Ernestine

Up to the north there, monsieur, you can see the woods where the General used to take his longest walks. When he left Madame at home, he could cover a lot of ground in an afternoon. The Sûreté assigned two inspectors to him, although he didn’t like it much. He was always polite to them—he was polite to nearly everybody—and of course he hadn’t forgotten that mad colonel who’d ambushed his automobile on the way down here. But when he was out walking, he wanted those two gorillas to keep their distance. One of the villagers told me it was comical to see them puffing and scrambling to keep up with those long legs of his.

Ah, no, monsieur; no bother at all. So few people come nowadays; it’s a pleasure for me to take you around. If you’re not too cold, I’ll show you the terrace while it’s still light. And the Mayor tells me I can show you everything inside—or almost everything. With the journalists, right afterward, I had to be more careful: they kept poking their noses into personal matters—as though the great ones had no right to keep their doors shut once in a while like the rest of us.

I see by that green ribbon that you have the Croix de la Libération. That’s unusual for foreigners. At Bir Hakeim? Well, I never! You must have been practically the only American there, monsieur. But just wait till we get to the study: I’ll show you something that’s bound to interest you.

In the bad times, the General—I could never think to call him anything else, even when he was President—used to stay out late in the park, especially in the autumn. Sometimes Madame made me put back dinner for him: she used to scowl, but I didn’t mind really. So long as he enjoyed my cooking, it didn’t matter: choucroute and then my cream puffs; he had a real sweet tooth. Once in a while he would look up from his plate and say, “Ernestine, that was good.” But more often he wolfed down his food with hardly a word, as though he couldn’t wait to go off again and think. When Madame believed I was out of earshot, she scolded him for his table manners. But how do you go about to correct the table manners of a king?

He never got really fat, though. He had that little paunch that the cartoonists loved to draw, but something inside him burned off all the rest. Before the war he used up energy arguing with all those nincompoop politicians. And later he had plenty to worry about: the Communists and the students, Algeria, the Americans. You will pardon me, monsieur, but I’m sure you know he was upset by things your people did in Indochina. He didn’t really dislike Americans—except maybe M. Roosevelt. He always said your country was Europe’s eldest daughter, rather like his own Elizabeth, No, it was more that it vexed him to see you repeating our own mistakes.

He never fussed too much about household matters. But whenever he came down here from the capital, he kept a sharp eye on the park and the walls and on Madame’s garden and the orchard. If anything went wrong outdoors, we soon heard about it indoors. He jumped all over us, like one of those Alsatian shepherd dogs.

Madame didn’t get off scot-free either, I can tell you, although she could give back as good as she got. Once before the war, when one of the Deputies came down to talk to him about his notions for using tanks, Suzanne—that’s my colleague—let him into the hall too soon. Before she could go up to announce him, Madame and the general started slanging each other across the upstairs landing. The poor Deputy had to stand there, fixed to the floor; and afterwards he had to watch the General’s face as he came down the stairs and saw that everything had been overheard. But nothing fazed the General: he just blinked once or twice and told the Deputy he was sorry he had kept him waiting.

The youngest child Anne (you know about that, monsieur. What a pity!—like a knife in their sides) had just turned ten when I first came to this village from up in the Vosges. In the beginning I worked at the hotel: they let me help out in the kitchen. One evening the General (he was still only a Colonel really) came down to the hotel to find someone who would lend a hand to Madame. He’d invited a dozen fellow officers from Metz, and Madame just couldn’t cope with all the cooking. The patronne was out, and I was beating up eggs for the chef when I heard someone rapping on the counter at the reception. I went on beating eggs, and then the rapping got like gunfire, so I went out. There he stood, quite red in the face, and with those furry, scowling eyebrows, just the way you’ve seen them, I’m sure, when he talked on the television about those wicked generals down in Algiers. But as soon as he saw me, he smiled, and I realized I was still waving my egg-whisk. I knew right away who it was: he wasn’t famous yet, but here in the Champagne people said he might win the next war for us if he could only convince the crétins in Paris they were wasting time with all those underground forts.

I was about 20 at that time, and, if I do say so, I wasn’t bad looking. Of course, I’ve always been big, but people said I had a nice figure and a pretty complexion. Back home I’d had boy friends. We didn’t shake our bottoms around in public the way they do nowadays, monsieur, but we had our moments. There was one boy, a mason; he didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to: il m’a fait drôle, celui-là. Not the same with the tail-pinchers at the hotel here: they teased me about my pink cheeks, said I looked like a Frido; and was I a virgin? Such talk!

