The Devil in the Flesh (2 page)

So I confessed, adding proudly that the headmaster had promised me total discretion (as if to a grown-up). My father wondered if I hadn’t concocted the entire romance from start to finish. He went to see the headmaster. During the course of their conversation he mentioned, in an offhand way, what he took to be a practical joke. “What?” said the headmaster, surprised and annoyed. “He told you that? He begged me to not to tell you, saying that you would murder him.”

This lie by the headmaster excused him; it added to my feelings of manly exhilaration. It earned me the instant respect of the class and winks from the form master. The headmaster hid his ill feelings. Yet the poor man didn’t know what I knew: shocked by his behaviour, my father had decided to let me finish the academic year and then take me away from the school. It was the beginning of June. Not wishing this to have any bearing on my prizes, my laurels, my mother kept quiet about it until after prize-giving. Come the day, as a result of unfairness on the headmaster’s part, who in his confusion feared the consequences of his lie, alone out of my class I received the major prize, which brought with it the award for most outstanding pupil. This was a misjudgement—the school lost its two best pupils, because the prize-winner’s father also took his son away.

Like decoys, pupils like us attracted others.

My mother thought I was too young to go to the Lycée
Henri IV. In other words—to go by train. So for two years I stayed at home and worked on my own.

I resolved to have endless enjoyment, since, managing to do in four hours work that my former schoolmates wouldn’t have produced in two days, I was free for more than half the day. I went for walks by myself beside the Marne, which was so much ‘our’ river that when my sisters talked about the Seine they called it ‘a Marne’. I even went in my father’s boat, despite him forbidding it, but I didn’t row, although I wouldn’t admit to myself that I wasn’t scared of disobeying him, simply scared. I would lie in the boat and read. During 1913 and 1914 I got through two hundred books there. None of them were what could be described as bad books; in fact they were the best, if not for the mind then at least for their own merits. Much later on, at the age when adolescence looks down on erotic literature, I acquired a taste for its infantile delights, although at the time I wouldn’t have dreamt of reading it.

The drawback to this alternating leisure and school work was that it transformed my entire year into an imitation holiday. The amount of work I did each day amounted to very little, but although I worked for shorter periods than the others, I carried on during their holidays, and so this very little was like a piece of cork that a cat has tied to the end of its tail for its whole lifetime, when it would have probably preferred trailing a saucepan around behind it for a month.

The real holidays were approaching, but since my daily routine went on as usual, this was of little concern to me. The cat was still staring at the cheese under its glass cover.
But then War came. It smashed the glass. The masters had other things to worry about and the cat was delighted.

To be honest, everyone in France was delighted. Prize books tucked under their arms, children crowded round public notices. Bad pupils took advantage of the distress and confusion at home.

Every day after dinner we went to the railway station at J …, two kilometres from where we lived, to watch the troop trains go past. We took bell-flowers and threw them to the soldiers. Women in overalls poured red wine into cans and sprinkled litres of it over the flower-strewn platform. The memory of the scene still makes me think of a firework display. Never was there so much wasted wine, so many dead flowers. We had to hang flags from all our windows.

We soon stopped going to J …—my brothers and sisters began to resent the War, they thought it was going on too long. It deprived them of their trips to the seaside. Accustomed to getting up late, they now had to go and buy newspapers at six in the morning. What a miserable sort of amusement! But around the twentieth of August the little monsters regain their hopefulness. Instead of leaving the dinner table where the grown-ups linger, they stay to listen to my father talking about the day of departure. There probably wouldn’t be any transport. So we would have to go a long way by bicycle. My brothers tease my younger sister. The wheels of her bike are barely forty centimetres across: “We’ll leave you behind on the road”. My sister sobs. And what enthusiasm to get the machines cleaned up! Farewell sloth. They offer to repair mine. They get up
at dawn to listen to the news. But while everyone else is amazed, I discover the motive behind this patriotism—a journey by bike! All the way to the sea!—a sea that is further away, more attractive than usual. They would have burnt Paris to the ground in order to get away quicker. The thing that was terrifying the whole of Europe had become their one and only hope.

