Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Irène Némirovsky
Dedication
Title Page
Translator’s Introduction
Part One: 1912–1918
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two: 1920–1936
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three: 1936–1941
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Copyright
The Fires of Autumn was written in the last two years of Irène Némirovsky’s life, after she fled Paris in 1940. The prequel to her masterpiece, Suite Française, it is a panoramic exploration of French life and a witness to the greatest horrors of the twentieth century.
After four years of bloody warfare Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. No more the naïve hopes and dreams of the teenager who went to war. Attracted by the lure of money and success, Bernard embarks on a life of luxuriant delinquency supported by suspect financial dealings and easy virtue.
Yet when his lover throws him off, he turns to a wholesome childhood friend for comfort. For ten years he lives the good bourgeois life, but as another war threatens everything Bernard had clung to starts to crumble, and the future for his marriage and for France looks terribly uncertain.
First published posthumously in France in 1957, The Fires of Autumn is a coruscating, tragic evocation of the reality of war and its dirty aftermath, and the ugly colour it can turn a man’s soul.
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, All Our Worldly Goods, The Dogs and the Wolves and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, such as the posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. She was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evêque (in German occupied territory). It was here that Irène began writing Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.
Suite Française
David Golder
Le Bal (including Snow in Autumn)
Fire in the Blood
The Courilof Affair
All Our Worldly Goods
Jezebel
The Dogs and the Wolves
The Wine of Solitude
The Misunderstanding
THERE WAS A bunch of fresh violets on the table, a yellow pitcher with a spout that opened with a little clicking sound to let the water pour out, a pink glass salt cellar decorated with the inscription: ‘Souvenir of the World Fair 1900’. (The letters had faded over twelve years and were hard to make out.) There was an enormous loaf of golden bread, some wine and – the pièce de résistance, the main course – a wonderful blanquette of veal, each tender morsel hiding shyly beneath the creamy sauce, served with aromatic baby mushrooms and new potatoes. No first course, nothing to whet the appetite: food was a serious business. In the Brun household, they always started with the main course; they were not averse to roasts – when properly cooked according to simple, strict rules, these were akin to classics of the culinary art – but here, the woman of the house put all her effort and loving care into the skilled creation of dishes simmered slowly for a long time. In the Brun household, it was the elderly Madame Pain, the mother-in-law, who did the cooking.
The Bruns were Parisians of some small private means. Since the death of his wife, Adolphe Brun presided over the table and served the meal. He was still a handsome man; bald and with a large forehead, he had a small upturned nose, full cheeks and a long, red moustache that he twisted and turned in his fingers until its slender tips nearly poked his eyes. Sitting opposite him was his mother-in-law: round, petite, with a rosy complexion crowned with fine, flyaway white hair that looked like sea foam; when she smiled, you could see she still had all her teeth. With a wave of her chubby little hand, she would brush aside everyone’s compliments: ‘Exquisite . . . You’ve never made anything better, dear Mother-in-law . . . This is just delicious, Madame Pain!’ She would put on a falsely modest little face and, just as a prima donna pretends to offer her partner the flowers presented to her on stage, she would murmur:
‘Yes, the butcher did me proud today. It’s a very nice cut of veal.’
To his right sat Adolphe Brun’s guests – the three Jacquelains – and to his left, his nephew Martial and Brun’s young daughter, Thérèse. Since Thérèse had just turned fifteen a few days ago, she had put her curls up in a chignon, but her silky hair was not yet used to the style she tried to hold in place with hairpins, so it was escaping all over the place, which made Thérèse unhappy, in spite of the compliment her shy cousin Martial had whispered to her:
‘It’s very pretty, Thérèse,’ he said, blushing quite a bit. ‘Your hair I mean . . . it’s like a cloud of gold.’
‘The little angel has my hair,’ said Madame Pain. She was born in Nice, and even though she left at the age of sixteen to marry a ribbon and veil merchant from Paris, she still had the accent of her native city, as sonorous and sweet as a song. She had very beautiful dark eyes and a lively expression. Her husband had left her destitute; she had lost a daughter who was only twenty – Thérèse’s mother – and was supported by her son-in-law; but nothing had affected her cheerful disposition. With dessert, she happily drank a little glass of sweet liqueur as she hummed a song:
Joyful tambourines, lead the dance . . .
