1914

At the station early the next morning, Blanche was there again, on the platform among the crowd waving little flags, as some boys chalked ON TO BERLIN on the flanks of the locomotive and a four- or five-man brass band did its best with the national anthem. Hats, scarves, bouquets, hankies, waved every which way as baskets of provisions passed through the train’s windows, hugs enveloped children and old folks, couples embraced, and tears fell on the railcar steps—as one can see today in Paris in Albert Herter’s vast mural in the Hall Alsace of the Gare de l’Est.[4] On the whole, however, people smiled confidently because it would all be over quickly, apparently, so everyone would be back soon—and from a distance, as Charles held Blanche in his arms, Anthime saw her gaze over his shoulder and once again direct that same look at him. Then it was time to get on the train and barely a week after his little bicycle excursion, after heading northeast from Nantes at six o’clock on Saturday morning, Anthime arrived up in the Ardennes on Monday in the late afternoon.

3

ON SUNDAY MORNING, Blanche awoke in her bedroom on the second floor of an imposing residence of the kind belonging to notaries, deputies, public officials, or plant managers: the Borne family runs the Borne-Sèze factory, and Blanche is their only daughter.

A strangely discordant atmosphere reigns in this albeit peaceful and orderly room. Framed local scenes— barges on the Loire, fishermen’s lives on the island of Noirmoutier—adorn the slightly off-center flowered wallpaper, and the furniture bespeaks an effort toward woodlands diversity worthy of an arboretum: a mirrored walnut bonnetière,[5] a writing desk of oak, a mahogany chest of drawers with fruitwood veneer, while the bed is of wild cherry, the armoire of yellow pine. So, an unusual ambience, and one ponders whether it arises from the mismatched edges—unexpected in what should be a meticulously appointed bourgeois house— of this faded wallpaper in which the bouquets are wilting as well, or from the astonishing variety of furniture woods: one wonders at first how so many different materials can get along together. And then one quickly senses that they do not get along at all, they cannot even stand one another, which probably explains the strange ambience: that must be it.

Until Blanche gets up, this furniture waits patiently to play its role. The night table—of beech—bears a lamp resting atop a few books, including Marc Elder’s The People of the Sea, a volume Blanche dips into occasionally, not so much for its stalwart capture of the previous year’s Goncourt Prize from a field including Marcel Proust as for her family’s friendship with the author, a local man whose real name is Marcel Tendron, and because this work reminds her of past Sunday excursions into the countryside to see the fishermen of Noirmoutier or barges moored for the estuary fishing of eels, lampreys, and elvers at Trentemoult, a village of fishermen and sailors on the left bank of the Loire.

Once out of bed the first thing Blanche did was decide what she would wear, selecting from the bonnetière a light short-sleeved blouse of batiste, from the armoire a suit of gray tweed, then stockings and undergarments from the drawer of the chest, on which a couple of perfume bottles sit forgotten. Hesitating between two pairs of shoes—lower or higher heels?—but not over her hat, a rice-straw affair trimmed with black velvet. After a scant hour in the bathroom, freshly bathed and dressed, she consulted the mirror on the bonnetière with a critical eye, smoothing a lock of hair, adjusting a pleat. As she left her bedroom she passed the writing desk, which had played no part in this morning’s activity; the desk is used to this, serving simply as a repository for the letters Charles and Anthime each regularly sends separately to Blanche and which lie bound by ribbons of contrasting colors in two different drawers.

Ready now, Blanche went quietly downstairs and on her way through the hall to the front door, made a detour to avoid the dining room. There—harsh grating of the bread knife against crust, clinking of teaspoons amid the aroma of chicory—her parents were finishing their breakfast: little audible conversation between Eugène and Maryvonne Borne; rumbling ingestion from the factory owner, melancholy sighs from the factory owner’s wife. Pausing at the front door by the wicker umbrella stand lined with waterproof canvas, Blanche chose a parasol of checked cretonne.