Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘Is no good at all!’ he said, despairing, sitting down on a stool. ‘I am a useless idiot who ’as no talent.’

He was sincere, believing it fully. Inside his tall, solid frame there lurked a childlike soul that was prone to sudden despairs as magnified as they were fleeting. Jean, who knew him very well, refrained from reassuring him and occasionally even expressed himself in complete agreement, just to incite his friend to react in a spirit of contradiction. To him the painting on the easel looked to be of such dazzling beauty that he no longer doubted Jesús’s great talent. He had purged himself of everything, of his false daring, of the old-fashioned academicism to which his skill had long bound him, of the influences that had held him back, and now his painting radiated the force and ardour that a great original artist brought to it. Jean was sure of it: Jesús would be counted among the few masters of his generation when, matured by his retreat, he finally made his way back to the galleries.

‘What do you want me to say?’ Jean said to him. ‘That you’ve got no talent, you’re a dauber and you’d do better as a house-painter, or that you’re the artist I like better than all the others, in fact the only one? You won’t believe me either way, and you’ll spend the next hour boring me stiff with your doubts. Stop it, you’re talking rubbish. You’re a happy man and it upsets you, and that’s entirely normal, because you’ve always heard that great artists live in a state of permanent torture …’

‘Michel du Courseau suffers!’

‘He suffers, but not because of his art, which he’s totally happy with, to a degree you and I can’t imagine. His suffering is about something rather different: how can he reconcile his very real and very sincere faith with his taste for little boys? He hasn’t found an answer yet. The day he does, he’ll suddenly stop being so repressed.’

Jesús rapidly forgot his own anxieties. He had worked all afternoon with passion and pleasure. The release of tension explained his pessimism and fears.

‘’Ow is Claude?’ he asked.

‘The same. It’s me who’s not well …’

They talked about Blaise Pascal. He sometimes came to the house in the afternoons. He had even bought two canvases, but had not taken them with him. Jesús occasionally found him interesting, and at other times thought him irritatingly pedantic and self-assured. They still did not know who he was, nor whether he had really possessed a collection of paintings before he buried himself in the forest. Jesús was nevertheless aware that he had conceived a sudden, violent passion for Claude. Fulfilled himself and therefore feeling that his own love affair was the only real one, the only one worthy of interest, Jesús assured Jean that what had happened was a stroke of luck for him and would provide him with an honourable means of extracting himself from an impasse. Jean did not reply. How could he explain what he still felt for Claude, and which would never be extinguished, even if she failed to regain her sanity? In short, that he owed her his love.

Shadows filled the studio. Jesús, sitting on a high stool, his feet resting on a bar with his chin on his knees, seemed immense and invincible. He belonged to a world-view that left no room for doubt at a moment when Jean was discovering the depths of human misery, loneliness and the looming approach of a despair that, fortunately, still repelled him. He felt an intense need to see Nelly and rushed his leave-taking.

Laura drove him to Gif station and as they were saying goodbye told him, ‘I’ll help you, but it’s not so easy. We’re all being watched and we’re all watching each other. You’ll have to take her away somewhere. Anywhere. Otherwise … you’ll have to give her up.’

She had touched the nerve of a passion that, in the saddest way, was starting to fade just because it did not know how to change. In the train taking him back to Paris Jean realised that the distance, small as it was, and his return to Nelly were beginning to erase Claude from his emotions. Life could not be this love that had no way out.

Night was already falling over the Luxembourg Gardens. He reached the Comédie Française, where the matinée had just finished. Nelly was taking off her make-up in her dressing room, replacing a stage face for one shining with cream that looked tired and drawn.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t come in time, I was never ever going to see you again. I wasn’t very good this afternoon and I’m depressed. I wanted to be a genius and it turns out I’ve just got some talent. That’s mediocrity for you. There are evenings when I’m just a sad and unhappy little girl who wants to cry her eyes out. Absolutely the worst thing of all, you horrible Jules-who, is that I’m starting to ask myself whether I’m not in love with you. Undo me, will you?’

He unhooked her heavy, starched seventeenth-century dress, which held her graceful bust in a straitjacket. She emerged, naked from the waist up and cream-skinned, staring at her mirror. She held her pretty, pointed breasts in her hands.

‘Maybe these really are my best bits,’ she said, letting them go. ‘And people are wrong. I have no talent. I just have nice tits. Kiss me.’

Her dresser came in.

‘Do you need me, Mademoiselle?’

‘No thank you. I’ve got my undresser. See you tomorrow, Mauricette. I hope I’ll be less terrible than today.’

‘You were marvellous.’

Nelly was talking to her in the mirror, her face tense, smoothing her eyebrows whose natural arc emphasised her dark eyes.

‘And to think I’m a stationmaster’s daughter!’ she said.

‘My brother works on the railways too!’ Mauricette replied, folding a scarf.

They walked back to Place Saint-Sulpice together, arm in arm. Before leaving for the theatre Nelly had made a cold supper and they ate it on the kitchen table, he in his shirtsleeves, she naked under her dressing gown. The summer night, silent and heavy, drifted through the window, filling the studio. In bed, Nelly snuggled against him.

‘The time for admissions has come,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wanting to say it since yesterday. This is the situation, my scrumptious Jules-who: I believe I’m actually in love with you, though you don’t deserve it. At the same time I’m also attracted to Jérôme Callot. Why? I don’t know. Well, every night we play the most sublime love on stage so convincingly that I suppose some of it’s left behind afterwards. But he’s an awful dunce; he got married when he was twenty and has two kids and and is never going to leave his bourgeois wife for me. So we say nothing to each other except for the cues Musset gives us, like two old hams. And I hang on to you, like you hang on to me, in spite of your Claude. See? I’m more honest than you. Now let’s go to sleep, as if you were Jérôme and I were Claude. Marvellous, isn’t it?’

Nelly’s skin still had the sweetish taste of make-up and her make-up removers. He could never confuse it with Claude’s. She fell asleep immediately, like a child consumed by sleep, her fists clenched, surrendering to her dreams with the same passion as she surrendered to the theatre. Sometimes she lived her dreams so intensely that she slept panting and out of breath, or uttered disjointed phrases that Jean memorised so that he could repeat them to her next morning. But she remembered nothing. Jean tried to summon a memory of Jérôme Callot’s face. He had seen him on stage and once in the wings at the Français: his large, leonine head, his curly hair, his superb voice, an assurance borrowed from his characters and, underneath it all, more than likely, an enormous stupidity of the sort that only actors are capable of. Nelly was attracted to him, conscious of his vanity, but knowing he lived in her world and that they shared the same double life, and Jean would never be able to do as much. He was astonished that he felt no jealousy, only a vague fear that was hard to define, possibly the fear of finding himself suddenly alone at a moment when nothing had prepared him to be. But he would always love Nelly, in his way, and an immense affection would bind them that nothing would dislodge. He leant over her and murmured in her ear, ‘My little sister …’