February 1914
It has not stopped raining on Lyon for three days, and Jeanne climbs back up the montée de la Grande-Côte with a basket that saws into her arm. At the Bernardins' - the silk merchants on the Croix-Rousse - Madame gave her two of Monsieur's worn shirts, 'for your husband, my poor Jeanne, they may still be of some use'. Jeanne thanked her with the right smile. Out in the street, she looked at the shirts. They are finer than anything she has ever worn. She will unpick them for the cloth.
Paul came home with news, that evening. The CGT is calling a big meeting against the Three-Year Law, in the hall of the Bourse du Travail. Jaurès is to come and speak in Lyon in person. Paul wants to go. Jeanne sees his eyes shining, which is rare enough for her to say yes, go, I'll wait up for you.
In Paris, the Caillaux affair devours everything. Le Figaro publishes, day after day. Calmette has found his rhythm - an article in the morning, an insinuation in the evening, all of it wrapped in the prose of a drawing-room prosecutor. Caillaux is accused of everything: of betraying France's interests in the negotiations with Germany in 1911, of protecting tax fraudsters, of being a womaniser and an unscrupulous politician. Facts are mixed with gossip, genuine documents with false interpretations, and the public loves it.
In the salons, people talk of nothing else. In the Senate, it is whispered that Calmette has private letters - intimate letters, written by Caillaux to the mistress who became his second wife. If they come out, the scandal will be absolute. Henriette Caillaux, the wife in question, reads Le Figaro every morning with a cold fury that her husband underestimates.
As for Verdier, he could not care less. He has other reading. The Deuxième Bureau's reports are piling up on his desk and drawing a picture that perhaps he alone is piecing together so clearly. The Germans are strengthening their heavy artillery. Not the field artillery - the heavy. Howitzers of 150 millimetres, 210s, and pieces whose calibre is little known. The French army, for its part, is staking everything on the 75, that marvel of accuracy and rate of fire that stunned the world in 1897. The 75 is the nation's pride. Verdier admires it as much as anyone. But the 75 fires flat, direct fire, at what can be seen. The German howitzers fire in an arc, over the hills, at what cannot be seen.
He writes a note on the subject. Three dense pages, backed with figures, closely argued. He passes it to Colonel Dupont, who passes it to General de Castelnau, who has other urgent business. The note will never come back.
February is carnival month in the Lot. Not a grand carnival, not Nice or Dunkirk - just the kids making themselves cardboard masks and the old folk getting out the accordion. Henri Castayrol takes his class out to draw the masks for the Friday drawing lesson. There is one girl, Lucienne Marty, eleven years old, a sharecropper's daughter, who draws as no one in this school has ever drawn. Sure lines, a sense of volume that staggers Henri. He mentioned her to the inspector, who shrugged. A sharecropper's girl, a girl full stop. Her schooling will stop at the leaving certificate.
Henri seethes quietly. That is what he is a schoolmaster for - to open doors. But some doors have locks that are not his.
In the evening, at the gathering at the mayor's house, people talk about the coming elections. The sitting Radical-Socialist seems well dug in, but the Catholic right is pushing a new candidate, a notary from Cahors who promises roads and bridges. Roads and bridges, that speaks to the peasants of the causse more than income tax does. Henri argues, gets heated, quotes Jaurès. The mayor, who is a Radical and not a Socialist, listens with half a smile. The priest, who drinks his coffee in the same place because it is the only place, says nothing, but thinks it all the same.
In the Chamber, the Doumergue government is holding on as best it can. Gaston Doumergue, a dyed-in-the-wool Radical, an affable man of the Midi, handles crises without ceremony and budgets week to week. The real issue is income tax - the Caillaux bill, as it happens, passed by the Chamber, blocked in the Senate. The France of 1914 is the last great European country without a progressive income tax. The indirect contributions, the 'four old ladies' - the business licence tax, the land tax, the personal property tax, the door-and-window tax - date from the Revolution, and everyone knows they are unfair. But the Senate is the Senate, which is to say the stronghold of those who profit from the injustice.
Clemenceau, seventy-two, watches from his newspaper. He writes, he scratches, he waits. He has been Prime Minister, he has broken strikes and ministers, he has enemies everywhere and friends nowhere, and he is convinced that this whole little political world is dancing on a volcano. But nobody listens to him any more than they listen to Verdier. Cassandras are rarely in favour in February.
On 28 February - it is an ordinary year, no 29th - Henri closes the school for the Mardi Gras holiday. Two days. He takes the train to Cahors, buys himself two books at the bookseller's on the place Gambetta, drinks a coffee in the pale late-winter sun, and watches the people go by. Soldiers on leave, peasants at market, nuns in cornettes, a motor car backfiring and making a horse back away.
The France of February 1914 is a country that works. Third industrial power in the world, second colonial empire, a sound currency anchored to gold, a culture that radiates in every direction - the painters, the writers, the musicians, the scientists, all of it is French or wants to be. Forty million inhabitants living better than their parents did, by and large. Not well for all, not fairly for many, but better.
Henri goes back to Labastide with his two books under his arm and the unhurried step of a man who has his place in the world. Spring is not far off. You can feel it in the light that lingers a little longer in the evenings.