The Bachelors (6 page)

After his mother's death, Léon, who for twenty years had not had a care or responsibility in the world, had to take over the running of the house. Somehow he managed, but only by taking pains out of all proportion to this simple task. Within a week his face changed, he grew puffy round the eyes, he had constant nightmares; even a Prime Minister feels less weighed down. Sometimes he was so overcome by it all that he could not bear it any longer and would go and rake the garden or mend his socks. At the same time he had to grapple with his mother's estate. We have seen what it consisted of. When, after having explained the lamentable situation to Léon and his niece, Maître Lebeau's assistant asked them whether they wanted to accept or refuse the estate, Léon was indignant: refuse his mother's estate! Later, he had another aristocratic impulse. Even though he knew already that he would inherit next to nothing, he announced to his niece that he would give her all the furniture left to him by his mother, although strictly he had no right to do so and although this mad gesture might make them liable to estate duty. The furniture was not worth a great deal — the valuation was twenty thousand francs (Mme de Coantré had reduced the insurance policy from fifteen thousand to twelve and finally to ten thousand francs as a measure of economy) — but the money he could have made from selling it would have saved him from destitution. Neither he nor Mlle de Bauret was aware of the almost insane disinterestedness of this gesture, which moreover gave no pleasure to the girl. His sacrifice, like all good sacrifices, was entirely in vain.

While we are on the subject of aristocratic gestures, we must cite one by M. de Coëtquidan: we should never get to the bottom of 'Gog and Magog' if we regarded them as mere puppets. One night, not long before Mme de Coantré's death, Léon heard a noise downstairs. He got up, and sure enough, there was someone moving on the ground floor. He crept, bare-legged, into his mother's room, and found her sitting up in bed, her eyes wide with terror. Whereupon Léon double-locked the door and lay low there in his nightshirt. Let the burglars remove the ancestral portraits, everything in the house if they liked! As for dear Uncle, alone on the first floor, he was left to his sad fate.

Meanwhile the old man, with complete composure, had been putting on his trousers, and, seizing a table knife he had brought up to his room the night before because he wanted to eat a pear before going to bed, he took up a position on the landing and waited; disagreeableness sometimes has its advantages. He too abandoned the ground floor to the burglar. But if the man came upstairs he would have a Coëtquidan to reckon with!

After a moment or two he saw a shadow on the staircase, and then found himself face to face with the intruder. 'What!' he exclaimed, an expression which admirably sums up his feeling: indignation at being treated with disrespect. The intruder must have been a novice; or else the descendant of the Crusaders, who in the day-time was a frightening enough spectacle, must by night, and with a knife in his hand, have looked like the wild man of Borneo. The visitor turned tail and rushed down the stairs. Thus it can be seen that M. Élie, who in the course of this narrative will be seen to be shy, pusillanimous, and on more than one occasion a moral coward, was physically brave. And he added to the merit of his conduct by not mentioning it to Léon. But he thought about it none the less, and privately gloated over it, as though it had been a real 'judgement from heaven' proving quite clearly what history had of course proved already but which there was no harm in proving yet again in everyday practice: that compared to the Coëtquidans the Coantrés were nothing but sheep's droppings.

3

B
ARON
O
CTAVE
DE
C
OËTQUIDAN
, after lunching alone (his sister, who lived with him, had lunched out), was sitting in a rocking-chair reading the
Daily Mail.
'Reading' is a euphemism, since he knew no English — no, let us be fair, he knew a few words. But the baron maintained that one cannot know anything about French politics without reading the British or American Press. He had a cup of coffee beside him, but he did not smoke.

