A King Alone Page 8

  We did, however, get to know the horse very well. The day after Langlois arrived, he took over an abandoned stable that belonged to the Café de la Route. Next to the dining room where Sausage stored her cases of beer. He dragged the cases under a lean-to and, without a word, Sausage cleaned it up that same day, then nailed boards all around it, leaving an opening for a door. Sausage also went to buy hay and feed. And in this stable Langlois installed his horse and his tack. He also spent the day sawing and nailing. We didn’t know he was a commander. Though he’d already presented himself to the mayor, that information hadn’t reached us yet. When it finally did and when, at the same time, everyone could see that commander sawing and nailing boards, installing curb chains, sweeping with a heather broom, hurling down pails of water, and, finally, sitting on the mounting block to prepare the harness, we found it all very congenial. And because, as I’ve explained, there were few occasions for us to be congenial to the man, we were congenial to the horse. Especially since the horse did everything to make it easy.

  He was a black horse who knew how to laugh. Normally horses don’t know how to laugh and you always get the feeling they’re about to bite. This one warned you with a wink that he was about to laugh, and his laughter formed in his eye in a very distinct way. So that when it reached his teeth, there was no misunderstanding. The door to his stable was always unlocked. He was never tied up. When he wanted to go out or see people, he would push open his door and appear on the threshold from which he could gaze at the respectable folk out for a breath of fresh air beneath the lindens or going about their business. If he recognized someone he was particularly fond of, he would call to him with one or two modest whinnies, like a dove’s coo. And if that person then looked up and said some soft words to him (as was always the case), the horse would draw close with friendly, even comical—purposefully comical—steps, precise and lively, and come to rest his head on the person’s shoulder. That’s when he would laugh sometimes, if you scratched his forehead a little or if he sensed his master was coming. And then the hand was withdrawn: no one knew if the commander would approve, so no one dared to continue stroking the horse; the horse, however, would start laughing softly and would place his forehead under the hand, on his own and without being asked. And Langlois would say to him, “Ah, you hussy!” (though he was a male and not a mare) and Langlois’s voice was full of so much affection that you could almost believe it spread beyond the horse, extending to the person petting him and all the others who were there sitting on the stone bench under the linden; because, though Langlois said only those words, he glanced around at everyone. The horse did other things, all as kind as could be and all directed with real intelligence toward the need to love that everyone shares. He followed his friends. If he saw people going off to the tobacco shop or a neighbor’s, to get tools or to borrow utensils, he would go with them, come up next to them, and rub his muzzle against their jackets; then, keeping pace with them, he would travel alongside, as if to spend a short time with someone he cared about. Sometimes, back then, he would amuse them with his little dove coo, or a little Spanish step, or by shaking his head and swirling his silky mane, always perfectly combed and shiny as a new penny. He was attentive to everyone. We could ask him for favors. At first, of course, we didn’t dare; we were content simply to enjoy his kindness. We worried about Langlois’s mood. Not that he would be in a bad mood but, like I told you, because he had almost no contact with us, we could hardly know if he would look kindly upon our using his horse. After a while, though, we realized that Langlois had let the horse roam free, that he understood his ways perfectly, and that, as a result, if the horse came out and offered us his harness to haul something up the Pré-Villars hill, or gave us the five minutes it took to cart a dump bucket from the fountain to the stable, there was nothing to do but accept these small favors as simply as he offered them.

  Often, then, if the horse wasn’t standing at the door of his stable waiting to greet his friends, and you needed him, you went in and asked, “You here?” He’d answer with his little dove call and he would come. No one knew his name. No one dared ask Langlois. And no one dared give him a name from our parts. All our horses were named Jewel or Belle. That didn’t suit him at all. He was more respected and loved than that; much more esteemed. Everybody spoke to him tenderly, but it would have been nice to have a name to attach to our kind words, to slip it in here and there among the thank-yous, just to make him understand that we appreciated and cared for him. But to find a name that would suit him was beyond the realm of the possible; and to find out what Langlois called him was in the realm of impossible things. Langlois was nothing but impassivity and coldness when he took him out; just by using his knees, he made him obey. If ever he said anything to him, it was in private, it was none of our business, and we were reminded of that at every moment. So some just called him “horse”; but little by little, in secret, and when we were sure nobody heard but us and the horse, we wound up calling him “Langlois” under our breath because, pure and simple, he did everything with us that Langlois didn’t.