I am Alsatian, it’s true, but my hair is black. Even now you can see no white, except right there, near my ears. Thank you, monsieur, you’re too kind. It’s never had any help, you know, nothing out of a bottle, ever! Tante Yoyo (that’s what we called Madame when we wanted—just a little—to make fun of her) wouldn’t have approved, and anyway I never needed it. My mother was the same: her hair was shiny and straight when she went to her grave.

Well, the General gave me the once-over; I could see he had the eye. He was devoted to Madame, of course: you mustn’t think there was ever anything of that kind between him and me. But some men have a way of looking at you that makes you shiver and melt at the same time. You’re theirs right away, even if they never come buzzing around you like the others. That way the bond gets even stronger.

He told me he could see I was the right one to help them out. I blushed all over: to be chosen above all the village by such a masterful gentleman! But I warned him that the patronne might be angry if I just went off like that. “Well,” says he, “she’ll just have to be angry, because I can tell from the way you handle that whisk that there will be no nonsense in your kitchen. Can you make a choucroute, Ernestine?”

“There are those who say so, monsieur.”

“And poulet gros sel?”

“If you mean can I boil a hen, heavens yes—and with sausage stuffing. But I’m a family cook. I’ve never cooked for company, not on my own.”

“All the better: you will have no preconceptions.”

You won’t believe it, monsieur, but 30 years later I heard him use that same big word to the man he had picked to run Algeria when the rebellion was at its worst. I was serving coffee after lunch in the Elysée, and this gentleman—he was the head of an electric company—he said he’d go anywhere for the General but that really he’d never governed anyone, let alone those wild-eyed Arabs. The General said, “Tant mieux, monsieur, vous n’aurez pas de preconceptions.” I nearly dropped the coffee cups. He winked at me too; he never forgot things like that.

Later they got the hotel to let me come up here once a week. And one day Madame said, “Ernestine, I can see you know how to handle children.” The little Anne—the one that wasn’t quite right, you know—had taken to me from the first day.

“Well,” I said, “I’d have been finished long ago if I couldn’t. I’ve six nieces and three nephews back home, and a brother twelve years younger than me.”

Her mouth twitched a little (she was never one for the big smiles, Madame), and I could see how the wind was blowing. Sure enough, a month later the General came down for a little talk with the patronne and she let me go. Oh, he could turn you like a top when he wanted to.

When the General was stationed at Metz, he used to drive all the way home (it’s nearly 200 kilometers) in the evening. It was partly to see Madame; he missed her, though she wasn’t the easiest one in the world. Very strait-laced: she had a way of squeezing her eyelids together until there was just a slit, with a gleam showing through, whenever someone made a joke she thought in bad taste or later at the Elysée when one of the ladies wore a gown that was cut too low. Never mind: there aren’t many marriages nowadays as good as theirs, where you have respect and quiet—with now and then a good dust-up, to be sure—and tenderness underneath.

But the real reason he drove all that way was the little Anne. He loved the other children: Elizabeth, his eldest, and Philippe, with that long upper lip like his, and already crazy about boats. He was stern with them, though. With the youngest, it was different. After dinner, he’d go upstairs and sit on her bed and read to her—I’m not sure how much she understood—or sing nursery rhymes. Off-key, they were, something terriblel He never could carry a tune, not even the Marseillaise. When she had fallen asleep, he’d work his shoulder out from under her head and get up and tiptoe out like a great giraffe. I could hear him whispering with Madame in the hall, and then off he’d go in the moonlight (in those days he drove his own auto) and get back to Metz in time to catch forty winks before morning.

During the first part of the war he was racketing about all over the country—up north there he put up a good fight with his tanks, you know—but when he saw that the old Marshal was going to give up, he had to get out. He had already told Madame to follow him to London with the kids.

“You’re the one to hold the fort, Ernestine,” he said. We were standing right here on these steps. “You and Suzanne. When the enemy gets here, just lie low and do what you can to save the place. I’m sorry we can’t take you with us, but God knows where we’ll end up.”

“If I can’t come with you,” I said, “I’d rather stay here. The house needs looking after, and there’s the plums and apples to bring in. Anyway it won’t be long.”

