Dark Summer in Bordeaux by Allan Massie

Author:Allan Massie [Massie, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Quartet Books
Published: 2012-09-15T22:00:00+00:00

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The Comte de St-Hilaire was a man of great distinction in Bordeaux, as his family had been for generations. His grandfather had been one of the founders of the exclusive Primrose Club and he himself had been its President. His vineyard in the Médoc produced a premier cru Claret. In the city itself he had a fine house in the Allée de Tournay which Stendhal had once called the most beautiful street in France. He had never engaged in politics, for he despised the Republic while indulging in an equally profound contempt for Action Français and the Royalists. He thought the famous Mayor of Bordeaux, Adrien Marquet, a vulgar fellow, and had an aristocrat’s disdain for Fascism. No doubt, if compelled to choose, he would have opted for it rather than Communism, for at least the Fascists were unlikely to deprive him of his property, but he regarded both faiths as manifestations of the deplorable twentieth century. His family had been Huguenots in the time of the religious wars, but he himself had long ago discarded any remnants of religious belief. He was a Voltairean sceptic and viewed the Catholic Church as a deplorably superstitious survival. He owned racehorses and collected pretty women. In his youth he had enjoyed a formidable reputation as a seducer of his friends’ wives – though in truth he had few friends, merely acquaintances with whom he was on easy conversational terms. For ten years now he had been recognised as the acknowledged lover and protector of Adrienne Jauzion, though she had come to bore him as almost everything did; and it amused him now to observe her toy with entering on an affair with that policeman who had been sent from Paris to command the Police Judiciaire. At the age of seventy he ignored the Occupation. It was something the French had brought on themselves by their folly and their contemptible politics. He placed no more trust in Marshal Pétain than in the God of his forefathers.

It amused him to read Mauriac’s caustic novels about his native city, though he found the author’s fervent Catholicism ridiculous. But so, to his mind, was almost everything. Life was something without reason, to which you had been condemned. The only thing was not to make a fool of yourself.

Jérôme was in awe of his godfather, dazzled by him also. He admired his massive indifference. Yet he had received occasional indications of what was almost tenderness. ‘You may be a little idiot,’ the Count had said once, ‘but then most people are, and there are moments when you are not without intelligence.’ And Jérôme, while in awe, also sensed that behind the imposing façade – itself as forbidding as the limestone of which the grand houses of the city were built – there was a disappointed romanticism, as if his godfather reproached himself for finding so little worth doing. And so he now nerved himself to call on him and present him with his problem. One thing was

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