The Bachelors (26 page)

They had foregathered two days earlier in solemn tumult, flapping their wings and chattering, driven by a divine impulse — their desire to be happy. For some time already they had been practising long flights to assuage their restless longing to be off. What they wanted was to give themselves a long holiday and pleasure in the sun, after which, for the nesting season, the season of worries and chores, they could return to the duller regions. They knew what a hard and exhausting journey lay ahead of them, they knew how many of them would come down on a pond for a rest and be killed by a shot from a wildfowler, how many would fall in the sea to the delight of the sharks, how many would be devoured by the sinister peregrine falcons which followed them in their flight. But none of this discouraged them, any more than the night, the wind, the rain, the mist, the absence of landmarks. Beyond were the Pyrenean passes, where the rain and the mist would cease abruptly as though an aerial partition blocked their way; beyond was the fragrance of Spain, and the green and the blue waters of Gibraltar, lying side by side without merging, and blue-breasted Tangier, a turtle-dove on the shoulder of Africa; and further still the warm, pink ponds sunk in their blazing torpor. And they set off, not wanting to stop, stopping just long enough to drink and preen themselves in a pool, hurrying, hurrying on as though they knew only too well that one can die for wasting a single minute on something other than happiness.

At this hour, too, there were men everywhere arriving in sight of death. Those who had been governed by principles and those who had feebly abandoned themselves to chance, those who had tortured themselves for nothing and those who had had no thought but to enjoy themselves, those who had done wrong and those who had not — all, when they arrived in sight of the Great Wall, acquired a mutual resemblance that was a kind of admission. It was hard to see how they differed and had differed from one another. It was even harder to see what use it had been to them to try to be different, to try to excel, to want this rather than that, to believe this rather than that. Everything, in the last resort, came to the same thing; it had all been, for every one of them, a way of passing the time, and now these men who had lived scattered and hostile were drawing together, like a group of men who are obliged to pass through the same door. M. de Coantré was among them, somewhere, more or less identical with each one of them (since they all had more or less the same face), not much higher than the base and the criminal, not much lower than the heroic and the renowned.

Suddenly he awoke with a start. It was no longer either the proud-sealed Coantré, or the timidly hopeful Coantré, but yet another Coantré who raised himself up with a jerk, clutching the sheet with both fists, and sat there bolt upright, quite still, his eyes dilated, like a bat clinging to a wall. His soul, in its last convulsion, sucked in the skin of his face, hollowing his cheeks and eye-sockets until he was quite disfigured. Cold hands already grasped his hands, but he no longer felt them now; he had gone beyond all that. Then he let go of the sheet, and his hands went up to the iron bed-posts.

Suddenly he cried out in a terrible voice, 'Madame Mélanie, stay with me! I don't want to die alone!' His right hand, gripping the bed-post with the strength of a gorilla, twisted it like a rope, and then, with a great gasp, he fell back on the pillow.

11

T
WO
days having gone by without any sign of M. de Coantré, Chandelier was seized with a double anxiety — at the thought of displeasing the baron by having displeased his nephew, and at the thought that something might have happened — and went to knock on the door of Picot's house. It was closed, as also were the shutters, and there was no answer. He thought M. de Coantré might have gone back to Paris, but finding this odd, he wrote to the baron.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred our presentiments turn out to be false, but the hundredth time they prove right and then we wag our heads and talk about 'the mysteries of life'. When M. Octave received Chandelier's letter he had a really extraordinary premonition that Léon was dead. And in the same instant burst from him, with the force of a rocket, the hope that he was.

He sent Papon to Fréville by the next train. And he thought to himself, 'If he were dead, what a miraculous solution it would be! Enough to make one believe in Providence!'

It was now four days since Léon had appeared. Papon and Chandelier went to see the mayor, who decided to have the door opened by a locksmith.

They found M. de Coantré stretched out on the bed, dead. There was nothing unusual about the corpse. Gibout, who was called, pronounced it a typical case of cerebral congestion, and the mayor gave permission for burial.

On receipt of Papon's telegram, M. Octave wired him some money with orders to get things done decently but without unnecessary expense and to have the body buried in the cemetery at Fréville. There was no question of his going there himself.

