‘I see nothing in it but faults and pretence. A kind of deceptive mishmash of meat and fish.’
‘You are talking just like the directors of our Royal Academy of Music, who ignore foreign art for fear it will bring down theirs.’
‘Peace, gentlemen,’ growled Semacgus. ‘I’m sure you’re both right, but you seem to take a perverse pleasure in forcing your arguments, with even more bad faith than the Président de Saujac.’
‘Oh,’ said Noblecourt, laughing, ‘that’s the whole pleasure of the thing. To maintain the unmaintainable, push your reasoning beyond the reasonable and put forward exaggerated arguments – all that is part of the joy of the debate.’
‘You admit it, then?’
‘I admit nothing. All I’m saying is that we should increase the controversy and put some bite into our presentation. The alternative would be like defending a dull thesis to the academics of the Sorbonne.’
Marion approached Louis, who was starting to doze off, and gave him a bag of fresh hazelnuts from a tree in the garden. Nicolas noticed his son’s tiredness.
‘My friends,’ he said, consulting his repeater watch, which sounded softly, ‘I think it’s time to bring this memorable evening to an end. Our host needs to rest after this royal feast and his excesses.’
‘So early?’ said Noblecourt. ‘Do you really want to interrupt this delightful interlude?’
‘Tomorrow has already sounded, and Louis’s mother is waiting for him. He is leaving for Juilly at dawn on the first mail coach.’
‘Before he leaves us, I want to give him a gift,’ said the procurator.
Monsieur de Noblecourt undid the second package, took out two small leather-bound volumes bearing his arms, and opened one with infinite care. Everyone present smiled, knowing his fanatical devotion to his books.
‘Here,’ he said with blissful solemnity, ‘are Ovid’sMetamorphoses, translated by Abbé Banier, of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres. These fine works are decorated with frontispieces and illustrations. My dear Louis, I offer them to you with all my heart …’ He added in a lower voice, as if to himself, ‘The only gifts that matter are those from which one parts with sorrow and regret.’ Then, raising his voice again, ‘May these fables, with their gods made flesh, stimulate your imagination and instil in you a love of literature.
All is enchantment, each thing has its place,
With a body, a soul, a mind and a face. 6
May reading them persuade you that what is elegant in Latin is not necessarily so in French, that each language has a tone, an order and a genius peculiar to it. Whenever you need to translate, remember to be simple, clear and correct, in order to render the author’s ideas precisely, omitting nothing of the delicacy and elegance of his style. Everything should hold together, in fact. Just as, in life, one becomes hard and heartless by being too attached to the letter of a principle, so in translation, the tone can become dry and arid as soon as one tries to impose one’s own ideas in place of the author’s.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Louis, now completely awake again, ‘I don’t know what to say. I certainly wouldn’t like to deprive you of a treasure to which I know you are attached. My father has told me all about your great love of the books in your library.’
‘Not at all, it is a pleasure for me to offer them to you! Don’t worry, I still have Monsieur Burman’s large folio edition, published by Westeins and Smith in 1732, with splendid intaglio figures …’
‘Many thanks, Monsieur. These books will be dear to me, knowing they come from you.’
While the former procurator looked on approvingly, Louis opened one of the volumes and leafed through it carefully and respectfully.
‘Monsieur, what are these handwritten pages?’
He held out a piece of almond-green paper covered in small, densely packed handwriting.
‘Quite simply, translations made by yours truly of the Latin quotations in the preface. You will be able to check their accuracy.’
‘Louis,’ said Nicolas, ‘it is a true viaticum our friend is giving you. Follow his counsel. I have always benefited from it. He was my master when I first arrived in Paris, when I was only a little older than you are now.’
They all rose from the table. The farewells took a while longer. Semacgus, who was returning to Vaugirard, would give Louis a lift and drop him at his mother’s in Rue du Bac. Nicolas made his final recommendations to his son. He was particularly insistent that the boy write him a letter, however short, every week. He opened his arms and Louis threw himself into them. Moved, Nicolas had the curious feeling that he was reliving a distant past, as if the Marquis de Ranreuil had reappeared in the person of his grandson.
The guests having dispersed, he went back to his quarters, overcome with a quiet melancholy. Life often had tricks up its sleeve, chance ruled, and fate often struck repeated blows. But this time it was different: his continuing disgrace was of little importance compared with an ambiguous destiny that offered him compensations which restored the balance. The discovery of Louis constituted the most important of these unexpected favours for which he had Providence to thank.
Monday 3 October 1774
Nicolas’s first thought, after Mouchette had woken him as usual by breathing in his ear, was for his son, who was starting a new life that morning. He had explained to him why he would be absent when his coach left. He dreaded the emotion he would feel, which Antoinette’s own emotional state would merely accentuate. He found it hard to think of La Satin as Antoinette, even though that was the name by which he had known her in the early days of their liaison. But, anxious for the past to be forgotten and to offer her son a mother worthy of the unexpected future opening up to him, she had certainly turned over a new leaf.
When he left Rue Montmartre, the pedestrians and the carriages were shrouded in autumnal fog. Where should he begin the errands he had planned? First of all, he had to purchase an oil for removing stains from clothes. He knew only too well how difficult it would be for a boarder like Louis to clean his clothes, since only underwear was washed by the establishment. This oil was designed to remove stains from any kind of material, however delicate, without in any way altering its colour or sheen. In addition, it possessed the useful ability to destroy bugs and their eggs, moths and other eaters of wool. It was in Rue de Conti in Versailles that he had discovered the inventor of this precious compound. The success of the formula had encouraged the man to start selling his product in Paris, at a haberdasher’s shop in the Grande-Cour des Quinze-Vingts.7 Nicolas knew that each bottle was wrapped in an explanatory note which would enlighten his son as to the best way to use this oil.
He also wanted to go to Madame Peloise’s shop opposite the Comédie-Française, which stocked a large selection of imitation gemstones of various different colours. He would choose one, have his son’s initials engraved on it, and have it mounted as a seal. The idea briefly crossed his mind of adding the Ranreuil arms, to link the grandson to the grandfather in a kind of continuation of the line. Some secret instinct made him hesitate, as if he feared that this initiative might cause inconveniences for young Le Floch. He stopped for a moment to wonder about his decision. Why had both he and his father found themselves in the situation of having illegitimate sons? A mere coincidence or a kind of fatal repetition, the reason for which escaped him? Last but not least, he thought he might take a stroll around the second-hand bookstalls, with a view to unearthing a few books to be added to the package he would soon be sending Louis at the school in Juilly.
He