Cécile Goudreau, who had been deeply shaken by Randolph’s death, now fell to weeping silently.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s right to leave!’ she kept repeating, her voice husky, broken by sobs. ‘This bit of Africa is still France!’

  ‘We’re no longer at home here since it’s become impossible for us to act,’ replied d’Orminy firmly.

  ‘To stay here is like dying,’ Cécile Goudreau muttered, ‘and to leave kills me!’ She sprang to her feet and cried in an unintelligible voice. ‘France! What have you done with your sword!’ and threw herself on the bed, racked by convulsive sobs.

  Neither d’Orminy nor Grandsailles made the slightest move to go over and console her, for their eyes were suddenly lighted by the unalterable resolve to leave.

  ‘I demand that you follow out my plan to the letter and to the end,’ said d’Orminy, taking the Count by the shoulders; and he continued with unaccustomed energy, ‘I shall countenance no discussion this time, for it is the only one to follow. In what I am going to do for you I risk my life. All I need is six pictures of you. The less you bestir yourself the better it will be. In fact, you can stay here with Cécile and wait for me till this evening,’ And as Grandsailles mildly tried to protest, the Prince of Orminy smiled to him with the most human smile, the most saturated with feeling, that had probably shone on his face in the whole course of his life, and said, ‘Stay, for once, and fly your kite.’

  Late in the evening the Prince of Orminy came and brought news to Grandsailles. Both of them with Cécile Goudreau and the canoness, who also had to get final instructions for the departure, were calmly pacing the after-deck of the yacht, pausing now and then and starting off again. The full moon had just risen. ‘It’s so beautiful – it’s like summer,’ said Cécile Goudreau. All spoke in low voices. ‘Listen,’ said d’Orminy, ‘I hear rowing.’ All listened in silence. ‘Natives,’ said Grandsailles, as he made out a fishing boat. ‘Yes, I know them,’ said the canoness, ‘it’s old Batta and his four sons. They’re going conger-fishing and are starting out so they will get there by the time the moon is down.’ The boat glided off and lay steeped in a kind of supernatural peace… a milky silence…. One heard only a faint lapping of water against the keel, like a sound of lunar saliva. The moon-drenched kite lying against a bulwark looked like a stellar ray that had just dropped there like a sign of the Zodiac.

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ sighed Goudreau, ‘this peace, all this beauty – it’s more than one can bear, it’s out of this world! Will we ever be able to leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow at five o’clock,’ said d’Orminy.

  ‘If we’re not all in prison,’ said Graindsailles.

  ‘The success of your mission to Malta will cause them to wait, to think things over,’ d’Orminy answered.

  ‘What a marvel Malta is!’ said the Count, involuntarily raising his voice.

  ‘Sh!’ said the canoness, ‘another boat going out for the conger-fishing.’

  ‘I’m very much afraid Broussillon may turn informer when he hears of Fouseret’s death,’ said Grandsailles in d’Orminy’s ear. The latter, who was deep in thought, did not answer and there was a long silence. One of the Arab fishermen was singing a plaintive song in Spanish. At each pause, when he stopped to take his breath, one could hear the water dripping from the oars:

  ‘Se murio mi esperanza!

  Yo fui al entierro

  Y encontre mi amor

  Que hiva en el duelo!

  Ay, oy, ay!’

  Dead is my hope!

  I went to the burial

  And met my love

  Who was in mourning!

  Ay, oy ay!

  ‘How is your foot?’ Grandsailles asked the canoness.

  ‘It still hurts,’ she answered, trying to put her weight on her foot which had just suffered an attack of gout. Brusquely she struck this same foot with full force against the deck, shutting her eyes to control her pain, and cried, ‘I can go to America on foot, even limping if necessary. Here even the smelts we eat stink of the Germans!’

  ‘So you’re happy to be leaving tomorrow?’ d’Orminy asked, amused at her outburst of impatience.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ said the canoness, ‘yesterday I want to leave!’ she concluded in a comical rage.

