Adam Gould Read online

  ‘Can you understand it?’ Sauvigny asked Belcastel suddenly. ‘The African’s enraging his guests by having the “Marseillaise” played? The rest is understandable. But that ... What possible motive could he have had?’

  ‘It is not a revolutionary tune in North Africa,’ the monsignor noted mildly. ‘It is the French national anthem.’

  ‘But the words ...’

  ‘Nobody in North Africa knows the words.’

  ‘Some people think,’ said the vicomte, ‘that too many bishops are jumped-up commoners. Men like that tend to be weathercocks. I believe the cardinal’s father was a customs officer.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think commoners are the only weathercocks. More?’

  Sauvigny let the monsignor refill his glass with Marsala. As he drank the sweet, heady stuff – it reminded him of his time with the Zouaves – he reflected that reasonableness could be a form of treachery. Monarchists didn’t want reason. They wanted kings with divine right, and held hard to distinctions between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate’ forms of government. Though legal, the Republic lacked the stamp of divine approval, and it was to ensure it never got it that they needed the vacillating, casuistic but, alas, indispensable clergy.

  ‘You,’ he reminded his host with sudden brutality, ‘must be the last man alive with whom Lavigerie will want to make peace. After the way you showed him up!’

  The monsignor flinched. ‘As I told you, I regret doing that. It was unchristian.’

  ‘War is war!’ Sauvigny was pleased to state. ‘You did the right thing for the Cause.’

  What Belcastel had done was to recall that years earlier, tempted by one of those rare chances for a successful coup which arise during crises, Lavigerie had written to the comte de Chambord to tell him, in masterful detail, just how he might set one in motion and propel himself into power. His letter was of course confidential, but necessarily a few men saw it, and one of these was Belcastel. Impressed by the cardinal’s lucidity and convinced that, in the hands of a more determined Pretender, the plan would have succeeded, he never forgot it, and, in his first flush of indignation over the Algiers toast, contacted the gentleman in charge of the dead Chambord’s papers. Skilfully, he overcame this custodian’s scruples and persuaded him to publish the explosive old letter in the Gazette de France, thereby discrediting the cardinal both with his new Republican allies and his Church.

  ‘It exposed him doubly,’ Sauvigny gloated. ‘A brilliant stroke!’ He laughed.

  As Belcastel shuddered, the burned side of his face flashed in then out of sight, like a palmed card. The reverberations had been scurrilous. ‘It was uncharitable!’

  Sauvigny made a rude noise.

  ‘I told myself that he in my place would have done the same. Publishing the letter, you see, was a sort of coup.’

  ‘ A Republican-style manoeuvre.’

  ‘I was going to say the opposite. Men like us gamble on a coup because it invites a miracle and gives God a chance to intervene. Rationalists have no such excuse.’

  Sauvigny wondered if his leg was being pulled.

  ‘Now though,’ the monsignor mused, ‘the cardinal’s claim is that Chambord committed political suicide by refusing to make concessions. That, I’m told, is why Lavigerie now wants to cut the Church free of your party. You, runs his argument, would drag us down with you, but no one has the right to commit suicide.’

  ‘And are you jumping ship too, Monseigneur?’

  ‘No! But remember that, though your ship is the monarchy, mine is the Church. And before you say that we are venal and stay with you because we need your money, remember why we do. We need to fund independent schools because of the Republic’s lois scolaires for which ...’

  ‘... you blame us. When we enrage the Republicans and they strike back, you get caught in the middle. Let’s admit that we are in your debt! Money can settle that. So pour me more Marsala and I shall propose my own toast. The Auteuil toast! Are we in Auteuil here?’

  ‘Passy, but we’re smack on the border!’

  ‘Border people! How fitting.’ Sauvigny raised his glass. ‘I drink to the French monarchist clergy. And,’ teasingly, ‘to the temporal goods we plan to provide for them.’

  ***

  ‘Well,’ François Tassart turned his back on the departing carriage. ‘They’ve gone!’

  Adam locked the gate, and the two walked quickly back to the house. It had started to freeze.

