May 1914
Henri has written back to Louise.
It took him eight days, which is a long time for a man who writes to his sister every week without effort. But writing to a stranger who sends you Francis Jammes is another matter. He tore up three drafts - too textbook, too stiff, too eager. The fourth was simple. It talked about the causse, about his pupils, about the leaving certificate that was coming up, and it slipped in between two sentences that he liked Jammes too, but perhaps preferred Charles-Louis Philippe, because Philippe wrote about the poor without prettifying them.
Louise's reply arrived on 4 May, a Monday. She said she did not know Charles-Louis Philippe and that he had better lend her a book. Henri smiled as he read that. A smile he showed no one.
But it is a smile on borrowed time, and May is not a month for quiet smiles.
The elections. At last.
The first round takes place on 26 April, the second on 10 May, and France splits in two like an apple. On one side, the supporters of the Three-Year Law, of order, of firmness towards Germany - the moderate right, the Catholics, the nationalists. On the other, the supporters of repeal, of income tax, of peace - Radicals, Radical-Socialists, Socialists.
In Labastide-Murat, Henri is not allowed to campaign - a state schoolmaster is bound to neutrality. But everyone knows what he thinks. The priest knows what he thinks too, and the priest thinks the opposite, and on the Sunday before the vote there is a sermon on the Christian's duty to his country that fools no one. Henri grits his teeth.
On the evening of 10 May, the results come in.
The left wins. Clearly. Jaurès's Socialists gain thirty seats - they go from 67 to 101 deputies. The Radicals and Radical-Socialists hold their ground. Together, the left has the majority. The message seems clear: France does not want the Three-Year Law, France wants peace, France wants income tax. Jaurès triumphs. Paul, in Lyon, opens a bottle with his comrades from the workshop. Jeanne drinks half a glass and goes to bed. She is pleased for Paul; that is something.
But the victory is more ambiguous than it looks. Among the Radicals elected, many are in no great hurry to repeal the Three-Year Law. The Senate remains hostile. And Poincaré, at the Élysée, has no intention of letting it happen. He is looking for a Prime Minister who is of the left by label and cautious by temperament - someone who will promise repeal without carrying it out, who will champion the income tax without rushing the Senate, who will run the country without changing anything essential. He will find one. He always does.
Verdier did not vote. Career soldiers do not vote under the Third Republic - the law forbids it, the old republican distrust of the sabre. That suits him. He would not have known whom to vote for anyway. He watches the elections from a distance, the way an engine driver might watch passengers arguing about the colour of the curtains while the boiler leaks.
What occupies him in May is a discreet trip to Brussels - an exchange of information with an officer of the Belgian General Staff, a colonel whose name he will never reveal. The Belgians are neutral, guaranteed by treaty since 1839, and they mean to stay that way. But the Belgians are not fools. They can see the roads and railway lines the Germans are building towards Aachen and Trier, towards their border. The Belgian colonel shows Verdier a map. The lines of advance are obvious. The Belgian plain is a billiard table - no mountains, no impassable river before the Meuse, and Liège is only a bolt, not a wall. If the Germans come through there with everything they have, the little Belgian army will hold out a few days, perhaps a week. No more.
Verdier comes back to Paris with that map printed on his mind. He lays it over Plan XVII in his head and sees the disaster take shape like an engineering diagram: while the French armies charge into Lorraine, the Germans come bursting in from the north in overwhelming mass, outflank, envelop, cut off. Sedan on the scale of a continent.
He cannot say it. Not like that, not so bluntly. You do not tell generals that their plan is a catastrophe. You write notes. Verdier writes a note.
In Lyon, May smells of lilac and working-class tension. The PLM railwaymen are growling - not a strike yet, but the evening meetings are stormy. Paul goes three times that month. The question is no longer just the Three-Year Law, it is daily life: wages that stand still, the pace of work that keeps rising, foremen tightening the screws. French trade unionism in 1914 is a strange animal, torn between the revolutionary CGT dreaming of a general strike and the reformists who want to negotiate. Paul is somewhere in between. He does not want revolution - he wants a decent wage, humane hours, and for his wife not to have to do housework in bourgeois households any more.
Jeanne, as it happens, has a problem. Madame Bernardin has told her, with all the tact of an anvil on an egg, that she is cutting her cleaning days from three to two. Monsieur Bernardin's silk business is 'a little slack'. Jeanne loses a third of her earnings in a word spoken between two mouthfuls of brioche. She goes back to Vaise and does the sums on a scrap of paper, in pencil, at the kitchen table. The rent, the coal, the food, Paul's shoes, which have holes in them. It will not stretch any more. She will have to find something else - sewing perhaps, or ironing for the neighbours.
She does not mention it to Henri in her letter. She writes that the weather is fine, that Paul is pleased with the elections, and that the lilac in the garden is magnificent this year. Sisters lie like that, by omission, out of reticence, out of the habit of carrying things alone.
On 18 May, Henri receives a parcel. Not from Louise - from the education inspectorate in Cahors. It is last year's leaving-certificate paper, sent as a model. He reads it and prepares his pupils accordingly, methodically, with the diligence that is his nature. The dictation will be a passage from Daudet, the questions on the geography of the départements, the arithmetic on areas and volumes. Lucienne Marty has been ready since March. Fernand Lavergne will make three mistakes, Henri knows it, and he will fight to have them forgiven in the overall mark.
In the evening, he writes to Louise. He sends her Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu de Montparnasse, a book about poverty and prostitution in Paris, a raw and tender book. He hesitates. Perhaps it is too much. Perhaps you do not send a book about prostitutes to a young lady you do not know. Then he tells himself that if she cannot take it, she is not the one he imagines, and he posts the parcel.
The France of May 1914 does not know what it is. It has just voted left, but it lives right. It talks of peace, but it builds barracks. It reads Proust and Barrès, Jaurès and Maurras, Bergson and Péguy - voices contradicting one another in every direction. It is the most cultivated country in Europe and the one that least understands what is happening to it. It has colonies it is proud of and workers it is afraid of. It has the 75 and no howitzers. It has Jaurès and no plan B.
On 31 May, the sun sets late over the causse. Henri is sitting outside the school, on the stone bench, reading Louise's reply. She liked Bubu. She says it is a terrible and necessary book. She says she would like to meet him, one Sunday, if he would not mind. Her brother Émile could act as go-between.
Henri lays the letter on his knees and watches the sky turn pink. The swifts scream over the village. He is twenty-four, it is the end of spring, and a woman wants to meet him.
He does not know that it is the last spring.