next to each town someone’s name. Against Clermont-Ferrand was the name ‘Michette, René’, underlined by Palfy. This addressee was to be given a second sealed envelope, which he would open and reveal the important person whose intervention would save Jean, if it ever became necessary.
‘I can’t show you any more,’ Jean said regretfully to Madame, reclaiming his property as Palfy returned, looking yellow and sheepish.
‘You had it?’
‘You gave it to me this morning, remember. For safekeeping,’ Jean lied, to save face for his friend.
Madame Michette had seen the list for long enough to scan the names.
‘I know some of these people,’ she said meaningfully. ‘They’re acquaintances.’
‘Yes,’ Palfy said, ‘but we must ask you to be very discreet. Since you’re clearly a trustworthy person, we can tell you that great plans are being made. The Germans have not won the war, as some benighted souls imagine. They have lost it. It is for that defeat that my friend and I are working. We are, I’ll be completely frank and open with you, secret agents.’
‘My lips are sealed!’ Madame Michette breathed, closing her eyes and pressing her hand to her stomach, which was making a joyful gurgling sound.
Jean tried very hard not to laugh. Madame Michette led them to a small ground-floor office from where, through a spyhole, they could monitor her customers arriving and leaving. As soon as they were settled, they fell fast asleep in their armchairs, full of lunch and exhausted from their recent forced march, and were undisturbed by the noise of the knocker and the comings and goings in the hall. Her uniformed customers, that day at least, refrained from behaving like conquering heroes. They came, mostly in groups of three or four and pushing a blushing virgin ahead of them, and the authority of Madame and her assistant madam impressed them deeply. There were no brawls, nor Bacchic outbursts.
Let us make the most of the moment while our two heroes slumber to satisfy the reader’s curiosity about a point of history that the author has, in his Machiavellian way, so far left blank. What happened when the twelve rifles of the SS Grenadiers took aim in the little village square where Constantin Palfy, Jean Arnaud, Francis Picallon and the surveyor Jacques Graindorge had been lined up to be shot? Of course, apart from themselves and Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt, no one really thought they would be shot. We would not have undertaken the narrative of Jean Arnaud’s long sentimental education if we had had to call a halt at the age of twenty because a uniformed idiot who played the violin had ordered a platoon of his men to execute four Frenchmen after a good lunch. No. Jean Arnaud and the strange Constantin Palfy will have a hard life, but it is Karl Schmidt who will be the first to die, which no one, except for his wife and children, will greatly mind. But let us abandon Karl Schmidt, whose only virtue was to add a grotesque element to a macabre spectacle. The thing we need to know is that the SS Grenadiers did take aim at our friends. It was a ghastly, melancholy minute and few who have survived such a thing can bring themselves to talk about it. Twelve black holes and an NCO, his boots squarely planted where he stands, revolver in hand for the coup de grâce, are an image you don’t forget. If you escape, by a miracle, that image awakens a deeper respect for life, and the three-line notices announcing the death of a hostage jump out of the news with a significance so harrowing that it can become unbearable. What does one think about at such a moment? It is as difficult for the survivor to remember as it is for anyone else to imagine. If we were to ask Jean Arnaud, he would answer, ‘I don’t know. Nothing, maybe. Two or three fleeting memories: Maman in the kitchen of her house, holding the iron up to her cheek, Papa limping across the garden, Antoinette showing me her bottom at the foot of the cliffs, Chantal in our bedroom in Rue Lepic, or Geneviève, my real mother, embarking at Cannes to escape from the war. But all of it very fast, very superficial. Nothing, in fact. And not even a thought for my soul’s salvation. No, really, nothing dignified or interesting, not the sort of thing you read in classical tragedies, romantic plays, or heroic novels.’ Come to the point, I hear you say. But the author cannot help but go on hesitating to say what saved Jean and Palfy that day, so utterly improbable does it seem here. It would be so much easier to explain that it was all a poor and violent joke on the Obersturmführer’s part to test the four Frenchmen’s equanimity, or, more prosaically, to divert himself after a campaign so rapid that the SS units intended for the fiercest fighting had not had to fire a shot in anger. Valiant warriors who had advanced with the thought of heroic battles to come had experienced considerable frustration. They had been drilled for war, not sightseeing. The firing squad was thus not merely a macabre joke. A few seconds longer, and Jean and Palfy would have been shot. So we are left with no alternative but to invoke Providence, that benevolent entity that sometimes stoops to take a hand in human destinies and delay deaths without giving reasons, just to amuse itself, or so it seems, to toy with existences that are no more or less dear to it than others and that it only identifies by caprice or a taste for sarcasm.
On this occasion, then, Providence appeared in the guise of an open-topped car belonging to the German army, an elegant high-bodied vehicle driven by a helmeted chauffeur whose chinstrap was immaculately placed. On the rear seat sat three individuals: two French soldiers in forage caps, flanking a Wehrmacht colonel. They had come from the south and been on their way for more than an hour, which showed how far behind the lines the tankettes were. But was there still a line on 20 June 1940? One wonders. The car was crossing the square when the colonel caught sight of the drama in which the Obersturmführer was already losing interest. He tapped the driver’s shoulder. The car braked in a cloud of dust. The Unterscharführer ordered his platoon to about-turn and present arms. Karl Schmidt attempted to inject an offhand note into his salute, but the colonel ordered him to approach.
‘What do you think you’re doing? Are you shooting civilians?’
‘They’re irregulars, Herr Oberst.’
‘They are not, because there aren’t any. And if there were, they would first of all be answerable to a court martial, not to an SS lieutenant.’
‘Herr Oberst, I assure you that they are dangerous bandits.’
The colonel sighed and stepped from his car to approach the men lined up in front of the Café des Amis.
‘Will you excuse me,’ he said in French to the two prisoners who flanked him, pale and with clenched teeth, on the rear seat.
The colonel approached Jacques Graindorge, who was seized again by a mad hope.
‘Were you sheltering these soldiers?’ he asked scornfully. ‘If one may call them soldiers …’
‘I thought they were Germans, General! I’m a friend of Germany, General, of Greater Germany, General.’
‘A friend of Germany ought to be able to tell the difference between a colonel and a general and a pair of khaki trousers and a pair of field-grey trousers. Or alternatively he’s an idiot, but even if he is we aren’t going to shoot every idiot on earth – we’d be here for years.’
One of the prisoners got out of the car and walked up to the colonel. Had it not been for his uniform, he could have been taken for a German: a tall Celt with curly blond hair, eyes of a clear blue, hollow cheeks.
‘Colonel, will you allow me to ask these men a question?’
‘Of course, my dear fellow.’
The man stared at the prisoners in turn, with great concentration.
‘Are there any Bretons among you?’
‘I am Anglo-Serb,’ Palfy said.
‘I’m
