Monsieur le Commandant Read Online Free Page B

she would tumble overboard, had leapt forward to grab her. As a result, the boat had rolled again, more violently this time. Ilse, carried by the momentum, had fallen into the water with the child. Jeanne had immediately dived to their assistance.
    Having saved her child, Ilse had pulled herself back on board with great difficulty, only to find no trace of my daughter. There was no sign of her in the water, either.
    Had Jeanne been hit on the head by one of the oars? Or struck the bottom of the boat as she rose from her dive? Or was she the victim of cramp or hypothermia? We never knew. Forty-eight hours later, a body was found at Saint-Pierre-du-Vauvray lock and brought to town. I went to the police station alone to identify it. My Jeanne was just a horrible thing, swollen and greenish, that I recognised from her bathing costume.
    Dr Dimey had been called to the house to give sedative injections to my wife and Ilse, both of whom were in shock. The doctor’s wife took Hermione home with her for a while.
    I refused all medication, retreating into silence.
    I tried to meditate on Malherbe’s consolation:
    To want what God wants
    Is the only study
    That can give us peace.
    The burial took place at Andigny cemetery, in the family vault. Marguerite did not have the strength to attend. And in any case, I preferred it that way. The Academy sent several members, among them the two Abels – my friends Hermant and Bonnard. The fiancé arrived from the provinces accompanied by an uncle. They offered their awkward condolences. At least my Jeanne will never belong to that nonentity, I thought, and was immediately stricken with nausea at the idea that I had been reduced to grasping at such straws in order to stave off despair. Olivier, alerted by telegram in Scotland, was with us by then, supporting his wife, whose pale and haggard face was frightening to behold.
    The next day, which also marked the return of Daladier and Chamberlain from Munich, we went to retrieve Hermione, the innocent cause of my daughter’s death, and I found that I could not bear to be near her.
    And yet, I found it impossible to blame Ilse.

5.
    Alone with my wife, I stayed at the villa on the banks of the river that had taken Jeanne.
    Olivier, the German and the little one did not join us either for Christmas or for New Year, preferring to spend the holidays in Megève.
    Marguerite appeared to have put her depression behind her. At least, in the eyes of those who did not know her very well. Towards the end of winter, she returned the manuscript of my latest novel – I made her read everything I wrote before sending it to my publisher – with a comment that escapes me for the moment, but which struck me as odd at the time. A somewhat peculiar sentence that troubled me. I let it pass. But then, a few weeks later, my wife began with increasing frequency to struggle to find her words. One might perhaps have put it down to her age, which I did to start with, but the symptom began to occur more and more frequently. I noticed, too, that she was favouring her left leg, moving heavily and painfully, and that she complained of the weight of her basket on market days. I decided that the cook should go in her stead, but when Marguerite dictated the shopping list, she could no longer find such commonplace words as ‘potatoes’ or ‘cheese’.
    Dr Dimey was called in for a consultation, and diagnosed an acute form of melancholy brought on by the shock of Jeanne’s death. He prescribed herbal remedies and vitamins, and suggested a cure in Divonne, where the waters were reputed to be excellent for neurasthenia.
    One morning, before I had even had a chance to buy our train tickets or book a hotel room, Marguerite was unable to rise from ourbed without my assistance. Dismayed and fearing meningitis – for she had been feverish and vomiting the night before – I drove her at once to Paris in our old Rochet-Schneider to see a famous nerve specialist whom my cousin Henri had