A King Alone Read online

  “Only Dorothée,” said Langlois. “We’ll come back for the others tomorrow. Let’s hurry. It’s urgent. Even she could stay here all night, but it’s for her mother. And tighten that knot around her stomach. I don’t want her coming loose as you bring her down.”

  Aided by a span of foggy red lantern light, Coquillat slid Dorothée down like a plumb line between his huge hands. The Ravanels waited below with the ladder.

  The whole thing, including the military condolences to Dorothée’s mother, who rocked back and forth wordlessly in front of her daughter’s corpse as if she meant to go on doing it for the rest of her life, took barely half an hour. Langlois was more fiercely drawn to the living than to the dead. He went to Frédéric II’s house.

  Frédéric II and his wife sat face-to-face, staring at each other in silence.

  “Don’t try to figure it out,” Langlois said to them. Then to Frédéric II: “Did you eat? You’re tired; try as you might, you won’t be able to sleep. You have to come. You’re the only one who can tell me who it is.”

  “Oh, I’m coming, all right,” said Frédéric II.

  Ravanel’s sleigh with its iron runners was hitched to two trotters in front of the Café de la Route. Langlois took Ravanel off to the side.

  “I’m going alone with Frédéric, no one else. I need discipline. I’ll get two men from the Clelles barracks. Go home and sleep. This is my business.”

  And giddyup!

  Langlois was wearing his police cap and cavalry coat. Frédéric II was bundled up in his carter’s cloak. He hadn’t wanted to wear his fur cap. He had a beret pulled down over his ears. (He will say that he was thinking of Monsieur V., who at that moment must have been smoking his four sous’ worth of tobacco in the golden glow of the ceiling lamp.)

  In Clelles, they took two gendarmes with rifles and cartridge pouches. As they were about to leave, the lieutenant came up to the sleigh.

  “Captain,” he said, “don’t you have the paper?”

  “What paper?” thundered Langlois. “You think I’m going to wait for the dispatch rider to come back? You think I need a paper from the royal prosecutor in order to ride through the woods with two men because I’m afraid of the dark? I’m going through the woods. Understood? And I’m afraid of the dark. Understood? Fall out!”

  The lieutenant stood at attention, saluted, and did an about-face.

  A quarter of a league from Chichiliane, Langlois stopped. He called to one of the gendarmes: “Farnaud, climb down and get rid of those bells for me.” (He was talking about the horses’ sleigh bells that until then had been ringing out gaily.) “And put out the lantern.”

  That last quarter of a league was taken at a walk.

  The glow coming from the windowpanes of the café door faintly lit the church square. Langlois knocked on a windowpane with his whip. A man came out.

  “The mayor’s?” said Langlois.

  It was three houses away.

  To the mayor, he said simply, “Give me the key to your meeting room. Your town hall is on the square, across from the road to Clelles, isn’t it? Give me the key, king’s orders. Are there at least armchairs in your meeting room? And two or three bits of candle? Perfect. Total secrecy. Affairs of state. Not a word or you’ll go straight to Devil’s Island. Take care of these horses. Put them in a good stable.”

  To us, he said, “Line up on the right,” and there we were on that infamous street (Frédéric II will say). At the beginning of the street, he pointed out the town hall on the corner, and its windows keeping an eye on everything. It was easy to pick out the fifth house: there was a lantern directly opposite.

  “Farnaud,” said Langlois, “you station yourself here.” (He pointed to the deep recess formed by a partly opened shed door.) “Don’t let anyone leave that house there, across the street, see? And don’t fall asleep or I’ll break your neck; and I’ll . . . well, you know me!”

  He led the two of us, the other gendarme and me (Frédéric II will say), behind that notorious house where, ferreting around cautiously, we found a tiny lean-to right next to what must also have been a back door; he stationed the other gendarme there, with the same instructions. He added that there would be no relief, that he would come from time to time to get information about things but that they were stuck there for the night. He acknowledged that it wasn’t warm out, but needs must when the devil drives and, anyway, he had chosen both of them because he knew they were capable of anything. And, indeed, they seemed to be.

