Monsieur le Commandant Read Online Free PDF

rather pretended to follow, the conversation.
    On my solitary walk back to the villa from the station, I found myself humming a tune, and realised that Marguerite’s childish and catchy song had stuck in my head. ‘Pretty little nose so nice and straight …’ I stopped in my tracks, suddenly understanding what it was that my wife, without ever having mentioned it, had seen. Or believed she had seen.
    And it struck me that this thought, this vague and nebulous suspicion, had been nagging at me for months without my having been consciously aware of it.
    Yet I could hardly confront my daughter-in-law point-blank with the question. What about Olivier? He was sensitive and might well take it amiss. As things stood, our relations were already embittered enough. I decided to wait for an opportune moment to bring it up casually. That in itself would be no simple task, as my son continued to object to my articles in the French press, although they merely addressed the self-evident truth that in every country where the children of Abraham decide to proliferate they pose a significant national and social threat. But as I generally sought to avoid family quarrels, I chose to put the matter off to another time.
    The following month, on a sudden whim I bought a First Empire painting that I had seen in the window of the Galerie Charpentier. The canvas belonged to some wealthy Parisian Jews who were selling their collection before emigrating to America. The dealer sold it to me at a reasonable price, while still ensuring a handsome profit for himself, since the Yids were in a hurry. The painting, by Louis-Léopold Boilly, was entitled
Amour familial
. In a corner of a bourgeois drawing room, a lovely young brown-haired woman is sitting on a sofa, dressed in anample silk negligee. Even as she embraces her three children, her face in profile, she places a tender kiss on the cheek of her husband, who, one arm draped across the back of the sofa, leans in turn across the tight little ensemble to kiss the forehead of his eldest daughter. The latter raises her eyes to her father, while the two little ones hug one another as they cling to their mother’s bosom.
    This edifying and touching image of a close-knit family, reminiscent of the allegorical work of Greuze some decades earlier, unsettled me for I recognised in it the protagonists of a true story, or one that might have been. The man was me in my younger days. The woman bore a striking resemblance to Marguerite as a young mother. The eldest child was Jeanne; the son, in the middle, was Olivier at six or seven. And the exquisite youngest one, with her blue eyes, anxious expression, round cheeks, porcelain complexion and blonde hair, being affectionately kissed on the ear by her brother – wasn’t she the very picture of Ilse? The relative ages matched in any case. I chose to decide that the painting did indeed portray my daughter-in-law, that ravishing poppet from beyond the Rhine whom our Christian family had adopted.
    I paid the dealer, took the painting home to Andigny, and had it hung forthwith in the drawing room.

    In May, the season of flowers and communions, a processional of girl communicants heading towards our cathedral rekindled an inchoate anxiety in my heart. The children of our city, draped in guileless probity and immaculate veils, were on their way to bring their reverent dreams to fruition beneath the splendours of the stained glass. I followed the processional in a fog. I entered the cathedral, greeting a few acquaintances, neighbours and tradesmen. At the centre of the nave, decorated for this holy day, the communicants gathered like a troupe of white angels – some of whom, the prettiest, resembled Ilse on her wedding day – enveloped in the symbolic purity of lilies. Theyheld hands in solemn silence, little brides of the faith trembling with sacred anticipation as they awaited the mystical moment of divine revelation. One girl, overcome with emotion, dropped her