Malevil, Page 46

  I explained that what struck me most about it personally was the absurdity of Fulbert’s claims. In my opinion, his letter was a reflection of the neurotic, megalomaniac element in his character. It was fairly clear that he had decided to have himself elected bishop so that he could claim precedence over me, ordain Gazel, and thereby eliminate me as an ecclesiastical rival. There was something rather childish in this insistence on being king of the castle, as it were. Instead of trying to make La Roque safe against possible marauders, which would be no mean task, he was engaging in a struggle for power with me, the very person who had warned him of the danger. And he was engaging in that struggle, moreover, without being in any position to win it, since his secular arm consisted solely of Armand, and Armand was confined to his bed, struck down by some mysterious ailment.

  I was inclined to laugh at the whole thing, but the others didn’t think it funny at all. They exploded with indignation. Malevil had been insulted. You might almost have thought that its flag (an object with no more than a potential existence, be it said) had been spat upon. Fulbert had dared attack the Abbé of Malevil, and therefore the assembly that had elected him!

  “Who does he think he is, trying to come and interfere with us, that slimy toad turd,” cried little Colin, who was by no means a lover of coarse language. Meyssonnier was of the opinion that we should go over and kick the contemptible wretch where it would hurt. And Peyssou announced that next Sunday, if that Gazel had the nerve to appear here, he would push his holy water sprinkler you know where for him. In short, you might have thought you were back in the days of the Club, when Meyssonnier’s Catholic League stood at the foot of Malevil’s ramparts, with Emmanuel’s Protestant outlaws up above, all bombarding one another with the coarsest epithets they could muster (many of them very inventively turned) before engaging in heroic battle. “Handle and all,” Peyssou added with a thump on the table. “I’ll ram it right up him handle and all if he sets foot here.”

  Somewhat astonished by this explosion of patriotism, I then read the assembly the reply I had drafted during the afternoon, and which I was now submitting for their approval.

  To Fulbert le Naud,

  Curé of La Roque.

  Dear Fulbert,

  According to the oldest documents pertaining to Malevil in our possession, which date from the 15th century, there was indeed at that time a Bishop of La Roque, who was enthroned in 1452 in the town church by the Lord of Malevil, Baron of La Roque.

  It is also clear, however, from these same documents, that the Abbé of Malevil was in no way subject to the Bishop of La Roque, but was chosen by the Lord of Malevil from among those of his relatives of the male sex resident with him in the castle. In general, a younger son or brother. The sole Lord of Malevil to depart from this rule was Sigismond, Baron of La Roque, who having neither son nor brother, appointed himself Abbé of Malevil in 1476. From that day onward, right up until our own times, the Lord of Malevil has always been as of right Abbé of Malevil, even though the exercise of his ministry has on occasions been delegated to a chaplain.

  There can be no doubt that Emmanuel Comte, as present proprietor of the castle of Malevil, has inherited the prerogatives attached to the castellany. Such is the judgment of the assembly of the faithful, which has unanimously confirmed him in the title and the functions of Abbé of Malevil.

  On the other hand, it is not possible for Malevil to recognize the legitimacy of a bishop whose nomination it has not requested from His Holiness and who has moreover not been enthroned in a town that falls within the purlieu of its domain.

  Malevil intends, in short, to preserve the integrality of its historic rights over its fief of La Roque, even though in its lively desire for peace and friendly relations with its neighbors it does not at present envisage any direct action intended to vindicate them.

  We nevertheless consider that any person inhabiting La Roque who considers himself or herself wronged by the de facto authority established within the town may at any time make appeal to us to have any such wrongs redressed.

  We think also that the town of La Roque should remain at all times accessible to us, and that no gate of the town may remain unopened to a messenger from Malevil without such action constituting a grave insult to the castellany and its assembly.

  Yours with sincerest best wishes for your welfare,

  Emmanuel Comte,

  Abbé of Malevil.

