The Bachelors (2 page)

In the boulevard Arago he stopped in front of an iron gate, behind which, in the darkness, it was possible to make out first a small garden and then a commonplace little villa, the front of which was unlit as though the house were uninhabited. M. de Coëtquidan took out a bunch of keys, which, like his trousers and his boot, were also tied together with a piece of string, frayed and fluffy with long use, and opened the gate. Then, pulling a leaf from a bush and stuffing the stem between his teeth, he walked round the house and into the only room which was lit, the kitchen, where a tall, bony, ageing woman with a face like a hen was busy at the stove.

'Ah! So you're back!' said the woman. And by the high-pitched tone of her voice as well as what she said — Mélanie usually spoke to him in the third person — M. de Coëtquidan knew she had been at the bottle.

With a grandiose gesture, arm outstretched, and an air of lordly condescension like a ham actor in provincial rep., he offered Mélanie the newspaper, unfolded, crumpled and stained with his fingermarks, which were always somehow sticky and unclean.

'Take it. It is yours!'

His gesture, and his 'It is yours!' could hardly have been more grandiloquent if he had been offering her a diamond tiara. But suddenly, his eyes darting round the kitchen with a look of almost frantic anxiety, M. de Coëtquidan said:

'Minine not here? Where's Minine?'

'Minine? Oh, yes, he's out on the tiles. But the grey one was here just now. What's more, she made a mess there, just where you're standing. It still smells.'

'No, it
doesn't
smell,' said M. de Coëtquidan in an unanswerable tone of voice.

'Well! You ought to have been here just now! Those cats! To think that we've had them for four years, and they still make messes everywhere!'

'They don't in
my
room,' said the old man in the same categorical tone. But suddenly his face lit up, became as it were transfigured, and with a cry of 'Ah! There's Minine!' he rushed across the kitchen, nearly knocking over Mélanie, and opened the door to a small cat which glided in, leapt on to a chair and then on to M. de Coëtquidan's shoulder, and began to rub itself against him.

M. de Coëtquidan was extremely popular with cats. He knew just how to stroke them at the base of the tail, between the paws, etc, a whole technique of fondling cats which is a speciality of bachelors. He drove them wild with excitement.

'Well, no dinner tonight?' he asked suddenly, in an arrogant tone of voice.

'I'm waiting for M. de Coantré. He's been to the lawyer's, and only just got back. He's upstairs changing.'

Without saying a word, the old man snatched up a bell, opened the door leading to the rest of the house, and shook it violently, with a sort of senile frenzy and an expression of great determination, as though he were giving the signal for an armed attack or shouting 'All hands on deck!' He still had the leaf in his mouth, like an old goat. A voice called: 'Coming! I'm coming!'

The kitchen was spacious and well kept; it was in fact the only well-kept room in the house. Two rows of copper saucepans glowed there like so many suns. In the middle, on the kitchen table, which was covered with a fine linen tablecloth, two places were laid, with crystal glasses and decanters: on very cold days, meals were served in the kitchen in order to avoid lighting a fire in the dining-room, where the warmth from the big stove which heated the house did not penetrate sufficiently. Silver, tablecloth and napkins all bore the coronet of a count. A piece of string was tied round the back of one of the chairs. M. de Coëtquidan and his string again! Strange that it did not appear on his coat of arms! For this was
his
chair. Of the ten dining-room chairs there was only one, it seemed, which did not wobble at all, and M. de Coëtquidan had appropriated it; if Mélanie made a mistake and put another one in his place, there was hell to pay. Today, as usual before sitting down, and even though he had seen the string, M. Élie tested the stability of his chair. Whereupon a little man came in and said rather breathlessly:

'I haven't kept you waiting, have I, Uncle? I don't think it's more than half past seven. What time do you make it, Madame Mélanie?'

(He always said 'Madame Mélanie', whereas M. de Coëtquidan called her simply 'Mélanie'.)

'No, Monsieur, it's exactly half past seven. But M. de Coëtquidan was in a hurry!'

'I've just come from the lawyer's,' said the little man, adding in a low voice, 'I'll tell you about it after dinner.' He sat down, and the two gentlemen, having tucked their napkins into their collars like farmhands, began their meal.

