‘Decide!’ Grandsailles raged, succeeding this time in seizing the whip and bending it in two.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked d’Orminy, proud of the tumult that at last seemed to sweep over the Count, awakening him from his apparent apathy. ‘Why, naturally nothing is decided,’ d’Orminy went on in a tone of impatience. ‘In 1918 Marshal Pétain stopped the Germans on the Somme, this time he has stopped them in Paris!’

  ‘Enough joking, please!’ said Grandsailles, giving him back the whip broken in two.

  D’Orminy deposited it on the marble mantelpiece and, having removed the pearl pin from his tie, tried now to put it back exactly in the centre, biting his tongue in his concentrated attention. Grandsailles took the Prince by the arm, though he was careful not to distract him while he was engaged in this operation, and waited as he observed his performance in the mirror. When the pin was finally in place Grandsailles said, ‘It’s true that we have the fleet… and the colonial army. Weygand, Noguès…. What will Darlan do?’

  ‘He’s an opportunist,’ said d’Orminy, ‘but he has a rôle to play….’

  ‘So have we,’ Grandsailles concluded in a low voice.

  Grandsailles had already headed toward the outside door and was waiting for d’Orminy, his glance resolute behind a film of emotion. Before taking leave of each other, the two friends kissed each other on both cheeks with unexpected force, driving their nails into each other’s shoulders in a brief clasp as they agreed to meet in Africa.

  That same evening, which was the first in Paris under German occupation, Grandsailles had a rendezvous at half-past six with Solange de Cléda at her house on Rue de Babylone. And as everything in this world, even the hours of circumstances, can be extended and repeated, everything except death, whose hour is rigidly fixed, Solange once more was ready for this visit of Grandsailles which she had been waiting for since the beginning of the war – nearly a year!

  Through what emotions had her heart not passed, between the extremes of rebellion and suppliant tenderness! In the fragile condition which is that of lovers, how had the pure, warm egg of her generosity of soul not yet broken? If even the promptest relief seems too long delayed for the one who needs it, what an eternity it must have seemed before that which Solange was waiting for materialized! All she wanted was to have her love reciprocated. She was ready to ask his forgiveness with all her heart, no longer summoning her arrogant pride to her own defence, tyrannically submissive, belittled in every way? She could be oppressed, insulted, yes! provided Grandsailles did not find her ungrateful for all the benefits which his mere esteem could procure her. Solange, poor dupe, held no other grudges against her despot than those that were independent of his will – the excessively long time she had had to wait for this meeting through the fault of circumstances which the war had imposed. In the depth of her gratitude Solange went so far as to thank destiny once more for having tortured her thus in the interminable agony of her waiting, for nothing is too late at the moment when it occurs, and now at least their chances of reconciliation were assured by her total renunciation of all the residues of dignity and pride which had still animated her at the time of their last frustrated meeting and which might now have compromised her chances of success. At present she would know how to silence the protests of her human self-respect and trample it underfoot! No more levels, no more defence – a woman who gives herself, more beautiful than before, more pure in her intentions! With what eloquence she would now be able to beg him for mercy, with what prodigality of gradations her sincere regret would enhance each of her syllables, soothing to sweetness the last suspicions of Grandsailles’ rancour. She had accumulated so much passion and tenderness for this single moment….

  When Grandsailles rang the downstairs doorbell, Solange could not restrain her eagerness. She rushed out to the landing, stood there, tightly holding with her two hands the crystal ball that adorned the top of the ebony banister. Breathlessly she listened to the Count’s footsteps as he began climbing the stairs with his swinging gait, that had the regular rhythm of a limping pendulum. It would take him at least a minute or two to reach the second storey, before his figure appeared against that last turn of the wall in greenish and shiny imitation marble on whose wavelike pattern Solange kept her eyes fixed. Standing thus, in the dim electric light that bathed this spot, her expectant figure resembled that of a chimera, a celestial Madonna’s face attached to the equivocal, full-curved and half-animal body of a sphinx.

  Grandsailles appeared, dressed in the uniform of a cavalry captain. Seeming not to notice Solange’s presence, he continued to climb with the same pace till he reached the step below the landing where she stood. There he stopped. Solange had controlled an impulse to go toward him, and seeing that Grandsailles refused any friendly gesture, she drew back, making herself slimmer as she flattened herself against the wall next to the door, as if to invite him to lead the way across the threshold of her apartment.

  ‘Madame,’ said Grandsailles without moving, as if glued to the spot, ‘our notary Pierre Girardin tells me that you claim that a five-minute interview would be all you needed to clear up our supposed misunderstanding. I am here to prove the contrary. You can’t find a single word to justify yourself…. You have tried to force me to marry you,’ cried Grandsailles. Then he added calmly, ‘Tomorrow evening I am leaving for Africa.’

