"But, Madame, what about the car?" Nanny moaned.

"It'll be reduced to ashes by now," replied Madame Péricand.

"What about the trunks, the children's things?"

The trunks had been loaded on to the servants' van. Only three suitcases were left by the time disaster struck, three suitcases full of linen…

"I'll just have to do without them." Madame Péricand sighed, looking up at the sky, picturing once more, as in a wonderful dream, the deep wardrobes in Nîmes with their treasured cambric and linen.

Nanny, who had lost her big trunk with the metal bands and an imitation pigskin handbag, began to cry. Madame Péricand tried in vain to make her see how ungrateful she was being towards Providence. "Remember that you are alive, my dear Nanny; nothing else matters!" The donkey trotted on. The farmer took small side roads thick with refugees. At eleven o'clock they arrived at Saint-Georges and Madame Péricand managed to get on a train heading in the direction of Nîmes. Everyone around her was saying the armistice had been signed. Impossible, some said. Nevertheless, there was no more gunfire, no bombs were falling. "Could this nightmare finally be over?" thought Madame Péricand. She looked again at everything she had brought, "everything she had saved": her children, her overnight case. She placed her hand over the jewellery and money sewn into her blouse. Yes, during this terrible time she had acted with determination, courage and composure. She hadn't lost her head! She hadn't lost… She hadn't… Suddenly she cried out in a choked voice. She clutched her throat and fell backwards, letting out a low moan as if she were suffocating.

"My God, Madame! Madame, what's the matter?" exclaimed Nanny.

"Nanny, my dear Nanny," Madame Péricand finally groaned in a barely audible voice, "We forgot…"

"What? What did we forget?"

"We forgot my father-in-law," said Madame Péricand, dissolving into tears.

22

Charles Langelet had driven all night long from Paris to Montargis and so had shared in the general misfortune. Nevertheless, he demonstrated great strength of character. In the hostelry where he stopped for lunch, the groups of refugees around him were complaining about the horrors they had encountered on the journey. They looked to him for confirmation, saying, "Isn't that so, Monsieur? You saw it too, didn't you? No one can accuse us of exaggerating!" but he merely replied, drily, "I didn't see anything."

"What? No bombs?" asked the surprised owner.

"No, Madame."

"No fires?"

"Not even a traffic accident."

"Well, lucky you," the woman said after thinking for a moment and shrugging her shoulders doubtfully, as if to say, "He's peculiar!"

Langelet took a bite of the omelette he'd just been served, pushed it away mumbling "inedible," asked for his bill and left. He got a kind of perverse pleasure from depriving these good souls of the satisfaction they hoped to attain by questioning him, for they-vulgar, vile creatures that they were-imagined they were feeling compassion for all mankind, while in reality they were merely thrilled by base, melodramatic curiosity. "It's unbelievable how much vulgarity there is!" Charles Langelet thought sadly. He was always pained and scandalised when he encountered the real world full of unfortunate people who had never seen a cathedral, a statue, a painting. What was more, the happy few, among whom he flattered himself he belonged, displayed the same spinelessness, the same stupidity in the face of misfortune as these common types. Lord! Just think of what these people would make of this "exodus," "their exodus" later on. He could just hear them: "I wasn't afraid of the Germans, not me," an old bag would whine, "I went straight up to them and said, 'This house belongs to the mother of a French officer'-and they didn't say a word." And another woman would say, "Bullets were flying all around me, but it's funny, I wasn't scared, not a bit." It was understood that everyone would embellish their tales with terrifying scenes.

As for Charles, he would simply reply, "That's odd. Everything seemed quite normal to me. There were a lot of people on the road, but that's all." He imagined their surprise and smiled, feeling smug. He needed to feel smug. When he thought about his apartment in Paris, his heart broke. Now and again he turned round towards the back of the car to look lovingly at the crates containing his porcelain, his greatest treasures. There was a Capodimonte group he was worried about: he wondered if he'd put enough wood shavings and tissue paper round it. There wasn't much tissue paper left by the time he'd finished wrapping everything. It was a centrepiece for a table: young women dancing with cupids and fawns. He sighed. In his mind, he thought of himself as a Roman fleeing the lava and ash of Pompeii, abandoning his slaves, his house, his gold, but taking with him, in the folds of his tunic, some terracotta figurine, a perfectly shaped vase, or a bowl modelled on a beautiful breast.

He felt simultaneously comforted and bitter at being so different from other people. He looked out at them with his pale eyes. The wave of cars was still moving and all the anxious, sombre faces were the same. What a sad breed! What were they thinking about? What they would eat, what they would drink? He was thinking about the cathedral in Rouen, the châteaux of the Loire, the Louvre. A single one of those venerable stones was worth more than a thousand human lives. He was approaching Gien. A black spot appeared in the sky. In a flash he realised that the stream of refugees near the level crossing would be a sitting target for an enemy plane so he pulled off on to a side road. Fifteen minutes later, there was a crash only a few metres away from him. Other cars also trying to avoid the main road collided with each other when a terrified driver took a wrong turn. They rebounded off each other into the fields, shedding luggage, mattresses, birdcages, injured women. Charlie heard confused sounds but didn't turn round. He headed at full speed towards a thick wood. There he stopped his car, waited a moment, then set off again through the countryside. The main highway was clearly becoming too dangerous.

He stopped thinking about the dangers the Rouen cathedral might face for a moment to imagine very precisely what was threatening him, Charles Langelet. He didn't want to dwell on it, but the most unpleasant images filled his mind. His large, delicate, slim hands clenched the steering wheel, trembling slightly. There were few cars and houses where he was, and he had no idea were he was going. He had always had a bad sense of direction. He wasn't used to travelling without a chauffeur. For a while he got lost in the outskirts of Gien, becoming ever more agitated for fear he might run out of petrol. He sighed and shook his head. He had predicted what would happen: he, Charles Langelet, was not made for this uncouth existence. The thousand little pitfalls of daily life were too much for him. The car stopped: out of petrol. He made a small gracious gesture to himself, as one bows before the inevitable. There was nothing to be done, he would have to spend the night in the woods.

"You wouldn't possibly have a can of petrol you could let me have?" he asked a passing driver.

The man said no and Charlie smiled, depressed and bitter. "Well, that's the human race for you! Egotistical and mean. In times of misfortune, no one will share with his brother, not a crust of bread, not a bottle of beer, not a pathetic little can of petrol."

The driver turned round and shouted at him, "There's some about ten kilometres from here, in…"

The name of the hamlet was lost as he drove off but Charlie had already started to walk towards the trees. He thought he could make out one or two houses.