The Bachelors (10 page)

'Well, do you want to sell or do you want to argue?' asked Bourdillon. 'I mean you and Mlle de Bauret. You'll need her consent.'

'My niece has given me power of attorney,' M. de Coantré said loftily. 'She said to me: "Anything you like, so long as I don't have to bother."'

Bourdillon could not repress a smile.

'What a splendid family!' he thought. 'We need more like them.'

'What do you advise?' asked M. de Coantré.

'Oh,
I
don't want to give you advice,' said Bourdillon, indicating for the first time that he had taken in what had happened earlier.

'But I must know the advantages and disadvantages of the two alternatives.'

'If you pay up now you'll be rid of it. If I try to come to terms it will take some time, but we'll probably get a reduction, as with Mme de Saint-Huberty.'

'It seems quite clear to me that we ought to try and scrape up something.'

'But you must provide me with the means to do so.
I
have in my file the list you know about, which your mother gave me, with the entry: Defraisse, four thousand. With theinterest,itwill make five thousand. But
you
can contest it. It depends whether you have any documents, any letters from Defraisse. ...'

'But there are stacks of papers at home! I found the attic full of them. If I have to go through them all...'

Bourdillon shrugged his shoulders gloomily.

'In that case, it would be better to pay up straight away, and get it over and done with.'

'Yes,' said M. de Coantré with an expression of resigned fatigue, 'I think it's better to pay up. It will put my mind at rest.'

'All the consequences of an authenticated act…' the piping voice continued in the other room as someone opened the door.

The desire to pay one's debts can arise either from honesty or from a pathological state. The latter was the case with our count. He could never be at peace with himself unless he felt that he was under no obligation to anyone. Moreover, he was afraid of reprisals from his creditors, as he was afraid of everything in such matters. When, some weeks after his mother's death, he had found two one-thousand franc notes in her desk, he was so terrified of being accused of having hidden them that he immediately informed Bourdillon by express letter.

'All the same,' said Lebeau, who was sitting on the edge of the table like a smart young bounder perched on a stool in an American Bar and poisoning the atmosphere with the fumes of his strong cigarette, 'All the same, it's silly not to contest a doubtful claim.'

'Well, if that's your opinion, let's try and make terms,' said M. de Coantré, pulling at his cuffs. It was a quick volte-face, but he was beginning to feel hypnotized by the bounder because, after all, this bounder was the boss.

'Oh, please don't do it for my sake,' said Lebeau. 'I simply said it would be silly.. . .'

'You must understand,' Bourdillon put in, 'that what M. de Coantré wants first and foremost is peace of mind. And he's ready to pay the price for it. If we settle with Defraisse without further argument, he won't have to worry any more.'

'Obviously!' Lebeau said facetiously.

'In spite of this procedure . . .' said the voice of the Catholic lecturer.

'Do
you
think Defraisse would compromise?' the count asked in the tone of voice in which one might ask a doctor. 'Do you think I'll get over it?' which is to say that it was an idiotic question.

'My dear M. de Coantré, how do I know? You're the one who's got the papers, if there are any.'

There was a long pause. One might have assumed that M. de Coantré was carefully weighing the pros and cons. In fact he was thinking of nothing — literally nothing. His eyelids were beginning to droop, as though what he really wanted to do was to drop off to sleep.

'Look here,' said Lebeau, 'we're all wasting our time.' (Complacently he flicked the ash from his cigarette.) 'If M. de Coantré values his peace of mind above everything else, he had better pay up. Otherwise, we should probably have to ask him to see Defraisse . . .'

The cruel politeness of 'We're all wasting our time' made M. de Coantré writhe. Could there possibly be a more courteous way of saying, 'You're wasting
my
time?'

'All right, let's pay him, and get it over with,' he said.

'Very well,' said the chief clerk heartily. 'But don't say I forced your hand. I'm still quite prepared to see Defraisse and argue with him, provided you help me, of course . . .'

'No, no,' said M. de Coantré. 'Sell as many of the shares as you need to, and let's hear no more about it.'