The Comte de Coantré was a man who might have been taken for about forty-eight years old, although in fact he was fifty-three: he was fairly full in the face, with a moustache and a short beard untinged with grey, and close-cropped hair. He wore an indoor jacket so threadbare in front that the lining showed through, and a workman's shirt of rough khaki flannel, with a greasy collar. His felt slippers both had holes in them, and his trousers were of precisely the same awkward cut as M. de Coëtquidan's — the regulation six inches below the fork. While M. Élie's hands, though criss-crossed with scratches from the cats, were delicate, almost feminine (he was proud of them, as he was proud of his sensitive feet, which obliged him to wear two pairs of socks all the year round), M. de Coantré's were rough and calloused, especially at the tips of the fingers, which were cracked and wrinkled and grey with encrusted dirt — the hands of a labourer.

During the meal, the two gentlemen churned out the most priceless collection of conversational inanities one could possibly imagine. M. de Coëtquidan recited what he had read in his newspaper, M. de Coantré what he had learnt at school. The inanity lay not so much in what they said, which contained a certain number of truths, as in the fact that they had no idea what they were talking about. And both with such passion. The name of Briand, which cropped up occasionally, drew lightning from their eyes. The Huguenots impaled by Montluc were impaled once more by M. Élie. Everything they said was categorical: men, events, opinions were judged in a phrase, almost invariably condemned, with no appeal. There were, however, two glimmers of light — one, when M. de Coëtquidan described the buttons on the uniforms of the Gardes-Françaises, and everything he said about them was correct; the other when M. de Coantré explained a device he had invented to prevent the rats from eating the food of two hens which lived in an enclosure at the bottom of the garden. During these passages the two gentlemen, each on his special subject, were interesting.

At length they rose from the table. M. de Coantré lit an oil lamp (alone, probably, in the whole of the boulevard Arago in 1924, the house had no electricity, through fear of novelty as well as expense), and saying to his uncle, 'Excuse me, I'm going in front because of the lamp,' he went out of the kitchen. The house was in total darkness, and the lamp threw a faint light on a narrow staircase, the steps of which were covered with a worn carpet. A large stove heated the house by way of the staircase well. M. de Coantré went up first, holding the lamp. Half-way up, noticing that M. de Coëtquidan was not following him, he stopped.

'Aren't you coming up, Uncle?'

'No, I'm warming myself,' the old man answered from beside the stove. And seeing the other hesitate, he added in a patronizing voice, 'Make yourself at home in my room. I'll be up in a moment.'

M. de Coantré went up to the first floor and into his uncle's room. It was pervaded by a smell at once strong and insipid, like the smell of ill-kept babies, the basis of which was a sort of cheap brilliantine the old man put on his hair. On the table, which was littered with stained and yellowing books and reviews, only a small corner was comparatively free, and even this was occupied by an assortment of those objects, peculiar to M. Élie, which are already old acquaintances to us: lumps of sugar, crusts of bread, shreds of tobacco and, needless to say, bits of string. Most of the objects to be seen on the table — books, cigarette packets, matchboxes, medicaments — had old used stamps stuck to them; for M. de Coëtquidan could not see a stamp on a letter (every night he poked about in the garbage bin with his stick to see if he could find one) without unsticking it, with great artistry, and resticking it, with spit, on some object in his room.

In the shadows against the walls one could vaguely distinguish a profusion of frames, imitation bronze statuettes, military outfits with sabres and straps, a crucifix above the bed, and a bookcase. Seeing all those military trimmings, our observer would have decided at once: 'He's an old retired Zouave major. Of course, the beard is typical.' But M. de Coëtquidan had never done even a week's military service. 'Well then, you won't deny he's a sportsman,' our friend would have rejoined, spotting a gun and a game-bag in a corner and three copies of the
Almanach
du chasseur français
on the table, respectively four, seven, and eleven years old — but M. de Coëtquidan did not even know how to load a gun, and the bag had never contained more than a few packets of cheap tobacco. But if our observer had opened the bookcase and discovered on the lower shelves (those hidden by the woodwork) the
Claudine
series, albums of Willette and Léandre, postcards of artistic nudes', books by Maizeroy and Champsaur, he would have announced triumphantly: 'I've got it! He's an old lecher.' Only M. de Coëtquidan, at the age of sixty-four, was a virgin.