  D’Orminy, who had been absorbed in thought, now took Goudreau and Grandsailles by the arm and led them below deck, while the canoness, hobbling painfully, tried to catch up with them for fear of missing some detail of their conversation.

  ‘Look,’ said d’Orminy, ‘beginning tomorrow the boat must remain without a crew on board, aside from the three of us and the three sailors who will bring us back to shore. At quarter-past three a special launch will come and fetch Grandsailles and the canoness to take them to the François Coppée, which leaves for Buenos Aires at five. The captain of the ship is informed of everything – bought very dearly, but trustworthy! You must leave here wearing my aviation lieutenant’s uniform. Once on board the François Coppée, lock yourself up with the canoness in my three-cabin suite. On no account must you leave it. All you will have to do is to wait for us. Cécile and I will arrive only in the last moment.’

  ‘Why must I disguise myself as you when I leave here?’ asked Grandsailles.

  ‘In order to escape,’ answered d’Orminy. ‘This very morning I put my house and my yacht at the government’s disposal. Tomorrow a gendarmerie company will take the place over. We shall be observed. When you leave,’ he said, addressing himself to the Count, ‘they must think it is I. I gave my word of honour that you were staying, but in exchange I received the formal promise that you would in no wise be molested in my presence – they would spare me this and wait to take action against you till after I leave.’

  ‘Then they have decided to arrest me?’ asked Grandsailles.

  ‘Just about,’ answered d’Orminy.

  There was a silence. Then Grandsailles asked in a sceptical tone, ‘And what about you? How are you going to leave the boat at the last moment without being spotted? And how are we going to avoid the police inspection before the François Coppée hoists anchor? All this strikes me as sheer childishness!’

  ‘That is mylookout!’ said d’Orminy energetically, making an effort to stand up. ‘Now remember what I’ve told you: the slightest deviation from my plan may mean my life, and anyway, devotion can go only so far. I loathe always seeming to speculate on my own personal danger!’

  D’Orminy had sat down again and was pressing his forehead, puckered with fatigue, against the outstretched fingers of his weary hands that seemed mummified by discouragement. He remained thus for a long time. Cécile Goudreau had hung herself round Grandsailles’ neck and was imploring him. ‘Come, now, let him do it his way! Let him do it his way for just once!’

  ‘All right!’ said Grandsailles, ‘I’ll shut my eyes to everything, but I think I should tell you that this afternoon some gendarmes came with a letter for me from the commissaire de police.’

  ‘What? And what did you answer?’ asked d’Orminy, startled.

  ‘Nothing!’ Grandsailles replied. ‘I refused to accept it, and I sent them packing.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said d’Orminy, ‘they’ll be back again tomorrow in any case….’

  Early the following morning the Prince of Orminy paid his last visit to Guillomet, the chief of police, whom he had known since childhood.

  ‘Listen, old man,’ he said to him, ‘I don’t want to keep you from doing your duty, but the Count of Grandsailles has been one of my best friends. Whatever may be your responsibility I ask you not to let anything happen before I leave. Also, as you promised yesterday, I don’t want anyone to come and disturb us in my cabin on the François Coppée. The honour of the lady who is leaving with me depends on it. Cécile Goudreau is not going. I entrust her to you and leave her under your protection. She is an intimate friend of the Count’s; she is the natural person to serve as a go-between for you and the Count – you know that he is impulsive and a little unbalanced.’

  ‘I know,’ answered Guillomet, ‘yesterday he even refused to read the very considerate message which I sent him.’

  At three o’clock a launch from the Françoise Coppée came to fetch the Count of Grandsailles and the canoness, and Cécile Goudreau and the Prince of Orminy remained alone aboard the yacht. The sea remained calm, smooth and burnished like a sheet of lead; the sky blended with the sea and the reflection of the mountain across the bay seemed as hard and corporeal as the mountain itself, as if the symmetrical excrescence of its double were but an inverted continuation of it. Only at long intervals would a llissa leap out of the water and shatter this illusion of the absolute, wrinkling the surface of the water with placid concentric circles.

