June 1914
Henri has met Louise.
Émile arranged it all - a Sunday in Figeac, at the market, neutral ground. Henri took the seven o'clock train, in a suit, freshly shaved, his collar a little too tight. He nearly turned back at Assier, between two stations, when the panic seized him all at once - he who talks without effort in front of twenty-three kids and a schools inspector, unable to think what to say to a woman of twenty-two he has never seen.
Louise was waiting for him outside the market hall, next to Émile. Small, dark-haired, a serious face that lit up when she smiled - and she smiled often, but never for nothing. A schoolmistress too, at the girls' school in Capdenac-Gare. She was wearing a blue dress and a straw hat, and she had Bubu de Montparnasse in her bag, which she gave back to him with a note slipped inside the cover that Henri would read later, alone, on the train home: 'Thank you for trusting me with this book.'
They walked through Figeac. Émile slipped away after an hour, with a tact Henri would not have believed him capable of. They talked about school, about their pupils, about what it is to teach in the Lot to children whose parents sometimes cannot read. Louise had a pent-up anger that Henri recognised at once - the same as his own, in front of the same walls. The certificate as the horizon, the girls steered towards sewing, the boys towards the plough, and intelligence wasted everywhere, all the time.
They drank a coffee on the square, in full sun. Henri talked about Lucienne Marty, his genius of a draughtswoman stuck on a farm on the causse. Louise said: 'I've got one who reads the way she breathes, and her mother wants to apprentice her to a milliner in September.' They looked at each other with that silent understanding that grows between people who do the same work in the same conditions, and who discover they are not alone.
Henri came back to Labastide on the evening train. He did not write to Jeanne that night. He opened his bedroom window on the warm night and stayed there a long time, listening to the crickets.
In Paris, the political game resumes after the elections. Poincaré has found his man: René Viviani, a Radical-Socialist from the right wing of the party, a brilliant lawyer, a formidable speaker, and above all supple enough to be steered. Viviani forms his government on 13 June. He promises the income tax - but the Senate will decide, and the Senate does not want it. He promises to 're-examine' the Three-Year Law - re-examine, not repeal. The word is weighed to the milligram. Jaurès sees through the manoeuvre at once and says so from the rostrum: a majority was elected for change, and it has been given a government for the status quo.
But Jaurès is tired. Not physically - he is built like an ox from the Tarn, he can speak for three hours on his feet without flagging. Tired in another way. Worn down by this endless battle against forces bigger than he is, against an undercurrent he can feel rising all over Europe - nationalism, fear of the other, the interlocking gears of the alliances, military stupidity raised to the rank of a virtue. On 17 June, he writes an editorial in L'Humanité that is almost a prayer: peace is possible if the peoples want it, if the socialists of France, of Germany, of England refuse war together. He believes it. He truly believes it. That is perhaps what is most beautiful and most terrible about the man - he believes in collective reason at the very moment when collective reason is leaving the room.
Verdier's June is strangely calm. Too calm. The Deuxième Bureau's reports contain nothing alarming - the Germans have not moved, nor have the Austrians, the Russians are holding routine manoeuvres. Europe seems frozen in an armed peace that could last indefinitely. Verdier does not believe it. He learned in Morocco that calm always comes before something, and that the something is rarely pleasant.
He takes advantage of the lull to go out a little. One Sunday, he goes to the races at Longchamp with a civilian friend, an engineer from the Ponts et Chaussées. The weather is fine, the women wear enormous hats, the horses gleam, the champagne flows. Verdier watches the spectacle with a detachment he did not know he had. All these people, he thinks. All these people who do not know.
But perhaps he is the one who is wrong. Perhaps the machine will stop of its own accord, the diplomats will do their job, the alliances will stay dormant. Perhaps Jaurès is right. Verdier hopes so - sincerely. He loves peace the way you love the air you breathe, without thinking about it, and he knows that the war he has been studying for twenty years has nothing to do with the war people imagine in the salons.
In Lyon, June is hard on Jeanne. She has found ironing work with a neighbour in the quarter, a widow who keeps a boarding house in the rue de la Claire. Three afternoons a week, bent over the board, the heavy iron in her hand, the heat rising. It pays badly, but it helps. Paul says nothing. He knows his own pride is at stake as much as their finances - a man ought to be able to keep his wife. But a fitter at the PLM earning four francs fifty a day cannot keep much of anything.
On Sunday 14 June, they go for a picnic in the parc de la Tête d'Or. It is their luxury, the luxury of people who have none - walking under the trees, looking at the lake, eating saucisson on a bench. Jeanne sits down in the grass and closes her eyes. The sun is warm, other people's children shout and play, and for ten minutes she forgets the iron, the accounts, the sock with a hole in it. Ten minutes. It is a great deal, ten minutes of peace.
Paul watches her and says nothing. He sometimes wonders whether he makes her happy. He does not ask, because the answer frightens him.
The leaving-certificate exam is held on 20 June in Cahors. Henri takes his six pupils there by train. Lucienne Marty, in a clean dress, her hair pulled back tight, her face shut with concentration. Fernand Lavergne, fidgeting, hands in his pockets, muttering his times tables under his breath. And four others, each with their own story, their nerves, their chances.
Lucienne gets her certificate. Not a single mistake in the dictation, the best mark in the canton for arithmetic, and a drawing thrown in, which the examiner kept, stunned. Fernand gets his too - just, with the three predicted mistakes, saved by his arithmetic. All six pass. Henri buys everyone a lemonade at the station café, and his eyes are a little too bright, which he hides by cleaning his spectacles.
On the train home, Lucienne sits down next to him and says: 'Sir, are there schools where they teach you to draw?' Henri looks at her. He knows they exist. The Beaux-Arts in Paris, the drawing schools in the big cities. And he knows that for a sharecropper's daughter from the Lot, they do not exist. He says: 'Yes. We'll talk about it again.' He does not know how yet. But he swears to himself he will try.
And on 28 June, the world tips over.
It is a Sunday. The weather is fine all over Europe. In Sarajevo, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province annexed by Austria-Hungary six years earlier, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, and his wife Sophie are being driven through the city in procession. A young man of nineteen, Gavrilo Princip, a Serb student, nationalist, tubercular, is waiting at the corner of the Appel Quay and the Latin Bridge with a pistol in his pocket. At eleven in the morning, the Archduke's car takes a wrong turning. Princip fires twice. Franz Ferdinand dies in the car. Sophie dies beside him.
The news reaches France in the evening. Henri reads it the next day, the 29th, in the paper. An archduke killed, in a country whose borders he could not draw on a map. It seems far away. It seems Balkan, which is to say incomprehensible and exotic and of no consequence. The paper gives two columns to Sarajevo and four to the Caillaux trial, which opens in a few weeks.
Verdier reads the same news in Paris, and he puts the paper down slowly. He does not yet know what is going to happen. Nobody does. But he senses, with the instinct that twenty years in the job have honed like a knife, that something has just been set in motion. The machinery of the alliances, that monstrous clockwork - Serbia is tied to Russia, Russia to France, Austria to Germany - he knows every cog of it. And he knows that when the first cog moves, the others follow.
But on this last Sunday of June, France is not looking towards Sarajevo. It is looking towards its golden fields, towards its vines in flower, towards the Caillaux trial and the leaving-certificate results. It has its own stories, its own dramas, its own tiny joys.
Henri writes to Louise. He tells her he would very much like to see her again, perhaps in Cahors, one Sunday in July. He slips a sprig of dried lavender into the envelope, picked on the causse on his way up to the school.
He does not know. Nobody knows. But there are thirty-seven days left.