“Vous êtes une brave fille, Titine,” says he. “And try to keep up Madame’s flowers. She’ll be grateful for that,”

Such a time we had getting Madame and the children off to Brest! All the time we were packing up their bags, we could hear guns to the north, and out on the main road there were lines of cars and cattle and people on foot.

Then came a terrible time, monsieur; it seemed like a century, and every day worse news. People drained away from the village like water from a sink, and up here there were just the two of us, Suzanne and me, rattling about. Once my old boyfriend, the mason from the Vosges, showed up; he was a corporal, but he’d lost his outfit. He’d got hold of some farmer’s clothes: looked like a scarecrow. I fed him up as best I could, and we both hid up in the attic. Zazou—that’s what we called Suzanne—was our sentinel, as you might say, but she didn’t stand watch long: the third night he was off again. He was going to try for Spain and then get to Africa. I never heard from him again.

Until the Germans took over the house, we could listen to the news from London. I’ll never forget the first time we heard that voice.

“Why Zazou,” I said, “it’s him; it’s the General! I think I’m dreaming.” And we both got down on our knees in the dark.

After that we didn’t miss a speech. Sometimes he began them the way he did later when he was running the show: “Françaises, français!” It came booming out in that kitchen even through all the static, and then I’d wonder how many others were listening and getting the shivers too.

When the Fridos moved in, we had to stop. Verboten! We drew a lieutenant with doodads all over his lapels, and a half dozen noncoms. At first they weren’t unfriendly—far from it: we had to keep our doors locked. One time Zazou had her little waltz with the sergeant. I’ve never blamed her; she was very cute, you know, and with all the men gone from the village—at the time it probably made things easier for us. And no one would ever tell Tante Yoyo.

As soon as the General became famous, the lieutenant froze up on us. He let the noncoms make a muck of the house: they smashed Madame’s best Limoges and tracked mud all over the downstairs. They ripped off the shutters on this side of the house for firewood, and when we complained to the lieutenant, they painted swastikas all over. You can still see traces on these stones. “Don’t think we don’t know whose house this is,” the lieutenant told me. “You can be sure you’ll never see him again.”

I knew in my bones that he was crazy, but I kept my mouth shut as the General had told me. In the second winter, when it got so terribly cold, a lot of the Germans were sent to Africa, and ours moved out to the hotel. In a way we missed them: we had no one to play tricks on any more. But we brought the radio back up from the root cellar.

The family didn’t come back here to live until after the General had broken with ces messieurs in Paris—but you know all about that. I was glad to see them, but it was a sad time. It was the year the little Anne died. I say “little”: actually she was 20, but you can imagine how it was. Her health had been failing ever since they got back to France: I suppose you could say her death was a mercy. But ah, mon dieu, mon dieu! After it was finished, do you know what he said? “Now she is like all the others.”

“The passage through the desert.” That’s what the General’s friends called his years down here. A lot they knew! For me anyway it was the best time of all. Elizabeth and Philippe (a Captain he was now) had married, and they came often with the grandchildren. The General spoiled those kids most dreadfully: a far cry from what he did to his own—except Anne. I wasn’t far behind. Zazou and I had our work cut out for us, that’s for sure. I never made so many cream puffs in my life. But I felt I was doing more for him and for all of them than ever before.

When the politicians began to show up down here—oh, some of them were frightened I can tell you—I knew in the pit of my stomach that the family was in for trouble again. At first he wouldn’t listen to them. “When I’m needed, Ernestine,” he told me, “I’ll know it well enough without those people to tell me.” But even though he had no use for them, I knew how he felt: France was a kind of princess who needed someone to protect her against all those crockery-smashers. So it wasn’t him I felt sorriest for, even when I could hear him pacing back and forth up here in the study.

Madame told me once—it was one of the few times she really smiled, from deep down—that on the wall of the house where the General’s parents lived, some schoolboys had written, “Charles XI born here.” Monsieur, those boys were smart!

