A King Alone Read online

  •

  In 1843, ’44, and ’45, Monsieur V. used this beech quite a bit. Monsieur V. was from Chichiliane, a commune about twenty kilometers from here by a twisted road, at the bottom of a deep valley. No one goes there, they go elsewhere, to Clelles (in the other direction), to Mens, or to countless other places even farther away, but not to Chichiliane. What would a person do there were he to go? What is there to do in Chichiliane? Nothing. It’s just like here. Elsewhere, too, of course; but elsewhere, whether to the east or the west, there can be things to discover, copses, crossroads. Twenty-one kilometers in 1843 was far, just over five leagues, and if you went out it was wearing a smock and boots on a plodding hinny. So Chichiliane was no ordinary destination.

  I don’t think there are any V.’s left in Chichiliane. The family hasn’t died out, but there’s no one named V. anymore—neither the café owner nor the grocer—and no one by that name appears on the plaque of the monument to the dead.

  There are some V.’s farther along, if you climb up to the Menet pass (the road takes you through masses of greenery in the midst of which you can make out more than a hundred huge or very beautiful beech trees, but none comparable to the beech near Frédéric’s sawmill), if you go down the Diois hillside, well, yes, there you’ll find some V.’s. The third farm to the right of the road, in the meadows, has a fountain with a spout made from two interlocking roof tiles; there are hollyhocks in a small parish garden and, if it’s summer, or even Easter vacation (but then there could still be frost in the vicinity), you might be able to see, sitting at the foot of the hollyhocks, a young man, very dark, thin, with a sprinkling of beard, all tending to exaggerate the size of his eyes, which are already very wide and lost in thought. Usually (well, when I saw him), he reads; he was reading Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie. He’s a V. He is (well, he was) at the école normale in Valence, or was it Grenoble? And reading Sylvie in that spot is quite odd. You cross under that pass through a tunnel about as “passable” as the former gallery of an abandoned mine, and the Diois hillside on which you emerge up there is a chaotic mix of monstrous whale-blue waves and black jet sprays spurting pine trees onto I don’t know what—an ugly, pinkish rock face, or one that is an insidious gray like the shells of large mollusks; well, the terrestrial equivalent of immense, colliding dark bodies of water that in the midst of a churning cyclone reveal an immeasurable depth. This is why I said that Sylvie, in such a spot, is rather odd because not only is the farm, called the Chirouzes, extremely isolated but its curved walls, its roof, and the way its doors and windows are hidden among huge flying buttresses all make it clear that it is afraid. There are no trees around. All the farm can do is hide in the ground and it’s plain to see that it’s doing just that with all its might: the pastureland behind is higher than the roof. The parish garden is there, just off to the side, fenced in by wire, I believe, and the hollyhocks are there, who knows why, and V. (Amédée), the son, is there, in front of it all. He’s reading Sylvie, by Gérard de Nerval. He was reading Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval when I saw him. I didn’t see his father or mother; I don’t know if he has brothers or sisters; all I know is that he’s a V., that he’s studying at the école normale in Valence or Grenoble, and that he comes back home during school holidays.

  I don’t even know if he’s related to, or a descendent of, that V. from 1843. His is the only family with that name anywhere near Chichiliane.

  I never could find out exactly what the one from 1843 was like. No one could tell me if he was tall or short. I imagine him with a beard, a bit like the beard of the young man reading Nerval, very brown, stiff, bristly, but somewhat sparse, and through which one can almost make out the shape of his chin. Not a nice beard, but a beard—I don’t quite know how to put it—a necessary, indispensable beard. Was he tall? Goodness, he might have been short but in that case he must have been stocky, and surely he had great physical strength.

  I asked my friend Sazerat from Prébois about him. Sazerat has written four or five pamphlets about the regional history of this part of Trièves. In his personal library I found a big illustrated book about Cartouche and Mandrin and werewolves with their different snouts all portrayed in it (not a single canine is missing). There are portraits of two or three stranglers of shepherdesses and lots of documentation about someone named Brachet, a notary from Saint-Baudille who, they say, “stole from the till to please some grand-society dame,” but about my V. from 1843, nothing, not a word.

