March 1914
The month begins in greyness and routine. In Labastide-Murat, Henri takes up his class again after Mardi Gras and finds his twenty-three pupils, minus one - little Delpech, whose father needs him in the fields because a cow has calved badly. Henri will go and fetch him back on Sunday, walking out to the Delpechs' place, three kilometres across the causse. He will talk to the father, explain that the leaving certificate is a chance, that the boy is capable, that the Republic's school is not the enemy of the land. The father will listen, arms folded over his smock, and will end up saying yes, because you do not say no to the schoolmaster. Not yet. Not in the Lot of 1914, where the black hussar of the Republic carries almost as much weight as the priest - and sometimes more.
Henri reads in the paper that Jaurès has spoken in Lyon. He writes to Jeanne to ask whether Paul was there.
Paul was there. And Paul came back changed - not in his ideas, which were already settled, but in his bones. He saw Jaurès up close, ten metres away, in the overheated hall of the Bourse du Travail. He saw that massive man, beard all awry, the voice that rose from his belly and filled the walls, saying simple things in immense words. That war was the crime of crimes. That the peoples had nothing to gain by slaughtering one another for the interests of the powerful. That the Three-Year Law was a provocation and an idiocy. That the workers' International could stop the machine if it truly wanted to.
Paul clapped until his palms burned. Around him, two thousand men were doing the same. And in the street afterwards, walking home towards Vaise, he felt something he had not felt for a long time - the sense that things could change, that his voice counted, that in May, at the elections, they were going to sweep away the warmongers and the reactionaries and build something just.
Jeanne listened to him tell it all, sitting at the end of the table, darning a sock. She smiled. She likes it when Paul comes home alive.
Verdier is not sleeping well this March. It is not insomnia, strictly speaking - it is that he wakes at four in the morning with figures in his head, and once the figures are there, they will not let go of him. He has obtained from the Deuxième Bureau an estimate of the German reserves available for mobilisation. The figure is colossal. Germany can put four million men in the field in a few weeks. France, with the Three-Year Law, barely two and a half million, counting the reservists and the territorials.
What torments Verdier is not the number in itself - Russia, as an ally, makes up for it with sheer mass. It is time. The German plan - he is convinced of it now - rests on speed. Strike France fast, through Belgium, before Russia is ready. Six weeks to bring down Paris, then turn east. If that is the plan, then everything is decided in the first three weeks. And Plan XVII, the French plan, which throws the armies straight into Lorraine, straight into the enemy's teeth while he swings round by the north... Verdier does not finish the sentence, even in his head.
He talks it over with a fellow officer from his year at Saint-Cyr, Major Leclerc, one evening at the officers' club. Leclerc raises his eyebrows. 'Verdier, old man, you think too much. We have the 75, we have the red trousers, we have élan. What more do you want?' Verdier orders a second cognac and does not reply.
And on 16 March, France is stunned.
At ten to six in the evening, Henriette Caillaux, the wife of Joseph Caillaux, walks into the offices of Le Figaro, at 26 rue Drouot. She is calm. She has put on her best coat, a fur muff. In the muff she has a Browning automatic, bought that very morning from a gunsmith in the rue Royale. She asks to see the editor. She is kept waiting. At five past six, she is shown into Gaston Calmette's office.
She fires. Six bullets. Calmette collapses. He will die during the night at Dr Hartmann's clinic in the rue de Courcelles.
France is left open-mouthed.
The next day, there is only one subject. Everywhere. In the cafés, in the factories, in the salons, in the schools. Henri learns of it from the paper on the morning of the 17th and forgets all about his arithmetic lesson. A woman has killed a man. The wife of a former Prime Minister has shot dead the editor of the greatest newspaper in France. And not some Apache from the backstreets, not some bomb-throwing anarchist - a bourgeoise in furs, in an upholstered office, at teatime.
Joseph Caillaux resigns from the Ministry of Finance at once. His career seems finished. The man behind the income tax, the bill that was to change French taxation, is swept away in the blood of this private affair turned public tragedy. Henriette is in prison. She will say she acted to defend her husband's honour, to prevent the publication of the intimate letters. Her trial will come - but not straight away. In July. But already the leader-writers are tearing each other apart. Crime of passion or political act? The madness of a humiliated woman or the calculation of a clan with its back to the wall?
The left says Calmette played with fire and got burnt. The right says this shows exactly what the Caillaux are capable of. The feminists do not quite know what to make of this woman who took up a revolver because it was the only weapon left to her. The question is asked, and not answered: what can a woman do when her name is publicly sullied and the law does not protect her?
Clemenceau exults in silence - or not quite in silence. In his paper, L'Homme libre, he comments on the affair with the elegant cruelty that is his trademark. He likes neither Caillaux nor Calmette. He watches them destroy each other the way an entomologist watches two scorpions in a jar. What interests him is that meanwhile, nobody is looking east. Nobody is talking about Germany. Nobody is seriously preparing anything at all.
In Lyon, Jeanne cuts out the article from Le Progrès and puts it away in her biscuit tin, between Henri's letters and a first communion card. She does not really know why. Perhaps because a woman taking up a revolver is the kind of thing you keep. Not as an example. As proof that the world can tip over in five minutes, with a single gesture, and that well-dressed people are no more reasonable than anyone else.
Paul, that evening, shrugs. 'Bourgeois killing each other, that's not my problem. The problem is May. The elections.'
He is right. And he is wrong. But he does not know it yet.
On 31 March, the almond trees are in blossom in the Lot. Henri sees them from his classroom window, white against the grey sky, and he finds it beautiful. He is twenty-four and spring is returning.