The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum

FRANCOISE stopped, astonished, on the threshold of Georges’s room: a young man was sitting in an arm-chair with a guitar on his knee.

“Don’t worry,” said Georges, laughing. “He is blind and he doesn’t speak French. Having him here is an Oriental refinement which I was keeping for you when you came back.”

This refinement was one of the madame of Patissia’s latest inventions. By exceptional favour she was allowing Georges to use it at home. Francoise, faced with the boy, whose eyes were lost in the distance, whose lips were smiling and who had just said a word of greeting in Greek, remained hesitant. But Georges had already embraced her and was leading her towards the divan. She made a show of resistance.

“You are making me do something horrible. To insult his affliction seems to me like insulting God.”

“There is no God in Athens. And anyway, in what way are we insulting the blind boy? You may be sure that he prefers to accompany pleasure rather than canticles.”

“You sound as though you had already made the experiment.”

“I promise you he has never been here before: you can ask him if you like.”

The musician took his guitar and hummed a song. It was a sweet and melancholy air, reminding Georges of those the passengers on the Delos boat had sung. Little by little, Francoise yielded to the strange charm of his presence, visible yet discreet. Her surprise turned to pleasure. She abandoned her lips and her body. Georges had never found her more desirable. The interval had moulded, polished and matured her.

“Tell me, who has been caressing you?” he asked her.

“The open air.”

“I didn’t know its hands were so practised. Wherever I put mine I feel that those of some cunning masseur have been there before me.”

“It is probably you I was thinking about,” said Francoise, laughing. “Your hands were pummelling me from afar.”

They broke off their frolics to look at the being who was watching them sightlessly. Imperturbably he continued playing and singing. He was like the young servant who appears in the obscene paintings of antiquity beside the couples sacrificing to Venus.

“He annoyed me at first,” said Francoise, “then he stimulated me. Now he bores me: I wish he were not so calm.”

“He is employed day and night at parties: he is blasé.”

“He is showing us how relative the greatest pleasures are: six feet away from him ours might as well not exist for him.”

“That helps us to understand our guardian angels: let’s hope that they are blind.”

“You must admit that as an ambassador’s daughter and perhaps a future ambassador’s wife, I shall owe a lot to you for my education.”

“How many boys and girls there are, wasting their youth! Some day you will bless me for not wasting yours. And to think that the whole of society should be leagued to hinder us from enjoying these delights!”

“It only hinders those who want to be hindered. Partly thanks to you, I admire all the ways there are of deceiving society: they are as numerous as those for deceiving nature. Happily, the exertions of morality are balanced by contrary forces. That’s a truth I learned long before you taught me others. I was twelve at the time: I was in Paris where my father was on leave. I went out one day with my nurse, and we were looking at magazines on a stall. A grave-looking gentleman stopped beside me and discreetly drew my attention; then he suddenly opened his coat, which was not that of Noah, and immediately walked away, taking with him my innocence. The struggle against society is carried on everywhere, you see, even at street-corners.”

Georges thought of the story Rudolf had told him about the guide at Pompeii: that, too, had represented the slaying of innocence by a simple gesture. He excused the vice of such men who lie in wait for children, remembering his school-years, when the boys who boasted of being “knowing” ferreted out the innocence of the younger ones, pitilessly.

Suddenly his attention was caught by the blind boy’s song. He recognised a poem by Cavafy, who had been recently “discovered”, having died some years earlier at Alexandria. He translated it for Francoise:

   “The accomplishment of the forbidden will
    Has taken place. They have risen from the bed
    And quickly dress, not speaking.
    Separately, stealthily, they leave the house; and while
    They walk with light and anxious tread in the street, it seems
    That they suspect that something in their attitude betrays
    From what kind of bed they have come.
    But the artist’s life is thereby enriched:
    Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or after years, will be written
    A powerful poem whereof this was the beginning.”