He had had a moment of uneasiness on hearing of Léon's death. Then he said to himself,' Even admitting that I've been at fault — which is by no means certain, one would have to look into it, examine the whole thing in detail — what's the use of torturing myself? Where he is now, he won't blame me. It's utterly pointless to worry about whether I behaved badly or not. It's all over and done with.'

Mme Émilie seemed much moved. She had thought of everything in regard to Léon except that he was mortal. 'And yet, God knows, we did everything we could for him!' After a moment devoted to reminiscence, and to groans about the necessity of bringing people from Le Havre to disinfect the keeper's house when it had already been done six weeks before, after the keeper had died, she withdrew to her room and, kneeling on her
prie-dieu,
prayed for Léon.

M. Élie received the news by express letter in the boarding-house M. Octave had found him — a boarding-house kept by a widow of respectable antecedents who had begun by letting one of her rooms to an American officer during the war and thereafter had slipped into taking lodgers, without diminishing herself in the eyes of her family by this 'business', justified as it was by its patriotic origin (another small item to add to the French debt to the United States). M. Élie, holding the letter in his hand, stood for a long time as though struck dumb, his pale eyes gazing into space, and thinking 'That's what is coming to me.'

Mélanie, who was informed by letter, felt her legs give under her and asked her concierge for a chair, into which she collapsed with a deathly look. She had to be given a glass of water etc. Among the things she said was one remarkable phrase: 'Poor M. de Coantré! He died because he had no one left to "declare himself to".' She meant, 'to confide in'.

Mlle de Bauret had been in Cannes, where she was busily pursuing an extremely attractive young Pole, when she received M. de Coantré's letter explaining his situation. She had had a twinge of impatience. 'After all, it's only a question of a few sous, whereas I've got to get hold of a man!' But she had sent off by return of post a five hundred franc postal order, which arrived after Léon's death. M. Octave's telegram announcing the news also reached her in Cannes. Without a moment's hesitation she decided that, even if it meant breaking with the entire family (but she knew very well there was no question of breaking with anyone over Léon), she would not, at any price, put herself out either for the funeral or for anything else. As she had warned everyone that she would be travelling about where the spirit moved her, she lay low for a week, and then, calculating that the funeral would already have taken place, asked a friend who was holidaying in Corsica to send the following telegram to the baron in her name: 'Only just received news, wire having followed me from town to town. Deeply regret too late etc.' Through the same channel she wrote M. Octave a 'perfect' letter.

Gibout wrote the baron a letter which was also considered 'perfect'. He explained how science is sometimes incapable of foreseeing a sudden quirk of nature. He spoke of Léon in 'perfect' terms. 'He enjoyed coming to see me because he could talk genealogy.'

At first everyone was much affected by the dramatic character of the affair, but afterwards they were pleased both for the sake of Léon, who would have dragged out a pretty miserable existence, whereas now he had rejoined his mother, and also for the sake of M. Octave, who had honourably extricated himself from a situation in which he had always had the
beau rôle
but which in the long run might have proved a burden. He was looked on with something of the tenderness people feel for a survivor from an accident. It is an elementary mistake to be surprised at people's indifference to the death of a member of their family. Not one of these people we are speaking of had loved M. Coantré. How then could his death have aroused in them anything else but indifference? Fortunately it came as a nervous shock, which enabled them to make the appropriate faces.

At Fréville, Papon's heart throbbed with self-importance. Long live Death, for making people important! Papon was a capable man. He had been working for M. Octave for seventeen years and robbing him for only three, increasing the monthly food bill by a regular four hundred francs. He was devoted to him, and touched as he was by the role he had been given in this affair, defended his interests with the utmost strictness. Thus he chose the cheapest wood for the coffin, deeming it unnecessary, like the good valet he was, to go to expense for something nobody will see.

