Monsieur Monde Vanishes (11 page)

Why? This question bothered him for some little while.

“Let's go and buy you some clothes before the shops shut.… You see, I think of you and not of myself.…”

“I must go and get some money from the hotel.…”

“D'you leave your money in the bedroom? That's a mistake. Especially if there's a lot of it.…”

She waited for him below. He took a bundle of ten thousand francs, so as not to unfasten the pin. The maid was cleaning the hallway, but she could not see him, for he had closed the door. Julie's words had made him anxious. He climbed onto a chair and pushed the parcel on top of the wardrobe.

She took him to an English firm where they sold smart ready-made clothes. She chose his outfit for him: gray flannel trousers and a navy blue double-breasted jacket.

“With a cap, you'd pass for a yachtsman!”

She insisted on his buying summer shoes of brown and white leather.

“You look quite different.… I sometimes wonder …”

She said no more, but merely cast a furtive glance at him.

She must already have been to the Cintra on her own, for when they went in the barman made some imperceptible sign to her and a young man winked at her.

“You don't look exactly cheerful.…”

They drank. They ate. They went to the Casino, where Julie stayed for a couple of hours and after winning two or three thousand francs ended by losing all that was left in her purse.

Vexed, she motioned to him: “Let's go back.”

They had already formed the habit of walking side by side; when she was tired she clung to his arm. They slowed down automatically a few yards before their hotel, like people who are going home.

She did not want to go through the brasserie.

They closed their door. She bolted it, for it was always she who took this precaution.

“Where d'you hide your money?”

He pointed to the wardrobe.

“I'd take care if I were you.…”

He climbed onto the same chair as that afternoon, passed his hand across the top of the wardrobe, but felt nothing but a thick layer of dust.

“Well, what's up?”

He stood there, aghast. She grew impatient.

“Have you turned into a statue?”

“The parcel's gone.”

“The money?”

Suspicious by nature, she refused to believe him.

“Let's see.…”

She was not tall enough, even when she stood on the chair. She cleared the table and climbed up on that.

“How much was there?”

“About three hundred thousand francs, or a little less …”

“What did you say?”

He felt ashamed, now, of the vastness of the sum. “Three hundred thousand …”

“We must tell the proprietor at once and send for the police. Wait.…”

He held her back. “No. It's not possible.”

“Why not? Are you crazy?”

“We mustn't. I'll explain why.… And in any case it doesn't matter, I'll manage somehow.… I'll send for some more money.…”

“Are you as rich as all that?”

She seemed resentful now, as though she were annoyed with him for having deceived her, and she lay down without a word, turning her back on him, and answered his good night with a mere grunt.

It was bitter and yet sweet, like the sort of pain that one cherishes and tends solicitously for fear of seeing it disappear. Monsieur Monde felt no anger, no resentment, no regret. About his fourteenth or fifteenth year, while he was at the Lycée, he had gone through a period of acute mysticism following a Lenten fast. He had devoted his days and part of his nights to spiritual exercises in search of perfection, and he had happened to keep a photograph of himself at that time—in a group, for he would have scorned to have his own likeness taken. He looked thinner and rather mournful, with a smile whose sweetness infuriated him later, when the reaction had set in.

Another time, much later, after his second marriage, his wife had given him to understand that she found a smoker's breath offensive. He had given up not only tobacco but any sort of spirits and even wine. He derived a savage satisfaction from this mortification of the flesh. This time again he had lost weight, so much so that after three weeks he'd had to go to the tailor's to have his suits altered.

It mattered little, now, whether they fitted him well or badly; but in the last two months he had lost weight far more drastically. He felt all the livelier for it. And although his once rosy complexion was now sallow, he would look with some complacency, when the occasion arose, at the reflection of a face that spoke not only of serenity but of a secret joy, an almost morbid delectation.

The hardest struggle was to keep awake. He had always been a big eater. Now, for instance, at four in the morning, he had to resort to various devices to stop himself from falling asleep.

