Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

They slept for a time, and were woken by the sound of hooting as the bus returned from Saint-Raphaël. Marie-Dévote sprang out of bed and dressed in the twinkling of an eye to go and meet her Théo. Antoine’s mouth felt furry and his eyes swollen. He too got out of bed, walked down the beach, jumped into the sea, splashed around like a seal and came out breathless but rejuvenated. It had stopped raining, and one of the painters had set up his easel on the beach and was finishing a picture of Théo’s boat, beached on the sand. A soft orange-washed light spread from the horizon into a sky that was free of clouds. Antoine walked behind the painter and felt a shiver of delight. He knew nothing of modern art, but this painting, laden with primitive colours and an ample, sensuous reality conveyed in reds and blues, charmed him instantly.

‘Do you sell your work?’ he said awkwardly, not knowing how to go about such questions with an artist, without offending him.

‘From time to time,’ the painter said, cleaning a brush.

‘I mean: that picture.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Antoine du Courseau. But the picture will be for Marie-Dévote and Théo. They haven’t got anything for the walls of their dining room.’

‘Ah!’

The painter tidied his palette away and, folding up his easel, offered the canvas to Antoine.

‘Take it now. If you don’t I’ll change my mind. I’ll glaze it for you when it’s dry.’

‘But … I need to give you something for it.’

‘Of course … write to my dealer. I’ll give you his card. He’ll tell you how much. That’s his business.’

Antoine stayed standing alone on the beach, the canvas in his hand, like a stray object he had discovered on the sand. Dusk was falling. A cool onshore breeze began to blow and he shivered.

‘Saints! What’s up, Antoine? Are you dreaming?’ Théo shouted. ‘Come and have a pastis.’

He walked back to the terrace. The bottle was waiting next to the carafe of cold water. Théo poured pastis, then water. Antoine placed the painting on the table and drank standing up.

‘Do you like it?’

‘I suppose so. Hey … it really looks like it.’

‘To decorate your dining room.’

‘Nice. The boat looks as if it’s about ready to go.’

‘Are you fishing tonight?’

‘I’m thinking about it.’

It was part of the game. Antoine played with ill grace, and Théo brought it to an end by giving in, but only after enjoying Antoine’s discomfort. He left to go fishing with his lamp, and Antoine remained in the dining room with Marie-Dévote and the two painters, who acknowledged his shy nod with a smile. Marie-Dévote had rings around her eyes and the slightly too languorous and feline look of a woman who has spent the afternoon satisfying herself fully. Antoine still wanted her, but more calmly and deliberately this time, and as he sipped her soupe au pistou, served steaming in big blue china dishes, he felt to an extreme extent — to the point of oppression — the fear of loving and of experiencing an impossible passion for a woman who could never be his. It was a bewildering feeling, a feeling that, for all its desire, revealed the bitterness of a wasted life. He wished he had never met Marie-Dévote, and he cursed the appointment with fate that had driven him, on an August afternoon three years earlier, to this beach café where a young girl sat sunning her brown knees on the terrace. At the same time he was forced to admit that, in the absence of Marie-Dévote, these last three years would have been pitiful, without any grace, joy or happiness. Without any happiness at all. He looked up.

‘What’s the matter?’ Marie-Dévote said. ‘Your eyes are watering.’

‘The soup’s hot. I burnt myself.’

‘Oh good. I’m glad it’s nothing worse!’

She left to help her mother with the dishes and he turned to the painters, who were also finishing dinner, and raised his glass.

‘Why don’t you join us?’ the one who had sold him the picture said.

‘I’d be delighted.’

They questioned him diplomatically, and he answered without bending the truth. One of the two men knew Grangeville.

‘I was up that way last year. I rented a little place near the cemetery. Very soft light. Grey gravestones, white cliffs, the sea. One of those places you wouldn’t mind dying in. I came back with a dozen seascapes, but that’s not what the dealers want. The only thing they can sell is the sun. Isn’t that true, André?’

‘Yes. And we’ll give them as much as they can handle, blue skies, blue seas, red sails, green boats. I know it like the back of my hand by now, I could go and paint it all in a cellar in Paris with a bare bulb over my head. This is the future, the Midi; people are going to make fortunes here …’

They discussed their respective dealers with a scorn and aggressiveness that startled Antoine. He had been expecting revelations about art, some explanation of heaven knows what, and all he got instead was talk about money, names, exhibition dates and moaning about critics who only cared about official art, that great producer of war memorials. Antoine had never questioned whether these memorials were beautiful or ugly. In the course of his excursions he had seen them going up in every village, allegories in exaggerated drapery shielding a wounded soldier with a tender hand, proud bronze infantrymen watching over tearful women and children. They seemed unhealthy to him, full of dishonest symbolism, but the thought of judging their beauty or ugliness would never have occurred to him without the two artists’ sarcastic commentary. He felt ashamed of his ignorance, and left them to go to his room. Here, a little later, Marie-Dévote followed him.

‘Would you like it again?’

‘Of course, it’s all I’ve got. I don’t give a damn about all the rest.’

And it was true: about all the rest he didn’t give a damn, and there was no pain, no sorrow, but when he pressed Marie-Dévote against him or, daydreaming, stroked her pretty breasts and their brown tips, something else existed: his pleasure. He stayed at Saint-Tropez for three days, his limit, which he never exceeded, so that he could be sure of leaving with a trace of animal regret on his lips that provided him with the certainty that he existed. The route des Maures, then the high corniche road to Nice, took him down to Roquebrune, where he stopped. Léon Cece, recognising the note of the Bugatti’s engine, appeared at his door in linen trousers and torn white singlet. Far from fading, his facial scars had deepened, splitting the soft tissue of his cheek, twisting his mouth, and attacking one eye, its bloodshot white beginning to bulge out of its orbit. His restaurant was doing badly. In the egotism of peacetime, diners were not willing to put up with the sight of his smashed face, a reminder of a time everyone was doing their best to forget and an awful reproach to those who had got through it without too much hardship; a mute and unacceptable pang of conscience from which most fled like cowards.

‘All right, Antoine?’ Léon called. ‘It’s been an age since we saw you.’

‘Three months. I had an accident. My knee in plaster. This is my first long trip.’

‘Well, that’s good anyway. You’re not like the others.’

They dined together on the balcony, wreathed by clouds of moths that whirled around the hurricane lamp and singed their wings. Léon was a man of truth. Unlike Charles Ventadour, the war he kept going back to was a squalid conflict, but it was his conflict, his alone, revolving around that attack when his head had been blown apart. He needed to talk about it, to go over it ceaselessly as though it were still possible, six years later, to take that one sideways step that would have saved him when the German 77 burst. And so great was his desire for that step that he seemed, at odd moments, almost able to erase the tragedy and recover his face as it had been, and his morale and cheerfulness, only to fall back again, harder than before, into the depths of a despair so bitter it had the taste of death about it. More than anything, he could not forgive the involuntary aversion of those who saw him for the first time. A curse had fallen upon him, and his uncomplicated and still sound spirit could not overcome the vast injustice that separated him from the rest of the living.