  There was still light behind the shutters. I say to him, “Why don’t we go in, there are four of us!” I understand that my question annoys him, so I shut my mouth. He leads me to the town hall, and he opens it as if it were his own house. So there we are in the meeting room. He strikes his lighter and lights a candle stub to inspect the place. He drags an armchair in front of the window (through which we can see the whole length of the street under its three lanterns and, opposite the middle lantern, my fifth house). I drag over another armchair. He says to me, “Get comfortable,” and blows out the candle.

  “We’re contraband here,” he says. “And also,” he says to me, “there are laws, Frédéric. I couldn’t give a good goddamn about bureaucratic laws, you know, but I respect human laws. And one of those laws says: Never arrest anyone, not even the greatest of criminals, between sunset and sunrise. First. Next, I won’t hide it from you, we’re not in a great position here. You have no witness. He only needs to say you’ve made a mistake. Third, something else is my personal business. And there’s no point in explaining it to you. To cut a long story short, we’re going to stay the whole night. You don’t need to keep watch. There are three of us for that. If you want to go to sleep, sleep.”

  Obviously, I don’t sleep. He’s up to all kinds of things the whole night. He goes out, he comes back in. I see that he goes to visit his gendarmes and he even goes to put his ear against the shutters and the door, but like a cat.

  And day breaks. And we see the bust of Louis-Philippe.

  “King!” says Langlois. He seems to be saying: And so what?

  But the time has come. Langlois is on the lookout for something. I wonder what it is, because he seems to be looking up. What he’s watching for is the chimney of the house. He’s waiting for it to start smoking, and as soon as it does, he stands up and says, “Onward!”

  He picks up the gendarme from the barn door. He says to us, “Pay attention, this is where I need discipline, so listen up. I’ll break the neck of any one of you who doesn’t do exactly as I say. Even if it seems extraordinary to you. Especially if it seems extraordinary. Because something extraordinary will no doubt happen; and we even need to hope it will happen. I’m going to go into this house; I’ll stay as long as I have to; time is not an issue; wait here. Don’t move. And this is what might happen.” (“If I’m seeing clearly,” says Langlois.) “The door will open. And that man will come out. Let him go. Don’t shout. Don’t move. Don’t shoot. Let him go, understood?”

  I found all that a bit far-fetched and I said so. So, on my honor (Frédéric II will say), he grabbed me by my tie and said, “Listen up, Frédéric, if you make a move, if you utter one word, it’s you I’ll shoot.”

  Now that was serious.

  He repeated to the gendarme: “He will come out, none of you move. He will leave, none of you move. When I come out, go” (he said to the gendarme) “fetch your colleague behind the house and the three of you, follow me closely. That’s all. At ease.”

  He adjusted his police cap and smoothed his coat collar. He crossed the street, knocked on the door. Someone came to open it (we couldn’t see who) and in he went.

  It didn’t take them long to reach an agreement. Langlois must have carried out his business in a flash.

  After, let’s say, two minutes, not more, the door opened. I confess I stopped breathing. And I saw the man from the front. There was something familiar about him.

  No need for Langlois to have gone on like that or to have grabbed me
by the tie. I wasn’t about to raise a cry or shoot (Frédéric II forgot as he said this that he hadn’t been armed) or run behind him. I was waiting to see what I’d never seen. He was a man like all the others! Even though, as I said, there was something familiar about him. (And indeed, as he found out later, it was the man with whom he’d remained crouching in the gear shed during the storm.)

  It was him. I recognized his gait: his manner of sauntering that, as he left the beech tree, had made me follow him through Le Jocond and L’Archat. The same gait with which, now, he calmly proceeded down the street, heading for the church square, as if out for a stroll.

  He’d walked on like that for, let’s say, about a hundred meters when out came Langlois. He sent us a withering glance even though the gendarme and I were huddled like two little rabbits in our corner of the doorway. And then he followed the man.

