Submission Read online

  Now Marie-Françoise served us a lamb shank confit with sautéed potatoes, and once again my attention began to wander. ‘Still, he is a Muslim,’ I murmured in my confusion.

  ‘Yes, and so?’ He was beaming. ‘He’s a moderate Muslim. That’s the point. He says so constantly, and it’s true. You can’t think of him as some kind of Taliban or terrorist. That would be completely mistaken. Ben Abbes has nothing but contempt for those people. You can hear it whenever he writes those editorials for Le Monde – underneath all the moral condemnation, there’s an edge of contempt. In the end, he thinks of terrorists as amateurs. The reality is that Ben Abbes is an extremely crafty politician, the craftiest, most cunning politician France has known since François Mitterand. And unlike Mitterand he has a truly historic vision.’

  ‘So you think the Catholics have nothing to worry about?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about? They have everything to gain! You know,’ he smiled apologetically, ‘I’ve spent ten years on the Ben Abbes file. I can honestly say that only a few people in France know him better than I do. I’ve spent almost my whole career tracking Islamist movements. The first case I worked on – I was still a cadet at Saint-Cyr – was the Paris attacks in 1986, which we eventually traced back to Hezbollah and, indirectly, to the Iranians. Then there were the Algerians, the Kosovars, the al-Qaeda offshoots, the lone wolves … It’s never stopped, in one form or another. So when the Muslim Brotherhood was created, we kept a close eye on them. It took us years to understand that, for all Ben Abbes’s ambitions – and he’s hugely ambitious – his plans had nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism. There’s an idea you hear in far-right circles, that if the Muslims came to power, Christians would be reduced to second-class citizens, or dhimmis. Now, dhimmitude is part of the general principles of Islam, it’s true, but in practice the status of dhimmis is a very flexible thing. Islam exists all over the world. The way it’s practised in Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with the Islam you find in Indonesia or Morocco. In France, I promise you, they won’t interfere with Christian worship – in fact, the government will increase spending for Catholic organisations and the upkeep of churches. And they’ll be able to afford it, since the Gulf States will be giving so much more to the mosques. For these Muslims, the real enemy – the thing they fear and hate – isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam – that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

  ‘What about the Jews?’ The question slipped out – I hadn’t planned on asking. The image of Myriam on my bed that last morning, in her T-shirt, with her little round bottom, flashed through my mind. I poured myself another large glass of Cahors.

  ‘Ah,’ he smiled again. ‘With the Jews, of course, things are somewhat more complicated. In theory, it’s the same – Judaism is a religion of the Book, Abraham and Moses are recognised as prophets of Islam. In practice, though, relations with Jews in Muslim countries have often been more difficult than with Christians. And of course the Palestinian question has poisoned everything. Some small factions of the Muslim Brotherhood call for retaliation against the Jews, but I don’t think they’ll get anywhere. Ben Abbes has always maintained good relations with the Grand Rabbi of France. Every once in a while he may let the extremists act out, because even if he really hopes to convert Christians in massive numbers – and who says he won’t? – he can’t possibly have high hopes for the Jews. What would really make him happy, I think, is if they left France on their own and emigrated to Israel. In any case, I assure you, he’d never compromise his vast personal ambitions out of love for the Palestinians. It amazes me how few people have read his early writings – though, to be fair, they’re all in obscure geopolitical journals. The first thing you notice is that he’s always going on about the Roman Empire. For him, European integration is just a means to this glorious end. The main thrust of his foreign policy will be to shift Europe’s centre of gravity towards the south. There are already organisations pursuing this goal, like the Union for the Mediterranean. The first countries likely to join up will be Turkey and Morocco, then later will come Tunisia and Algeria. In the long term, Egypt – that would be harder to swallow, but it would be definitive. At the same time, we’ll see European institutions – which right now are anything but democratic – evolve towards more direct democracy. The logical outcome would be a president of Europe elected by the people of Europe. That’s when the integration of populous countries with high birth rates, such as Turkey and Egypt, could be key. Ben Abbes’s true ambition, I’m sure of it, is eventually to be elected president of Europe – greater Europe, including all the Mediterranean countries. Remember, he’s only forty-three – even if he cultivates a paunch and refuses to dye his hair. In a sense, old Bat Ye’or wasn’t wrong with her fantasy of a Eurabian plot. Her great mistake was in thinking the Euro-Mediterranean countries would be weak compared with the Gulf States. We’ll be one of the world’s great economic powers. The Gulf will have to deal with us as equals. It’s a strange game Ben Abbes is playing with Saudi Arabia and the others. He’s more than happy to accept their petrodollars, but he won’t give up the least bit of sovereignty in return. In a sense, all he wants is to realise de Gaulle’s dream, of France as a great Arab power, and just you watch, he’ll find plenty of allies – not least the petro-monarchs, who have swallowed many a bitter pill for the Americans and alienated their own people in the process. They’re starting to see that an ally like Europe, with fewer organic ties to Israel, might be a much better alternative …’