  I must emphasize here that in my mind this letter was no more than a sort of practical joke, its intention being to put Fulbert in his place by confronting his megalomania with a grotesque parody of itself. Perhaps I should spell it out even more clearly: At no point did I ever believe myself to be in any way the heir of the former lords of Malevil. Nor was I any more serious about the vassalage of La Roque. However, I read my letter out with a completely deadpan face, assuming that this would only add to the assembly’s appreciation of its humor.* (Possibly I am—as Emmanuel claims—“impervious to humor,” but I am not at all certain that this letter was entirely “a sort of practical joke” in Emmanuel’s mind. [Note added by Thomas.])

  I was wrong. The humor escaped them totally. They admired the tone of the letter (“It’s a real knockout,” Colin said) and were genuinely wild with enthusiasm about its content. They demanded to see the documents on which it was based, and I was obliged to go and fetch those venerable relics from the glass-fronted shelves behind me, together with the translations into modern French that I had once had made.

  They became wild with excitement. The passages establishing La Roque as our fief had to be read over and over, as well as Sigismond’s historic decision to appoint himself Abbé of Malevil.

  “Well, there’s a thing,” Peyssou said. “You know, I’d never have thought we had the right to elect you the way we did, not really. You ought to have shown us all this before!”

  The antiquity of our rights plunged them into a frenzy. “Five centuries,” Colin said, “just think of it! Five centuries we’ve had the right to be Abbé of Malevil!”

  Meyssonnier, honest as ever, albeit against his will, was forced to point out that there had been the French Revolution.

  “Oh, but that lasted no time at all,” Colin said. “There’s no comparison!”

  The notion that really excited them beyond anything, however, was that of the enthronement of the bishop in our fief of La Roque by the Lord of Malevil. At Peyssou’s request, I explained what the word entailed as best I could.

  “Well then, Emmanuel,” Peyssou said, “it’s all as clear as could be. If you haven’t enthroned Fulbert, then he’s no more a bishop than my backside.” (Vigorous approbation.) And after that the only thing they were prepared to discuss was how and when we could mount an expedition against La Roque to avenge the insult done to us and to re-establish suzerainty over our rightful fief.

  I listened in silence to this maelstrom of nationalistic passion I had unleashed. As I saw it, the moment had passed when it would have been possible to tell the assembly that my letter had been intended as a parody. They were too inflamed by now, and certainly wouldn’t have thanked me for it. However, I attempted to quiet the more ardent among them and finally succeeded, with the help of Thomas and Meyssonnier, then of Colin, once it had been formally and solemnly decreed that we would never abandon “our friends in La Roque” (Colin). And that in the event of their being molested or wronged, Malevil would intervene on their behalf, as I had already stated in my letter.

  Gazel came again next day. I handed him the letter without a word, and he rode off. Two days later the ADZ was finished and the wheat was ripe for harvest.

  It was a long and arduous business, because we had to cut it with sickles, tie it into sheaves by hand, cart the sheaves back up into the castle, set up a threshing ground in the outer enclosure, and thresh it with hand flails. It was an operation that entailed a great deal of sheer physical hard work, and when it was over we had all of us acquired a new understanding of the Biblical phrase about earning
your bread by the sweat of your brow.

  Despite everything, however, we were able to tell ourselves that it had been well worth the trouble. Even taking into account the quarter ruined by the looters, the harvest worked out at an increase of ten sacks for every one planted. In all, twenty-two hundredweights of grain. Not very much in comparison with our very considerable reserves (mainly derived, where wheat was concerned, from the booty provided by L’Étang), but a very great deal when considered as our first harvest since the day it happened, and as a promise for the future.

  The night that followed the harvest I was awakened by a slight sound somewhere to one side of me, or more precisely by my inability at first, in my half-sleeping state, to understand what was causing it. But when my eyes opened, even without being able to see anything, since it was a moonless night, I realized that it was Evelyne, over on the sofa near the window, sobbing quietly into her pillow.