The Bruns and their guests sat in a very small dining room flooded with sunlight. The furniture – a Henry II sideboard, cane chairs with fluted legs, a chaise longue upholstered in a dark fabric with flowers – bouquets of roses against a black background – an upright piano – everything huddled together as best it could in this small space. The walls were decorated with drawings bought in the large department stores near the Louvre: young girls playing with kittens, Neapolitan shepherds (with a view of Mount Vesuvius in the background) and a copy of The Abandoned Woman, a touching work depicting a woman who is obviously pregnant sitting on a marble bench in autumn, weeping as a Hussar of Napoleon’s Army disappears in the distance among the dead leaves.
The Bruns lived in the heart of a working-class area near the Gare de Lyon. They heard the long, wistful whistles of the trains, full of resonance, that passed them by. But at certain times of the day, they could feel the faint, rhythmic, metallic vibrations coming from the large iron bridge the metro passed over as it emerged from deep beneath the city, appearing for a moment under the sky before fleeing underground again with a muffled roar. The windows shook as it passed.
On the balcony, canaries sang in a cage and, in another, turtledoves cooed softly. The typical sounds of Sunday rose up through the open windows: the clinking of glasses and dishes from every floor, and the happy sound of children from the street below. The brilliant sunlight cast a rosy hue over the grey stonework of the houses. Even the windows of the apartment opposite, dark and grimy all winter long, had recently been washed and sparkled like shimmering water in the bright light. There was a little alcove where the man selling roasted chestnuts had been since October; but he was gone now, and a young girl with red hair selling violets had materialised to take his place. Even this dark little recess was filled with a golden mist: the sun lit up the dust particles, the kind you get in Paris in the spring, that joyful season, dust that seems to be made of face powder and pollen from flowers (until you realise that it smells of dung).
It was a beautiful Sunday. Martial Brun had brought in the dessert, a coffee cake with cream that made Bernard Jacquelain’s eyes light up with joy. They ate it in silence; nothing was heard but the clinking of teaspoons against the plates and the crunching of the little coffee beans hidden in the cream, full of heady liqueur. After this brief moment of silence, the conversation started up again, just as peaceful and devoid of passion as a kettle simmering gently on a stove. Martial Brun was a young man of twenty-seven with beautiful doe eyes, a long, pointy nose that was always a bit red at the tip, a long neck he kept tilted to one side in a funny way, as if he were trying to hear some secret; he was studying medicine and talked about the exams he was soon to take.
‘Men have to work so hard,’ said Blanche Jacquelain with a sigh, looking over at her son Bernard. She loved him so much that she felt everything applied to him; she couldn’t read about an epidemic of typhoid that had broken out in Paris without imagining him sick, even dying, and if she heard any military music, she immediately imagined him a soldier. She looked darkly, sadly, at Martial Brun, replacing in her imagination his nondescript features with those of her adored son, and thinking that one day Bernard would graduate from one of the great universities, showered with prizes.
With a certain sense of complacency, Martial described his studies and how he sometimes had to stay up all night. He was overly modest, but a thimbleful of wine made him suddenly eager to talk, to impress others. As he was bragging, he ran his index finger along the back of his collar – it was a bit tight and irritating him – and he puffed his chest out like a rooster, until the doorbell rang and interrupted him. Thérèse started to get up to answer it, but little Bernard got there first and soon came back accompanied by a plumpish, bearded young man, a friend of Martial, a law student named Raymond Détang. Because of his liveliness, his eloquence, his beautiful baritone voice and his effortless success with women, Raymond Détang inspired feelings of envy and gloomy admiration in Martial. He stopped talking the moment he saw him and nervously began brushing up all the breadcrumbs scattered around his plate.
‘We were just talking about you young men and your studies,’ said Adolphe Brun. ‘You see what’s in store for you,’ he added, turning towards Bernard.