  ‘Good riddance!’ Tassart stamped cold feet. ‘That countess wanted me to tell her how to get my master to recognize the Litzelmann children. She cornered me. Did you hear her mention paternity suits?’ As he smiled, his teeth slid over his lower lip as though cancelling the smile. ‘My master used to say of young women like her that they’re brought up in convents, then never learn how to live in the world. Mind, I should not have let my feelings run away with me earlier. Perhaps that encouraged her? Speaking with respect, she’s a child herself. Pretty, though. My master would have had an eye for her in his day.’

  Adam swung the key-ring on his finger. ‘And would it have been right,’ he queried, ‘if he let his feelings run away with him?’ They had reached the hall where their ways divided.

  ‘It’s not ...’

  ‘... your place to say! But?’

  Hearing themselves laugh at the same moment, both men paused, then laughed at their laughter.

  ‘I have no place now!’

  ‘I have never quite known mine.’

  ‘Because you’re a foreigner?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  That wasn’t why, though. Adam never had known it. Place in his Ireland had been a slippery notion; in the seminary it had been provisional, and here – ah well, in Dr Blanche’s establishment, the only one worrying about such things might be Tassart. Adam was amused by the manservant’s attempts to hold on to notions of hierarchy while enjoying its occasional collapse. Tassart’s stock phrase – the one which had made them laugh – was ‘It is not my place to say, but ...’ There were a great many ‘buts’, for the valet’s position with Maupassant must have been like that of a dumb-waiter: that small domestic hoist which glides between kitchen and dining room, servant’s sphere and master’s, and belongs in both. As though acknowledging this, Tassart, when remembering those days, always spoke of ‘our’ flat. Even his readings from Guy’s stories staked a claim. Perhaps he planned to write himself? Adam had seen pencillings on his cuffs. Notes? For a memoir? Maupassant had written about servants. Could he have guessed that one might turn the tables? What, after all, could be more just than such an appropriation of the reflective, upper world which servants enabled and often saw from closer than the upper folk guessed? One of the male nurses here had worked in a house where concealed corridors, running parallel to the visible ones, allowed chamberpots and the like to be discreetly spirited away. Bandages, blood, clysters ... Unseen, behind panelling, tiptoeing servants bore off evidence as alertly as mice or spies or – come to think of it – writers. So why should Tassart not change trades? According to Baron, he had told the kitchen that, though he had always refused to wear livery, he felt a bond with fellow-servants and was indignant when they were misrepresented in books.

  ‘He’d have us believe,’ had been Baron’s half-incredulous comment, ‘that he and his master talked about this. Well, maybe they did. I’d have said though that custards and shoe-polish were more in a manservant’s line.’

  Reminded, Adam now asked Tassart about these conversations, and was amused by the valet’s indignation.

  ‘I hate the picture,’ he told Adam, ‘that my master’s friend, Monsieur Zola, draws of domestics in his books. Perhaps you’ve read Pot-Bouille? It is painfully misleading, a contemptuous, mean-spirited cartoon. Gentlemen think we use bad and incorrect language but, in twenty-five years’ service, I never once heard a maid use the sort of filthy words which Monsieur Zola puts in the mouths of maids and cooks. And people reading his books believe that that’s the way we talk! “It’s not right, Mons
ieur,” I told my master. The real lives of girls in service are worth writing about, but not, as Monsieur Zola thinks, because they might hide lovers behind the kitchen door so as to smuggle them up to their attic. Few do that. They don’t dare. Besides, unlike the ladies who visited my master, they’re too decent. No, what’s interesting about those poor girls is how careful they have to be and what a lot they have to put up with just to earn their thirty francs a month – most of which has often to be sent home to their needy families. But the worst thing is that they have to bottle up their feelings and can never let off steam. In most households servants are expected to have no character at all. Men like my master are rare. He respects character even in a servant.’

  ‘Talking of letting off steam, did you hear about his throwing sticks at the vicomte?’

  ‘At his “billiard-ball head”? I heard. Yes. His mind is on heads, poor Monsieur! That’s because he is worried about his own. He keeps saying, “I’m going at the top!” It’s heartbreaking. He thinks I stole his brain. Why would I – even if I could?’