  And we followed his orders to the letter; and then the two gendarmes and I followed Langlois. So here we were spaced a hundred meters apart, strolling calmly, at the pace of the man there out in front, at the head of the line.

  It was very early in the morning, but the blacksmith was already firing up his forge. When the man passed him, he was throwing his ashes in the snow. They greeted each other.

  How can it be that the man behind him, with his cavalry coat and police cap, could have some sort of relationship with this man out for a morning stroll? Or with us, two hundred meters away, even less. Yet seeing that we were taking the same street on which he and I had first arrived, I wondered where we were going like that.

  We passed the farm that, the previous day, had been the first to loom out of the solitude. It was there, with its snowy beret pulled down over one eye; exactly as it had been. But now the man and I were walking in the opposite direction. And Langlois with his police cap.

  Again we went along the path through the forest. And sometimes a bend in the path would hide the man, and sometimes, Langlois. At one of these bends we found Langlois had stopped. When we reached him, he said, Halt!

  There, in front of us, some fifty meters away, the man stood leaning against the trunk of a beech tree, looking at us.

  We stayed like that for a short time, face-to-face across fifty meters. Then Langlois moved toward the man, step by step, until he was three steps away. Then, once again, they seemed to come to an unspoken agreement. And then, truly, at the moment we could no longer bear to be there, when we were about to shout “What on earth are you doing?” there was a loud detonation. The man fell. Langlois had shot him, twice, in the stomach; a gun in each hand, at the same time.

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  When Langlois got back to our town, he found the resignation letter he’d begun to write; he added: “Regrettable lack of sangfroid on the job . . . worn-down pistol triggers, which should have been detected by a careful examination of the weapons, occasioned this terrible accident for which I have no excuse.”

  He put his letter in an envelope and sent it.

  •

  I heard many things about this Langlois afterwards. At some point, more than thirty years ago, the stone bench under the linden trees was full of old men who knew how to grow old. This is how I’ve pieced together what they said to me.

  “Here, work heals all wounds,” they said, “and, a year later, in ’46, we had to make a real effort to recognize Langlois when he came back. And it’s true, he’d changed.”

  It was in late spring, at dusk. That very lovely dusk we often get around here: gentian blue and gold. We were preparing for our major summer projects and were poking around in the vegetable gardens in Pré-Villars, in the bend in the road to Saint-Maurice. Right there, the road emerges from a cut in the hillside, above a hollow where all the villagers have their vegetable gardens, and in order to reach the village, the road goes around this hollow, almost full circle.

  At that hour and in that season, it wasn’t a matter of work that had to be done quickly or that occupies your entire mind; we were simply digging small irrigation channels or else we were earthing up, which allows you to raise your head often. Especially on those beautiful velvet evenings.

  That’s how we saw a man on horseback emerging from the cut in the hollow, coming from Saint-Maurice. He was riding a splendid beast with a lot of spirit, prancing and neighing and quite at the command of the rider, whose legs allowed for a very pretty display, but no more. The rider wore a redingote buttoned to the collar, tightly belted and without frogging, but his opera hat was of uncommon insolence. Its dimensions, its curves, its hide, the way it was cocked, tilting slightly onto the forehead, showed the skill it took to balance it as the horse bolted and swerved to the right: the hat was transformed into a good kick in the collective ass of everyone who was looking at it.

  You can well imagine that we didn’t take our eyes off him while he was turning with the road around Pré-Villars. We weren’t used to such fandangle in our parts. We said to ourselves, “Now there’s one!” One what, nobody knew, but he was one.

  But he wasn’t one: he was Langlois. We cheered him but he shut down the cheering before anyone could pat him on the shoulder, which is what everyone wanted to do. And he hardly spoke three words to Frédéric II, who was slapping his thighs at the sight of him. Three little words, and not hello or goodbye but something so unexpected that we couldn’t say what he’d said. He turned on his heels, went into Sausage’s kitchen, closed the door behind him, and through the windowpanes we could see him climb the stairs to the bedroom he’d occupied previously. Even Sausage stared at him in amazement.