When they took me with them to Paris, Suzanne was a little jealous. She needn’t have been: I was like that gentleman in Algiers; I’d go wherever the General wanted, but for me, monsieur, those ten years away from here were my passage through the desert. Anyway this house mattered more to him than that drafty palace in Paris, with all those uncomfortable chairs and the chandeliers like icicles. At first I was a personal maid in the private apartments, if you could call anything private in all that hustle-bustle. I missed my kitchen; I missed my pots and pans. Later they let me go down and lend a hand to the chefs, and sometimes I passed coffee after those huge luncheons or helped the diplomatic ladies with their wraps. But I was no one: just a bug in the wall.

Foreigners? My yes, the place was crawling with them: all the Ambassadors (yours was a real charmer, monsieur) and tons of Africans and chiefs of state from everywhere. Once we had your own President: he was much younger than the others, and so elegant! Everyone said he was very intelligent too, although Madame didn’t think he’d picked a very good wife.

Those strangers tired the General, though, and all that ceremonial: I could tell he hated it even when he did it so beautifully. After his eyesight got worse, he sometimes mistook names and faces of people who came up to shake hands. Once in a while he did it on purpose. I remember one of the bishops who tried to play politics: one evening I saw him coming through the line all tricked out in a beautiful purple soutane with lace, and the General leaned back, pretending to squint, and said, “Ban soir, madame.”

It was interesting I grant you, monsieur, but it wasn’t for me. I had no one to hang onto—except, well, yes, one of the cooks took a fancy to me. Raymond his name was: a nice-looking fellow from Nice, white-haired but still trim and flat in the belly. He couldn’t bear to eat his own stuff, he told me; that was how he kept thin. He’d been doing pastry in the Élysée for years before we came there. He was about to retire, but he was still fresh and disposed, as we say: you know how those southerners are. He had the idea we should get married and start a little restaurant in Nice.

I really was tempted, I can tell you. We started to figure out how much of our savings we could take to fix up a place like that, and how we’d try to keep prices down and still put a little something aside. I was just screwing up my courage to tell Tante Yoyo—and then the whole of France fell in, like a soufflé when you open the oven too soon. I knew it was the end for the General.

So I had to tell Raymond it was no go. He was furious at first; stamped his feet and cried like a child. Then he hugged me tight and begged me to change my mind. But how could I? What would all of them do down here at Colombey without me? And just when everyone else was running out on the General.

I guess everyone gets tired of being saved, especially we French. We love to get back to our quarrels: one thing we never forget is where we buried the hatchet. And if you make us too prosperous, we get to thinking we can make everything run all by ourselves, like the fly—you remember the fable?— who claimed she was moving the coach.

I shan’t forget that last day at the Élysée. He’d said goodbye to his ministers the day before, so there was only Madame left to lunch with him. They sent me off to look after their baggage. There wasn’t much: he never kept anything personal at the palace except his clothes and his shabby little brown case with papers, and maybe a book on his bedside table— that week it was M. Churchill’s book about the war—and his toothbrush and razor. Madame was the same way: they had always acted as though the Élysée was just a hotel they were staying at.

At lunch we all trooped down the staircase, but at the bottom the General stopped. He waited there—I can’t think why: he’d already guessed how the vote would come out—until I brought him the newspaper, just as I had always done whenever they went home for the weekend. He folded it over in his hand, and we all went out together: he and Madame and his aide—a nice young colonel—and me. Near the perron in front of the rose garden the big old Citroen was waiting. The staff was drawn up on the steps, lots of them in tears. I caught a glimpse of Raymond, blubbering away with the others, but I couldn’t bear even to wave. We enjoy a good cry in France, especially the southerners: sometimes it means something, more often not much. Three months later I heard he had married a Marseillaise.

The sky was cloudy and sad: a real Parisian April day. The General shook hands all around, with now and then a “Merci,” and climbed in, and then we heard the gravel crunching under the tires for the last time.

By the time we got home, the sun was beginning to come out. Dear old Zazou was waiting for us at the front gate. “Well, Suzanne,” he told her, “we’re back. And this time it’s for good.” He asked the chauffeur Francis to drive his aide to the hotel and make him comfortable there. After they had left, the gardener closed the gates, and the General went inside. I fixed them some supper, a nice omelette and the new asparagus, and they ate while he watched his own final speech on television. Then there was a silence—I can’t describe how deep it was—that fell over the whole house.

