The Conspiracy (13 page)

XIII

Around Neufchâtel, the Pays de Bray is a vast, sad, green region, swept in mid-season by salt winds from the Channel coming up the open valleys behind Dieppe and Le Tréport. Dominating the maze of fields and quickset hedges, the swirl of streams through orchards and the hamlets of wood and red-and-white brick, the high chalk cliffs have the solemn, dreamy immensity of coastal cliffs and, on the road from Neufchâtel to the sea, at each turn you expect the waves to make their sparkling appearance. Great edifices of cloud pile up over this whole region: above the forests, the pastures where half-wild herds of colts gallop and the bare ridges where the form of some abandoned plough or sowing-machine will sometimes appear against the sky like a huge insect – a harvestman or grasshopper of iron . . .

La Vicomté is situated a mile away from the village of Grandcourt. It is a long Norman villa of pink brick with ashlar string-courses, built onto the former main building of a sixteenth century hunting-lodge: on the mantelpiece in the dining-room, one can still make out the blurred arms of the Guises. La Vicomté possesses lawns of a velvet less smooth than in the days when M. Rosenthal's mother used to order rye-grass seed from Oxford; festoons of rose-bushes along the paths; a dovecote where bats make their abode; a river; white-painted wooden fences; a warden's lodge; and over-large stables, inhabited only by two horses,
Bois-Belleau
and
Urania
, barely roused from their slumber by a few holiday outings, and six Harlequin Great Danes.

Behind La Vicomté, on the far side of the main road, the valley rose towards the edge of the Forêt d'Eu, breaking the horizon with its storm-tossed crown.

No type of landscape weighs upon the leisure of townsfolk with a more intense tedium than these stifling pasture regions, which have nothing to show for themselves but a few sublime lines and some charms of detail, and which are metamorphosed only by dawn's scarves upon the meadows or the theatrical onset of night. The inhabitants of the châteaux would attempt to escape from those leagues of faultless greenery by prolonging throughout the summer the social diversions of the winter in Paris. The holiday weeks would be spent in conversation, in continual communication between one estate and another, in visits, in urban ceremonies that were termed neighbourly relations. No one yielded to a natural indolence scarcely imposed other than by sea or snow. Least of all the bourgeois, conscious as they were of an old provincial society of landowners living above them, bound by inimitable exchanges of still feudal forms of homage. Those noble families of the Bray region, who lived for six months of the year in melancholy apartments round the church of
Sainte-Clotilde
where their daughters would be married, in the fine season used to do the rounds of their farmers, who would really be in need of advice from the tall vicomtesses with manly voices and big feet, on account of their daughters, who used to conceive children by unknown farm-hands, and their last-born infants, whose bottles spiked with cider spirit used sometimes to kill them off a bit early. In the meantime, the head of the family would go off with his steward and farm manager, to haggle over cows and horses and drink with copers and land agents at the fairs which used to be held all along the borders of Picardy – at Envermeu, at Londinières, at Gamaches and at Foucarmont. Courtesy visits would be made to the Château d'Eu, where the Princesse d'Orléans used to spend her holidays amid ebony and tortoiseshell mementoes of
La Grande Mademoiselle
and Lauzun, and whose green-latticed rooms – filled with primitive weapons, and with macaws and lizards stuffed by
Don Pedro I
, Emperor of Brazil – she would partially open for her guests. In autumn, packs still used to hunt in the Forêt d'Eu and in a theatrical manner slay the noble beasts who know how to die sobbing by torchlight: stags, does, or wild boars which defend themselves to the last against the hounds on a bloody bed of dead leaves and clay. The bourgeois lords of the manor, meanwhile, who would sometimes hear a horn sound in a wood or beneath the trees of a park, hesitated to get up little packs to course hares and used to regret not being English – citizens of a country where the fox is consigned to the blows of nobles and commoners alike.

The Rosenthals used to receive guests almost every year. Some would make a detour on their way to Deauville or Le Touquet, others would come down from Paris for a few days.