  Nonetheless, Sazerat knows the story. Everyone knows it. You just have to bring it up yourself; otherwise no one will discuss it. Sazerat told me, “It’s a question of tact. He was considered deranged, crazy. We just try to keep the thing hushed up. We know enough about ourselves to be sure we won’t be stopping buses on the road from one day to the next, but not enough to be sure that, someday, we might not go too far. So it’s best not to talk about those things, best not to draw attention to them.”

  I said, “Oh, please! You’re not telling me everything.”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “What would I be hiding?”

  Obviously. He’s a historian. He hides nothing; he interprets. What happened is more interesting. I think.

  •

  ’43 (1843, obviously). December. Winter had come on so early and so fast that it seemed never to have left. Every day a cold north wind, the clouds gathering in the horseshoe formed by the mountains L’Archat, Le Jocond, La Plainie, Le Mont des Patres, and L’Avers. The clouds that were already dark in October were joined by the even darker clouds of November, then on top of them came those of December, dark and dense. Everything piles up on us; nothing moves. Green at first, the light turns the color of hare innards, then an extraordinary black that, black as it is, has shadows of deep purple. A week ago you could still see the shepherd’s hut on Le Jocond, the edge of the pine forest, the clearing with gentians, a bit of meadow that sits up there. Then the clouds hid it all. So. At first you could still see Préfleuri and the tree trunks tossed out after the cutting, but then the clouds dropped even more and hid Préfleuri and those tree trunks. So. The clouds stopped along the road that goes up to the pass. You could see the maples and the 12:15 stagecoach for Saint-Maurice. There was no snow yet, and people were hurrying to get over the pass in both directions. You could still easily make out the inn (the building is now called “Texaco” because the company has placed ads on its walls), you could see the inn and all the horses that were there to back up the steam drays that were rushing to get across while the road was still passable. The cabriolet from the firm of Colomb and Bernard, hardware dealers from Grenoble, was visible. It was coming down from the pass. Whenever that one returned, you knew that soon the pass would be blocked. Then the clouds covered the road, Texaco, and everything else; they dribbled down onto Bernard’s meadows and the quickset hedge; and though this morning you can still see the twenty or twenty-five houses in the village each with its thick bar of purple shadow beneath the awnings, you can no longer see the arrow atop the steeple’s weathervane because a cloud has sliced it off directly above the South, North, East, West markings.

  The snow begins to fall just after. By noon, everything is covered, everything is erased, there is no world, no sound, nothing. Dense vapors run along the rooftops and cloak the houses; the flutter of falling snow tints the dark windows a cool, blood-rose in which you can see the metronome of a hand wiping the frost from the pane; then a cruel, emaciated face appears, looking out.

  All those faces—whether of men, women, or children—wear fake beards fashioned out of the darkness of the rooms from which they emerge, beards of black raffia that devour their mouths. They all look like priests of the Feathered Serpent, even the Catholic priest, despite the ORA PRO NOBIS inscribed on the lintel over his window.

  One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock; the snow continues to fall. Four o’clock; night; fires are lit in the hearths. Five o’clock, six, seven; lamps are lit: it is snowing. Outside there is no longer earth nor sky, neithe
r village nor mountain; nothing but a crumbling heap of thick, frozen dust from a world that must have exploded. A room in which the fire has gone out is uninhabitable. Everything is uninhabitable, that is, there’s no longer any place to imagine a peacock-colored world, except bed. And even then, huddling under blankets in twos, threes, fours, or sometimes fives. Who could imagine that bodies could be so vast? Why would Chichiliane have come to mind?

  And yet, it was precisely Chichiliane.

  One day, two days, three days, twenty days of snow, until about the sixteenth of December. No one knows the exact date, but in the evening of the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth, Marie Chazottes was not to be found.

  “What do you mean ‘was not to be found’?”

  “She disappeared.”

  “What on earth are you saying?”

  “Vanished as of three o’clock in the afternoon. At first we thought she’d gone to a friend’s house, but no. Or perhaps to another friend’s, but no. No one saw her anywhere.”

  The next day, through snow still falling thick and fast, Bergues is visible passing by on his snowshoes; he goes down by the Protestant cemetery, toward Adrets. Another man is seen going up toward La Plainie by the goat path, and a third rushes off to Saint-Maurice. From there, after searching the valleys, he goes to get the gendarmes.