  “Are you crying?” I asked in a quiet voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  A series of muffled sobs and sniffs followed, then: “Because I’m unhappy.”

  “Come and tell me about it.”

  She was off the sofa and onto my bed in one bound, and she snuggled into my arms. Although she had filled out a little, she still seemed incredibly light to me! No more than the weight of a kitten on my shoulder. She continued to sob.

  “Evelyne, you’re soaking me! It’s like being under a waterfall! Come on, mop it up!”

  I handed her my handkerchief and she was forced to stop her sobbing, even if only for as long as it took to blow her nose.

  “Well?”

  Silence. Sniffs.

  “Blow your nose, for goodness’ sake, instead of sniffing like that!”

  “I have.”

  “Blow it again.”

  She did as she was told, and to judge by the sound, without success. The sniffing began again immediately. Nervous presumably. Like her cough, like her sobs, like the shudders shaking her body. Perhaps like her asthma. Since the scene in the wheat patch and Momo’s death she had already had one terrible attack. I wondered whether this meant there was another on the way. I put my arms around her. “Come on now,” I said, “tell me what it’s all about.”

  Silence. “All those dead people,” she said at last very quietly.

  I was surprised. I hadn’t been expecting that. “Is that why you’re crying?”

  “Yes.” And when I didn’t speak, she went on: “Why? Does that surprise you, Emmanuel?”

  “Yes. I thought you were going to say I didn’t love you any more.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You love me just as much, I can tell that. The only difference is that you’re strict with me now. But I like it better really.”

  “You like it better?”

  Silence. She was thinking, concentrating so hard on trying to unravel her exact feelings that she had forgotten to sniff. “Yes,” she said at last. “I feel much more sort of safe.”

  I made a mental note of that but said nothing.

  “Those people that were killed—couldn’t we have let them come and live at Malevil? There’s plenty of room here.”

  I shook my head in the dark, as though she could see me. “It isn’t a question of room but of provisions. There are eleven of us now. If we had to, we might be able to find food for two or three extra people, but not for twenty.”

  “All right,” she said after a moment, “but then we should have let them eat our wheat.”

  “And what about the others?”

  “What others?”

  “The others who will come after them. I suppose we’d have to let them kill our pigs, eat up all our cows, and take away our horses. There’d always be plenty of grass left for us to eat.”

  This sarcasm was wasted on Evelyne, however. “You said yourself that the wheat harvest wasn’t all that big.”

  “No, not compared with our reserve stocks, thank goodness. But all the same, twenty-two hundredweight sacks of grain, that will make quite a few loaves, you know.”

  “But we could have managed without it if we’d had to! You said so!” she shot back very quickly in an accusing voice.

  Every word I ever said was engraved permanently in her memory, it seemed. “If we had to, yes. But how do we know that next year’s harvest isn’t going to be disastrous? It’s always safer to have a little in hand. Even if it’s only so that we can help our friends in La Roque if they need it.”

  “And the people in the wheatfield, why couldn’t we help them?”

  “Because there were too many of them, I’ve already told you.”

  “There are just as many people in La Roque.”

  “Yes, but after all, we know them.”

  And since she didn’t answer, I began listing them: “Pimont Agnès Pimont, Lanouaille, Judith, and Marcel, who looked after you.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and old Pougès. We haven’t been seeing him lately, old Pougès.”

  It was true. It was a good ten days since we’d last watched the old reprobate soaking the ends of his mustache in our wine. And that way of ending an argument, without any conclusions drawn, without any admissions being made, was wholly typical of Evelyne. Apart from which, I was very impressed by the grownup way she’d argued. Nothing childish in her remarks. And her French had improved too. Ever since I had been “strict with her,” she had stopped taking refuge in childishness.

  “Right,” I said, “the hearing’s over. Back into your bed. I want to go to sleep.”

  She clung on. “Can’t I stay just a little longer, Emmanuel?” she said, slipping back into her baby voice.

