Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘I haven’ anysing agains’ the foie gras . Is quite pretty on a plate with this little black truffle and the nice white border.’

‘You have to be an artist to notice that sort of thing,’ Madeleine said.

The husband of the woman with the fish-eyed stare decided it was time to speak.

‘Monsieur is a painter? I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Rhesús! Rhesús Infante!’

‘He means Jesús, of course,’ Palfy added, his eyes sparkling with pleasure at so much stupidity spread out before him.

‘No one is allowed to call himself Jesús!’ Madame Michette said indignantly. ‘It is … blasphemous.’

‘No’ allowed! No’ allowed!’ Jesús shouted, choking.

Jean saw Madeleine looking desperate. Her dinner was going downhill. He rushed to her rescue.

‘Madame Michette means that in the Auvergne it’s not customary. No one would call their son Jesús. Not even a bishop. But in Spain, and especially in Andalusia, Jesús is a familiar … presence, someone people talk to every day, to praise him, to curse him or pray to him. Is that right, Jesús?’

‘Is true.’

Nelly Tristan leant towards Jean a second time and whispered, ‘Don’t you find a woman who’s drunk disgusting?’

A servant was circulating constantly, a bottle in his hand, each time filling up her glass, which, as soon as it was full, she emptied. She was looking paler and paler. Her gaze shimmered with a general, directionless tenderness.

‘No,’ Jean said quietly.

‘I’m not talking about going to bed, I mean in a general way.’

These private exchanges were arousing the disquiet of a fat, fortyish man in a loud tie seated at the far end of the table. He was unable to hear Nelly’s words but appeared anxious to avoid the scene he felt was on the point of erupting. It came as a visible relief to him when Nelly stood up, pushed back her chair and, addressing Madeleine in an affected voice, said, ‘Where’s the little girls’ room, darling?’

The fortyish man stood up too and asked Madeleine to excuse him.

‘I’ll show her.’

‘As you like.’

He took Nelly’s arm and they left the dining room.

‘You know she’s amazingly talented!’ Madeleine said.

‘She is,’ Julius said, ‘and also very lucky to have a producer like Émile Duzan. He’s like a father to all his stars.’

‘All the same,’ Palfy said, ‘I rather think there’s an age when daddies stop taking their little girls to the toilet, and she’s past it.’

‘Very unhealthy curiosity, I call it!’ Madame Michette said. ‘Now my girls …’

She stopped and looked at Palfy, who smiled back with perfect sweetness, inviting her to go on.

‘You have many girls?’ Julius asked.

‘Quite a few!’ Madame Michette said, embarrassed.

‘I’m sure they’re ravishing!’ Oscar Dulonjé said unpleasantly.

‘That’s not for me to say!’ Madame Michette simpered. ‘All I can tell you is that they’re well brought up …’

The servants changed the plates and the butler carved a joint of roast beef whose arrival monopolised the guests’ attention for some time. A young man with a ferret-like profile who had been silent before grasped the opportunity to say a few words.

‘Did you know that the Schillertheater is coming to Paris next month? The French will finally have a chance to get to know Schiller.’

‘Indeed,’ Julius said, ‘that’s no bad thing. Schiller’s a European writer whose reputation has suffered — though no longer — from the disharmony between France and Germany. Alas, I hear they’re putting on Kabale und Liebe ,12 which is far from being one of his best plays. Franco-German relations deserve a little more care.’

Madame Michette helped herself shamelessly to three slices of roast beef, a liberty she would never have allowed herself at Zizi’s table, but in all this warmth and luxury and feeling of being with the right people she was losing her sense of proportion.

‘In return,’ the young man said, ‘you should do Claudel. Apparently he’s very good in German …’

‘I’ve never read Claudel,’ Julius said, ‘but I hear a lot of talk about him. He was a director of Gnome and Rhône,13 which is working for our new Europe now, and a distinguished ambassador. The Comédie Française has a project it wants my help with. A very large number of costumes. In these times of restriction it’s not easy to lay one’s hands on the necessary fabric, but we’ll do our best. I think the play’s called The Satin Slipper …’

Nelly Tristan had just come back into the room with her producer, smiling happily, and pounced on the play’s name.

‘ The Satin Slipper! It’s gorgeous. I’ve read it — it must be at least ten hours long. I love Claudel. I recited his ode to Marshal Pétain for schoolchildren. Everyone cried. And there was a prayer that reminded me I was one of Mary’s children …’

Suddenly there occurred a miraculous moment, which captivated all the dinner guests as Nelly, whom they hardly knew and whom they looked down on with the bourgeois disdain proper towards actresses and kept women — and Nelly was both — as Nelly lowered her voice and in a tone of unexpected and pure emotion recited Claudel’s very beautiful prayer:

‘I see the open church, and must go in. It’s midday.

Mother of Jesus, I haven’t come to pray.

I’ve nothing to ask of you, nothing to say.

I’ve come here, Mother, just to look at you, and not look away …’

Nelly hiccuped and frowned.

‘Shit! I can’t remember the rest, but it’s really lovely. By the end I was crying too. It’s good that I’ve forgotten it, really, isn’t it? What’s this? Roast. Madeleine darling, we do stuff ourselves with you. I adore you, and Julius too. You know, if you and Julius weren’t having this big thing together, I’d be your girlfriend just like that …’

Émile Duzan was squirming on his chair, pink and embarrassed.

‘Listen, Nelly, just stop drinking, will you?’

‘Poor love, I’m making him uncomfortable. He’s such a sensitive flower.’

‘I like it when people are honest!’ Madame Michette said.

‘I’m flattered!’ Julius declared.

‘Me too!’ Madeleine added.

‘Can I have the mustard?’ the woman with the fish-eyed stare asked.

They gave her her mustard and she said no more for the rest of the evening, except as she was leaving, when she said goodbye and thank you in a tight-lipped way. The remaining guests wondered why she had been invited, and if she had even been aware of being at dinner with other people, whose wandering conversation never actually appeared to reach her, even when her husband raised his voice to say, ‘My wife and I …’ The rest of the dinner passed off in the same way. Jesús had a spat with the ferret-faced young man when he expressed his scorn for modern painting, and Oscar Dulonjé and Émile Duzan discovered with equal emotion that both had joined the same political party on the same day, the party whose great objective was France’s entry into Hitler’s united Europe.

In the drawing room, where they returned after dinner, Palfy elaborated an interesting theory concerning the curfew and the rise in the birth rate, despite two million men being confined in stalags and oflags. Julius became embarrassed and attempted to change the subject several times; Palfy took no notice. Jean was probably the only guest to discern, behind his friend’s salacious speculations, the ironic and mischievous sense of humour he had cultivated in England during his brief period of splendour. As the hours went by Madame Michette became redder and redder, victim to the high blood pressure she suffered from every time she mixed white wine, claret, champagne and Alsatian cherry brandy. But that was what people had come for: to drink and eat and turn their back on daily hardships. They had drunk and they had eaten. Now their fear of missing the second-to-last Métro and the last connection was beginning to be all-pervasive; Nelly, who, having sobered up once, was well on the way to getting drunk again, provided the last event of the evening. She snagged her stocking, and it ran. Madeleine immediately brought her a new pair and, beneath the concupiscent gaze of the male guests, she hitched up her skirt and changed them. There was a glimpse of frothy white lace knickers, of the sort worn by French cancan dancers.