A King Alone Page 9

  If our royal prosecutor had wanted to spout more inanities, he could have spouted one that’s true: there was too much real work to do for the Louveterie Corps ever to have dreamed of posting a captain here. Nevertheless, Langlois and the royal prosecutor dreamed about it, and they must have moved heaven and earth because, about a month after that famous dinner at Sausage’s, we learned that our neighbor from Saint-Baudille, Urbain Timothée, had been named a captain of the Louveterie.

  He wasn’t an influential member of the electorate; you couldn’t call him a romantic lord of the manor either. As a matter of fact, “romantic” was just a bit of an understatement. He was a “Guadalajara,” as we call people here who’ve gone to Mexico to make a fortune. He’d come back rolling in pesos, no doubt about that, but he’d lost a couple of marbles in the process.

  Physically speaking, he was a small man, no taller than a grasshopper’s knee, compact and well proportioned, so much so that you would have thought he was a young lad if it weren’t for his patch of gray goatee and the most extraordinary pattern of wrinkles ever worn on yellowing skin. Was he lively? Oh, he was; despite his sixty years, he was made of a kind of powder that exploded at every opportunity so that where he’d been a moment before, in front of you, now nothing was left but dust. He’d patch himself together, piece by piece, ready for another takeoff à la Jules Verne while you were still rubbing your eyes.

  His wife was a Creole woman older than he was, still beautiful and languid like a late afternoon in June.

  At first, people here considered her uncivilized, but she wasn’t, not at all. She’d come, it was said, from a very famous Spanish convent that provided an education to all the daughters of good families in Mexico, in an odd spot for young girls, it was said, right by a volcano and a glacier. But about those things from another world, you know, we spouted a lot of nonsense. But I do know that when Madame Timothée (we called her Madame Tim) came to the area (she was close to sixty; she looked twenty, well, let’s say thirty), she was much talked about. Just imagine: this woman of cerulean marble, with eyes that took forever to blink; like the setting sun! That’s when the rumor about the convent near the volcano began, I’m sure of it. Before that, I think people had only spoken about snow. I even think it was Madame Tim herself who deliberately spread the rumor.

  “Tell them,” she said, “that it is very high, very high, higher than here.” And just hearing her pronounce those “very high, very high, higher” and the slow, supple rumbling of her throat, like the secret call of ewes, was enough to make you believe whatever rumor she wanted you to. She was afraid she’d be mistaken for a woman from the hot deserts.

  But there was no risk of that because when she got here she still had her five children with her, and what a marvel! We’ve seen enough to know that no woman from the hot deserts would snuggle up to her children like that!

  Here her three daughters spent the three or four years needed to make them marriageable and got married; of the two boys, one died on a long journey in Austria, the other held a position in Paris. After seven or eight years, around the time I’m telling you about, Madame Tim was a grandmother many times over. The daughters all had good situations in the plains below.

  You’d regularly see a messenger going down the paths from Saint-Baudille and then you’d see a load of nannies and children climbing back up. The eldest daughter alone had six children. Madame Tim’s messenger was under orders to go to all three households and collect the lot of them.

  The festivities never stopped: afternoon snacks for the children in the maze of box hedges; rides on muleback through the grounds; games on the terraces; and, if it was raining, to calm the ants in the pants of all the children, all kinds of shindigs in the château’s vast attics. And then the floors would rumble like distant thunder from the leaping and racing around.

  Whenever the opportunity arose, whether on the way back from Mens (where the road passes a corner of the château grounds) or returning on an autumn day from a bit of rabbit hunting, that is, whenever you were on the summits overlooking the maze of box hedges, you couldn’t resist gazing at all the fun going on. Especially since Madame Tim was always the drum major.