“Admirable!” exclaimed Francoise; “The Athenian guitarists sing Cavafy’s poems, as the Venetian gondoliers sang Tasso’s. But I think that for us the embarkation is for other shores than Cythera.”

“All roads lead to Cythera, as well as to Rome.”

“All roads lead only to ourselves, my dear Georges.” Lulled by the music he pondered on what Francoise had said: her words, too, were roads which led him back upon himself. He was not so proud, now, of the little scene he had arranged. The pleasure of surprising Francoise by a fresh act of shamelessness had already lost its edge. Coldly judging his action he blushed at it. So it was not enough for him to deceive people whose guest he was, a chief to whom he was indebted! Not only had he corrupted a young girl, but he was showing her that even the worst corruption left no trace. He was leaving her intact, yet more experienced than a courtesan. Their idyll was not that of Daphnis and Chloe, but of Le Rideau Levé or of La Philosophie dans le Boudoir.

Was this what Georges’s beginnings had promised? If the Alexandrian poet had found enrichment in debauchery, if his poems had been born thus, he had at least the excuse that he had not begun otherwise, that he had seen the reflection of the Muses in a miry stream. But Georges, who had in childhood discovered the most exalting vistas of life, was he not violating their memory by such excesses? He knew it was true, yet knew not how to redeem himself. Like the Love which he no longer sought, everything pure within him had died with those far-off years, and perhaps it was the desire to avenge himself which drove him to these profanations. Besides, was he not profaning himself as much as Francoise? In any case, the two partners could not reproach one another: the Ambassador’s daughter was worthy of the past pupil of the priests. The divan where they had lain was as infamous as the bed of Cavafy’s heroes. Their shamelessness in evil was as complete: they did not even notice that they were naked. The blind singer by whose agency they thought to add spice to their enjoyment, this musician was the image of their own youth.

+++

That evening, at signature time, the Ambassador was discussing one of Redouté’s historical allusions and asked Georges to verify the dates of a former Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Year-Book supported him, and Redouté seemed mortified to be found in the wrong in front of his young colleague. No doubt it was to wipe out his mortification that the Ambassador threw out this observation:

“That list of former Ministers is a subtle idea of the Personnel Service. We have the illusion of adding our own to the great names of history. It glorifies our task. The poor consul, lost in the wilds of Arabia or China, discouraged by eternally reading his own entry, goes a few pages further and immediately forgets his disgrace: no longer is he serving Yvon Delbos, but Vergennes or Talleyrand.”

“I fear,” said Georges, “that those great names were not appreciated by the consul who inspired Campana to write his epitaph:

    Fever, raki, boredom, the east wind
    And finally the Year-Book---a more dangerous poison
    Than women, the spleen and spirits----
    Killed him.”

“Peace to his ashes! But that consul was certainly less witty than Campana, or he could not have died of boredom from reading the Year-Book. There are a thousand ways of amusing oneself with it, even when it annoys one. There is the easy game of grouping the names of the Service by affinities, so that one can form embassies whose common denominator is professional, adjectival, prenominal (that’s where I would be), mineralogical, zoological, canonical or erotic. There is the more learned research for ‘historical accidents’, as Léger would call them, which many of the names represent. I can imagine them illustrated by a fresco like the picture of the Congress of Paris on the staircase of the library at the Ministry. There would be our mediocre faces, but dressed in the clothes of those from whom we are supposed to be descended: M. Laurent talking to Michelangelo instead of to M. Giletière.”

Georges admired the Ambassador's art in veiling his own pretensions with irony, so that he could poke fun at those of his colleagues.

