every day. If I had dared, I think I would have been indelicate so that she could have had her way with her handsome dark-haired boy with blue eyes. The young lady felt it well, that I was on her side; she had sympathy for me, and when I followed her on her horseback rides she knew that I wouldn’t say anything at home if the other one joined her on the road to do a bit of galloping. But, one day, the Charente overflowed, just like the Seine the other year. The countryside had become like a great lake, with trees sticking out their heads to show where the roads had been, back when things were still in the natural order, and islands where the land rose above the flood. It was a large expanse of water, all flat, all gray, almost without current, except toward the middle, where the river, which had become wicked, flowed; and it looked like a large tarnished zinc plate. The young lady said to me once: “Barnavaux, we will take the little boat and you will take me to that island over there. I want to see it.” I answered, of course, “Yes, mademoiselle,” and I went to get the oars from the shed, right near the landing stage. When I came back, it was just as I had expected. There he was, the young man, and he got into the boat as if the thing had been agreed upon from all eternity, saying only: “Good morning, Barnavaux.” And I answered him: Good morning, Count. Today, I would find it funny to call Count a bounioul, but at that time I was only a rookie, I repeat. Then we started, and I began to row, my back turned to my passengers. I could only hear them kissing a little. And then what? It was only fair. If I had been in the other man’s place, I would have done the same. I approached the island gently and jumped ashore with the chain, at the end of which there was a large stone for mooring. When the young lady held out her hand to her friend so that he could let her down, I saw clearly that they were in agreement and that she would do anything he asked, no matter how, no matter the price. And it’s beautiful to to see, even when one is not there to enjoy it, a girl who makes up her mind, a girl who loves with everything she has, her head, her heart and her body! It lit up the landscape, it made sunshine, this day when there was none. They both began to walk so close to each other , their arms so interlaced that they formed a single mass, and they went as if dancing. I, who had also dismounted, stayed near the boat so as not to disturb them. Suddenly, I heard Mademoiselle Aimée letting out a cry. It was something that had just risen under her feet and was leaving like a ball: a hare, an unfortunate hare that had remained there, prisoner of the flood. It had surprised the young lady, she had been frightened; and then she began to laugh because she was brave… But I saw her face change a second time and I understood why: it was because of the other one! He had thrown himself forward, and I would never have believed that a human face could suddenly become so like a mouth. His lips had curled up, he showed his gums and his teeth, and I heard—it was the first time I had heard—the deep uh! of the Negroes when they are happy and an assault is ordered to destroy a village. The hare was hurtling down, down, already very far, his ears laid back, his legs so fast that they seemed to be getting tangled up; and soon there was nothing left, to the eyes, of his tawny fur; there was only a furrow in the grass, with drops of water jumping: the water from the damp grasses stirred up by his running. Uh! Uh! It was the man who had gone after him. He had completely forgotten that he was with a woman and that she could be his, as he wanted, whenever he wanted. Uh! Uh! It was splendid and it was dreadful. He was winning over the hare, the man, the man who had become a hunting animal again, he was winning over him with his long legs, whose feet landed so lightly that nothing could be heard but the tearing of the grass. And if his chest was still rumbling, it was from pleasure, for he was not out of breath; on the contrary, he was regaining strength and joy as he got closer to the beast, he was going ever faster. The end of the island, the hare stopped. Is it caught? The man had thought so, he had jumped, stretching out his hands, his claws. No. The hare had made a detour, it was going back in the opposite direction. And it lasted! It lasted more than an hour. I saw them pass in front of me, two meters away. The hare had blood at the tip of its nose and frightening eyes, in which there was no longer either white or black: the color of dull zinc or dirty flood water. He, the hunter, he had fallen I don’t know how many times, he was disgusting, his clothes torn, his hands grazed. Huh! Huh! Now, if he had had his sense, he would have stopped because he was almost exhausted, too. But he was mad, absolutely mad, and that sustained him. In the end, the hare returned to the end of the island, where he had been surrounded at first. No doubt, that was how he had arrived, and he hoped that the road would reopen. But there was only water. The hare couldn’t take it anymore, he tried to get in to swim or cool off, I don’t know. Flouc! The man went in behind him, and his hands closed around the animal’s neck. It uttered that sick cat-like cry of a hare whose kidneys have been crushed by a dog, and that was all. To think that I had just called him Monsieur le Comte, the one who came back with that animal strangled in his fingers, that brown skin where there was life quivering before it died! It was lucky he was covered in mud, for he was naked, that is to say. And he no longer knew where he was. He wanted to smile, not knowing that he was still showing his gums, his face turned into a mouth again. Mademoiselle Aimée cried: “Savage! Savage! You are a savage! ” He didn’t realize. He was there, changed into a beast. Mademoiselle Aimée cried again: –Barnavaux, take me! And I brought her back as quickly as I could. I had seen the bounioul, I had learned what it was before going to the land of bouniouls… And you, now, do you understand? Chapter 14. THE TWO BANKS. The young Chinese man came out of the School of Political Science, rue Saint-Guillaume. He had fine, slanted eyes, as befits his race, a nose both flat and aquiline, and a long braid which, emerging from his black silk skullcap, whose coral bud shone like a little cherry, fell straight down onto his beautiful sky-blue tunic. I recognized him: it was Li-Ouang, and I had met him in society, where he is appreciated, even by women. The Chinese know how to give flowers, because they love them. And this one is considered a kind of rare and precious object. In each of the houses he frequents, the mistress of the house says, speaking of him: My Chinese, as she would of an old vase, of great value, belonging to the yellow family. I greeted him friendly, and he raised his hands to his chest, in the fashion of his country, to return my greeting. But, seeing Barnavaux at my side, he almost smiled and passed: the Chinese, even today , have, as we know, little esteem for the profession of arms; and for the common soldiers, they despise them. Barnavaux noticed this. With the tip of his tongue, and with a light breath, he threw the cigarette he was finishing into the gutter. “What is he doing here, that bird?” he asked, returning disdain for disdain. “He is taking classes,” I replied. They teach him the history of civilization in Europe, the history of the formation of nationalities, that of Napoleon I and international law, a whole lot of things, in short, a whole lot of things you have no idea about, Barnavaux. He’s very intelligent. Barnavaux shrugged. “And you make friends with him, eh? And those young men who accompanied him also make friends with him? He goes to the café and to women’s houses, and to the theater. They treat him like a European, right? ” “Why not,” I replied. “Didn’t I tell you he’s very intelligent? He’s also very well-bred: he fits in everywhere. What does that do to you? ” “I don’t care,” said Barnavaux, “it’s stupid to treat a Chinaman like a European: it’s stupid, I repeat. But I don’t care! When he returns to his country, he’ll learn the difference.” It’s because you play nice with him, because you play the fool, that he takes himself seriously. But, once there, he’ll know what white people’s politeness is worth, white people’s consideration. And they’re the ones who are right, those white people over there, they’re not you! Yes, yes, wait: we’ll put him in his place! I knew one once… He was well received in France, he was dragged everywhere, he was shown everywhere: at government parties , at dinners. He was made to eat with ministers’ wives , that monkey! You’re just not thinking about anything: as long as we haven’t made all the French in the colonies take leave, they’ll be thinking about nothing… Then, one day, a deputy, a very powerful deputy, said to him: You’re going back to China. No doubt you’ll pass through Saigon: you must visit a French colony! Well, I’m going to give you letters signed with my name, with my seal, and everything. That will open all doors for you. And he wrote them; beautiful letters! And he gave them to him. The Chinese man looked at them with respect, because these people, when they see writing, it’s as if they saw the good Lord, it’s the same thing-Buddha; he put them at the bottom of a beautiful new trunk and embarked on a liner. A French liner, Messageries Maritimes, I suppose: it’s only us poor devils who get stuck on transports that take three months to make the journey. And it was full, this boat, full as an egg! It was autumn, the time when we returns. He had taken firsts and was put in a cabin with two berths. But no one wanted him. A Chinese, eh, a Chinese! Would you sleep with a Chinese, you, even you! The commander wanted him to share the cabin of a French civil servant, a socialist, whose grandmother was a black woman from Guadeloupe; but the civil servant protested, saying that they wanted to insult the majesty of Europeans in his person. In the end, all the same, he was taken in by a missionary. He was a very nice man, this missionary. He had a de before his name, but he explained that he could not differentiate between the Chinese and the whites. This was under the pretext that even the Chinese have a soul. He also said that he knew the family, which was a distinguished family. Missionaries like to make friends: that’s their business. And then there you have it: we saw Aden, where there is nothing but eagles, snakes that are eaten by eagles, and English people dying of heat. We saw Colombo—you remember Colombo, where the men have a comb in their chignons, like the women—and then, at the end, the Saigon River. The Chinese man breathed in the smell of the river; it filled his nostrils, that muddy smell of the lands that seem to float, that sometimes really do float, all along the river; earths like sponges, that float like bundles of rushes, a kind of green rafts! He said to himself: I am home! I am home! But the boat moved forward, always moved forward, in this muddy water, gently, very gently: you know well that there are places where it sticks like glue, and that there was once a large steamer that stayed there for a whole year; we had sown rice all around, we were making a garden!