The Captain

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• Two sticks and one footHis right hand gripped the bar of a crutch wedged under his right armpit; his left hand had only a stick. Colette listened to that sound going away up the stairs to the library all through her girlhood, firm and even. On summer evenings on the terrace he left the crutch and the stick propped against the wall, stood on his one leg like a heron with one hand on the garden rail, and sang.
• A captain of zouavesThe rank was real: captain in the 1st Zouaves, a French infantry regiment, and his leg was amputated. In the villages where he lectured, children waited at the door of the emptied schoolroom afterwards to watch the gentleman with only one leg go past. Colette describes him as a one-legged captain of zouaves, quick as gunpowder and afflicted with philanthropy, whom a small tax office in the Yonne was never going to keep quiet.
• He hoarded every printed page in the houseBefore going up to the library he folded the newspaper Le Temps carefully and hid it under the cushion of his armchair, and buried the science weekly La Nature in the pocket of his long coat. His small bright eye swept the tables for anything else printed, which went upstairs and never saw daylight again. Then he cross-examined his children: had they seen the Mercure de France? The Revue Bleue? They were well trained at this particular hunt and had left him nothing.
• Jealous at nearly sixtyHis wife walked down to Léonore's butcher shop for a shoulder of mutton and stopped at two other shops on the way home. He met her at the door: she had taken her time. She had also called at Cholet's for blackcurrant leaf. From there he arrived, in four moves, at the charge that she had been showing herself off to the young men at the bar across the road and to the two Mabilat sons. She was fifty-four and defended herself without laughing. He did not laugh either. Their daughter, fifteen, laughed at both of them, and writes that she had not yet learned to recognise the ferocity of love under an old man's eyebrow, or the blush of adolescence on a woman's faded cheek.
• The voiceHe had a velvet baritone and sang on the flagged terrace after dark: old drawing-room songs about pages and squires and captains, and about a queen who forgot her crown for the page she adored. The neighbour who came over to listen said the Captain had a voice for the theatre. His wife said that if he had wanted to, he could have; he was gifted at everything.
• Forty sous and a packet of tobaccoMme Bruneau lived across the road and came over on fine evenings to talk. She liked to say that she was growing old beside a poor specimen of a husband and would die without ever having known love. He answered, in the same beautiful voice, that his offer stood: forty sous and a packet of tobacco, because it was her, and she should not haggle, because when he raised his prices she would regret today's terms. He called it after her in the street on every day that followed, whether she ran across holding her skirts up or crept along the housefronts under her violet parasol: 'Quarante sous et un paquet de tabac!' She laughed it off for as long as she could manage. Then she packed up her furniture and her husband and moved to the top of the hill, well away from them. His wife's entire reproof was to say his surname twice, which was what she always called him.
• Campaigning with a magic lanternWhen Colette was eight or nine he decided to go into politics, and that the way to win the people was to instruct them. He took a projection lantern, a microscope, coloured teaching charts in which a weevil magnified twenty times humiliates a vulture shrunk to the size of a bee, and public lectures against drinking. All of it went into an old carriage behind an ageing black mare, along with his crutches and his daughter. The audiences sat on worn school benches under a swinging oil lamp, listened with the effort showing on their faces, and applauded timidly. A mayor in clogs congratulated him as though he had just escaped a disgraceful sentence.
• The drink afterwards, and the agent he lostHe never left a village without at least standing the parish council a drink. At the nearest bar the mulled wine was boiling on the embers with lemon and cinnamon floating in it. He took only fizzy water, being a southerner, while his daughter took the wine and knew her manners: she called for the jug to be brought level with the brim, wished the company good health, clinked, drank, banged the empty glass down and wiped the sweet burgundy off her lip with the back of her hand. Her country politeness thawed the drinkers, who decided the Captain was a man like themselves apart from the leg, a good talker and perhaps a bit touched. The lectures ended when his wife caught her daughter's breath one evening. He shrugged: she had taken away his best electoral agent.
• Zola locked in the deskHe kept the whole of Zola locked in a desk of thuya wood, a mass of yellow volumes that kept growing. What he was really locking away was the author's name. Zola bored him, and rather than work out a reason to allow the books or forbid them he banned the lot, saying he saw no use in these children reading Zola. His wife, whose grey eyes were no good at lying, handed over three of them anyway. Their daughter stole the rest at fourteen.