Suite Francaise Part 3

The Pericands had been travelling for nearly a week and had been dogged by misfortune. They'd had to stay in Gien for two days when the car broke down. Further along, amid the confusion and unimaginable crush, the car had hit the truck carrying the servants and luggage. That was near Nevers. Fortunately for the Pericands, there was no part of the provinces where they couldn't find some friend or relative with a large house, beautiful gardens and a well-stocked larder. A cousin from the Maltete-Lyonnais side of the family put them up for two days. But panic was intensifying, spreading like wildfire from one city to another. They had the car repaired as best they could and set out once more, but by noon on Sat.u.r.day it was clear the car could go no further without a thorough overhaul. The Pericands stopped in a small town just off the main highway where they hoped to find a room. But all sorts of vehicles were already blocking the streets. The sound of creaking brakes filled the air and the ground next to the river looked like a gypsy camp. Exhausted men were sleeping on the gra.s.s, others were getting dressed. A young woman had hung a mirror on a tree trunk and was putting on make-up and combing her hair. Someone else was washing nappies in the fountain.

The townspeople had come out on to their doorsteps and surveyed the scene with utter amazement. "Those poor people! But honestly, they look so awful!" they said, with pity and a secret feeling of satisfaction: these refugees came from Paris, the north, the east, areas doomed to invasion and war. But they they were all right, time would pa.s.s, soldiers would fight while the ironmonger on the main street and Mlle Dubois, the hatmaker, would continue to sell saucepans and ribbons; they would eat hot soup in their kitchens and every evening close the little wooden gates that separated their gardens from the rest of the world. were all right, time would pa.s.s, soldiers would fight while the ironmonger on the main street and Mlle Dubois, the hatmaker, would continue to sell saucepans and ribbons; they would eat hot soup in their kitchens and every evening close the little wooden gates that separated their gardens from the rest of the world.

The cars were waiting for morning to fill up with petrol. It was already becoming scarce. The townspeople asked the refugees for news. No one knew anything. "They're waiting for the Germans in the Morvan Mountains," someone said. Such an idea was greeted with scepticism.

"Come on, they didn't get that far in '14," said the fat chemist, shaking his head, and everyone agreed, as if the blood spilled in '14 had formed some mystical barrier to keep the enemy out for ever.

More cars arrived, and still more.

"They look so tired, so hot!" everyone kept saying, but not one of them thought to open their doors, to invite one of these wretches inside, to welcome them into the shady bits of heaven that the refugees could glimpse behind the houses, where wooden benches nestled in arbours amid redcurrant bushes and roses. There were just too many of them. Too many weary, pale faces, dripping with sweat, too many wailing children, too many trembling lips asking, "Do you know where we could get a room? A bed?" . . . "Would you tell us where we could find a restaurant, please, Madame?" It prevented the townspeople from being charitable. There was nothing human left in this miserable mob; they were like a herd of frightened animals. Their crumpled clothes, crazed faces, hoa.r.s.e voices, everything about them made them look peculiarly alike, so you couldn't tell them apart. They all made the same gestures, said the same words. Getting out of the cars, they would stumble a bit as if drunk, putting their hands to their throbbing temples. "My G.o.d, what a journey!" they sighed. "Hey, don't we look gorgeous?" they asked with a giggle. "They say things are a lot better over there," they would say, pointing over their shoulders to somewhere lost in the distance.

Madame Pericand's convoy had stopped at a little cafe near the railway station. They got out their basket of food and ordered some beer. At the next table, a beautiful little boy, very elegantly dressed but whose green coat was all crumpled, was calmly eating some bread and b.u.t.ter. On a chair next to him was a clothes basket in which a baby lay crying. With her experienced eye, Madame Pericand could tell immediately that these children came from a good family and that it would be all right to speak to them. So she talked kindly to the little boy and made conversation with the mother when she came back; she was from Reims, and looked enviously at the substantial snack the Pericand children were eating.