… Suddenly, there was a wooden quay, a dirty wooden quay, half eaten by shipworms–and the Chinese saw France! Yes, it is indeed France that we find in Saigon. We can joke about the naval officers who did that. But it is beautiful, it is big, it is astonishing, it is like a town back home, finally, with a theater, a church, multi-story houses: we are not among the yellows, we do not realize that we are among the yellows; from a distance, it is the same as Bordeaux, the same as a seaport here. And even, it is better; all the dirty jobs, it is not the whites who do them. Whites who become ship unloaders, workers, coolies, what, what misery! Over there, the whites, they are all kings! On the platform, there were rickshaws, little handcarts pulled by other monkeys of his race. The Chinese man was about to get into one of these rickshaws like a European, and better, without hurrying, like a rich Chinese man. An Annamite put his hand on his shoulder, an Annamite police officer, with a saber-bayonet and all the trappings of respect. “It’s not good!” said the Annamite. “What?” replied the Chinese man. “It’s not good!” asked the police officer again. “Some have to go through anthropometry. ” At that moment, I interrupted Barnavaux. “Ah! yes, I know,” I said. ” We have introduced the ingenious methods of Doctor Bertillon into our Far Eastern colonies, but the Europeans come in as they please. They are the superior race, and considered inviolable and without blemish. Whereas the Chinese, we mistrust them.” In France, the Bertillon method is only applied to defendants. In Indochina, all Chinese are considered born defendants. Barnavaux continued: “Good! You understand.” This Chinese man was taken to an office where there were already other Chinese; and an Annamite said to him: “You have to be stripped naked, Maoulen. Quickly! ” “What for?” he asked the Chinese man from Paris. “Looks like tattoos,” said the Annamite . But the Chinese man only understood good French. Then a white employee explained to him: “You’re told to undress so we can take your measurements, so we can note your tattoos. You have tattoos, eh? Well, What are you waiting for! Undress, for God’s sake! But it bothered this Chinese man to get naked in front of someone he hadn’t been introduced to; he wasn’t used to it. Then he remembered the letters the deputy had given him. “Where are your letters?” asked the white clerk. “In my trunk!” he said. “Do you think,” said the clerk, “that we can wait for all the Chinese to open their trunks before anthropometrically analyzing them?… Take off your underpants, you idiot!” And, as he wasn’t hurrying enough… There’s no point in me going on: the police make themselves understood in the same way in every country in the world. The Chinese man noticed this. Then he said: “I’m going back! I’m going back! I’d rather go back to China right away!” He went back to China, and he wasn’t happy. A Chinese person retains his anger much longer than we do. And this one had been treated differently by the French in Saigon than by those in Paris. He had seen the difference, and that was what made the saliva in his mouth so bitter. He went to find, in Peking, a minister of his country, a great minister, I don’t remember which one. But first he was obliged to do the lais, to get on all fours in front of him seven times in a row, his nose to the ground; and that also proved to him that he was no longer in Europe. As for the minister, he thought that it was not yet the time to quarrel with the people of the West. Later , we don’t know… He thought for a minute and asked: “Were the letters you received from a great French mandarin?” “They were from a great mandarin of France, that’s the truth of truths,” said the Chinese man. “And where did you keep them?” asked the minister again. “In my trunk,” replied the Chinese. Then the minister said to him in a magnificent voice, as if on the parade ground: “Do you know what you are? ” “You are my father and my mother!” said the Chinese. “You are a turtle’s egg! They give you letters, a great French mandarin gives you letters, and instead of keeping them on your chest, you put them in your trunk, with the clothes that are supposed to cover your contemptible body? Do you admit it? ” “Yes,” said the Chinese. “Well, you will receive a thousand blows from the stick.” The Chinese received the blows from the stick, concluded Barnavaux, and that taught him that in Indochina, and even in China, a Chinese must not be treated like a white man. It is wisdom and policy that dictate it. You others, you know nothing about it. You know nothing. Chapter 15. PETER CAESAR. Louise gave birth to a boy on February 12th, at the Baudelocque pavilion. Barnavaux was notified the next day and he notified me. Only we had to wait until the day when visits were authorized to go and see her with him. I didn’t understand why at first: since he was the father, wasn’t he?… At ten o’clock in the morning, I waited for him at the Port-Royal station, on the Avenue de l’Observatoire. The Baudelocque pavilion is almost opposite , it wasn’t far to go, it seemed good! And I saw him arrive, freshly shaven, his mustache tipped with an iron, rolled under, polished as if for a review, and looking rather serious, although cheerful. It made an impression on him, having a son, and he didn’t hide it. At the door of the pavilion, Barnavaux asked the concierge: “Madame Collot, please?” I looked at him, a little surprised, but the concierge understood at once. He answered without hesitation: “To the right, Room C, Doctor Motte’s department.” We found it without difficulty. These light buildings, low against the sky, were fresh and almost pretty. And Louise was there, lying in a candid bed, her face pale but well rested, her brown hair hidden under a white cap, and everything she needed above her head, on a glass console. Only the number was a little annoying. It must be annoying, for a patient, to be nothing more than a number: We’re French, we have a name, at the town hall and on his street. But Barnavaux was reasonable. Seeing the eighteen bunks that filled the room, and thinking of the others, in the other buildings, he said to himself that something like an accounting system was needed to find one’s way around. And then the barracks and the hospitals had accustomed him to that. In a small, light cradle, near the bolster, on the right, the newborn slept soundly. He had funny little fingernails, very fine, and so clean! Barnavaux looked at his own, which were black and all broken, naturally. This little living thing, which would not have been there without him, embarrassed him. It’s very different to have thought of something and to see it; and besides, one never imagines what it’s like in reality. But he kissed him all the same, and he kissed Louise on the forehead. “Did it go well?” he asked. “Me,” said Louise proudly, “I’m like Mama. Mama, all it took was time to fetch a bucket of water from the fountain, and that was it! ” In her heart, there was the naive contentment, not only of continuing the race, but of perpetuating its qualities. She added with a wise air: “That’s a stroke of luck, that’s a stroke of luck… There’s one here who cried fifty hours. A butcher’s shop, it was, a real butcher’s shop!” Yet she gave details about herself too, because all women like to talk about that, like soldiers about their campaigns; and then it was a kind of satisfaction that Barnavaux understood well. He had brought two oranges, which he fiddled with in their tissue paper, and I don’t know what mysterious thing, hidden in a small watered-down cardboard box , with the name of a watchmaker from Palaiseau on the lid. “Here it is,” he said timidly. “You always told me you wanted one for him. So…” She opened the box, with that delighted haste that all women show when looking at jewelry: there was, at the end of a coral necklace, a little gold heart, engraved with a cross. “Is it really gold?” she asked. “Is it real gold?” “Yes,” said Barnavaux proudly, “do you want me to give it to him?” She accepted, her eyes shining. Barnavaux lifted the little wrinkled head. Louise advised: “Don’t hurt him!” No, he wasn’t hurting him. He had respect, precautions because that red neck, and that chicken neck, they weren’t solid, of course—and they were his! He let that beautiful gold heart shine above the cradle blanket, for magnificence’s sake. It was Louise who had always wanted this ornament for her little one, and Barnavaux was not surprised: he had seen so many fetishes! I was thinking of the golden bull of the Roman children. Suddenly, in one of the eighteen cradles, one of the newborns began to wail: an ugly high-pitched meow, like a cat’s. Then it was another, and another, finally all those in the room, and Louise’s little one himself. It hurt the ears to hear them, when you weren’t used to it. “It’s always like that,” Louise explained, with a learned air. “When one of these midges wakes up, all the others do the same thing. ” And she offered the breast to the child, whom a nurse had just placed in her arms, and who fell silent: in the sheath of his swaddling clothes, he looked like a bottle being filled. –He’s not expensive to feed at the moment, said Louise… He’ll be more expensive later, when we give him the bottle… And that makes me happy. It’s strange, how happy it makes me. Just imagine, there are loads of them here, especially when they don’t know the father, they don’t want to know anything, to keep the little one. They cry: Get rid of him ! Give him to the Assistance! We don’t say anything to them, but when his breasts start to hurt, we pass the kid on to them, and if they let him have a single pacifier, they don’t want to part with him: it’s over. I understand that!