  He fell silent; he’d been talking for half an hour straight. I wondered whether he was going to write a book, now that he was retired, and put his ideas down on paper. I thought his analysis was interesting – if you were interested in history, that is. Marie-Françoise brought in dessert: a croustade landaise with apples and nuts. It had been a long time since I’d eaten so well. After dinner, the thing to do was to take a glass of Bas-Armagnac in the sitting room – and that’s just what we did. Wilting in the brandy fumes, pondering the old spy’s lustrous skull and plaid smoking jacket, I wondered what he really thought of all this. What opinion could a man have, after he’d spent his entire life dealing with the inside story? Probably none. I’d bet he didn’t even vote – he knew too much.

  ‘I went to work for French intelligence,’ he said, in a calmer tone, ‘partly, of course, because I’d spent my childhood fascinated by spy stories. But also, I like to think, it was because I’d inherited the patriotism that always impressed me in my father. He was born in 1922, if you can believe it. Exactly a hundred years ago. He joined the Resistance early on, in late June of 1940. Even in his day, French patriotism was an idea whose time had passed. You could say that it was born at the Battle of Valmy, in 1792, and that it began to die in 1917, in the trenches of Verdun. That’s hardly more than a century – not long, if you think about it. Today, who believes in French patriotism? The National Front claims to, but their belief is so insecure, so desperate. The other parties have already decided that France should be dissolved into Europe. Ben Abbes believes in Europe, too, more than anyone, but in his case it’s different. For him Europe is truly a project of civilisation. Ultimately, he models himself on the emperor Augustus – and that’s some model. We still have the speeches that Augustus made to the Senate, you know, and I’m sure he has read them closely.’ He paused, then added, ‘It could be a great civilisation, for all I know … Have you seen Rocamadour?’ he asked all of a sudden. I was starting to nod off. I said no, I didn’t think so – or rather yes, I’d seen it on TV.

  ‘You must go – truly, you must. It’s just twenty kilometres away, and it’s one of the most famous shrines in the Christian world. Henry Plantagenet, Saint Dominique, Saint Bernard, Saint Louis, Louis the Eleventh, Philip the Fair – they all knelt at the foot of the Black Virgin, they all climbed the steps to her
sanctuary on their knees, humbly praying that their sins be forgiven. At Rocamadour you’ll see what a great civilisation medieval Christendom really was.’

  Certain phrases of Huysmans about the Middle Ages floated vaguely through my mind. This Armagnac was absolutely delicious. I was about to answer Tanneur when I realised that I was incapable of expressing a coherent thought. To my great surprise, he began to recite Péguy in a firm and measured voice:

  Happy are they who died for the carnal earth,

  So long as the war was just.

  Happy are they who died for four corners of earth.

  Happy are they who died a solemn death.

  It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all. To see this neat, elegant, cultured, ironic old man declaiming poetry surprised and moved me.

  Happy are they who died in the great battles,

  Who were laid upon the earth in the sight of God.

  Happy are they who died on a last rampart

  With all the trappings of great funerals.

  He shook his head in resignation, almost in sadness. ‘You see, in the second stanza, to heighten the poem, Péguy has to bring in God. Patriotism alone isn’t enough. He has to connect it with something stronger, to a higher mystery, and he makes the connection very clear in the next lines.’

  Happy are they who died for the carnal cities,

  For these are the body of the city of God.

  Happy are they who died for their hearths and fires

  And the meagre honours of their native homes.

  For these are the image and the seed

  And the body and the first taste of the house of God.

  Happy are they who died in this embrace

  Bound by honour and their earthly vows.

  ‘The French Revolution, the republic, the motherland … yes, all that paved the way for something, something that lasted a little more than a century. The Christian Middle Ages lasted a millennium and more. Marie-Françoise tells me you’re a specialist in Huysmans, but to my mind, no one grasped the soul of medieval Christianity as deeply as Péguy – for all his republicanism, his secularism, his support of Dreyfus. And he understood that the true divinity of the Middle Ages, the beating heart of its devotion, wasn’t God the Father, wasn’t even Jesus Christ. It was the Virgin Mary. That, too, you can feel at Rocamadour.’

  I knew they were going back to Paris the next day, or the day after, to pack up for their move. Now that the ‘broad republican front’ had formed its coalition, the results of the run-off were no longer in doubt, and neither was their retirement. After I sincerely congratulated Marie-Françoise on her culinary talents, I said goodbye to her husband at the door. He had drunk almost as much as I had, and still he could recite whole stanzas of Péguy by heart. I had to admit, I was impressed. I wasn’t really convinced the republic and patriotism had ‘paved the way’ for anything but a long succession of stupid wars, but in any case, Tanneur was far from senile. I wouldn’t mind being that sharp when I was his age. At the bottom of the steps that led to the street, I turned and said, ‘I’ll go to Rocamadour.’

