drizzle that was working its way through the cape he had spread across his handlebars. Despite his sou’wester, rain was also dripping down his neck, and his soaked feet were squelching on the pedals in shoes that were too big for him. Coming round a bend, he saw a car that had stopped on the verge. It was a car that impressed as much by its size – it looked as large as a truck – as by its yellow coachwork, black mudguards and white wheels. A chauffeur in a light blue tunic and peaked cap was crouching next to the offside rear wheel, whose tyre was flat, and trying to remove the wheel. He must have been lacking an essential tool, because, seeing Jean, he hailed him. Jean slowed and stopped and stood open-mouthed: the chauffeur was black. His face, wet with rain, shone under his cap, and when he opened his mouth Jean was struck by the size and yellowish colour of his teeth.
‘Is there a mechanic near here?’ the chauffeur asked.
‘Yes, at the bottom of the hill.’
‘Is it far?’
‘Maybe a kilometre.’
‘You wouldn’t like to go and get him for me, would you?’
‘It’s hard to ride back up the hill. I’ve already done it once.’
‘Will you lend me your bicycle?’
‘It’s too small for you.’
‘I’ll manage.’
The chauffeur took off his cap and tapped on the rear window, which opened with a squeaking sound. A face appeared, pale and with grey semi-circles under the eyes. The neck disappeared into a tightly tied blue silk scarf. It was impossible to say whether it was a young man ravaged by a hidden illness that gave his cheeks and forehead a parchment-like translucency, or a much older man whom death would soon blow apart, splitting an envelope stretched to breaking point over a fragile skeleton.
‘Monseigneur,’ the chauffeur said, ‘this boy is lending me his bicycle to go and fetch a mechanic. There’s one at the bottom of the hill, he says.’
‘Hurry then! We have to pick Madame up again at five o’clock.’
The man’s voice matched his physique, thin and fragile. Jean was dazzled: he had heard the chauffeur call his passenger with the blue scarf ‘Monseigneur’. This passenger now turned and looked at him sympathetically and added, ‘You’re not going to stand out there in the rain. Come and sit by me.’
The chauffeur opened the door and Jean shook out his rubber cape and climbed into the passenger compartment, where the man pointed to a folding seat.
‘What is your name?’ he asked immediately.
‘Jean Arnaud.’
‘And do you live near here?’
‘At Grangeville.’
‘It looks as if it rains rather a lot here.’
‘Oh, it depends! There are fine days too.’
Jean’s eyes began to get used to the half-darkness inside the car, whose luxury seemed fabulous to him. The seats were of glossy black leather, the carpet of animal fur, and another pelt covered the knees of the traveller, who was bundled up in a black overcoat with an otter-skin collar. A tortoiseshell telephone connected him to the chauffeur, who was separated from his passenger by a glass panel. Beside the folding seat there was a drawer of some rich hardwood, filled with crystal decanters and silver goblets.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Everything … everything, Monseigneur.’
‘I see that you’re well brought up. This is a great strength in life. What do your parents do?’
‘My parents are the caretakers at La Sauveté. My father’s a gardener. He lost a leg in the war. He doesn’t want me to be a soldier.’
‘He’s right.’
‘What kind of car is this?’
‘Hispano-Suiza. Have you ever seen one like it?’
‘Never. It’s beautiful. It must cost a lot of money.’
‘I don’t know. They bought it for me. I’m a very lazy man. I don’t buy anything myself.’
‘Then people must steal from you.’
‘Perhaps, but never mind. That’s the price of my peace of mind.’
The man coughed into his closed fist. He peeled off one of his tan kid gloves to take a phial out of a small box next to him, from which he dripped a few drops onto a handkerchief. A strong medicinal smell filled the car.
‘Are you ill, Monseigneur?’
He nodded his head, put the handkerchief over his nose and breathed in deeply before answering.
‘I have asthma.’
‘Can’t the doctor cure you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s very sad!’
‘You are a very kind boy.’
Jean looked at him intensely, and the man smiled back.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ Jean said.
‘Yes, but I cannot promise I’ll answer it.’
‘How do you become a monseigneur?’
‘It’s a very old story. I didn’t become a “monseigneur”. My father was a prince. And my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. You would have to go a long way back into history to find the first of my ancestors who became a prince, in the year 318 of the Hijra, which is to say in AD 940, which you will understand better, I dare say, being a little Christian. At that time there reigned at Bab al Saud an extremely powerful king, named Salah el Mahdi. He was good, but arrogant, and had a serious fault, which was never to know when people were lying to him. When I say “serious fault”, it was almost an illness with him, he made so many mistakes about other men. Haroun, his vizir, who looked after the affairs of the kingdom in the company of a dozen or so emirs who had sworn loyalty to him, used his position to accumulate an immense fortune by extorting money from country people and merchants alike and by using the royal fleet for pirate raids across the Mediterranean, as far as the coast of France. The king suspected nothing. He believed that his kingdom’s finances were prospering, because the vizir very skilfully denied him no luxury. When the vizir offered him a sumptuous present he did not suspect that it was the hundredth fraction of the pirates’ booty, of which the wretched band in power kept the other ninety-nine hundredths. His harem was populated with beautiful, pale, almost diaphanous creatures captured from Christian ships, whom Haroun assured him were gifts from foreign kings dazzled by his reputation, when they were really poor Greek girls snatched from their families or passionate light-skinned Sicilians kidnapped by the crews of pirate feluccas. Haroun and his henchmen were so greedy that after several years had passed they began to believe that what they were giving the king was still too much, that the hundredth of the spoils that they were forgoing to keep him happy would do just as well in their own chests. So they arrested Salah el Mahdi and would certainly have cut his head off