He was a tall, clean-shaven man, with white hair cut short, as spruce in his attire as his brother was not. However, if we have noted at the beginning of this book that M. Élie was dressed 'like nobody else', it must be said that the baron also — in
his
case in an aristocratic way — wore an unusual get-up alike for his age, for his position and for the season. In this month of February in Paris, conventionally the season for dark clothes, he was wearing a light grey suit with turn-ups on the trousers and shoulders cut in the American style (which was then a rarity, for the fashion did not catch on until two or three years later). A soft white collar, a white linen bow tie knotted with studied negligence, beautiful brown laced ankle-boots (made to measure, costing three hundred francs, and lovingly
boned
until they had acquired that
genuine
[
In English in the original.
] chestnut glow), white woollen socks like his brother (those delicate Coëtquidan feet!), no ring, no watch-chain, no cuff-links (his shirt was a soft one with mother-of-pearl buttons). On his lapel the rosette of the Legion of Honour, in the smallest available model, which had none the less provoked a memorable scene when the baron had bought it after his promotion, protesting against its 'repulsive size' and pretending he wanted one specially made for him that was invisible to the naked eye. For M. Octave had always made a point of refusing to be satisfied with 'standard models', and would order, to his own specifications, such things as a shooting jacket in bishop's purple or a beach jacket with gilt buttons, or else a waste-paper basket made of wire-netting but 'of a size that only existed in wicker on the market' or an absolutely sensational trouser-press, of a type abandoned in 1840 though it was the only effective one, or a mysterious looking suitcase designed for luggage-racks which was supposed to have a capacity well above that of the largest suitcase normally allowed in a luggage-rack. All these objects, either because they proved useless or because the baron soon realized that they made him look ridiculous, ended up with the valet or the chauffeur after being used two or three times, and thus allowed their owner to kill two birds with one stone by giving proof, with a mere jacket in bishop's purple, at once of his munificence and the singularity of his soul.

Anyone who saw Baron Octave, member of the board of Latty's Bank and Officer of the Legion of Honour, dressed in this way would have taken him either for a genuine original or for a composite personality like an actor playing a part. The second hypothesis would have been the right one.

This important man, who by virtue of his wealth and even more his station had a voice in fairly considerable interests, had something of the childishness of his brother, the fruit of a similar upbringing, totally divorced from life. M. Élie, at different periods of his life, and even at different hours of the day, was wont to think of himself now as an officer, now as a Nimrod, now as a lady's man, and so on. Sometimes, indeed, his ideal was much more modest. One day, for example, an old friend of his passed him in the street and seeing him gradually stop, then start up in the same way, then stop again, at the same time continually turning the handle of his cane, said to him, 'I say, Élie, old man, what
are
you up to?' And M. Élie, still swinging his cane energetically without immediately stopping, threw him a 'Do be careful! You might give me time to put the brake on,' as he passed. For the moment, M. Élie believed himself to be a tram. On a somewhat higher level, M. Octave also had his little games. He played at being the 'modern man' — more specifically the 'modern man, American variety'.

The profound eccentricity inherent in the character of the Coëtquidans revealed itself in M. Octave at about the age of twenty-five in this form: I shall be the modern man of the family. In no time the idea had become mixed up with Americanism, and subsequently it had determined all the baron's opinions and attitudes. For example, it had prompted him to love or feign to love the democratic system, to scorn or feign to scorn people's rank, to take an interest or feign to take an interest in the machinery of business and economics, to disparage slightly or feign to disparage slightly the Deity to the point of affecting a dash of Voltairianism. But quite apart from such lofty matters, this bias also extended to the most trivial things. The desire to be a modern man, American style, explained why the baron's table was systematically vile (a businessman must have an unprejudiced mind, and therefore an unprejudiced stomach — gastronomy was anyway 'out-of-date'); why he' did' his shoes himself (an up-to-date man must be able to look after himself — though in fact it was his servant, Papon, who did the polishing and brushing, while M. de Coëtquidan merely gave a final flick with the cloth); why he had a rocking-chair in which he suffered agonies for fear of toppling over backwards but which he had seen described as an American speciality in a picture paper of 1875; why at the slightest excuse he corresponded by express letter or telegram, as if, by such speedy communication, he hoped to make up for being a hundred years behind the times by reason of his birth; and so on. All this, apart from the pleasure the baron enjoyed in being different, had the added attraction of annoying his family and thus gratifying the rebellious spirit which is one of the characteristics of the Breton nobility. M. Élie for his part deliberately exaggerated the shabbiness of his clothes, with the sole aim of annoying his brother and his sisters.