Bernard did not reply because at the age of fifteen, the company of adults still intimidated him. He was still in short trousers. (‘But this is the last year . . . Soon he will be too big,’ his mother said, sounding regretful but proud.) After this hearty meal, his cheeks were fiery red and his tie kept slipping. He gave it a hard tug and pushed his blond curls off his forehead.
‘He must graduate from the Polytechnique, the most prestigious Engineering School, among the top of his class,’ his father said in a booming voice. ‘I would do anything in the world to give him a good education: the best tutors, anything; but he knows what I expect of him: he must graduate from the Polytechnique among the top of his class. He’s a hard worker though. He’s first in his class.’
Everyone looked at Bernard; a wave of pride rushed through his heart. It was a feeling of almost unbearable sweetness. He blushed even more and finally spoke in a voice that was breaking, sometimes shrill and almost heart-rending, sometimes soft and deep:
‘Oh, that, it’s nothing really . . .’
He raised his chin in a gesture of defiance and pulled at the knot in his tie so hard it nearly ripped, as if to say:
‘We’ll see about that!’
He was excited by the dream of one day seeing himself become an important engineer, a mathematician, an inventor, or perhaps an explorer or a soldier, having encounters with a string of beautiful women along the way, surrounded by devoted friends and disciples. But at the same time, he glanced furtively at the bit of cake sitting on his plate and wondered how he could manage to eat it with all those eyes staring at him; fortunately his father spoke to Martial and diverted everyone’s attention, leaving him in obscurity once more. He took advantage of the moment by wolfing down a quarter of his cake in one mouthful.
‘What branch of medicine are you planning to specialise in?’ Monsieur Jacquelain asked Martial. Monsieur Jacquelain suffered from terrible stomach problems. He had a blond moustache, as pale as hay, and a face like grey sand; he was covered in wrinkles like dunes furrowed by the sea breeze. He looked at Martial with a sad, eager expression, as if the very fact of speaking to a future doctor might be enough to discover some secret cure, but one that wouldn’t work on him. He instinctively placed his hand on the spot where the illness made him suffer, just below his sunken chest, and repeated several times:
‘It’s a shame you haven’t got your qualifications yet, my dear boy. A shame. I would have come to you for a consultation. A shame . . .’
Then he sat there, deep in anguished thought.
‘In two years,’ Martial said shyly.
Urged on by their questions, he admitted he had his eye on an apartment, on the Rue Monge. A doctor he knew wanted to retire so would pass it on to him. As he spoke, he could picture all the pleasant days ahead . . .
‘You should get married, Martial,’ said the elderly Madame Pain with a mischievous smile.
Martial nervously rolled the soft part of the bread into a ball, pulled at it so it took the shape of a man, stabbed at it with his dessert fork and raised his doe eyes to look at Thérèse.
‘I’m thinking about it,’ he said, his voice full of emotion. ‘Believe me, I’m thinking about it.’
For a fleeting moment, Thérèse thought his remarks were directed at her; she wanted to laugh but at the same time felt embarrassed, as if she’d been left standing naked in public. So it was true then, what her father, her grandmother and her friends at school were saying: ever since she had started putting up her hair, she looked like a woman? But to marry this kind Martial . . . She lowered her eyes and watched him with curiosity. She’d known him since she was a child; she liked him very much; she could live with him as her mother and father had lived until the day the young woman died. ‘The poor boy,’ she suddenly thought. ‘He’s an orphan.’ She already felt a kind of affection and concern that was almost maternal. ‘But he’s not handsome,’ she continued thinking. ‘He looks like the llama at the zoo in the Botanical Gardens: gentle and slightly offended.’
In an effort to stifle a scornful laugh, two dimples appeared on her rather pale cheeks; all the children of Paris had pale faces. She was a slim, graceful girl with a soft, serious face, grey eyes and hair as fine as mist. ‘What kind of husband would I like?’ she wondered. Her thoughts grew sweet and vague, full of handsome young men who looked like the Hussar from Napoleon’s Army on the print opposite her. A handsome, golden Hussar, a soldier covered in gunpowder and blood, dragging his sword behind him through the dead leaves . . . She leapt up to help her grandmother clear the table. She felt a jolt that brought her back from her dreams to reality; it was a unique and rather painful feeling: someone seemed to be forcing her to open her eyes while shining a very bright light in front of her.