  “No, you cannot. Off you go.”

  She went, and she went quietly. In fact she even obeyed with a sort of zest, as though there lay before her the prospect of a whole life spent beside me in a state of ecstatic obedience.

  All the same, there are things about her I don’t understand. She talked about the people in the wheatfield, but she didn’t mention Momo.

  But then, neither did La Menou ever talk about Momo. The day he was killed I had made many private predictions to myself about what her reactions might be; but none of them proved accurate. She had not sunk into stupefied despair. She had relinquished not one jot of her status in the community. She still ruled as tyrannically as ever over the female denizens of the castle, preferably pecking the one who was oldest and most given to cackling, but when the need arose, albeit more cautiously, not sparing the two pullets, and Catie more than Miette, since Catie had quite a sharp beak too. Nor had she allowed herself to waste away. Her fork and glass were just as active as before, even though there could be no hope of her ever getting any fatter. And lastly, she was still as scrupulously clean, a tiny well-scoured little skeleton of a figure in which everything, muscles and organs, had been reduced to its minimum, the hair pulled tightly back over the little skull, the black smock well brushed, the rows of safety pins still decorating a low square neckline revealing the flattest of flat chests. And finally, she was still trotting about just as perkily, as nimbly, as quickly as ever, with her thin scraggy neck stretched out ahead of her.

  It was always either Catie or Miette who set the table and La Menou who laid the napkins at our various places. For hygienic reasons, so that we wouldn’t use one another’s, she had made marks on them that only she could decipher. And one morning as I was about to sit down I noticed with some concern that someone had set Momo’s place again at the end of the table and that there was a napkin in the plate. I saw that Colin had noticed as well; he was making apprehensive signals at me with his eyes and head. However, having finally sat down, I counted the places and realized that there were in fact only eleven, as usual now, not the twelve I had expected. Besides, it was Catie who had set the table that morning, and I couldn’t believe she’d made a mistake. And indeed, when I leaned forward to question her with my eyes, she waved one forefinger in a discreet negative gesture, as though to say, Don’t say anything.

&n
bsp; Everyone was now seated, with the exception of Jacquet, who was standing at his usual place, arms hanging out from his sides, golden brown eyes misted with anguish, staring down at the awful void where his plate should be. He looked across at me, eyes humbly asking what crime he had committed that I should deprive him of his food like this. His whole attitude was that of a good-natured dog subjected to a cruel master as a puppy, then adopted by a family that has made much of him, constantly trembling at the thought that he might one day find himself suddenly deprived of this new happiness, a happiness of which he feels unworthy and which he is perpetually afraid may turn out to have been a dream. It wasn’t that Jacquet found it unjust that I should deprive him of his food. If I had done so, then that meant it must be just. And he was quite prepared, when the meal was over, to go out and work with us as usual, with nothing in his belly. His only fear was that this deprivation might be a prelude to banishment.

  I smiled to reassure him, and was about to intervene when La Menou said gruffly, “Are you looking for your place, my lad? It’s here.” And she indicated with a jab of her chin the place where Momo used to sit.

  A great silence fell. Jacquet, totally bewildered, looked at me. I nodded in confirmation, and he set off to walk the length of the table and sit down in Momo’s old place, painfully conscious the whole time—poor Jacquet who had a horror of attracting attention—that every eye in the room was fixed on him.

  As soon as Jacquet was seated, Colin tactfully began a discussion. The squares of cardboard over the traps in the ADZ were worrying him. If it rained, then the earth over them would hold the water and they would rot. And even before that they would become less rigid when damp and sag under the weight of the earth. So any assailants would immediately see the traps as a regular pattern of hollows. Peyssou suggested that we should pierce holes in the cardboard so the rain could drain straight through into the traps themselves. And Meyssonnier suggested a system of two pieces of plywood supported by a slender central lath which would collapse under an enemy’s weight.