By a Slow River Read Free Page B

see them anymore. They’d packed up and left. The town belonged to them. Everybody dried out. After that you had to work—for them.
    Getting back to the château, I’d honestly have to say it’s the most imposing residence in town. Old Destinat—I mean the father—had built it just after the disaster of Sedan. And he hadn’t cut corners. In our region, if you don’t talk much, you may like to impress by other means. The prosecutor always lived there. He was born there, and there he would die.
    The château is immense, beyond a human scale. Even more so since the family has never been a big one. Old Destinat, as soon as he had a son, halted production. His cup had overflowed— at least officially. The policy didn’t prevent him from ballooning local bellies with some very handsome bastards, to whom he would give a gold coin and, on the day they reached twenty-one, a beautiful letter of reference—as well as a symbolic kick in the ass encouraging them to go far, far away and verify that the earth was truly round. Around here that’s called generosity, but not everyone behaves that way.
    The prosecutor was the last of the Destinats. There won’t be any others. Not that he wasn’t married, but his wife died too soon, six months after their wedding, at which all the fame and fortune the region could muster had conspired to gather. The young lady was a de Vincey. Her ancestors had fought at Crécy. (Everybody else’s too, no doubt, but in most cases nobody knows and nobody cares.)
    I’ve seen a portrait of her, done just after her marriage, that hung in the entry hall of the château. The painter had come from Paris; he somehow captured her impending end in his depiction of her face. It was striking, the pallor of a woman soon to be dead, the resignation in her features. Her first name was Clélis, not common; it’s very prettily engraved on the pink marble of her tomb.
    An entire regiment could set up camp in the park of the château without feeling cramped. It’s edged by water. At the far end there’s a little communal path that serves as a shortcut between the town square and the port of embarkation; then comes the little canal of which I’ve spoken, over which the old man had a Japanese bridge built and daubed with paint. People call it the Blood Sausage, since it’s the color of cooked blood. On the far bank you can see the big windows of a high building, the factory lab, where the engineers figure out how to make more money for their bosses. A narrow and sinuous creek meanders along the eastern side of the park; it’s called the Guérlante—Barely Slow—a name that aptly expresses its lackadaisical flow, all whirlpools and water lilies. Here water permeates everything. The grounds of the château are like a huge soggy cloth; the grasses drip incessantly: It’s a place to fall ill.
    That’s what happened to Clélis Destinat, and in just three weeks it was over, from the doctor’s first visit to Ostrane’s last shovelful of earth. He’s the sexton and gravedigger, and he always pours that one out very slowly. “Why that one and not the others?” I asked him one day. “Because that one,” he said, looking at me with his eyes like dark wells, “that one has to stick in people’s memories.” Ostrane is a bit of a talker; he likes to say things for effect. He missed his calling. I could easily imagine him on the stage.
    Old Destinat rose straight out of the dirt, but in fifty years he’d succeeded very well in cleaning himself off, thanks to many banknotes and sacks of gold. He had come up in the world. He employed six hundred people, owned five tenant farms, eight hundred hectares of forest—all of it oak—pasturelands without end, ten residential buildings in V, and a fine mattress of stocks—and no fly-by-nights, no Panama Canals!—on which ten men could have comfortably slept without elbowing one another.
    He received and was received everywhere. Equally well at the bishop’s and at the