Guests not travelling by road would, as of old, arrive on the nine thirty-six train at the station of Blangy-sur-Bresle. They would leave the waiting-room, they would glance round the dark, hostile square illuminated only by the distant lights of a bar, and they would remark to one another that it wasn't going to be much fun. But Jules the chauffeur would emerge from the shadows to save them and they would set off for La Vicomté in the old nineteen hundred and eighteen Panhard, which had belonged to M. Rosenthal's mother and in which, in nineteen hundred and twenty-two, as a last journey before her death she had gone on a tour of the Scottish lakes. La Vicomté would be floating like a ship in the depths of the night, all its lights ablaze. The Rosenthals would be sitting in the small drawing-room: they would barely stir to welcome their guests, the conversation would resume, the maidservant would take the cases up to the rooms and Mme Rosenthal would say:

— You have the yellow room – or the blue room.

She would also say:

— Well, as you can see, I'm not putting myself out for you, family life goes on. I want guests at La Vicomté to feel entirely
at home
from the first evening; to understand that there'll be no fuss made, no great to-do in their honour, and that everybody's absolutely free and among friends . . . I'm for British hospitality, there's nobody like the English for putting you at your ease . . .

On the first evening, the guests would report the latest news from Paris, where, they would say, nothing was going on, where there was nobody left – apart from the two and a half million Parisians who were not going away on holiday. At around eleven, the conversation would begin to flag.

— I think, M. Rosenthal would then say, that the moment has come to sound lights out . . .

Someone would reply:

— These first hours in the country really knock you out . . .

— Don't they just! Mme Rosenthal would exclaim in a triumphant tone, as though she had been expecting this avowal of La Vicomté's irresistible power over city-dwellers. Don't they just! One feels slightly tipsy . . .

When there was a moon, before putting the guests to bed they would shepherd them out onto the terrace of the large drawing-room, to show them the pearly wraiths of mist floating above the lawns. Naturally, they would always sigh, and murmur:

— How peaceful!

Or:

— You don't know how lucky you are . . .

Like everybody else, however, they would feel a vague unease confronted by all this whispering vegetation, all these expanses of darkness, and would not be displeased to find themselves back in the protective light of the lamps. They would also be shown, on the far side of the meadows, the lowering woods of a large park.

— That's the estate of our friends the Besnards, M. Rosenthal used to say.

— Would that be the family of the weaving Besnards? the guests used to ask.

— They're the weaving Besnards, the refining Besnards, the paper Besnards and I don't know what else, M. Rosenthal used to reply modestly.

The stockbroker would pronounce this name Besnard in the very tone adopted by the local nobility when speaking – from the abyss of their two or three hundred hectares of wheat fields and meadows – about the Polignacs, whom they would see in August in the stands at Dieppe racecourse, or about the Bertiers de Sauvigny. No one has more respect for the big producers, or the captains of industry as people call them, than the men who play the roles of brokers and tragedy confidants in Capital's game of pass-the-parcel. M. Rosenthal, in spite of the pride he felt at belonging to the Company of Stockbrokers, was impressed by a big industrialist or a big steward of industry – a director of the
Transatlantique
or the
Nord
. He placed nobody higher than the Besnards, who in fact headed one of those awesome dynasties from the Nord who rule over spinning-mills, clothworks, carding-factories and sugar refineries: people spoke of them in Lille – at the
Bellevue
or the
Huîtrière
– as they did of the Prouvosts or the
Mathons
.

The Besnards lived in a little pink-and-white Directoire château, delicate in style. ‘Old' Besnard had hair so white it made him look at first like a good-hearted man: he still wielded absolute power over his wife, his sons and his daughters-in-law. The ‘young' Besnards, who were thirty-four and thirty-five years old, scarcely dared open their mouths at table, except when their father was questioning them or catching his breath. All the Besnards were tall women and tall men, fair-haired and dressed in black since, like members of a princely family, they were always in mourning for some uncle or cousin. Mme Besnard wore lisle stockings and her daughters-in-law stockings of silk. On Sundays, the Grandcourt village priest used to feel none too easy when he sensed those six unmoving archangels behind him in their churchwardens' pew, overseeing the conduct of the children in the choir and the speed of the Mass – like the output of a loom.