This was the moment, moreover, when general weariness pervaded the Monico like drifting dust. For the second time Monsieur René, who called himself Artistic Director, had come into the pantry, impeccably dressed in dinner jacket and immaculate white waistcoat, with his teeth gleaming aggressively.

Monsieur Monde could watch him coming through the room, for close to him at eye level there was a minute round spy-hole that enabled him to keep watch, not so much on the guests as on the staff.

Monsieur René could not help smiling to right and left as he walked, like a prince distributing favors. He moved along in this fashion in the glowing light of the dance hall, reached the folding doors, which were hung with red velvet on one side but shabby and squalid on the other, and at the precise moment when he pushed them open with a practiced hand his smile disappeared, and there was no more sign of his splendid teeth; he was a quadroon from Martinique, whose hair was almost sleek, but whose bluish nails betrayed his mixed blood.

“What's the time, Désiré?”

For the time is never publicly displayed in a place where so much art is used to make people forget time.

Désiré was Monsieur Monde, who had chosen the name himself. Désiré Clouet. It had first occurred to him at Marseilles, when he was sitting with Julie in a brasserie on La Canebière and the girl had asked his name. Caught off his guard, he had been incapable of inventing one. Across the street, over a cobbler's shop, he had read a name in yellow letters: “Désiré Clouet, shoemaker.”

Now he was Désiré to some people, and Monsieur Désiré to the rank and file of the staff. The pantry was a long, narrow room that had once been the kitchen of a private house. The green-painted walls were turning yellowish and, here and there, the color of tobacco juice. A door at the far end gave onto the back stairs. As this made it possible to leave the place by a street different from that in which the main entrance was situated, guests occasionally came through Monsieur Désiré's domain.

These were mainly the clients of the gaming tables, who were not offended by dirt and disorder. They did not mind seeing that the kitchens of the Monico consisted of a wretched gas stove whose red rubber tubing was forever coming apart, and which was merely used for warming up dishes brought in from a nearby bistro. There was no sink. Greasy plates and cutlery were stacked in baskets. Only the glasses, marked with the letter M, were washed on the spot and put away in a cupboard. On the floor, under the table, bottles of champagne were waiting, and on that same table open tins of foie gras, ham, pieces of cold meat were laid out.

Désiré's place was in the corner, against the wall of the dance hall, on a kind of platform where there was a desk. He replied: “Four o'clock, Monsieur René.”

“Soon be through now!”

Apart from the hostesses, there were scarcely half a dozen guests in the hall, and they had stopped dancing; the band took long rests between their numbers and Monsieur René was obliged to call them to order from afar, with a barely perceptible movement of his hands.

Monsieur René was eating. Almost every time he came into the pantry he ate something, a truffle that he'd pull out of the foie gras with his fingers, a piece of ham, a spoonful of caviar, or he would drain a bottle; if he felt like a square meal he would make himself a substantial sandwich and eat it slowly, his cuffs turned back, perched on a corner of the table, which he had carefully wiped.

There were long intervals, like this, when Désiré had nothing to do. He had been given the title of steward. He was in charge of everything in the pantry: food and drink, cigarettes, accessories for the
cotillon
; he had to see that nothing left the room without being entered on a slip of paper, and then make sure through his spy-hole that the customer received that particular slip and no other, for waiters are up to all sorts of tricks; one night they'd had to strip one of them to find the money he denied having taken.

Julie was there in the orange-lighted dance hall. Her customers had all gone. She was sitting at a table with Charlotte, a plump blonde; they were exchanging idle remarks, pretending to drink, and getting up to dance together every time Monsieur René came past and snapped his fingers.

It was Julie who had introduced Monsieur Désiré to the Monico. The first evening, on discovering that his money had vanished, he had wanted to go away. Anywhere, he didn't care where. It was she who had been indignant to see him accept the situation so naturally, for she was incapable of understanding how such an event could come almost as a relief.