  ‘We still have two hours before us,’ said d’Orminy. ‘You won’t guess what I’ve brought.’ He went over to a cabinet, opened it and pulled out two opium pipes. ‘We’re going to smoke, it’ll calm our nerves. From here we can see everything that goes on on the other side….’ They smoked.

  On the beach, before the Prince of Orminy’s house, a group of gendarmes stood conversing. Among them were five civilians, three men and two girls. All were idle and restless, and they would sit down on the sand in uncomfortable positions only to get up again immediately; stooping to pick up pebbles which they would throw awkwardly into the water to make them ricochet; climbing up on a bank to take pictures of one another.

  ‘What a capacity for sterile agitation human beings have!’ d’Orminy exclaimed, possessing as he did the contrary faculty of being able to remain motionless as a mannequin for long hours at a stretch.

  ‘Poor things,’ said Cécile Goudreau, ‘they’re terribly ill at ease. They look as if they desperately needed to empty their bladders, but actually it’s not their fault. It’s perfectly clear. They have no opium! Now I understand Grandsailles. When you feel at the end of your rope, completely hopeless, what could be more exhilarating than to fly a kite!’

  At a quarter past four, three of the police force climbed into a tiny boat, scarcely big enough to hold them, and began calmly to row out to the yacht.

  ‘There they are,’ said d’Orminy, ‘they’re already coming to bring Grandsailles their ultimatum. They think it’s he who is here instead of me. You go out and receive them. Tell them that the Count is asleep, that you will give him the message and bring them his answer in half an hour.’

  ‘And then what?’ asked Cécile.

  ‘I will tell you afterwards,’ d’Orminy answered, and he went and shut himself up in Grandsailles’ cabin.

  Everything went as he had foreseen; the gendarmes delivered the message from Guillomet, their chief, and rowed away as they had come, lingering now and then to pick up a long red seaweed caught on the end of an oar, or using the latter to tap a piece of floating cork to try to make it sink. D’Orminy spent a long time reading Guillomet’s message. The latter’s manner toward the Count had become brutal. He called upon him to leave the boat and to appear before him. At the end of his message, however, he appealed to his patriotism and even invoked the tricolour. D’Orminy then went over to the little ship’s bar, detached a small French flag pinned between two bottles of Amer Picon and surrounded by other flags of different nationalities, folded it twice, and put it into an envelope that he sealed with the official seal which the Count of Grandsailles had left on his desk.

  ‘There, chérie,’ said d’Orminy to Goudreau, ‘go ashore and give them this envelope. Tell them you are coming back in ten minutes, but instead, without wasting another second, make your getaway; you’ll just have time to get on board the François Coppée. There you will join Grandsailles right away and wait for me. I have things to finish here, but I’ll follow you shortly, and I’ll be on board the François Coppée half an hour after you at the latest.’

  Cécile Goudreau went into the cabin a moment to get herself ready to leave; when she was already in the yawl she seemed to hesitate. D’Orminy complimented her on the adornment she had just put on – a ‘damp stone’ grey voile turban ending in a veil that reached down to her waist, encircling and clasping it like a belt.

  ‘It’s very “departurish”,’ said d’Orminy, ‘but above all it’s so Parisian. From where I stand, by squinting my eyes a little, it’s exactly as if I were looking at a panoramic view of Paris.’

  D’Orminy uttered these words as he stood leaning over the bridge railing, a little stooped, his torso projecting over the edge of the vessel like one of the beneficent gargoyles on the Gothic towers of Notre Dame. ‘And now be on your way, chérie. I’ll see you by-and-by!’

  He grinned a goodbye as he watched her disappear, tightly clenching his teeth which in the already yellowish light of the afternoon sun appeared even yellower than usual, as though he were squeezing a half slice of lemon in his mouth, and even as if this fruit had managed in spite of the distance to squirt acid drops into the eyes of both of them. The half slice of lemon of d’Orminy’s smile diminished progressively, and soon, of the Prince’s whole figure, Cécile could make out precisely only the flashes of his gold ring shining in the sunlight, by which she could tell that he was still waving to her with his hand.

