Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Antoine, whose nose was sensitive, offered the abbé a cigar, which the priest lit after clearing his throat.

‘Not bad! So how goes it? I’m not talking about your knee, naturally.’

‘Another fortnight and I’ll be as nimble as a deer,’ Antoine responded, pretending not to understand.

‘It’s been two months, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, two months.’

‘Two months without sin! Some people up there will be very interested in your soul.’

‘How very kind of them.’

Antoine recounted the story of Jean and Michel, of the punctured hosepipe and the cut-up headscarf. The abbé listened less than attentively. The first glass of calvados, drunk a little too quickly because he had been thirsty, distracted his attention. He would have liked to know its vintage, but when Antoine began to think aloud he was not to be interrupted.

‘I’m very drawn to Jean. If you could see how serious he is, how closely he looks at you, if you could read his thoughts as they pass across his face, you’d be asking yourself the same question as I do: where does he come from? And it is doubly frustrating that when I look at him, I say to myself every time: I know that face, I’ve seen it somewhere before. In a dream? In the real world? Impossible to tell. Will we ever know?’

The abbé maintained a prudent silence. He knew, but no one would make him betray a confidence. Or possibly later, if circumstances demanded it. He poured himself another glass of calvados and sipped.

‘One thing at a time. Don’t get too interested in Jean Arnaud. Your son has priority, and he needs it. Jean, on the other hand, has all sorts of advantages: a mother of admirable virtue, a father who is both a hero and an idealist …’

‘You’re suggesting that Michel doesn’t have those advantages?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. By the way, how are matters at Saint-Tropez?’

‘Excellent,’ Antoine replied, put out and instantly withdrawing into himself in the wake of his rebuff. Quite understandably, he did not hold with a priest reminding him, in conversation, of things said in the confessional. But the abbé Le Couec, a man of excessive integrity, could not forget words murmured in an unguarded moment. Antoine’s life, both internal and external, belonged to him, and he intended to maintain his right to oversee it outside the church as well as inside.

‘You’re fortunate,’ the abbé said. ‘You might have been a lot less lucky.’

‘I’m obliged to you!’ Antoine said drily.

‘As a matter of fact, I have never understood what drove you away from Madame du Courseau.’

‘If only I knew myself!’

‘She has great qualities.’

‘I shan’t contradict you on that point.’

‘She’s an excellent mother.’

‘Without a doubt.’

‘She is beyond reproach.’

‘Who would dare say anything to the contrary?’

‘So?’

‘She bores me,’ Antoine said wearily.

The abbé did not know what boredom was, and supposed it to be some sort of illness that a healthy man would fight with prayers, calvados and long, strenuous walks. Perhaps Antoine’s illness was the result of him never going out without his Bugatti.

‘When your leg’s out of plaster, we’ll take some exercise together.’

‘I had a sufficient dose of that to last me a lifetime between ’14 and ’18.’

‘The doctor will most certainly prescribe another one.’

‘The park will be quite enough for me.’

Shouts and laughter came from outside. Antoine lifted the curtain. Antoinette was chasing Jean, who was running away from her with all the speed his legs could muster, round and round some armchairs and a bench. Finally she cornered him and threw her arms around him to kiss him. He wriggled out of her grasp and kept running, looking behind him and paying no attention to Michel who, as he ran past, stuck out his foot. Jean went sprawling, but made no sound, and got up again with knees, hands and chin covered in blood. Grabbing a stick, he launched himself at Michel, but Adèle, who had come running, took the stick from him and let Michel run away. Antoine heard snatches of his daughter vehemently arguing, accusing Michel. Madame du Courseau and Adèle took Jean inside to clean him up and paint him with iodine.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yes. Strange. Very strange. I’m surprised at Michel. At Sunday school he’s a very attentive and devout little boy. A good Christian in the making. He’s very talented, you know. On Sunday he sang a solo in church, in a marvellous soprano. I would have given him absolution without confessing him. If you give him modelling clay, he’ll sculpt you miniature saints that are little masterpieces. I intend to ask him to make the Nativity models for me at Christmas.’

‘An artist in the family? That’s all we need. Where does he get it from? I have nothing to hide. Not a creative bone in my body. Generations of unambiguous Normans going back as far as you like. I’m the first of my line who’s even dreamt in his sleep. Nothing on the Mangepain side either. Not a glimmer of sensitivity anywhere.’

‘Let’s not make too much of Pasteurian inevitability. It’s a perfect case of spontaneous generation. We should wait … all children are gifted. It’s afterwards that it goes wrong.’

They carried on talking as the dusk fell, one of those long conversations containing many overtones, peppered with Antoine’s occasional acid and cynical remarks and the abbé’s stolid common sense. When the latter stood up to go, the house swayed a little around him. The room stank of cold cigar smoke. The carafe was empty. On the stairs the abbé missed his footing and travelled the rest of the way on his bottom, laughing like a lunatic. Marie-Thérèse offered to drive him back to the rectory.

‘No, thank you, my dear. I’ve filled my tank and I need to burn it off.’

‘You talk like my husband, Father. Like a mechanic.’

‘They don’t yet have their saint, but they will. They deserve him. If need be, I shall go to Rome personally to petition His Holiness Pius XI. Actually, you’ve hit on something, I shall go and make my request this instant.’

He caught his foot on the doormat inside the front door and nearly fell over again.

‘Father!’ Marie-Thérèse said in a voice full of reproach.

‘My dear penitent, one does not dictate his conduct to a priest such as myself. I have certainly overdone the calvados in your husband’s company, but it is when the spirit elevates itself and is released from material contingencies that ideas come in their multitudes. On which note, the Lord bless you and keep you.’

Taking down his wide-brimmed hat from the coat hook, he placed it on his head with an energetic gesture and strode out into the darkening night. She watched him until he was past the gates and was surprised to hear him, just as he presumably thought himself out of earshot, let go two crisp and substantial farts that rippled through the evening air. But with what circumlocutions could she report that to his superiors, especially when the abbé couldn’t care less? He had two more calls to make, before returning to the rectory and a dinner of cold potatoes and a bowl of curd cheese.

The purchase of her Model T Ford changed Marie-Thérèse’s life profoundly, and even her appearance. She abandoned her Lanvin for a more sporty look, exchanged high heels for flats, bobbed her hair and started smoking two packs of caporal cigarettes a day. Her stubbed-out butts filled the ashtrays at La Sauveté, and when she spoke her breath, laden with cold, sour smoke, hit you in the face. She drove prudently and without haste along the region’s narrow roads, venturing twenty-five or thirty kilometres from Grangeville but never overstepping the confines of her self-imposed kingdom. She often took the children with her, including Jean, to show them churches and ruined abbeys and the châteaux of friends, where they were invited in to nibble snacks in large, gloomy rooms that smelt of furniture polish and old ladies. The château that fascinated Jean Arnaud the most was the Malemorts’: an elegant residence in red brick, flanked by two turrets and a pretty dovecote. The Marquis de Malemort, who had recently turned thirty, was struggling valiantly against the hard times. He had razed three-quarters of his parkland to turn it into fields and taken back his two tenanted farms to run them himself. Each year this solid Norman with his highly coloured complexion lost a little more of his aristocratic manner and looked a little more like a peasant, but on Sundays, dressed in grey and wearing white gloves with a carnation in his buttonhole, at the reins of his trap, in which sat the marquise and their daughter, Chantal, he still possessed a definite style. People bowed low to him not from servility, but as befitted a proud picture of the past in an era without pity.