Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

When he first encountered La Garenne at Michel’s studio, Jean wondered what could have brought together two such radically different beings. The truth was that Michel, disoriented by his move to Paris and hardly knowing his way around, had taken up with La Garenne as a guide, knowing nothing of his racketeering. The dealer had summed him up at a glance, put him in touch with Alberto by renting the apartment beneath him, and steered him towards a gallery that guaranteed his new agent a percentage.

‘I’m working for the future!’ Louis-Edmond had told Jean. ‘Your friend is greatly talented. I shall help him, even if I have to ruin myself in the process.’

He was not ruining himself, but at present was making little profit from Michel, who still had a provincial’s sense of thrift. So either at Alberto’s or Michel’s La Garenne would find a couch and a screen where he could lay his weary body in privacy when his long expeditions around Paris took him far from Rue de la Gaîté.

‘He’s repulsive, I grant you,’ Michel said to Jean, ‘but he has ideas, and Christian charity requires that we must not abandon him at such a time. There is no soul that is completely lost. He sometimes asks me extraordinary questions about salvation and grace. I sense that you’re hostile because you knew him at a time when he was brought low by a woman. This Blanche has been the great curse of his life. Without his mother whom, alas, I didn’t know, a real angel of mercy, of kindness and pity, whose name alone is sublime — Mercedes del Loreto; Loreto where the angels transported the humble abode of the Virgin Mary — without that sublime being he would have sunk into utter wretchedness. Beware women, Jean. There are Blanche de Rocroys everywhere. I don’t need you to tell me that you have a tendency to give yourself up to the pleasures of the senses. You should tread very carefully. A man can only be fulfilled in chastity …’

And are the boys provided by Alberto Senzacatso part of your scheme of chastity? Jean wanted to ask. But he did not. Michel, wrapped in himself, would have been so discombobulated by the question that Jean preferred just to listen to him, with a hypocrisy equal to that of Michel himself. In any case, who cared! There was no doubting his sincerity when he sermonised like this. Despite their past and their childhood when they had hated each other, Jean retained a scrap of affection for the du Courseaus, who had had such a profound influence on him; and remained fascinated too, like an entomologist, by that insect La Garenne and his breathtaking nerve, fooling everyone so completely for a time. Poor Blanche! And she was still trying to help the scoundrel who, not content with humiliating her, was now dragging her name through the mud.

*

In March Antoinette came to Paris for a few days. At twenty-seven, in the eyes of the world in which she lived, she was already an old maid, only fit to be married to a widower with children who would accept her for her dowry if there was one and would close his eyes to a scandalous past. Antoinette brought butter, two chickens killed the previous day and some pâté made by her mother for Michel. Of the gaiety and carelessness that had once enlivened her face, there was no longer any trace in her insipid features. Dressed in black and wearing the sort of felt hat beloved by ladies of good works, she looked older than her years. Her mother had imposed mourning on her for her Mangepain uncle, suddenly departed after an excessively good meal with the Germans, to whom the former radical socialist and freemason had been a most faithful vassal in an obscure pact of collaboration. Oppressed by an absurd observance that meant nothing to her, Antoinette’s youth had vanished. Jean hardly recognised her, yet their last meeting had only been in 1939, two and a half years earlier, an interval that at their ages should have meant nothing. Perhaps at Yssingeaux, when she had come to tell him that he was Geneviève’s son, he had already noticed the first signs of her vitality fading. That day he had desired her, but everything had become impossible with the sudden shift in what was right and wrong, and they had gone their separate ways, sad and disappointed in each other, frozen by inhibition. Antoinette’s arrival in Paris in March 1942 was a serious shock to him. The restraint, humility and awkwardness of the provincial woman in a capital city that frightened her, despite its state of calm and near torpor, robbed him of the happy images of his childhood, of the discovery of love, the scene at the cliff when she had shown him her pretty, plump bottom and the melancholy, tender last night in a Dieppe hotel before his departure for England. He could not believe that this woman in flat-heeled shoes, cotton stockings, and without make-up had inspired in him the first passion of his life. Close to her, he sought in vain the smell of the beaches where they had caressed each other, the barns where they had kissed and fumbled, and the dream of their first night together, when they had made love in almost every room at La Sauveté. Life had swiftly worn Antoinette down, leaving its mark on her once irresistible features. She had started to look like her mother, though she would never inherit Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s character. Women’s lives and men’s march to the beat of different drums. Beauty — strictly speaking, Antoinette had never been beautiful but she had radiated health and a love of pleasure — beauty fades too fast and exposes its blemishes, while in men the same blemishes are taken for signs of character. Jean had felt none of time’s ravages. His discovery of its hold over Antoinette in the space of just a few years was sudden and disagreeable.

The news she brought from Grangeville seemed to come from another country. Albert Arnaud, ill-resigned to growing vegetables, was dragging his leg and grumbling more than speaking; his cousin, Monsieur Cliquet, with whom he was still living, was conducting (with such a mysterious air that it was transparent) a secret campaign on the railways, where he had gone back to working as an interpreter-auxiliary for the German railway workers; Captain Duclou had built a home-made radio and hidden an aerial in the anemometer in his garden to receive the BBC’s French service broadcasts and pass on their news to the village; the Longuets increasingly believed themselves to have been born de La Sauveté; Monsieur Longuet, having reinvented himself as a civil engineer, had signed a contract with the Todt organisation to build bunkers up and down the coast. Thanks to him, there was not a man left unemployed in the neighbourhood, although work appeared to be far from the chief ambition of his son Gontran, who had just married a Mademoiselle de Beausein (the ‘de’ was as doubtful as it gets) from the Rouen bourgeoisie; she had already had visiting cards printed bearing the name ‘Baronne L. de La Sauveté’; the Marquis de Malemort, released from his oflag with a group of other farmers and outraged by this act of usurpation, had insulted Gontran after Mass; the gendarmes, acting on a complaint from the Longuets, had threatened to send him back to his prison camp but he had thrown them out with such aristocratic finality that nothing more was heard of the affair; Chantal was working with her father — Jean wouldn’t recognise her: heavier all round, ruddy, foul-mouthed as a trooper, the last of the Malemorts downed her calvados with all the assurance of the marquis; and the abbé Le Couec, more destitute than ever and fed by the measured charity of his farmers, travelled the countryside on foot, dispensing the one asset in which he was rich, a saintly generosity: people said he was a member of the Breton Liberation Party but at the same time hid Allied airmen shot down over France and guided them to a secret organisation that repatriated them to Britain.