… … Eight days after his birth she returned to her little lodgings in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques to rest there for another week, although she had no need of it, she affirmed. And when I say rest, that is the word she used. But, to leave Baudelocque, she even refused the cab I offered her, giving as reasons, firstly, that it was too close to her house, and secondly, that there was no luggage. This argument left me disconcerted. But the fact is that, in her world, the principle is that carriages can only be used to transport, quickly, objects that are too heavy or too cumbersome, which the omnibus drivers refuse to accept. And as soon as she was at home she discovered so many things to do, and the child gave her so much worry, that I hardly ever saw her sitting down. Then she went back to purses because it is a job that can be done at home. And I understood at that moment why she had put in the extra effort during her pregnancy. She was still free to come and go, so this was the moment when she could put things aside. Afterwards, she knew very well that she would have to become the slave of the little one: it takes up time, and it takes away resources. These are things that are planned, we are used to it, we take precautions quite naturally, without being surprised, nor surprising anyone: everyone knows that it must be done like that… And despite the work, despite the nights when she got up ten times, Louise had taken on a beauty I had never known in her: so full, ingenuous, touching! I remembered Barnavaux’s words: A woman who has had another child, she is new! It was very easy for painters to give a virginal air to their Madonnas, they must never have lacked models. Often, during the day, when it was necessary, and even when it was not necessary, she would put the child completely naked. He moved his short legs, happy with their freedom, and one could see on his gums that kind of liberation of the muscles which is the smile of newborns. Then Louise looked at everything, everything, everything! And I heard her once murmur: “And to think that it was me who did all that!” For she was astonished, and quite proud, like many young mothers, to have brought into the world a being who was not exactly like her, a man, a male: it seemed admirable and mysterious to her. To Barnavaux, he at first showed something mystified in his physiognomy. It was his, that, or rather it was from him. He did not have Louise’s good reasons for having made a habit of it. Louise’s conviction was physical: this child was hers like her own arms, and her whole body, and her thoughts. Barnavaux’s was intellectual: he noted, but with an unconscious stupor. Then he got used to it, and was very happy. I gave him the credit that he was a good father. Finally, they spoke to me about baptism. I thought so, that there would be a baptism! Of all the rites of Christianity, it is the only one that the Parisian people, and especially the women, feel it is impossible to deprive themselves of. One can unite without a priest, one consents, although with more difficulty, to die without prayers and without ceremonies; but if the holy water had not flowed over that little forehead, Louise would not have been reassured, she would have feared the most dire fate for her child; and already, that little heart of gold that Barnavaux had placed around that frail neck, and which was barely visible under the tender flesh of the shoulders, she had gone, one morning, to have blessed at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. So we would baptize Pierre-César, and I would be his godfather. “That’s good,” I said, “Pierre-César… but Pierre-César what? Barnavaux?” Louise blushed, and Barnavaux turned his back on me to avoid my gaze. “Pierre-César what?” I repeated. “As it was declared at the town hall,” said Barnavaux, with embarrassment: “Collot, Pierre-César Collot.” And it was Louise again who was the most frank and the most courageous this time. “You understand,” she said, “I get twenty sous a day as single mother. Then it wouldn’t be right for him to admit it. “No,” Barnavaux pronounced, “it wouldn’t be right!” Chapter 16. THE BAR. At one of the corners of the Rue de Sèvres, near the Institute for Young Blind People, there is the Café des Vosges, which is all white, old-fashioned, friendly, and hospitable. It was there that I met Barnavaux, sitting at one of the tables on the terrace, in the company of a fat, blond man, dressed in white: colonial costume in all its purity. He was missing only a helmet. This didn’t surprise me: the higher-ranking colonials frequent a brasserie on the boulevard. The others, since the administration of the colonies was moved to Rue Oudinot, quite commonly patronize the Café des Vosges, where they find employees of the ministry: men they envy and respect, believing them to be endowed with great power. So I thought I had in my presence a minor colonial official, a customs employee or storekeeper, who, in this heat, was wearing out his old dolmans: of which I approved. But Barnavaux saved me from my error. “Him?” he said. “He’s a cook in a restaurant in the neighborhood! And the fact is that nothing looks more like a colonial, in terms of costume, than a cook-pastry chef in the uniform of his profession.” I apologized. But the blond, white man replied: “No offense. It’s still my old effects from the Coast that I’m wearing for the present.” Would I have recognized Barnavaux if I hadn’t been there? But, all the same, I’ve never been anything but a cook: in the regiment first, and then on board the Chargeurs-Réunis, and then with Monsieur Laresche, the consul of Rio-Black person. Over by Saint-François-Xavier, where the sun was setting, the summer sky, implacably pure, was tinged with green and salmon. A Saharan sky, in truth, harsh, dusty, sublime! But a slightly fresher breeze rose from the northeast, and the evening newsboys began to announce their gazettes. I took one from them, out of habit. It announced more difficulties with Germany over Morocco. “We’re going to be in trouble!” said Barnavaux. “We’re always in trouble, with the Prussians. Barnavaux has the fault of wanting to talk about everything. When he broaches diplomatic questions, I do everything I can not to hear him: his opinions are excessive and his documentation insufficient. But the big blond man was important. “It’s nonsense,” he said, “everything we do is nonsense! People in a hurry. You should never be in a hurry. That’s it.” That’s what diplomacy is all about: taking your time. Barnavaux began to outline a vast plan for European war. He was unbearable. The fat blond man interrupted him again. “You have to have served in diplomacy to talk,” he said. “I served: with the consul. So, I know. It’s already happened like that, at Rio-Black Person. It’s the same thing. The affair he mentioned was old. It had left only a vague memory in my mind. I questioned him. “Rio-Black Person,” said the cook, “is a small port, in a Portuguese enclave, on the Grain Coast, and all around, there are our possessions. But they put a consul there. I’ll tell you why later .” He kept repeating at the end of the day: “That’s what it’s like to have been a sailor and an explorer.” They always give me bad seats at the Quai d’Orsay: a guy who ‘s done something, he’s never a careerist! What do they want me to do here! Reports on trade? I can’t kill myself repeating every month that the Portuguese only sell postage stamps. It seems that the Portuguese themselves were of the opinion that it wasn’t enough and that they had entered into negotiations with us to exchange their colony for something else, or to sell it. Only, it was in Paris that it was being dealt with. They only put him there, Mr. Laresche, to show the great interest that France has to the Rio-Black person. But they didn’t tell him anything at all, they didn’t keep him informed of anything, and he had nothing to do, absolutely nothing. From time to time, at sunset, he would go to the banks of the rio to kill a gueule-tapée. The gueule-tapée is a large lizard, which is very good to eat. I would cook it for him tartare style, but Saraï, his mousso, a little Malinké, refused her portion, on the pretext that she was descended from that beast, and that her principles forbade her from devouring her grandfather without necessity. In the end, it disgusted him to bring back game, Mr. Consul, to see that the mousso didn’t want it, and he gave me his rifle, telling me to put a greasy rag around the batteries, the caps on the barrels, to take it apart and put it back in its case. Afterwards, he began a novel to say that the mousso was a little savage, that he didn’t understand her, that no one would ever understand her, and that she was cheating on him with blacks. But he gave it up after two weeks, on the pretext that it was too hot, that this thing had already been done by other naval officers, and that he, consequently, had no right, since he was no longer a naval officer. That’s probably how, all the same, he began to think again about his old job. Just when I thought he was going to go mad with boredom, there he was, taking a new whim and amusing himself by cruising at sea in a bad native boat, with eight Kroumen for paddlers. He called it doing the hydrography of the bar, and the fact is that he took soundings all day, took notes, and drew up piles of plans in his office when he got home. Sometimes it made him take a bath, naturally. Do you know what a bar is on the West Coast? Barnavaux and I nodded in agreement. The cook continued: “I don’t know why it exists. They say it comes from the meeting of the river waters in the sea with the waves from the open sea. But there are bars even at points where there are no rivers. Only the Kroumen know how to cross the bar. They touch their charms, aim for the moment when those big waves aren’t breaking, get caught on their backs… Oh! Oh! Oh! There’s one. Oh! Oh! Just a second, and like that for as long as it lasts. If you miss, the boat can be broken on the bottom like a nut. The men’s heads too, although they are clever, those Kroumen.” But the annoying thing is the boat: there are always Negroes! And yet, there are days , weeks, seasons, when even the Kroumen don’t want to know anything. The consul declared that he wanted to find out the law of the bars, questioned the Kroumen, talked with Father Wilson, the head of the Verbeck factory, who had been a pilot, and began to do calculations in a notebook. But then one day someone brought him a coded dispatch. He deciphered it himself because he didn’t have a chancellor, and was completely astonished. It was because of this exchange with the Portuguese, which had been going on for years, and which could remain going on for all eternity. It seems that the Germans, all of a sudden, had decided that they didn’t want it. Or else, they needed something else too: Champagne, Burgundy, the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, and tram permits. And to mark their resolution, they sent the aviso Fafner. If you had seen it, Mr. Consul! Of course, he hadn’t felt joy like that since his first communion. A warship, a warship was coming! As a sailor, he didn’t care at first that it was German. Right away, he went to get his… what do you call it, that thing where sailors find the names of all the warships in the whole world, with their description, their portrait, and everything? “The Naval Annual, by Brassey,” I suggested. “That’s it.” And when he had finished reading, at first he was disgusted. “But it’s a tub,” he said. “A saucepan, a dirty little saucepan!” And then his face changed. “I’ve never seen Napoleon. He’s not my age. But no one will ever get it out of my head that Napoleon must have made that face when he saw victory.” He pulled the mousso Saraï by the little ducktail she had on the back of her head—that’s how Malinké women do their hair—and said to her: “There’s promotion in class. There’s consul, there’s first-class consul, and consul general. There’s