His hunger had disappeared. Four hours in the library and he had no new information for Jeannette, except that the doctors had failed to help her mother, but that much had already been clear. Here he was, exploring the same diagnoses the doctor had given. It was these that must be discarded in the first place. He returned the books to the reshelving trolley and stepped out into the courtyard. The streets were quiet but for the distant singing of the stretcher-bearers, and his feet clacked in the cool.
He turned a corner and the moon revealed itself suddenly, huge and white behind a flowered branch, an interloper before the sun had even gone. He stopped, and tried to consider outright what might have happened to Ariane Molineu in her lifetime. What interferences might have been made. What damning course of action. What—or who—in her life might have proved a cause.
9
Sylvain Leclair lived on his vineyard on the left bank of the Hérault, and spent his days between the trellises or in his vaults monitoring the barrels. At the same time, he was a figure about town, a feature at most major gatherings and many minor ones, in a way that had little to do with his profession. Possibly, it had more to do with his connection to Paris: his maiden aunts lived in the Fifteenth Arrondissement and he visited them several times a month, and was apparently popular at salons in the neighbourhood. But Sylvain never masqueraded as a cosmopolite, nor falsified his southern vowel sounds, or the nasal accent that rounded off most end-stopped words with that inconclusive syllable “uh.” On the contrary, Sylvain Leclair was unashamedly parochial, and always disgruntled, aggressive, self-righteous, and somehow this was his ticket to all classes and parties, in which he was famed and praised for his bad temper.
Jeannette’s relationship with Sylvain was based, like her father’s, on his friendship with her mother. All she knew was that Sylvain had first befriended Jeannette’s maternal grandmother in Paris, and then had befriended her child. Sylvain filled a certain space for the girl with no siblings, and when Ariane turned sixteen he became her ally at the balls, and her comfort when she felt ill at ease, which was often. She hung on his arm and, naturally, rumours soon developed that they were engaged.
When Ariane turned eighteen and there was still no sign of a proposal, her father addressed Sylvain: he must either make clear his intent or put an end to his attentions. Sylvain was surprised, he said he was sorry, he had no intention of proposing marriage. After that, except for the odd sighting across rooms, Ariane and Sylvain did not meet again for several years.
By a series of improbable coincidences, in the winter of 1901 Frédéric Molineu found himself sitting beside Monsieur Leclair at a dinner party in Fontainebleau, to which he had been invited at the last minute by a professor at L’École Normale. Their conversation took its turns and it emerged that Monsieur Leclair had known Frédéric’s wife Ariane as a young girl. Naturally, it occurred to Frédéric that there might have been some romantic attachment; but it seemed so physically unlikely—this large provincial man, his delicate young wife—that the notion was instantly usurped by the possibility that such a friend from her past, capable of reciting such happy memories, might provide some comfort to Ariane, who by now experienced every human interaction as though it were a violent scratch.
Sylvain accepted the invitation to dine, and to Frédéric’s astonishment the effect was nearly immediate. Reunited with her old friend—who was twenty years older than her and had by now gained so much weight he could be taken for her grandfather—Ariane began to resemble her old self. Sylvain’s visits became a monthly event, and she continued to relax; she slept and ate well; she was once again that cheerful woman Frédéric had known in the early days of marriage.
It did not last long. The patterns in Ariane’s mind could not, it seemed, be reversed, and little time passed before she fell again into darkness. No one ever knew the precise nature of Ariane’s bond with Sylvain Leclair. The only important thing was that even he was not capable of saving her.
When Frédéric and Jeannette first moved south to Montpellier four years earlier, the vignerons’ unrest over the falling price of wine was a recent memory for the townspeople. During Sylvain’s visits to the Molineus he had not, they thought, made particular efforts to conceal his political activity, but nor was it something he discussed much, and if he did mention it they tended to imagine he was exaggerating for effect. As they settled into Montpellier, however, it became apparent that nothing was exaggerated, and that Sylvain was famous throughout the town for thundering to the front of the crowd at Place de la Comédie, where the syndicalists and royalists and Occitan separatists had all gathered to protest the fraudulent powder then swamping the market, which could be turned into wine with the addition of well water. And when Marcelin Albert screamed from the podium, Sylvain Leclair had roared back his slogans, and roused from the crowd the energy of a bonfire.
Such open fever had not recurred since in Montpellier, but Sylvain was always alert to other kinds of contagion. Ostensibly, the war had settled the region with the double balms of employment and bereavement. But something else was boiling underneath. The unconscripted who feared censure were quick to denounce others, and public squares were rife with scraps of hearsay, transmitted from mouth to ear, mouth to ear, until in some warped fashion they were returned to the doorstep of the accused as a talisman of wrongdoing.
It is hard to say just how the word first spread about Patrice Nolin. In all likelihood it was some indiscretion of his own, a passing remark, probably, that caught in the windpipes of a nervous patriot who proceeded to spread it around, until in the space of a single evening Nolin’s name was carried across town, and in the morning the whole of Montpellier was against him. And, naturally, Sylvain Leclair caught word of this on his morning ramble, and swiftly brought the facts as he could discern them to the house of the Molineus. Midhat had just left for the Faculty. Frédéric Molineu was about to follow when he saw Sylvain Leclair’s portly frame in the driveway, swinging his cane.
“Good day Sylvain.”
“Good morning. Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Nolin is gone. He came home from dinner, there were letters on his doorstep. He was scared, he left.”
“Come in, what are you talking about. What letters?”
“Thank you,” said Sylvain, brushing his feet on the rug. “There were three or four of them. Some were anonymous. At least one,” he grunted, “was written by Luc Dimon.” He shot a glance down the hall.
“Luc?” said Frédéric. “What does he have against Patrice?”
“Oh, you know. Traitor, this, that. German, selfish, all the rest.”
“My God. Should I, do you think, visit him? Or, should we avoid …”
“There isn’t time,” said Sylvain. He glanced again in the direction of the kitchen. “He and the girls were ready to leave an hour ago.”
“You’ve seen them then.”
“I passed by. I told him what I had heard.”
“What did you hear?”
“This, that. We’ll have to be very careful now. Shall we sit? I could do with a coffee.”