  She was sumptuously clothed in a heavy wool dress over enormous petticoats that pleated and unpleated around her statuesque body with each step she took. She embellished her big bosom with linen frills. Seeing her in the middle of that vatful of children holding several in each hand like bunches of grapes while the others splashed around her, she was irresistible! Behind her, the nannies still carried the newborns in their white cocoons. Or else, if you stood on tiptoe and craned your neck to see over the hedge, you’d catch her in the middle of a bucolic picnic, distributing slices of cake and glasses of fruit-syrup drinks, flanked on the right by a male servant in blue (the son of Onésiphore from Prébois), who carried the keg of orangeade, and on the left by a female servant in violet and white (the granddaughter of old Nanette from Avers), who held the basket of pastries. It was a sight to behold!

  And if she happened to notice you—when, for example, the look of astonishment in some little girl’s eyes made her demand to know what she was staring at—then Madame Tim would call out to you and you had no choice but to obey. And for you it wasn’t orangeade but a glass of wine that Onésiphore’s son was sent running to fetch. And that was that; there was no way you could leave; right away you had two or three children on each knee asking you to tell them a story.

  But we don’t know any stories and even if we did, we wouldn’t know how to tell them.

  And we were glad to be there, next to Madame Tim, so respectable despite the volcano and the glacier (or perhaps because of them).

  “Enjoy life!” she said to us. “Enjoy life, it’s the only thing to do. Make the most of everything. Look at me, how I make the most of it all!” And, with a slow, precise gesture, she would grab some grandchild, press him gently to her breast, and caress him until mouth, limbs, and laughter were busting out all over; and when at last he lay there split open like a sliced peach, she’d lift him to her lips with those admirable arms of hers in order to give him a kiss.

  You can of course understand that to have a Louveterie captain with this woman for a wife suited us just fine.

  We got the news before the people concerned. Someone had gone to Grenoble, I can’t remember why, and brought back the gossip. Everyone was in favor of it, of course, though some said it was true and some said it wasn’t.

  And Langlois listened to us. When one fine day he mounted his horse at two in the afternoon, we said to ourselves, “That’s it, he’s going there with his letters patent!”

  “Oh, no,” others said. “He’s not wearing his opera hat.”

  And it’s true. He was wearing his buffalo jacket and his otter cap because it was late October.

  Nonetheless, it was the road to Saint-Baudille that he took. We went to the little square with the linden trees so we could watch him from above. He was heading in that direction at a quick pace.

  I have the feeling he was having a bit of fun at our expense that afternoon: his path led down toward the Ébron River and naturally we started looking out for him at that stretch of road that reappears just beyond the river. And after we’d calculated the time you needed to go down to the river, cross the bridge, and come up on the other side, we still didn’t see him. So once again we were arguing about those letters patent, that opera hat, that otter cap, when somebody shouted, “Look! He’s over there!”

  And he pointed his finger away from the road, toward the meadows to the right, and there Langlois was, climbing through the fields toward the château, waving his handkerchief at us.

  “Damn stubborn fool!” we said to ourselves, quite pleased with these signals he was sending us with his handkerchief that were, when it comes down to it, friendly. Why was he so nice from a distance and so nasty up close?

  It seems he came back very late, and that evening, according to Sausage, he spoke his first kind word. She’d h
ad to stay up and, even when the last customer had left, she’d had to wash the glasses, then wash the bottles, then dry the glasses, then put the bottles to drain; finally, she’d come to her doorstep to gaze out on the sleeping village and the square with its linden trees murmuring like a cool stream. She stood face-to-face with a hundred thousand stars.

  She heard trotting but was too caught up in her mindless bliss to have the immediate presence of mind to go in and up to her room; she only thought of it when it was too late: there in the square was Langlois.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” he said.

  She didn’t answer and they went in. She had already done so much that she merely lingered on while Langlois stabled his horse. She said to herself, “I’ll bring him his candle. He won’t bite me!” Obviously not, quite the contrary! He said to her, “It’s been a long time since we’ve discussed the ways of the world, hasn’t it, old girl! And yet,” he added, “the world keeps on turning. Faster and faster, you might even say.”

  And yes, he’d gone to Saint-Baudille; and it had been for the letters patent; and yes, Urbain and Madame Tim had been appointed captains of the Louveterie.

