Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

As soon as they arrived in the town centre they dispersed according to a prearranged plan. Madame Michette installed herself at the Café Riche, next to the telephone booth. Palfy and Jean sat at a table some distance away, pretending to ignore their new friend, who ordered a beer and immersed herself in a spy novel. With a passion unexpected in a person as down to earth as she was, she had, in the space of a night, taken the bait put down by Palfy and decided, by every possible means including the consumption of pulp novels on the subject, to begin her training as a secret agent.

The wait lasted all morning. Palfy rejoiced in his machinations. Jean was the only one not to believe it would work, even though the preparations had crystallised in his mind’s eye an idealised image of the young woman he had glimpsed during the parade. In the shabby, heavily perfumed surroundings of the Sirène, that image was like a window open onto a scrap of sky, a hope that a world more sympathetic to his tastes and his aspirations still existed despite the debacle of the past month.

‘I feel we’re on our way to great things,’ Palfy murmured. ‘The era is eminently favourable to those who venture all. We shall have fun.’

‘I’ll admit it hasn’t got off to a bad start. I adore Madame Michette.’

‘France is full of Madame Michettes. We shall fill their heads with dreams.’

‘You’ll fill their heads. Not me.’

Palfy waved his hand irritably.

‘Are you starting again? Listen, dear boy, I don’t know how many times you’ve tried to back out, but it’s time to stop. I know your excellent soul, your rectitude, your honesty, your courage and loyalty. All well and good, I’m in the picture. You can’t shock me any more. But from now on, life is about living, so put all that on one side for the next few years. We own nothing, hardly even the shirts on our backs. We’re starting again from nothing. I have a few ideas and you’ve got a sweet mug — women like you. On my own I can’t do anything, and if you go it alone you’ll end up doing ghastly little jobs: delivering parcels, or bouncer at a nightclub. Think about it …’

‘Then explain to me,’ Jean said, ‘why your cheating makes me feel so uncomfortable. I should be getting used to it and recognising that it’s justified most of the time, because all you’re really doing is taking advantage of human stupidity. But I can’t help it: every time something inside me says no.’

‘My dear chap, I’m afraid these scruples of yours are metaphysical in origin. They’re an artificial distinction, produced by centuries of tradition, between good and evil. Trust me on this: get out of the habit, or you’ll be doomed to play the game of a society that doesn’t give a shit about your soul and will happily exploit you like a slave …’

A slave? Wasn’t one a slave to everything? To one’s social status, one’s passions, one’s stupidity or clear-sightedness for that matter? Jean would have liked to muse on the question at greater length, without immediately answering yes or no to Palfy, for whom, ever since they had enlisted, he had felt real friendship, even something close to admiration. Palfy shone a light on life, painted it in bold colours, set traps for him. Unfortunately, every time events seemed to point to perfect happiness, they had a tendency to come to grief and everything went back to square one. Staring out of the café window, Jean felt sceptical about the possibilities Palfy saw in the situation: he saw only a quiet street, women carrying shopping bags, a queue outside a butcher’s twenty people long, several closed steel shutters. After the emotions sparked by the parade, life was returning to normal, as dull as before, with the same hardships making themselves felt and starting to monopolise people’s thoughts, as night followed day. How could one hope to succeed in a defeated country that, since the unprovoked massacre of its sailors at Mers el-Kébir, no longer knew whether yesterday’s allies were not today’s enemies and whether the enemy currently occupying half the country in such a disciplined way would not become tomorrow’s friend? To be able to see clearly these days demanded a particular lucidity, one that no single person possessed. Reason dictated simply surviving until one could see things more distinctly. No one knew what was happening in Paris or the rest of France. Jean thought about his father. How was he feeling now, the old leftist pacifist who had remained so loyal to his ideas that he was willing to insult French officers in the street while a war was going on? Jean had disappointed him deeply by enlisting on the eve of the conflict.

‘I need to see my father,’ Jean said.

Palfy shrugged.

‘Forget it. You’ve got to leave all that alone now too.’

One of the girls from the Sirène came into the café. She brought an address. Madame Michette made a note. By the end of the morning she had half a dozen other addresses. Posted at different crossroads, the girls had observed six possible Claudes and trailed them to where they lived. Six was too many. Jean did not hide his scorn. He found Palfy’s new ploy risible, an ugly caricature of the carefree pleasure to be had from a sudden encounter with a desirable face and a tantalising outline in the morning sunshine. After lunch he refused to accompany Palfy when he set off, list in hand, to find the real Claude. He was thrown into an even greater panic when his friend returned triumphant. Claude existed! And she was waiting for him, in a café on Place de Jaude. First they had to put on an elaborate act for Madame Michette, whose chest had swelled to bursting and who expected a medal at the very least.

‘Get going!’ Palfy ordered. ‘I have a hunch that you’ve got an incredible opportunity waiting for you this time, one you can’t pass up. She’s much more beautiful than we thought when we first caught sight of her. A refugee from the north. Lives in Paris. Get a move on, I tell you! The future is yours.’

‘I won’t know what to say to her, I don’t know her.’

‘You’ll think of something.’

He went, pursued by Palfy, who, suspecting he might try to run away, did not want to give him the opportunity.

‘What did you say to her?’ Jean asked as they reached the café.

‘Nothing. I didn’t need to. She guessed.’

‘I haven’t even got enough to buy her a drink.’

‘I thought of that. Here.’

He held out a 500-franc note.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘What do you care?’

‘Was it Zizi?’

‘Yes, clever dick. She’s mad about us.’

‘It makes me feel sick.’

‘We’ll pay her back a hundred times over.’

The time for hesitating was over. Palfy turned and walked away. Inside the café the young woman was sitting at a table on her own. She smiled when she saw him walk in.

‘So it is you,’ she said.

Jean had never read On Love .3 Had he ever opened it, he would probably have shut it again immediately. Theories left him cold, and the philosophy of love had not yet revealed itself to him. Jostled and pre-empted by reality, as spoilt as a little prince and punished as only the innocent are, he had never thought love could be expressed in cut-and-dried formulas. The cold-eyed clarity of Stendahl’s Julien Sorel, punctuated by outbursts of frenzy, left him annoyed and disbelieving. In truth, being incapable of calculation, he found it natural that fortune should smile on him more than other young men of his age. Life had granted him, very young, two capital experiences and he felt they would never be repeated, at least not in the same way. A shred of reason restrained him — reason that was swept away by the words ‘So it is you’ and by the amused look the speaker directed at him. He felt suddenly awkward and ridiculous, and so inferior to the lovely woman staring at him that it was all he could do not to take to his heels. Sitting facing her, he was unaware that the crystallisation around her fleeting outline had turned into a real love that was almost comfortable in its reciprocity, however undeclared it was, and that he was preparing for this young woman with her nose dotted with pale freckles, her unmade-up mouth that scorned lipstick, and short hair that exposed her lovely, gazelle-like neck, to be the love of his life — even long after everything was finished between them — and that his only distress, as it is with every happy love, would be not to know how to love her enough. In short, as she sat in front of him with her chin resting on the palm of a hand ornamented at the wrist by a green malachite bracelet, she was the natural intermediary a boy of twenty needed in order to embark upon manhood.