As soon as the door of Picot's house was opened, and while the preliminary investigations were being made, Papon, confident that no one could have counted the money before him, stole eight francs from a cup in which M. de Coantré, in his bachelor way, feeling it necessary always to have small change at hand, had collected thirty francs' worth of small coins. But that of course was not the real joy which Papon received from this death. Even heirs who are genuinely grieved by the death of the 'dear departed' are nearly always consoled by the enjoyment they get from rummaging through the deceased's belongings, violating his most intimate secrets, hoping to discover something scandalous in the thick deposit which encumbers any dead person's room (letters, files, odds and ends), the sort of secretion every man produces day by day and in the midst of which he makes his nest. Society gives individuals a powerful satisfaction when it allows them in certain cases to do what they like with the complicity of the law — heirs who can rob legally, policemen who can beat people up legally, judges who can legally dispense injustice, colonial settlers who can legally murder a native whose face they do not like. Rummaging through M. de Coantré's belongings with the delicious feeling of taking part in a police inspection, Papon experienced one of the most exquisite pleasures he had ever experienced in his life. He opened a packet of letters addressed years ago by Mme de Coantré to her son and tied up with a shoe-lace. He read a few of them, but they were so innocent that they bored him and he stopped at that. He slipped Léon's diary into his pocket to read in the train on the way home (he would put it in the suitcase on arrival). He was infuriated by a sealed packet which bore the inscription:
To be burned unread after my death.
He could have read it and then thrown it away, but he did not dare. Having sorted everything out, he dined at Chandelier's and ate enough for four — for the lugubrious and the sublime induce hunger.

Much of the ill that might have been said of Léon at Fréville remained unsaid because Papon and Chandelier only spoke to one another in official circumstances, mutually regarding one another as a 'peasant' and a 'flunkey'.

M. Octave could not for a moment consider making the journey to Fréville for the funeral: the weather was too cold and his chest would not stand up to it. Still less could Mme Émilie, with her extremely delicate health. M. Élie said he was no longer of an age to catch trains at seven o'clock in the morning in winter; he would not do it for anyone, not even his brother. M. Octave was kind enough not to offer him his car and so deprive him of his excuse. The whole family had been informed, but not one of them went to Fréville. Gibout excused himself on the ground that he had a consultation at Le Havre. The only person to follow M. de Coantré's coffin was his uncle's valet.

Papon brought back M. de Coantré's little trunk: it was all that remained of the house of Coantré, like a trunk washed up on a beach, the sole remains of a sunken ship. The baron found in it some small household objects, a crucifix, a box of tools. In the address book were some cuttings of newspaper articles on the subject of longevity, which tends to prove that however bitter M. de Coantré's life may appear to some, he hoped it would not end too soon.

Papon handed over to M. Octave the bills he had incurred at Fréville. Among them was the bill for Léon's meals at Chandelier's. M. Octave considered that Léon had eaten a great deal for a man with no money. But he grew cross when he read '2 rums, 1 fr. 50', then the next day, '3 rums, 2 fr. 25 ', and then '1 bottle of rum, 15 francs'. This consumption of liquor was all the more impressive because Chandelier had doubled Léon's bills by adding food and drink he had not had. 'So he drank!' the baron thought. 'That explains a great many things.' And he fell into a long reverie.

One of the classic instincts of the human idiot is to reconstruct a whole animal from a single bone, but, unlike Cuvier, to do it on a false premise, the bone in question belonging to another species. If a young woman of means rejects two or three suitors simply because she suspects it was not for herself that they wanted her, how delightful to be able to explain it by saying she is a Lesbian. Why didn't we spot it before! That explains everything! What it is to have an emancipated mind! On the basis of these grubby bits of paper which showed M. de Coantré swallowing in the space of a few days a fairly considerable quantity of spirits, half of it the pure invention
OF
a rascally café proprietor and the other half consumed only by a reflex of self-defence on the part of a poor wretch who felt the need to warm himself, frozen as he already was by the cold hands of death — on the basis of these bits of paper M. Octave reconstructed everything, understood everything:
et mine
reges intelligite.
The fact that Léon drank — a fact that was now 'established' explained as clear as daylight the failure of the enlargers, the eccentricity of his life, his taste for 'the people'; and there it was, it was the key to everything! Even to his 'emotionalism'. 'When he was moved, and wanted to kiss me, he must have had a drop.' M. Élie having called to see his brother shortly after this great discovery, M. Octave asked him 'Did he drink?'