‘Camille,’ he says, ‘get down from there, if you drop out on to the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. Though you might, at that; who would notice?’
Now, while he adds up the tradesmen’s bills, his son leans out of the window as far as he can, looking for further carnage. The curé recrosses the square, the dog falls asleep in the sun. A boy comes with a collar and chain, subdues the dog and leads it home. At last Jean-Nicolas looks up. ‘When I have paid for the roof,’ he says, ‘I shall be flat broke. Are you listening to me? While your uncles continue to withhold from me all but the dregs of the district’s legal work, I cannot get by from month to month without making inroads into your mother’s dowry, which is supposed to pay for your education. The girls will be all right, they can do needlework, perhaps people will marry them for their personal charms. We can hardly expect you to get on in the same way.’
‘Now comes the dog again,’ his son says.
‘Do as I tell you and come in from the window. And do not be childish.’
‘Why not?’ Camille says. ‘I’m a child, aren’t I?’
His father crosses the room and scoops him up, prising his fingers away from the window frame to which he clings. His eyes widen in astonishment at being carried off by this superior strength. Everything astonishes him: his father’s diatribes, the speckles on an eggshell, women’s hats, ducks on the pond.
Jean-Nicolas carries him across the room. When you are thirty, he thinks, you will sit at this desk and, turning from your account books to the piffling local business on which you are employed, you will draft, for perhaps the tenth time in your career, a deed of mortgage on the manor house at Wiège; and that will wipe the look of surprise off your face. When you are forty, and greying, and worried sick about your eldest son, I shall be seventy. I shall sit in the sunshine and watch the pears ripen on the wall, and M. Saulce and the curé will go by and touch their hats to me.
WHAT DO WE THINK about fathers? Important, or not? Here is what Rousseau says:
The oldest of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family, yet children remain tied to their father by nature only as long as they need him for their preservation…The family may perhaps be seen as the first model of political society. The head of the state bears the image of the father, the people the image of his children.
So here are some more family stories.
M. DANTON had four daughters: younger than these, one son. He had no attitude to this child, except perhaps relief at its gender. Aged forty, M. Danton died. His widow was pregnant, but lost the child.
In later life, the child Georges-Jacques thought he remembered his father. In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don’t come back, to quibble or correct.
M. Danton had been clerk to one of the local courts. There was a little money, some houses, some land. Madame found herself coping. She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out. Her sisters’ husbands came by every Sunday, and gave her advice.
Subsequently, the children ran wild. They broke people’s fences and chased sheep and committed various other rural nuisances. When accosted, they talked back. Children of other families they threw in the river.
‘That girls should be like that!’ said M. Camus, Madame’s brother.
‘It isn’t the girls,’ Madame said. ‘It’s Georges-Jacques. But look, they have to survive.’
‘But this is not some jungle,’ M. Camus said. ‘It is not Patagonia. It is Arcis-sur-Aube.’
Arcis is green; the land around is flat and yellow. Life goes on at a steady pace. M. Camus eyes the child, where outside the window he throws stones at the barn.
‘The boy is savage and quite unnecessarily large,’ he says. ‘Why has he got a bandage round his head?’
‘Why should I tell you? You’ll only bad-mouth him.’
Two days ago, one of the girls had brought him home in the early warm dusk. They had been in the bull’s field, she said, playing at Early Christians. This was perhaps the pious gloss Anne Madeleine put on the matter; it was possible of course that not all the Church’s martyrs agreed to be gored, and that some, like Georges-Jacques, went armed with pointed sticks. Half his face was ripped up from the bull’s horn. Panic-stricken, his mother had taken his head in her hands and shoved the flesh together and hoped against hope it would stick. She bandaged it tightly and put another bandage around his head to cover the bumps and cuts on his forehead. For two days, with a helmeted, aggressive air, he stayed in the house and moped. He complained that he had a headache. This was the third day.
Twenty-four hours after M. Camus had taken his leave, Mme Danton stood at the same window and watched – as if in a dazed, dreadful repeating dream – while her son’s remains were manhandled across the fields. A farm labourer carried the heavy body in his arms; she could see how his knees bent under the dead-weight. There were two dogs running after him with their tails between their legs; trailing behind came Anne Madeleine, bawling with rage and despair.
When she reached them she saw that the man had tears in his eyes. ‘That bloody bull will have to be slaughtered,’ he said. They went into the kitchen. There was blood everywhere. It was all over the man’s shirt, the dogs’ fur, Anne Madeleine’s apron and even her hair. It went all over the floor. She cast around for something – a blanket, a clean cloth – on which to lay the corpse of her only son. The labourer, exhausted, swayed against the wall, marking the plaster with a long rust-coloured streak.
‘Put him on the floor,’ she said.
When his cheek touched the cold tiles of the floor, the child moaned softly; only then did she realize he wasn’t dead. Anne Madeleine was repeating the De profundis in a monotone: ‘From the morning watch even until night: let Israel hope in the Lord.’ Her mother hit her across the ear to shut her up. Then a chicken flew in at the door and got on her foot.
‘Don’t strike the girl,’ the labourer said. ‘She pulled him out from under its feet.’
Georges-Jacques opened his eyes and vomited. They made him lie still, and felt his limbs for fractures. His nose was broken. He breathed bubbles of blood. ‘Don’t blow your nose,’ the man said, ‘or your brains will drop out.’
‘Lie still, Georges-Jacques,’ Anne Madeleine said. ‘You gave that bull something to think about. He’ll run and hide when he sees you again.’
His mother said, ‘I wish I had a husband.’
NO ONE HAD LOOKED at his nose much before the incident, so no one could say whether a noble feature had been impaired. But the place scarred badly where the bull’s horn had ripped up his face. The line of damage ran down the side of his cheek, and intruded a purple-brown spur into his upper lip.
The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.
When he was ten years old his mother married again. He was Jean Recordain, a merchant from the town; he was a widower, with one (quiet) boy to bring up. He had a few little eccentricities, but she thought they would do very well together. Georges went to school, a small local affair. He soon found that he could learn anything without the least trouble, so he did not allow school to impinge on his life. One day he was walked on by a herd of pigs. Cuts and bruises resulted, another scar or two hidden by his thick wiry hair.
‘That’s positively the last time I’ll be trampled on by any animal,’ he said. ‘Four-legged or two-legged.’
‘Please