Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Jesús was no more awake than Jean but glimpsed, standing behind Palfy on the landing, the girl who had come to pose for him. She was called Josette and had generous breasts, and portraits of her in outrageous style already furnished the rooms of several German officers and their most bountiful dreams.

‘Not today, Josette! Is the wrong time …’

She cried and he pressed a note into her hand, a remedy he considered, not without justification, to work very effectively whenever disappointment manifested itself. Once Josette was gone, they boiled water for ‘real’ coffee, which they drank with ‘real’ warm croissants. Palfy, finding it hard to sit still, went to the window. Paris was enveloped in a purifying cold, its roofs covered in frost in the clear light of the end of December. A city unlike all others, whose gentle blue and pink breath misted the windows and broke up the sun’s rays.

‘You’re not about to say, “It’s between you and me now!” are you?’ Jean said.

‘Don’t worry. Not a bad idea, though.’

‘Is it all thanks to Madeleine that you got your permit to cross the demarcation line?’

‘Of course! The dear girl. She’s complaining that she never sees you. We saw her last night. Marceline’s very impressed with her.’

‘Marceline?’

‘Ah yes, you didn’t know … Marceline Michette.’

‘The patronne at the Sirène?’

‘So what?’

‘You’re not going to tell me you’re shacking up with the patronne of a brothel now?’

‘No, you ninny! Zizi’s the one I’m after …’

Jean tried to remember the foxy, mocking features of the redheaded Zizi at the Sirène, apparently Palfy’s sort of girl.

‘What about … Marceline’s husband?’

‘Taken prisoner, dear boy! Bravely falling back to Perpignan, his regiment left him behind. There are, sadly, some colonels not worthy of being called the father of their regiment. Now our dear sergeant-major is atoning for France’s sins. Let us salute a warrior and a gentleman. Monsieur Michette! A hero! Not to mention his wife, who yearns to serve her country. Her talents cannot be allowed to lie fallow. In Paris there’ll be no stopping her.’

Jesús poured himself more coffee.

‘The best I ’ave ever drunk!’ he said. ‘This war ’as got to be made to las’.’

‘We’re working on it in high places,’ Palfy assured him. ‘And what about dear Claude? Are you still seeing her?’

‘Every day,’ Jean said, ‘but yesterday she had to go away for a few days …’

‘So everything going all right there then. Good!’

Jean and Jesús looked at each other. Why say more? If Claude returned, her sudden departure — once explained — would be no more than a moment’s upset that was swiftly forgotten, and if she failed to return Palfy would not even notice. Jean’s affairs of the heart had always seemed to him to be pointless aberrations, weaknesses unworthy of a young man destined for a great future. So Jean said nothing: Jesús knew what had happened, and that was enough. In any case Palfy had already moved on, asking Jesús to recount in detail La Garenne’s rackets. The scale of the gallery owner’s hoaxes thrilled him. He immediately wanted to meet this master swindler and have lunch with him.

‘He doesn’t have lunch with anyone,’ Jean said. ‘He’d be too afraid he’d be left with the bill.’

‘I’ll take him out!’

‘You haven’t got any money!’

‘I’ll borrow some from him.’

They burst out laughing.

‘Even supposing you succeed,’ Jean said, ‘which, just between ourselves, would be a stroke of genius, I ought to warn you that as soon as he opens his mouth to speak he’ll start spitting into your food.’

‘I’ll buy him some new dentures.’

‘He’ll resell them as a Surrealist sculpture.’

‘You won’t stop me, you’ll see.’

Jean believed him. His friend had spotted an opportunity and was already plotting to join forces with La Garenne. After all, yes, why not? Jesús was delighted by Palfy.

‘This La Garenne ’e’s a slob. ’E put everyzin’ in iz own pocket. What I like ’e’s that ’e’s connin’ the Boches. For that you need a hombre with big cojones .’

‘No hurry. Let’s give it some thought. I have a few ideas. Today I’m having lunch with Madeleine and her Julius, at Maxim’s, where else?’

‘It’s their local,’ Jean said.

‘I saw this Julius fellow yesterday for the first time. Not uncongenial. A great music lover.’

‘Like that SS officer Karl Schmidt, the one who wanted to shoot us to the strains of his violin?’