  The horse had only had one shortcoming: he was hard-hearted with other animals. He never laughed, never cooed, not with another horse, not with a mare. He didn’t even look at them. He would pass by them, aloof, to come to us. He loved above his station.

  The day after Langlois arrived, he went to see the mayor to show him his letters patent. About a month later, he went again.

  We got word of it from the Martoune woman, the sacristan I already told you about. “That little faker!” she said. “I could tell he was following me.”

  Following that Martoune woman is no small feat. She’s seventy years old but that’s the least of it; she’s a hunchback, too, and her nose is so stuffed with snuff that her mouth has been open for thirty years; with, of course, all the havoc that the air here can wreak on a gaping mouth. A sight to see! Following Martoune in drugget knickers and boots as soft as a handkerchief! Ha!

  “Laugh like the lummoxes you are,” she said. “If I’m telling you, it’s true. Why else would I bother?” In other words, she said she’d been watching his shenanigans. He’d station himself under the willows across from her door. It was, let’s say, a Tuesday. She went to stick her goat in the meadow. He watched her. She did a few chores. His eyes followed her everywhere. Sometimes he’d even come out of the shelter of the willow branches to follow her for real, keeping his distance, but step by step. Wednesday, Thursday, and Martoune, who’s no fool (if I told you about her youth . . .) notices that Langlois comes out from his shelter under the willows to follow her each time she heads toward the church. She says to herself, “Just you wait, young man!” And, indeed, Saturday, she was doing her cleaning in the church and, sure enough, that Saturday, Langlois follows her in. That Saturday, that’s all that happened. Saturdays, Martoune runs a damp cloth over the Holy Virgin and a dry cloth over Christ, who’s made of plaster and whose blood is seriously fading: the priest is always redoing the drops with a paintbrush. She sweeps under the chairs and then lines them up. But on Mondays, she “does the sacristy” as much as she can, from top to bottom. Which means not only does she brush, shake out, and hang up the clothes the priest wore on Sunday but she also airs out his entire wardrobe because the closet where it’s kept is in the north, beneath the shadow of the great oak: things grow moldy there very quickly.

  On Monday, then, she had set out the four beautiful chasubles: the mauve one; the pink-and-green one with roses and leaves embroidered in gold thread, looking just like living roses (it was given to the parish in ’27 by the Présentine convent, where there are still extraordinary embroiderers); the gold one (so beautiful that the priest doesn’t dare wear it); and the cornflower blue and host-wafer white one—the everyday one (which is getting threadbare and which the Martoune woman pays careful attention to). And it was to do just that that she’d gone to the small grated window that looks out on the Carles meadow. Hearing a faint noise outside, she said to herself, “Ah
! Here you are!” She stepped back from the window, and what should she see but a shadow going by, and by again, and finally a hand placing itself on the grate (this small window isn’t even as tall as a man; it reaches up to my chest, here). It was Langlois’s hand. She recognized his big silver ring.

  Martoune is intelligent, like I told you, but perhaps not in every respect. In spite of her age, her hump, and her snuff, she’d gotten it into her head that she could play the wench. She stayed out of sight.

  “Hey in there! What’s going on? Are you trying to make a fool out of me? Get yourself over here, now!” Langlois said in a voice that made Martoune leave her dark corner at once.

  Langlois looked at the sacerdotal vestments on the backs of the prie-dieux.

  “Are they all here?”

  “Yes,” said Martoune.

  “There aren’t any more?”