plenipotentiary!” Saraï didn’t understand a thing, of course, but she replied: “That’s good! I didn’t understand either, but the boss was happy, and that made me happy, because he was cool and not proud. He immediately wrote a long, encrypted dispatch and began to wait impatiently for the Fafner. It didn’t take long. Three days later, he was in front of Rio-Black Person, the German aviso. Cannon shots to salute, the Portuguese’s response with a kind of bombard, the visit of the Portuguese governor with his postage stamps, because one should never miss an opportunity, the visit of Commander Herr von I-don’t-know-what to the governor: finally, volume, what! But he was a casserole, this Fafner, the consul had said it well: a casserole I wouldn’t have wanted for peas. However, I don’t know what the French government replied to the consul. He looked desperate. He shouted: “They’re idiots in Paris, completely idiots! You have no idea! After what I told them… Go away, they’re thinking I should go away! In January, I’ll go away, if I’m mistaken. And let them discharge me, then, let them dismiss me!” Damn calves! The Germans had received orders not to go ashore. They came down all the same, but incognito, in small groups, to make contact with the female population of Rio-Black Person, as is proper. They also got splendidly drunk, also as is proper. Father Wilson, the former English pilot who came quite often in the evening to report, because of the entente cordiale, would only say in summary: “Uneventful, sir!” After these visits from Father Wilson, the consul would start doing calculations again with small letters instead of numbers, and I would hear him repeat aloud: “What idiots, what dark idiots! Let them wait, let them drag it out until the end of the year. I’m sure…” He sometimes left drafts of dispatches lying around. This is how I was able to read, one morning: …
Tidal waves, Mr. Minister, I make it my duty to remind you, are large waves that come, for several days in a row, to break on the shore in a permanent and continuous manner. This is a very frequent phenomenon along the West Coast of Africa as well as on the entire Atlantic part of Morocco. However, they occur mainly from November to May, and sometimes they last without interruption until January. During tidal waves, the breaker bar is pushed more or less far out to sea, without one being able to know exactly where: and then, if one is anchored close to land, the tide scours the sandy bottoms, loosens the anchor, and the ships that are dragging have a good chance of running aground. If the anchors resist, they tire a lot and their hulls must be excellent. The only recourse is to flee to the open sea… Another phenomenon is that the tidal wave is only announced by a very great refraction of the air, which goes unnoticed if one does not know the cause, and a great premonitory calm… That is what the diplomatic correspondence of the consul was. I know nothing about it, but it surprised me. The month of October was fine, which seemed to bother him. No doubt, he found that the heat lasted too long. But, in November, the weather changed, and the wind coming from the sea freshened considerably. Then, the face of the consul The consul turned pink like a young girl’s. One morning, he went to find the Kroumen: “There are some to cross the bar today,” he said. But the Kroumen would not have any idea how to cross the bar. The consul went home rubbing his hands and all day he remained on the veranda watching the sea. The water was laden with sand as far as the eye could see, and the Fafner dipped its nose in the water every minute, like a duck trying to catch a bloodworm. “Provided he remains faithful to his duty, for God’s sake!” said the consul. “Provided he doesn’t run away. This is where, you filthy boat, this is where the fatherland sent you, not out on the high seas!” That evening, after his dinner, he would not sleep. He went out and brought back old Wilson, who smoked a pipe. He took a book and began to declaim: “Oh! How many sailors, how many captains… Wilson, who only knew a few words of French, listened without saying anything. He still smoked pipes, but he also drank whiskey. I had gone to bed. Around two o’clock in the morning, I heard a cannon shot, then another, and another. I dressed at a gallop. Monsieur le consul was saying: “That’s it. I knew it! The Fafner couldn’t hold, as soon as the tidal wave hit the bar! The Fafner is in distress. She’s going to sink! ” “Sh’is leeky,” said Wilson. “Yes, my old Wilson, leeky. Ah! the bar of the Rio-Black person, the right bar! I was sure, come on, I was sure!” He broke off and shouted: “That’s not all: we must go!” Wilson was of the same opinion. The ship’s lights could be seen, and from time to time the cannon thundered to call for help. The Kroumen showed no desire to launch their boat. “Twenty gourdes per man,” said the consul. “A hundred francs! A pile of camels!” They let themselves be persuaded. Wilson pushed them by the shoulders with his fists. And they left, all eight of them, with the consul and the pilot. Enough to save one’s life on a night like this. How did they not drown? It’s a miracle! An hour and a half later they were back, though! They had slung a rope onto the aviso, established a back-and-forth, and all the men of the Fafner were saved, including Herr von I-don’t-know-what. The consul was soaked to the skin. But he said very politely to the commander of the Fafner: “My house is open to you, sir.” And the other one, at that moment, was very nice. He replied in excellent French: “I must refuse you nothing, sir!” They had another good whisky, with hot water and sugar, and I made the German commander’s bed. But, after seeing for himself that nothing was missing, the consul went back down to his study and sent a final dispatch: … As I had intimated to Your Excellency, it was impossible for a sloop of the age and tonnage of the Fafner to resist the tidal waves that make the Rio bar dangerous. I am happy to inform you that, however, the crew is safe… “Well,” I asked, “is that all?” “Naturally, that’s all,” replied the cook. Events had just demonstrated that, as a port, Rio-Black Person was no match for Marseille, and the boat was at the bottom of the water. No one spoke of anything more. “Tell me,” I said, “is there a bar at Agadir? ” “A dirty bar.” I passed by there, on a cargo ship that was plying the ports along the coast…
Chapter 17. WATERLOO’S REVENGE. It is certain that this Englishman, who was dressed like a gentleman, was causing a scandal on the boulevard: he was obviously drunk. Drunk with majesty and with fantasy at the same time. First of all, he had taken a cab, not that he felt any difficulty in standing on his legs: he walked very straight, on the contrary, he raised up to six feet from the ground the pride of a magnificent stiffness. But it was his idea, I suppose, that a carriage would transport him more quickly to another place where he would find other champagne. He had reckoned without the magnificent suggestions of his brain. This is a justice that has been done to the British race by many sociologists: it loves action. Now drunkenness develops the natural qualities of men, it brings them to paroxysm. This Englishman must have been of a generous and compassionate nature, and, moreover, he was hot. He began by wanting to climb onto the seat to refresh himself. Then he thought that the coachman, on the contrary, must be tired of always doing the same thing, and he politely invited him to take his place on the cushions of the carriage, while he held the reins. It was in order to provide him with a change, and the coachman, handsomely paid, made it his duty to accede to his wishes. Nothing is more marvelous than the sensitivity of certain steeds, long accustomed to the bit. One could truly believe in a sort of telepathy! As soon as this Englishman had seized the reins, it was the horse that began to stagger. It traced, on the wooden pavement, the most singular sinuosities, it had strange caprices of direction. The Englishman did not understand the cause, but his whole heart was bathed in tenderness; he deduced only from the phenomena before his eyes that this poor horse was tired. Even more tired, evidently, than the coachman himself, and he had thought of the man before thinking of the beast! He wanted to repair this injustice. It was at that moment that Barnavaux and I saw him. The Englishman, having unharnessed the horse with a speed that proved real knowledge of hippology, was trying to get it into the carriage. The horse did not want to. He probably thought that it was not big enough. But I am convinced that he also had a sense of propriety and that he intended to remain decently in his place. Truly, he looked shocked. The coachman too. He was fed up with his client. I suppose he expressed this opinion in a somewhat lively manner , because the Englishman demonstrated to him, in an incontestable manner, his superiority in the art of boxing. The result was, in the public, an awakening of national sensibilities. The Englishman, crushed by numbers, fought for a few moments with indomitable energy; he was only saved, in this unequal struggle, by the arrival of the police. But what surprised me, in this whole affair, was Barnavaux’s indifference. An indifference that was not in his habits. Barnavaux has the instinct for justice, at least in matters of combat; His feelings of indulgence towards people who fail in the virtue of sobriety are justified by personal memories and by the principle that one should not reproach others for sins from which one is not exempt; finally, he loves the natural manifestations of genius. And yet, he viewed with disdain the misfortune of this Englishman whose heroism and delirium were going to lead him to the station. I reproached him bitterly. He seemed to me unworthy of himself. “It’s because he’s an Englishman!” Barnavaux replied dryly. “I don’t like them. ” “Barnavaux,” I told him, “they are friends, almost allies! Don’t play personal politics. ” “I don’t play personal politics,” Barnavaux replied. ” Only the English disgust me because the things they do themselves they don’t want others to do.” They only understand each other, they only find excuses for each other. But other peoples, they always have to behave well; it’s not fair! Once upon a time, there was poor Father Barbier, the engineer guard… I searched my memory. “Barbier… The one who was in Libreville? ” “He was in Libreville,” said Barnavaux, “but then they put him in Obock. And that’s where the misfortune happened to him. But all the same, you remember him! Eh, what a good man! I can still see him with his long beard, the piece of chalk he always had in his pocket for iron his helmet and his canvas shoes, as soon as he saw a stain, a scratch, nothing at all, and a little skin to rub his brass buttons. For he was a soldier, a real soldier, although only a sapper; and at the same time a civil servant! Father Barbier’s handwriting ! It was