Planus (26 page)

'Is Monsieur at home?'

'Yers,' said the gamekeeper.

'He's not out hunting, then?'

'The boss never goes hunting,' said the keeper.

'Ah! What does he do, then?'

'I dunno. He reads.'

'All day long?'

'Ail day and all night. What sort of life is that? I've given in my notice.'

The gamekeeper was obviously in a bad mood.

'There doesn't seem to be any shortage of game in the district,' I said to him, pointing to the pheasants and to the paddock full of deer, and hoping thereby to soften him up.

But the man burst out, 'That's just why I'm pissing off. I can't work for a master like that! He's never held a rifle in his life. Everybody in the neighbourhood beats game for him, and he buys everything they bring him. Take a look for yourself, it's worse than a menagerie. Even my wife is fed up to the teeth with it. We're leaving, and yet it was a good place. .. .'

'Go and tell the master I'm here,' I said to the gamekeeper, 'and open the garage door. I'm spending the night here.'

I found my friend's father comfortably installed in a deep leather armchair by the fire. The master of the house was in a quilted dressing-gown, his feet in enormous slippers, a rug over his knees, a tartan shawl round his shoulders, a scarf round his neck, a toque of hare's fur on his white hair, piles of books all round him, a book in his hand, his large spectacles on his nose; the room, on whose walls were hanging, as in all hunting-lodges, trophies, stags' antlers, boars' heads, deers' hooves, a stuffed eagle-ray, was as light as day, lit by butane gas-bulbs.

'Ah! It's you,' he said, raising his head and taking off his glasses.

'And what are you reading?'

'What, has that oaf of a gamekeeper told you already? Soon the whole countryside will be taking me for an old lunatic. So much the worse. I'm retiring. I've sent in my resignation to the Palais. Just fancy, I've discovered that I have a passion for detective novels. I read day and night. I buy everything that comes out. I've already devoured thousands of them, and I'm having them sent from England and America. I've got enough to last me for years. I feel rejuvenated. Ah! If I was twenty years old, I'd become a detective! I've missed a great career a la Conan Doyle... .'

The old man's eyes glittered with malice.

up ... 5 and evoked what could have been the glory, the destiny of France: . . The revolution of 1789 would not have taken place. . . .'

Quoting this passage from
Catherine de Medicis
to Chadenat, who did not read novels, the indomitable enemy of the English said to me : 'Your master Balzac doesn't understand anything about it. He's a novelist. But the English fleet which blockaded La Rochelle and gave the Huguenots such strong support, would have sailed up the Loire, bombarded Tours or Blois and the English would have taken the royal capital by storm two centuries before the storming of the Bastille by our own people ! ...'

Chadenat was right. Balzac was my master, my third master. Honore de Balzac and all his characters! . . . Until the day when I found that even he was at fault, complaining that Mme Hanska made him waste too much time by her indecisiveness, her dithering, and the rendezvous she arranged with him all over Europe. He notes down as follows:
Ah! That woman! . . . Yet another book I shall fail to write on account of her
... as if one were put here on earth to write books! . . . And besides, he was much too fond of bric-a-brac. That model of first-class reporting, that page of journalism where Victor Hugo describes the setting in which Balzac lay on his death-bed as a kind of national furniture repository, succeeded in detaching me from the man. No, it's not possible, this taste, this bad taste of hard-up men of letters. And his platitudes and his pettiness in wanting to kiss his society woman, as if society women did not kiss just like all the others! . ..

Have I explained what it was that detached me from my second master, the due de Saint-Simon? It was the furious and passionate intriguing with which the pair of them, he and the duchesse, defended their rank, their privileges and their fortunes at court.

Man is too small.

Living is the important thing.

'I would rather live amongst people who know nothing except how to live, than amongst these worldly people who know almost everything
except
that!' cried the exasperated Liszt one day, as he sat down at the piano to accompany the dancing in a drawing- room full of counts and countesses. And he improvised a fiendish Hungarian czardas, closing his eyes, letting his fingers run freely over the keys, striking chords, changing the rhythm, baffling and discomfiting the brilliant society of Parisian snobs. But Liszt, although he was obliged to appear in society, like all musicians, was a man of genius.

Genius.

The attribute of music.