‘Growing up is so tedious,’ she thought. ‘If only I could stay the way I am . . .’ She sighed rather hypocritically: it was flattering to inspire admiration in a young man, even if it was only the well-mannered Martial. Bernard Jacquelain had gone out on to the balcony and she joined him among the cages of canaries and turtledoves. The steel bridge vibrated: the metro had just passed by. A few moments later, Adolphe Brun came out to the children.
‘The Humbert ladies are here,’ he said.
They were friends of the Brun family, a widow and her daughter Renée, who was fifteen.
Madame Humbert had lost her brilliant, charming husband early on. It was a sad story, but a good lesson for the youngsters, or so they said. Poor Monsieur Humbert (a talented lawyer), had died at the age of twenty-nine for having too great a fondness for both work and pleasure, which do not go together, as Adolphe Brun remarked. ‘He was a Don Juan,’ he would say, shaking his head, but with an expression of admiration, mixed with condemnation and a tiny bit of envy. Twirling his moustache and looking pensive, he would continue: ‘He had become very conscious of his appearance. He had thirty-six ties’ (thirty-six stood for an exaggerated number). ‘He had started to indulge in luxuries: a bath every week. He caught the chill that killed him coming out of one of the public baths.’
His widow, left with no money, had been forced to open a milliner’s shop to earn a living. In the Avenue des Gobelins stood a boutique painted in sky blue; high up on the roof was a plaque bearing the inscription: ‘FASHIONS by GERMAINE’ finished with a gold flourish. Madame Humbert launched her creations on her own head and her daughter’s. She was a beautiful brunette; she carried herself with majestic dignity, showing off one of the first new straw hats to come out this spring, trimmed with a burst of artificial poppies. Her daughter wore a modest creation of tulle and ribbons: a stiff bonnet but as light as a lampshade.
They had been waiting for these ladies before going out to finish their Sunday in the fresh air. And so they all headed for the metro at the Gare de Lyon. The children walked in front, Bernard between the two girls. Bernard was painfully aware of his short trousers and looked with anxiety and shame at the golden hair that shone on his sturdy legs, but he consoled himself by thinking: ‘This is the last year . . .’ Besides, his mother, who spoiled him, had bought him a cane with a gold knob and he played with this nonchalantly. Unfortunately, Adolphe noticed it and muttered: ‘He looks like a dandy with that cane in his hand . . .,’ which spoiled all his pleasure. Lively, always on the go, slim with beautiful eyes, to his mother he was the personification of masculine beauty, and with a jealous pang in her heart, she thought: ‘He’ll have so many conquests by the time he’s twenty,’ for she intended to keep him at home until then.
The young women wore black cotton stockings with nice tailored suits that modestly covered their knees. Madame Humbert had made a hat for Thérèse just like Renée’s, an impressive creation decorated with chiffon and little bows. ‘You look like sisters,’ but what she really thought was: ‘My daughter, my Renée, is prettier. She’s a little doll, a kitten with her blond hair and green eyes. Older men are already starting to notice her,’ she continued thinking, for she was an ambitious mother who could foresee the future.
Emerging from the depths of the underground, the little group came out of the metro at the Place de la Concorde and walked down the Champs-Élysées. The women carefully lifted the hem of their skirts a bit as they walked; you could see a respectable ruffle of grey poplin under Madame Jacquelain’s dress, a reddish-brown sateen for the elderly Madame Pain, while Madame Humbert, who had an ample bosom and made the most of her ‘Italian eyes’, was accidentally showing off a dapple grey taffeta ruffle that rustled silkily. The ladies were talking about love. Madame Humbert let it be known that she had driven a man wild with her strict morals; in order to forget her, he had to run away to the colonies, and from there he had written to tell her that he had trained one of the little natives to come into his tent at bedtime and say: ‘Germaine loves you and is thinking of you.’
