A King Alone Read online

  As soon as winter arrived again, Langlois returned. He was alone. He put his horse up at the mayor’s but carried his haversack to the Café de la Route.

  “I’m an old bachelor,” he said, “and up there I would annoy the mayor’s wife. Here, I can smoke my pipe and wear my slippers. And I like company. I’m not here to work. I have a three-month leave.”

  Well, he’d said all that needed to be said in order for people to get used to seeing him behind the café windows, sitting astride his chair watching the snow fall.

  He had very fine weapons. He took excellent care of them. The tradition has remained: we still call a shotgun that is in perfect shape a “Langlois.” He lined up his pistols on a marble table next to him. He greased them, wiped them down, tested the springs of the unloaded pistols, and carefully adjusted the triggers. “They fire at the slightest pressure,” he said. He aimed at snowflakes, keeping them at the tip of the barrels the whole time they were falling, without losing sight of them for a second. He loaded his weapons and placed them within reach. “And now,” he said, “I’m going to play the bourgeois.” And he positioned his police cap like a tough guy’s. He was a bourgeois from a bourgeoisie that had a strong scent of Abd-el-Kader.

  •

  At that time, the Café de la Route was owned by a woman nicknamed Sausage: a former courtesan from Grenoble who had decided to spend her sixties in the countryside (no doubt to fulfill a dream she’d had the whole time she was working); a mighty woman, immovable as a rock, with a big mouth that she used enthusiastically to sound the charge in the ears of anyone who tried to tread on her toes. It was only in subprefectures and barracks towns that she’d plied her trade, which obviously requires knowledge of the flesh, but even more than that, a good business sense and a solid imagination, including an understanding of the two overlapping worlds. One mustn’t forget that those women, especially at the end of their glory, consoled the entire contingent of former junior officers coming back from Algeria and Allah’s paradise. Naturally, and with the most honorable of intentions, she and Langlois became as thick as thieves.

  In winter, there wasn’t much happening at the Café de la Route. Around noon, four or five old men would come to drink a sou’s worth of laced coffee. They would stay there until three, sleeping around the stove. Sausage would sit near Langlois and they would discuss the ways of the world.

  “What would you do with a dead man?” Langlois would say.

  “Nothing,” she’d respond.

  “Obviously,” said Langlois.

  It was, like the previous years, a heavy, overcast winter, black with snow.

  “What a hole-in-the-wall,” said Langlois.

  “No different from Grenoble,” she’d say.

  “I disagree,” Langlois would say.

  Around the stove, the old men reeked of warm corduroy and quid.

  “What do you mean ‘no different’?” said Langlois.

  “What’s so great about Grenoble?” she’d say.

  “Nothing,” Langlois would say. “There’s a village around Mer-el-Oued,” said Langlois. “It’s just like this one.”

  “There’s no snow there?” she’d say.

  “No, but there’s sun,” said Langlois.

  •

  People lived through that November and December with hunched shoulders, waiting for who knows what. Around Christmas, the weather improved; there were even four or five days of real sun, freezing but very bright. Holiday bells rang out.

  Langlois put on his boots and went to find the priest.

  “It’s your midnight mass that worries me,” he said.

  “It was getting off to a good start, in any event,” said the priest, and he led Langlois through the church that he’d been decorating for a week with holly, boxwood, and paper garlands.

  Later, Langlois admitted to having been very impressed by the golden candelabras, the altar candles wrapped in tinfoil, and the beautiful chasubles that were displayed in the sacristy. “All that pageantry!” he’d said afterwards . . . (“We all understood part of the mystery,” he said, “but no one understood it in its entirety.”)

  “Forgive my asking, Father,” said Langlois, “but in the neighboring villages here in the canton, are there also such fine things in the churches?”

