The Bachelors (23 page)

That same evening M. de Coantré bought some condensed milk, some tins of food and a pot of jam, which he took home in his haversack. He made the best of a bad job, telling himself that it was healthier to eat a light meal at night. He had expected to find this shopping painful, because it might be a source of rumours, but it turned out not to be.

On the other hand, two new facts
were
painful. One was the recognition that the countryside no longer interested him. Just as, in his conversations on the first day with the wheelbarrow man and the innkeeper, he had given a firework display of all his country knowledge, and now had no fireworks left because he had said all he had to say, in the same way he had used up during the first two days all his reserves of feeling in regard to Nature. Forced to admit he was no longer the same man as he had been at Chatenay, he looked at himself with the expression worn by cows when they watch a train go by and by men when they discover the meaning of the term 'integrated personality'.

What also pained him, unsociable though he was, was the feeling of having been deserted, a feeling that was now stronger than ever. He acknowledged it with comical surprise; it gave him the look of a girl at a ball who has had few invitations to dance, and it hurt him even more than his lack of money. M. Octave replied to his lyrical letter with a message congratulating himself on his nephew's happiness at Fréville. These congratulations arrived just when Léon was beginning to be unhappy. But neither Aille de Bauret nor Élie nor Mélanie answered him. And when he arrived at Chandelier's, where he had his mail addressed, and was told once more that there was nothing for him, his eyelids twitched and his throat went dry. It was Mélanie's silence which hurt him most of all.

The coarseness of the people among whom he had to eat at Chandelier's, which had delighted him at first ('Simple people! The good, natural life!') he now found hard to bear.

'Come on, I'll stand you a noggin if you can prove there's a God.'

'If only I'd drunk when I was young! But I've only been boozing for the past eighteen years. What about you, how much d'you drink a day?'

'Well, I'd say about six litres, like everyone else.'

He was tired of hearing such remarks. He felt as isolated as though he were alone on an island. His thoughts now wandered back to the house in the boulevard Arago. Arago! There was Uncle Élie there, who after all was one of the family, his mother's brother, who could be obliging enough when he chose, and was almost touching when he volunteered to deliver by hand (so that he could remove the stamp) a letter he had been asked to post. With Uncle Élie he could always go and gossip when he was too bored — he remembered the day he had asked him to help with a division sum which he could not work out because of the decimal point (and the old man had failed too). At Arago, too, there was Uncle Octave, eternally helpful. And there was Mélanie, a temperamental, peevish, insufferable old bird, but reliable and devoted. All of them people who had known his mother (how important this fact had suddenly become for him!), all of them from the same cell, and most of them congealed together, as it were, by having lived together so long. Arago meant 'security' (his mind continually fastened on this word). Arago meant
home —
he discovered this new word. And the Arago days were gone for ever!

At last he received a note from Mélanie, trivial and brief. She said, with a touch of sourness, that M. Élie was pleased with his boarding-house. He realized she was jealous, and was glad. The idea of persuading Mélanie to come and live at Fréville crossed his mind. Then it faded. But for a moment it had shone.

After a few days, Chandelier informed Léon that the boy could bring him his meals again. The innkeeper had pretended he was not available in order to sicken M. de Coantré with the keeper's house and force him to take a room at the inn. His plot having failed, he now regretted the profits he was losing through Léon's eating at home. Léon saw through the manoeuvre, and would have liked to refuse: now that he had grown used to tinned food, he appreciated its convenience and especially its cheapness. But he was afraid to incur Chandelier's resentment. It was the first time it had struck him quite so forcibly that he was at the mercy of this brute, and he realized the drawbacks of the country, where there is no choice of people as in a city, and you have to come to terms with everybody. He agreed to have the boy back, but held out for doing the housework himself.