“M. Redouté painting roses, Bourbon Busset as Saint Louis’ nephew, Montbas as an agent of Mazarin, Billy as the Comte de Clermont’s tutor, Vyau de Lagarde as Louis XV’s bastard, Fouques-Duparc as his valet-de-chambre, d’Ormesson sitting on the fleur-de-lys with his mortier on his head, Beaumarchais with a watch in one hand and Figaro in the other, Boissezon as Madame du Barry’s nephew, Nerciat as Felicia, Chambrun as Lafayette, Vitrolles as the agent of the emigré princes, Clement-Simon buying Notre-Dame under the Terror, Clauzel holding Napoleon’s will leaving him a hundred thousand francs, Vaux Saint-Cyr engraving his name on the Arc de Triomphe, du Chaffault as Lamartine’s godson, La Chauviniere as Chancellor Pasquier’s adjutant, Castellane as a Marshal of the Second Empire, d’Aurelle de Paladines at the head of the Army of the Loire, Menthon as St. Bernard, Croy as Attila, and Mlle. Borel as Jeanne d’Arc.”

“It would hardly be wise to give all our colleagues their ancestors’ costumes,” said Redouté. “You know what the Duc de Morny replied to the Princesse Murat who asked him ‘when was the time of the douceur de vivre?’ ‘Beware!’ he said, ‘At that date you would have been in the kitchen and I in the stable.’ ”

“That time is coming when one will have to come from the stable or the kitchen to be a diplomat. We are living through the last great period of the Service. The 1914 War dealt it a great blow and it will not stand up to the next.”

“But there will always have to be diplomats,” said Georges.

“What use will they be? What use are we already, between ourselves? We had originally a use as senders of information, but the telegraphic agencies have finished that. Then we had a use as negotiators. But from now on everything is done in our Ministries or in conferences which by-pass us. Finally we had a use as representatives. That is almost all that remains to us, provided we perform it. As a matter of fact I don’t entirely disagree with the colonel when he wants to abolish ambassadors.”

“At least let us become ambassadors first,” said Redouté.

“Have no fear, you shall all be ambassadors. But it isn’t that which will save the Service from extinction. It has been undermined in two ways: by the appointment of heads of missions from outside the Service, and by the competitive system. For one justifiable appointment like Frangois-Poncet, there are so many idiotic ones. Remember that poor devil Deville, my distant predecessor, and the fellow who was appointed to Peru so as to avoid being arrested. Then there was that man in Moscow who used the Bag for trafficking in works of art; and the Minister at Berne whose wife was a standing joke because of the bricks she dropped; and the ex-prefect who became Minister in Sweden and whose dispatches were carefully preserved in the Ministry’s collection of facetiae.”

“But there was Jules Cambon as well!” said Georges, glad to pay tribute to the man who had inspired him with the wish to be a diplomat.

“Do you think so? A man who had not the wit to prevent a war? His brother Paul was worth more---he did excellent work in London---and Barrére, who brought Italy back into our fold.”

“Even if he couldn’t prevent the war, Jules Cambon had the merit of foreseeing it, as you can see in the Yellow Book.”

“Ah! young man, young man! I am sorry to overthrow your idols, but however much I esteem you I cannot let you go on believing in the Yellow Book. They haven’t yet published the real documents about the origins of the War of 1870, and yet you would have it that they have done so for the 1914 War! Everything you have read on this subject in the Yellow Book was worked over by Jules Cambon himself when he was secretary-general of the Quai d’Orsay during the war. Paléologue followed his example when he succeeded to the same post. He had already practised tinkering with the texts during his embassy to St. Petersburg. His contempt for truth was equalled by his elevated opinion of his own functions, and he succeeded in making a preconceived historical narrative, as Victor Hugo wrote out the end-rhymes before composing some of his poems. Robien, who was then at St. Petersburg, tells a good story about an important telegram which he had given to the chancellery with orders that it was not to be sent till he came back from Tsarskoe Seloe. It was during the war and it was about the Czar’s reply to a request for an offensive from the French General Staff. The objections were stated, the promises specified, the conditions stipulated---all of it invented by the imaginative Paléologue. He came back and went straight into the chancellery with his fur coat over his uniform and his astrakhan cap on his head. ‘Send off the telegram,’ he said. You can imagine how, with such principles, he played hell with the Yellow Book.”