Is the selfishness of children really so different from our own? During the summer in the country we curse the rain, while the farmers are crying out for it.

IT IS RARE FOR THERE TO BE A DISASTER WITHOUT warning signs appearing beforehand. The assassination in Austria, the storm over the Caillaux trial, created a suffocating atmosphere conducive to wild behaviour. So my real memories of the War date from before war broke out.

Here is why.

My brothers and I used to make fun of one of our neighbours, a ridiculous man, a dwarf with a goatee beard and a hooded raincoat, a town councillor by the name of Maréchaud. Everyone called him Old Man Maréchaud. Although we lived next door we refused to say hello, which made him so livid that one day, unable to stand it any longer, he came up to us in the street and said: “So you don’t greet a town councillor then!” We ran off. After this rudeness, hostilities were opened. But what could a town councillor do to us? On the way to and from school my brothers used to ring his doorbell then run away, emboldened by the knowledge that his dog, which must have been the same age as me, was nothing to be afraid of.

The day before the fourteenth of July 1914, as I was going to meet my brothers, I was astonished to see people gathered outside the Maréchaud’s front gate. Despite the pruned linden trees, their villa could still be seen at the end of the garden. Since two o’clock that afternoon their
young maid, who had gone mad, had sought sanctuary up on the roof and was refusing to come down. Horrified by the scandal, the Maréchauds had closed the shutters, which added to the drama of a madwoman on the roof by making it seem as if the house were deserted. People were shouting, infuriated at her employers for not doing something to help the poor soul. She was tottering about on the tiles, although she didn’t seem drunk. I would have liked to stay, but, despatched by my mother, our own maid came to summon us back to work, without which I wouldn’t have been allowed to go to the celebrations. I left with a heavy heart, praying the maid would still be on the roof when I went to meet my father at the station.

She was still there in the same place, but the few passersby on their way back from Paris were hurrying home for dinner so as not to miss the ball. They only glanced at her for a moment as they walked by.

In any case, up till now it was still really just a dress rehearsal for the maid. As was customary, she would give her opening performance in the evening, with the festive lamps acting as footlights. There were some in the garden as well as on the main avenue, because, being local worthies, the Maréchauds hadn’t dared not have any illuminations, despite pretending to be away. The eeriness of this house of crime, with a woman with flowing hair walking about on the roof as if on the bridge of a flagship, was heightened by her voice: unearthly, guttural, with a sweetness to it that made your flesh creep.

Being ‘volunteers’, the members of the fire brigade in a small district were busy with other things apart from manning the pumps all day. After work it was the milkman, the confectioner and the locksmith who put out fires, if they
hadn’t already gone out by themselves. After the call-up our firemen also formed a sort of secret militia that did patrols, manoeuvres and night rounds. These gallant fellows eventually appeared and pushed their way through the crowd.

A woman stepped forwards. It was the wife of one of the town councillors, an opponent of Maréchaud and who for the last few minutes had been sympathizing loudly with the lunatic. She gave the fire chief some advice: “Try and get her down gently—the poor young thing is so badly off in that household, where they beat her. And if it’s fear of being dismissed, finding herself without a job, that made her do it, then tell her I’ll take her on. I’ll pay her double.”

Her triumphal act of charity made little impression on the crowd. The woman was annoying them. They were only interested in the capture. The firemen, six of them, climbed the gate, surrounded the house and began to clamber up the walls on all four sides. But no sooner had one of them got onto the roof than the crowd started calling out to warn the victim, like children at a Guignol show.

“Do be quiet!” shouted the woman, which drew cries of “There’s another one! There’s another one!” from the onlookers. Hearing their shouts, the madwoman armed herself with tiles and flung one at the helmet of the fireman who had made it to the top. The five others straight away climbed down again.