molded, and, when he was about to begin a capital letter, he made feints with his pen, feints like a fencing provost who is going to give you a sixte blow… So it was he who was chosen to guard Obock. “But there is no one left, in Obock!” I remarked. “It’s been twenty years since they deigned to realize, at the ministry, that Obock was a mistake, a vast administrative and geographical error, and that Djibouti should be preferred to it. ” “That’s precisely why they put Father Barbier there,” Barnavaux continued . You know that Obock had been set up on a grand scale. There was a governor’s palace, a hospital, a sort of barracks for the administrative services, a prison, everything needed for a colony to be happy, and four palm trees, which had to be watered all the time, because the vegetation in this country isn’t natural. When we moved to Djibouti, we took everything we could: the hospital beds, the windows and doors of the governor’s palace and the houses, and even a mooring cannon. Only, principles are sacred. It is a principle that, if the French flag has flown once over a point on the globe, it must continue to fly there. Father Barbier was charged with guarding the flag. He had absolutely nothing else to do, guard the flag; that and water the palm trees, which were always thirsty. And he was all alone, you understand, absolutely all alone! Not another white man with him, nothing but Somali militiamen, roundworms, who have the faces of old men from birth. It must be the sun that dries them out, they have the right: it’s the hottest country in the world. But they ended up maneuvering like real troops; Father Barbier made them obey to the letter and , from time to time, he took them across the sands on an expedition against a supposed enemy, giving them magnificent speeches on the strategy of Napoleon I and the duty to sacrifice one’s life to destroy the enemies of France. It surprises you; it’s because he had gone mad. Because of the sun, probably, but above all from living alone, with no one to whom he could speak a reasonable language. His idea was that he was Governor General of the Desert, and that he was accountable to no one, except, like all Governors General, the Minister and the Colonial Inspectors. That’s even why the colonial inspectors , when they came, couldn’t see that he was feeling down. He was very polite to them, he gave them dinner, and even took an extra bottle of wine from the store. But when they had left, if they hadn’t drunk the whole bottle, he would return it to the store with this inscription, in his beautiful handwriting: Bottle left in this condition by the inspector. Because in his opinion, it’s through writing that you make good finances. He also kept the inspector talking about the greatness of France and his plans for the administration of the Deserts, but that made him likeable and, compared to a lot of others, it was innocent. And it went on like that… It went on until the day when, instead of an inspector, it was an Englishman, a very rich Englishman, who arrived on his yacht. He was going to India, I think, and crossing the Red Sea. The whim came to him to stop at Obock. Father Barbier was deferential to the inspectors. I told you . But with an Englishman who wasn’t even a civil servant, he was only the governor of the Desert; affable and… and… how do you say when you seem superior? “Condescending,” I suggested. “Condescending.” He welcomed the Englishman, who had notified him of his visit, standing on the small wharf, whose wood was a little rotten, but it didn’t show because the crossbowmen were all covered in oysters. And Barbier had put on his cloth uniform, in the shade at fifty degrees, while his ascaris presented arms. The Englishman held out his hand, but Barbier kept his in the regulation position, then gave a warlike salute and shouted: “Put down… arms!” The ascaris put down their arms, and the Englishman looked flattered. It’s true that the reception he was receiving had something majestic about it. However, when he asked to visit the surrounding area, Father Barbier told him that it couldn’t be, for political reasons. The Englishman looked astonished, but he didn’t get angry because Father Barbier, while giving the military salute, said to him: “My Lord, France makes it its duty to invite you to dinner!” The dinner was a fine dinner. It was Father Barbier who had written the menu, and each dish was brought by his boy, accompanied by four ascaris, weapons in hand, bayonets fixed. When the boy set down the dish, the ascaris presented arms; and there was also an ascari bugler who sounded in the fields when Father Barbier clinked glasses with the Englishman, saying: “My Lord, to your lady!” The Englishman had ordered a case of his own champagne, but Father Barbier refused it, explaining that he should accept nothing, for fear of being accused of corruption, and that they would drink unlimited French champagne , on condition that the Englishman would be willing to justify the consumption of the bottles provided to him by signing in the special register for passing guests, unassimilated foreigners, shipwrecked. The Englishman signed and drank his fill, believing that he had only been asked for his autograph. When he got up to leave, it was midnight. And it was just at that moment that Father Barbier shouted: “Do you think it’s going to happen like that? My lord, it won’t happen like that! ” The Englishman thought there was something to pay and asked how much it was. “Nothing!” said Father Barbier. “Only it’s a matter of avenging Waterloo! ” The Englishman no longer understood at all. But Father Barbier, turning to the boy, the four militiamen, and the bugler, said to them: “Guards! Take this man to the violin!” And the Englishman was taken to the violin, concluded Barnavaux. If it had been he who had done it, he would have found it very funny. Well, he declared that the British power had been outraged in his person. He made a complaint to his consul, he made a name for himself in the newspapers, and Father Barbier was dismissed; because once he returned to France, he thought, talked, answered like everyone else, he was cured, and when he swore that he no longer remembered anything, no one understood that he had been mad, no one believed him! That is why I have no pity for the English when they are drunk. They do not repay us . They are a people who have no charity. Chapter 18. DADDY-THE-LITTLE-BOY. Barnavaux, for a long time, has professed an opinion before me: he does not believe that man is descended from the ape. But, until now, when I asked him on what basis he rejected a hypothesis so dear to the materialists, he only answered me: “On what? On the fact that it is not true, that is all!” He seemed to be sure of it. And nothing is more unbearable than people who seem to be sure! So I said to him: “Barnavaux, this is just an assertion on your part. And what is your assertion worth?” But he persisted: “Man is not descended from the ape, I repeat! ” “Why, Barnavaux, why? ” “Because no one knows anything about it, first of all. And then… and then because it may be from another beast!” There was no way of making him say more. By dint of questioning him, I thought I discovered that his reticence came from the fact that, on the subject, he himself knew nothing. He had retained the conclusions of another, while retaining a doubt about these conclusions; knowing only that there was something, something enigmatic, mysterious, even difficult to believe, but so new, so characteristic and striking that he could in any case no longer believe anything different. But what was it, what was it? When I insisted, he changed the subject. And then, suddenly, one day, it was he who came to find me. “You know,” he said to me, “the man who knows about the matter that interests you is in Paris. Do you want to see him? ” That was out of the question. I simply asked: “Where should he be received? At my house? At the café—and then in which café? Or at the wine merchant’s? For, for tact and a sense of propriety, there is no chief of protocol who, in his small sphere, can equal Barnavaux. He knows where the people he introduces me to will not be embarrassed with me, and where I will not be embarrassed with them. To my great surprise, he answered me this time: “Frenchy has money at the moment, and he’s well dressed. He even told me he would come and get you in a car: a car he took by the month. And he wanted to take you to dinner in a chic place, in Montmartre, for example. He doesn’t leave Montmartre. But I explained to him that it wasn’t possible, because of my uniform. So he will drive us to the country, somewhere, to eat fried food. ” “Barnavaux,” I said, “you have some very rich friends now! ” “Me?” he protested, “no! I didn’t tell you that Frenchy was rich. I told you that he had money at the moment. It’s not the same thing. I’ve known Barnavaux for so long that I thought I could afford the slightly vain satisfaction of guessing the profession of the person he was going to introduce to me; a man who wasn’t rich, but who had money; he was a comrade of the legion, without a doubt, German, English, Russian or Hungarian, of noble stock and from a powerful family, come to enlist with us, at the first or second foreigner, for reasons that one will never know. “That’s it, eh?” I asked, proud of my insight. “No!” said Barnavaux, shrugging his shoulders. “But then, what does your friend do? You should know ! ” “Frenchy?” replied Barnavaux: “he’s a gold prospector.” That’s how I became acquainted with Frenchy; and during the few weeks that he kept a few louis of the seventy-five thousand francs he had brought back from the placer mines of Madagascar, he was quite intimately involved in my life. All the apparent luxury of his person was constituted by his automobile—a 30-40 HP, supple and powerful, of the kind that one rents to American millionaires; and from this magnificent carriage, one could see a small, thin man, yellow with leather, with eyes enlarged by fever and absinthe, dressed like workmen when they have their best clothes: all in black, with a very open waistcoat over his white shirt and a tie, also black, which on his low collar drew a butterfly with too thin wings. He felt the pain of having lived alone for too long, waving by the riverbanks the tin bowl in which the gold flakes fall and tremble. I mean that he was no longer ashamed, unlike most civilized men, to remain silent. For hours and hours he remained mute, fully satisfied to drink and eat, or even simply not to be standing, not to walk, not to work. The women did not say much to him. Not out of virtue. I have lost the habit a little, he explained timidly. But Barnavaux respected him, admiring that a man who had no more education than he had been able to manage without a leader, without external discipline, able to count only on himself in barbaric countries. He was not a man who could be easily questioned. It was necessary to wait for him to answer an internal question. One day, however, he spoke to himself, without being invited. “Yes,” he said, “it was when I was prospecting in Madagascar, in the great eastern forest, at the point where it falls towards the Betsimisarake country. You are surprised that I am not a talker? How can you!