Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘I thought you were avoiding me,’ she said, kissing Jean. ‘And why haven’t you brought your divine lady friend?’

‘Divine’ was a word much in vogue, which the fashionable young hairdressers with whom she spent a couple of hours every day in order not to look as if she had been to the hairdresser — oh subtle accomplishment of long toil! — used to describe the least of their amazements.

‘She’s not divine,’ he answered. ‘She’s just a woman with a little boy she can’t leave on his own in the evenings.’

He tried not to feel he had been right to hesitate to come and allowed himself to be led towards a group surrounding a bald, plump man with a scarred cheek. Julius Kapermeister had none of the cold, condescending distinction of a Rudolf von Rocroy. The son of a solid line of Dortmund industrialists, he certainly possessed a more than modest opinion of himself, but concealed it beneath an unctuousness that was excessive, particularly if you knew the extent of his official functions — and even later, when you learnt what their objective was. Unused to Germans, Jean had a feeling of unease he found hard to shrug off. Julius spoke precise, heavily accented French, but we shall spare the reader a phonetic transcription of his words. One is enough, and Jesús will for ever chew his French into a sort of pidgin, while Julius had already made considerable progress in less than a year and could express himself relatively fluently in correct French.

‘So here you are, Jean Arnaud!’ he said with affected surprise. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Madeleine, yet never seen you. I was beginning to think you were refusing to meet us! There are one or two French who, it must be said, are rather stubborn — though in one sense I forgive them — they’re reluctant to understand …’

Taking Jean by the arm, he steered him to a sideboard covered in bottles of champagne, whisky and vodka. The dozen or so other guests present looked at Jean with mingled curiosity and envy. Who was the badly dressed but rather good-looking young Frenchman whom Julius was favouring with a private word?

‘What will you have?’ Julius asked.

Jean chose a glass of champagne and Julius served him. A white-gloved servant passed around trays of sandwiches and petits fours that had survived the guests’ first famished rush. Jean refused.

‘Ah, I see, you’re the sporting type!’ Julius exclaimed, clasping his biceps with a firm hand. ‘Which sport?’

‘I sell pictures!’

The German laughed loudly.

‘I know, I know! A very good profession at the present time. The Germans have brought metaphysics, history and music. The French are teaching us taste, good taste, art! And cuisine. Cuisine , Monsieur Arnaud, is the gift of the gods. Have you read Is God French? by our great Friedrich Sieburg?’

‘No,’ Jean said. ‘And I’d be fairly likely to answer the question in the negative.’

‘You mean you think God is not French?’

‘If God exists He must have slipped away for a bit, and it seems to me He doesn’t have a lot of time for us French.’

‘Come, come, come,’ Julius said, wrinkling his pink brow. ‘Do you mean the French lost a war they started because God wasn’t on their side but riding on our tanks instead? I suppose it’s possible. We must talk about it again. It looks to me as if our friend Jesús is looking for you. Such an extraordinary young man and so profoundly original, yet he’s lost the moment he sets foot outside his den. A very shy lion. I say, who is that impressive person following Constantin Palfy? I don’t know her.’

‘Madame Michette, Marceline Michette. Her husband’s a prisoner of war. A former infantry sergeant-major, who re-enlisted in 1939.’

‘I see, I see … We must look into that. And what did Monsieur Michette do in civilian life?’

Jean looked squarely at Julius, to see whether he would raise an eyebrow.

‘The Michettes run a well-known brothel at Clermont-Ferrand. Perhaps the best in the Auvergne. If the Michelin Guide was fair, it would give them three stars. Excellent appearance and morals, perfect service …’

‘What a remarkably interesting person! I suppose she has many political friends …’

‘Not many, I don’t think… local officials perhaps …’

‘You may be forgetting that the capital of France has moved. It’s no longer Paris but Vichy, and from Vichy to Clermont is a mere stone’s throw. And what is she doing in Paris?’

‘You’ll need to ask Constantin.’

Julius moved towards the singular couple, whom Madeleine had already greeted, and Jean found himself on his own next to a servant who was passing round caviar on squares of toast. He took one and the servant asked, ‘Monsieur is only taking one?’

‘Is it rude?’

‘Oh no, Monsieur, but it’s not what people usually do here.’

A young woman with very white skin and very dark eyes walked over to him. He knew the face and tried and failed to put a name to it. The woman smiled at him and picked up a bottle of whisky, half filling her glass. It was not him she had wanted to meet; she had just been on her way to the sideboard. She did not look embarrassed to be seen filling her glass, and as Jean made a vague gesture she stopped.

‘Have we met somewhere?’

‘I have a feeling we have,’ he said.

‘I don’t.’

‘I must be wrong, then.’

‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,’ she said, almost rudely. ‘You don’t know me but you’ve seen me. Somewhere. In a film.’

‘It’s a long time since I’ve been to the cinema.’

She shrugged and turned away. He was alone for a moment and stood watching the guests. Apart from Jesús, Palfy and Madame Michette he knew no one. At a similar occasion in London he would have been able to put names to at least two or three of the faces. Stendhal would have considered it a desperate situation for one of his heroes, greedy to experience the world. What would Julien Sorel have done in his position? He would have had an advantage over Jean, dressed in the black of a future cleric, attracting people’s attention by his combination of good looks, outward reserve, and aggressive conversation. But aggression did not come naturally to Jean. The only way he might be provoked into it, he reflected, was if he started thinking about Claude, the evening he was missing with her, and what she would perhaps have started to confess to him if he had not given in to Jesús’s entreaties. Not that Jesús craved the high life. He wanted to please Madeleine but had refused to go so far as conforming to the conventions of a formal dinner, arriving in his usual suit of heavy corduroy, tieless, shirt open, revealing his thick, curly chest hair and contempt for social niceties, a contempt that might easily have turned him into the hostesses’ darling, had he had any leanings towards a social life beyond Rue Lepic.

Madame Michette, abandoned by Palfy, seemed at a loss. Everything was new here: the apartment’s luxury, its objets d’art , pictures and furniture (she had just run a finger over the marble top of a console table to see whether it had been dusted recently), the servants whose like she had not seen outside the pages of the sagas she read, and the host, a man so powerful that all Paris was queuing up for his invitations. She had had to admire the fact that within a day of her arrival Palfy, apparently waving a magic wand, had led her to this holy of holies at which — supreme revelation — she had simultaneously discovered Madeleine introducing their mutual friend with the title of baron. Why had he not told her? She felt guilty at having sometimes been sharp with him, at having doubted his social standing. Might Jean not be an aristocrat too in that case, despite being less well-dressed and looking profoundly bored? Madame Michette pounced on him.