The Praetorians by Jean Lartéguy Read Free Book Online

coming down here, Philippe. She’s called Irène, she’s extremely pretty.”
    Esclavier gave a short, rather strident laugh.
    â€œYou want to marry her off? I’m sorry, but——”
    â€œNot at all. I like her as she is, free, cynical, at least in her manner of speaking, with a taste for anything that glitters but well aware that it isn’t gold. I don’t see her under any man’s thumb, with a brat on her knees, and it’s not my line to play the heavy grandfather.
    â€œA shame you don’t enjoy good food. Don’t try and pretend. I saw how you behaved at dinner. Frugal men make me feel uneasy, and also those who don’t sleep well. Caesar, who knew something about men of your sort, said: ‘Let me have men about me that are fat . . . and such as sleep o’nights.’ You chaps, the officers of this new army born in Indo-China and Algeria, are thin, restless, and you sleep badly. Does de Gaulle know that?
    â€œMy daughter’s exactly like you.”
    Â * * * * 
    When Donadieu was alone again he took out his tobacco jar and the old long-stemmed German pipe that Paul Esclavier had brought back for him from one of his countless journeys across the Rhine. He filled it carefully and lit it. The sky had grown dark, the stars twinkled brightly.
    Urbain had at last reached a state of indifference, of curiosity without passion. The little daily certainties he had chosen had taken the place of the dreams of adolescence and the desires of maturity. He lived under a glass dome, in a rarefied but pure air, and only certain sounds, certain images, smells and tastes, freed from all context, reached him.
    A toad croaked on three notes—the first three notes of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue.” For a moment this sound appeared to sum up the whole world, to be the most perfect expression of it. Nothing else counted but the acrid taste of the tobacco, the gentle breeze redolent of resin that swept the darkened landscape, and those three notes hanging in the silence.
    Â * * * * 
    On the following morning Esclavier found two letters slipped under his front door. The first one he opened was from Squadron Leader Jacques Glatigny and was ten days old; it had followed him from the Val-de-Grâce to the apartment in the Rue de l’Université before being forwarded to Saint-Gilles.
    â€œMy dear Philippe,
    â€œIt is with great sorrow and real dismay that I have just heard about your resignation from the army. After Boisfeuras, who chose to die, here you are leaving as well. I’m staying on and I feel guilty. But I’ve got five children, I’ve no private income and I can’t think of any other profession but the army. General de Gaulle’s régime, in spite of all its shortcomings and defects (including the defect of depending solely on the life of one man), suits me for the time being. I look upon it as a temporary but necessary stage in our history. This adventurer has perhaps given evidence of wisdom in not following us. He had acquired a sense of the possible in his retirement, and what we suggested was not possible if one considers the real state of France and that of the world. It was a great dream which only suited a young nation. It was you who summed him up so succinctly, after one of those visits to officers’ messes which we organized for him so that he should get to know us better: ‘You can see he was never out in Indo-China.’ And Boisfeuras had then chuckled in that grating voice of his.
    â€œOh that voice! I can still hear it. I close my eyes, and there he is in front of me with his swinging Vietnamese coolie gait.
    â€œDe Gaulle, it’s true, was not out in Indo-China, nor did he undergo our temptation. So he is bound to condemn us, because he can’t understand us. He wants to create a France, and perhaps a Europe, set aside from the great currents of violence that are