“When Cambon and Paléologue were elected to the French Academy,” said Redouté, “they thought they were electing diplomats, but really they were electing authors of fiction. But to come back to what you were saying, sir, about recruitment, does it follow that because the entrance exam. is becoming more and more difficult the successful candidates will be more and more remarkable?”

“That’s just the danger. The final idiocy of the Service was to take to recruiting good examinees. For a job which calls above all for social qualities, they look only for academic degrees. Were there ever more learned men concerned with a treaty than with the Treaty of Versailles? And look at the result: because it was the work of historians and jurists, it broke all the rules of historical truth and juridical prudence. The treaties of Vienna were drawn up by diplomats who were men of the world, and they were based on permanent realities. And yet we continue to people the Quai d’Orsay with bright schoolboys and smart alecks. When I see one of these fellows, festooned with diplomas, boldly making his way up the Service, I feel like quoting one of Pirandello’s plays at him. ‘Watch out for your feet, Doctor.’ ‘My feet? Why?’ ‘You have iron shoes.’ ‘I have?’ ‘Yes, and you are going to meet little glass feet.’ ”

+++

The Lebanese and the Armenian were lamenting that the season had depopulated the Wooden Baths. There were, they said, “dances for men only” at Athens and the Piraeus, which took the place of the baths. But in spite of their hardihood they thought it would be rash to be seen at them.

They regretted this all the more as the gardens were less safe this autumn. The two friends had had a few escapes and were showing more caution. The Lebanese had brought a stout stick with which he had twice already covered his retreat. The Armenian knew how to box, and had also provided himself with an American knuckle-duster. They called this “armed diplomacy”. They also went on their expeditions without watches, jewellery or brief-cases, carrying only enough money to pay for their pleasures, and the keys of their flats attached by a safety-pin to their braces. They counted thus on limiting the dangers of theft or burglary in case they were attacked.

“You make me tremble!” said Georges. “What pleasures can be worth running such risks?”

“Pleasures for which we would pay with our existence,” declared the Lebanese.

“Ill-explained pleasures’, as one of the historians of Monsieur’s time wrote about him.”

“Please do not oblige us to give you explanations,” said the Armenian. “Our cause has only too many devotees whom you have a perfect right to consult.”

“You have a great many to choose from,” said the Lebanese. “It begins with the Symposium and the marvellous theory of the androgyne and it ends with Corydon and examples drawn from dogs and ducks.”

“Indeed,” said Georges, “I think that any man worthy of the name has only to recall his school years. But that is no reason for reverting to them. You people are cases of arrested development.”

“Never mind what we are: that is how we are,” said the Lebanese. “I read once in an old French book a country priest’s sermon which proved the existence of God in a most summary fashion. ‘God exists, God exists, my brothers. And since He does exist, why deny it?’ In the same way, why deny other things which exist? Human nature and history prove it. It is in no need of proof: you realize yourself that everyone has made the experiment at least once in his life, and it is just as pointless to attack as to defend.”

“It is a pity that such a good cause should not be very diplomatic,” replied Georges.

“You forget that we are in Athens, my dear fellow. What is reprehended elsewhere is treated with consideration in this blessed land.”

“But there is scandal here, as everywhere.”

“Not for diplomats. The Protocol’s business is to smother their scandals. For the rest, it’s not my fault if the world must see scandal where there is none to see. Everyone has a right to live: why should our profession be a tomb?”

“But why choose it, if you are in danger of dragging it in the mud? Because, you know, in spite of the devotion of the Protocol, you are risking the most scandalous of all scandals, all the time.”

“If we do represent some risk, we often prove our value as well.”

“Indeed you do. But I’m afraid that your ministries care less about the absence of value than about the absence of risk.”

“Ah, now, we would have had our chance with some Foreign Ministers I could mention; with your Marshal d’Huxelles, for example----”

“That’s a long time ago, isn’t it?”