  Again Tassart looked ready to weep. And, though Adam tried to comfort him, he wondered too whether Maupassant’s instinct wasn’t sound. It looked as though, in a way, the valet was indeed hoping to steal his master’s brain.

  IV

  February 1892

  Reflections float; air is buoyant, and the eye ambushed by surprises. Those specks by the perron now are not snow but snowdrops, for winter is on the wane. But change can be disturbing. Some inmates grow restless, and there are scuffles in the cour des agités. Maupassant’s mood veers between ravings and remissions attended by attacks of keen anxiety.

  ‘My mind is mush. Gone soft! I have to die before I lose it.’ These words sound as cold as if he had been keeping them on ice.

  ‘You seem all right now.’

  ‘Oh, it stages the odd reappearance.’ His chill words pop like spat pips. ‘I think it sidled onstage today, and am pitifully glad. I couldn’t bear to end up like your terminal patients. They’re animated ... bags.’ He frowns, then speaks in a rush: ‘What matter, you may think, since I wouldn’t know? What matters is that my mother would.’ He nods. ‘She’d get reports. Not from poor François, mind! He’d spare her, but gossip wouldn’t. Its source is our very own Dr Grout, who is courting poor Flaubert’s niece, Caroline de Commanville. You’ve met her! At lunch, remember? Well, Caroline’s an indiscreet old friend whom my mother will pump for details. I know she will because I trained her to. For years she used to collect anecdotes for me to write up. “Get details,” I’d insist. “Details are what makes a story live!” So she developed a nose for them and will get them about me – then be devastated!’

  Guy looks steadily at Adam. ‘She calls me her great man! Such a man – don’t you think? – ought to kill himself while he’s still lucid. Will you help me do it, Gould? When the time comes? I wouldn’t ask if I hadn’t made such a poor fist of it last time.’ He runs the tip of a finger along the scar in his neck where the sliver of broken glass must have slipped. Missing the artery, it left a pink, satiny crease studded with nodes no bigger than lettuce seeds or the beads in a baby’s necklace. ‘No use asking the doctors.’ He lifts an eyebrow. ‘Their oath, you see! The hypocritical, Hippocratic one!’

  His smile pleads. Guy the seducer.

  He means it, thinks Adam, then wonders: is there a ‘he’ there now? Dr Blanche’s notes on this case describe: ‘Acute disorder of the intellectual faculties characterized by melancholy ravings ...’

  ‘Gould?’

  ‘We’re hoping to get you better.’

  ‘What if you can’t?’

  Adam can’t bring himself to say. After Guy’s last attempt his neck wound gaped like a split pomegranate.

  ‘Yes? No?’ The straying mind is back, focused by need. ‘Do you,’ Guy presses, ‘mean “maybe”?’ His hair has fallen out in handfuls, and he hates letting the barber trim his beard. Naturally, he cannot be allowed to trim it himself. ‘I know I don’t sound the way I used to.’ His once robust frame is a ruin. ‘Unfortunately, I can see how things are.’ He waits. ‘Well?’

  Adam shakes then stops shaking his head. ‘Maybe,’ he says, then: ‘Let’s wait a little. The topic sharpens your mind wonderfully. Maybe you will cure yourself?’

  Afterwards he can’t be sure whether he made a promise and whether, if so, it is binding. Now that he has decided – this was quite recent – against going back to the seminary, by what rules will he live? He wonders if Guy recognizes him as a rudderless man.

  ***

  More damage by Dynamitards!! Anarchists attempt to destroy the barracks in the rue de Rivoli where the Garde Républicaine is quartered. No lives lost.

  Adam is now the house press censor. Each morning, before patients receive their newspapers, he checks them for references to Guy, pen poised to ink them out. Happily, a series of outrages has diverted public attention and Guy is forgotten. This is a relief. Adam, when inking out his name, always felt a small, superstitious shiver.

  Anarchist-Trial Judge’s residence bombed. Further attacks feared.