"Can I have some chocolate with my bread, Mummy?" said the little boy in green.

"My poor darling!" said the young woman, putting the baby on her lap to try to calm him down, "I don't have any. I didn't have time to buy some. You'll have a lovely dessert tonight at grandmother's."

"Would you allow me to offer you some biscuits?"

"Oh, Madame! You are too kind!"

"Don't mention it . . ."

The two women conversed cheerfully and graciously, with the same gestures and smiles they used when being offered a pet.i.t four and a cup of tea on any ordinary day. Meanwhile, the baby was screaming; one after the other, refugees with their children, their baggage, their dogs poured into the cafe. One of the dogs smelled Albert in his basket and, barking excitedly, rushed under the Pericands' table where the little boy in green was calmly eating his biscuits.

"Jacqueline, you have some lollipops in your bag," said Madame Pericand, with a discreet gesture and a look which meant "You know very well you should share with those who are less fortunate than you. Now is the time to put into practice what you have learned at catechism."

She got a feeling of great satisfaction from seeing herself as possessing such plenty and, at the same time, being so charitable. It was a credit to her foresight and kindness. She offered the lollipops not only to the little boy but to a Belgian family who had arrived in a truck jammed with hen-coops. She threw in some pains aux raisins pains aux raisins for the children. Then she had some hot water brought to prepare the elder Monsieur Pericand's herbal tea. for the children. Then she had some hot water brought to prepare the elder Monsieur Pericand's herbal tea.

Hubert had gone to try to find some rooms. Madame Pericand went out of the cafe to ask directions to the church in the middle of the town. There, families were camping out on the pavement and on the church's large stone steps.

The brand-new church was white and still smelled of fresh paint. Inside, it embraced two different worlds: the normal world of daily routine and another existence, strange and feverish. In one corner, a nun was changing the flowers at the feet of the Virgin Mary. A sweet, calm smile on her face, she slowly removed the shrivelled stems and replaced them with big bouquets of fresh roses. You could hear her scissors clicking and her gentle footsteps on the flagstones. Then she put out the candles. An elderly priest walked towards the confessional. An old woman was sleeping on a chair, holding her rosary beads. Many candles were lit in front of the statue of Joan of Arc. Little flames danced in the strong sunlight, pale and clear against the dazzling whiteness of the walls. Between two windows the golden letters of the names of people who had died in 1914 shimmered on a marble tablet.

Meanwhile, an ever-increasing crowd rushed towards the church like a wave. Women, children, all came to thank G.o.d for having arrived safely or to pray for the journey ahead. Some were crying, others were wounded, their heads or arms wrapped in bandages. Their faces were mottled with red blotches, their clothes wrinkled, torn and filthy, as if they had slept in them for several nights. Some were sweating, large drops of sweat falling like tears through the grey dust on their cheeks. The women pushed their way inside, threw themselves into the church as into some inviolable sanctuary. Their agitation, their frenzy, was so great that they seemed incapable of staying still. They moved from one altar to another, knelt down, got up, b.u.mped into chairs with a timid, terrified look like night owls in a room full of light. But little by little they calmed down, hid their faces in their hands and, exhausted and with no tears left, finally found peace in front of the large black crucifix.

After saying her prayers, Madame Pericand left the church. Once outside, she decided to restock her supply of biscuits, which had been greatly diminished by her lavish generosity. She went into a large grocer's store.

"We've got nothing left, Madame," said the employee.

"What? No shortbread, no gingerbread, nothing?"

"Nothing at all, Madame. It's all gone."

"Then let me have a pound of tea, Ceylon tea?"

"There's nothing, Madame."

They pointed out some other food shops to Madame Pericand, but nowhere could she buy a thing. The refugees had cleaned out the town. Hubert met her near the cafe. He hadn't been able to find a room.

"There's nothing to eat, the shops are empty!" she exclaimed.

"Well," said Hubert, "I found two shops full of goods." found two shops full of goods."

"Really? Where?"

