David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (37 page)

“Why is it,” he asked in a softer, fainter, shaky voice, “why do I feel such a terrible pain on my right side, as if a crab is digging into my flesh with its claws?”

I said nothing. In any case, he didn’t really seem to see me.

“God! I’m not afraid of death!” he said suddenly. “It is a great joy to die a Christian, with a clear conscience, having served my religion and my Emperor.”

Suddenly his pompous, solemn tone changed once again, became anxious, full of a kind of zeal and goodwill. “I haven’t touched a single penny of the money entrusted to me by the state. I will leave empty-handed, just as I arrived when I came to power.”

He sighed weakly, finally seeming to recognise me. “Thank you, Monsieur Legrand. Would you be kind enough to give me something to drink?”

I handed him a glass and he drank the cold tea, panting like a dog quenching its thirst. I left him alone and went to lie down. The heat in the room and the stench of fever made me drowsy. I finally fell asleep, feeling I was being tossed from one nightmare to the next.

COURILOF RECOVERED
; at least, Langenberg allowed him to go and present his report to the Emperor, and from that day on, I no longer saw my Killer Whale. Our paths would sometimes cross in the rooms on the lower floor, next to the office. He would nod at me as he passed by, and say in his pompous, mocking voice: “Are you getting used to the climate of the Palmyra of the North, my dear Monsieur Legrand?”

And, without waiting for my reply, he would nod his wide smooth forehead several times and murmur: “Yes, yes, of course.” And with an absent-minded, kindly wave of the hand, he would keep going.

Whenever I asked him about his health, he would smile and say, “
Nil desperandum,
” slightly raising his voice, undoubtedly to arouse the admiration of all the scroungers gathered around him. “I have never had a tendency towards hypochondria, thank God! Work, now that’s the true fountain of youth!”

At that time, I became close to Froelich, with the goal of finding out details regarding the minister’s first wife. Utterly pointless but I was curious! Froelich had known her well; he had raised the Courilofs’ nephew, Hippolyte Nicolaevitch, who, at present, held an important post at the ministry under Courilof. (He was called “Little Courilof” or “Courilof the Thief” to distinguish him from his uncle.)

Froelich had been his tutor for fifteen years, right up until the death of the first Madame Courilof. In response to my questions, he hesitated slightly, then said, “You are familiar with the reputation of Her Majesty the Empress Alexandra? Mysticism bordering on madness. The first wife of His Excellency was the same. By the end of her life, she was completely mad.” He replied touching his finger to his forehead. “His Excellency’s private life has not been easy…”

“And now?” I asked.

Froelich gave a little whistle of delight; he had thin, tight lips, an anxious look in his eyes; he rubbed his hands together, glanced nervously around him. “The beautiful Margot,” he said quickly, “will ruin His Excellency’s career. The only reason he hasn’t already fallen out of favour by now is that Prince Nelrode is his friend and has protected him. And, truthfully, isn’t it scandalous that the Minister of Education, whose main function is to protect Russian youth from the path of evil, gives them instead, by this marriage, an example of loose morals?”

He fidgeted with his pince-nez for a moment. “It appears she was once very beautiful,” he observed, with regret.

A few days later, Prince Nelrode came to lunch at the Iles. I recognised the elderly man with the weary, delicate eyes I’d once met in the minister’s room when he’d been ill. In 1888, Prince Nelrode had narrowly survived a terrorist attack. His assailant, someone named Gregoire Semenof, aged seventeen, had easily been overcome by the prince’s soldiers. And the prince arranged for a rather barbaric, though efficient, execution; his men kicked Semenof in the head until he was dead.

There was another story about Nelrode. During one of the uprisings in Poland, when the town square was covered in dead bodies, he had a thin layer of dirt scattered over them and instructed his squadrons to carry out manoeuvres there, crushing and levelling the earth for six hours, until there remained nothing of these fallen men but a bit of dust.

The other guests were Langenberg, Baron Dahl, his son Anatole, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs (one of the three such ministers who had been labelled “foreign to foreign affairs,” a nickname that was an instant success). Unbelievably old and pale, hunched up like a compass and as light as a dead leaf, his head constantly shaking, smelling of violets, he took a quarter of an hour to cross the terrace, leaning on Courilof’s arm. In his hazy eyes, he had the dreamy, sad look of a very ancient horse dying of old age in his stable. His conversation, in the purest, most classical French, was so dotted with circumlocutions, euphemisms, allusions to events of a former age long forgotten by everyone, that he seemed unintelligible, not only to me but to
his colleagues as well. It was obvious, however, that they happily listened to him, as if he were speaking a classical language that was mysterious and poetic.

