Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Jean wondered whether, apart from what concerned his adoptive father and the dear abbé, these pieces of news still had any meaning for him. That world was no longer his, and never would be again. He had bid it farewell the day he had challenged it and fled to Paris with Chantal de Malemort. He no longer had a refuge there and he was sufficiently wise now not ever to want to see Chantal again. Even Antoinette bored him a little by reminding him of the milieu in which he had lived. He found her drab and lifeless, far from his own preoccupations; he took her to the theatre where she was mystified by Giraudoux, and to the Opéra where she fell asleep during a ballet. They talked about Michel, whom she admired as a man about Paris, without a hint of irony. He became annoyed with her for her awkwardness that tarnished his picture of the past. Yes, he was shedding his baggage or, to put it another way, he was discovering his solitude, the daunting wasteland in which he would have found himself if it had not been for Nelly. He would have liked to talk to Antoinette about the young woman who had given his life so much colour, about Claude who had sunk so deep into the darkness. But it was easier to say nothing, and those withheld confidences separated him from the woman who had been his first love.

He went with her to Gare Saint-Lazare. On the platform neither of them knew what to say. Antoinette put her cardboard suitcase up in the luggage rack and rested her arms on the open window.

‘I’m happy to have seen you again, looking so well,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Same here.’

‘You won’t forget?’

‘We don’t forget anything.’

She still hesitated.

‘I do! I forgot to tell you I met one of your old friends, Joseph Outen. He’s been released from his stalag. He asked for news of you.’

‘What’s he doing?’

She put a finger to her lips. Jean knew she had not forgotten to tell him about Joseph. She had not dared. German soldiers smelling strongly of leather and coarse cloth passed behind him, looking for their reserved carriage. Antoinette followed them with her eyes.

‘Come closer,’ she said.

He went closer, and she held out her hand. He squeezed it.

‘He’s full of odd qualities,’ she added with unexpected warmth. ‘He’s interested in all sorts of things. He’s learning English at the moment …’

‘He was learning Chinese once too.’

‘Oh, that’s all over … A youthful mistake. English is more useful for what he’s doing now.’

She put on a knowing look. The platform staff were slamming the doors.

‘It looks as if the train will leave on time. Monsieur Cliquet will be happy.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Joseph I’ve seen you. He was worried about you. He’s always saying how talented you are and that you were the best oarsman at Dieppe Rowing Club. He told me to tell you that you should take up yoga, like him. I don’t really understand what all the exercises are about, but apparently it helps concentrate your mind …’

At the last minute she was confessing what she had not dared to admit since she had arrived: that in Joseph Outen she might have found a last hope. Jean was moved and reproached himself for not having helped her.

‘You should come to Dieppe,’ she said. ‘You get on so well together. He has big plans …’

All his life Joseph would have big plans, which would fail one after another. Now it was Antoinette’s turn to be on the receiving end of his fervour. Her face lit up because she was talking about him. He was probably waiting for her at Dieppe, where they saw each other in secret. Antoinette would only ever have guilty love affairs. The finger on her lips, the knowing look meant that Joseph had got himself involved in clandestine activity, that he was riding a new hobbyhorse. But he was not up to it, and it would beat him the way he had been beaten by his previous enterprises. Poor Antoinette! The widower and his children would be waiting at the end of the line.

The train began to move.

‘I’ll come,’ he said. ‘This summer. Definitely.’

He walked beside the carriage. Antoinette was smiling and crying at the same time. Their fingertips touched. Jean stopped and soon saw only an arm and a hand waving a handkerchief. The reader already knows that there was no return to Dieppe in the summer of 1942, when the Canadians landed. Jean did not see his adoptive father again. As for Joseph, it is the author’s turn to know more than the reader and to anticipate the story. The former bookseller, who has had no further impact on Jean’s life after being his first mentor, has resurfaced in his mind almost by accident, one afternoon on a station platform. Yes, he is Antoinette’s lover. Flimsy, furtive encounters that only bring them, because of their blindness, a brief elation that disguises a reality both mediocre and without a future. Lacking any experience, Joseph has set up an intelligence network that he has christened, with some pomp, Light and Truth. The network is composed of amateurs whose best weapons are faith and naivety. Each day Monsieur Cliquet provides a breakdown of the German convoys bringing equipment and troops to the Normandy coast. The Allies will take no account of this information that summer and find themselves massacred quite unnecessarily. Aside from Monsieur Cliquet, transport expert, the network’s other members know no more than Madame Michette, but Marceline is supervised, used by professionals whom she obeys as only women who wield authority themselves know how to obey. Joseph’s team, knowing nothing about secrecy, take grossly innocent risks that for six months produce a number of results. With the disaster of the butchered Canadians, Joseph learns his lesson. The Allied high command has refused to listen. In disgust he decides to dismantle his network. But it is too late. A woman has been arrested by chance. Within minutes she provides the names of the entire Light and Truth network.

Monsieur Cliquet dies in the carriage taking him to Germany and Joseph is deported with his companions, apart from the woman who so kindly betrayed them and who is then turned to work for the Sicherheitsdienst. As he already speaks German and knows the conditions in the camps, Joseph survives; the only one. At the end of May 1945 he is repatriated and parades through Dieppe with other former prisoners in their striped uniforms under a banner that reads, ‘Never again!’, a declaration all believe in, until the moment the world is covered in new concentration camps which humankind’s finer feelings this time forbid it from describing in such terms.

But Joseph has come back too late. The scramble for the spoils is over. The gluttons have scoffed the lot; the jobs are all taken and Antoinette has married Pierre du Gros-Salé, a squire from thereabouts, a widower as we foresaw with six children who need to have their arses wiped and their noses blown and be brought up without, of course, displaying a scrap of gratitude. Joseph is a decent man. He will not bother her. His consolation prize is a post as tutor at Dieppe’s lycée. For a moment he believes himself to be a guide to young souls to be moulded, but rapidly discovers that they are frightful brats who like to mock his skeletal thinness, imitate the lisp he acquired when the Gestapo knocked all his teeth out and which he cannot afford to fix because he has no money for dentures, and make fun of his ugly demob suits and hollow, hacking cough. So he leaves, for black Africa where he has discovered that his status as ‘resistant and deportee’ is enough to earn him a headmastership. Here he feels for a time that he is contributing to the radiance of France and introducing its values to the young and awakening intelligences of his pupils. It does not take him long to realise that this too is a mirage. The ‘young, awakening intelligences’ are only interested in kicking him out, him and his radiant France. He will die stupidly in Douala in 1956 from a scorpion bite, mourned by his companion, a pretty Fula woman with copper-coloured skin who has given him a daughter they christened Antoinette. Exit Joseph, whose life is remarkable in one respect, that it is as touching and insignificant as it is a failure from start to finish. In short, he is one of those beings from whom those of a superstitious bent do well to keep their distance: he brings bad luck, and worse, poor man’s bad luck. He himself realises it in the few minutes before he dies, in one of those dazzling visions the grim reaper apparently allows, like a condemned man’s last drink. Lucid at the finish, he is relieved to slip away. His daughter, his honey-coloured baby, is brought to him and he smiles at her but refuses to kiss her, for fear of contaminating her with his bad luck. His precaution is wise: at the age of twenty, named model of the year in New York, Antoinette Outen will marry Peter Kapp III, heir to the fashion stores that bear his name. At the time of writing, after three months of marriage she has divorced and is making her first film. There lies the proof: Joseph Outen’s life was not completely pointless.