Hubert burst out laughing. "There was one that sold pianos and the other, things for funerals!"

"You're such a silly little boy," said his mother.

"At the rate we're going," Hubert remarked, "I imagine pearl crowns will soon be in great demand. We could stock up on them, what do you think, Mother?"

Madame Pericand shrugged her shoulders. She could see Jacqueline and Bernard on the doorstep of the cafe. Their hands were full of chocolate and sweets that they were giving out to everyone around them. Madame Pericand leapt towards them.

"Get back inside! What are you doing out here? I forbid you to touch the food. Jacqueline, you will be punished. Bernard, your father will hear about this." Grabbing the two stunned culprits firmly by the hand, she dragged them away. Christian charity, the compa.s.sion of centuries of civilisation, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more.

11.

Maurice and Jeanne Michaud walked one behind the other on the wide road lined with poplar trees. Around them, behind them, in front of them, people were fleeing. Occasionally the road rose more steeply and they could see clearly the chaotic mult.i.tude trudging through the dust, stretching far into the distance. The luckiest ones had wheelbarrows, a pram, a cart made of four planks of wood set on top of crudely fashioned wheels, bowing down under the weight of bags, tattered clothes, sleeping children. These were the poor, the unlucky, the weak, the sort who don't know how to manage, who are always pushed to the back; the frightened, too, and the stingy, who had put off buying a ticket until the last minute because of the price, the expenses involved and the dangers of the journey, but who had suddenly been gripped by panic just like everyone else. None of them knew why they were bothering to flee: all of France was burning, there was danger everywhere. Whenever they sank to the ground, they said they would never get up again, they would die right there, that if they had to die it was better to die in peace. But they were the first to stand up when a plane flew near. They were compa.s.sionate and kind, offering that active and attentive sympathy that working people normally reserve for their own families or the poor, and even then only at moments of the most exceptional fear and misery. Nearly a dozen times, some of these big, strong women had offered to help Jeanne Michaud to walk. Jeanne herself held children by the hand while her husband carried bags on his shoulders: sometimes a bundle of clothing, sometimes a basket with a live rabbit and potatoes, the worldly possessions of a little old woman who had left Nanterre on foot. In spite of the exhaustion, the hunger, the fear, Maurice Michaud was not really unhappy. He had a unique way of thinking: he didn't consider himself that important; in his own eyes, he was not that rare and irreplaceable creature most people imagine when they think about themselves. He felt pity towards his fellow sufferers, but his pity was lucid and detached. After all, he thought, these great human migrations seemed to follow natural laws. Surely such occasional ma.s.s displacements were necessary to humans, just as the migration of livestock was to animals. He found this idea oddly comforting. The people around him believed that fate was tracking them down, them and their pitiable generation; but not Maurice: he knew there had been exoduses throughout history. How many people had died on this land (on land everywhere in the world), dripping with blood, fleeing the enemy, leaving cities in flames, clutching their children to their hearts: no one gave a thought to these countless dead, or pitied them. To their descendants they were no more important than chickens who'd had their throats slit. As he walked along, he imagined their plaintive ghosts rising up, leaning towards him, whispering in his ear, "We've been through all this already, before you. Why should you be more fortunate than us?"

"There's never been anything as horrible as this!" a big woman next to him groaned.

"On the contrary, Madame, on the contrary," he replied quietly.

They had been walking for three days when they saw the first regiments in full flight. Confidence was so ingrained in the heart of the French that when they saw these soldiers, the refugees thought a battle was about to begin, that the High Command had given orders for small groups to head for the front by a circuitous route, that the armed forces were still intact. This hope kept them going. The soldiers wouldn't say much. Almost all of them were depressed and pensive. Some slept in the backs of trucks. Tanks plodded forward in the dust, camouflaged with thin branches. Between the leaves faded by the burning sun, you could see their pale faces, weary, angry and exhausted.

