MICHEL TOURNIER
179
For want of a pipe, he closed his eyes and allowed himself a good
minute of voluptuous, smiling, Buddhist reflection.
"The police are looking for you," he finally said. "It would be
my duty to denounce you. I'll give some thought to what I can do for
you. But I need proof that you have total, blind confidence in me.
It's very simple, then. Go back to your hiding place. Come back to–
morrow at the same time. There won't be any trap. That'll prove
that you have confidence in me. Then we shall be united in a pact.
You're quite free not to come back."
The next day, Bob was there.
"You can't rely on my giving evidence about the letters," Lucien
told him. "But I have something better to offer you. The day after
tomorrow we'll be crossing the frontier into Italy. I'll take you
with me."
Bob fell on his knees in the caravan and kissed his hands.
It was child's play for Lucien to smuggle him over the frontier
by hiding him in his bed. He insisted that he should stay hidden dur–
ing the circus's stops at San Remo, Imperia, and Savone. He waited
until Genoa to introduce him to Signor d'Urbino as a friend met by
chance in the crowd, with whom he intended to stage a new act.
They started work right away .
The enormous difference in their height in itself suggested
several classic numbers. One such mime act was the battle of David
and Goliath, to which Lucien had added a finale of his own inven–
tion. After the giant had fallen onto the ground, his conqueror blew
him up with a bicycle pump. From then on he was an obese, docile,
flabby pachyderm, rolling from one side of the arena to the other at
the mercy of the dwarf who handled and manhandled him . He put
him to various personal uses: as a pneumatic mattress to take a nap
on, as a trampoline to leap up into the apparatus, as a punching bag.
And the colossus was always ridiculed and trounced by his minus–
cule adversary. Finally Lucien perched himself astride his neck and
put on an enormous overcoat that covered Bob right down to his an–
kles. And they perambulated in this fashion, having become a single
man eight-feet-two tall, Bob blinded and obliterated by the coat,
Lucien perched on high, imperious and wrathful.
It
was when they reverted to the great tradition of the whiteface
clown and the August that their entrance took on its definitive form
and crowned Lucien's triumph . The whiteface clown, made up, titi-