‘Men are often more sensitive than we are,’ sighed Madame Humbert.
‘Oh, do you think so?’ exclaimed Blanche Jacquelain. She had been listening with the same haughty, sharp expression as a cat eagerly eyeing a saucepan of hot milk (she stretches out her paw then pulls it back with a brief, offended miaow): ‘Do you really think so? It’s only we women who know how to sacrifice ourselves without any ulterior motive.’
‘What do you mean by ulterior motive?’ asked Madame Humbert; she lifted her chin and flared her nostrils as if she were about to whinny like a mare.
‘My dear, you know very well what she means,’ replied Madame Jacquelain in disgust.
‘But that’s human nature, my dear . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the elderly Madame Pain, nodding her head and jiggling her jet-black hat covered in artificial violets, but she wasn’t really listening. She was thinking of the bit of veal (left over from the blanquette) that she would serve that evening. Just as it was or with a tomato sauce?
Behind them walked the men, holding forth and gesturing grandly.
The peaceful Sunday crowds walked down the Champs-Élysées. Everyone strolled slowly, no doubt feeling heavier because they were digesting their meals, because of the heat – early for the time of year – or simply because they felt no need to rush. It was an amiable, cheerful, modest group of ordinary middle-class people; the working classes didn’t venture there, and the upper classes only sent the very youngest members of their families to the Champs-Élysées, supervised by nannies wearing beautiful ribbons in their hair. Along the avenue, they could see students from the Military Academy of Saint Cyr walking arm in arm with their lovely grandmothers, or pale students in pince-nez, from the prestigious Polytechnique whose anxious families gazed lovingly at them, high school students in double-breasted jackets and school uniform caps, gentlemen with moustaches, young girls in white dresses walking down to the Arc de Triomphe between a double row of chairs where other students from Saint Cyr and the Polytechnique sat, with other gentlemen and ladies and children identical to the first group, wearing the same clothes, the same expression, the same smile, a look that was cordial, curious and benevolent, to such an extent that each passer-by seemed to see his own brother by his side. All these faces looked alike: pale-skinned, dull-eyed, and nose in the air.
They walked even further, right down to the Arc de Triomphe, then to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, to the Boni de Castellane Villa whose lilac silk curtains fluttered out on to the balconies in the light breeze. And then, at last, the horse-drawn carriages arrived in a glorious cloud of dust, returning from the races.
The families sat on their little metal chairs. They studied the foreign princes, the millionaires, the famous courtesans. Madame Humbert feverishly sketched their hats into a notebook she took out of her handbag. The children watched in admiration. The adults felt contented, satisfied, without envy but full of pride: ‘For the pittance we paid for our chairs and the price of the metro, we can see all of this,’ the Parisians thought, ‘and we can enjoy it. Not only are we spectators at a performance, we are also actors (though with the most minor of roles), with our daughters so beautifully decked out in their brand-new hats, and our chatter and legendary gaiety. We could have been born somewhere else, after all,’ thought the Parisians, ‘in a place where even seeing the Champs-Élysées on a postcard would have made everyone’s heart beat faster!’
And they settled back comfortably in their chairs.
‘Did you see that pink parasol trimmed with lace roses?’ they said, slightly critically, as if they owned the place. ‘It’s too much; I don’t like that sort of thing.’
They recognised the celebrities that passed by:
‘Look, there’s the actress Monna Delza. Who’s she with?’
The fathers told their children stories from the past:
‘Five years ago I saw Lina Cavalieri having lunch with Caruso over there,’ they said, pointing towards the windows of a restaurant. ‘Everyone was gathered round them and looked at them as if they were curious animals, but that didn’t dull their appetite.’
‘Who’s Lina Cavalieri, Papa?’
‘An actress.’
Towards evening, the children were starting to drag their feet. The powdery sugar from the waffles fluttered through the air. A fine dust rose slowly towards the sky, a golden dust that crunched between the teeth; it veiled half of the Obélisque in mist at the Place de la Concorde, shrouded the pink flowers on the chestnut trees; the wind carried it towards the Seine and it gradually fell to the ground while the last of the horse-drawn carriages and the Parisians headed for home.