Madame Michaud kept thinking she saw her son among them. Not once did she see his regiment's number, but a kind of hallucination took hold of her. Every unfamiliar young face or voice caused her to tremble so fiercely that she had to stop dead in her tracks, clutching her heart and softly muttering, "Oh, Maurice, isn't that . . ."

"What's wrong?"

"No, it's nothing . . ."

But he was no fool. He shook his head. "You see your son everywhere, my poor Jeanne!"

All she did was sigh. "He does look like him, doesn't he?"

After all, it could happen. He could have cheated death; he could suddenly appear at her side, her son, her Jean-Marie; he would call out to them joyfully, tenderly, in that sweet masculine voice she could still hear, "But what are you two doing here?"

Oh, just to see him, to hold him close, to feel his cool rough cheek beneath her lips, to see his beautiful eyes shining close to hers, his deep expression, so alive. He had hazel eyes with long eyelashes like a woman, eyes that saw so many things! She had always taught him to see the funny and moving side of people. She liked to laugh and felt sympathy for others. "It's your d.i.c.kensian spirit, Mother," he would say. How well they knew each other! They would cheerfully, sometimes cruelly, make fun of people who had been unkind to them; then a word, a gesture, a sigh would make them stop. Maurice was different: he was more serene, cooler. She loved and respected Maurice, but Jean-Marie was . . . Oh, my G.o.d, he was everything she wanted to be and everything she dreamed of and everything that was the best of her: her joy, her hope . . . "My son, my little love, my Jeannot," she thought, calling him by the nickname he'd had when he was five, when she would take his head gently in her hands and kiss his ears, tilt his head back and tickle him with her lips while he laughed and laughed.

Her thoughts became more and more feverish and confused the longer she walked. She was a good walker: when she and Maurice were younger, they had often gone rambling in the countryside during their short holidays. When they didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel, they would set off like this with food and sleeping bags in their rucksacks. This was why she suffered less fatigue than her companions. But this incessant kaleidoscope, these strange faces pa.s.sing endlessly before her, then fading and disappearing, was much more painful than physical exhaustion. "A herd of horses," she thought, "trapped." In the crowd, cars were tangled up like those reeds you see floating on the river, anch.o.r.ed by invisible knots while floodwater rushes all around them. Jeanne turned away so she couldn't see the cars. They poisoned the air with their petrol fumes, deafened the people on foot with their futile honking as they tried in vain to clear a way through. Seeing the impotent rage or the gloomy resignation on the drivers' faces was a comfort to the refugees. "They're not going any faster than us!" they would say to each other, enjoying the feeling of shared misfortune.

The refugees were walking in small groups. Chance had thrown them together at the edge of Paris and now they stayed together, though they didn't even know one another's names. With the Michauds was a tall, thin woman, wearing a cheap, shabby coat and a great deal of costume jewellery. Jeanne vaguely wondered what would possess someone to flee wearing enormous earrings encrusted with fake pearls and diamonds, large red and green stones on her fingers and a paste brooch with small bits of topaz.

Then there was a concierge and her daughter, the mother small and pale, the child big and heavy. They were both dressed in black and dragged along amid their luggage a portrait of a large man with a long black moustache. "My husband," the woman said. "He's the caretaker at the cemetery." Her sister was with her, pregnant and pushing a sleeping child in a pram. She was very young. As each convoy of soldiers pa.s.sed by, she too would tremble and search the crowd. "My husband is out there somewhere," she would say; out there somewhere, or perhaps out here . . . anything was possible.

And Jeanne would say, for the hundredth time no doubt-she really had no idea what she was saying any more-"So is my son, so is my son . . ."

They hadn't yet been sh.e.l.led. When it happened, they didn't know what was going on at first. They heard the sound of an explosion, then another, then shouting: "Run for it! Get down! Get down on the ground!" They immediately threw themselves face down.

"How grotesque we must look!" Jeanne mused. She wasn't afraid, but she was short of breath and her heart was pounding so violently that she pressed both hands to it and pushed it down against a stone. She could feel a bell-shaped pink flower brushing her lips. Later, she would remember that while they were stretched out on the ground, a small white b.u.t.terfly was lazily flitting from one flower to another.

