To his chauffeur, a black man in a blue tunic.’
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’
He had to explain from the beginning, and then explain a second time to Albert, who to Jean’s astonishment decided that the thousand-franc note was proper treasure trove and pushed it into Jean’s money box. Yes, Geneviève had been there that afternoon. She had come directly to the lodge to kiss Jeanne, before going across to La Sauveté to see her parents and her brother and sister.
‘She hasn’t changed, our little one,’ said Jeanne, trying as she invariably did to link the fearful present to a reassuring past where everything had been kindly and good.
‘What are you talking about? She’s twelve years older and looks it!’ Albert said, turned as ever towards the future.
‘I mean that her heart’s still in the right place. She gave me a stole and a bag which will be just right for mass on Sunday.’
After dinner Madame du Courseau appeared, and Jean was sent to bed. Grumbling, he went upstairs, leaving his bedroom door slightly open. He could not hear everything, but he realised that Marie-Thérèse had come to find out whether Geneviève had unburdened herself to Jeanne any more than to herself. Jeanne was stony in her replies, answering in monosyllables until the conversation was interrupted by the familiar rumble of the Bugatti being driven out of its garage. This one was a Type 47, the largest cubic capacity ever produced by Ettore Bugatti, a 5.35-litre engine that effortlessly accelerated to 150 kilometres an hour.
‘It really is far too late to be going out for a drive,’ Madame du Courseau said in an offended voice.
Antoine had been left feeling confined and stifled by the emotions that Geneviève’s visit had aroused. For several days he had wanted to try out the new car, delivered three months earlier from the Molsheim workshops, over a proper distance, but as it was late he switched his itinerary and took the road for Paris, where, arriving shortly after midnight, he stopped for a demi and a ham sandwich at a café at the Porte Maillot. Not having been to Paris since 1917, he found the city changed. He remembered black streets and empty boulevards, in which glimmers of blue light escaped from behind blinds placed over windows: a city of often beautiful women, of whom he had been instinctively suspicious. Now he wandered in search of memories and found none, and as in such circumstances we generally find what we would like not to, on Place de l’Étoile he overtook a yellow Hispano-Suiza driven by a black chauffeur. He let it pass him and followed it to a side road off the Avenue du Bois, where it stopped outside an hôtel particulier. The chauffeur opened the door. Geneviève stepped out first, waiting for the prince, tall and slightly stooped, to follow and take her arm. Antoine accelerated past them so that he would not be recognised.
It was two o’clock by now, and the only life to be found was at Place Pigalle, Montmartre, where he abandoned the car and walked. Because the girls who began to accost him bored and repelled him, he pretended to be part of a group that had just alighted from a bus and were hastening towards a nightclub whose entrance was in the shape of an enormous red devil’s mouth. English was being spoken around him, then German, as a trilingual guide steered the group, sat it down at small tables and clapped his hands to call the waiters, who arrived with demi-sec sparkling wine in champagne flutes. Antoine found himself sitting between an American woman and a German, facing a nondescript individual who laughed for no reason and who, for as long as the show (pretty bare-breasted girls playing with snakes) lasted, kept his hand in his trouser pocket and did rather unspeakable things, apparently without conclusive result. Scarcely had the show finished than the guide collected up his herd and stuffed them back into their bus. Antoine followed. At this late hour no one was counting the tourists in search of the legendary Paris by night, and in any case it was highly likely that some had been mislaid en route, either too drunk to go on or spirited away by some hungry seductress. The bus drove on to Bastille, from where the passengers had a brisk walk to a dance hall on Rue de Lappe. At the tourists’ arrival the band struck up. Bad boys in shiny black shirts and striped trousers danced a rakish waltz with molls in plunging necklines. Antoine found himself with a Swedish couple, who were beside themselves with pleasure. They asked him where he was from, and when they discovered they were talking to a Frenchman their joy was boundless. The woman was not bad-looking, with attractive breasts that stretched the fabric of her low-cut dress; when Antoine distractedly stroked her thigh under the table, she bit her lip. They drank warm white wine and nibbled slices of soft sausage that were supposed to get them in the mood. Antoine was looking forward to enjoying himself when the bad boys and their molls had left the dance floor, but no one was brave enough to follow them and the guide gathered his tourists together to go. The tour was over. The bus discharged its dazed and exhausted night owls at Place de l’Opéra, which was deserted except for the street-sweeping machines sluicing it clean with great jets of water. The Swedish woman looked around for Antoine, but he was already gone, walking quickly up towards Trinité and then via Rue Blanche back to Pigalle, suddenly anxious for his car, which he had left with the hood down in the fine drizzle that had started to fall over the city, varnishing its empty, dirty streets strewn with dustbins. Girls leaving nightclubs as they closed ran, pushing up their coat collars. The blue Bugatti was where he had left it, its handsome leather upholstery soaked and its steering wheel dripping. Antoine dried both with an old raincoat and set off slowly in search of the Porte d’Italie, to which a policeman on a bicycle eventually directed him. Day was breaking. He shivered in his still-wet cockpit, but the engine’s organ-pipe sound was on song with such evident pleasure that Antoine kept going to Fontainebleau, cutting deep into the frosty forest that sparkled in the morning light. On the main square he found a brasserie and ordered a bowl of coffee, as he waited for a barber and a shirt-maker to open their doors. He felt pleasantly light-headed at the change he had wrought in an itinerary that for ten years had been immutable. He had a pang of regret about the Swedish woman – the warm skin between her stocking and knickers had seemed very welcoming. But one cannot have everything, and at the other end of the Nationale Sept4 there was Marie-Dévote and little Toinette and at Roquebrune Mireille Cece, the daughter of poor Léon. It was already plenty. Antoine was no longer twenty years old. He even admitted to being fifty-six, and though he had lost weight at Marie-Dévote’s express request – despite her shamelessly filling out herself – he could no longer lay claim to a young man’s adventures. Shaved and roused by coffee, he set out again and made Lyon without stopping, where he slept for twelve hours and opened his eyes on a deep, swirling fog. A pea-souper, thick and dirty and clinging, had come in through the window and was raking his throat. He could not see as far as the end of his bed. The foggy moods of the Saône and Rhône were joining forces. Antoine remembered the nickname given to Lyon by Henri Béraud: Mirelingue-la-brumeuse.5 The Lyonnais, accustomed to this miasma blanketing their city, seemed not even to notice it. Antoine eventually found the Vienne road, and immediately the fog lifted, revealing the Rhône valley, green and grey and lovely under the winter sun.
At Aix he halted outside Charles’s garage, under the sign saying Chez Antoine. Charles no longer got his hands dirty, and instead oversaw his mechanics from a small glass office which he filled with caporal tobacco smoke while reading books about the war. Hearing the Bugatti’s engine, he came straight out.
‘All right, Captain? Well, well, the new one, eh?’
He spread his arms wide, as if the Bugatti was going to jump up and hug him. The engine was idling, and he put his ear to the bonnet to hear the tick-over.
‘Terrific!’ he said. ‘Really terrific.’
‘Twenty-four valves, single overhead cam. Like a watch: I averaged 112 between Lyon and Aix. In October I’ll have the 50: double overhead cam and supercharger.’
‘Ye gods! … This one must do at least 200 an hour.’
‘Only