… For months and months, I went alone, through these great woods that never end. When I followed the course of a river, the greenery became low, bushy, overwhelming. To take a step, you had to give ten blows of the machete, cut the stems from which the sap comes out like water from a faucet. You advance as if in a green tunnel, and it is hot, humid and hot like in a tunnel. It smells of mud, rot, crushed plants and, as you cut your way through this jumble, you hear all around extraordinary noises, which are frightening without knowing why: like pieces of satin being quickly unfolded. At last, I understood. They were snakes fleeing. They weren’t bad: big black and green snakes. Those that weren’t affected didn’t bother. They stayed coiled around the branches, their rings so tight that, if you hadn’t been warned, when you didn’t see their long heads and their shining eyes, you would have taken them for large snails. Especially since there are real snails, bigger than those you see in Europe. They climb trees, leaving a shiny trace, or else sleep on the branches, like shells fixed to a rock. One evening when I happened to throw some on my fire, the idea came to me to taste them. They weren’t bad. So I indulged in a whim and fed on them sometimes. I usually went, because it’s more convenient, to look for them under the big trees that grow on the heights. Walking is easier there; The densely packed tops prevent the grass and ferns from growing. And while I was harvesting, I heard something like crying around me. Yes, crying! But in music, on three very high notes, abominably sad, and which could be heard from everywhere… You others would have been terrified. I knew that it was nothing but the babakoutes who were taking flight. These babakoutes are not quite monkeys. They look more like big squirrels, with hands, real hands, and a flatter face, much more human than that of squirrels. Babakoute means papa-the-little-boy in Malagasy, and the Betsimisarakes claim that he is their ancestor, that they were born, a long, long time ago, from a couple of these large beasts that are so hard to see—they are always at the top of the trees—and that we hear from so far away! When I had a good harvest of snails, I put them in reserve in an empty tin can, well away from the fire, to let them disgorge. Then I went to sleep peacefully: there is not a single ferocious beast in all Madagascar, and even the men are so fearful! But then one morning I realized that there was nothing left in the can: someone had stolen from me during the night! And twice, three times, the same thing started again. I decided to stay awake to be sure, and on the fourth night, when I saw a human form leaning towards my snails, I fired a shot at it with a rifle loaded with small pellets. But I had fired from quite close, and my quarry was doubtless delicate. I saw it fall, I heard it moan, moan! So I went to see, and I found… it’s difficult to explain to you: an animal that was not a monkey and that was not a man: a very large babakut, if you like. But I had shot some in the past, babakuts, although, I repeat, these animals are very difficult to distinguish under the trees, and this one was so different! First of all, in size, which was that of a girl of fourteen or fifteen . I say a girl, because it was a female. But also in the face, which had become more refined, while remaining that of an animal. You know, the face of dogs, which is so far from ours, and yet makes you say: How much he looks like a man! That was it. And because of the eyes, perhaps: enormous eyes, and which looked straight ahead: for They weren’t placed on the side, like those of animals. And they were tender, painful, miserable! Yes, just like the eyes of a little girl! I took this beast-woman in my arms, and she let me do it; I washed her thigh, all speckled with little wounds: it was there that she had received the shot. She was covered with white fur , with longer black hairs on her belly and head. It did me good to see her fur. “After all,” I thought, “she’s only an animal!” But suddenly she took my neck with both arms, complaining softly, weakly, like a woman, you know! Only women do that when asking for shelter. And I didn’t know anymore, I didn’t know at all. There were babakoutes crying in the forest, but she didn’t pay attention to them. She was only looking at me, I tell you, at me, who had just put twelve shot into her skin! Ah! How cuddly she was! And that’s why I told Barnavaux, back in the day, that man didn’t come from the monkey, you understand, but from a similar beast. Monkeys are mean, angry, without memory, and dirty, and ugly in their gestures. You know that well! To see a monkey make love, one would become disgusted with love for one’s whole life. Whereas she, the depths of her being, was goodness. Like men, after all: men are good, if you think about it. If they weren’t good, they wouldn’t have become what they are today. If they were bad, with their intelligence, they would still be satans. We have so much interest in being satans! But we can’t , that’s the truth. And then, when you’re all alone, as I was, when you have no one near you to contradict you, to put you back in step and in measure, to make fun of you and say to you: You’re crazy! especially to force you to clarify your thoughts by speaking them, thoughts become dreams. You don’t ask yourself if it could have happened, it’s enough that it pleases. And I liked to imagine that of these babakoutes, with their feet, their hands, their mouths, there are some who have gone wrong, and who have become monkeys, others who have become, little by little, more what they felt in their inner soul, and men in the end. I liked that, I tell you! And sometimes, that one, I called her: little girl, but other times: grandmother! Her injury prevented her from moving for a few days. That’s probably why she got used to me. When she was cured, she sometimes went very far away, but she always ended up reappearing. I found her in the morning at my side before dawn. Yet, as soon as the sun shone, she would climb onto a stone and look at this round, luminous ball with strange signs. To thank her for having come back, or because she was surprised, or because she was cheerful because of the new day? I don’t know. My word of honor, she seemed to be praying, her expression was so serious! And she wasn’t happy that I wasn’t doing the same thing, as if, because of my ingratitude, something bad was going to happen to us. She didn’t just imitate the movements like monkeys, she understood. One night when I had a fever and was shivering, she huddled close to me to keep me warm. All animals do that. But as I continued to be cold, I saw her get up, get some wood , and put it on the fire. Ah! Come on, isn’t that human, isn’t that human intelligence, would any monkey have done the same? I also remember: she played with the gold nuggets I was picking up. As if she thought it was beautiful. I have forgotten how long those days lasted. I only know that after washing sand in the forest for a long time, always moving forward, I saw at the end rice paddies, cassava fields and a Betsimisarake village called Ampasimbé. I was immediately happy to see a village again. Because of the rice, the chickens, the rum and the women. But the beast-woman, at the last trees, took my hand. I
understood well that she was saying to me: Don’t go! But I went anyway , didn’t I! Then she went back into the forest, and for the first time I heard that she was crying like the other babakoutes, on three weeping notes. It made me a little sad, and then I thought no more about it. I gave piastres to the people of Ampasimbé,–these Betsimisarakes do not know gold;–I had a barrel of rum tapped, an ox was killed, and they drank, and I drank to my liking. These Betsimisarakes had hung flowers on their ears, according to their custom when they make merry: the flowers of a grapefruit tree bigger than a beautiful oak of our countries: it is an intoxicating smell, even more than the toaka. And when I’d had enough, I went to my hut. Not alone, of course! Among those people, they always give a wife to strangers. It goes without saying, and you can’t refuse. It’s as if you refused holy water at a funeral: a religious duty. Just as the stars were fading, I heard scratching at my door. I said to the Betsimisarake: “Rasoa, what is it? Iza aty vé, Rasoa? Go see.” And she opened the door, very calmly. “It’s nothing, Rafrenchy,” she said. “Someone who ran away right away .” But I heard, already very far away, the three cries of the babakoute. And very often again, on the following nights, the beast-woman scratched at the door and ran away without daring to enter. The Betsimisarakes were afraid, because it’s not a good sign when their ancestor returns. And they believed that was why one of their dogs caught rabies one day. He escaped, drooling on the stones, and I said that he had to be shot, along with all the others he might have bitten. But the rabid dog ran without anyone being able to reach him, toward the side where there was no water, toward the forest! And from that moment on I had only one idea: “She’s the one who’ll be bitten, the beast-woman. We mustn’t!” And I went to lie in wait on the path I’d come in by. That’s the way she’d surely come back. But I couldn’t stop anything. I heard her still crying, screaming, but in a different voice: the dog was on top of her! I knocked out that brute with a blow from my rifle butt, without firing. And since she was afraid of fields and houses, the beast-woman, I stayed there to care for her, in her forest. I did what I could. I lit a fire, I reddened the rod of my rifle, I put the red-hot iron on the bite. Then I felt, again, the same thin, caressing arms around my neck. The same ones… only it was the last time. I saw her die, the beast-woman! And become a beast altogether. She bared her teeth, she gnashed… Sir, I buried her like a woman, a Christian: but it was a monkey I buried, a monkey. Evil had made a monkey of her! Chapter 19. FOUR DAYS… Poor Louise’s child died towards the end of March, on a sunny day. I went to throw some of those flowers called snowballs onto his cradle; and some neighbors too, although they were not rich, brought him other flowers, all white, white lilacs, white violets, snowdrops. They covered the poor, clean sheet, they hid the miserable form of this little corpse, exhausted, emptied, reduced to nothing: one of those child corpses, which have no bones yet, which have struggled, struggled until their flesh has disappeared, and which, to defend themselves, before deciding to flee, life has gradually devoured from the inside, like a worm gnawing at a fruit. All that remains is the humped, bulging skull, over the blue holes of the closed eyes, over the drawn features which are those of an old man. Alas, it is at this moment, when they are no more, that we must seek their resemblance! Now this almost imponderable mummy is atrociously similar to Barnavaux; to Barnavaux as I saw it at Val-de-Grâce. when he was shivering with fever, when he said to me: Huh? You think I look awfully old! But Louise continues to cover this horrible thing with kisses, she only speaks of it with infinite gentleness, with a kind of precaution to ennoble it, to make it beautiful in her memory, and to suffer less herself, perhaps. And when they ask her how he died—they always ask that, and what’s the point?