Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

End of paragraph about Chantal and the Longuets. I’ve still got lots of news to tell you, but if I write too much you won’t read my letter. Let me know if there’s any way of getting word to my father. He’s never mentioned here. I’m the only one who misses him. Terribly. Don’t laugh. Your affectionate aunt,

Antoinette

His affectionate aunt? Yes, it was true, even though they were so close in age, she twenty-four and he twenty-one, a difference of no significance now, but one that had been so great in his childhood that he had repeatedly been tripped up by it. Had it really been his ‘affectionate aunt’ who had celebrated her nephew’s thirteenth birthday by taking him down a gully to the bottom of the cliffs at Grangeville to show him her bottom, two delicious globes that dimpled where they met the small of her back? Had it been his affectionate aunt who had led him into the hay barn for altogether more serious games? To a bare mattress in the new house her mother was having built? And to a night of melancholy goodbyes in a hotel at Dieppe before he left for England? When he had found out he was Geneviève’s son, it had opened up a gulf between Antoinette and him. But perhaps it was better that way. It was to her he owed his transition to manhood, still more because of her that he had felt jealousy for the first time and suffered his first and greatest disillusionment, although these negative experiences had in the long run been of little use to him, nature in her generosity having endowed him with the ability to forget and to hope. So that the part of her letter that talked of Chantal de Malemort, though it still made his heart ache, no longer deeply affected him. Claude had wiped out all his bad memories. Thanks to her, the world was now a spectacle he could observe with a detached, almost untroubled gaze, a vantage point that let him take things as they were, without disapproval or indignation.

Which was useful, for he needed a healthy dose of indifference to deal with Louis-Edmond de La Garenne’s salacious mischief-making. We have not much discussed this character, except to describe his physical appearance, unflatteringly some will think. It is, admittedly, not kind to point the finger at a man in a wig who imagines he’s the cat’s whiskers, nor to make fun of excessively wide trousers or pointedly hold your nose when a person with bad breath speaks to you. Nature is cruel enough without us adding caricature to the blemishes with which she already makes so free. And since two wrongs don’t make a right, it ill becomes us to invoke Louis-Edmond’s lack of scruples and then display the same fault when speaking of him. But how are we supposed to stifle our laughter when we’re faced with his schemes, and our brickbats when they fail, and how can we feel pity for a wretch so bent on humiliating Blanche de Rocroy? Jean was dismayed and moved by Blanche. She would for ever be downtrodden and ridiculed, or treated with sadistic delight as a pariah by her employer. If he were to sack her, she would starve; at least that was what he let her think. But Jesús — who also felt sorry for her — reassured Jean. He was convinced she liked to be whipped, and that if Louis-Edmond abandoned her she would simply go looking for another tyrant capable of humiliating her to the point of complete degradation.

However, an unexpected meeting that took place in October 1940 was to alter Louis-Edmond’s attitude.

Shivering in a Spanish shawl her grandmother had brought back with her from a pilgrimage to Compostela in 1865, Blanche watched gloomily through the gallery window as the procession of uniformed tourists wended their way around Place du Tertre. These young Teutons did not feel the nip of autumn, with their pink cheeks and blue eyes, their polished boots and black leather belts with buckles stamped Gott mit uns . They lingered in front of the open-air exhibitions, buying their miniature Eiffel Towers and Sacré-Cœurs and postcards of Le Lapin Agile, admiringly contemplating the painters seated on their stools, bearded, their berets tilted down over one ear, pulling on their black pipes and begging tobacco from their audience of nouveaux riches , those soldiers who should have been taken captive with a pot of French jam or a quarter-kilo of butter but who now represented prosperity, strength, the new order.

It was just after lunchtime. Business was slack. Jean was cataloguing his drawings in hell. Louis-Edmond was shut in his office, supposedly working, but in reality asleep with his feet on his desk, trousers and waistcoat unbuttoned, revealing a triangle of rumpled, dirty shirt and a waistband of grey cotton underpants. Blanche stood up as a German officer came into the gallery. She had learnt to recognise the ranks: this one was a colonel. He nodded to her, put his cap under his arm and glanced around at the canvases hanging from the picture rail, a smile of distaste curling his lips. Blanche was about to summon Jean when the officer asked in almost unaccented French, ‘You haven’t anything of interest apart from these horrors, have you? I’m looking for a Utrillo.’

The rule laid down by La Garenne was to make it clear that the gallery possessed many valuable reserves, far from the public’s vulgar gaze.

‘I’m sure we have. I’ll have to ask Monsieur de La Garenne. He’s an unusual proprietor and a very bad dealer. When he finds a picture he likes, he refuses to sell it. He’d like to keep everything for himself. But he can be persuaded … if you’re a genuine lover of art.’

The German smiled.

‘In that case I’ll leave you my name. You can call me in the mornings at the Hôtel Continental.’

Removing his black leather glove, he wrote in the visitors’ book ‘Rudolf von Rocroy’.

‘Von Rocroy!’ Blanche exclaimed, her heart beating fast. ‘My name’s Rocroy too, Blanche de Rocroy. I was always hearing my father talking about the German branch of our family …’

‘Yes, we do come from France originally; we emigrated to Germany after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. My father used to keep in touch with a cousin of his: Adhémar de Rocroy—’

‘That was my father.’

‘So we’re cousins too.’

Blanche clasped her hands together. Fortune was smiling on her at last, in the shape of this cousin with clean-cut features, piercing blue eyes and manners she had straightaway identified as perfect. The last of the French Rocroys, the pitiful straggler of a once great line, had rediscovered her pride in the family name. All was not lost. The younger branch had kept the flame firmly alight, and its representative was both a dashing officer and a victor.

‘Do you have children? I do hope so!’ she innocently exclaimed.

‘Four. Two little Rocroy boys to be on the safe side, and two girls.’

Praise be! The Rocroy line was indeed assured.

‘In that case, come and see me tomorrow at the Continental instead. We’ll lunch together and you can tell me what interesting things you have in your secret reserves … I’ve already forgotten your owner’s name.’

‘Louis-Edmond de La Garenne. He doesn’t awfully look like it, but he’s descended from a crusader.’

Rudolf von Rocroy raised an eyebrow in silent approval. He kissed his cousin, as cousins do in well-born families, and the following day over lunch he even addressed her as tu and Blanche, who had only addressed three people as tu in her entire life, was clearly required to respond in kind. She had brought von Rocroy good news: La Garenne owned a number of paintings of the sort that interested him — Utrillos, Derains, Braques and Picassos — although it would take a little time to have them brought to Paris from the country where they had been stored since the outbreak of war.