The Bruns, Jacquelains, Humberts and Raymond Détang sat down on the terrace of a café for a drink:
‘Two grenadines and eight glasses of wine.’
They drank in silence, somewhat tired, rather light-headed, pleased with their day. Raymond Détang fiddled with his little beard and began showing off for the benefit of the woman sitting next to him. It was a hot evening. The first street lamps were being lit and the sky was turning a pale mauve, almost sugary, you could say, like the colour of violet sweets. It looked good enough to eat. ‘Ah, this is so nice . . .’ the women sighed, and ‘It’s almost too nice to go back home, isn’t it, Eugène?’ But Eugène or Émile (her husband) shook his head, looked at his watch and simply said: ‘Time for supper.’ It was nearly seven o’clock and all the little Parisian families would soon light their lamps and sit down to dinner. The delicious smell of stew and fresh bread would do battle for a few moments with the scent of the perfumed dust that the expensive ladies had left in their wake; it would compete with it and, in the end, win the battle.
The Bruns and their friends parted at the Étoile metro station. They settled the bill – ‘And I still owe you some money for the waiter’s tip . . . Yes, I insist; the man who pays his debts is richer for it . . .’ Then everyone went back home.
IN 1914, MARTIAL Brun ordered a bronze plaque for the door of his future home on the Rue Monge; it was engraved with these words:
DOCTOR MARTIAL BRUN
EAR, NOSE AND THROAT
The apartment would not be available until the end of October; it was now the 14th July. Martial went to see his friend, the doctor, who was still living there. After saying goodbye to him, he stopped on the staircase, took the plaque out of his pocket and polished it until it gleamed. Then he tiptoed back up the stairs, held it against the wooden door for a moment, tilted his long neck even further to the side and thought: ‘That’s really nice’, and began to daydream. There was a polished oak bench on the landing; the windows were made of coloured glass and their reflection covered the stairwell in translucent light, as in a church. Martial imagined a procession of patients arriving to consult Doctor Brun. ‘That excellent Doctor Brun . . .’ he whispered softly, ‘Martial Brun, that famous doctor . . . Do you know Doctor Brun? He cured my wife. He removed my daughter’s adenoids.’ He could almost smell that odour of antiseptic and clean linoleum wafting out of his consulting room. No more studying! He had earned his diplomas! That blessed moment when a Frenchman could say: ‘I’ve sown well. Now it is time to reap.’ And in his mind, he mapped out the future. He assigned a date to each event in the years to come: ‘I’ll move in here in October. I’ll get married. I’ll have a son. The second year, I’ll be able to have a holiday at the seaside . . .’ His life was planned in advance, sketched out right down to every success, right up until he was old, until he died. For naturally, there was death. It had its place in his domestic calculation. But death was no longer a wild animal lurking in the corner, lying in wait, ready to pounce. It was 1914, for heaven’s sake! The century of science, of progress. Even death seemed diminished in the light of such knowledge. It would wait in the wings for an appropriate moment, the moment when Doctor Brun would have fulfilled his destiny, lived a long, contented life, had children and bought a little house in the country, the moment when the white-haired Doctor Brun would fall peacefully asleep. Accompanying him on his path, Doctor Brun imagined Thérèse. He had always . . . he stopped at the word ‘loved’ as it seemed to him, heaven knows why, bordering on the improper. He had always hoped to make her his wife and the mother of his children. She was eighteen and he was thirty. Their ages were appropriate. She wasn’t rich but she had a small dowry of safe investments: Russian bonds. And so, everything was in place: the house, the money, the wife. His wife . . . But he hadn’t yet put the question. He had been content to make allusions, to sigh, pay compliments, to squeeze her hand furtively, but that was surely enough. ‘Women are so shrewd . . .’
Once again, Martial gave himself a stern talking to:
‘I will not let another day go by without asking her if she will marry me. It would be simpler to talk to Uncle Adolphe, but I must take a modern approach. It must be her decision.’