I looked at Dahl with curiosity: I knew from Froelich that he was the sworn enemy of Courilof and his eventual successor at the Ministry of Education. He was fat, of average height; his neck was short and thick, his head shaved in the German style. His eyelashes, eyebrows, and moustache were a faded blond that blended into his greyish pale face. He had bulging cold eyes, like certain fish, very wide nostrils that breathed in deeply, and a look on his face that was simultaneously arrogant and nervous, the kind of expression you see on certain international criminals. Froelich told me that, in his youth, Dahl had been a notorious pederast (Froelich called it “dubious morals”), but now Dahl seemed to have settled down, desiring only the pursuit of a brilliant career.

Marguerite Eduardovna sat at the place of honour. Wearing make-up and powder, with pearls around her neck and her body poured into her long, tight corset and lace bodice, she said nothing. She seemed not even to hear the men’s conversation, just stared sadly out into space.

Almost immediately, the conversation turned to the Emperor and the Imperial Family. The expressions they used to discuss them—”His Majesty deigned to grant me the immense honour of allowing me an audience with him… When I had the profound pleasure of seeing our beloved sovereign…”—were spoken with such mockery and scorn that the words took on a tone of intentional farce. Nelrode, in particular, excelled at it. He looked at the gold-framed portrait of the Emperor on the wall opposite him and a smile fluttered across his lips, a spark of intelligence flared in his delicate, weary eyes.

“You all appreciate the goodness, the magnificent soul, the angelic innocence of our dearly beloved sovereign, don’t you?” Courilof gave a little ironic sigh and fell silent. The others nodded, and the same amused twinkle lit up their eyes. What he really meant was: “You all know that Emperor Nicolas is hardly intelligent”; everyone understood what he was saying, and each of them believed himself the only one to understand. Courilof
was obviously attempting this sarcastic, nonchalant tone. But he couldn’t quite manage it; a hatred he could barely disguise made his voice quiver the moment he said the Emperor’s name. Dahl stopped eating and drinking for a moment, then looked at Courilof for a long time, his eyes half closed yet staring at him ironically, as if he were watching Courilof performing on a tightrope.

Sometimes one of the guests would secretly glance over towards the end of the table where Courilof’s daughter sat next to Dahl’s son, Baron Anatole, a large, pale young man of twenty. His mouth gaped open, his cheeks were puffy, his eyelashes white: the spitting image of the suckling pig you eat at Easter. He listened to no one and spoke in a sharp, monotonous voice that now and again shot through the noise of the conversation like a plane in a tailspin.

“The ball that Princess Barbe gave was all in all more successful,
a grander affair,
than Princess Anastasie’s ball…”

Dahl and Courilof both frowned and made a point of looking away. A long discussion about censorship followed. It was late, nearly four o’clock, and still no one thought of leaving the table. It was a beautiful, sunny day; the rose bushes in the gardens swayed in the wind; beyond the treetops, you could see St. Petersburg in the distance, like a dark cloud topped in gold.

Censorship of personal correspondence was a tradition that the elderly Minister of Foreign Affairs deemed appropriate, “having proved its worth.” But the prince thought it dangerous.

“A statesman should not allow himself to feel personal animosity,” he said, “and the practice of reading the correspondence of one’s enemies can only lead to such feelings. When I read that our dear Ivan Petrovitch refers to me as a blood-thirsty tiger, it makes no difference that I am hardened by fifty years of service to the Imperial Court of Holy Russia, for my sins, it still upsets me. I am only human … What’s the point of knowing too much? It is always better, always wiser, to close one’s eyes.”

“Excellent advice for certain husbands,” said the elderly minister.

After he said this, he laughed; his false teeth rattled several times in his empty mouth, and he looked squarely at Marguerite
Eduardovna, with the dreamy, sad expression of a melancholy old horse who chews its cud and stares blankly out in space. Courilof took the insult without saying a word, without flinching, but he frowned slightly, and his face appeared paler and harsher.

