‘What you believe and what can be proved are different.’
Dr Morel sighed. ‘Leave the law at home, Duras. Leave it to men like your father.’ Taking the other boy’s face in his hands he turned it sharply until they met each other’s eyes. ‘Now, the truth. Did you hit him?’ The boy’s face narrow and watchful, his curls dark and his nails clean. I was surprised by that. I hadn’t met anybody whose nails were clean. He seemed to be considering what it would cost him to admit this.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
So I first met Emile Duras, son of a lawyer and here because his father paid for him to come here to be educated. He went home at the weekends, which made him an outsider. His father was a rich lawyer and as St Luce was for the sons of destitute nobles, of whom there were enough to fill five classes of forty boys each, that also made him an outsider. But the biggest thing that set him apart, the thing that sent him out to punch me when other boys told him that was what he must do, was his name. Had he been de Duras, should such a family exist, his life would have been easier. The lack of the particule, the de in his name, set him apart from the others and from me, although I was too young to realise it.
My first day was simple. I trailed behind Emile and sat quietly at the desk I was given and answered the three questions the old headmaster asked me. Luckily I knew the answers to those, because there were others to which I did not. When Emile dipped his head for silent reading I did the same, looking over to see which page he read and fumbling to find my place. I read the page three times – and, though it made little sense, when asked to read a line I did in as clear a voice as I could manage. ‘The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it . . .’
Emile’s sentence came from further down the list of quotations because he sat two desks away. In the weeks to come we managed to sit side by side, when it became obvious our brief fight had made us friends. Emile’s sentence read, ‘Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us consider how happy those are who already possess it.’
Later I learnt the name Rochefoucauld, later still who he was and why his maxims were famous. His name reminded me of the cheese I’d eaten with le Régent and Emile brought me a sliver from home, wrapped in paper. It tasted as I remembered, of mould and horses’ hooves clipping on brick and dung beetles and sun.
I learnt a lot from Emile in my first two weeks at St Luce, which boys and which masters to avoid and which could be trusted, and at the end of that I discovered what two weeks’ grace meant and that Emile had truly become my friend. A boy – older and bigger, because all the boys were older and bigger, since I was the youngest and smallest in the school – walked up to me and tried to take my work book, having had his own stolen, the loss of which was punishable by beating. And instead of letting it happen, Emile stepped up beside me and together we saw off the would-be thief.
It was a friendship that was to last for years and only be broken by something bigger than friendship and fiercer than shared bonds. That was so far into the future we could barely imagine it from a world of small boys where days stretched for ever and our memories hungrily swallowed every detail of the world around us.
‘You can be good at sport, you can be good at learning, you can be good with your fists . . .’ Emile grinned ruefully and touched the yellowing fringes of the black eye I’d given him a few weeks earlier. Out of friendship I touched my lip, although the scab was mostly off and the swelling long gone. The written rules were on a board in the main hall. They were few and easy to understand. The unwritten rules more numerous and more complex. In the school as in the later world I was to find: but like the rules of the later world they could be simplified and reduced to those that really mattered. That was what Emile was doing, while standing with his legs apart and his hands behind his back as his father might do in court. ‘You should punch, but you should also read to yourself.’
I looked at him.
‘The masters will leave you alone.’
He seemed to be saying that Dr Pascal and the other masters should see me read books and the boys above should see me punch people. I checked, and that was exactly what he meant. I was six and he was nearly eight, older and worldly wise. I did my best to obey his suggestion. The result was the masters liked me, and my friends grew in number. Those I hit wanted to be friends so I didn’t hit them again, and their friends wanted to be my friends so I didn’t hit them to start with. Inside a year I stopped having to hit people and stopped worrying about being their friends. They were still friendly to me but got little in return. Emile was the exception.
We played together and he got permission from his father to bring me home for a weekend. I arrived in near rags and left wearing Emile’s old clothes. More to the point, I left fed and with my pockets filled with slivers of five different cheeses. Emile’s mother thought my passion for Roquefort funny and asked who’d given it to me.
‘Monsieur le Régent.’
She looked at her husband, who looked at Emile, who shrugged slightly to say he didn’t know if it was true but it was possible. And so I came to tell them about the day the duc d’Orléans rode into my father’s courtyard and left a row of kicking villagers strung from the trees behind him. I left out eating beetles.
Emile told me later what she said. Sometimes life is kinder than one thinks. Sometimes it is even kind to those in desperate need of kindness. I adored her and she became the mother mine had never bothered to be. This amused Emile as his possessiveness of me extended to expecting his mother to like me also. An only child, in his home he was as spoilt and cosseted as a dauphin. Even the prickly Maître Duras approved of my friendship with his son.
A small man with expensively tailored clothes and a jewelled ring on one finger, his coat was buttoned tight to the neck and his nails always clean. Occasionally I would find him staring from me to his son as if considering the difference. Emile was cleaner and still taller, although I was catching up. My appetite was bigger and I ate everything put in front of me, which endeared me to Madame Duras, a large woman fond of her gold bracelets, her supper parties and her garden. Maître Duras acted for the school, and for baron de Bellvit, which was how Emile came to be at the school and why the school agreed when Maître Duras suggested I might come to his for a few days over the holiday since I had nowhere else to go.
I was noble and instinctively polite and treated his son as an equal because no one had suggested I shouldn’t. Later, other boys became my friends. Some of them in the first few terms suggested Emile was too common to be friends with people like us. And I looked at them and I looked at myself and I looked at Emile and wondered what the difference was. We wore the same uniform and went to the same school, we ate the same food and attended the same classes. The only difference was that Emile looked a little cleaner and had clothes that were a little neater and slept at home rather than in the dorms. To me that made him luckier than us not worse. All of us knew we were different from the peasantry.
That sullen indistinguishable mass who stared at us with flat eyes from the fields on the two occasions a year we were allowed to leave the school grounds: once to visit the fair at Mabonne and again to be fed by the baron de Bellvit, our local landowner and titular master, under its founding articles, of our school. The peasants dressed in rags and dirt and lived in hovels – it was hard beneath the mud and sweat and stink to tell the men from the women. And though we might see a wide-eyed boy only a little younger than we were, or a girl pretty enough to make us notice her, we knew what they would become. It had always been this way and we believed it always would. More to the point, they believed it and so it was.
1728
Hanging the Dog
To cook mice
Drown first. Clubbing produces sharp fragments of bone. Gut, skin and clean in water. Wrap three or four together in wet clay and bake in a bonfire. Alternatively, halve along length, fry with sliced onions and season with salt, pepper and thyme. This also works for sparrows. Tastes like chicken.