Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

I hear you say that this is a long digression about characters who, in this second part of Jean’s life, no longer play any part. Yet a tree only grows if one prunes it. Two branches have been cut. Jean is still not truly free, he still has new steps to take, but he already knows the value of these symbolic separations. When one is no longer tempted to lean on anyone, the future takes on a sweet taste of adventure. Driven by necessity, he has set out on a hard path, and that is our subject now. Do I mean the gallery in Rue La Boétie? No. We shall barely refer to that any more than the production company where Jean spent a few lacklustre months working for Émile Duzan. He has a handsome office and two salesmen, both experts on the Impressionist period. His clientele is mainly composed of a particular group of nouveaux riches that in times of scarcity thrive on other people’s misery. The black market is the only economic force in France. It controls everything. But money earned too fast by those who have been hard up burns a hole in their pocket. No one is taken in by the fiction of price controls. The new rich no longer keep the money launderers in business. They invest in haste in reliable commodities: paintings, gold, objets d’art , jewellery, property. Easy to dupe and flatter, like those drunk with rapid social success they step delightedly into an antique dealer’s or a private gallery, talk headily in hints and whispers with a moneychanger, or visit a chateau for sale. You see them driving in cars, taking the sought-after places in the few sleeping cars still operating on the main lines, lunching and dining in restaurants whose supply chains the economic police turn a blind eye to, because the other half of their clientele is German. In fact a large-scale and still hardly noticeable revolution is taking place. France is being transformed because wealth is changing hands; a class of owners is disappearing, gradually ruined, selling its traditional possessions, lovingly amassed and preserved from generation to generation, and another class is taking its place, vast, infatuated, its pockets filled with cash, over-made-up, its women dripping with costume jewellery. There wafts around this new category of French citizens an atmosphere of happiness and self-confidence that provokes endless supplicants to line up and cadge a favour or money. Jean sees it all, indeed had observed its beginnings before the war at the time of Antoine du Courseau’s sale of La Sauveté to the Longuets. He watches and says nothing. It is not his job to mix with the customers. If he were to listen to them, he would be unable to stop himself from throwing them out, these philistines snapping up a Bonnard because the subject is a nude next to her bathtub (‘for our bathroom, darling, don’t you think, over the bath’), a Matisse (‘it’ll amuse the children’), a Renoir (‘for my wife, she does love her roses’). He has been put there to certify transactions that benefit a clique whose names he affects not to be aware of. At its head stand Palfy, Rudolf, Julius. He lends his name and will be the one who pays if anything goes wrong. He knows it, but at the end of the month there is the cheque that just covers the bills for the clinic where Claude lies sedated. We shall return to Claude. She is there, she exists, from time to time Jean can see her, gaze back at her heavy, imploring eyes, kiss her warm mouth. She does not know, she will never know, he swears to himself, what he has got himself involved in to bring her back to life. Before we do, we must speak of the other business proposed by Palfy, and of Jean’s first journey.

Rudolf von Rocroy was pacing up and down the platform at Gare d’Austerlitz, less aristocratic in a suit than in his colonel’s uniform. The war, even though he has done his best, successfully until now, not to get mixed up in it, was what gave him his brilliance. His return to a synthetic flannel suit, tasteless tie and starched collar was a reminder that the officer in gleaming uniform concealed a gentleman of slender means who had difficulty making ends meet and then not always in a dignified manner, for he too belonged to a doomed class under Germany’s National Socialism. His cowardice and dishonesty had been the price of his survival. Jean found him pitiful and inexcusable. Rudolf caught sight of him and turned his back, the sign they had agreed. They had reserved seats in the same compartment of the same carriage of the Paris — Irun express and no longer knew each other. Rudolf buried himself in a French book. The other travellers were of no interest. Jean watched through the window as the landscapes of a France he had never seen before slipped past. Where was war or occupation to be found in these green contours of Touraine, Limousin, Charente, Bordeaux? He could only see the peace of fields and woods, the promises of springtime and hamlets warmed by the beautiful day’s sunshine, the little roads that wove a network of friendship between farms and villages. The blitzkrieg had left no wounds here, or if it had they had been dressed: reconstructed bridges, roads cleared of the endless detritus of an army fleeing the enemy. Only the mainline stations and their German railway workers in their curious caps proclaimed the poignant reality: at its nerve centres France was no longer itself. An insidious shadow shrouded it.

Between Bordeaux and Bayonne he fell asleep. He opened his eyes in the Basque country, awakening in him thoughts of Paul-Jean Toulet, whom he had discovered thanks to Salah on the eve of war. Between banks of rhododendrons he caught sight of Guéthary, where the poet had died. If Nelly had been with him, she would have recited his lines on Bayonne:

Bayonne! A walk beneath its arches,

No more need one bear

To leave one’s inheritance there

Or one’s heart dashed in pieces.

After the war he would find Salah again and take him to hear Nelly. But what did ‘after the war’ mean? No one had any idea when it might be. And where was Salah living, now that Geneviève was alone in Switzerland? When he heard about her liaison with Palfy, which was now official, there would be fireworks. The unusual Nubian was the prince’s executor, managing the fortune Geneviève had inherited. Incapable of adding two figures together, she had had to put herself entirely in his hands. Jean imagined Salah’s cold rage. He would try to destroy Palfy. But this time Palfy was forewarned. He would not allow it to happen, and there was no doubt that he was of that breed that always knows how to put a former servant in his place.

At Irun, long checks delayed the train. Feldgendarmen , French police, Gestapo and customs officers went through the hundred or so passengers with a fine-tooth comb. Rudolf was to spend the day at San Sebastián. Despite his rank and the fact that his mission documents were in order, he was subjected to almost as rigorous an examination as Jean. With their papers stamped, they still needed to present themselves to customs. This time Rudolf’s curtness had an effect. Jean was searched, but the suitcase, which at that moment belonged to neither of them, remained in the luggage rack, untouched. Jean grabbed it and carried it to the Spanish train, where he had a sleeping compartment reserved. The hardest part was over, and he was surprised to have been so calm and indifferent, even wondering if an arrest and interrogation wouldn’t have troubled him less. Rudolf disappeared. He was alone. Spain as seen from Irun station hardly aroused enthusiasm. He remembered his arrival in Italy a few years before, the intense pleasure he had felt at crossing the frontier, and he would have liked to encounter Spain in the same fashion, with a haversack on his back and a bicycle, but his adolescent passions were out of time and he was not entering the country to visit it with his Théophile Gautier in his hand, the way he had visited Italy aiming to follow in Stendhal’s footsteps. It was a dismal beginning: at the sight of his French passport the Spanish police had become even more unpleasant, and now the train was delayed for an unknown reason. Travellers who had counted on the delay kept arriving, running along the platform with parcels tied up with string in their hands. Night fell. The station lights went on. They were wretched and yellowish, but the effect was like a party after France in the blackout. At last the train rolled slowly through the town, its suburbs and industrial estates, and plunged into a long tunnel before speeding up slightly and panting along an uneven, jolting track. The ancient engine could be heard labouring at the front, puffing a plume of golden flecks into the night. There was a dirty, smoke-filled restaurant car that stank of cooking oil and served cold omelettes and rancid biscuits. Jean sat down at a table. Three Spaniards sat around him, voluble and self-assured, swallowing the unspeakable tortilla without blinking, ordering bowls of coffee and smoking foul cigarillos. The train toiled on through a mountain pass. Several times it seemed as if it would run out of breath and stop, and then with a last effort it was over the top, and descending in a hellish squeal of steel.