The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

that we should all now climb into the car, and I will take you to the cave site. Then I’ll tell you the second.”
    This time they all piled into a single limousine. Lespinasse drove, Manners sat beside him, and Malrand had somehow managed to place himself in the back with a woman on either side. He looked very pleased with himself. They parked at la Ferrassie, and Malrand led the way, Lespinasse coming after with a large picnic basket from the trunk of the car. It was a brisk climb, but the old man seemed infused with energy and set an urgent pace. Finally they came out, as Lydia had suspected from the sketch map, on the same green sward where she and Manners had disported themselves so delightfully the previous day. She caught his eye and tried one of Clothilde’s winks. He blushed. Good.
    “Here we are,” said Malrand. “I come here from time to time. It’s a lovely spot. The first time was with your two fathers, in September of 1944, after they had liberated Toulouse and got me out of prison. We collected all the cartridge cases, and tidied up the mound of rocks, over there behind that leaning tree.”
    Lespinasse opened the picnic basket, and took out a small silver tray, some flutes, and a bottle of champagne. The cork popped noisily, and he poured five glasses. One for himself, Lydia noted, approvingly.
    “Was that the tree that was blown aside by the German mortar?” asked Manners, strolling across to it, as Lespinasse served the champagne.
    “Yes, and still alive. I suppose the taproot gets water.” The tree seemed to emerge from a large, grass-covered mound. There was no sign of fissure in the rock.
    “Well, a toast to your dear father, and may he rest in peace, along with yours, Lespinasse,” said Malrand, sipping and surveying the grass, the trees, the sky, as if it were simply marvelous to be alive on such a day.
    “You were going to tell us the second thing you wanted, François,” said Lydia, her curiosity too insistent to be silent.
    “Yes, I was,” he said slowly. “I spent a lot of time dreading that this tale would come out, and now it has, I’m not sure it will be so bad after all. And above all, I think I want to look at the portraits of our ancestors, that first Frenchwoman and Frenchman, those first children of Périgord, once again before I die.”
    He strolled over to the grassy mound and rested his hand against the leaning tree.
    “I particularly want to see her again, the woman of the cave. I have carried a great tendresse for that woman since 1944. So did my English friend, your father. And the older he got, as we sat up late at night and talked about it all, the more he seemed to confuse her with his Sybille. Or the more they seemed to come together in his mind. And you can appease an old man’s vanity by confirming or refuting something that has nagged me for over fifty years. Something your father said, Lespinasse, about the portrait of the man looking rather like me. I’d feel very honored if it were true.”
    He raised his glass in salute to the mound. “To them, our ancestors, whoever they were,” he said, and drank.

Author’s Note
    This is a work of fiction, which seeks to remain faithful to the little that is known of Neolithic culture some seventeen thousand years ago and to the far better known history of the Resistance of the Périgord region of France in 1944. The connections between the two go far beyond the simple coincidence of geography. The Resistance frequently took advantage of caves in which to sleep, shelter and store weapons, caves that in some cases had been inhabited almost continuously for thirty millennia. In the course of researching this book, I learned that “Berger,” the Resistance name of the celebrated writer and future Gaullist minister André Malraux, boasted during a visit to the cave of Lascaux in 1969 that he had stored weapons there, even leaning his bazookas against the famous sketch of the eviscerated bison and the slain man with the head of a bird. Like many of Malraux’s reminiscences, this seems to have been rather too cavalier with the truth.
    André Malraux and the late President François Mitterand, whose complicated politics included a period of apparent adherence to the Vichy regime before he joined the Resistance, are the joint inspirations for my fictional character François Malrand. André Malraux, who wrote ambitious and grandiose novels of love and revolution and fought in Spain in the 1930s, was a