Malevil, Page 4

  I was already in my funeral clothes, and anyway I had no wish to start playing catch-as-catch-can with Momo from oak tree to oak tree. La Menou panted up to join me. I attempted to parley. Although I was six years younger than Momo, he looked upon me as my uncle’s double, so my authority over him was almost that of a father.

  Even so, my efforts met with no success. I might have been talking to a wall. Momo didn’t yell back his usual “Eevee ahone fahodsake!” He said nothing. Just looked down at me and kept moaning, his black eyes shining out from among the tiny spring leaves.

  The only reply I could get was one “Hon’t ho!” (I won’t go), not yelled but uttered in a low determined voice while his head, torso, and hands all rotated firmly from side to side in a mime of negation.

  I renewed my arguments. “Now come on, Momo, do be sensible. You must have a wash before you go to the church.”

  “Hon’t ho! Hon’t ho!”

  “You don’t want to go to church with us?”

  “Hon’t ho! Hon’t ho!”

  “But why not? You always like going to church.”

  Sitting perched on a big branch, he waved his hands in front of him in agitated dismissal of the whole idea, all the time peering down at me with those sad eyes through the little shiny oak leaves. And that was that. I could get no further response from him, just that sad gaze.

  “We’ll have to leave him,” La Menou said. She laid the clothes she had remembered to bring with her at the bottom of the tree. “He’s not coming down now, no matter what we do, not till we’ve gone.”

  She had already turned and was walking back up the paddock. Quick glance at my watch. High time we left. I thought of that long social ceremony before me, almost wholly unrelated to anything I myself felt. Momo was right. Why couldn’t I stay there sobbing in a tree, instead of going off to join my tearful sisters in a grotesque simulacrum of filial piety.

  I climbed back up the slope of the paddock in my turn. It seemed horribly steep. I looked down at my feet and noticed with surprise that the pasture was dotted with bright green tufts of new grass. In the first few days of sun they had sprung up with incredible exuberance. It occurred to me that in less than a month now my uncle would need me to help on the hay.

  It was a thought that ordinarily filled me with joy, and the odd thing was that the joy even then began to well up. And then suddenly it was as though I had been physically struck. I stopped dead in the middle of the sloping field. The tears were running down my cheeks.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Things begin to move quicker. The next milestone is only a short way on. A year after the accident, Maître Gaillac called me to say he would like me to come and see him at his office in town.

  When I arrived at the appointed time, the lawyer himself was not available, and the head clerk showed me into an empty office. Since I had been asked to “make myself comfortable” while I waited, I sat down in one of those great leather armchairs in which so many behinds tensed by the dread of financial loss had rested before mine.

  Time became vacant, then stopped. My eyes wandered around the room. I found it extremely depressing. Beyond Maître Gaillac’s desk, the entire wall was covered from top to bottom by a multitude of tiny drawers filled with the documents of past cases. They made me think of those little pigeonholes to which people’s ashes are consigned in a columbarium. Man’s mania for filing everything away.

  The curtains were bottle green, the material covering the walls was bottle green, the filing system was dark green, even the leather covering the desktop was dark green. And on it, beside a monumental inkstand made of imitation gold, there stood a macabre knickknack that had always fascinated me: a dead mouse imprisoned inside a block of transparent material that looked like glass. The mouse too had been filed away.

  I imagined that it must have been caught red-pawed nibbling at some document or other and had been condemned, by way of punishment, to a life sentence embedded in plastic. I bent forward and picked it up, the mouse and its transparent cell. It was surprisingly heavy. And then I remembered having seen Maître Gaillac’s father, during a visit to the office thirty years before with my uncle, using it as a paperweight. I stared in at it, that tiny rodent condemned to all eternity. When Maître Gaillac, Junior, retired, he would bequeath it in his turn to his son, I supposed, along with the drawers of his columbarium and the graveyard of old files in his attic. I found it all very sad, those generations of lawyers handing on that same little mouse down the line. I don’t know why, but it made me very aware of death.