  This Louveterie was beginning to take on genuine importance for us. It was with a unanimous voice—an inner voice—that we decided in any case we would call Madame Tim the Captainess. Urbain . . . well, we’d have to see. It would depend on his explosiveness. We’d need at least enough time to see his uniform.

  But, strange as the decision was, the people who’d made it had a first-rate knowledge of men. It seems that Urbain was only waiting for this decision to solidify himself. He sent for the tailor from the Twenty-eighth Regiment of the Chasseurs d’Afrique and had him bring his weapons and luggage to Saint-Baudille. The tailor stayed for a week during which he did two very different things: he spent his days sewing and adjusting the uniform; he spent his evenings teaching Onésiphore’s son how to play the hunting horn. They would go up to the highest terraces and the October wind would blow belches, farts, and sighs to break the heart of a winded Jeremiah down our way. Ah! We were quite worried about all that for a while until, on the third day, with an October wind as heavy as honey and dark wine, we heard some beautifully modulated husky notes ring out. Onésiphore had finally given up, ceding his place to Pierre-le-Brave from Ponsonnas, a former player in a brass band who knew all the instrument’s secrets.

  Maybe you think that, because Urbain was knee-high to a grass-hopper, his uniform must have looked clownish on him? Not at all. Remember Madame Tim. She had a keen eye and saw to everything. Monsieur Tim was dressed in a small jacket à la Zouave that made his chest swell just a bit, and long trousers with stirrups, trousers that fit tightly around the calves and thighs, right up to a leather belt that rode a little high on the waist. All this made him seem taller than in real life. The uniform was made of Elbeuf cloth, smooth to the touch, the color of a dried leaf. His head wear was a small Tyrolean felt hat with a pheasant feather.

  “Absolutely no fancy stuff,” said Madame Tim to the tailor from the Twenty-eighth Regiment who wanted frogging, lanyards, and epaulettes.

  She didn’t even want the three stripes of his rank to be wider than a pencil.

  What she’d done was well done and practical, too: for copses, mountains, horse riding, for rain or snow, you could put gaiters or boots over the trousers and a cape over the jacket; and good for show, a Tyrolean felt hat with a pheasant feather inevitably flatters its man.

  •

  The dark time of snow, cold, and vague apprehensions returned. We were fretful. It wasn’t easy to forget those days of being like sheep in a pen for Monsieur V. That’s when it was reassuring to see a light in Langlois’s window.

  In fact, Langlois had work to do. It was obviously no longer a matter of extraordinary things; it was, on the contrary, a matter of the most ordinary things in the world. And of his new role.

  That year the weather paid special attention to the shaded parts here. Around Rousset and the Lente forest, the small dark valleys of Bouvante and Cordéac were squeezed as if in a screw press by frost that crushed anything alive or made everything spurt out. Farmers in Avers reported seeing wolves.

  At first those wolves had come trotting soundlessly around the houses. They snatched a goose, demolished a rabbit hutch, maimed a goat, even sniffed at the heels of a man carrying the mail on foot, and finally played a little night music. In the stables, the cows and horses made a racket as they danced to the tune.

  Since we had a Louveterie commander and captain, what was the point of putting up with this?

  “Of course,” said Langlois, and he destroyed three or four of them with his rifle.

  They were young: two-year-old wolves, already quite strapping, that until then had had their pick of whatever they pleased in the Golconde forests where no one tussled with them over the huge white hares and the wild geese. Here, obviously, things are different: our geese aren’t wild and we don’t want anyone acting like they are. And then, we have lambs, kids, and calves, which makes us very vulnerable.

  Langlois’s rifle shots made that clear. The remaining young wolves got the message. They were, in any case, big enough to track long distances; now, going to or coming back from the hunt, they were content to stop to the edge of the woods to insult the village at length.

  But there weren’t only the young wolves.