Now, monsieur, I’ll tell you something I’m a little ashamed of. I can see this place means more to you than to others who come here, so I don’t mind telling you that all the time I was pulling a long face with the others, secretly—in my for interieur, as we say—I wasn’t unhappy that the General had been beaten. I hated the people who’d done it: they didn’t give four sous for the whole of France so long as they could go back to playing their little games. But really it was the General who had had the last word: he’d fooled them all by keeping his promise to go away when he was no longer wanted.

Down here in the Champagne no one dreamed of his going away. There was this house that he and Madame had worked so hard to restore, and the beautiful park, and then all the people in the village. They admired him, of course, and they were a little afraid of him, but they loved him. He loved them too, though he’d rather have cut his throat than tell them so. One time he was talking at table about that marshal in Morocco before the First War. What was his name? Yes, Lyautey. He was telling Elizabeth’s husband—he was later a general too, you know—and the curé, the same that married them, that the Marshal was more of a chief than the others because into everything he did he always put a little parcelle d’amour. I could hear in the General’s voice how he envied that. But down here he found ways to do the same thing.

The last day was just like all the others. It was November: the weather was about the same as now. He’d spent the morning up here at this desk, working on his memoirs. You see there, monsieur, the same things he had in front of him. That’s his friend the Admiral, the one that was a monk before the war. And the General with Elizabeth in her wedding gown, and the grandchildren, those three little squirming boys. And there’s the gadget I mentioned to you: it’s a bit of cannon from a German tank; General Koenig brought it back from Bir Hakeim. Yes, that’s right: it might have taken a crack at you too. In the center there you see the little Anne.

So it’s just the way he left it—except for all those masses of paper. What dust catchers! We lost no time clearing them out.

At lunch he talked more than usual: he was clacking away to Madame about the book. He’d just finished the foreign stuff, and he was getting ready for the part about great Frenchmen: Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Danton, Napoleon. He hadn’t any doubt where he belonged either; I couldn’t help laughing a little to myself. Modesty wasn’t exactly his specialty.

After lunch he made a little promenade around the garden with Madame, picking up a branch here and there: we’d had a big wind the night before. Then he went off by himself to talk with the young farmer, our neighbor. He’d bought some more land down there to add to the park, and he wanted to see how they were coming with the opening in the wall. That excited him much more than the elections.

Toward evening he climbed back up here. He stayed longer than usual; I don’t know why. I wonder now whether he felt in his bones that he was having his last look through that window: the bare branches in the park, with the mist catching in them; the sun going down beyond that pile of hills over there. He seemed to enjoy this time of year most: he told me once that there was nothing he liked better than the smell of dead leaves because it reminded him that death gave a kind of protection for the new life working underneath.

From down in the kitchen I could hear him close the shutters. In this one room he never wanted Suzanne or me to do it. We could always tell by listening what mood he was in. If it was slam, bang, clatter, we knew he’d read something bad in the papers—maybe about the new President—or else the book wasn’t going right, and then dinner would be gloomy. But that night he shut them more slowly: we heard the hinges squeaking. Usually that was a good sign.

At quarter to seven he joined Madame in the little room they called the library. I’ll take you down, and you’ll see for yourself how it was.

First he snapped on the television and sat down at that card table. He liked to listen to the local news before the Paris announcers came on, but all the while he was laying out cards for solitaire, looking up once in a while at the announcer from under those bristly eyebrows. That night Madame was writing letters at her little secretary. I was in the kitchen: I’d boiled them a nice hen, and I was putting the finishing touches on an Alsatian pudding—apples and plum jam and a thin crust. Suzanne had just left the pantry to call them to dinner when she heard a scraping noise, as if someone was pushing a chair across the parquet, and then the General’s voice, not very loud but high: “Oh, such a pain! Right there along my back.” Suzanne came running; Madame had just got up from her desk. The General was slumped over on his side, but the arm of his chair—that little one over there—kept him from falling. Those were the last words he spoke, ever.

Madame—well, monsieur, she was a marvel; that’s the least one can say. She sent Charlotte to the pantry to telephone Dr. Lacheny at Bar; it was only a few kilometers away. But she knew what was happening, because when I came from the kitchen, she told me to go to the gatehouse and ask Francis the chauffeur to fetch the curé. At my age one doesn’t race about much, but I made it to the gatehouse in record time.

Then came the hardest part: we three women had to stretch the General out on the hearth rug, where he would be more comfortable and more easily examined. His face was pale, his hands too, like skimmed milk. He was still breathing, but he was unconscious. And heavy, oh my! and tall, more than two meters: the coffin, monsieur, was two meters seventeen.