  Maître Gaillac, Junior, came in just then. Dark, tall, sallow, and already graying. He greeted me with slightly weary politeness. Then, turning his back on me, he opened one of his little drawers. From it he extracted a file, then from the file a letter sealed with wax, which he pressed between his fingers with a weary, furtive gesture before handing it to me, as though he was amazed by its thinness.

  “There you are, Monsieur Comte.”

  And then in his slightly flaccid voice he began on a long meandering explanation rendered totally pointless by the few words I had already read on the envelope in my uncle’s studied handwriting: “To be handed to my nephew Emmanuel Comte one year after my death if, as I suppose, he has taken over the management of Les Sept Fayards.”

  I had a few errands to run in town before going home, and I carried my uncle’s letter around with me in my jacket pocket the whole of that afternoon. I didn’t open it till that evening, after dinner, in the seclusion of the little office in the dovecote tower of Les Sept Fayards. My hand shook slightly as I opened the envelope with a daggerlike paperknife my uncle had given me.

  Emmanuel,

  This evening, for no good reason, since I am in good health, I have been thinking about my death, and I have decided to write this letter. It makes me feel very strange when I think that you will read it when I have gone and that you will be looking after the horses instead of me. As they say, everyone has to die someday. Which simply proves that “they” are stupid, since I can see no necessity for it at all.

  Les Sept Fayards is not the whole of what I left you. There is also my Bible and my ten-volume Larousse dictionary.

  Of course I know you’re no longer a believer (and whose fault is that?), but do read the Bible now and then nevertheless, in memory of me. It’s a book in which you have to go deeper than just the way people behave; it’s the wisdom there that counts.

  While I was alive, no one but myself ever opened my Larousse. When you open it now, you will see why.

  And lastly, Emmanuel, I want to tell you that without you my life would have been empty, and that you made me very happy.

  Do you remember the day after you ran away from home, the day I came to find you in Malevil. My love to you.

  Samuel

  I read the letter through twice. My uncle’s generosity of spirit made me feel ashamed. He had always given me everything, and yet it was he who was thanking me. That “you made me very happy” was enough to bring a lump into my throat. Just a clumsy enough little phrase in itself, and yet I didn’t see how I could ever think myself deserving of the immense affection behind the words.

  I read the letter a third time, and that “and whose fault is that?” jumped out at me this time. Once again I recognized my uncle’s allusive manner of communication. He was leaving me absolutely free to fill in the name on the dotted line his question left. My father, perhaps, because he had allowed himself to be converted to the “wrong” religion? My mother, with her poverty of heart? The Abbé Lebas, with his sexual inquisitions?

  I also wondered why my uncle had alluded to that visit of his to the clubroom in Malevil the day after I ran away. Was it to give me an example of a specific time when I had made him “very happy”? Or was there some other notion lurking at the back of his mind, something he had been unable to make himself express openly? I was too familiar with my uncle’s preference for the indirect hint to make up my mind on the point in a hurry.

  I
pulled my uncle’s heavily laden key ring from my pocket and immediately located the key of the big oak armoire. I opened the two massive doors, and there, framed by tier upon tier of shelves crammed with files, I saw the Larousse and the Bible on a shelf of their own, fourteen volumes in all, since the Bible itself was a monumental edition bound in rich brown tooled leather. Four volumes of it. I took them all out, laid them on a table, and slowly leafed through them. The illustrations impressed me immediately. There was an air of genuine grandeur about them.

  It had not occurred to the artist for a moment to try to beautify his characters, no matter how holy they were supposed to be. Very much the contrary. He had preserved in them the rugged, wild aspect of savage tribal chieftains. Looking at them, so bony and thin, with such roughly hewn features, all barefooted, you could almost smell the reek of greasy sheep’s wool, of camel dung, of desert sand. And a sense of the highly charged and violent life they lived shimmered all around them. Even God himself, as the artist had envisaged Him, was no different in kind from these rough nomads who counted their wealth in terms of children and flocks. He was merely bigger and even more savage of aspect than they, and one glance at Him was enough to make it clear that He had created these men “in His own image.” Unless, of course, it was the opposite.