  It wasn’t peak tourist season yet, and I easily found a room at the Beau Site Hotel, agreeably located within the medieval citadel. The restaurant had a view overlooking the Alzou: the site was, in fact, impressive and received plenty of visitors. After a few days watching wave after wave of tourists from all four corners of the earth, each tourist different, each the same, camcorder in hand, roaming amazed over the jumble of towers, parapets, oratories and chapels that climbed the side of the cliff, I felt as if I had somehow stepped out of historical time, and I barely noticed when, on the evening of the second electoral Sunday, Mohammed Ben Abbes won by a landslide. I had drifted into a dreamy state of inaction, and even though here the hotel Internet worked fine, I wasn’t especially worried not to have heard from Myriam. In the eyes of the owner and his staff, I was a type: a bachelor, rather cultured, rather sad, without much in the way of distractions – all of which was an accurate description. In the end, I was the kind of guest who never gives you any trouble, which was all that mattered.

  I’d been at Rocamadour for a week or two when finally I got her email. She had lots to say about Israel, about the special atmosphere she felt all around her – extraordinarily dynamic and lively, but with an undercurrent of tragedy. It might seem strange, she wrote, to leave a country like France because you were afraid of hypothetical dangers, only to emigrate to a country where the dangers weren’t the least bit hypothetical. A Hamas offshoot had just launched a new series of attacks, and practically every day some bomb-wearing kamikaze blew himself up in a restaurant or on a bus. It was strange, but now that she was there she understood: since Israel had always been at war, the attacks and the battles seemed inevitable, in a sense, natural. They didn’t keep people from enjoying life, at any rate. She attached two photos of herself in a bikini on the beach in Tel Aviv. In one of the photos, a three-quarters rear view of her running towards the sea, you could really see her arse and I started to get a hard-on; I wanted to touch her arse so badly my hands tingled with pain. It was incredible how well I remembered it.

  Closing up my computer, I realised that she hadn’t once said anything about coming back to France.

  Early in my stay I fell into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady. Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin – the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem. The baby Jesus – who looked nothing like a baby, more like an adult or even an old man – sat on her lap, equally erect; his eyes were closed, too, his face sharp, wise and powerful, and he wore a crown of his own. There was no tenderness, no maternal abandon in their postures. This was not the baby Jesus; this was already the king of the world. His serenity and the impression he gave of spiritual power – of intangible energy – were almost terrifying.

  This superhuman image was a world away from the tortured, suffering Christ of Matthias Grünewald, which had made such a deep impression on Huysmans. For Huysmans the Middle Ages meant the Gothic period, and really the late Gothic: emotionally expressive, realistic, moralising, it was already closer to the Renaissance than to the Romanesque. I remembered a conversation I’d had, years before, with a history professor at the Sorbonne. In the early Middle Ages, he’d explained, the question of individual judgement barely came up. Only much later, with Hieronymus Bosch for example, do we see those terrifying images in which Christ separates the cohort of the chosen from the legion of the damned; where devils lead unrepentant sinners towards the torments of hell. The Romanesque vision was much more communal: at his death the believer fell into a deep sleep and was laid in earth. When all the prophecies had been fulfilled and Christ came again, it was the entire Christian people who rose together from the tomb, resurrected in one glorious body, to make their way to paradise. Moral judgement, individual judgement, individuality itself were not clear ideas in the mind of Romanesque man, and I felt my own individuality dissolving the longer I sat in my reverie before the Virgin of Rocamadour.

  Still, I had to get back to Paris. One morning it hit me that it was already the middle of July, and that I’d been there for more than a month. The truth was, I had no pressing reason to go back. I’d received an email from Marie-Françoise, who’d been in touch with other colleagues: no news from the administration. We were all in limbo. In the larger world, the legislative elections had been held, with predictable results, and a government had been formed.

  The town began to hold organised events for the tourists. Mainly these were gastronomical, but some were cultural, and the day before I left, as I made my usual visit to the Chapel of Our Lady, I happened on a reading of Péguy
. I sat in the next-to-last row; attendance was sparse. Most of the audience was made up young people in jeans and polo shirts, all with those open, friendly faces that for whatever reason you see on young Catholics.

  Mother, behold your sons who fought so long.

  Weigh them not as one weighs a spirit,

  But judge them as you would judge an outcast

  Who steals his way home along forgotten paths.

  The alexandrines rang out rhythmically in the stillness, and I wondered what the patriotic, violent-souled Péguy could mean to these young Catholic humanitarians. In any case, the actor had excellent diction. I thought that he must be a well-known theatre actor, a member of the Comédie Française, but that he must also have been in films, because I’d seen his photo somewhere before.