“---or in Russia, with Count Lamsdorf, or in Germany with Prince von Bülow, the Imperial Chancellor.”

“Yes, but it’s always in other times and other countries.”

“Did you know that twice before 1914 peace was saved by two French diplomats, thanks to the relations they had with high Socratic circles in Berlin? At the time of the Tangier affair, it was Lecomte, the Counsellor, who worked on what they called William II’s camarilla. And at the time of the Agadir business, it was Berckheim, Lecomte’s successor, who worked on what still remained of the camarilla. They don’t teach us those things when we are preparing for the exam.”

+++

The Ambassador was beginning to despair of Léger. The Quai d’Orsay had just torpedoed the peace project which Lord Halifax had gone to try to arrange in Berlin at the end of November. And a disquieting circular on France’s diplomatic position arrived in the Bag. It was unusual for the Ministry to send out such things, and it was not to M. Laurent’s taste. He underlined the obscurities, verbosities, inconsequences and indiscretions of the text, and declared it “worthy of Berthelot, who wrote badly, or of Claudel, who writes as God pleases”. It seemed to him a bad sign that Léger was the author of it. Plato knew what he was doing when he banished the poets from his Republic. Decidedly, they were no great help to the Quai d’Orsay.

“And what about its official prose-writers?” went on M. Laurent. “Giradoux, with his meretricious brilliances, his bad jokes and his dull twaddle, doesn’t even merit the ridiculous epithet ‘Giralducian’ coined by his admirers. And Morand’s flippancy and bawdry would have had him recalled in any other country but France.”

Georges had thought that it was only against Claudel that the Ambassador conducted his vendetta, but here were the Giradoux and the Morands coming in for it just as heavily. Now that he knew M. Laurent better, he could see that his hostility was fermented by envy. He had seen him taking just as much delight as Redouté in communiqués which gave him publicity. The idea that Claudel and others had in their own right a place of honour in the international press, and that their writings took precedence over their official functions, was more than he could stand. The secret of Léger’s exception from this general condemnation was no doubt the fact that he was unknown as a poet. One could pretend to like him without offending oneself, and in doing so satisfy the appetite for literature which was one of the weaknesses of the Service, and which in others the Ambassador judged very harshly. In the same way, Stendhal for M. Guizot was a “knave”. By pouring contempt on men of letters of whom he was jealous, the Ambassador fancied himself to be playing the part of an old Service hand, of an upholder of tradition and a descendant of the Medici.

He kept the circular to re-read, and, as he said, to try to understand it. He also kept a dispatch which Redouté had been polishing and repolishing for several days, about ecclesiastical properties at Naxos---‘“the matter of the former community of Naxia”’---which the First Secretary described as one of the Embassy’s “loftiest concerns”.

These properties, which had formerly belonged to the French Jesuits, were the subject of litigation between the Holy See, as the present proprietor, and the Catholic community of the island. The Holy See had entrusted their administration to Italian Jesuits who had made themselves detested and, what was worse, had been dispossessed. It hastened to put back the French, who soothed local feelings and recovered the property. But the victory was short-lived. At the instigation of the Greek Government, which did not like the Holy See, the community had set in motion a law-suit to recover ownership of the property. It had won in the first instance and on appeal, and everything indicated that the court of final appeal, before which the matter was pending, would uphold these decisions. France had refused to support the French Jesuits, so as not to renounce for herself, in favour of the Holy See, her reversionary rights in the Naxos property. However, the canonical counsellor at the Quai d’Orsay had just informed the Embassy that an emissary of the Vatican would shortly arrive in Athens with a view to coming to some arrangement.

The Ambassador had let Redouté go and kept Georges behind on some trivial pretext.