  For Marie Chazottes has indeed disappeared. She left her house at about three in the afternoon, wearing nothing warmer than a scarf; her mother even had to remind her to put on her clogs; she was heading out in slippers because, she said, she was just going to the shed on the other side of the barn. She went around the corner of the wall and, since then, nothing.

  Some say . . . but of course there are countless stories, while the snow goes on falling the entire month of December.

  Marie Chazottes was twenty or twenty-two years old. It’s hard to know what she looked like because around here, when they say “a beautiful woman” they mean “a fat woman.” Beautiful? You need fat calves, fat thighs, a big bosom, and to be light on your feet; that’s beautiful. Otherwise, why waste your time. You might go as far as to say “She’s not bad” or “She’s pretty,” but never “She’s beautiful.”

  Now that I think about it, Raoul’s mother-in-law is a Chazottes. She’s even the daughter of the aunt of our Marie from ’43, an aunt younger than her niece, very common in these parts. So, there you have it: that woman, and therefore also Raoul’s wife, is a Chazottes. Little Marcel Pugnet is too, by his mother who was the sister of Raoul’s mother-in-law. And the Dumonts, they’re Chazottes as well, by the daughter of the first cousin of Raoul’s mother-in-law.

  In fact, the Dumonts are very handsome men, without a doubt (true, men are not judged in the same way as women). Everyone agrees, in Saint-Maurice, Avers, and Prébois. Their build, their blue eyes, their gait, their friendliness and willingness to help: they’ve got everything going for them. They have a very pretty nose, the same nose you’ll find on little Marcel, along with the blue eyes. The Dumonts, the Pugnets, and Raoul’s wife all have brown hair, a brown rare in these parts: very dark and shiny. And Raoul’s wife, even with the work she does, always outside and in the fields, is still very pale. Not suntanned like everyone else. Her upper arms, which you can see through the sleeves of her blouse, have stayed as white as milk. The Dumonts are really pale, not ruddy or tanned, even though they’re in perfect health. This is how we can, perhaps, imagine Marie Chazottes: a little brunette with blue eyes, white as milk, lively and shapely, like Raoul’s wife.

  All those descendants I just mentioned and who can be seen living today are decent people, perhaps even a bit austere. Likewise, in 1843, no one had thought for a minute that Marie Chazottes could have run off. A gendarme used those words, but he was from the Graisivaudan valley. Anyway, run off with whom? All the boys from the village were still there. And everyone knew she wasn’t seeing anyone. And when her mother had called her back to put on her clogs, she’d been going out in her slippers. So if that was running off, it was running off with an angel!

  No one talked about an angel, but almost. That is, when Bergues and the two other poachers, who knew what they were doing (and knew, too, every nook and cranny where someone could get lost), came back empty-handed, mention was made of the devil. In fact, people talked about him so much that the following Sunday the priest gave a sermon on the subject. There were only some meddling old women to listen; people went out as little as possible. The priest said the devil was an angel, a dark angel but an angel nonetheless. Meaning that if the devil had had something he’d wanted to do with Marie Chazottes, he would have gone about it differently. He has plenty of women among his clientele, but they don’t disappear; on the contrary. If the devil had wanted to bother with Marie Chazottes, he wouldn’t have carried her off. He would have . . .

  Just then they heard a gunshot outside and two screams. The snow hadn’t stopped falling just because it was Sunday, quite the contrary, and the morning was so dark that the light at ten o’clock mass was exactly like the light at the end of vespers.

  “Don’t move,” said the priest to his ten or twelve old women suddenly chilled to the bone.

  He climbed down from the pulpit, made his assistant priest go hide in a confessional, and went to open the door. He was a handsome man. Even when the door was wide open, his burliness blocked the doorway. The church square was deserted.

  “What’s going on?” he cried loudly enough to be heard by the people he could barely make out through the snow and the windows of the Café de la Route. The people came out of the café and said they had no idea.

  “Well, get over here,” said the priest. “You can see I’m wearing a surplice and my shoes have buckles. I’ve women here who need someone to accompany them home.”