—she answers: He died like a little bird. Like a little bird! I remember that dreadful skeleton, the frowning look, under the wrinkled forehead, those eyes so painful that they seemed to know, and to be afraid, and all the ignominies of infantile diarrhea!… But she erases all that, Louise, she cancels it, wanting to see only what she loved so much: the most adorable part of his flesh. Barnavaux witnessed the newborn’s agony, and as he was leaving the room to return to Palaiseau, he was told: You won’t see him again! That’s why he wasn’t surprised the next day when they brought him the telegram I sent him. He knew in advance what was contained on that blue paper. His captain, who had just supervised the training of recruits on the glacis, was just returning to the fort, and he handed him the dispatch. Barnavaux was a soldier, an old soldier. When he made the gesture and saluted, he didn’t need to force himself to take up the position; it came all by itself. Besides, he didn’t feel much yet. Like all men who receive the news of a misfortune that happened in their absence, far from their eyes, he couldn’t really understand it because he hadn’t seen it. He couldn’t tell the difference between the dead baby and the dying baby. The captain caught on faster than him. He has a different upbringing, his nerves are more sensitive. “Is it your child who died?… Do you need permission? The burial… Do you know when the burial will take place?… Well , four days? The commander of the fort must sign. But leave without delay, I’ll arrange that. ” He adds, in a different voice: “You must wear that like a soldier. It’s a pitying word.” Barnavaux takes it well, and something tightens around his eyes. But it also means that the captain is finished with him, and that he can break off. He salutes militarily, and turns around to go and put on his uniform. His comrades already know; some say: My poor old man! Others: So, it’s Louise’s little one who’s dead? There are surely some who think it’s a riddance for him. But most of them have no other idea than to put on a proper air in the face of an event that doesn’t interest them. Outside, a light south wind is blowing, bringing spring out everywhere, and that’s what occupies them, that’s what they are full of, without knowing it: the need to savor the day. Barnavaux himself is quite astonished by this gaiety of things in the light and the buds. It bothers and distracts him. Louise, over there, thinks only of her dead little one; here he thinks mostly of Louise. He feels sorry for her, but he thinks what a shame it is, a beautiful day like this. It’s not that he doesn’t have a heart like everyone else. But what can you do? His body is active and healthy; he lives, and he doesn’t like pain, he remains immersed in what surrounds him. And yet something irresistible draws him to where people cry. He couldn’t help but go there. While he was driving towards Paris, Captain Merle went to find the commandant of Bienne. “I took it upon myself to let Barnavaux leave with a four-day leave to be regularized,” he said. “It’s to go and bury his child. ” “Good,” said the commandant. “You were right… ” Then, his thoughts returning: “But actually, Barnavaux… I never heard that that man was married! You can look in the company records. You can’t find anything; what is this child?” “He may not be married,” Merle replied. “But that doesn’t prevent… ” “That doesn’t prevent having a child? Of course! Only that’s enough for us not to know this child. Come on, Captain, think about it! All the men in the company can come and tell you the same story to shirk. It’s already too much that there ‘s a law that now obliges us to take exceptional measures, to grant permission, to do all sorts of things in favor of married men. It’s disrupting the service. We have to squeeze the margin from somewhere. ” “I promised him his permission,” Captain Merle remarked. “I thought… It’s my fault. ” “I signed his permission. Only, he gave a false reason for obtaining it. And so… you can tell me about it when he comes back. But Barnavaux doesn’t know anything about what’s going on at Palaiseau.” He is in Paris, he has found Louise again, and she cried much harder when she saw him again. She was waiting for him for this, she said terrible and almost vile things that her great grief suggested to her: that it was not worth it, that nothing was worth it, then: neither her courage in preparing for the life that was coming, nor her heroic labor, nor the burdens of pregnancy, nor the sweats of childbirth. She has said everything, in short, she insults fate. And Barnavaux finds that it is not fair, indeed. He has seen many die, he is not surprised that people die, and the little one was still only a little one, almost a thing, although of his blood. Only children should not die. He thinks more or less like Louise, but beyond, for everyone; and he pities her, above all, an instinctive and loving pity that brings tears to his eyes. However, at first he only finds vulgar things to say: We must face the facts, Louise: we did what we could, didn’t we, we had nothing to do with it… Then, suddenly: Poor little mother!… Poor little mother! And Louise, who has never been called that by the poor toothless mouth that has just fallen silent forever, Louise who will perhaps never be called that again, cries more. But at the same time she feels completely bathed in something very sweet… They don’t hold great ceremonies for the burial of very young children. The undertakers sent only one undertaker with a small box. Yet Louise had wanted the body blessed before taking it away: she wouldn’t have been at peace, without that, she would have been afraid for him, perhaps for herself… An indifferent priest came, murmured a few words and left very quickly; but it was an insurance against mystery, and it did him good. Then the undertaker put a white sheet over the box, which he carried away with one hand. In the other he held a wreath of white pearls given by the house, and some of the flowers. We had taken the rest, Barnavaux, Louise and I. There were two more neighbors to accompany us, two old women for whom time was of no account, and Louise’s mother. Barnavaux thanked her profusely. And an hour later, there was nothing left, only a little disturbed earth, in a corner of the common grave… Barnavaux remained two days in Paris, after the burial. And, from the morning of those two days, I had not risen before it fell on me. The idleness, the dreadful idleness of old soldiers who need to be commanded! He tried to find stains, he cleaned my hunting rifle, he polished old weapons brought back from distant journeys; and as he recognized the origin of each one, he tried to talk about it, to find himself, while talking, as he had been: a man who thinks only in images, and who plays with them to think a little further, like children. But he stopped almost immediately, disgusted. He explained, after a long silence: “It’s the same with men who have no appetite: it bores me to remember!” Then he started to turn again, like an old dog who can no longer find the rugs he knew to lie on, in an apartment that has been moves. He never finished anything, he started everything, he started at the end. Then, a good judge, in these things, he had disdain for him, he went to drink. I don’t always like it when Barnavaux goes to drink. I didn’t offer him anything, on purpose, without gaining anything by it. He took his cap, turned it between his fingers; then, opened the door, very gently, without saying goodbye: proof that he was going to return, because he is polite. Of this singularly unequal politeness of the French today, exempt from rites, or taking only an infinitely diminished account of them, which allows for bad words, obscenities, villainy, bad jokes, and is no longer made up of anything but intelligence and sensitivity: which way it will slide or rise, in the future, all that, I don’t know. He soon returned, a little clearer in his own eyes and much more unbearable to himself and to others, because the causes of his terrible boredom were beginning to appear to him. Did I need to witness these outbursts? I need a necessary amount of solitude every day; and the surplus of my time, there are so many people to whom I must give it! I am becoming almost cruel. “Barnavaux, why don’t you stay with Louise? Your leave is about to end! ” He looks at me and answers bluntly: “It tires me! I can’t! I love her as I have never loved her before , that, I swear. When I am all alone, and I think of her sorrow, of the misfortune that has happened, of everything, it hurts me so much and it is so much to myself that I need to tell her. And, when I tell her, she does not answer in the same way, she does not think the same things, when we think of the same thing; It’s as if we had muzzles on! At the moment when we are happiest or most unhappy, even if it’s with the woman we love completely and who loves us completely, even if it’s with the mother of the child we’ve just lost and whom we both miss, it’s at that moment that we are most alone, because we follow our own idea which cannot be the other’s idea. I didn’t know that. But it’s certain, and it’s impossible for it not to be like that: there’s nothing to be done. And while he was talking, I saw Louise, poor abandoned Louise. “So,” I said to him, “is it… is it completely over? ” “What?” he said, astonished, “what’s over. ” “Louise… ” “Over! No, but why? Since I only think of her!” Only, we will only be able to see each other again when we have each lost the upper hand in our ideas, the strongest. There will always be enough left, afterward, which will still be just the two of us, so that we will be more the same together than with everyone else . He left again on Thursday evening, for his barracks at the fort. Louise accompanied him to the station, and I took the train to Palaiseau. At times the earth, in the moonlit night, was all white with apple trees in blossom, or pink with cherry trees; and the scent of these flowers that bloom before the foliage, was light, impalpable and delicious. “What a country,” Barnavaux told me, “what a beautiful country! Everything is in place, remade by man, comfortable, rich, and one understands everywhere. When it is wild, one understands nothing. One can manage to live here.” And I was moved, seeing that he was thinking of staying. So he was not base in spirit, he did not think, the child gone, of escaping from Louise’s life : and so many others would have done it, in his place, it would have been so easy, he had such a good excuse: It’s my turn for the colonies, I’m leaving. Goodbye! So these two years would have left him only a new memory, jumbled up with the others, a little longer, a little sadder, despite everything a little better. It was good, he was a good man, my old Barnavaux, to go on the side of courage and honesty. There was therefore perversity in the question that came to my lips; there would have been more, if I had not known that he always decided alone, and by instinct, without anyone being able to change anything: –Barnavaux, do you remember what you said to me at Tourane: The France, a country where there are only whites; one cannot live there: one is not served! I thought he was going to answer me that things had changed in his soul because things had happened, and that he had duties, and that he retained an affection. I forgot his modesty. Sentimental motives , the only ones that ultimately drive them, the French like to be spoken to about them, but not in private: only at the theater or at the café-concert; where it is permissible to suppose that it is not you who are in question, but your neighbor. Very rarely, on the contrary, do you admit a personal allusion: you would bear it badly, you would no longer be in control of yourself, and that is not proper. He answered me: “One is not served! One is not served!