M. Octave de Coëtquidan had risen to the position he now occupied thanks to his close friendship ever since their college days with M. Héquelin du Page, who was now chairman of Latty's Bank. His business capabilities were more than questionable. In spite of his position, he shared his brother's and his nephew's ignorance of the realities of life, and their inability to adapt themselves to it. He lived almost entirely according to his own idea of himself. The rule is for a man to put on blinkers around his twentieth year and then, for the rest of his life, carry straight on like a carthorse. M. Octave had not failed to keep this rule. One remembers Michelet's cruel remark about Molière: 'Molière knew nothing of the people. But what
did
he know?' One might have said the same of the baron, as well as his brother: 'What
did
they know?' Their prejudices and their mannerisms covered them as though with a varnish preventing all contact between them and the outside world. Marie-Antoinette's famous 'If they have no bread, let them eat cake' has always been considered an odious remark. But perhaps it was simply that Marie-Antoinette believed that cake was no more expensive than bread. M. Octave thought Papon was robbing him when, after an afternoon's shopping all over Paris, he claimed to have spent four francs on trams. Four francs on trams — impossible! On top of all this, having achieved an important position through influence, the baron felt justified in regarding himself as a
self-made man.
[
In English in the original.
] He pompously declared that he had 'risen from nothing'. The human mind is endlessly ingenious in self-flattery.

In everything he did M. Coëtquidan was ruled by principles. In fact he would often get marvellously tangled up in them. For example, when he did something which bored him, he thought he was doing his duty. He would even say: 'If I didn't do what bores me, I would do nothing at all.' One could use up a whole ink-well of deep thoughts on this.

M. de Coëtquidan, then, was sitting 'reading' the
Daily Mail
when Papon announced M. de Coantré. M. de Coantré came in, shook hands with his uncle, and bowed a few inches too low, like a steward.

It was quite a different M. de Coantré from the one we saw in rags at the beginning of this narrative. He was wearing a dark grey suit, of good material and extremely clean. This suit dated from 1905 and, because of its cut, made an old-fashioned effect which was not, however, out of place on a man of his age. What was indeed extraordinary, if not ridiculous, was the height of his stiff collar, of a shape that had also gone out of fashion twenty years earlier, and below this collar a black silk stock with a stag's-tooth pin. His starched cuffs, cracked with use like an old face with wrinkles, were detachable. But it was perhaps his boots which cried out most eloquently their date of birth — 1900 to 1905. They were buttoned boots, square-toed, and immensely long, curling upwards like certain kinds of medieval footwear. Like the suit, they were of excellent quality and almost as good as new despite their twenty years, since M. de Coantré wore them only two or three times a year and looked after them with the greatest care.

M. de Coantré had left in the hall a short velvet-collared overcoat (of a type known as a 'bum-freezer') and a silver-handled cane which was also very 1900. But, in accordance with the conventions of his youth, he had kept his bowler hat in his hand, as well as a pair of gloves which, now that he was seated, he had carefully placed in the hollow rim of his hat, for this pair of gloves was composed of two identical ones, and M. de Coantré assumed that this was not noticeable when he held them in his hand. They were mourning gloves, for M. de Coantré, during the past twenty years, had had no occasion to wear gloves except at family funerals. And they had that pitiful flatness, that lifeless appearance of gloves that have never been worn.

No sooner was M. de Coantré seated than the baron, with the purposeful air he always showed in conference, as though to say 'Gentlemen, let us stick to the point' (a quite artificial purposefulness by which he concealed his natural timidity), switched the conversation in the direction he wanted. Pointing to the
Daily Mail,
he said in a stilted voice:

'Have you read Herriot's splendid speech?'

M. de Coantré knew perfectly well what his uncle was up to. He, too, tried to switch.

'I'm afraid not. With all the worries I've got at the moment I've hardly the time.'