They chatted a bit longer and then, 'having said all there was to be said,' M. de Coantré got up to go. It was only then that he realized that Lebeau had left the room — without saying goodbye to him.

Scarcely had M. de Coantré gone before Bourdillon was running after him with a half-mocking, half-pitying smile and handing him his bundle of papers, which he had forgotten. Every time he left the lawyer's office he forgot something.

Once outside, he began to walk aimlessly. He felt so disgruntled that he stopped at the first tobacconist's to buy a packet of cigarettes. Six months before, when he realized his new financial position, he had given up smoking to save money. But now his will-power was crumbling. On the most favourable assumption, if no more creditors turned up, he would have two thousand francs left! 'But after all,' he thought, 'there's still time to tell him to contest it. I'll have a look through my papers. In any case, even if I have to pay, there's always Uncle Octave.' He noticed that involuntarily — as a horse whose rider has fallen asleep automatically takes the accustomed route — his steps had led him to the boulevard Haussmann. He went upstairs without taking the lift, for he was afraid of such machines (similarly, without either of them having mentioned it, M. Élie never took the lift).

M. Octave was out. Léon pretended to look for a visiting card in his wallet (for twenty years he had had none) and exclaimed 'I've
just
given the last one away!' having forgotten, as Papon, who eyed him in silence, had not, that he had already been through this little act twice before in Uncle Octave's hall. Then, on a slip of paper which he afterwards put in an envelope, he wrote 'My dear uncle, a new creditor has turned up at Lebeau's: five thousand francs. Once this is paid (and a thousand francs saved elsewhere), I shall have two thousand left. No comment. I shall, if I may, call on you tomorrow at five. Your affectionate Léon.' When he saw himself signing 'Léon' on a note to M. Octave, he had the impression that he was on a footing of great intimacy with his uncle, and that his uncle wished him well. He put 'your affectionate' because it was a formula used by the Duc d,Orléans.

He did not get back to the boulevard Arago until eight o'clock, having a genius for taking three or four hours, so fantastic were the means of transport he adopted, on a journey which a messenger boy (not by nature in a hurry) would have done in one. M. Élie had started dinner without him. He went straight upstairs to change, partly to spare his 'best' clothes but also because he always felt slightly uncomfortable in them. And when he saw these clothes laid out on the bed, he remembered all the trouble he had had earlier in the day, brushing them, finding a clean shirt, cleaning his boots, shaving, etc., and the pill he had just swallowed seemed even more bitter. When one 'dresses up', he thought, one ought at least to be rewarded by the success of whatever it was that made it necessary.

In the dining-room, taking advantage of Mélanie's momentary absence, he said to M. Élie:

'Uncle, I have some bad news for you . .

M. Élie looked up sharply and stared at him, showing his big, pale pupils.

'What's that?'

'There's a new debt on the estate, and when it's paid I'll have only two thousand francs left.'

M. de Coëtquidan breathed again. An odd way to express oneself, typical of the de Coantrés of this world, to speak of bad news to a third party when the news is only bad for
oneself.

'Actually,' M. de Coantré went on, 'it isn't certain that we'll have to pay. I must go through my papers. If I happened to find ...'

'Ha! there's Minine,' said M. Élie. 'He wants to come in.'

He had heard a miaow behind the front door. He got up, let the cat in, and gave it a few scraps of meat which he tore off roughly with his fingers like an Arab.

'Yes,' M. de Coantré continued, 'it may be that my having found the letter from M. d'Aumagne, which if it had been couched in terms ...'

'Ah, Minine! You want to go out?'

The cat had gone back to the door and was indeed now miaowing to be let out. The cats of the Arago household had this in common with humans: they always wanted to be somewhere else. So M. de Coëtquidan, a devoted slave to their every wish, was always opening a door somewhere or other, and the phrase 'He wants to come in' or 'He wants to go out' had become a private joke betwéen Mme de Coantré, Léon and Mélanie. It should be noted, in passing, that M. de Coëtquidan addressed cats in the second person plural, which sounds rather grand, instead of saying 'tu' in the normal way. Did they say
'vous
' to cats at the court of Louis XIV? Perhaps they did until the latter part of his reign, when it was felt that the time had come to 'brighten things up a bit.'