  On the very last page of the Bible, written in pencil in my uncle’s writing, I noticed a long list of words that immediately intrigued me. Here are the first ten: actodrome, albergier, aléochare, alpargate, anastome, bactridie, balanobius, baobab, barbacou, barbastelle.

  The arbitrary and artificial nature of this list was evident at a glance. I pulled over the first volume of the Larousse and opened it at actodrome. And there between the two pages, secured by two tiny strips of Scotch tape to the center of the left-hand one, was a ten-thousand-franc Treasury bond. More bonds, varying in value, were distributed throughout the ten volumes, always facing one of the outlandish words my uncle had listed in the Bible.

  Though not staggering, the total was nevertheless something of a shock: 315,000 francs. It is worth noting that this posthumous gift did not at any point fill me with a sense of ownership. My feeling was more that of having been made the trustee of this capital, as I had already been of Les Sept Fayards, and that I was in duty bound to give my uncle an account of the use to which I put it.

  My decision was taken so quickly that I even wondered whether it had not in fact already existed even before my discovery. I put it into effect immediately. I remember I glanced at my wristwatch. It was half past nine, and I experienced a moment of childish delight at discovering that it was still not too late for a telephone call. I looked up Grimaud’s number in my uncle’s address book and dialed it there and then.

  “Monsieur Grimaud?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Emmanuel Comte. I used to be headmaster at Malejac school.”

  “What can I do for you, Headmaster?”

  The voice was warm and friendly. Not at all the sort of voice I’d expected.

  “May I ask you one question, Monsieur Grimaud? Is Malevil castle still for sale?”

  A silence, then the same voice, but guarded, circumspect, a hint curter this time: “As far as I know, yes.”

  It was my turn to let silence work for me, and Grimaud eventually went on: “May I ask you, Headmaster, if you are any relation to Samuel Comte of Les Sept Fayards?”

  I had expected the question and knew what I was going to answer. “I am his nephew, but I didn’t know my uncle knew you.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Grimaud said in the same cold and cautious voice. “Was it he who gave you my telephone number?”

  “He is deceased.”

  “Ah. I didn’t know,” Grimaud said in a different tone.

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. There were no condolences, no regrets. I continued: “Monsieur Grimaud, could we meet, do you think?”

  “But of course. Whenever you like, Headmaster.” And the voice was once more as affable and warm as at the beginning.

  “Tomorrow? Late morning?”

  He didn’t even pretend to be very busy. “Yes, of course, come when you like. I’m always here.”

  “At eleven then?”

  “Whenever you like, Headmaster. I am entirely at your disposal. But eleven is fine, if that suits you.”

  And so obliging and courteous had he suddenly become that it took me a good five minutes to wind up a conversation whose essence had been expressed in a few short seconds.

  I hung up and sat gazing at the red curtains drawn across the windows of my uncle’s office. Two contradictory emotions were doing battle inside me. I was overjoyed at my decision and stupefied at the sheer size of what I was undertaking.

  An absentee landlord, a shady agent, a determined purchaser; a week later Malevil changed hands. The six years that followed were crammed to the utmost limit with a myriad activities.

  I kept up the pressure on all fronts at the same time: the horses at Les Sept Fayards, the clearing of the Malevil land, and the restoration of the castle. I was thirty-five when I threw myself into the last two tasks, forty-one by the time I had accomplished them.

  Early to bed and early to rise, I was only sorry I didn’t have several lives so that I could devote them all to my undertakings. And Malevil, throughout all those labors, Malevil was my reward, my one love, my madness. Under the Second Empire the bankers had their ballet dancers. I had Malevil. Though I did have my ballet dancer too, as I shall relate shortly.