  Republicans are now thought to regret alienating so many Catholics. When trouble explodes on your left, you look the other way for friends. But the Right is skittish. Its organ, L’Autorité, has been printing a heated correspondence about a proposal by the bishops that their flocks should agree to respect the government. Readers – who may not be readers at all, but the editor in disguise – reject the notion. Insults like ‘morally defrocked’ scorch through letters from ‘An anxious Catholic from Saint-Malo’, ‘A troubled father’, ‘A loyal subscriber’ and many more. Most claim to be laymen, fear change, and are outraged to find it coming from their Church. ‘Any priest who supports the proposed compromise must,’ says ‘A betrayed and bewildered member of the faithful’, be ‘either mad, vicious, a gull, a joker, a double-dealer or a liar.’

  Adam asks Blanche whether this fury could affect patients? ‘Should we stop their newspapers altogether?’

  ‘If we did,’ says Blanche, ‘how could we ever get them ready to return to the great madhouse outside? You too, Gould, may have trouble adapting to it! How come you’re so unlike your madcap uncle? He told me your papa was a bit of a wild man too.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why I’m cautious. I’m fearful of damaging people.’

  ‘Did you ever?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I won’t probe.’

  ***

  Days go by. The thaw expands. Sap rises. Moisture glints.

  ‘ ... two ... three.’

  In one of the exercise yards to the side of the old château a voice counts. It rattles with brusque precision through the kitchen window to where Adam and the cook are sitting at a deal table planning the week’s menu. Repeated scrubbings have so stripped the grain of the deal that its fibres feel to their fingertips like string. Adam thinks of Guy’s softened brain.

  ‘Calf’s head,’ licking her pencil, the cook writes greasily, ‘for Wednesday. Monsieur le Directeur is partial to it. We’ll need several. Salsifis would go well with them and plain boiled potatoes. I’ll make a sauce. For pudding ...’

  ‘One ...’

  ‘Poor gentleman!’ She shakes her head. ‘He’s fighting duels. In his fancy of course. Been at it since breakfast! A lot of them do that. Pull the trigger. Bang! I suppose it’s a relief. Is it something he read in the paper that got him agitated?’

  Adam admits that they haven’t worked out how to keep the papers from Maupassant.

  ‘A shame!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not that I took to those things of his that Monsieur Tassart read to us. My little kitchen maids are so young. I had to send them away. Can’t have their minds corrupted before their bodies. I could do sweetbreads for Thursday, if you like, or pigeon pies, then turbot on Friday after a clear soup. No, I don’t like stories about low life. Keeping that at arm’s length is hard enough for decent people. So why read about it? Plain folk have
to mind their step. As I said to Monsieur Tassart, one slip can topple you. Fast! No need at all to read about what’s below! Never look down, is what I say. Looking up to your betters can teach you things. Oh, you may laugh if you like.’

  Working in an asylum has made the cook contentious.

  ‘Bang!’ shouts Guy.

  ‘That’s right,’ shouts Adam boisterously. ‘Bang!’

  Reading Guy’s stories has expanded his view of the world. They disconnect doom from licentiousness. Maybe this is what worries the cook who, on second glance, is younger than she chooses to seem, possibly still in her twenties, with tender, blanched flesh. Trussed into a tight topknot, her hair pulls at her facial skin. Perhaps she thinks of prettiness as a lure? Something for which she could be blamed? Perhaps she craves the guard-rails with which Guy’s tales do away. The fallen women in his brothels are more cosy than randy and as easy to chat with as – well, herself.

  ‘Life’s a tightrope,’ she says now, while writing ‘compote de pommes or crème caramel?’

  Reading this upside down, Adam asks greedily, ‘Why not both?’

  She smiles.

  ‘One ...’ Guy’s footsteps pound monotonously back and forth. ‘Two ...’

  Listening for fear in these shouts, Adam hears only rage and wonders whether this was always Guy’s trouble. ‘Cook, do you think fear keeps the world in order? Are you a timid person?’

  She, thinking he’s flirting with her, snaps her notebook closed and stands up. ‘I’m not a rash one anyway.’

  Dismissed, Adam leaves the kitchen, still wondering whether Guy’s rage began when he lived like the poor clerks in his early stories. Confined in their rabbit-hutch lives, their only safe outlets would have been visits to sanitized brothels supervised by the Paris police. Might Guy still be sane if he had stuck to those? The doctors are unsure how much the pox contracted in his youth weakened his constitution.