“I have noticed, my dear Sarre,” he said, “that you have some idea of the art of writing. I should like you to help me to go over the most important of the dispatches which our friend has so laboriously concocted, beginning with this one. I dare not make too many corrections before both of you and I could not possibly correct with him alone. But I think that if you and I revise the texts, we should make a good job of it.

“Besides, I want your opinion as much on the matter of them as on the manner. After a certain number of years in the Service---and this goes for Redouté as for myself---one becomes incapable of distinguishing between what is important and what is not. At my age and in my position one no longer writes: one is content with signing. Redouté says, ‘This comma is very important’, and I end by believing him. You at least still have a supple mind and you aren’t obsessed by commas. But do not preen yourself on this transitory merit: one day you will be like all the rest of us. The Service should stop at the rank of Third Secretary: only to that point is one a brilliant diplomat. Higher up the brilliance fades and one becomes an ambassador when one is only a burnt-out star. You will think of me later on when you call in one of your young colleagues, just as the old King of Sweden makes a young officer sleep with him so that he can have a little real warmth.”

Georges was touched by these confidences: their human content moved him. They first of all cut out the opening of the dispatch, which was full of superfluous references. Then, seeing Georges tone down some pieces of over-fine writing, the Ambassador could not repress his delight.

“Indeed, you have the sense of the diplomatic style. I allow Redouté to use a literary style which is fashionable in the department, but I don’t like it. In the old days of the Service, fine phrases were as rigorously proscribed as blank verse should be in good prose. One remembered that one really was addressing the nominal addressee of the dispatch: His Excellency the Minister for Foreign Affairs. One’s only concern was to be brief, clear and dignified. Ribot should have recalled the Ambassador at Constantinople when he wrote, ‘I have been to see the amiable phantom, temporarily in charge of Foreign Affairs.’ When the head of a mission begins to turn fine phrases, it is a sign that he is degenerating. I am afraid that Frangois-Poncet is going downhill, because I notice not only that he writes more than ever, but that he turns fine phrases as well.”

The next day the Ambassador gave the First Secretary his dispatch, duly corrected and abridged.

“Let us not be so pretentious,” he said, “as to make them read long reports in Paris. And also, if you please, let us adopt a more modest style. You overwork your writing: this becomes obvious and in the end is humiliating. It could still be taken for my work, had you not given me away without meaning to by sending too much material while you were in charge here.”

“I seem to remember that you congratulated me on that.”

“No doubt I did; but I was thinking of you rather than myself.”

Now Georges understood why M. Laurent wanted him to revise Redouté’s style. He hoped to make the Quai d’Orsay believe that it was his own. His touching confidences had not been disinterested.

Redouté was reading the dispatch and laughed sarcastically.

“I entirely agree with you, sir, that one should be brief; but also one should write French.”

In a loud voice he read the end---the only “fine phrase” which Georges had spared, though changing a word in it: “The barque of St. Peter will not sail much longer to Naxos; from now on the illusions of the Vatican can travel in Charon’s barque.”

“‘Charon’s barque!’” repeated Redouté, who had written “the barque of Charon”.

“God forgive me, sir, but you must have been thinking of Claudel when you committed this barbarous cacophony.”

“None the less I think I have seen that expression in classic texts.”

“I should very much like to see those texts.”

The Ambassador looked suspiciously at Georges: his faith in his new editor was shaken. Georges went for the Littré.

“The Ambassador cannot have been mistaken,” he said as he came back.

He pointed to what Littré calls the “twenty-ninth position” of the letter A.

“Dear lexicographer, talking about language as one talks about love,” said the Ambassador, his serenity restored.

Poor Redouté did not seem to be able to take in the fact that for once Littré had declared against him. He found out to his cost that it is as easy to purify a purist as to swindle a swindler. M. Laurent consoled him by reminding him of what Paul-Louis Courier had said: “There are five or six people in Europe who know Greek, and there are even fewer who know French.”