Often he would take out his wallet to see how much money he had left. But having done so, he was afraid to count the notes, and left it open beside him before pocketing it again. At last he made up his mind. Expecting to find three hundred francs, he found two hundred and twenty. What would he do when they were spent? Appeal to Uncle Octave once more? The latter knew perfectly well, after all, when he gave him five hundred francs, that such a pittance would soon run out! Why hadn't he set him up properly, if only to be rid of him for a while? (Léon envisaged quite calmly the most humiliating possibilities.) He was turning all this over in his mind when he began to feel unwell, mildly at first, then with agonizing sharpness. His fingers were cold, and so, too, was the upper surface of his thighs. Like a drowning man searching desperately for something to cling on to, he wanted to concentrate on some action or other; so he snatched up some nail-clippers and cut his nails. Feeling worse, he went to the lavatory, although he felt no need to do so. But it seemed to him that any change which occurred in his body might bring him relief.

The feeling eventually disappeared, leaving him with that sensation of weakness and heaviness combined which he had already experienced more than once — during his night in Montmartre, for example. It was the combined weakness and heaviness of his flabby, drooping body, that succession of thick and thin strokes — the big head and the narrow chest, the bulging stomach and the skinny legs. He sat there limp and shrivelled in his chair, thinking of the old familiar Arago sounds: the squeaking of the rats, the crack of a splintered lamp-glass, the falling of the coal in the stove, the voice of M. Élie giving orders to the cats. Had he been at Arago now, Mélanie would have plied him with her own special medicines and M. Élie would have said in an avuncular way: 'Mustn't stay like that, my boy. Oh no, that won't do at all,' and gone off to fetch the doctor — for he adored going to fetch the doctor because it made him feel important and at the same time gave him something to do. Suddenly the clock chimed. Léon gave a sudden, violent start. The chiming of the clock made him want to cry.

He thought he must have grown weaker through going short of food.

He went to look at himself in the mirror, convinced that it must show in his face that he was a sick man. But he could see nothing abnormal in his face. He simply found it ludicrous.

However, less perhaps from concern for his health as from the need for some human contact which would cleanse him of the atmosphere of the inn, he decided to pay a visit that afternoon to Dr Gibout, general practitioner at Saint-Pierre-du-Buquet, a market-town which could be reached in half an hour's walk and a twenty minute bus-ride. M. Octave had told him. 'You'll have two people to rely on at Fréville: Chandelier and Gibout. You'll see Gibout for yourself-he's a real countryman, a big, round fellow, father of four, and an excellent doctor. He could have been a Deputy ten times over, but he prefers to do his job, and
he makes money
[
In English
in
the
original.
] hand over fist.'

Mme de Coantré had made a cult of illness. She had a little cupboard entirely devoted to prescriptions (all of which were kept, sometimes for as long as twenty years), to those marvellous advertisements for patent remedies which one has only to read to feel cured, and to phials and bottles of medicine, which sacred economy forbade one to throw away as long as some of the mixture remained. Even though the mixture must long ago have gone bad, it was still kept and it was not until the day it was needed that its sinister colours would prompt the decision to throw it out. Léon's relations with doctors had always been strange. Whoever was looking after him, Léon alternated sharply between the notion that this doctor knowingly and deliberately was killing him and the notion that the mere presence of this doctor in his neighbourhood was enough to prevent his dying. According to the mood of the moment, Léon would either defy the doctor's orders not to smoke, for example, and deliberately smoke a great deal; or, on the other hand, he would be pusillanimity itself and could be seen standing in the middle of a crowd on the edge of the pavement absorbed in a mysterious occupation which they could not understand: he was feeling his pulse. Sometimes, to the suspension of all other business, he would go back to see the doctor to check up on some minor point — whether a tablet should be chewed or swallowed — and at other times it was terrifying to see him, having mislaid the spoon, swigging his potion from the bottle. All this was the height of incoherence, though not so very different as one might think from the behaviour of a normal man towards doctors and medicine.

