An Officer and a Spy

Pauline smiles. ‘Why?’

‘In honour of Loge in Das Rheingold, of course — the demigod of fire. You must see the resemblance, my dear? Look at that passion! Captain Lallemand is the Demigod, and Georges is the Good God.’

‘I don’t know very much Wagner, I’m afraid.’

Lallemand, the keenest student of music in our circle, affects shocked disbelief. ‘Don’t know very much Wagner! Colonel Picquart, you must take Madame Monnier to Bayreuth!’

Curé asks, a little too pointedly for my liking, ‘And does Monsieur Monnier enjoy the opera?’

‘Unfortunately my husband dislikes all forms of music.’

After they have moved off, Pauline says quietly, ‘Do you want me to leave?’

‘No, why would I want that?’ We are drinking orangeade. The great stink has lifted in the last day or so; the breezes of the faubourg Saint-Germain are warm and blossomy with the scent of a summer evening.

‘Only you seem very uncomfortable, my darling.’

‘No, it’s just I wasn’t aware that you and Blanche were acquainted, that’s all.’

‘Isabelle took me to tea with Alix Tocnaye a month ago, and she was there.’

‘And where is Philippe?’

‘He’s out of Paris tonight. He doesn’t get back until tomorrow.’

The implication, the offer, hangs unspoken in the air.

‘What about the girls?’ Pauline’s daughters are ten and seven. ‘Do you have to get back to them?’

‘They’re staying with Philippe’s sister.’

‘Ah, so now I know what Blanche meant by my “surprise”!’ I am not sure whether to be amused or annoyed. ‘Why did you decide to confide in her?’

‘I didn’t. I thought you had.’

‘Not I!’

‘But the way she spoke — she led me to believe you had. That’s why I let her arrange this evening.’ We stare at one another. And then, by a process of intuition or deduction too rapid for me to follow, she says, ‘Blanche is in love with you.’

I laugh in alarm. ‘She is not!’

‘At least you must have had an affair with her?’

I lie. What else should a gentleman do on these occasions? ‘My darling Pauline, she’s fifteen years younger than I am. I’m like an older brother to her.’

‘But she watches you all the time. She’s obsessed with you and now she’s guessed about us.’

‘If Blanche was in love with me,’ I say quietly, ‘she’d hardly arrange for me to spend the night with you.’

Pauline smiles and shakes her head. ‘That’s exactly what she would do. If she can’t have you, she’ll have the satisfaction of controlling whoever does.’

Instinctively we both check to see we are unobserved. A footman is doing the rounds, whispering to the guests that the concert is about to resume. The garden is beginning to empty. A captain in the dragoons stops on the threshold and turns to look at us.

Pauline says suddenly, ‘Let’s just go now, before the second part. Let’s miss the dinner.’

‘And leave two empty places for everyone to notice? We might as well put an announcement in Le Figaro.’

No, there is nothing for it but to endure the evening — the string quartet in the second half, the two encores, the champagne afterwards, the lingering goodbyes of those who have not been invited to dinner but hope for a last-minute reprieve. Throughout all this Pauline and I carefully avoid one another, which is of course the surest sign of a couple who are having an affair.

It is after ten by the time we sit down to eat. We are a table of sixteen. I am between Aimery’s widowed mother, the dowager comtesse — all black ruffled silk and dead white skin, like the ghost in Don Giovanni — and Blanche’s sister, Isabelle, recently married into an immensely wealthy banking family, proprietors of one of the five great vineyards of Bordeaux. She speaks expertly of appellations and grand crus, but she might as well be talking Polynesian for all I am taking in. I have an odd, almost dizzying sense of disconnection — the sophisticated talk is just a babble of phonemes, the music mere scrapes and twangs of gut and wire. I look down to the far end of the table, to where Pauline is listening to Isabelle’s banker husband, a young man whose pedigree breeding has given him an appearance so refined that it is almost foetus-like, as if it were an error of taste even to emerge from the womb. I catch Blanche’s eye in the candlelight, glittering out at me from within her game-bird plumage, the woman scorned, and I look away. We finally rise at midnight.

I am careful to leave the house before Pauline, to preserve appearances. ‘You,’ I say to Blanche at the door, wagging my finger, ‘are a wicked woman.’

‘Good night, Georges,’ she says sadly.