By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel Read Free Book Online

The unexpected rendezvous had led him straight to the Thérieux Café (the nearest one), toward which the rest of us eventually ambled, still shaking our heads thinking about the lunatic’s calligraphy, his universe of confetti and stains. Before long, we too were in our cups (though more out of boredom than terror) and shrugging our shoulders, as we watched through the narrow window the east turn dark as ink dissolved in milk.
    And then, amid all his snoozing and snoring, swilling and swaggering, the mayor’s chair finally collapses with him in it. A good laugh all around, and a round of drinks to boot. Words flow again. We’re talking and talking when one of us, I don’t remember who, brings up the subject of Destinat. And another—again the exact one escapes me—proposes matter-of-factly, “That’s where they should put the little teacher, over at the prosecutor’s house in the park where the tenant was.”
    Everybody found this a fine idea, not least the mayor, who allowed that the thought had already crossed his mind. A wave of rib-poking and knowing glances rippled through the rest of us. It was late. The church bell clanged twelve strokes against the night. The wind blew a shutter back. Outside, the rain tussled with the ground like a big river.

VII
    By the next day, the mayor had come down from his high horse. Humbled in dress as well as demeanor, he was back in his accustomed thick corduroys, wool jacket, otter cap, and hobnailed boots. The finery and self-assurance of the bridegroom had been consigned to oblivion. His playacting, the preening of the coxcomb, was of no use now: Lysia Verhareine had discerned his soul. Besides, calling on the prosecutor in evening dress was bound to rub him the wrong way from the outset. No one likes a suppliant with airs, and Destinat would’ve regarded the mayor as you might regard a monkey wearing a man’s clothes.
    The little teacher kept her faraway smile. Her dress was never more formal than it had been on the first day, but it assumed the forest shades of autumn, trimmed with a Bruges lace that lent her garb a religious gravity. As the mayor led the way, floundering in the muddy streets, she placed her tiny feet on the water-furrowed earth, avoiding every puddle and rivulet as if she were playing at tracking a gentle animal in the sodden ground. Beneath her smooth young-girl’s features, you could still make out the mischievous child she must have been not long ago, leaving off hopscotch to slip into gardens and pick bunches of cherries and red currants.
    She waited before the steps leading up to the château as the mayor went in alone to present his request to Destinat. The prosecutor received him in the entrance hall, the two standing all the while under the ten-meter-high ceiling, in the chill of the black-and-white marble tiles on the floor. They described the checkerboard of a game begun at the dawn of time, in which ordinary men are pawns, in which the rich, the powerful, and the warlike make their moves while from afar, always falling, the servants and starvelings watch.
    The mayor played the only card he could: directness. With his eyes lowered to the tiles and Destinat’s spats (cut from firstrate calfskin), he declared himself without mincing words. He hid nothing: the shitty “Marseillaise,” the cataclysmic mess, and the idea that had occurred to everyone, and first of all to him, of accommodating the girl in the house in the park. Then he fell silent and waited, groggy as an animal that has run smack into a fence or a big oak trunk.
    The prosecutor didn’t reply. He gazed through the cathedral glass of the great door at the light as it came and went, in all tranquillity; then he made the mayor understand that he wished to see the young woman, and the door was opened to Lysia Verhareine.
    I could embroider: That’s not hard, of course. But what would be the point? The truth is so much stronger when you look it in the face. Lysia entered and held out