The conversation continued, turning to the appointment of a new governor general in P … and he replied to Dahl in a steady voice. It was only several moments later, when no one was looking as Nelrode told some anecdote about a civil servant accused of misappropriation of public funds and theft, that my Courilof sighed softly, cautiously, and let his head drop heavily down.

The prince lifted the glass of wine in front of him to his lips, smelled it without drinking it, as if it were a bouquet of flowers. He put it down again, shrugged his shoulders in his familiar way, and said: “Who hasn’t His Majesty Emperor Nicolas appointed as governor general!
O tempora! O mores!
It’s exactly the same with the Saint George Cross. It’s handed out like candy these days! Now when His Majesty Alexander III was Emperor.

He stopped for a moment, sighed, thought for a while, then murmured: “Sad, such a very sad day for Russia when that sovereign died!”

“Definitely,” said Courilof enthusiastically. “
Juvenile consilium, latens odium, privatum odium, haec tria omnia regna perdiderunt.
(Childish advice, envious conspiracy, and private hatred have brought down kingdoms.) Nevertheless, no one reveres and, dare I say, adores His Majesty Emperor Nicolas more than I do, but it is unfortunately true that a certain softness, a certain nobility of character, doesn’t quite fit with exercising absolute power.”

“But it is very kind to be noble and sensitive, like His Majesty,” said the prince, slightly sneering, his tone unmistakably filled with respectful scorn. “That is how he recently granted Emperor William a commercial treaty that is very advantageous to Germany but infinitely less so for Russia… His Majesty, our dearly beloved Emperor Nicolas, couldn’t refuse Emperor William anything; he was the Emperor’s guest at the time, as he did me the honour of telling me himself.”

“
Tamen, semper talis…
Still, and always, the same
,
” murmured Courilof.

“I have noticed throughout my very long life,” the elderly Minister of Foreign Affairs said slowly, “that princes are too inclined to follow the noble instincts of their magnanimous hearts. It falls to their ministers to balance such tendencies with practical realities and economic necessity.”

He smiled and suddenly seemed to me infinitely less stupid and inoffensive than I’d thought; a gleam suddenly illuminated his lifeless eyes. At that very moment, he looked at me. I was bathed in sunlight; this was the reason, without a doubt, that my face stood out in the dimness and caught his near-blind glance from amongst everyone else. He nodded towards me.

“Monsieur is getting an education,” he said in a voice that was kindly, mocking, and scornful all at once, the same tone my Courilof tried to imitate without managing it.

Marguerite Eduardovna saw her husband give her a look and stood up to leave; I was about to go with her when Courilof called me back. “Stay. The prince would like you to recommend something for his asthma.”

I sat down again and, after some time, they forgot about me. I’d stopped listening to them. I was bored and tired. They were smoking and speaking more loudly. I heard Dahl’s sudden laughter, the Killer Whale’s voice, and the prince. I remember thinking about Fanny, about the Party leaders in Geneva. I looked at the sun over the grounds and started to automatically recite the months…July, August, September… “Ceremonies and public holidays don’t really start until the autumn…” I felt a vague sense of sadness. At that very moment, I was struck by Nelrode’s voice (they were going on about the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War): “No one wants war. Not the sovereign, not the ministers. In fact, no one ever wants war or any other sort of crime, but that doesn’t stop it. Because the people in power are weak human beings, not blood-thirsty monsters, as everyone imagines them to be.
Lord,
wouldn’t that be preferable!”

He took the elderly Minister for Foreign Affairs by the arm.

“It just makes my blood boil! These children, these incompetents … Still! All that will pass very quickly! As we will… So what?” he said. He shrugged his shoulders wearily, closed his eyes and began reciting: “
So what if your life went entirely according to your wishes?

“
So what if you’d read the Book of Life straight to the end?

“Good Lord! What are we doing in this hell? We’re not greedy animals, yet we’re wasting our lives in vain pursuits, seeking favour and friendship from the sovereign.”

“You are still young,” said the elderly minister bitterly. “Wait until you have reached the very end of your days, as I have, and see the coldness and hostility of the princes replace the trust and goodwill they have bestowed upon you before!… Do you know that since last Christmas, I’ve been prevented from having private meals with the sovereigns? I feel,” he suddenly exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence, a despairing tone of the betrayed lover in his voice that made me smile, “I truly feel that you can’t recover the past! I cannot sacrifice the little time I have left to these ungrateful rulers. It’s killing me, I say it openly, it’s slowly killing me!”