  “Of course,” said the priest. “In fact, we are the poorest. We’re the only parish that doesn’t have ornaments of real gold on its altars. All this is copper that I’ve polished with great care, but in Saint-Maurice, and in Clelles, and in Prébois, and even farther away, they have real gold. In Clelles, for example, they have a monstrance worth a fortune.”

  Right then Langlois was so close to learning the whole truth that he asked if what one called a monstrance wasn’t (he was looking for the right word) that round thing?

  “Exactly,” said the priest, “with its rays like the sun’s.”

  “Good, good,” said Langlois. “So you say there are monstrances and candelabras, and clothing, I mean uniforms similar to those here, in all the canton’s churches?”

  “More beautiful ones, much more beautiful,” said the priest, who was an athletic man, timid and inspired.

  “Well then,” said Langlois, “let’s say this mass, Father. I have the feeling that perhaps there won’t be too much of a risk.”

  Still, Langlois took his precautions. He decided that as long as he was there, he might as well serve some purpose, right? Besides, he let it be known that disobeying him had not been good for Delphin-Jules. And here’s what he said: “I’ll take you to midnight mass. Then I’ll gather up the men and women who want to come; I’ll need a few men in any case, I’m not up to leading everyone. How many are you: Thirty? Forty? Fifty women? I’ll need four men: one near the back, two more bringing up the rear, and me in the lead.”

  He found more than four men. He found more than thirty who came with lanterns all the way to the Café de la Route to fetch him. While he was putting on his boots, they waited outside. The light from the lanterns flickered through the falling snow. There were also two or three torchbearers, their torches throwing off naked flames and pitch smoke among the white drifts. Once his boots were on, before he went out, Langlois said to Sausage, “There are at least thirty of them; every time I think I know what it’s all about, something eludes me. There are thirty of them; look at them. They’re having a great time with their lanterns. That reminds me of something . . .”

  The women, too, were having a great time. They remained very dignified but were rejoicing. Even Marie Chazottes’s mother, who was being led by the arm by a sister-in-law—Anselmie no doubt, carrying a missal big enough to take down an ox.

  The priest had prepared a chair for Langlois in the front row, but the captain stayed by the door.

  “My place is here, Father. We are both on duty this evening.”

  “You don’t think that the monster—”

  “Perhaps it’s not a monster,” said Langlois.

  The mass took place without incident. It was magnificent. The altar candles sparkled in clusters and even the priest indulged himself by putting a little pinch of real incense in the thuribles. As soon as the balsam smoke rings spread throughout the tiny church vessel, Langlois (who was thinking about all the churches in the canton) felt certain that the night would pass without an abduction. “I understand everything,” he thought, “and can explain nothing. I’m like a dog who can pick up the scent of a leg of lamb through a cupboard door.”

  When mass ended, the priest himself took part in guarding his flock. He felt, he said, personally responsible. It was no longer snowing. The night was clad in an iron calm. The flames of the candles and torches in procession rose up as straight as spearheads.

  “I’m very pleased that everyone got home without difficulty,” the priest said to Langlois, who was walking him back to the rectory.

  “Nothing could happen tonight,” said Langlois.

  “For a soldier who was a hero on the battlefield,” said the priest, “you ha
ve a very thorough knowledge of the powers of the mass; I congratulate you. Admit that the monster cannot come near the divine sacrifice.”

  Langlois and the priest, each carrying an altar candle, found themselves alone just then at the entrance to the rectory; that is, at the edge of the village; and, some hundred meters off, beyond a small meadow, you could see the very black wall of the forest in the very black night.

  “Truth be told,” said Langlois, “and I wouldn’t want to upset you, Father, but I believe he is indeed nearby and I believe, on the contrary, that it’s because he’s nearby that we were not in danger.”

  “Divine grace?” asked the priest.

  “I have no idea what it might be called,” said Langlois. “We are men, you and I,” he continued, “we have no need to be frightened of words; well, let’s just say that tonight he found sufficient diversion.”

  “You frighten me,” said the priest.