And yet this was so. It was bound to happen. He had made a mistake, in Paris, through maladroitness or through timidity perhaps, when he provided himself with so large a sum of money. In so doing he had not followed the rule, a rule that was unwritten but which existed nonetheless. When he had decided to go off he had felt no surprise or emotion, because he knew it had to happen. By contrast, when he had gone to the bank to withdraw the three hundred thousand francs he had felt embarrassed and guilty.

On those other two occasions when he had dreamed of escaping, had he thought about money? No. He had to be quite destitute, out in the street.

And now this had happened at last.

“Wait a minute. I've got something to say to the proprietor.”

Julie had gone downstairs. When she came back a few minutes later she announced: “I was quite right.

… Where would you have gone? … There's a little room free, up at the top.… It's a servant's room, but Fred rents it by the month, quite cheap. I'll keep this room myself for a day or two and if I don't find anything I'll join you up on the sixth floor.… I'm sure I'll find something!”

She had found herself a job first, as hostess at the Monico, and then a few days later she had found him the position that he had now held for nearly two months.

They had practically nothing in common now. Occasionally, when Julie was on her own, they would go off to their hotel together in the small hours. She would tell him stories about René or about the boss, Monsieur Dodevin, stories about her fellow hostesses and her customers; he would listen patiently, nodding his head and smiling beatifically. So much so that she lost patience.

“What sort of man are you?”

“Why?”

“I don't know.… You're always contented. You don't mind how you're treated.… For one thing, you never brought a complaint, and yet you're not afraid of the police.… I noticed that, you may be sure! … You say good morning to that bitch that stole your money, when you meet her on the stairs.…”

Julie was convinced—and he felt inclined to agree with her—that it was the chambermaid on their floor, an ugly girl with greasy hair and big slack breasts, who had taken the bundle of notes from the top of the wardrobe; for she was just the type to spy on guests in their bedrooms, being always on the prowl in passages with a duster or a broom in her hand as an excuse.

Julie had discovered that she had as a lover a musician from the Casino who treated her with contempt.

“I bet you whatever you like that he's got the money now. He's too cunning to use it right away. He's waiting till the end of the season.…”

It was quite possible. And what of it?

This, again, was something he had dreamed of. Perhaps, indeed, it was just for this that he had left home? He often wondered about that. As a young man, when he passed a certain sort of woman in the darkness, particularly in sordid streets, he felt a great thrill of excitement. He would brush by them deliberately, but he never turned around; on the contrary, he would make his escape hurriedly as soon as they spoke a word to him.

Sometimes, especially in winter, he used to leave his office on Rue Montorgueil and spend a quarter of an hour wandering, through drizzling rain, in the mean streets around Les Halles, where certain lights seem redolent of mysterious debauchery.

Every time he had taken the train, alone or with his wife, every single time, he had felt a pang of envy, as he sat in his first-class carriage, of the people carrying shabby bundles and going off somewhere or other, careless of what awaited them elsewhere.

There was a night watchman on Rue Montorgueil, a former schoolmaster who had lost his job because of misconduct with his girl pupils. He was ill-dressed and unkempt. He would take up his post in the evening with a bottle of wine in his pocket and settle down in a small cubbyhole where he warmed up his supper over an alcohol burner.

On some mornings when Monsieur Monde arrived very early because of urgent business, he had surprised the man tidying things up, calm and unconcerned, on a last round to make sure that all was in order and then slipping off down the street in the bright early sunlight.

Where did he go? Nobody had ever discovered where he lived, in what corner he would go to ground, like an animal, during the daytime.

Monsieur Monde had actually envied him too.

And now Monsieur Désiré had begun to look like him.

“What d'you want, boy?”

The busboy had just rushed into the pantry; he had come, needless to say, to speak to Monsieur René, who was still busy eating.