… There is Louise, now!” He had discovered the housewife, the servant, the woman, the wife, the tradition of his ancestors, and that seemed to him to change everything: just, salutary, excellent, touching too, but it mustn’t be said. He developed his plans, on the practical side: since his re-enlistment, not a single punishment. That was rare! They would give him back his stripes, he would become a sergeant, and this time he would remain a sergeant, until the end. He would have, for his retirement, a nice little position, in a ministry. And even now, if I wanted to take care of it? I had friends. What if I got him accepted as an orderly, at the Ministry of Colonies? From orderly, once back in civilian life, one can go from office boy. After that, bailiff: that’s the crowning glory! At a pinch, when everything was settled, one could live in the country: Clamart! “With Louise? ” “Why yes, of course,” he said, with an astonished air. “With whom then?” Look at me: I’m twenty years older than her. I wouldn’t find that anymore. She’ll have her little pension in turn, when… And this proved to me that he considered Louise his own: she interested him even for the moment when he would be gone! So she would take him to the town hall. Very probably to the church, because it’s nicer! At Palaiseau, I left him on the road to the Fort. “You won’t forget?” he said gravely. “What?” “So that I can be put on watch at the ministry, for everything that’s necessary, for the rest: no punishments since re-enlistment, sergeant, good subject, good behavior! ” “Good God,” I said, “Barnavaux, all that changes you! But be sure…” He was happy to be back in his chalet, he was so used to it. That morning, on the glacis, as he was initiating the recruits in the handling of weapons, during a break Captain Merle called him: “You were at your child’s funeral? ” “Yes, Captain. ” “Are you married? ” “No, Captain. ” “Did you recognize that child? ” “No, Captain. ” “You’ve done something wrong, Barnavaux… You say?… Nothing, is it, nothing… It’s better… Break it off. ” Barnavaux broke it off. In the wrong! He had done something wrong! What did he mean? He searched very sincerely, without finding anything. And the whole day passed, peaceful and uneventful. The next day, after the drill and before supper, as is customary , the company formed a circle to listen to the reading of the report, which was followed by the distribution of the mail, carried by the quartermaster. Barnavaux wasn’t expecting letters, and for a long time he hadn’t listened to the report, knowing in advance what it might contain: today, Saturday, equipment review: it was mourned! Suddenly, he heard his name. His name was in the notebook. He listened: Day of March 18, 1912.–Punishments: Barnavaux, private first class, four days in prison, order of the commandant of Bienne, commanding the detachment of the 3rd Colonial Infantry at the Palaiseau posts. Eyes turned towards him. He rectified the position, Deceived the good faith of the captain commanding the 3rd marching company, having requested and obtained permission to attend the funeral of his son, even though he was an illegitimate child. No one dared look at him when he went back up to the room to get his old greatcoat and follow the corporal on duty from the fort who led him to the casemate. No one spoke to him, from those who brought him the soup, in his cell. He did not take this punishment like the others, all the others that during his already long career he had so carelessly endured, like a man who pays the price, and will do it again, if he pleases to pay again. And he made the iron platoon, he, Barnavaux, with rookies he despised, and strong- willed men he no longer wanted as companions. And he wheeled stones into the courtyard, he, the old soldier, exempt from forced labor! Everything was falling apart for him, everything! His old comrade Müller had come to bring me the news. As soon as I knew he could go out, having finished his sentence, I ran over. He came to me a little pale, his teeth clenched, his expression evil; and we walked for a long time in silence on the paved road that goes up to Verrières. “That’s it,” he said finally, “I won’t be a sergeant. There’s a fate, you see. I’ll never be anything, nothing! I’ll leave this professional dog without a penny and without a real job; it’s sold, we can deliver! You’re going to tell Louise… You’re going to tell her that it’s no good walking with me. What can I do when they don’t want me anymore, physically? So, there’s my road, and there’s his. No more joking! I gave him consolations that weren’t lies. Four days in prison, and for such a reason, they had given them to him on principle. It wouldn’t prevent anything, it would delay him by three months, not even, perhaps. And he must have known it, he knew it better than I. With his iron-shod shoe, he pushed a pebble far down the road. “That’s not it!” he shouted, “don’t you understand! I’ve had enough of France! I’ve had enough, that’s it! Ah! Let’s go back, for God’s sake! Let’s go back! At the first port of call, as sure as Verrières is here, I’ll desert! There’s no shortage of other countries where one can serve, where they ‘ll give me a brieton, tobacco, and a rifle. And countries that are better, that are serious; where yes means yes, and no means no! In France, what do words mean now? Is there anyone who knows, can you explain it to me? I’m a soldier. I have a bad head, but once I understood an order, I never ate it. Well, I don’t understand anymore. Didn’t Louise get twenty sous a day as an unmarried mother, for having a child, anyhow, with anyone? Answer, eh, answer! So, it’s not bad, to have illegitimate children, it’s allowed, it’s authorized, it’s… it’s privileged! And when he died, the illegitimate child, my child, and the government’s child, as much to say, they said to me: Ah! he was an illegitimate child, and you asked for permission to mourn him, this child of nothing, this child of nobody, this bastard. That’s fine: four days in prison, Barnavaux! What does France want, when is she right, when are n’t madmen talking, giving orders, handing out money and punishments? Do you know? Tell me, if you know! I avoided answering. What could I have told him? That it was like that in all countries, more or less; that he could flee France, desert—and I knew he was boasting, but he wouldn’t: Barnavaux is like all Frenchmen, he cannot live abroad . He needs his homeland, or races that recognize his superiority—that he could look everywhere, everywhere he would find the same thing, or almost, except among the Negroes and the Muslims: the same cruel conflict between an ancient ideal, coherent like everything ancient, and a new ideal, doubly anarchic precisely because it is new, first of all, and no one has yet distinguished between what is good and what is bad; and secondly because it is individualist. These were subtleties that all his life he had disdained: even more so in his anger. I simply asked: “But you, Barnavaux, what do you want? ” “What I want,” he shouted, “I want justice! And justice doesn’t always have to be what’s best, but it’s what’s always the same thing. You can look it up: there’s no other definition! Justice is the order. Where are the orders, now show them to me! When we’re in the colonies, we others, and we see what’s happening in France, we don’t understand anything, we say to ourselves: But what are they doing, what are they doing? They’re fighting over tails. They don’t see that elsewhere, here, there’s everything to do and everything to take! Today, it becomes clearer to me: they’re arguing about orders, because there are thirty-six of them, like in war when you have bad leaders. Oh! I see clearly, come on, I’m not as stupid as you think. The bottom line is the argument between the old and the new. They had their qualities, the old ones, they had more children, they were less drunk. But they had their faults, too: they were less intelligent, slower , softer, and, basically, less brave and more boastful: there has never been more bravery than today, in France… But I don’t care. All I ask is that we make up our minds. How do you expect us to know our place, how do you expect us to serve, how do you expect us to obey? I’m becoming like everyone else here… He stretched out his hand and swore: “I won’t obey anymore!” March 30, 1912. Thus ends the story of Louise and Barnavaux, marked by deep feelings and cruel dilemmas. Their lives, intertwined by dramatic events, leave an indelible mark on the reader’s mind. Pierre Mille reminds us here that the path of life is strewn with pitfalls, where love and pain often coexist, and where every choice can change the course of our destiny.
📖 Découvrez *Louise et Barnavaux* de Pierre Mille, une histoire poignante où l’amour et le destin se croisent dans un récit captivant. 🌹
🖤 **Résumé**
Une passion intense et un amour impossible se dessinent entre Louise et Barnavaux. Au cœur d’une époque tumultueuse, leurs vies s’entrelacent entre secrets, mystères et trahisons. L’histoire nous plonge dans une époque où les cœurs sont divisés et les passions brisées. Un voyage émotionnel qui vous tiendra en haleine jusqu’à la dernière page.
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🔍 **Détails**
– Un mélange d’amour, de drame et de suspense.
– Un récit intemporel sur la lutte entre le cœur et la raison.
– Une histoire qui explore les complexités des relations humaines.
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