  “I don’t yet know exactly what I mean,” said Langlois. “Perhaps I’ll never know, though I’d like to. It’s still too early for him to be over there,” he continued, pointing toward the shadowy edge of the woods. “Maybe he won’t come tonight, but he may well be in there already, watching you and me without our being in danger. Here with our candles, we are already giving him everything he needs. It’s odd, isn’t it, Father! What a thread our lives hang by!”

  Langlois immediately sensed he had said something out of place. The priest let him know it, barely wishing him a good evening.

  When the door of the rectory had closed and he heard the two locks click into place, Langlois blew out his candle and went back to the Café de la Route, whistling a little tune.

  “So,” Sausage said to him, “did you bring in your silly geese?”

  “Geese, turtledoves, and partridges, I brought them all in,” said Langlois. “Give me a drop of brandy, will you? My insides need warming. He’s not a monster. He’s a man like all the others. You want me to tell you what we need: midnight mass on New Year’s Eve, and a long one without interruptions.”

  “You said it, mister,” she responded as she handed him his candle.

  •

  November and December went by without incident. The January days lined up, one after the other, peacefully and slowly. No one dared to breathe during the dark stormy days that stretched out in absolute silence. February began. It wasn’t over yet, but you could trust that by March . . .

  •

  One morning, Frédéric II was making his coffee. It was seven o’clock; black as night, but the snow was beginning to take on that green break-of-day color. While the coffee was brewing, Frédéric II allowed his mind to wander; he looked all around him. He looked at those dresser drawers that one rarely opens, and above the wardrobes where one rarely goes to see what’s there. Not for all the gold in the world would Frédéric II have given up those two hours of freedom every morning. He would think about his youth. He would think of everything he’d do if he didn’t have a wife and child, of everything he’d do if it were to be done over, of everything he should do. He’d pause in his thinking to take a box down from the mantel and rifle through its contents. Thrilled to find a peg or a nail to slip in his pocket, or a little piece of pitch to move to another box, or an old amber bit from the pipe that belonged to Frédéric I, or even Frédéric zero from the mists of time; odds and ends that lips had sucked on under Louis XIV and that he lingered over for ages, wondering what he could ever do with such amazing things.

  That morning, he was into the dresser drawers and in one of them he found a lovely little colorful clockface. Everything was there: the mechanism, the hands, and even two keys, one to wind it and one for the chime. The chime was perfect. Oh, that! Never had Frédéric II heard such a bell! It sounded like a darning needle striking a little glass lamp chimney. You wound the bell by sticking the key in a small round hole, which was, precisely, the eye of the shepherd with his golden hair, golden jacket, and red scarf, who was handing that very blue cornflower to the shepherdess, so pale with a touch of pink. You stuck the key in the shepherdess’s eye to wind the clock itself. An extraordinary movement! My goodness! The chime was beautiful, but you had to wait an hour to hear it again, whereas the movement, well: tick tock tick tock all the time. What a sound! Ah, never had Frédéric II had such sweet sounds in his ears. There was no question of moving on to something else that morning. He closed the drawer and began to plot his delightful day. He wouldn’t be content until this clock was hanging on the wall. No point in trying to do without it. Just imagining that he wouldn’t hear that tick tock made him find that time was passing very slowly. The wife could say what she wanted. His mind was made up.

  His coffee was delicious. The clock was in his lap and he was thinking about what he would do. It was simple: he’d make a little wooden case, cutting out a round hole with a saw in which he would set the clockface, and a good hook behind to hang it with. Out of what wood? Walnut, of course. He even remembered a bit of new wax that was probably in the box marked “Spices” over there on the mantel—just what he needed to give the case a shine and mask the joints.

  He didn’t have any walnut here. There were two nice pieces of it at the sawmill. He pictured himself sawing, sanding, adjusting, and varnishing during what looked like it was going to be an overcast day. He carefully put the little clock back in the drawer after looking once again with immense pleasure at the golden shepherd and the pale shepherdess.

