Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

So it is with his adoptive father, Albert Arnaud, wounded equally by loneliness, the devastation of his pacifist dreams and of France, by the country’s occupation under those he continues to refer to as ‘the Uhlans’, and by Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s practical initiative to plant cabbages, carrots and potatoes where there should have been rhododendron beds, azaleas and oriental flowering cherries. Perhaps his reaction was absurd and disproportionate, but let us reflect for a moment on the kind of existence Albert Arnaud had had: a childhood and adolescence that was far from well-off, a coming of age at a local brothel and then marriage to a kind and generous woman who nevertheless could hardly be said to have lived her life with a deep sense of romance. Then had come the four years of the Great War and the loss of his leg at the bottom of a muddy shell-hole. The unexpected arrival of the baby Jean had swiftly turned into a mixed blessing, as Albert had watched his adopted son grow up with the children from La Sauveté, Michel and Antoinette du Courseau, and privately felt that nothing good could come of it. He sensed, not without reason, that Jean would be happy neither at home nor with the du Courseaus, tugged in two directions by different worlds that would both reject him as a hybrid, belonging to neither. And Jean would certainly not become a gardener.

Albert’s accumulated knowledge — his only capital — that he would have liked to bequeath to the boy, Jean did not want. In any case, he did not have green fingers: whenever he planted something, it almost never turned out well. So let us not mock Albert’s disappointment when, instead of his flowers, he sees vegetables growing, and let us compare him to a man who has spent his life reading and suddenly finds himself in a universe purged of books. Without twisting words and their meaning, let us say that flowers are his culture. Without flowers, existence lacks the one gratuitous element that justifies it: the creation of beauty. They are his poetry, the thoughts he can’t manage to articulate, the pictures he dreams of and that the earth has given him, perfect and complete, the symbols of a world of exquisite grace.

Jean had not wanted flowers, or political ideas; instead, in 1939 he had enlisted. Albert had felt deeply wounded and the wound had been, in the larger sense of destiny, like a denial of justice. The abbé Le Couec’s patient explanations were to no avail. The facts were there. Albert did not reproach Jean. His elevated and democratic notion of individual liberty forbade it. Adoptive father and adopted son will not see one another again. Jean writes phrases of such banality that even he finds them depressing. From Antoinette, their go-between, he gets conventional answers: ‘Your father’s in good health and hopes you are too.’ She faithfully writes down these sentences, adding as a PS, ‘He’s sad, grumpy, stoical and never smiles.’

When Jean finally has an opportunity to travel to Grangeville, it happens to be on 19 August 1942, the morning a commando unit of Cameron Highlanders from Winnipeg lands at the foot of the cliffs, slips between the German bunkers and reaches the village. At Puys and on the esplanade at Dieppe the remaining commando units are pinned down by the German defences. But at Grangeville and a little further south, at the Pointe d’Ailly lighthouse, Lord Lovat’s № 4 Commando at the foot of the cliff — at the spot where Antoinette first showed Jean her bottom — and the Cameron Highlanders have met no resistance. They blow up a coastal artillery battery, the one placed in the former garden of Captain Duclou, Jeanne Arnaud’s uncle, and for a time their advance is practically a victory parade as they hand out cigarettes and sweets, pat children’s cheeks and then, joining up with the South Saskatchewan Regiment which has surrounded Pourville without succeeding in taking it, return to their landing craft. Albert is at the roadside. He recognises the khaki uniforms and the soldiers in their tin hats.

His memories of 1914 are like a lump in his throat. Forgetting his neutrality, he limps as fast as he can towards them, waving his arms to stop them turning onto a path where a Wehrmacht patrol is lying in wait. German and Canadian bullets riddle his body, easily a hundred or more, for no one counts the bullets when they’re waging war. Let us merely record that when it is over, there is nothing left of Albert. The pieces of him are collected with a fork and spade and tipped into a sack.

Jean is turned back at Rouen without explanation. He nevertheless manages to get through to Antoinette by telephone and from her learns that Albert, according to his oft-expressed wish, has been buried without a religious service. The ceremony is attended only by the du Courseaus, Captain Duclou, stunned and muttering and making no sense, Monsieur Cliquet who repeats over and over again, ‘That’s what happens to pacifists’, and the abbé Le Couec, who is wearing an ordinary suit so as not to disturb his friend’s soul’s rest but who, through the long night that follows, will pray for him at the foot of the altar. It is all over for Albert, and we shall miss him. He will no longer pitch his stubborn ideas against an unreliable and inconstant world in which men and women of his ancient stamp have no place. A little of France as she once was has been extinguished with his passing.

And while we are on the subject of the dead, let us mention too that a year earlier, in the summer of 1941, the prince slipped away at Beirut. That enigmatic figure simply stopped breathing one night. At dawn his secretary/chauffeur/right-hand man, Salah, bent over him to wake him up. He lightly touched the hand that lay on the sheet, and it was cold. The prince was a wax statue, his papery yellow skin stretched over a bony mask. He was buried according to the rites of his religion, and that afternoon friends gathered at Geneviève’s. She displayed impressive dignity. Perhaps she was already aware of what the prince’s will contained. She had inherited a substantial fortune, but not its management. Salah with his dark complexion was stepping into the light, and there were those who murmured spitefully, in Beirut as in Alexandria, that he was now more than merely Geneviève’s legal representative, which was untrue. And she herself was at risk. Lebanon’s climate did not suit her. She felt she needed to get to Switzerland, which, despite her possessing influential contacts, looked to be almost impossible, and it took her until December 1941 to make it happen and find her way to a small village in Valais, hidden away in the mountains, called Gstaad, where she rented the first floor of a modest country hotel.

As for the famous letter given to Jean by the prince before the outbreak of war, it remains unopened. To be honest, Jean attaches no importance to it, and the only person to suspect its true value is Palfy. Which is, one imagines, why his first question when he arrives in Paris on Christmas Eve of 1940 is, ‘Have you still got the letter?’

Jean is no longer even very sure where he has put it, and it has to be said that at that moment it is the least of his worries. Claude left him the day before, and he has not yet got over this latest sudden twist of fate. During the night Jesús and he have polished off a bottle of calvados between them, a present in a parcel from Antoinette. Waking up has been exceptionally painful and there is no respite: here is Constantin Palfy, knocking at the door in an elegant grey flannel suit.

‘You’re my first port of call,’ he says. ‘You look like death warmed up. I bring you “real” coffee and “real” croissants. Everything is real!’

‘Even me, who’s a real idiot.’

‘Ah, delectatio morosa … that is you all over, my dear Jean.’