Finally she heard a voice whisper, "It's over; they're gone." She stood up and automatically brushed the dust from her skirt. No one, she thought, had been hurt. But after walking for a few minutes, they saw the first fatalities: two men and a woman. Their bodies had been torn to shreds, but by chance their three faces were untouched. Such gloomy, ordinary faces, with a dim, fixed, stunned expression as if they were trying in vain to understand what was happening to them; they weren't made, my G.o.d, to die in battle, they weren't made for death. In all her life that woman had probably never said anything but ordinary things, like "The leeks are getting bigger" or "Who's the dirty pig who got my floor all muddy?"

But what do I know? Jeanne asked herself. Perhaps there was a wealth of intelligence and tenderness behind their low brows, beneath their dishevelled, lifeless hair. What are we in people's eyes, Maurice and I, other than two miserable employees? It's true in a way, but in another way, we are precious and unique. I know that too. "What a horrible waste," she thought again. She leaned against Marurice's shoulder, trembling, her cheeks wet with tears.

"Let's go," he said, gently pulling her away.

Both of them were thinking the same thing: "Why?" They would never make it to Tours. Did the bank even exist any more? Was Monsieur Corbin buried beneath the rubble with his files? With his valuables? With his dancer? And his wife's jewellery! But that would be too good to be true, Jeanne thought with sudden ferociousness. Nevertheless, she and Maurice hobbled along, continuing on their way. All they could do was to keep walking and place themselves in the hands of G.o.d.

12.

The little group made up of the Michauds and their companions was picked up on Friday night. A military truck stopped for them and they travelled through the night, lying among the crates, until they arrived at a town whose name they never discovered. The railway line was intact, they were told. They could go direct to Tours. Jeanne went into the first house she saw on the outskirts of the town and asked permission to wash. The kitchen was already full of refugees rinsing their clothes in the sink, but they took Jeanne to the water pump in the garden. Maurice had brought a little mirror on a small chain; he hung it from the branch of a tree and shaved. Afterwards they felt better, ready to face the long wait by the door of the barracks where soup was being given out, and an even longer wait at the third-cla.s.s ticket window at the train station. They had eaten and were crossing the square in front of the station when the bombs exploded. Enemy planes had been flying above the town for the past three days and air-raid warnings had been constant. The town had to make do with an old fire siren to sound the alarm; through the din of the cars, the screaming children, the noise of the terrified crowd, you could barely hear its faint, ridiculous sound. The people arriving off trains would ask, "Is it an air raid?" and be told, "No, it's over," only for the faint bell to be heard again five minutes later. There was laughter. Shops were open, little girls played hopscotch on the pavement and dogs ran through the dust near the old cathedral. The Italian and German planes were ignored as they glided calmly overhead. People were used to them.

Suddenly, one broke loose and swooped down at the crowd. He's going to crash, Jeanne thought, then, No, he's going to fire, he's firing, we're finished . . . Instinctively, she covered her mouth to stifle a scream. The bombs had fallen on the train station and, a bit further along, on the railway tracks. The gla.s.s roof shattered and exploded outwards, wounding and killing the people in the square. Panic-stricken, some of the women threw down their babies as if they were c.u.mbersome packages and ran. Others grabbed their children and held them so tightly they seemed to want to force them back into the womb, as if that were the only truly safe place. A wounded woman was writhing around at Jeanne's feet: it was the one with the costume jewellery. Her throat and fingers were sparkling and blood was pouring from her shattered skull. Her warm blood oozed on to Jeanne's dress, on to her shoes and stockings.

