The Years of Fire (38 page)

“I’m sure they do. In fact they told me so themselves, in their own words. In any case, if they thought you were a criminal you’d know it by now, and you wouldn’t have come here tonight to ask me that question.”

“And yet, I almost killed a woman.”

“Without meaning to, Charles, without meaning to! Hmm … I’m not happy about the way you’re seeing this.… Let’s look at the thing as it really happened, shall we? It was she who seems to have wanted to kill herself. But she failed to do so. And to whom does she owe her life? To you, Charles. To you. That’s what you must not forget. I hope you will always bear that in mind.”

Charles jiggled the glass of port in his hands, staring down at the gently dancing liquid. He saw the actress talking to him, sitting across from him, wearing her blue silk dressing gown, her long hair tied back with a ribbon to which she’d pinned a tiny bouquet of dried flowers. He heard her deep, resonant voice echo in his ear, warm with the friendship she had been offering without even being aware of it.

And for the first time in a long time, instead of grimacing at the memory, he smiled.

“I think the moment has come for you to learn something from life.” The notary stood up, slightly wobbly, from his desk. He walked over and stopped at the shelf on which were ranged the most beautiful editions of the literary masterworks. “I think, young man, you’re ready for an intensive treatment of
The Human Comedy
. You are familiar with
The Human Comedy
, are you not?”

“By Balzac? I haven’t yet read anything by him.”

“Well, the time has come, young man. It’ll open your eyes and shore up your soul for life’s approaching battles, as our old spiritual leaders used to say. You’ve already had one battle, but there’ll be others.”

He took down five huge, red tomes bound in stiff canvas boards, and placed them on the floor at the young man’s feet.

“I just bought it in the Pléiade edition. These here are part of the ‘Intégrale’ collection, brought out by Les Éditions Seuil. They’re quite lovely too, but I find them a bit cumbersome, although the price was right. Are you going straight home?”

Charles nodded.

“Good. Take them with you. A present from me.”

Charles was speechless. When he found his tongue he protested that he didn’t deserve such a gift.

“Nonsense, nonsense, it’s nothing. No need to thank me. But read them soon – all of them, no skipping! You’ll have your preferences, as I have mine; parts of them will strike you as slightly boring, but others will sweep you away like a hurricane. I defy you to read through the whole of
The Human Comedy
without coming away with a more self-assured and intelligent view of life.”

He leaned against the bookshelf. The tiring day, combined with the port, had suddenly turned his legs to rubber.

“That’s one of the benefits of great books,” he went on, his chin raised high as though he were addressing a vast audience. “The most important, of course, is the pleasure we derive from them. Oh yes, Charles, read
The Human Comedy
and it won’t let you down, I promise you. You’ll learn to appreciate the effects of passion, greed, ambition, egotism, and hatred thrown into fierce hand-to-hand combat with virtue, love, friendship, genius, integrity, and what have you!”

His voice, carried away by an access of lyricism, became nasal, trembling, and rose at times to its highest pitch.

“Literature, my dear, young friend, is concentrated life served to its readers in the comfort of their armchairs (to paraphrase Musset). It is the fruit of a million experiences, a tenth part of which one wouldn’t normally live long enough to have. Through literature we participate in a sort of eternity; it makes us like God: omnipresent, existing everywhere and in every time! Literature doesn’t necessarily make us wiser – that would be asking too much, and it depends, does it not, on what we carry around in our heads – but sometimes it can help us to be a little less stupid.”

He continued in that vein for several minutes. Charles listened with a slight smile on his lips, but gradually the notary’s fervour broke through his reserve and he recognized in it his own love of books, expressed though it was with an eloquence and precision he himself could never have attained. From being mannered and a bit ridiculous, the notary had become sublime.

“Right,” he said suddenly, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “I guess I let myself be carried away. Whew! It’s tiring! I’m not twenty years old any more. Let’s deal with more tangible things for a moment. I’ll go find you two large plastic bags to take your books home in. But first, a last little drop of port!”

This time Charles declined strenuously. Whenever he had too much alcohol he had the disagreeable impression that reality broke down bit by bit, and he felt obscure forces sloshing around within him trying to gain ascendancy. It made him think of his father, and he was overcome by a sense of horror that immediately rendered him sober.

Michaud drank a last glass of port and sank into his chair, feeling suddenly calm, almost melancholy. Then he got up, left the room, and returned with two bags.

“I have a great deal of faith in the Balzac treatment,” he said to Charles, placing his arm around his shoulders and conducting him to the door. “You are an intelligent young man, and also a very sensitive one. Balzac will do wonders for you, I’m certain of it.”

“So am I,” said Charles. “I still don’t know how to thank you.” He seemed unable to express his gratitude except by being exceedingly polite. “I’ll start reading the
Comedy
first thing tomorrow morning, I promise. And I’ll ask Céline to read it, too.”

The notary smiled with delight and patted Charles several times on the back.

“Come more often, Charles,” he said with a sudden show of gravity and emotion. “We hardly see each other any more! If you knew how much pleasure.… No, no, don’t worry, I won’t get drunk on port every time you come by. Tell me what you think of Balzac. I’ll be all ears, dear boy. In the meantime, to bed with me, old butt of Malmsey that I am! I’m half asleep already!”