It wasn’t more than ten minutes before the doctor and the curé arrived, almost at the same moment. The doctor came into the library first; the abbé waited in the salon. The doctor leaned down and listened and tapped, and after a minute he looked up. He said a clot had broken in the aorta—that big pipe, you know, that leads to the heart—and so the blood had drained away from the rest of his body. He gave him a shot of morphine, but he told Madame he hadn’t suffered after those first moments. Madame told the curé to come in, and the doctor said it was very serious. The abbé knew what that meant all right: he lost no time in giving the sacrament. Just afterward the heart stopped. But the curé had acted in time: I can tell you we were all thankful to hear him say that.

By this time the clock on the mantel was striking seven-thirty. Only a half hour had passed; I couldn’t believe it. We all knelt down: Madame and Zazou, the doctor and the cure, the chauffeur and I. No one said a word.

Isn’t it strange, monsieur, that of all the thousands of people he had known in his lifetime, there should have been only the six of us? And none of us what you would call great ones, eh?

Madame told the curé and the doctor to say nothing, and she had to be careful when she telephoned the family in case anyone was listening. She didn’t want the relatives to hear the news from the radio; she didn’t even tell the President till the next morning. Elizabeth and the young General and their daughter (her name was Anne too) arrived in the small hours, Philippe the next day. By that time we’d moved most of the furniture out of this room, except that couch. There we laid the General out, facing the window that looks down toward the village. The flag (it was the same I’ve seen him raise many times on Bastille Day) was pulled up to the pockets of his khaki tunic, where Madame had pinned on the medals of the Free French—nothing else. She let me put the rosary in his fingers: I’d never touched them before except to shake hands. When we’d finished, Zazou said, “He looks 20 years younger.”

At lunchtime next day, Madame had a bad moment. She’d watched all night with the General, and when the family went into the dining room, she saw his empty place and me standing by the pantry door with the hors d’oeuvres. She stopped and covered her face with her hands. I put down my platter and motioned the others to stay put. She and I went into the pantry: her face was wet, and she held tight to my hand. After a minute, she straightened up and said, “You can serve now, Ernestine. We’ll ask Elizabeth to sit there.” And we went back in.

In the afternoon, Madame said, “Good heavens, we forgot about M. Chasserades!” That was the little gentlemen—sweet he was, with pop eyes, and pink cheeks like mine—who kept the General’s office in Paris and came down every Tuesday with the mail. Sure enough, a few minutes later we saw him trotting up the driveway with his string gloves and his briefcase. He was struck all of a heap: he dropped his case and out fell all the letters he’d brought down for the General to sign, and thank-you notes from people to whom he’d sent the latest volume of his Memoirs. So there were lots of letters that would never be received, and more the General would never read: from Lady Churchill, I remember, and one in French from the King of Persia. Madame said there was even a letter from the Pope.

After that came the turn of the great ones—but you’ve read all that in the papers. The house turned into a regular beehive. Some of them muttered because we’d had the coffin nailed shut. But Madame just narrowed her eyes and told them that was the way he’d wanted it. She was right. I said to him once—it was after the postman died—I said, “General, isn’t it terrible to keep people watching for nights on end before they close you up?” “Quite right, Ernestine,” says he. “It won’t be that way with me.”

And now, monsieur, I’ll ask you to excuse me. The light goes so fast this time of year, and I’ve got all those shutters to tend to. Yes, I suppose I could, but I like to open up in the daytime: I don’t want the place to get looking spooky. With Madame gone too, and no more children about, I haven’t much to do anyway. No more choucroute, you know, and no cream puffs either—except sometimes when Zazou or Francis comes up from the village. An egg is about all I do most days, and in summer we’ve got tomatoes and a bit of green stuff out back.

Oh no, monsieur: it’s kind of you to ask, but there’s no problem. The Mairie takes care of me, you see, and for people like you I really enjoy doing it. You make me feel that what I do has an interest and even, as you might say, a value all its own. He always made me feel that too.

Now watch out for that step: it’s very tricky. I can’t think why we’ve never had it fixed. The path over there will take you back to the village. It’s a bit longer, but it was one of his favorites: you’ll have just time to see how beautiful the park is at twilight. And I wish you a bon voyage.