  “No, there are only four.”

  “Let me get a better look at that one,” said Langlois, slipping his index finger through the window bars and pointing toward the pink-and-green one.

  And Martoune rushed to do it.

  “And the gold one.”

  She showed him the gold one; Langlois had framed his face in a barred square and was looking attentively.

  “Now get me the monstrances.”

  Oh, that! Never in her life, Martoune said, had she touched the monstrance; and in any case there was only the one, locked away in the tabernacle, and it was the priest who took care of it.

  “On your honor?” asked Langlois, half jokingly.

  “On my honor, Commander,” she said.

  He seemed to raise an eyebrow at the title (she was flirting with him, like old people do). His eyes pierced through her with a couple of those nasty looks of his and off he went.

  That very evening he set out to pay a visit to the priest. A visit about which we learned nothing. All we knew was that there are two hundred steps from the Café de la Route to the rectory; Langlois, having put on his fitted redingote and his fancy opera hat, saddled up his horse at three in the afternoon, mounted, and crossed those two hundred steps in his fancy uniform, checking his horse so tightly that the animal danced in place like a seahorse. Naturally this outing was a huge success with everyone.

  We remarked, in fact, that Langlois stayed barely an hour at the rectory before the two of them, the priest and Langlois, came out and headed toward the church, which they entered. The horse, left to himself, returned to the stable without stopping with any of his friends; he simply greeted them as he went by with a little coo. Like us, he seemed puzzled as to what this cavalcade could possibly mean.

  After a while, we got in the habit of saying that when it came to Langlois, nothing meant anything in particular.

  That spectacular visit to the rectory, for example, meant absolutely zero, nothing, naught. He stays for barely an hour, but everyone knows that when you visit that priest, there’s no escape; out the two of them come; and off they go to the church. And there they stay, oh, let’s say, twenty minutes. (And we know what they did: the priest opened the tabernacle and showed him the monstrance, and that was that. Langlois took a look and, having looked, went on his way.) Twenty minutes; then Langlois left the church and a little later, so did the priest. And barca, the end, as Langlois would have said, for we never saw Langlois in church again, not for mass, not for vespers, not for anything. And afterwards, whenever he would meet the priest on the road or in the village, he greeted him the same way he greeted all of us: just a wave, not a word.

  If we’d been nasty, rest assured we’d have had good reason. Because think about it: he’d done us a great favor. It seems to me we should have become fed up with his presence among us with his tight-lipped air. But then this air of his resembled to a tee the one he’d often put on at the time of the story, and it was just like he’d acted when he was trying to sort out true and false in the case of Delphin-Jules’s death. And that, I have to say, brought out our better side because, when we thought about the previous winters, we still had a few icicles in our mustaches.

  And then, something else needs to be said: Langlois seemed to be held in high regard by the people from below, that is, the bigwigs.

  When we found out he was coming to live among us, in addition to that pride I mentioned (not that it took away from it; on the contrary), we said, “He must be in disgrace. They must have thrown him a bone and made him a commander because of his medals, his shirt-front, his elegance, and the way he glowered at you so you almost had to turn away; but they must also have wanted him to understand that the only commanding he would ever do was going to be in some backwater.”

  But no, on the contrary. Near summer’s end a cabriolet came over the pass and it gleamed as if it had been polished with sword paste; we had been watching it climbing down through the trees for more than an hour, shinier than a scarab. And when it stopped in front of some of us who were harvesting, we saw the oddest thing: It was carrying on its back, behind the hood, a groom who got down to ask for some information: “Do any of you know Commander Langlois?” Well, you can understand that we’re not going to answer on the spot when you spring a surprise like that on us right in the middle of harvesting. You have to think a bit whether you are going to say yes or no. And so while we stood staring at this little car that seemed to have just hatched from an egg and the groom who was glistening even more, out comes the boss, no doubt to help make up our minds. And we did, right away, because who was it but the royal prosecutor himself. No doubt about it: he was famous all the way to the most deserted mountain peaks, what with his white whiskers and the big bulging belly he carried a few steps in front of him like a drum; yes, that was him.