M. de Coëtquidan came back. But by now Léon had understood, and said no more about his affairs.

Soon after dinner he went up to his room and wrote three letters. Impulsive as he was, he would have suffered if something had prevented him from writing these letters at once, even though they could not be posted until the next day. One was addressed to the son of the old lady in whose house he had lodged at Chatenay; another to a decayed nobleman, a sort of jack-of-all-trades who dabbled in marriage-making and had done so for him; the third to one of the doctors at his auxiliary hospital. He had had no dealings with these people for twenty, fifteen and ten years respectively, but they were the only names he could think of when, during dinner, he had made this resolution: 'There's no time to lose. It's time I found myself a job.' In these three letters M. de Coantré explained his situation in a few words and asked if he could 'do something'. He emphasized his talents as a male nurse.

When he had written them, he felt he had taken action. Three letters! Proudly he weighed them in his hand. And, no doubt, writing a letter
is
an action. This impression of having 'taken a step forward' somewhat assuaged his bitter feelings.

(It is amusing to observe that M. de Coantré's handwriting, firm, upright, well-formed, the signature strongly underlined, would have credited him, in the eyes of a graphologist, with all the characteristics — concision, energy, pride, vitality — in which he was most conspicuously lacking.)

That night, he woke up at two o'clock, a thing which never happened to him, and did not go to sleep again.

Next morning he went up to the attic, where there was a packing-case full of letters addressed to his mother, which for the past six months he had not found time to sort because the idea of it was too irksome. There, perhaps, some document lay buried which would enable him to avoid paying the five thousand francs. He took out three packets of letters, and immediately was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task; it is always astonishing to see, in a dead person's room, how many letters someone of no social importance has managed to receive.

Before going to Lebeau's, Léon had made up his mind to spend the next morning at a job he adored, a job he wallowed in, a job that had almost become a vice with him — and vice is the word, for it gave him an almost sensual pleasure: mowing the lawn. And he needed this pleasure all the more today because he had to compensate himself for the ordeal of having to go back to Lebeau's. After debating with himself for a few moments, he decided to indulge himself and forget the five thousand francs. He closed the packing-case and went down from the attic to play with the mowing-machine. When an unpleasant thought occurred to him, he simply told himself: 'Anyway, I made a thousand francs yesterday' (on the lawyer's fees).

That afternoon he wrote to Bourdillon: 'In spite of my searches, I have found absolutely nothing which might enable me to contest the Defraisse claim. Will you therefore take the necessary steps to see that this man is paid.'
(This man!
When one pays someone what one owes him, one naturally acquires the right to insult him a little.)

He wrote the address on the envelope with scrupulous care. Ever since he had noticed the envelopes of letters he had addressed to Bourdillon carefully pinned on his file, he sensed that the contents of these envelopes might be enough to hang him. And he sent Mélanie to post the letter, although M. Élie might have done so on his way out. But he was afraid that M. Élie, unable to resist the temptation to unstick the stamp, might spend his afternoon walk delivering the letter himself; and
what on earth
would they think of the rectangle of glue on the envelope?

Once the cook had gone, M. de Coantré experienced a kind of euphoria comparable to that of a martyr going to the stake or, better still, a man who has slit open a vein and whose life is ebbing away: the languorous pleasure of utter impotence. There was something beatific about the ease with which M. de Coantré shed his possessions. And this is clearly what the masses feel when they interpret the famous passage, referring to a certain category of beings, to mean that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

5

T
O
BE
THE
'plutocrat of the family' is not a state one would wish on anybody. It would take a long time to work out the total sum that his relations, one after the other, had extracted from M. Octave. He had painstakingly supported Mme de Coantré when she was assailed by the money troubles brought down on her by her husband and her son. He had taken in Mme de Piagnes when she became a widow, and, incredible as it may seem, the rent she paid him in 1924 — four francs a day — had not altered since 1906. He had showered presents on his great-niece Simone de Bauret and 'taken her around', until the old cousin took a fancy to her. And this is to mention only the family. In fact no stranger ever approached him in vain.