  It was while he was accompanying the Martoune woman home that Bergues and two other fellows who’d been having a drink at the café came upon the astounded little group gathered around the man who had just fired the shot. His name was Ravanel, and his name lived on (like all the other names I’m mentioning) because his role in the tragedy turned out to be more complicated than the gunshot that interrupted the priest’s sermon about the devil. The priest was right. This wasn’t about the devil. This was much more worrisome.

  The Martoune woman lives in the Pelousères neighborhood, right on the corner near the Fagot bakery, on a paved street that turns into a small road, then a footpath up to the Black Woods. A very charming neighborhood of detached houses separated by tiny vegetable and flower gardens. At the time of this story, because it was winter and one of the harshest ever, the snow had been falling nonstop for a month and had blanketed the gardens; each house looked like it had been set up twenty meters apart on a single, pure white steppe.

  There, in front of his own barn, stood Ravanel—dazed and trembling with anger—with two of his closest neighbors. And after Bergues, showing great presence of mind, had taken the rifle that still had a bullet to go from his hands, this is what he said.

  “I said to the young fellow” (“the young fellow” was Ravanel Georges, at the time twenty years old and, to judge by the Ravanel who drives trucks today and who is the grandson of this famous Georges, he must have been a rather fat young fellow) “I said to the young fellow, ‘Go check on the piglets.’ There were some suspicious noises (you’ll soon understand why). Out he went. He turned the corner, there, just three meters away. Luckily, I’d stayed by the door looking out the window in it. He turns the corner. He’d just gone around it when I hear him scream. I go out. I round the corner. I find him lying on the ground. Two seconds and, up there, between the Richauds’ house and the Pelouses’, I saw a man go by, running toward Gari’s barn. I got my gun quick and fired at him as he was climbing up toward the little chapel. And there, he disappeared down the sunken lane.”

  Georges was brought home. He was all right and now he was drinking a bit of hyssop liqueur. And this is what he said.

  “I turned the corner. I didn’t see a thing. Not a t
hing. Someone covered my head with a scarf and tossed me on his back like a sack, took a few steps, and was carrying me away. He was carrying me away! But when he was putting the scarf over my face, I lowered my head so that when I got lifted up, instead of the scarf smothering me, it didn’t smother me completely because I could still shout. So he dropped me fast, and I heard Father saying, ‘Capounas! The scoundrel!’ Then Father shot his rifle.”

  He hadn’t made it all the way to the pigsties where the tumult was still going on. They went to find out what was happening, and what they discovered was rather unsavory. One of the pigs was covered in blood. No one had tried to slit its throat, which would have been understandable. The pig had been slashed all over, more than a hundred gashes that were probably made with a knife as sharp as a razor. Most of these gashes were not straight, but corkscrewed or serpentine, curved, arced across the pig’s whole skin, and very deep. You could tell they’d been made with pleasure.

  That was incomprehensible! So incomprehensible, so disgusting (Ravanel was rubbing the animal with snow and, no sooner had he got him clean than you saw the blood oozing back out and trace what looked like the alphabet of some unknown, barbaric language), so immediately threatening that Bergues, ordinarily so calm and so philosophical, burst out: “Damn bastard. I’ve got to get him.” And he went to fetch his snowshoes and shotgun.

  But between what there is to do and what gets done! . . . At dusk, Bergues came back empty-handed. He’d followed tracks, bloody ones. The man had been wounded. There were drops of blood, very fresh, pure on the snow. And because the footprints were normal, quick and light, the man must have been wounded in the arm. In fact, Bergues had been quick himself; he’d followed the tracks barely half an hour after they’d been made; he is the fastest walker in the village and he had his snowshoes and his anger too; he had everything but he couldn’t see anything apart from that clear trail, those perfect stains of fresh blood on the virgin snow. The trail went straight through the Black Woods and then came right up against the very steep slope of Le Jocond and got lost in the clouds. Yes, in the clouds. There’s no mystery there, no trick to suggest that some sort of god, a half, whole, or quarter god, was involved. Bergues was a straight shooter. If he said that the bloody tracks got lost in the clouds it means, literally, that they got lost in the clouds, that is, in the clouds covering the mountain. Don’t forget that the sky was still overcast and that, while I’ve been telling you all this, the cloud is still slicing the weathervane arrow atop the steeple in two.