While the shooting galleries, fairground attractions and stalls on the place de la Mairie were bemoaning the lack of customers on a night when the takings should have been pouring in, the most audacious delinquents climbed the walls and thronged onto the lawn to watch the hunt.
I’ve forgotten what the madwoman was saying, with that underlying note of mournful resignation in her voice that makes someone sound as if they are right and everyone else is wrong. The louts who preferred this performance to the funfair still wanted the best of both worlds, however. Afraid the lunatic would be caught while they weren’t looking, they rushed off to have a quick ride on the merry-go-round. Others, more sensible, settled in the branches of the linden trees and were quite happy letting off Bengal lights or firecrackers.

One can imagine how fearful the Maréchauds were, shut up inside their house amongst all the noise and light.

The town councillor who was married to the lady of charity climbed onto the low wall beside the gate and gave an impromptu address on the spinelessness of the house’s owners. He got a round of applause.

Thinking the applause was directed at her, the madwoman gave a bow, a pile of roof tiles under each arm, because every time a firemen’s helmet glinted she hurled one at it. In her unwordly voice she thanked them for finally understanding her. She reminded me of a female pirate captain alone on the deck of her sinking ship.

Wearying of her, the crowd dispersed. I would have liked to stay on with my father, while my mother, to satisfy that need children have for making themselves feel sick, took the others off to the roller-coaster. And it was true, I did feel that peculiar need more keenly than my brothers. I loved it when my heart beat quickly and erratically. Yet I found this performance, which was deeply poetic, more enjoyable. “You’ve gone quite pale,” said my mother.
I made out it was the Bengal lights. I told her they made me look green.

“I’m still afraid it’ll upset him,” she told my father.

“Oh, there’s no one more impervious,” he replied. “He could watch anything, except someone skinning a rabbit.”

My father only said it so I could stay. But he knew that I was overcome by what I was seeing. I could sense that it had deeply moved him as well. I asked him to lift me onto his shoulders so that I could get a better view. The truth was, I was about to faint; my legs were giving way.

By now there were only about twenty people there. We heard trumpets. It was the torchlight procession.

All of a sudden the madwoman was lit up by hundreds of flaming torches, as if the soft glow of the footlights had given way to the glare of flashbulbs, photographing the latest star. And then with a farewell wave, either believing it was the end of the world or simply that they were coming to take her away, she threw herself off the roof, smashed through the awning with a terrible crash and landed in a heap on the stone steps below. Up till then I had been trying to withstand everything, although my ears were ringing and I was devoid of feelings. But when I heard people shouting: “She’s still alive,” I fell off my father’s shoulders, unconscious.

When I came round, he took me down by the Marne. We stayed there until late, lying on the grass and not saying anything.

When we got home, I thought I saw a white figure through the railings, the ghost of the maid! But it was Old Man Maréchaud in his nightcap, gazing at the damage, his awning, his tiles, his lawn, his flower beds, his steps covered in blood, his ruined reputation.

If I dwell on an episode like this, it is because it helps to understand, more than anything else, what a peculiar time the War was, and how I was struck less by what was picturesque than by the poetry of things.

WE HEARD ARTILLERY FIRE. THERE WAS FIGHTING near Meaux. People said that some Uhlans had been captured near Lagny, fifteen kilometres away. While my aunt talked about a friend of hers who had fled at the very start, after burying her clocks and tins of sardines in the garden, I asked my father how we were going to take all our old books with us; they were the things that would cost me the most to lose.

But in the end, just as we were about to leave, the newspapers announced that there was no need.

My sisters now went over to J … to take baskets of pears to the wounded. They had found a form of compensation, admittedly not much of one, to make up for all their plans that had fallen through. By the time they got to J … their baskets were almost empty!

I was due to go to the Lycée Henri IV, but my father thought it best to keep me in the country for another year. During that dismal winter my sole source of amusement was rushing to the newsagent to make sure I got a copy of
Le Mot
, a paper I enjoyed and which came out on Saturdays. It was a day when I never got up late.