The Thibaults (38 page)

A murmur grew, filling the place with sound; and life went on its way again. Jacques drew a deep breath, and the blood once more flowed freely through his limbs. He had a sudden vision of dangers ahead, a pitfall. “Trapped!” he murmured. Then other thoughts welled up. He seemed to live again some seconds of his Greek oral, the crucial moment when he made that slip; the tablecloth rose green before his eyes, with the examiner’s thumb splayed flat on the Choephoroi, his bulging nail flaked like a shred of horn.

“Who is first?”

He did not hear the name that Battaincourt announced. I’d have been first, he thought, if I’d tumbled to
asylum, shrine. Wardens of the domestic shrine
. Then, again and again, he struggled to reconstruct the train of thoughts which had misled him to that appalling blunder.

“Wake up, doctor! Try to look pleased!”

Daniel clapped Antoine on the shoulder and Antoine deigned to smile. For that was Antoine’s way; pleasure for him almost always involved a feeling of constraint, for the gravity of his demeanour precluded any show of gaiety. It was different with Daniel: his gaiety was untrammelled. He seemed to find an almost sensual pleasure in poring on the faces of his friends, his neighbours, and, above all, the women present, mothers or sisters, whose artless affection frankly betrayed itself in every accent, every gesture.

Glancing at his watch, Antoine turned to his brother.

“Well? Anything more to do here?”

Jacques gave a start.

“What? Oh, no, nothing at all!” He looked dejected; he had just realized that inadvertently—at the moment when the results were posted, most likely—he had made the pimple on his lip (which for a week past had spoilt his appearance) start bleeding again.

“Then let’s be off,” Antoine proposed. “I’ve a patient to see before dinner.”

As they left the quadrangle, they saw Favery hurrying up to greet them. Fie was jubilant.

“There you are! I told you I’d heard your French composition was a fine piece of work.”

Favery had left the Ecole Normale a year previously and, eschewing provincial posts, had got himself nominated to a temporary vacancy at the lycée Saint-Louis. He did coaching in his off-hours by day so that by night he might enjoy the life of Paris. Teaching did not appeal to him; his preferences went to journalism, with a secret hankering after politics.

It came to Jacques’s mind that Favery was fairly intimate with the examiner in Greek, and again a picture of the green tablecloth and the examiner’s finger flashed across his mind; he felt his cheeks reddening with shame. That he’d nevertheless passed had not yet dawned on him; he experienced no sense of relief, rather a mood of listlessness, with occasional bursts of rage whenever he recalled his blunder or the pimple on his lip.

Daniel and Battaincourt linked their arms in his and swung him along, to a dancing lilt, towards the Pantheon. Antoine and Favery followed behind.

“My alarm goes off at six-thirty,” Favery explained, “standing in a saucer poised precariously upon a tumbler.” His voice was loud, his laugh complacent. “I curse a bit, open an eye, switch on the light; then I move on the hand to seven o’clock and go to sleep again, clasping the infernal machine against my chest. Presently the house, the whole neighbourhood, is rocked by an earthquake; I damn its eyes, but disobey. I give myself till five past, then ten, then a quarter past, and, when it’s two minutes over the quarter, I allow myself till twenty past—to make it a round figure. At long last I scramble out of bed. All my things are spread out ready—like a fireman’s kit—on three chairs. At seven-twenty-eight I’m in the street; naturally I’ve had no time for breakfast or a wash. Just four minutes remain to catch my subway. At eight o’clock I’m standing at my desk and the cramming process begins. You know when I get away. I have to find time for a bath, for dressing, and looking up friends. How the devil am I to do any work?”

Antoine listened with half an ear, while his eyes roved in quest of a taxi. He turned to his brother.

“Dining with me, Jacques?”

“Jacques is having dinner with us,” Daniel protested.

“No, no!” Jacques exclaimed. “I’m dining with Antoine tonight.” And to himself he added with impatience: “Won’t they ever leave me in peace, confound it! For one thing, I’ve got to put some more iodine on my boil.”

Favery put in a suggestion:

“Let’s all have dinner together.”

“Where?”

“Any old place. How about Packmell’s?”

Jacques demurred:

“No. Not tonight. I’m tired.”