  Cécile Goudreau pressed the rather plump envelope containing the flag with some uneasiness. The ‘soft’, unexpected contact caused by the contents produced in her an undefinably sinister sensation. Her launch, after describing a wide semi-circle to go round a group of reefs, headed straight for the beach where the group of gendarmes stood. Cécile Goudreau delivered the envelope, and almost immediately left, this time in the direction of the port of Casablanca, to board the François Coppée and join the Count of Grandsailles and the canoness, who must be waiting for her.

  At the very moment when the chief of police Guillomet, having unsealed the envelope, was looking with stupefaction at the little tricoloured flag which he held up between his fingers and which was the sole response to his letter demanding that Grandsailles surrender himself, Cécile Goudreau, already far out in the middle of the bay, turned her head to look once more and for the last time at the Prince of Orminy’s boat and she was paralysed to see the immaculate kite, warm with sunlight, soaring majestically over the yacht. Instinctively she thought, ‘Something frightful is going to happen!’ But she did not have time to crystallize the impression of her fear. A violent explosion rent the silence of the late afternoon, a black column of smoke rose in a whirl from d’Orminy’s yacht which, after having dipped violently toward the bow seemed for a moment to have regained its stability while flames burst out from it in all directions, and it gradually settled on its side. D’Orminy had committed suicide, blowing up the engine-room with dynamite!

  Cécile Goudreau kept her eyes glued to those flames, and to the soot-black smoke that now rose vertically very high in the sky, while she cried to her two sailors, ‘Quick, Quick! What the Count of Grandsailles has just done is not our concern! Quick! I have to report this to the Prince.’

  ‘It’s I, Cécile,’ she said, knocking at the door of Grandsailles’ cabin.

  Grandsailles opened. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, immediately struck by Cécile’s look of utter distraction.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she repeated in a fateful tone. She wrapped round him her arms that had become energetic as a man’s and led the Count toward a lingering ray of light that came through the porthole.

  ‘Come over here,’ said Cécile, ‘come here to the light. I want to see you, I am curious to know for once what your eyes are going to do when you hear what I have to tell you. Look at me… come, Hervé!’

  The canoness, gripped by a recurrence of the gout, had drawn near by means of a series of painful but agile hobbles.

  ‘Has d’Orminy been arrested?’ the Count hazarded, and as Goudreau shook her head with a madwoman’s terrifying smile, he immediately assumed the worst.

  ‘I see,’ he said, ‘he tried to escape, he fired on the police and….’

  Cécile Goudreau continued to shake her head, though more slowly and bitterly now, and said finally, hammering out each word, ‘He killed himself in your place and scuttled his boat.’

  At this moment the canoness let herself drop to her knees, uttering a plaintive wail that resembled the intensely human, almost childish cry of a dolphin that has just been pulled out of the water, and hid her face in her apron, trying to stifle a sob that she strung out in a succession of spasmodic, brief, diminishing jerks that would begin again with each burst of tears by the same initial moan. The better to give herself over to her despair the canoness let herself drop from her knees to a sitting posture. Cécile Goudreau, with an obsessive stubbornness which her recent dose of opium, no doubt, rendered even more exorbitant, had taken hold of Grandsailles’ face, and with the claws of her hands she dug and pressed all around the Count’s dry and dream-filled orbits as though by means of this kind of anxious massage she hoped to draw from him evidence of some weakness in his impassivity. She kept repeating, querulous, cajoling and suppliant at the same time, ‘Come on, now. Weep! Weep! Why don’t you weep!’

  Grandsailles who had been enduring this outpouring with stoical indifference, abruptly stopped Cécile’s hands, seizing her two small and livid wrists, which were only waiting for this, with a single authoritative hand, and said, ‘Why do you want me to weep over an act that fills me with pride for my friend?’

  Cécile freed one hand from the clasp, which had become affectionate, reached up and caressed a lock of the Count’s greying hair, so seldom dishevelled, and with tear-filled eyes looking into the depths of those that refused to weep said to Grandsailles with an infinitely gentle note of reproach, ‘Now you see…. Poor d’Orminy! We won’t have to listen to his foul-smelling secrets any more!…’