Charles had just stepped off the porch and was heading down the street when the door reopened and the notary’s head appeared, worried.

“Oh yes, I forgot to ask you.… Your father, Wilfrid, I mean. Have you heard from him since the … er … incident?”

“No,” Charles said simply.

“It’s just …” He stopped, troubled, apparently regretting his question.

Then he added: “Maybe he’s left the city.… He could be a long way from here …”

“Could be. Did he say anything to you?”

“No, no, of course not. He definitely did not speak to me.” And with that he closed the door again.

Intrigued, Charles walked off down the street, his euphoria gone.

Charles never saw the Blond Angel again, and never tried to see her. He had no desire to stand by watching helplessly while she slid into the depths (didn’t he recall reading some lines in a poem by Victor Hugo about that?), and he preferred to believe that that dramatic evening in Brigitte Loiseau’s life had been like a warning to her, and that, after having come so close to death, she had decided to take herself in hand. Once, walking along rue Rachel, he had glanced up to the door of her apartment; a “FOR RENT” sign was hanging from one of the posts of the balcony, and he found the sight comforting. The woman who lived downstairs came out to shake out a rug and told him that the actress had gone back to her family in Chicoutimi to convalesce. “Ah,” thought Charles, “I hope she stays there, far away from predators like De Bané. I hope she regains her strength and pours it all into acting.” Fame awaited her, he was sure of it.

Sometimes he talked about Brigitte to Céline, but he soon realized it was not one of her favourite topics and he determined to avoid bringing it up in her presence. In any case, his new love for Céline pushed thoughts of the Blond Angel farther and farther into the darkness of the past.

Lucie, who had a nose as sharp as a fox after a three-day fast, had twigged to the relationship between Céline and Charles. There were a thousand little signs. But since she could do nothing to stop it, she decided to turn a blind eye, leaving it up to the two principals to make the announcement themselves, but also hoping against hope that they didn’t end up with a baby in
their arms. She said nothing to her husband, who as yet hadn’t noticed anything, preoccupied as he was with keeping his business afloat and, in any case, happy to see that Charles’s misadventure seemed to have had a salutary effect on him, and that he had returned to his former good-natured self. But in the end everything became obvious to everyone. Charles and Céline couldn’t take their eyes off one another. They sat together in interminable conversations, went out on long walks, went to movies together, and disappeared from time to time without telling anyone where they were going. And often they were caught smooching in dark corners.

Like Lucie, Fernand’s feelings about the affair were mixed. Charles’s trafficking days had left him with some doubts about the boy’s character. But his strong affection for Charles helped him keep an open mind.

“Céline is as solid as a rock,” he said one night to his wife, “but by the same token she knows what she wants, and we can’t just make her do whatever we want her to do. She’ll be a good influence on Charles, and will keep him from getting into trouble again. And he’s a good lad. His heart is in the right place. I’m sure he’ll treat her with the utmost respect. Still, we should keep an eye on them, don’t you think?”

One night shortly after the end of classes, Steve Lachapelle called to say he’d landed a summer job at a cheese factory in Anjou, and that there were two or three positions still open. Charles went down the next day and was hired. A few mornings later, he and his friend found themselves wearing white smocks, hairnets, and rubber boots up to their thighs, shovelling cheddar into an immense vat that reeked to high heaven. The work was exhausting, and carried out in a somewhat hostile environment, since the factory’s other employees were non-unionized and forced to work under stupefying conditions, and they looked with envious contempt on the students, whom they saw as pampered little middle-class kids out on a lark to make some extra pocket money.

Charles got home each night at six, quickly ate his dinner, and went to bed. After sleeping for an hour or two, he got up, took a shower, and spent the evening with Céline. Or with Balzac.

Fulfilling his promise to Parfait Michaud was not a problem for Charles. He began reading the different volumes of
The Human Comedy
at random. After being disappointed with
The Country Doctor
, which he thought for a while he would never get through, he picked up
Splendours and Miseries of the Courtesans
, then
Lost Illusions
, and finally
Old Goriot
and
Cousin Bette
. With these he became a devoted Balzacian. Characters such as Vautrin, Lucien de Rubempré, Esther and Eugène de Rastignac became part of his daily life. He talked about them constantly, and in his proselytizing zeal went out and bought several paperback copies of Balzac’s novels and tried to convert Céline and Blonblon – without much success, it must be said. But it was when he tried it out on Steve Lachapelle that the real disaster occurred.

One night he had insisted so fervently that Steve read “at least a bit of Balzac” before he passed on to his greater reward that when Steve left he took with him a collection of the great novelist’s short stories, promising to return it within a week. Still under the influence of Charles’s enthusiasm, he opened the book in the metro and took a run at “An Incident During the Terror,” a tale of courage and goodwill. All through school he had never read any more than he’d absolutely had to, relying on his memory, guesswork, and the notes he’d borrowed from his fellow students. But after a few pages he found that the story was taking a run at him. “An Incident During the Terror” became mysteriously transformed into an incident during the drowsiness that slowly overcame our novice reader, who, with the book resting on his lap and his head bent over it, started his night before arriving at his home.