“Tiresome old thing!” murmured Daniel, slipping his arm in Jacques’s. “Doctor, you’ll join us at Packmell’s, won’t you?”

Antoine had secured a taxi. He turned towards them, obviously in two minds.

“What sort of a place is Packmell’s?”

Favery drew a bow at a venture.

“Not by any means what
you
think… .”

Antoine looked at Daniel questioningly.

“Packmell’s?” Daniel said. “Hard to classify, isn’t it, Batt, old boy? Quite out of the ordinary run of cabarets. More like a well-conducted boarding-house. Certainly the bar functions from five to eight, but at eight-thirty the bar-flies flit with one accord, leaving the field to the ‘regulars.’ The tables are run together and we all dine off a vast and highly decorous tablecloth, with Mother Packmell in the seat of honour. A good band; pretty girls. What more can you want? So that’s that. You will meet us at Packmell’s?”

Antoine rarely went out at night; he led laborious days and reserved his evenings for examination work. Today, however, he did not feel in the mood for hematology. Tomorrow would be Sunday; Monday, the daily round began again. Occasionally he took a Saturday evening off and plotted out a night’s amusement. Packmell’s appealed to him. Pretty girls …

“Have it your own way!” His voice was studiously indifferent. “Where is it, by the way?”

“Rue Monsigny. We’ll look out for you up to half-past eight.”

“I’ll be there long before that,” said Antoine, slamming the taxi door.

Jacques made no protest; his brother’s assent had changed his outlook and, moreover, he always took a secret pleasure in giving in to Daniel’s caprices.

“Shall we walk there?” Battaincourt asked.

“Personally, I’m taking the subway,” said Favery, stroking his chin. “I’ll change in a jiffy and meet you there.”

Paris was stifling in a sultry heat presaging storm, the heat-wave which so often ends July, when at each nightfall the air grows drab and dense—with dust or mist, indistinguishably.

They had a good half-hour’s walk before them. Battaincourt came up to Jacques’s side.

“So now you’ve started on the path of glory!” There was no irony in his voice.

Jacques made a petulant gesture; Daniel smiled. Though Battaincourt was five years older than himself, Daniel regarded him as a mere child, and the very quality which so irritated Jacques—his incorrigible naïveté—endeared him to Daniel. He recalled the days when they used to ask Battaincourt to recite, and the latter, planted on the hearthrug, would declaim:

“O sleek-haired Corsican, how fair thy France

Under the sun of Messidor …!”

The would-be Napoleonic gesture that accompanied this exordium always set them loudly laughing, but their hilarity never shook Battaincourt’s simple faith.

In those days Simon de Battaincourt, a new-comer to Paris from the city in Northern France where his father, a Colonel, lived, used to wear a black, close-fitting coat, which he had had specially made to order, as being most seemly for a student at the Paris School of Divinity. The budding clergyman was at that period a frequent visitor at Mme. de Fontanin’s house; she made a point of encouraging his visits, as Colonel de Battaincourt’s wife had been one of her childhood friends.

“I can’t stand this Latin Quarter of yours!” exclaimed the ex-divinity student, who now lived near the Etoile, wore light suits, and had quarrelled with his people over the fantastic marriage on which his heart was set. He was now employed, at a salary of four hundred francs a month, cataloguing prints in the Ludwigson Art Gallery, where Daniel had found him a post.

Raising his eyes, Jacques looked about him. His gaze fell on an ancient flower-vender squatting behind her basket of roses; he had passed her earlier in the day, when he was with Antoine, but then he had observed her with brooding eyes, aloof from all distractions of things seen. Recalling their walk together up the Rue Soufflot, he suddenly felt that he missed something, as if some familiar thing were lacking, like a ring that he had always worn. The feeling of unrest which had haunted him for the past three weeks, and, less than an hour since, weighed on his every step, had vanished, leaving behind a void that was almost pain. For the first time since the results were out, he took the measure of his success; but it left him dazed and broken, as though he had fallen from a height.

“Anyhow, you had some sea-bathing, I suppose,” Battaincourt was saying to Daniel.

Jacques turned to his friend.

“Yes, by Jove!” he exclaimed, and his eyes grew tender. “To think that you came back all on my account! Had a good time down there?”