‘No grudges, Jean. Very unbecoming. The SS and Wehrmacht are worlds apart. One day the Wehrmacht will wipe out the SS. Julius may not be a Prussian nob but he’s a solid businessman. One of his daughters is married to an English banker in London and one of his sons is at Bern, as an attaché at the embassy. All doors open for him — and he can’t live without Madeleine. You should see her, dear boy. Your attitude upsets her.’

Jean promised. One day … In the meantime he would arrange a meeting with La Garenne. Palfy wrote down Blanche’s name.

‘A Rocroy? That rings a bell. I’ll do some research. By the time I meet her I’ll know everything about her family. What a performance! You’ll see. Come on, come to lunch at Maxim’s, both of you. Madeleine will be so pleased.’

‘Will there be black pudding?’ Jean asked.

‘Black pudding at Maxim’s? You are joking, dear boy.’

Jesús felt as Jean did.

‘I am like ’im, I wan’ black puddin’. They ’ave it in a little restauran’ …’

Palfy shrugged.

‘You’re pathetic, the pair of you. I’ll leave you to it. See you soon.’

He was already halfway down the stairs.

Everything worked out. Very well. La Garenne, whom it cost nothing, suggested an address to Michel du Courseau. A gallery offered him hanging space. For a modest fee. Jesús was unsurprised. According to him, the ascetic nature of the paintings and their religious inspiration made them powerfully prophetic pictures in wartime. They would show the French how to suffer, now that they were without bread and butter, cheese and meat, and going through their own Passion. Their natural masochism would find an outlet in Michel’s display of suffering.

‘Your uncle ’e’s very talented,’ Jesús said approvingly. ‘You’re no’ nice to ’im. Et look like ’e bore you.’

It was true. Michel bored Jean enormously. Not a word he spoke rang true, despite his sincerity. The excessive self-confidence he had always felt spilt over into his art. All around him he saw skilful mediocrities trying to establish themselves in the general confusion. Once he had obtained what he desired, there was no question of his showing his contemporaries any indulgence. Jean who, in reality, barely knew him, so divided in enmity had they been in their childhood, discovered that behind his humble exterior Michel maintained a view of himself that was so superior that no one else actually existed — an idea intensely comforting to a young person aspiring to genius. Even the failure of his first exhibition in spring ’41 — a failure that was unjust because even though there was nothing new in his sombre, passionate approach to his subject, it was still a revelation of a painter brave enough to go against fashion — even that failure was a source of pride to Michel. In the essentially biographical idea he had of what counted as glory, a failure was one more ‘proof’, a necessary expiation that would help him make a name for himself.

But if we occasionally proceed too slowly as far as Jean is concerned, we ought not to go too quickly with the characters in his life. We have scarcely reached the end of 1940, and here we are already talking about Michel du Courseau’s exhibition of religious paintings from spring 1941, just before Hitler sets his Panzer divisions on the Soviet Union; about the death of the prince, also in ’41, in the course of that summer; and a year later about the death of Albert Arnaud. Our only excuse is that our real preoccupation is the unexpected and hasty departure of Claude Chaminadze, shortly before the first Christmas of the occupation. We therefore request that the reader return with us, for a moment, to the three days that followed this dreadful blow to Jean’s existence. He felt he had returned to the aftermath of the departure of Chantal de Malemort in that same building in Rue Lepic where they had lived together so carelessly and happily. With Chantal, however, the disaster had been definitive and complete at the instant of its discovery. With Claude, hope remained: an explanation might be forthcoming that would return their life to what it had been before. Jesús commented, perhaps shrewdly, that Michel du Courseau had the evil eye. Had it not been at the concert he had given in 1939 at the Pleyel that Chantal had run into Gontran Longuet again? Now Michel had reappeared and Claude had vanished. Jean did not believe in the evil eye, but he listened to the Andalusian’s grumbling ruminations and they distracted him from his anxiety and pain. It was Jesús’s belief, in any case, that women went up in smoke several days a month. They returned transparent, as immaterial beings. In reality they no longer existed: it was a proven way for them to rest and not get older, an old trick they had exploited ever since they arrived from that unknown planet to cause us anxieties that only a real, open friendship between men could attenuate … Jesús did not deny that these absences had something magical about them, but refused to explain them to himself in those terms because Spaniards and certainly not Andalusians did not believe in magic. Magic was a Lapp invention at best, or a Scandinavian one at worst, a migratory invention whose effects were most noticeable at the start of winter, when the days shorten and night closes in. Fairies do not exist in hot countries, where the sun wipes out imagination.