But Jeanne was saved from thinking about the dead by the wounded, who were calling for help from beneath the piles of shattered stone and broken gla.s.s. She joined Maurice and some other men who were trying to clear away the rubble. But it was too difficult for her. She couldn't do it. Then she remembered the children who were wandering piteously about the square, looking for their mothers. She called them over, took them by the hand and led them to the cathedral, where she a.s.sembled them in the front portico. Then she returned to the crowd. When she saw a frantic woman, screaming, running back and forth, she would call out in a calm, loud voice, so calm and loud that she herself was amazed, "The children are by the church door. Go and get them, over there. Could everyone who has lost their children please go and get them at the church."

The women rushed towards the cathedral. Sometimes they wept, sometimes they burst out laughing, sometimes they let out a sort of wild cry, a choking noise, like no other sound. The children were much calmer. Their tears dried quickly. Their mothers carried them away, holding them tightly. Not one of them thought to thank Jeanne. She went back into the square where she learned the town had not suffered much damage. A hospital convoy had been hit just as it was pulling into the station, but the line to Tours was still intact. The train was getting ready right now and would leave in a quarter of an hour. Immediately the dead and injured were forgotten; people rushed towards the station clutching their suitcases and hatboxes like life jackets. The Michauds spotted the first stretchers transporting the wounded soldiers. Because of the crush it was impossible to get close enough to see their faces. They were being piled into trucks and cars, both military and civilian, requisitioned in haste. Jeanne saw an officer going towards a truck full of children, supervised by a priest. She heard him say, "I'm terribly sorry, Father, but I must take this truck. We have to get our wounded to Blois."

The priest motioned to the children who started to climb out.

"I'm terribly sorry, Father," the officer repeated. "A school, is it?"

"An orphanage."

"I'll send the truck back to you if I can get any petrol."

The children-teenagers between fourteen and eighteen-each carrying a little suitcase, got out and formed a small group round the priest.

Maurice turned towards his wife. "Are you coming?"

"Yes. Wait a minute."

"What is it?"

She was trying to catch sight of the stretchers moving one after the other through the crowd. But there were too many people: she couldn't see anything.

Next to her another woman was also standing on tiptoe. Her lips were moving but she made no sound: she was praying or repeating someone's name. She looked at Jeanne. "You always think you see yours, don't you?" she said.

Jeanne sighed faintly. There was no reason at all why it should be her son rather than another woman's who appeared, suddenly, there in front of her eyes, her son, her own, her beloved. Perhaps he was in some peaceful spot? The most terrible battles leave some places untouched, protected, despite being surrounded by fire.

"Do you know where that train was coming from?" she asked the woman next to her.

"No."

"Are there many dead?"

"They say there are two carriages full of casualties."

Jeanne gave in and let Maurice pull her away. With great difficulty they made their way to the railway station. In places, they had to step over stone slabs and piles of broken gla.s.s. They finally made it to platform 3, where the train for Tours was getting ready to depart, a small local train from the provinces, peaceful and black, puffing out its smoke.

13.

It was two days since Jean-Marie had been wounded: he was in the train that was bombed. He wasn't hit, but the carriage caught fire. In his attempt to get out of his seat and make it to the door, his wound reopened. When he was picked up and hoisted into the truck, he was only semi-conscious. He lay motionless on his stretcher; his head had fallen sideways so that, at each jolt, it banged hard against an empty crate. Three vehicles full of soldiers were moving slowly down a road that had been machine-gunned and was hardly pa.s.sable. Above the convoy the enemy planes flew back and forth. Jean-Marie came out of his delirium for a moment and thought, "This is how birds must feel when the hawks circle above them . . ."

In his confusion he could picture his nanny's farm, where he used to spend the Easter holidays as a child. The farmyard was bright with sun: the chickens pecked at grain and hopped friskily about in the ash pile; then his nanny's large bony hand would s.n.a.t.c.h one of them, tie its feet together and five minutes later . . . that stream of blood and that little gurgling sound. Grotesque. Death. "And me too; I've been s.n.a.t.c.hed and carried away," he thought, ". . . s.n.a.t.c.hed and carried away . . . and tomorrow, thin and naked, tossed into a grave, I'll be as ugly as that chicken . . ."

