Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Jean was struck by the simple tone of this unpretentious man, who ran his network with professorial seriousness and left nothing to chance. He was filled with admiration for his discretion and his leadership, and his willingness to open his soul to a near stranger. In the months that followed, they saw each other regularly at different locations, walking together in woods and parks, like two philosophers keeping each other informed about the evolution of their thoughts after they had exchanged the information Jean had received from Laura and Jean’s own next orders.

In early August 1944 they met in Paris. The network had suffered two heavy blows, but the strict separation imposed by its chief had avoided a catastrophe. The final days of the occupation had been less uncomfortable than might have been expected. Marceline told Jean of Julius’s execution. Madeleine had vanished with Blanche. Palfy, now married to Geneviève, was already in Switzerland, his new fortune safe. The Théâtre Français had closed. Nelly was idle at home. Jean joined her. In the evenings they lingered on her balcony. Shadows hugged the walls. The Germans, barricaded in the Palais du Luxembourg, fired salutes that shook the area like a firework display. The telephone kept working, by some aberration, and people called each other all the time to pass on news. Nelly opened her mother’s last preserves: confit d’oie, duck pâté à l’armagnac, truffle salads, smoked eels. She started riding a bicycle, bare-legged and wearing a big beribboned hat, and came home with strange snippets of information: there was not a gram of caviar left in the expensive districts; there were only milk calves to be had at La Villette; all the children had pimples; the Café Weber was the secret command post of the Resistance; the Eiffel Tower was closed to visitors; at the Cherche-Midi prison the warders had asked the prisoners to protect them from possible reprisals; General de Gaulle, leading a commando unit, had liberated Champigny-sur-Marne himself and had a lunch of fried roach in an open-air café with General Eisenhower. Lovely, happy and free, Nelly invented stories with abandon. It was fine and hot. The days were long. People lived very well with an hour of gas and six hours of electricity a day. Jean raided Nelly’s library and discovered a German poet called Rilke whom she recited to him, standing up, wrapped only in a sheet.

‘I live, and at that instant the century turns.

One feels the wind from an enormous leaf,

one of God’s and your and my written sheaf

that on high in foreign hands revolves.

One feels the radiance of a brand-new page

on which everything can still become.

‘How appropriate that is, and from a German too.’

One morning Laura telephoned from her office. Her department was moving out. Trucks were being loaded with the archives, under the protection of an armoured car. Jean dashed to the Étoile to find her. Alone in the square, she watched the procession of green vehicles moving out of the 16th arrondissement, heading east.

‘It’s a rout, Jean. I’m going to try not to follow and reach Gif on foot. They’re saying the Chevreuse valley has been liberated. I’m afraid for Jesús. Recently people have been turning their back on him, because of me.’

Jean was a better judge of the situation than she was.

‘You’ll make things worse. Don’t go. I’ll talk to the chief and you come straight over to Nelly’s, but for heaven’s sake not in uniform.’

‘I haven’t got anything else.’

‘Go to a shop now and buy something.’

She reached Place Saint-Sulpice at the end of the day, wearing a raincoat over her uniform. Nelly gave her something to wear. The short man in glasses came to fetch her and took her to stay at his command post.

‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude, but my powers are becoming limited. I thought I was the only one in the Resistance but I’m discovering that there are thousands, millions of us.’

Marceline, who was now constantly at his side, added,

‘At setting out we were five hundred, but being speedily reinforced

We saw ourselves three thousand on arriving at the port.’

‘Yes, Madame Michette, your quotation could not be more apt. Three thousand just seems to me to be something of an underestimate. We are living literature. Your passion for Corneille reminds me of my youth. The theatre of moral nobility! It’s certainly the moment for it. We shall badly need it …’

With Laura safe, Jean began to worry about Jesús. Borrowing a bicycle, he cycled to Gif with a safe-conduct in his pocket for his friend, whom he found, as anticipated, a prisoner of the FTP,35 locked in a barn with twenty other ‘traitors’. The safe-conduct was no magic wand. Three colonels wearing new braid discussed interning Jean. Fortunately the telephone worked. They called Paris. The messenger’s credentials were confirmed, and he was able to go to a devastated Jesús.

‘To me! To me, a Spanish man! Jean, you saved my life. Where is Laura?’

‘Safe. She was very worried about you.’

The local maquis controlled communications and vanished when a German convoy passed through. Jesús was given a hunting rifle. He was guarding the mairie by the time Jean reached Paris again, exhausted. At the beginning of September in Les Lettres Françaises he stumbled on an article devoted to two great painters of the Communist resistance: Pablo Picasso and Jesús Infante. There was talk of an exhibition. A photo in L’Humanité showed Laura kissing Picasso and described Jesús as a former Republican fighter living in exile.

Jean appreciated the honour. From the cell in which they had been ten men scratching, moping, exchanging their life stories, passing on rumours and hearsay, imagining Paris ablaze and the armies of Field Marshal von Rundstedt regaining the offensive and driving the Allies back into the Atlantic, he had been moved to solitary confinement. Through the cell bars he could see the prison yard and the circle of prisoners from whom he had been separated. The overcrowding, the chatter, the complaints of the weakest, the lofty contempt of the strongest and even the dignity of the best had robbed him of his energy. Ironically solitary confinement returned it to him. He resumed the exercise regime he had begun at Dieppe Rowing Club years before. Press-ups, sit-ups, warm-up exercises, shadow-boxing; his fitness began to return. It would have returned faster if he had been properly fed. He would have liked more reading material too. A book a week did not satisfy his craving. He paced round and round inside his four walls, attempting to recall every detail of the battle of Waterloo as Fabrice del Dongo had experienced it, or the scene of Julien Sorel reaching for the hand of Madame de Rênal. In between he recited to himself lines Nelly had taught him.

‘Your brown hair and shining black mantle,

Your hard bright eyes that are too gentle,

Your beauty which is not one,

Your breasts a cruel Devil corseted, perfumed

with musk as he did your pallor

Stolen from the moon at dusk …’

He regretted not being able to remember how it went. Another couple of lines,

‘Time for a greeting, all bedazzled

Time to kneel and kiss your slipper … ’

But they had left him a notebook and pencil and he resumed his previous discipline, his daily habit of noting down his thoughts.

A lawyer had been appointed by the court, an intelligent and over-quick young man named Deschauzé. It was not his fault: Maître Deschauzé had thirty defendants like Jean to defend and mixed up their cases, histories and sometimes their names. His heavy briefcase was full of hot air.