He was supposed to see her that very evening, for they were going out together. It was the 14th July and they were going to watch the dancing at the Place de la République. Adolphe Brun was very strict about everything Thérèse saw or read: she was not allowed any popular novels; he went through her reading with a fine-tooth comb and only allowed her to see matinees of classical French films; but to him, the streets of Paris held no danger. Its sights, its atmosphere, the gaiety, the hustle and bustle – he allowed Thérèse to enjoy these things as an old Indian brave would allow his children to play on the prairies. To outsiders, this was a wild place full of perils – but to him, it was the most peaceful countryside.
Standing in front of the carousel with its wooden horses while the orchestra played, or perhaps in the dark street they would take to walk home – the youngsters in front, the parents behind – he would say to her . . . What would he say to her? ‘Thérèse, I have loved you for a very long time . . .’ or ‘Thérèse, you alone can make me the happiest, or the most wretched of men.’ Perhaps she would say: ‘I love you too, Martial, I do.’
Martial could feel his heart pounding at this idea; he took a little mirror out of his pocket and anxiously looked at himself, hanging his head down even more than ever and almost sweeping his long eyelashes against the mirror, for he was short-sighted. He had taken off his pince-nez so he could see himself: ‘She has to be able to see my eyes,’ he thought, ‘my eyes are really my best feature . . .’ For a moment he studied his terrified eyes, his pointy red nose and the black beard that hid his cheeks. Then he sighed sadly, put the mirror back in his pocket and walked slowly down the stairs.
‘She’s a serious young woman. Respectable women do not care about good looks. We’ll make a family together . . . We have to have the same likes and dislikes . . .’
Then he weakened:
‘I’ll love her so much,’ he thought.
He had dinner with the Bruns. Nothing had changed at their house. Nothing would ever change. Her father sat in his shirt-sleeves reading the newspaper in his usual place, at the head of the table, the same table, the same armchair, the same newspaper, the same Uncle Adolphe that Martial was used to seeing, with his bald head, his wide blue eyes, his long red moustache. Grandmother was in the kitchen; Thérèse was setting the table. In the future, he would come to this dining room with his wife and children. He felt very happy. He took Thérèse’s hand; she pulled it away gently but she smiled at him, and that knowing smile, somewhat mocking but friendly, filled his soul with hope. Of course she had guessed everything.
After dinner, Thérèse went to put on her hat.
‘Are you coming with us, Mama?’ asked Adolphe, winking mischievously at his nephew to encourage him to hear what he said next: ‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll get too tired?’
‘Me? Get tired?’ the elderly lady protested with indignation. ‘Speak for yourself with your varicose veins! I have strong legs, I do, thank the Lord! And besides, someone has to keep an eye on Thérèse.’
‘Well what about me? And Martial? Don’t we count?’
‘You . . . when you see those Chinese lanterns, you stand there like a child with your mouth hanging open. And Martial is too young to look after a young woman.’
‘Oh, I’m too young,’ protested Martial, delighted. To hide his lack of composure, he picked up the newspaper that his uncle had just put down. ‘Anything new in the paper?’
‘The Caillaux trial is starting on Monday.’
Martial leafed absent-mindedly through the Petit Parisien, and read out loud: ‘Monsieur Maurice Barrès was elected President of the League of Patriots’; ‘In Sarajevo, after the assassination, attacks on the Serbs . . .’
He folded up the paper, carefully smoothing it out. He shuddered slightly, his shoulders twitching as if he felt a chill run through him. He even thought: ‘What could be wrong with me? I’m shivering. I must have stopped wearing my flannel underwear too early this year.’ He made it a rule to keep wearing it until the 15th August, because you can never be certain at the beginning of summer. Certain . . . this little word suddenly resonated in his mind. What had made him shiver was not the early signs of a cold, but something within, something that had nothing to do with anything physical . . . Anxiety. No, that was too strong a word. Sadness . . . Yes, that was it; suddenly he felt sad. He had been beaming all day long and now suddenly . . . Mere mortals knew nothing of what was thundering through every Embassy in Europe, and yet he sensed a kind of agitation in these high places, something feverish, the shock of opposing electric currents that struck him every now and then, just as you sometimes see sheep safely sheltered in their folds anxiously raise their heads when they sense a storm raging in the distance. The assassination of that Austrian prince . . . The crowds the day before yesterday, demonstrating in front of the Statue de Strasbourg at the Place de la Concorde . . . Words, rumours, talk, words . . . one word . . . But a word that doesn’t belong to our century, thank goodness.