  Buying Malevil was by no means a folly. It was in fact a necessity if I was to expand my uncle’s business, since family discord had forced me to sell La Grange Forte in order to hand over their share of the inheritance to my sisters. And besides, I was by now hard pressed for space at Les Sept Fayards to keep my ever-increasing number of horses: those I bred myself, those I bought for resale, and those I boarded. My intention, when I bought Malevil, was to divide my “stable” in two, so that half could be moved to the castle along with La Menou, Momo, and myself, while the other half could remain at Les Sept Fayards in the care of Germain, my hired hand.

  So the restoration of Malevil was not entirely the disinterested preservation of a masterpiece of feudal architecture.

  Moreover, impressive though it is, and strongly as I am attached to it, I freely admit that Malevil’s main attraction is scarcely its intrinsic beauty. A fact that undoubtedly differentiates it from the other castles of the district, all of which are harmoniously proportioned, contoured in eye-pleasing curves, and merge infinitely more satisfactorily into the landscape.

  For the landscape around here is a smiling one, with cool streams, sloping meadows, green hills topped with chestnut woods. And in the midst of all those gentle curves Malevil sticks up like a sore stone thumb, savage and perpendicular.

  On one side of the double stream of the Rhunes, which must in the Middle Ages have been one vast river, there rises a sheer cliff. Halfway up it, and overhung to the north by the upper half, stands Malevil. The cliff makes it inaccessible on all sides other than by the one road that slopes up to it from the west. And I am certain that the embankment supporting the road was man-made, constructed for the sole purpose of providing a way up to that rocky platform only after someone had decided that the castle and its little hamlet were to be built there.

  On the far side of the Rhunes valley, facing Malevil, stands the Château des Rouzies, also medieval, but elegantly, moderately medieval, also a castle rather than just a great country house, but embellished with low, nicely placed round towers that charm the eye and wear even their crenelations with the air of a well-designed decoration.

  One glance at Les Rouzies is enough to tell you that its opposite number, Malevil, is a stranger here. Because although every one of its stones certainly came from local quarries, its architectural style is wholly imported. Malevil is English. It was built by our invaders during the Hundred Years’ War, and once served as a center of operations for the Black Prince.

&nb
sp; The English, far from the mists of home, must have enjoyed being in this country with its bright sun, its wine, its dark-haired girls. And they tried to make sure they stayed. An intention everywhere manifest in Malevil. It was conceived as an absolutely impregnable fortress from which a mere handful of armed men could hold a vast region in thrall.

  No curves, no elegance. Everything has its use. Take the gate tower, for example. The entrance to Les Rouzies is a vaulted arch flanked with two little round towers: a construction as elegant in outline as it is harmonious in its proportions. At Malevil, however, the English simply left a gateway with a semicircular arch in the battlemented wall, then to one side of it put up a two-story rectangular building whose sheer face, naked and forbidding, is pierced with tall arrow slits. It’s big, it’s square, and militarily speaking, as I know beyond doubt, it is murderously efficient. Beneath the ramparts and the gate tower they then hewed out a moat in the living rock twice as wide as the one around Les Rouzies.

  Once through this main gate, you are still not inside the castle proper but in an outer enclosure about fifty yards by thirty that once contained the little village housing the castle’s retainers. There is a piece of astute military thinking behind this. The castle was certainly a protection for the village, but it was also using the village as an extra defense. Any enemy who succeeded in overwhelming the gate tower and the outer wall would then face a very risky advance through the narrow village alleys.

  And even if the enemy won that battle, his troubles were by no means over. He had simply run up against a second line of ramparts running like the first from the overhanging cliff to the steep bluff below, which defended—and still defends—the castle proper.

  This battlemented rampart is much higher than the outside one, and its moat much deeper. Unlike the first moat, moreover, this second one presents the attacker not with a convenient bridge but with the additional obstacle of a drawbridge topped by a low square tower.