Once or twice in a season, the Rosenthals would go and have lunch with the Besnards. This year, ‘Old' Besnard told them:

— You'd never guess where I've just got back from this evening? From Roubaix. I drove my car myself, there and back again. There was a by-election at home. A person must be capable of making an effort, so I went to vote against my workers.

— If only all big industrialists had your conscience, my dear, sighed Mme Besnard.

— It's foolish anyway, said Alain Besnard, to think that Father's vote has exactly the same value as the ballot cast by the lowest of his hands.

Bernard did not attend the lunch with the Besnards, whom since his childhood he had dubbed the Ogres – or, since reading
Gobineau
, Kings' Sons. When his mother told him all about it, however, he regretted not going.

There was much to be said about the summer '29 visitors to La Vicomté. Where now were the days of Mme Rosenthal Senior, between nineteen hundred and the War, when – in a La Vicomté then full of plush furniture and family photos and with an Easter-egg collection in the children's room – old ladies in white dresses trimmed with guipure and embroidery used to parade their flounced parasols along the paths and the river, and maintain the rules of high bourgeois ritual with regal strictness?

Nothing, perhaps, better illustrates the destructive march of time than the disappearance from the estate at Grand-court of those former guests of honour the great Dreyfusard professors: friends of Mme Rosenthal and her sister Clotilde, after having been the same to M. Charles Rosenthal, founder of the practice and childhood friend of
Scheurer-Kestner
. That was the period when Edouard Rosenthal dared bring to visit his mother only those of his friends who had just discovered Wagner, published their first book, or were just back from a journey to Persia or Egypt, or a mission to Italy – who were really ‘interesting'. Money then seemed only the temporal condition of a life dedicated to noble concerns, to knowledge of the world: they would have blushed to seem to raise it above culture, music, ideas. But during the summer of '29, at La Vicomté there were only Adrien Plessis and spouse, Henry Lyons and spouse, and Comtesse Kamenskaia: the Lyons were bankers, the Plessis brokers, and Comtesse Kamenskaia a comtesse.

— What a crew! Bernard would say to himself. These people are impossible. The Lyons are pigs, the Plessis fools, the White Russian lady has walked the streets in Bucharest and
Pera
. Let's get the hell out of here!

Bernard would drag Catherine – who, after all, was only twenty-two and had not yet entirely lost the ability to laugh at people – into playing the giddy goat.

They would go swimming at Criel, Dieppe or Le Tréport, or buying novels at Neufchâtel-en-Bray. In the morning they would set off, mounted upon Urania and Bois-Belleau, whom Bernard had five or six years earlier rechristened The Muse and The Unknown Horse. Two or three Great Danes would follow them or bound ahead at the nostrils of the horses, who would toss their heads and make their bits and curb-chains jingle. The Forêt d'Eu was no less damp and rotten than all other forests in rich and fertile regions; but they appeared to savour the pleasure of emerging blindly onto a windswept scarp gleaming like a horse's flank in the sun, or of galloping, without a thought for the animals' fragile legs, along a main road between two rows of trees. Bernard would then go so far as to call Catherine
Diana of the Crossways
, because of the excitement of the race and the wind – and because it is easier to love women of flesh and blood through great replicas from novels.

One always tells the woman one is destined to love about one's childhood. You tell yourself you might have played with her when she had bare knees and wore short skirts revealing the long white scars of her scratches – and that all that lost time must be recovered, but you won't manage to do it. You are in despair, you would need to have a whole lifetime of fond chatter before you. Bernard was still mistrustful. He scarcely spoke to Catherine except about the fine weather, the sea, horses, a few journeys he had made, and the singular buffoonery of adults. In order to establish complicity with a woman, it is quite enough to teach her a few passwords and think one understands her at a glance.

One day he took Catherine to have lunch with the regional councillor for Martin-Eglise, whom he had known for fifteen years: they ate a never-ending prosperous farmer's repast, in a dining-room that smelled of mould, dust and carbolic acid. In the glass cases, there were stuffed monsters – five-legged calves, two-headed sheep, a foetus – the councillor's collection. The councillor's wife wore a dress with a bertha, and an amazing auburn-and-grey false bun.