Jean Rouaud - Of Illustrious Men

To control the brightness of the light, there was a little copper wheel down by the burner that you turned to regulate the length of the wick. If the wick was too high, the elongated flame became a dark red spindle and a wisp of soot went wafting up to the ceiling, where it traced a blackish circle. Long after the French Electric Company had improved its network and power outages were only a distant memory, the kitchen ceiling still bore the stigmata of these lamp-lit evenings.

But the damage could be more considerable. One night, a forgotten lamp covered the entire shop with a uniform layer of soot. In the morning, there were fine black particles floating in suspension everywhere, as light as a swarm of flies at the edge of a pond, and the closer you got to the lamp the faster they swirled, making the air unbreathable. They filled our noses and throats. We had only to crack open the door for our faces to turn into those of chimney sweeps. Mother had to cover herself from top to toe and swathe herself in an old overcoat before plunging, booted, gloved, and hooded, into the cloud of ashes and extracting the guilty lamp, which went on belching out its trail of smoke on the pavement for a long time. When the particles had very gradually settled, when we could see, in a manner of speaking, more clearly, Mother admitted that she didn’t know which way to turn, and then said that she must be dreaming — although perhaps not. It was a heartbreaking sight: a post-atomic vision, such as those the futurologists predict for us when the conflagrations started by the nuclear bomb will cover the earth in a grayish coating. Of lesser import, but equally efficient. We had just experienced the paraffin bomb. The shelves holding the brightly colored bowls — orange, green, or lemon yellow — and the shelves with the piles of white porcelain, some of the models gold-bordered, the table on which the sets of delicate cut-glass goblets were lined up, the shelves of red-enamel casseroles — everything had now become charcoal gray, as if the whole shop had been plunged into a bath of tar. A monochrome world, which we carried with us under our soles, because despite all our precautions we couldn’t help spreading it everywhere. It was useless wiping our feet on the mat a hundred times, nothing could prevent the imprint of our to-ings and fro-ings remaining on the linoleum like so many elaborately choreographed dance steps. And, in spite of it all, we still had to go out to do the shopping. When we got home people would say: You’ve been to the butcher’s, haven’t you? Of course. There was nothing magic about guessing that. They only had to follow our footprints.

We didn’t know where to begin. So the first haphazard wipe with a sponge was applied to a corner of a shelf, but this only added to our discouragement; the mixture of soot and water turned into mud that spread out under the dishes, became more deeply encrusted in the grooves in the wood, and launched a black mini-tide that trickled down the cupboard doors, outlining a Carte du Tendre on which all the branches of the river led to Despair. As for the sponge, after one wipe with each side, it had to be thrown away.

By a stroke of luck it was a Saturday, and Father, who was a salesman, would soon be home after his week on the road. The onlookers who had come to gauge the scale of the calamity, shaking their heads sympathetically, were all of one mind: Don’t do anything until Joseph gets back. Joseph will know. Perhaps because of the ordeals life held in store for him, everyone agreed that when it came to adversity he was in a class of his own. Which was true; we were the first to benefit from it. For instance, if the car happened to break down at two in the morning on a deserted country road, it didn’t even occur to us to worry. In similar circumstances other people panic, lock the doors, and bed down as best they can on the seats, waiting for dawn and a passing tractor. But we were quite sure that he would find a solution. He would raise the hood of the Peugeot 403, shine his flashlight on the engine, bend over, push his tie over his back, test a few parts, and, with a bit of wire and one of Mother’s stockings, concoct an emergency dressing that would enable us to get home safely. He took a legitimate pride in his makeshift repairs and his gift for improvisation. It was his Leonardo da Vinci side — minus the aesthetic sense. This was how he had invented a way of heating the big bedroom overlooking the street, by getting the pipe from the stove in the shop below to run across it. He had gotten the idea after reading an article in Historia (like a lot of autodidacts, he was fascinated by history and ancient stones) about the wall heating in a Gallo-Roman villa. The pipe came up through the floor and then, with bends here and attachments there, made its angular way over to the chimney conduit three or four feet above the head of the bed, which obliged us to take great care when we went to bed and got up. Apart from the unpleasantness, just hitting our heads on it was likely to throw the whole fragile tubular edifice out of kilter. There were contemporary sculptures at the time that looked just like it, which still send people into ecstasies, but when Father showed off his ingenious heating system to relations or friends, we felt rather embarrassed.

He arrived in the early afternoon and as usual parked his car in the square by the side entrance to the church in a maneuver that had become impeccable through frequent repetition, since he was already performing it at the age of fourteen behind his father’s back. A whole crowd was there to meet him. Pushing and shoving, they escorted him from his car to the shop, anxious to tell him the latest news. His tall figure with the prematurely white hair towered over the circle of the faithful. Their first stop was at the blackened lamp cooling on the pavement. Eager to hear his reaction, they all nevertheless expressed their own opinions, but this was merely a matter of form, since they would agree with whatever he thought. Everyone said that he was “someone,” or “a gentleman,” or “a fine fellow,” but their way of raising their eyebrows, or pursing their lips, testified to a much richer, much more profound inner feeling, and conveyed their respect, admiration, and allegiance far better than the pathetic conventional terms they used in their attempts to define it. He inspired awe.

Some of them, those who hadn’t come off best on this occasion, hadn’t forgotten how, a few years earlier, he had changed the minds of everyone in the district when public opinion had almost unanimously decided by way of reprisal to boycott the doctor. If the doctor had merely been content to finish off his patients they wouldn’t have objected: a mistaken diagnosis, a dangerous drug, an operation that went wrong — nobody’s perfect. But what they reproached him for was much more serious for the former Royalist region, which, two centuries earlier, had watched the Republican armies exterminate the last Vendean troops. A free thinker, the doctor had chosen to be true to his principles and send his little boy to the local lay school. There were only five or six unfortunate children in the school, all of whom were vilified by the hordes in the Christian schools and condemned, in the longer term, to perish in the flames of hell. This might well be proof of his intellectual honesty, but it was a preposterous idea, which in a very short time amounted to putting the skids on him professionally, for the sentence had not been long delayed. Nevertheless, the town had taken the precaution of consulting Joseph the Great, whose lack of enthusiasm for this kind of excommunication they feared. Indeed, he immediately called a parents’ meeting, and after a tumultuous session during which the apprentice Inquisitors expatiated on the measures to be taken to send the infidel to the stake, he took the floor: “I am infinitely grateful to Dr. Monnier for having saved the lives of my wife and two of my children. I can see no reason why I should change my doctor.” The ban was lifted. The next day, the good doctor’s waiting room was crowded with patients.