  Solange’s lips trembled several times as if she were about to speak, but she remained silent, while by an infinitely sweet shaking of her head she expressed, as no words could have done, all the injustice and the fatality of her unhappiness. Perhaps if Grandsailles had seen her expression at this moment…. But he was no longer looking at her. His eyes had alighted on the silhouette of his own shadow projected on the opposite wall and he was waiting only for the five minutes to pass. All the arguments, all the entreaties, all the ardent words that Solange had repeated to herself, day after day, were there hovering on her lips, but she said nothing. What was the use? Grandsailles turned his back and started down the sairs. At this moment Solange took a step toward him…. Grandsailles stopped short for a moment. Solange, clutching the ebony banister, waiting for the impossible, could barely hold herself upright.

  ‘Take good care of yourself!’ was all she said.

  When Grandsailles had gone, Solange remained for a long time in the same position, her eyes fixed on the green imitation marble wall above that last turn of the stairway in front of which the Count had passed before he disappeared from sight. Solange de Cléda’s face seemed to have become serene, but if at this moment someone had had the curiosity to draw near and look between her half-shut eyelids he would probably have been terrified to observe that they were without sight and that in the slits between her lashes, instead of fixed pupils, only the whites were visible. And it is in the whites of these eyes, smooth as those of blind statues, that Salvador Dali’s imagination wishes to engrave, and thereby immortalize them at the end of this chapter, the Latin word, ‘nihil’, which means ‘nothing’.

  *A remarkable fact is the capacity for endurance and even for ‘health’ that accompanies certain grave affections of the mind in well-determined cases of dementia. Thus in Napoleon and several other men of action I have been able to analyse vestiges of ‘Clédalism’ in which the mind seemed to function not only independently of but even in contradiction to certain laws of the organism, thus offering an exception to the old idea that the body is the mirror of the soul.

  Driving herself continually, with all the force of her paranoiac proclivities, to go constantly counter to all natural laws. Solange de Cléda while awaiting the Count’s return was progressively and imperceptibly turning into a monster.

  5

  War and Transfiguration

  On arriving at d’Orminy’s villa near Casablanca and contemplating the immense square of its whitewashed façade, Cécile Goudreau had said, ‘You can’t tell whether it’s the house that makes the most of the moonlight or the moonlight that makes the most of the house, so sweet does the jasmine smell here!’ She had taken a deep breath. It was in these fragrant and limpid moonlit nights at the beginning of the North African November that the most subtle and paradoxical villainies of the most dramatic shufflings of contemporary politics were to struggle, unfold and be decided. In these latitudes politics itself had entered a lunar phase, a phase of shadows, of penumbrae and of fulgurations in which it became difficult not to confuse the true sharp light of a friendly face with the wan reflection of a spy’s or a traitor’s, so fierce and united were loyalty, courage and treason, like Seraphis, worshipped by the Egyptians, with its single animal head with three snarling mouths – dog, lion and wolf – surrounded by the seductive serpent of opportuneness: all in bright, solid gold, crowning a solitary trophy planted in the heart of the desert and projecting an elongated and melancholy shadow that vanished on the confines of the sand, which was parched and avid of the new blood of history.

  At the beginnings of this African ‘intermezzo’ everything became ambivalent – difficult and easy, with nothing impossible. Merely to be able to move one’s little finger it was actually necessary to get all the wrangling and conflicting powers in the world, if not into agreement, at least compliant and tolerant of this little movement. But for anyone capable of manoeuvring with astuteness, suppleness and Machiavellianism this whole network, this complicated intrigue, this struggle of apparently irreducible imponderables could on the contrary be transformed into a favourable mechanism, and then the play of contradictory and simultaneous interests could become a powerful, formidable and secret master-lever, capable like that of Archimedes of moving the world by merely applying to it the pressure of a single little finger. But this required a special man, inflexible and fanatical in his decisions, suspicious of everything, trusting no one, possessing the science of provocation, as capable of concealing the ever-precise motives of his actions as the vague ones of his sympathies, and combining with the flashes of his anger the distant fog of an effaced and superlative elegance. This man was Count Hervé de Grandsailles, or at least he believed himself to be he, inasmuch as for a short time he really was. But if Grandsailles possessed to a superlative degree most of the faculties required to play an important rôle in this North Africa of the end of 1941, he lacked one, that must have been as important as the others – sympathy. Grandsailles succeeded in imposing himself, but his lack of sympathy immediately caused the objectives of his successes, too quickly attained, to crumble.

  Grandsailles reached North Africa at the beginning of the month of November, and he immediately established his headquarters on the Prince of Orminy’s three-masted yacht which was anchored in a small bay off-shore.

  ‘It looks damned official!’ Cécile Goudreau had exclaimed on seeing from the window of her room the outlines of two marines whom Grandsailles had obtained to mount guard on the bridge. Below deck the Canoness of Launay had succeeded in finding an adequate place for each of the Count’s habits, setting up all his familiar objects in an order that to all appearances was the same as they had occupied at the Château de Lamotte or the house in the chestnut grove of the Bois de Boulogne, love philtres included. And just as in Libreux she might often have been seen of an afternoon surrounded by three or four peasants with one knee to the ground, their arms crossed on a woven basket, holding a piece of rough bread, reminding one of a Le Nain painting, so now it was common to see her in the winter sun with a newspaper on her head, surrounded by three Arabs squatting on their haunches, who came every day bringing provisions, reminding one of a Fortuny painting. But if the canoness always reminded one of a painting, the Count always reminded one of a third act, and while in Paris it was more or less Racinian, in Africa the curtain was about to rise on an astounding melodrama.