  Before his wife got up (she’d want too many explanations), he would go down to the sawmill. It would just take twenty minutes.

  Sordid day of fog; you could only see five or six meters in front of you. The frozen snow was easy to walk on. Bone cold: he had on his sheepskin jacket. The village was asleep. There was light in the windows of the Café de la Route, at the mayor’s, at Dorothée’s. That girl was an early riser!

  The road to Avers, from which you can see Bergues’s windows and—no more village. One hundred meters: here at least you can see a little better, that is, the fog glows a bit more and you can make out a few hints of trees that are willows. One hundred meters farther and it’s the sawmill.

  It took Frédéric II about ten minutes to find his walnut. He was at his door; he was about to close it; he heard a noise coming from the beech tree. Naturally, the beech was entirely erased by the mist. All you could see was its enormous trunk; the rest was completely lost. Frédéric II listened; it didn’t seem like anything; it was noise. You couldn’t possibly guess what was making that noise. Birds? Well, they had to be big ones then, moving cautiously. In this season there are no birds’ nests. Rats? It seemed that at one moment something had squealed; it wasn’t a rat sound. You could see absolutely nothing. Where the noise was coming from, there was nothing but white. Frédéric stood there with his hand on the latch.

  He wasn’t wearing clogs; that morning he had on his boots. He could walk without making a sound. Slowly he let go of the latch and approached the tree. About three or four meters from the beech trunk there was a bramble bush (it’s still there). Frédéric II had been behind the bush for perhaps half a minute, wide-eyed and openmouthed, when there was a noise that resembled one that something, or someone, or an animal, a snake sliding along the branches or the bark would make; and, out of the mist as if down a trapdoor, there slowly appeared a booted foot, a pair of trousers, a jacket, a fur hat, a man! He descended the two and a half meters of the trunk that were visible and placed his feet on the ground.

  Who was that fellow?

  Naturally he was facing the tree trunk, with his back to Frédéric II. He didn’t look familiar. He slipped into a copse, took four or five steps, and disappeared into the mist.

  “What the hell was he doing way up inside there?” thought Frédéric II. He went over to the beech and noticed fat carpenter nails hammered in the trunk spaced so that they created steps of a sort.

  “Shit, strange fellow, what the hell is this?” Frédéric II said to himself. “Let’s see,” and he began to cl
imb. It was easy: the nails were placed so that feet and hands had no trouble.

  So there’s my Frédéric II on the crotch of the trunk, at the spot where the main limbs begin. And shrouded in fog. He could no longer see the ground. Everything happened very quickly. It was like something was burning below him.

  Of the four main limbs that branched away from one another there, the biggest (as wide as three men together) had been swept clear of snow. You could see that the man had come down from there. In fact, there were still carpenter nails here and there to help.

  “Darn rascal!” Frédéric II grabs hold of the nails and climbs. He climbs. Beneath him and around him, the mist closes in, ever denser. And he feels that the branch, instead of growing thinner as you’d expect, is, on the contrary, becoming thicker. It can happen: some kind of canker will cause the wood to expand. This branch had expanded to the point of now being as thick as five men; at the same time, it was becoming more horizontal.

  Luckily right then Frédéric II stopped for a few seconds to catch his breath. A few seconds during which, without his realizing it, his body and mind were preparing for the horror.

  He drew closer (he did not climb any more, he stretched toward the edge of a sort of enormous nest, wide as a vat, that the canker had hollowed out in the enormous branch). Without knowing it, he was at that moment so forewarned, so divided, so split in two by trepidation as if by an ax that his hands were bolted to the nails and his arms were as stiff as wrenches. Only gruesome curiosity made him crane his neck: he was all eyes. Which is why he remained solidly fastened when his face arrived, through the fog, three finger widths away from another face that was very white, very cold, very peaceful, with closed eyes.