+++

Towards the end of the afternoon Georges was in his office, finishing a note on the “works at the harbour of the Piraeus”---another litigious affair in which French interests were involved---when the kavas brought him a note from a caller. It was signed: “Father de Trennes.” The kavas’ description of the visitor left him in no doubt that this was the Father de Trennes.

“Ask him to wait for a moment,” he said. “I will ring.”

He had to pull himself together, to compose his features and indeed his soul as well, for this encounter. He shut the Piraeus file and leaned over his desk with his head in his hands.

The most contemptible act of his youth revived in his memory. The man he had betrayed when at school was here. Of course, he had done what he did to protect a love which this man was threatening, but was that sufficient excuse? His arrival also revived the image of that love---the image of the child which Georges had evoked with Rudolf on the mountain at Delos, and again the other day with Francoise. The child would be in the room, between Father de Trennes and himself, as though they were at Saint-Claude again. But now it would not be to divide them in bitter opposition; on the contrary, his unseen presence would bring them together and unite them. Since leaving school, Georges had not seen any of his old teachers or fellow-pupils, for he held them all responsible for the drama which he had sought to forget. And now fate had to bring him just the one person from that period who had him at a disadvantage! Perhaps Father de Trennes did not know what had happened and was going to ask him for news of the child who was no more. But no: if he came back, it was because he knew about it. And was it not right that he should meet, in the timelessness of Greece, the first man to speak of Greece to him in living terms? The man, too, who had been the first to reveal to him what life was, who had shown him, beside the secrets of children, the secrets of men. And now his presence here showed him that beside that which was finished there was something else that had endured. He was still a priest, today as ten years ago. Ten years already! Only ten years!

Father de Trennes came in. He had the same attractive elegance; his whitening head made him look more distinguished; his expression was prouder, his smile more equivocal. He held out his hand to Georges, and sat in the arm-chair.

“I had business with the diplomat,” he said, “but I prefer to renew acquaintance with the schoolboy.”

The sound of his voice had a great effect on Georges: it was as though he were hearing it again in the half-light of the dormitory.

“We have done each other a lot of harm,” said the priest, “but we have expiated it and forgiven one another. Otherwise I should not have asked to see you and you would not have received me.”

These two sentences summed up so much, that Georges found himself incapable of adding anything. Besides, the priest had already risen.

“This visit was something I owed to unforgettable memories. I shall value it very highly: for you it will at least have been short. Perhaps you will be kind enough to see me tomorrow about the Naxos lawsuit.”

Georges was thankful to the priest for his tact, but he had never expected to see him one day as the Vatican’s envoy. He suddenly felt a need to prolong this encounter which linked him with the past.

“Are you free for dinner?” he asked.

“I am always free for you,” replied the priest.

Georges tidied his papers, telephoned to Redouté, and left the Embassy with his visitor.

They chose to go towards the sea rather than the mountain. Along the ill-lit boulevard the passers-by looked like ghosts, and the Japanese pepper-plants like the trees on the banks of the Styx.

“Are we glad or not, to see one another again?” asked Georges.

“At least, we could not meet under happier circumstances than these.”

“In Athens, as elsewhere, the dead do not come back.”

“One must die to be able to come back. Only those who are forgotten are dead. There are beings whom one never forgets.”

“No reasoning and no illusion can bring them back to us.”

“Everywhere,

    ‘On my way there comes and sits
     A poor child dressed in black...”

The priest remained faithful to the author he had loved to quote in the evenings at school: but the cup had been shattered before the lips had drunk of it, and the Night of May had given place to the Night of December.

They went to a lonely tavern near Glyphada. Although it was the end of the year, the temperature was spring-like: the sea air came in heady gusts through the open window. There were no other diners. Chance had left Georges and his guest in solitude. But this did not enable them to exchange new ideas or confidences. They said nothing, having too many things to think about. They looked at the sombre expanse of sea, where the foam seethed tirelessly round the rocks. It seemed to be tossing the body, scattering the hair, and smothering the voice which had reduced them both to silence.