Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘So, Monsieur Arnaud, you look rather out of sorts.’

He rolled his ‘r’s. It was an accent he claimed to have acquired as a boy, in his primary school in the Auvergne. He even occasionally came out with a ‘ Fouchtra! ’ which he felt sounded very local, but which left any listener who really came from the Auvergne baffled.

‘No, I feel excellent, thank you. I just know hardly anybody here.’

‘Ah, the who’s who of Paris! So difficult to break into!’

‘Even more so if you can’t really be bothered.’

Polo looked surprised. Since his ascent he felt at ease everywhere. This young man looked unconcerned.

‘I’m delighted to have bumped into you — I wanted to give my wife a little painting. A very little one. On canvas. That you can roll up. I’ll drop into your gallery tomorrow. I’m sure you can find something suitable for me. And don’t fleece me on the price; I’m a friend of Julius’s and Constantin’s …’

He moved away, smiling, happy to have revived the young man’s gloomy spirits with the thought of a painting. A very small painting that could be rolled up and slipped in a handbag for a journey to Switzerland or Spain. There was a stir: Marceline was entering the drawing room, a head taller than the women and almost all the men. In recent weeks she had filled out and looked practically voluptuous in a blue satin dress, in her hand a very large bag that she left on an armchair before walking over to Madeleine and saying in a voice both earnest and joyful the phrase Palfy had taught her and that people now expected from her, while restraining themselves from giggling: ‘My own two in your dear ones,’ and shaking both hands as she did so, surprising those who did not know her and were astonished by this impulsive irruption of a she-bull in a china shop. Jean did not smile. He had a soft spot for the ridiculous Marceline, so at ease with herself. After gushing greetings to Madeleine and others she moved in his direction, picking up a glass of champagne from the butler on the way. She smelt strongly of a cheap perfume that Palfy had identified as patchouli. Crossing the drawing room, she ignored Blanche, who was looking daggers at her. From her private convictions Madame Michette derived a poise that nothing could alter. Her activity, hilarious to start with, then by chance branching into genuine clandestine undertakings, had developed and magnified her authority. In all innocence she had believed she was working for Palfy from the moment she had informed him of her desire to serve, and it had not occurred to her for a second that he might have launched her on an unsuspecting Paris as a joke. That evening she was about to play her most important role: to extricate Jean from this trap, to spirit him away from Julius’s agents.

‘I’m getting you out of here, young man,’ she said, speaking out of the side of her mouth, as if the slightest word might be read on her lips and give them away.

‘How?’

‘Go into the hall, discreetly. I’ll be in Madeleine’s bedroom. But quickly. There’s no time to lose.’

He would have believed anyone at that moment. He slipped out without being seen and found Marceline in the bedroom. She was already undressing. She was wearing two dresses, one on top of the other, two pairs of stockings, two necklaces.

‘Put these on!’ she ordered.

In her bag she had a pair of high heels and a floppy hat.

‘I’ll never be able to walk in these.’

‘I’ll tell them you’re drunk.’

He did as he was told, hid his suit in Madeleine’s wardrobe, and let Marceline apply lipstick and eye shadow.

‘For once it’s useful to be a pretty boy,’ she said.

Looking at himself in Madeleine’s mirror, he felt he looked grotesque, no better than a clown.

‘I shan’t fool anyone.’

She placed a wig on his head and the floppy hat. She stood back.

‘Perfect!’ she announced. ‘Time to slip away.’

She took his arm, supporting him as if he were a tipsy girl, and they reached the street door. There were cars lined up along the pavement. In one of them sat four men in black. The driver turned to look at them, but Avenue Foch was deep in shadow and he saw only two women built like prizefighters.

‘Female wrestlers,’ he said to his companions, whose laughter wounded Marceline enough for her to hesitate, on the point of turning round and slapping the man. Her sense of duty won out. She shrugged, pulling Jean along with her. His ankles were buckling. They crossed the Étoile and turned into Rue Troyon. Two prostitutes stationed outside a dingy hotel sniggered.

‘Look at the queens!’

Marceline retorted with an obscenity so vulgar that the girls, awestruck, were silenced.

They walked for five minutes more, until they arrived at a barred gate opening onto a private path that led to small ivy-covered houses like the one where Claude’s mother lived. Marceline knew the way. In the darkness she located a well-concealed entrance. She knocked three times and the door was opened by a man in braces, his feet in worn slippers. A dim light lit a table at which a woman put down her crochet work to observe them.

‘He’s a friend,’ Marceline said. ‘He needs a quiet place for the night to sort out his next move.’

‘Has she got coupons?’ asked the woman.

The man dismissed the ill-mannered question with a gesture.

‘I said a man friend,’ Madeleine corrected her, lifting off Jean’s hat and wig.

Their host burst out laughing.

‘Well, well, well!’

Marceline modestly acknowledged her success. Jean stood, embarrassed and conscious of how ridiculous he looked.

‘He can sleep in the storeroom back there,’ the woman said, getting to her feet with difficulty, her legs swollen by poor circulation.

‘We’ll make a bed up for him. Has he eaten?’

She could not bring herself to address him directly.

‘Yes,’ Jean said, ‘thank you. Foie gras and cold veal. But I’ve been drinking champagne so I’m a bit thirsty.’

‘We only have water.’

‘There’s nothing better.’

They looked at him, puzzled and anxious. The words ‘ foie gras ’ and ‘champagne’ aroused a strange reaction in the woman.

‘Perhaps the storeroom isn’t very comfortable. We could put him in the boy’s room. He’ll have to leave the shutters closed in the morning.’

‘I’ll be here to collect him tomorrow before eight,’ Marceline said. ‘He won’t be any trouble. I’ll bring him a change of clothes. Where are your things? At Nelly’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Give me the key.’

‘Knock before you go in.’

She raised her eyebrows, concerned, and he added, ‘Nelly may not be alone.’

‘I’ll know what to do. Go to bed and sleep well. Tomorrow will be tiring.’

She seemed about to salute as she disappeared with decisive steps down the path. Jean thought that if she came across the two tarts in Rue Troyon again they would be in for another mouthful.

‘My name’s Jeanne,’ the woman said.

‘My mother was called Jeanne too.’

‘I have a son your age. He’s a prisoner in Silesia.’

‘He was studying at the Arts et Métiers,’30 the man said. ‘My name’s Paul. We’ll show you your bed. You must be tired.’

The bedroom smelt of mothballs. Photographs of actresses plastered the walls.

‘We’ll have to open a window,’ the man said. ‘You’ll get a headache if you don’t. We have a lot of moths.’

Jean drank a glass of water, got undressed and lay down. For a few minutes he listened to them tidy the main room without speaking, before they went into the neighbouring bedroom, where he heard whispering. Their bed creaked, and Paul started snoring almost immediately. Jean lay with his eyes open in the darkness. Everything was unravelling. He thought of Julius, who must be mad with rage and anxiety, of Nelly packing a suitcase for him on Marceline’s orders, of Claude assailed by anguish in her drugged dreams. He was distancing himself from her. Another current was carrying him away. His easy life was coming to an end. He felt a satisfaction so keen he sighed with pleasure: it was curious to be joining the Resistance, dressed as a woman, on the day of St Jean himself, to be borrowing the bed of a prisoner of war who, before being called up, had collected the photographs of three German actresses: Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl and Brigitte Helm. The smell of mothballs persisted, despite the open window. A pair of cats fought furiously on the path outside until someone threw a saucepan of water at them. Silence fell again. Paul’s snoring subsided. Jean wondered what the couple lived on, old before their time, withdrawn from the world in the heart of Paris in a tasteless neoclassical house, whose imitation Henri II furniture made it nearly impossible to move around. Without a thought for their own safety they sheltered the strangers Marceline brought them at night. In the wake of Madeleine’s soirée they represented another, very different France that one was tempted to forget when one lived in the artificial, glittering milieu he had inhabited up till then. Paul made him think of the man whom he still, out of gratitude, thought of as his father. Albert and Jeanne, Paul and Jeanne. The same preoccupations, the same narrow horizon, but within the limits of its narrowness a generosity and courage that were there when they were needed. Jean hoped their son was aware of their qualities and did not reject them or reproach them for not belonging to the world of lovely film actresses in which he lived in his dreams, far from the braces and slippers of Papa, and the waxed tablecloth and crochet work of Maman.