  And indeed he had changed. It wasn’t a matter of disgrace or resentment, though. The very next day, still sporting his opera hat (about which we said, “Come now! He could have worn another hat for us!”), he paid a call on the mayor to whom he presented the documents naming him commander of the Louveterie.

  So here were bizarre things again! Not long before we’d had a lieutenant of the Louveterie (he’d come with the mining engineer from La Mûre and a chocolatier from Grenoble, supposedly for a wild-boar hunt that, in the end, was only an excuse for a boys’ night out), but a commander, now that was new. Besides, the lieutenant lived in Mens, which meant that, hierarchically speaking, a commander should live at the very least in Grenoble, right? And in the best neighborhood at that. Whereas this one (who was Langlois) told the mayor of his firm intention to live here, in our village.

  We are not particularly prideful, usually; and even when there are occasions for pride, we mull them over a good dozen times before deciding if it’s worth it. But this time, we were convinced it was worth it. Even though Langlois continued to take his room and board at Sausage’s.

  In any case, we learned that the redingote, although it had no frills, was made of broadcloth; that it could be replaced by a jacket of buffalo hide, softer than any cloth, while the breeches were of drugget from Montmélian or corduroy from Annecy to make you drool. He also had impeccable boots that he dirtied intrepidly, and that made his feet look smaller than a woman’s; and above all there were three huge caps with earflaps—one made of a plain English wool, one of homespun, and one of otter skin—all of them much more to our taste than the opera hat that he nonetheless continued to wear on Sundays. In addition, there was a rumor going around that he was only at Sausage’s temporarily and that he was planning to have a house built (a Bongalove, it was said) in a charming spot; well, in a spot where we never went, far above the low valleys, and from where it’s possible to perceive, when it’s time, the peddler’s blue umbrella at least a week before he gets here.

  The outfits were indisputable: we had seen them. As to the projects, they were not at all in harmony with Langlois’s face. Back at the time of the event, he’d made a lot of speeches, whether to reassure us or to “give us an earful.” Now, he hardly spoke. Frédéric II, for example: whenever they met, he greeted him simply with a wave of his hand, without a word. Frédéric II was dying to take him home for a drink and a talk about that night and that morn
ing in Chichiliane, right? What do you think? And to pat him on the knee. And when people were hanging around in the church square to kill time or to let their animals drink, he’d pass by with nothing more than a quick word or two. Not that he was unsociable. The former Langlois, obviously, if someone had said to us that he’s coming here to live, immediately we would have imagined that he’d play ninepins, bowls, or manille; we’d end up calling him, simply, Langlois. But, even if he wasn’t familiar in that way, it’s not like he held back or acted at all haughty; none of us ever thought that his rank had gone to his head. Often enough he’d stop with one of us, even Frédéric II. He would say, “So, how’s it going?” That was all, of course; but after he’d been here for a month, we thought that wasn’t so bad.

  There are two words to describe him; one monastic and the other military. The first: “austere.” He was like a monk who has to make an effort to drag himself away from where he is to come to where you are, who makes a show of laughing and speaking the way you do and is either too polite or too disdainful to surprise or unsettle you. The other word for what Langlois had become is “brusque.” He was brusque like those people who don’t feel obliged to explain the whys and wherefores to you; who have things to do other than wait for you to understand.

  So there were these new clothes; but he still had his thin, silky, supple little mustache, and those dark, staring eyes that, more than ever, would bore a hole in whatever he was looking at. That’s why, when we realized we’d have to take him as he was, that there was no hope of ever seeing him relax, and that this, in fact, must have been his own way of relaxing and softening up, we accepted it, the way one accepts anything and everything here that must be accepted; that is, calmly. He’d done so much for us that it would have been easy to see us as ungrateful. Perhaps we were a tiny bit, but then, we also had things to do. In any case, every time he asked someone how they were doing, they’d answer amiably enough that they were doing fine.