  So we even gave him a little boy to lead him to the village, saying to ourselves, “When he finds out that his commander is lodging at Sausage’s!” But when we get back from work, we see this prosecutor and our Langlois strolling beneath the linden trees on our little square, admiring our beautiful trees, pointing their canes toward the low country that can be seen in its entirety from way up there, almost straight down; pointing at some lovely farm below that they were talking about, or sketching out a few paths they’d gone down or meant to go down; well, thick as thieves. They dined together at Sausage’s; she’d cooked up a tasty little meal.

  Much later we gleaned something of what they’d been talking about that evening; whether it had been an ordinary visit, or an official one, and whether it had been made to a disgraced captain of the gendarmerie or to a Louveterie commander in good favor.

  In fact, at a certain point, after the tragic end of the story I’m telling you, the woman called Sausage got to where she couldn’t contain her grief any longer and she started talking a blue streak to console herself, to bring everything back to life. She talked about Langlois; and the tone people use to speak about Langlois now, that is, this friendly tone I’m using to talk to you about him, comes largely from the woman called Sausage.

  You never see the whole picture. If all we’d known was Langlois’s haughtiness and his silence, we might have stayed bitter. Everything else, when you think about it, was so congenial! Not like the Langlois who berated Anselmie and (the least amusing part of the story) all the rest; it’s a fate that awaits us all.

  The royal prosecutor hadn’t come to see the captain or the commander. More like (according to Sausage) a good friend; a friend who could be refused nothing. One time, this royal prosecutor who was so impressive even began to spout inanities. No doubt to cheer up our Langlois. “Beware the truth,” said this prosecutor (so it seems), “it is true for everyone.” (No need to go to school until you’re twenty to figure that out.) And in fact, after this bon mot, Langlois did cheer up. It didn’t take much, did it?

  And then, they must have had business together. These prosecutors often made timber deals under the table (though those are unimportant prosecutors), or tanned fox and badger pelts just to add a few girandoles to the fancy balls they hold in their towns to marry off their daught
ers, so it seems. Because Sausage, without really acting like she didn’t know what’s going on, never missed a thing (how attentive she was around Langlois!), and she heard Langlois say, “Don’t worry, everything passes through my hands.”

  That night they must have reached the decision whose results we would see a month later.

  The Louveterie Corps, the Wolf-Hunting Corps, is an odd one. There are lieutenants who are fair and square and who work very hard, just like their equivalents in the Forestry Corps. They manage (or do their best) to destroy the “harmful” ones, but they have to protect the “helpful” ones too. I’m talking about animals. For example, the “harmful” are foxes, wild boars, badgers, stone martens, weasels, and obviously wolves: the bloodthirsty. The “helpful” are the mountain goats, bucks, does; stags, according to the season (mating or not), are alternatively classified as “harmful” or “helpful.” I don’t mean that the lieutenants take all that very seriously, but really, they should. In any case, above the lieutenants, there are captains and well, they don’t lift a damn finger because their positions are purely honorary. For example, our risky high-mountain regions where the terrain isn’t exactly suitable to the faint of heart teem with “harmful” animals: there’d never been a Louveterie captain there though. We stuck to a lieutenant, because we needed someone who knew how to handle a rifle, even on a weekday. (And don’t forget there were bears at the Rousset pass and in the Lente forest; and wolves everywhere.) They put captains in the valleys, near Pontcharrat, or even farther north, all the way to Ugine, in areas, that is, where they were just “for show.” They were generally very influential members of the electorate with ambitions; or else romantic lords of the manor of a sort. Being a Louveterie captain allowed them to have a certain lifestyle—and uniform. And they could prance around like little Caesars if they wanted—a fantastic emotional outlet that’s useful to prefectural diplomacy as well.