  Since his arrival in Africa, the Count of Grandsailles seemed to have grown younger; his movements now were light and quick, and his limp had developed a special agility in getting in and out of the landing yawl, in going up and down the white marble steps to d’Orminy’s house, barely grazing them with his spurred heels glistening with nickel, almost on tiptoe. He had grown thinner, and ate frugally. His outbursts of anger were lashing and brief, like the crack of a whip, and his expression was consumed by the fire of ambition. He appeared only in the evenings to dine in the company of Cécile Goudreau and d’Orminy, and at about eleven the latter would often accompany him back to the yacht where the two friends, the one in uniform, the other in mufti, would remain till three in the morning in deep conspiracy. This was also the time habitually reserved for rather shady visitors. D’Orminy, whose knowledge of law was far superior to the Count’s, which was nearly non-existent, would help the Count to untangle and solve the complicated questions which he suddenly saw himself faced with and of which he had almost no understanding. And always the same scene would be re-enacted.

  ‘I don’t need to find out about the laws!’ Grandsailles would bellow, ‘I know everything! I have three thousand years of experience, I’m as old as the world!’

  D’Orminy would burst into a yellow laugh with his yellow teeth, and before going off to bed would leave all the files in good order, laid out on the Count’s table, ready for the latter to use the next morning to develop his plans. It is true that the use which Grandsailles made of all these documents the following morning was odd and unexpected most of the time. For according to him, and to use his own words, ‘There was not a single law in the world which in the hands of a “real character” could not be used, without distorting it, for ends exactly contrary to those for which it had been created.’ This essentially Jesuitical faculty that was peculiar to him for transforming all things, even the most adverse, to his own taste and use, Grandsailles called the ‘touch of grace’, the ‘Machiavelli talisman’. And the latter’s smile, which he considered the keenest of which man was capable, prevented him in his moments of success from registering his pleasure and enabled his set face to remain serious.

  Grandsailles had been sent by Vichy on a special mission to negotiate an increase in imports from North Africa, especially of sugar and cotton: in this matter the backing of M. Edouard Cordier, who had remained in France, was inestimable, enabling him forthwith to represent the majority of the most powerful French industrialists, both morally and materially. All this endowed his person with a sudden importance in realms which he could never have suspected, but he valued his new power only as a means of carrying on his political intrigues more effectively. The moment came when, in order both to succeed in the mission which served as a front and to continue his more occult ones, circumstances made it necessary for him to go to Malta. The Count could barely contain his fury when d’Orminy began to list the insurmountable difficulties that seemed to lie in the way of this voyage.

  ‘First of all,’ said d’Orminy, ‘there’s the question of how to get there; you’ll have to find a plane, and pilots….’

  ‘Yo u can take me,’ Grandsailles broke in, slightly drawing back his face as if to avoid the Prince’s bad-smelling breath, trying at the same time by this movement to arouse d’Orminy’s acute sense of inferiority. He continued severely, ‘Otherwise what’s the use of your having been a pilot for ten years, and having a lieuten-ant’s rank?’

  ‘I’m no longer in the active service. My plane isn’t at my disposal any longer,’ d’Orminy replied.

  ‘You still have your uniform?’ asked Grandsailles.

  ‘We’ll look into all that later, but I don’t think I’ll be able to fly you.’ As he spoke d’Orminy had been backing away from the Count and had seated himself with difficulty, as if in acute pain, behind the other’s desk.

  ‘The weather is good,’ said Grandsailles, who had gone over to the cabin porthole, his face lighted by the moon. His hair, just beginning to turn grey, was silvered by its rays.

  ‘I just had a glimpse of you as you will be when you are old,’ said d’Orminy, looking at him with kindliness. ‘You will hardly change, and only for the better.’

  Grandsailles did not answer. He was thinking, ‘I’ll let you admire me for another few moments, after which I will insult you. You’re just in the right frame of mind, exceptionally affectionate and devoted. You’re feeling sorry for yourself, thinking you’re going to die soon and imagining me surviving everything; you’re even getting sentimental. So this is the moment to pounce on you mercilessly to revive your spirit of action, shake you to the depths, wind up all the springs of your energy so that your entire fund of resources will drop on all fours at my feet and you will flatten yourself out before my desires – flat as a carpet.’ Then, imagining d’Orminy turned into a flying carpet taking him to Malta, he could not repress a smile, but turning it immediately into one of contempt, he broke his long silence and said in a hard tone.

  ‘A truly courageous spirit would not in the present circumstances indulge in the kind of personal reflections that are passing through your head at this moment. Your suicide complex is of no interest to history. When you spoke, just now, of my old age you were only thinking of yourself. I esteem you, but your death will leave me indifferent. It will at least spare me having to listen to your foul-smelling secrets. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you: you ought to have your teeth looked after.’