If M. Octave had not sung the praises of Gibout, M. de Coantré might not have been able to bring himself to cross the doctor's threshold that afternoon. This poor man would have refused to put his life in the hands of a man who gave the appearance of poverty — which may perhaps justify the Chandeliers' stricken faces and the atmosphere of catastrophe that had pervaded the room at the inn when the count had revealed that he had no money. This wretched little garden, this dusty, threadbare door-mat, these dull, greenish door brasses, this broken bell-push, this slattern who opened the door, this smelly little hall... And yet, as M. Octave had said, the doctor was rolling in money and dealt on terms of equality with all the nobs in the
département.
M. de Coantré wrote 'Count de Coantré, nephew of Baron de Coëtquidan' on a piece of paper and sent it to the doctor. Then he went into the waiting-room, which was already occupied by a lady whose mourning clothes gave her an air of superficial dignity.

He had just sat down, and had not yet had time to give way to his uneasiness about the welcome he would receive from the great man, when the door into the consulting-room opened and Gibout walked in. He came up to him and asked if he would mind waiting while he dealt with the lady, and they whinnied politely in one another's faces. Gibout recalled Chandelier in age and appearance: he was indeed a 'rustic', "whom one could visualize in a blue peasant's smock: ill-shaven, florid, with short, thick curls like the fringe on an ox's forehead. His trousers, worn too low, left a gap below the waistcoat revealing his leather belt and even an expanse of shirt.

After a quarter of an hour he reappeared and led Léon into his consulting-room.

'So you're M. de Coëtquidan's nephew! I see, so your mother was his sister? . . . Quite so. And therefore you must be related to the Champagnys?'

'I call Mme de Champagny "cousin", but I couldn't tell you exactly how we're related. ...'

'Your cousin! Well, how very interesting! Tell me, then, is it true that she's a first cousin of the de la Naves?'

'Goodness! I haven't the least idea.'

'You see, in my spare time I collect documents about the families in the neighbourhood. I suppose you're only here for a short stay, but if ever you had a moment I should be delighted to show them to you and ask your advice.'

'Alas! I don't know much about it. As you see, although the Champagnys are my cousins, I should be incapable of explaining how,' said M. de Coantré who had come for medical treatment.

'What a pity! Your uncle told me more or less the same thing. But with him it's a fad. You know what he told me? That all the gentry were fools, and the only intelligent ones were those who had married Jewesses, because they then acquire something of the Jewish intelligence. Ah! it's a great pity the nobility don't take more trouble to get to know one another better and form a united front. But still it's something, by Jove, to have been on top for four hundred years! You can always tell a gentleman, you know. I've met them in Morocco, for example, settlers in the
bled
dressed like highway robbers. Well, one look at them and I could see they had that something that gave them the right at certain moments to sneer at the rest of us.'

'I can't say I've ever noticed that something,' said M. de Coantré, making a wry face.

He looked at this grubby man, reeking with vulgarity, this slovenly peasant with his passion for the nobility. He longed to talk to him about his health, but he felt it might be tactless, that he would be regarded as a spoil-sport. It was Gibout who came to his rescue.

'Enough of this gossip! I haven't yet asked you what brings you here. Nothing serious, I'm sure,' he said jovially. And having dismissed this tiresome possibility, he leapt on to his hobby horse and was back in the clouds once more. 'Still, I should have liked to show you first of all the château of Champagny. I've got a photo of it here which the baron gave me himself. It isn't on sale, which is why I'm so keen on it.'

'I know Champagny well,' said Léon. 'I stayed there when I was a young man.'

It was no good. Gibout was determined to show him his château. He searched for the photograph. M. de Coantré wondered if there were suffering patients next door waiting with bated breath to be told if they were going to die or not. He wondered if Gibout would ever be able to recover enough detachment of mind to examine him seriously. Finally the doctor produced a green cardboard box full of envelopes, each of which contained a postcard. The envelopes were annotated and each of them bore a coat of arms drawn in pen and ink.

'Here we are, this is Champagny,' said Gibout, as if Léon had not told him that he had been a guest at the château. 'And here's the Macé de Thianville's. You must know them, they're also cousins of yours.'

'I don't think so,' said Léon in the accents of truth.

'Yes, yes. They are your cousins. Mme Macé de Thianville was a des Mureaux, not the des Mureaux of the Aveyronnais, the branch which. . .' (he recited a pedigree). 'Well, well! I must say it's a bit thick that I should have to tell you who your relations are! But here we are, the proof. . ..'