‘It smells of gunpowder,’ he said out loud, showing the newspaper to Uncle Adolphe and trying to sound as if he were joking. ‘It smells of war . . .’
‘Well, if there is a war, we’ll fight,’ said Adolphe, twirling his moustache and puffing out his chest. ‘We’ll eat rats, like during the siege.’ Then he turned towards the women and asked impatiently: ‘Well, are you coming? We’re going to miss the fireworks.’
‘Tonight, I’ll ask her, I’ll definitely ask her,’ Martial said to himself, and, oddly enough, this time he knew he actually would do it, he wouldn’t shy away. The feeling of sadness remained in his heart, but not only sadness, a sort of extreme awareness of his entire being, as if he were alone in a room and could hear footsteps outside.
Thérèse found him standing in the small entrance hall. He was staring at the door, his neck straining forward, his nose red and his forehead covered in sweat. She started laughing:
‘You frightened me. What are you doing standing here? Come along, let’s go, Papa is going downstairs. Close the door. Don’t step on my skirt. You’re so clumsy! You’ll tear the hem.’
All four of them went out on to the street; it was already alive with the sound of celebrations. Violinists were tuning their instruments at the intersections. In front of the small cafés, the squares were marked off for the dancing, a rectangle of pavement lit by paper lanterns and the moon. They could see the swaying shadows of the trees on the ground. The night had something gentle about it, something soothing and sensual that intoxicated the young men and women. Young girls wearing boaters and white blouses raced by, raising their skirts up to their calves. Soldiers danced with chambermaids. On the Avenue de la République, there was a fair, stalls, the smell of hot oil, gingerbread, gunpowder, circus animals, noise, shouting, gunshots and fireworks.
Martial took Thérèse’s arm.
‘Here, right now, immediately,’ he thought.
He shouted into her ear and later on, she would recall his hoarse, anguished voice, merging with the roaring of the captive lions, the sound of the Marseillaise and the hum of the carousels.
‘Thérèse, I love you. Will you marry me?’
She couldn’t hear what he was saying. She gestured to him to say no more, then smiled and pointed to all the people around them. He looked at her with terror in his eyes, gasping with anguish. She felt sorry for him and gently squeezed his hand.
‘Is that a yes?’ he cried. ‘Oh, Thérèse . . .’
He could think of nothing else to say. He put his hand under her elbow and supported her with respect and infinite care, as if he were carrying a priceless vase through a great crowd. She was touched by his gesture. ‘He wants me to understand that he will always protect me, always love me.’ He wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t eloquent, but he was a decent man and she felt affection for him. She had always known that she would end up marrying him. Yes, even when she was still a very young girl, when he let her ride piggyback . . . Once, when she was nine, he had carried her all the way to the top of the Colonne de Juillet at the Place de la Bastille. She had felt safe in his arms, and occasionally opened one eye to look down at the square, very far below . . . Yes, that day she had thought: ‘When I grow up, I will marry Martial.’
They had left the broad avenue now. They walked down the calmer, darker streets. They crossed the Seine. The adults walked behind them.
‘He’s asked her,’ they said. ‘He’s talking intently, gesturing with his arms. She’s listening without saying anything. That’s it, he’s done it. It was meant to be. He’s a decent young man.’
‘Will you dance at their wedding, Mama?’ Adolphe asked his mother-in-law, straightening a leg to make her a small bow.
Madame Pain dried her eyes. She was remembering her own daughter. But it was just a sad, fleeting thought. She was too old to think about the dead for long. In old age, the dead are so close that you forget about them. You can only imagine things that are far away. She imagined Thérèse’s wedding, the honeymoon, the wonderful meal . . . the child that would be born.
She nodded her head and, her voice quivering with emotion, her eyes still full of tears, she automatically began to hum: