Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Fortunately Blanche is there to watch over her. She corrects her blunders, points out the way forward. She may have spoilt her own life, but she will make sure Madeleine succeeds, and beyond her expectations. It is her cherished ambition. At this sort of evening she is like a chair attendant in the park: invisible and swooping down on the prey that fortune offers her. She has just noticed that Madeleine and Jean are having a private conversation. She whispers in Madeleine’s ear, ‘The lady of the house belongs to all her guests.’

Madeleine follows her meekly, ready to obey. She has not offered to help Jean, and he has not insisted. Let us watch her once more as she joins the prefect of police, who is getting bored talking to a German official with mediocre French. Her dressmakers and new young hairdresser (sought-after throughout Paris) have fashioned a new woman with such skill she cannot be taken for anything other than a lady. And as only appearances matter, she is actually in the process of becoming one, of erasing her past. We have mentioned that she was accomplishing her second destiny. She has a third she is not expecting, of which she remains unaware. As we shall not see her again, better to speak of it at once and salute this modest woman to whom Palfy gave her start in life, who has no other ambition than to feel secure, and whom Blanche will push to become what she herself can never be. In fact, Madeleine is to carry on living happy and carefree with Julius until that dawn of 21 July 1944, when the SS raided their apartment in Avenue Foch. The previous day, von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life had failed. The repression had begun. Julius, who had played the Wehrmacht card, was in the first wave. He was shot the same afternoon. Madeleine shut up the apartment, leaving it in the butler’s care, and fled to Montfort-l’Amaury and the house Julius had bought for her. Let us remember the dates, which are important: the Allies are still in Normandy but Paris’s liberation is not far off. The German army is packing up. Polo has already left for Spain with his treasures; Palfy is married and living in Switzerland, free from want; Rudolf von Rocroy, posted to the front, has managed to get himself rapidly taken prisoner by the British. One society is scattering, and a new one has yet to take its place. Madeleine, who in her innocence has committed to neither side, awaits in starry-eyed trepidation the arrival of the officers in crepe soles. One of these, a major commanding a parachutists’ unit, purposely seeks her out to inform her that he is the owner of the Avenue Foch apartment. He is deeply sorry to hear of the death of Julius, his friend of pre-war days, and reassured to know that nothing has been stolen. The only damage that occurred was when the SS raided the apartment and stupidly broke a Chinese vase.

‘It’s the price of war,’ he says. ‘I should like you always to consider that apartment your own. Julius was my business partner. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have nothing left. Whenever you come to Paris, you must make yourself at home.’

Madeleine does not hesitate. Major Bernstein is a gallant officer. So gallant that she marries him, partly to be back among the same servants, rather more in order to survive, because Julius had no time to leave her anything. She can return to Paris, head held high, under her new name. Her third act has begun, leaving her former life, her depressing Montmartre existence, far behind in the past. Now, when she talks about her memories, she feels no need to delve into her Pigalle period. She has another past to replace it with, that of her Avenue Foch years with Julius, her musical evenings among friends. At the same time she is able to negotiate the ordeal of the purges unscathed. Who would think of making trouble for Madame Bernstein, whose husband is fighting at Bastogne with his regiment of parachutists? Major Bernstein is, in short, an ideal husband, so undemanding in every way that he dies discreetly from a bullet in his abdomen in February 1945, leaving Madeleine a widow, Madame Bernstein, and in possession of a fortune large enough for her to live without cares from that day forward. In truth she would happily have retired to the countryside, the dream of city dwellers who have pounded the streets in their younger years, but Blanche is there, pushing her to become the muse of a small artistic clique. And so Blanche fulfils herself through another woman whom fortune has smiled on more broadly than her. Madeleine will enjoy an affair more intellectual than physical with a poet who makes frequent retreats to Solesmes. From it she will gain a discreet and fashionable glory. Ten years later, her Tuesdays will be the most sought-after in Paris. Every August she will sponsor an annual music festival in an ancient abbey. Age will suit her very well, and in her sixties she will take to wearing a velvet choker that hides the wrinkles on her neck. Need we add that Blanche will not leave her, hating her a little more each year and concealing it very well, wounded in her self-esteem to the point of feeling poisoned, to see Madeleine succeed where she herself has failed …? Madeleine will only become aware of Blanche’s hatred in the last moments of her life, laid low by a fatal bout of influenza in 1970, when Blanche tears from her ring finger a large emerald given to her by Major Bernstein on the last night of his final leave. She sees Blanche’s mad stare in a face disfigured by greed and a haste to see her benefactress dead and buried. La Garenne had been right to mistreat his mistress and demand lewd favours from her. He would have made her a saint. Freed from his clutches, she stole from Madeleine, blighted her final moments with hatred, and discovered that when she in turn wanted to invite artists and writers to her own Tuesdays, not one of them was at all interested in her.

We have finished with Madeleine and Blanche. They have just spoken to Jean for the last time, and now he is aware of exactly how alone and ignored he is in this gathering. The author would like to add a footnote here. It may be, in truth, that we have shown a Jean too composed and too sure of himself. Let us not forget that he is only twenty-two and that he has already had his fair share of struggles, been aided by fortune, harmed by misfortune. He is beginning to form a more accurate idea of the world confronting him, and in which he must, at this moment, survive. He has responded to Julius’s judgement on him with impudence, but impudence cannot hide an intelligent anxiety about his fate. His throat is tight. He has never found himself in such a tight spot, and is thinking about everything that will soon change around him, about Claude whom he will be forced to abandon, about Nelly whom he will not be able to see again, at the same time as scanning the room for the man who is responsible here for carrying out Julius’s orders. We shall add that he has no regrets. It was a fine adventure, and he has savoured the trips to Portugal, even Urbano’s unexpected friendship. But everything is crumbling: the way to Claude is barred to him, Nelly at this precise moment is perhaps already in bed with her fool, and he will never see the money he carefully deposited in a secret account in Lisbon.

He drank several glasses of champagne and thought of Antoine du Courseau and their last night before abandoning La Sauveté to the Longuets. Palfy touched his elbow.

‘Are you dreaming?’

‘I’m afraid my goose is cooked.’

‘Marceline will be here in a minute. I’ve just telephoned her.’

‘Then what?’

‘We’ve confected a little stratagem. Be patient. Talk to someone. Julius is watching you.’

Palfy left him. The only person Jean felt like talking to was the butler, the one person worthy of the occasion, but the butler would not compromise himself by mixing with the guests. Polo walked over and collected two glasses.