His forehead banged against the crate with such force that he let out a faint protest: he didn't have the strength to cry out any more, but it caught the attention of the soldier on the next stretcher, wounded in the leg, but not too badly. "Hey, Michaud? What's wrong? Michaud, are you OK?"

"Give me something to drink and get my head in a better position and get this fly away from my eyes," Jean-Marie wanted to say, but he only sighed. "No." And he closed his eyes.

"They're starting again," groaned his friend.

At that very moment more bombs fell around the convoy. A small bridge was destroyed: the road to Blois was cut off; they would have to retreat, clear a pa.s.sage through the crowd of refugees, or go through Vendome, but they wouldn't make it there until nightfall.

Poor lads, thought the Major, looking at Michaud, the worst off. He gave him an injection. They started moving again. The two trucks carrying the minor casualties crawled towards Vendome; the one carrying Jean-Marie took a path through the fields to shorten the journey by a few kilometres. The truck soon stopped, out of petrol. The Major went to see if he could find a house in which to lodge his men. They were away from the ma.s.s exodus here; the river of cars was moving along the road down below. From the top of the hill, in the periwinkle-blue twilight of this peaceful, tender June night, the Major could see a black swarm from which arose a troubling sound-distinct from the sound of car horns, cries and shouts-a muted, sinister murmur that pierced the soul.

The Major saw a row of farms. They were inhabited, but only by women and children. The men were at the front. It was into one of these farms that Jean-Marie was taken. The neighbouring houses took in the other soldiers. The Major found a woman's bicycle and said he was going to the nearest town to get help, petrol, trucks, whatever he could find . . . "If he has to die," he thought, as he said goodbye to Michaud who was still lying on the stretcher in the farm's large kitchen while the women prepared and warmed up a bed, "if he can't go on, he's better off between two clean sheets than on the road . . ."

He cycled towards Vendome. It took him the whole night and, when he was about to enter the town, he fell into the hands of the Germans who took him prisoner. However, realising that he wasn't coming back, the women had already rushed to the village to warn the doctor and nurses at the hospital. But the hospital was full of the victims of the last bombing, so the soldiers remained in the hamlet. The women complained: with the men gone, they had enough work to do in the fields and looking after the animals without having to take care of these wounded men who'd been dropped on them!

Jean-Marie, burning with fever, painfully opened his eyes and saw an old woman with a long, sallow nose at the foot of his bed, knitting and sighing as she watched him: "If I could just be sure that my old man, wherever he is, the poor bloke, was being looked after like this one who means nothing to me . . ." Through his confused dream he could hear the clicking of the steel knitting needles. The ball of wool was bouncing on his blanket; in his delirium he thought it had pointed ears and a tail, and he stretched out his hand to stroke it. Now and again the woman's adopted daughter would stand close to him; she was young, with a fresh, rosy face, slightly heavy features and lively brown eyes. One day she brought him a bunch of cherries and put them next to him on the pillow. He was not allowed to eat them, but he pressed them against his burning cheeks and felt content and almost happy.

14.

Corte and Florence had left Orleans and were driving towards Bordeaux. Things were complicated, however, by the fact that they didn't know exactly where they were going. First they had headed towards Brittany, but then decided to go south, to the Midi. And now Gabriel was saying that he wanted to leave France altogether.

"We'll never get out alive," said Florence.

What she resented, more than the weariness and fear, was her anger-a blind, maddening rage that rose up from inside to suffocate her. She felt that Gabriel had broken the tacit agreement that bound them together. After all, for a man and woman in their position, and at their age, love was a contract. She had given herself to him because she hoped he would take care of her-not just materially but emotionally. Until now she had been dutifully repaid: he had given her wealth and prestige. But suddenly he seemed to her a weak and despicable creature.

"And would you care to tell me just what we would do abroad? What we would live on? All your money is here, since you were foolish enough to have the whole lot sent back from London, not that I've ever understood why!"