  One night, the hay bag that blocked the dormer window in Fulgence’s stable was yanked out, torn to shreds, and in the morning, what a sight! The horse and cow had had their throats slit and a bit of each of them had been eaten. Thirteen lambs had been disemboweled for the sheer thrill, it seemed, of sinking teeth in wool. A fourteenth had been carried off. So it wasn’t a question of young wolves anymore. We were dealing with someone who didn’t care a whit whether or not he was a character in one of La Fontaine’s fables. This was the work of an old pro, and maybe one with another mouth to feed.

  And, judging from the leap he’d had to make with a lamb in his teeth to climb back up to the dormer window, he was not a gentleman you’d want to meet in a dark alley at night.

  And all of this had happened without a sound, which was a sign of prodigious self-confidence.

  Nevertheless, Langlois trailed him alone for three days.

  “He’s having his fun with us,” Langlois said at last to Sausage, and he smoked four or five pipes in a row sitting by the stove.

  “Do you have a Sunday dress?” he asked Sausage next.

  “Of course.”

  “Show me.”

  By this time, we already knew that nothing meant anything when it came to Langlois. She invited him to her room and opened her trunk. It was even a very beautiful Sunday dress, not meant for these parts, so no one had ever seen it; but, if what they say is true, it wouldn’t have dishonored the Tuileries.

  “Perfect,” said Langlois.

  Double-quick, he summoned the lieutenant and his piqueur here and put them on guard duty in Avers. Then he went off to Urbain’s. That same evening, on the terraces of Saint-Baudille and in the areas of Avers where the lieutenant was posted, a truly magnificent dialogue of hunting horns began. Even though you knew what they were, once in a while the sounds were so hoarse they gave you goose bumps—that music was full of ancient menace.

  Those hunting horns: what an invention!

  I know what I’m talking about. Those fantasias so terrified the woods around Avers, more than the two sentries ever could have, that Langlois had time to take care of his business . . .

  I imagine he was the one who set up those evening duets; those nocturnal calls with so much anguish; those responses with even more anguish; those dialogues of grand, bitter, despairing voices raised in conversation above the woods; those little dawn reveilles that sounded like a timid horseman trotting in place with no way out. All of that was, in the end, a bit militaristic if you look deep enough into it. But faced with the wolves I’m talking about, there was hardly time to split hairs.

  What fo
llowed, obviously, was of the same order. But don’t you forget (not that anyone would call us worldly, with our forests, our mountains, our north wind that makes your nose piss like a fountain, our mud that rises from our shins to our knees and from our knees to our heads) that we adore ceremonies. When life demands a ceremony, we have ceremonies that it is wise not to neglect or ignore. Just try being husband to a godmother without carrying a beribboned cane! If you are a best man, don’t think of mentioning the bridesmaid’s snuffbox. And don’t try harvesting the fields without festooning the horses’ breasts with the obligatory sprays of straw. Or slicing the bread without cutting the sign of the cross into the loaf! And I could go on and on until tomorrow. So for those mysterious works carried out in the regions that skirt sorrow and death, why wouldn’t there be an even more demanding ceremony? And, after everything I’ve told you, why not admit that Langlois was qualified to set it in motion?

  And you have to acknowledge it was done in a masterly fashion.

  That cold, silent face, and those eyes looking beyond the mountain at who knows what, no doubt hid some calculating instinct. Within the hour we learned that, as a service provided by the commune, there would be a wolf hunt under Langlois’s direct orders; that the captain, and especially the Captainess, would take part, not from the balcony but in the ranks; that the legendary royal prosecutor, invited by special messenger, had dropped everything to join us; that he was at a staging inn in the village, having spent the previous night in Monétier; that, it seemed, he’d never carried his belly so quickly; that of course we shouldn’t expect to see him laugh; that he had, on the contrary, a rather surly air about him, but this was a trait inherent to his position so there was no call for worry.

  That’s not all: eleven hunting horns were to be distributed among the lines of beaters; the Captainess’s outfit was a marvel, it was said. Imagine this woman in the snow! Finally, that very evening we were to gather at the school hall where Langlois in person would bring us up to speed on the roles we were to play.