M. de Coantré placed the lamp on the table, then hesitated once more. Naturally he found it rather off-hand of 'Uncle' to stay below warming himself and keeping him waiting when he had told him that he had serious matters to discuss with him. But he was so used to being deferential that it did not occur to him to be shocked. He could have sat down and waited in the only armchair, which was placed in front of the table; but the idea never crossed his mind, for it was 'Uncle's chair'! The only other chair in the room was loaded with several years' supply of copies of
La Sabretache,
as though to indicate that it was not meant to be sat in and that etiquette required of M. de Coëtquidan's visitors that they should remain standing while M. de Coëtquidan naturally occupied his own armchair. Threatened with a long wait, M. de Coantré, not without going through an inward debate that one could have read on his face, eventually decided to remove the
Sabretaches,
which he stacked clumsily on the table. Then, taking a piece of paper from his pocket and placing it too on the table, he sat down and waited.

He could hear, downstairs, the spitting noise of M. de Coëtquidan's pipe: the old man was in the habit of dribbling into it until it contained such a quantity of liquid that he was often to be seen emptying the bowl in the garden, letting out a stream of blackish juice on the gravel. Then M. de Coantré heard another characteristic noise, and his face stiffened with annoyance.

This noise was made by M. de Coëtquidan turning the handle of the stove in order to make it burn more strongly and give out more heat. This gesture of his — a ritual gesture, like so many gestures and words in this house — had always been the cause of dramas — also ritual, of course. During the time when the house was run by the Comtesse de Coantré, mother of M. de Coantré and sister of M. de Coëtquidan (this time was not long past: she had been dead only six months), M. de Coëtquidan paid his sister a rent of five hundred francs a month, which he now paid to her son. The surreptitious twists the old man gave to the handle of the stove increased the consumption of coal:
inde irae.
It was not uncommon for Mme de Coantré to scold her younger brother like a naughty boy.

'Élie, you've been at the stove!'

'No!'

'Don't tell lies! I heard you.'

'I tell you I didn't! So there!'

The handle of the stove was nowadays one of the things that induced a constant state of anxiety in the poor count's feeble brain. He lived in dread of hearing the fatal noise and then having either to accept this waste of coal, or admonish his uncle, a contingency which assumed agonizing proportions in his mind. After lunch he would watch for the old man to go out and, as soon as he heard the front door close behind him, would go down two floors to turn the stove down. At night, on the point of going to sleep, he would wake up with a start, thinking he had heard someone at it.

At last M. de Coëtquidan came laboriously up the stairs, gripping the banisters so hard that it sounded as if he might uproot them: they shook from top to bottom of the house. M. de Coantré went out to light the way for him, and M. de Coëtquidan entered his room.

'Uncle, I'm going to have to talk business to you for the first time . . .'

M. de Coantré stopped short. His uncle's eyes had alighted on the chair: the
Sabretaches
were no longer there! And immediately the old man's glance leapt round the room with the same frenzied gleam that had crossed it when, casting a circular look round the kitchen, he had asked: 'Where's Minine?'

'There they are,' said M. de Coantré, pointing to the table.

M. Élie fumbled through the reviews with nervous fingers. And M. de Coantré, though long accustomed to his uncle's behaviour, was stupefied by his action: the old man was counting the reviews as though he were afraid his nephew had stolen one of them. Then he sat down and grunted: 'Hrrr . . .' These 'Hrrr's, resembling the grunts with which certain species of monkeys punctuate everything they do, were always heavy with significance, usually of a threatening kind.

A troubled look came oyer M. de Coantré's face, and blinking rapidly, he said:

'Uncle, ever since Mama's death I haven't bothered you with business matters. With her example always in mind, I wanted above all to avoid worrying you in any way.'

'You did right, my boy,' said M. de Coëtquidan, with a cynicism to which both he and his nephew remained oblivious.

'Nevertheless the time must come when one has to face realities. In this life of ours,' the count went on sententiously, 'we must be realistic.' (This word 'realistic' was fashionable in the newspapers of the day. When the reader gets to know M. de Coantré better, he will realize that on his lips it had a very special savour.) 'I saw Bourdillon again today' (this was the chief clerk in the office of Lebeau the solicitor), 'and the time has come to put you in the picture.