Monsieur le Commandant Read Online Free PDF Page B

candle, knocking down the one in front, which set off a chain reaction like a game of skittles. Murmurs of disapproval rose from the pews. The girl who had started it all fainted and was carried off. Calm was restored in the church, and I fell to thinking.
    In a few years it would be our Hermione’s turn to join the May processional in white. Her brown hair haloed by the insubstantial veil, she would be full of devotion reciting her catechism, a book of canticles on her knees, as she prepared to be brushed by the wings of a great happiness. But as I sat and watched among the murmuring crowd in the ancient cathedral, I was thinking:
Is my granddaughter fully entitled to receive that divine and sacred communion? Is she truly a member of the flock of God’s children?

6.
    I could no longer bear to remain in such a state of uncertainty. On the occasion of a weekly meeting of the Academy, I put in a request at the Institute for the address of a service specialising in private investigations. Our secretary provided me with the requisite information, and I proceeded to the office, which was located, rather poetically, on Rue de la Lune in the second arrondissement, next door to the School of Wireless Telegraphy. I explained to the man who received me that I was seeking any available information about a Monsieur and Madame Wolffsohn of Berlin, whose daughter had been an actress in the early thirties. The investigator replied that such an inquiry would be very costly, as an assistant would have to be sent to Germany for several weeks, and in these troubled times. I insisted that expense was no object, adding that what I most wanted to know was whether these people might by chance be Jews. The man gave me a knowing look, as if to say that my request was more common than I had thought. He promised me results within two months at the latest, and asked for a rather sizeable advance that I paid without haggling.
    That night I had dinner with Louis-Charles Royer, the gifted author of
La Maîtresse noire
. Maurice Dekobra was there too. Like Geneviève Tabouis, who had so accurately predicted the latest crises, he believed that war was now inevitable. Having spent the night at the flat of Olivier and Ilse – whom I no longer dared to look in the eye – I returned to Andigny, where I was alarmed by a change in Marguerite’s demeanour. She would fly into a temper at the least provocation, raging, her gaze fixed and hard and lit by a spark of madness, demanding informationon a subject that, once again groping for the right word, she was unable to explain to me.
    This interlude of abrupt and frequent tantrums lasted barely a month. As summer approached my wife grew slowly but irremediably weaker. I was the disconsolate and powerless witness to this irreversible deterioration. Marguerite spoke less and less, her conversation for the most part without sense. Ilse threw me long, sorrowful looks. Olivier rarely visited. The harvest came three weeks late because an early frost the previous autumn had compelled our farmers to re-sow a third of their fields. On 4 July, I was invited to the wedding of my old friend (and new member of the Académie Goncourt) Sacha Guitry at the church of Fontenay-le-Fleury, in the parish of the Château de Ternay, which he had recently bought.
    The great throng of notables included Monseigneur Merio, Bishop of Versailles, who sanctified the union between Sacha and young Geneviève; Prince Poniatowski; Monsieur André Magre, Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic; Prefect of Police Langeron; Monsieur Huisman, the Jewish Director of the Beaux-Arts; Goncourt academician René Benjamin; Maurice Martin du Gard, Max Maurey, Lisette Lanvin, the humorist Tristan Bernard (another Jew, but very witty) … Our dear host took us on a tour of Napoleon’s room, which he had reconstructed most faithfully. This wonderful, worldly day in the country was a welcome break from the monotony of the bedside and the nauseating