was waiting, right next to Jean, in the darkness of the confessional? What if there were no priest on the other side at all, but a huge ear sitting on the wooden bench, an ear of God with hearing so acute it could listen in to the most secret thoughts.
‘Is that all? Well, that’s not too bad. Those are not really sins, more weaknesses that a boy like you ought to be able to put right with no trouble. Two Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. You can go.’
Jean left the confessional, hands clasped together and head bent, and walked to the altar where he kneeled and prayed, his heart heavy with his remorse at having deceived a man as good and generous as the abbé Le Couec.
At La Sauveté Antoinette was waiting in Jeanne’s kitchen, where Jeanne was ironing in front of the range on which she was keeping the iron hot. As soon as he walked in, his gaze met Antoinette’s, and he knew that she was waiting to make sure he hadn’t weakened. He held her look and grinned.
‘So did you make a good confession, little one?’
‘Very good, Maman. The abbé Le Couec told me my sins aren’t really sins.’
Antoinette’s eyes shone with pleasure. She kissed Jeanne on the cheek, shoved Jean playfully, and skipped back to La Sauveté. A few days later, when they were out for a walk together, she showed him her breasts, which had already grown into two charming, nicely firm little domes. Jean was filled with happiness, and his remorse at having deceived the good abbé steadily faded. He was beginning to lose his trust in the absoluteness of a religion that was unable to penetrate the secrets of people’s souls. You could escape from God’s omnipresence, and trick his ministers, without the earth opening up beneath your feet. The idea was not yet clear in his mind, but a glimmer flickered on the horizon: if a person watched where they were going, they ought to reach a world less full of threats and menace. Wasn’t Albert an unbeliever? And Jean could not imagine that a better person than his father existed.
However strong Antoinette’s hold on him was, she could not remove Chantal de Malemort from his thoughts, where she continued to reign discreetly as a figure of pale and dark beauty, pink-lipped, slender and modest. On New Year’s Day, Madame du Courseau drove the children to a party at the Malemorts’. That afternoon, during a game of hide and seek, Jean found himself alone with Chantal in the trophy room on the château’s ground floor. Dozens of stuffed birds crowded the shelves, and the whole of one wall was covered in the antlers of stags hunted in the forest of Arques by three generations of Malemorts. The room was icily cold and smelt of dust, a dead, faded smell that caught in Jean’s throat. Chantal pulled back a brocaded curtain that hid a recessed door.
‘Hide in there!’
‘What about you?’ he blurted out, so close to the object of his admiration that he was unable to stay calm.
‘I’m coming with you, of course!’
The heavy curtain fell back over them and they stood still for a moment, side by side, not touching, their backs against the door. Shouts rang out in the corridor. Michel was looking for them. He entered the room and called out, ‘Come out, I saw you!’
Chantal made a slight movement, and Jean put his hand on her arm. They held their breath, shoulder to shoulder. Michel marched around the room, looking under the table, opening cupboards.
‘I’ll give you three seconds to come out!’ he shouted.
Jean held Chantal’s arm more tightly and she didn’t move. They heard the door close again, and the sound of a stampede in the corridor.
‘He’s gone!’ she said.
‘It’s a trick. He’s going to come back as quietly as he can.’
Two minutes later the door creaked, and Michel burst into the room.
‘Hey! I saw you.’
Terrified, Chantal hid her face in the hollow of Jean’s shoulder. He felt pure happiness. For years afterwards he remembered that impulse she had had to claim his protection, and the firmness with which he had kept her close to him, wrapping his arm around her, with his nose in her fresh-smelling hair. Chantal de Malemort never belonged to him more than she did at that moment, as a child-woman.
When Michel finally gave up his search and left the room, Chantal detached herself from Jean, pushed back the curtain, and pulled him by the hand. They ran to the hall, where the Marquis de Malemort was pulling off his mud-plastered boots and drenched oilskin. He had just been out to take oats and straw to his horse and gave off a strong smell of stables. Jean admired this handsome and solid man, who owned a château and was favoured with a title that belonged in the kind of fairy tales in which kings and princes have daughters more beautiful than the dawn’s meeting with the night. That this character was real did not intimidate him, quite the contrary. He liked his strong, earthy presence, and the way he swore with the same manners as Madame de Malemort and the same gentleness as Chantal. A bond united this family – the château, the name – a bond whose subterranean ramifications Jean had only just begun to perceive, through snatches of conversations whose meaning he did not always understand, but which seemed to exclude him. In short, Chantal belonged to a caste that put her beyond his dreams, in a virtually magical firmament in which she glided on the tips of her feet without touching the earth at all. Left to himself, Jean might eventually have doubted the superior existence of Chantal de Malemort, but he had Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, née Mangepain, to influence his thoughts, a woman sugary to the point of crystallisation in her decorum, hungry to add ever more titles to her conversation and gather like nectar, from one country house to the next, the crumbs of a decaying society of which she would have adored to be a part, even if it meant being swallowed up along with it. Her admiration – stripping her character of every natural quality – helped to sustain the existence of a tradition that had been more overwhelmed by several years of recession than it had been in a hundred and fifty years of revolutions.
However kind the Malemorts were to him, Jean never saw them without a feeling of guilt, as though his place was not among them. He was the son of Albert and Jeanne, caretakers of La Sauveté. If he ever forgot it for an instant, Michel made it his business to remind him with a wounding word. Michel’s unpleasantness hurt him because, even though he did not love Michel – how could he? – he genuinely admired him for his talents. He would have given anything to sing like him at mass, or create the crib figures he made with his own hands, or paint the colourful landscapes that had already been shown in a gallery at Dieppe, and then at Rouen. What did he, Jean Arnaud, possess that he could shine with, in the eyes of the Malemorts? Nothing, apart from his strength, his physical agility, and some secrets passed on to him by Monsieur Cliquet and Captain Duclou, incommunicable secrets that Chantal would never need to use: the history of locomotives through the ages, and how to predict the weather.
I sense that the reader is eager, as I am, to reach the point where Jean Arnaud becomes a man. But patience! None of us turns into an adult overnight, and nothing would be properly clear (or properly fictional) if I failed to illustrate the stages of our hero’s childhood in some carefully chosen anecdotes. This is, after all, the period when Jean is to learn what life is, or, more specifically, when he is to experience a range of feelings, aversions and passions which will imprint themselves deeply on him and to which he will only discover the key very much later, around the age of thirty, when he begins to see things more clearly. At the time that I am talking about, he is still a small boy, and beyond the walls of La Sauveté the wide world that awaits him, with all its cheating and its pleasures, is a long way off. So far away that you might as well say it doesn’t exist. Jean had an idea of it, however, thanks to an encounter that I want to record and to which I implore the reader to pay attention. It happened under the premiership of Camille Chautemps, which is entirely irrelevant, I hasten