“Far better than I’d any reason to expect,” Daniel replied.

Jacques smiled ruefully.

“As usual!”

The look that passed between them was the aftermath of a longstanding controversy.

Jacques’s affection for Daniel had an astringent quality, far different from the easy-going friendship Daniel accorded him. “You’re far more exacting where I’m concerned,” Daniel once remarked, “than for yourself. You’ve never fallen in with the life I lead.” “No,” Jacques had answered, “I’ve nothing against your way of living; what I cannot bear is the attitude you have adopted towards life.” And therein lay the source of many a quarrel in the past.

After Daniel had taken his degree, he had refused to follow any beaten track. His father was away and did not trouble about him. His mother left him free to choose his path; she respected strength of will in any form and was fortified by her mystical faith that all was for the best where her children—-and, in general, the family-were concerned. Above all she wished her son to feel free and under no obligation of earning money to better the fortunes of his family. Nevertheless, Daniel could not ignore this duty. His inability to help his mother had preyed upon his mind for two consecutive years and he had anxiously cast about for ways and means of reconciling duty to his kin with other and more urgent needs that shaped his conduct. Scruples whose complexity even Jacques was far from appreciating. The truth was that—judging by the haphazard way in which Daniel had set about learning his art, unaided, taking instinct (mere caprice, it often seemed) as his only guide, painting so little, drawing little more, sometimes shutting himself up all day with a model, only to cover half the pages of an album with outline sketches, and then not touching a pencil again for weeks on end—the truth was that few indeed would have suspected the sublime faith he felt in his talent, and in his future. A tacit self-esteem untainted by conceit: he waited for the day when, in the long process of unalterable law, all that was best in him would find a medium of expression; for he was certain of his destiny—that of a first-rate painter. When and by what path would he win to that high estate? He had no notion and, judging by his conduct, did not greatly care. “We must let life take charge,” he proclaimed, and followed his precept to the letter. Not without twinges of remorse, however; but his timorous reversions to his mother’s moral code had been short-lived and never restrained him effectively from following his bent. “Even when in the past two years my conscience pricked me most acutely,” he once wrote to Jacques (he was eighteen at the time), “I can swear I never reached the point of being genuinely ashamed of myself. What is more, when in those hours of doubt I blamed myself for yielding to temptation, I actually felt far less angry with myself than later on, when life had taken charge again, and I recalled my puerile gestures of self-restraint and abnegation.”

Soon after this letter was written, Daniel happened to share a compartment in a suburban train with another passenger (known to them thereafter as “the man in the train”) who can assuredly have had no inkling of the repercussions that brief encounter was to have upon the early life of two young people.

Daniel was returning from the Versailles Park, where he had lounged away a fine October afternoon under the shadows of the trees. He jumped aboard a car just as the train was leaving. As chance would have it, the face of the elderly man sitting opposite him was not entirely unfamiliar; their paths had crossed that afternoon in the Trianon shrubberies and Daniel had observed him with some interest. He welcomed the chance of examining the man at his leisure. A near view of the traveller gave the impression of a much younger man: though his hair was white, he could be little more than fifty. A short white beard set off effectively the oval of a face whose symmetry enhanced its gentle charm. His complexion, hands, and bearing, the cut of the summer suit he wore, the exotic shade of his tie, and, above all, the clear blue gaze, vibrant with life and light, that he cast on all about him—all gave the impression of a quite young man. The book whose leaves he was turning with a practised hand was bound in flimsy leather like a guide-book, and the cover bore no title. Between Suresnes and Saint-Cloud he rose and, going into the corridor, leaned forth to contemplate the panorama of Paris, all flecked with gold under the fires of sunset. Then, drawing back, he leaned against the inner window, behind which Daniel sat. The hands that held the cryptic book were level now with Daniel’s eyes, only the pane of glass intervened; plastic hands, emotional yet listless—a thinker’s hands. The fingers moved, half opening the book, and on a page flattened against the glass Daniel could read a few phrases:

Nathanael, I will teach you fervour …

A throbbing, lawless life… .

A harrowing existence, Nathanael, rather than tranquillity.

The book slipped aside, but not before Daniel had caught a glimpse of the title heading the page:
Les Nourritures Terrestres
.