Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

She had asked him without warning, ‘Do you want to see my bottom?’

To be honest, her bottom did not interest him very much. He would have preferred her breasts, but they would be for later, another time, and anyway Antoinette only ever did the things she wanted to do. The two of them had found a place concealed by a rock, where it was hard for them to be seen even from the top of the cliff above them. Antoinette had lifted up her skirt and pushed down her white cotton knickers, uncovering two lovely, smooth fresh globes that exuded a sense that being naked like that filled them with joy, making them want to burst with health and pleasure. The cleft disappeared into a shadowy fold between her thighs. Beyond, other mysteries began that Jean would have liked to find out about and whose importance he sensed without knowing why.

‘So?’ she said.

‘It’s very pretty.’

‘You can kiss it!’

He had put his lips on the soft skin, so soft it had a sweet taste, and had managed to hold back from biting, a maddening impulse that suddenly started up like hunger somewhere between his teeth. He had not been upset when in an abrupt movement she covered up her two marvels, for their contemplation was making him dizzy. Mademoiselle du Courseau straightened her skirt, and they dashed back up the gully together, hand in hand, to fetch their bikes and pedal frantically all the way to La Sauveté …

‘Yes, Father,’ Jeanne said, ‘you’re right. In books we learn how we must behave in life. But there are also books that are dangerous for people’s good sense.’

‘What are you reading, Jean?’

‘Treasure Island, Father. It was a present from Uncle Fernand.’

‘Always stories about sailors!’

Fernand Duclou looked up. ‘Well then, father, perhaps you’ll tell us what you’ve got against the navy, you, a Breton?’

‘Nothing, my dear man. It’s perfectly true that stories about sailors are generally a good healthy read.’

‘Because there are no women on board sailing ships’ Monsieur Cliquet said mischievously, taking the dice cup from Albert. ‘Whereas,’ he added, ‘there are women on trains and even Madonnas in sleeping cars.’

He was referring to a novel that had sold a fabulous number of copies, whose title was known even to those who were illiterate. Jeanne coughed, covering her embarrassment, and pulled her chair closer to spread her knitting over the kitchen table, above which hung an electric bulb and its china shade. The light was yellow and it flickered, but it was a novelty they were becoming accustomed to, not without the anxiety that it would be more expensive than their oil lamps. Jeanne stretched out the sleeve of the jumper she was knitting and compared it with the one she had just finished. Captain Duclou poured warm blue wax into the bottle, and the three-master bobbed on a sea stirred up by a swell.

Albert had won. He sat back and lit a pipe, reached for his newspaper and after reading a headline, said bitterly, ‘They’ll have his hide, and then we’ll have another war.’

‘The war is over, for all of us,’ the abbé said.

‘Oh, they’ll wait until Jean’s old enough to be called up.’

‘Well, that gives us a bit of time, and as for your Aristide, no one will miss him.’

‘Briand equals peace!’ Albert said forcefully.

‘Peace equals a good navy,’ the captain said. ‘We no longer have one.’

‘And a decent transport system,’ Monsieur Cliquet said firmly. ‘How can we mobilise today’s wonderful modern armies with a network as out of date as ours? If the government thought that there would be another war, it would take the railways in hand. It’s not doing that, and I therefore deduce that there is not going to be a war in the near future.’

‘Now, now!’ Jeanne said. ‘There’s no need to go having an argument when everyone agrees.’

The abbé protested. He did not agree, and he did not care for Briand, calling him an ‘orator’ and beginning to imitate rather grotesquely his famous ‘Pull back the machine guns, pull back the cannons’ speech. He then raised the embarrassing matter of his criminal record. In his eyes Briand embodied the worst aspects of the centralising republic that got itself mixed up in the affairs of the world willy-nilly, while denying its provinces their rightful cultural freedoms.

‘Just listen to the Chouan!’2 said Monsieur Cliquet, who had voted radical socialist since his youth.

The priest roared with laughter and leant over to borrow Albert’s tobacco pouch to roll himself a cigarette between his fat peasant’s fingers.

Jean was no longer following their talk, his mind having gone back to the delicious picture of Antoinette’s bottom. He now badly wanted to see it again, and stroke its cool skin.

‘It’s time you went to bed,’ his mother said. ‘You have to be up at six tomorrow.’

Jean closed his book. In bed he would be alone in the dark, with no one to interrupt his reverie. He kissed everyone goodnight and went upstairs. Each year at Christmas Marie-Thérèse du Courseau gave him something for his bedroom, bookshelves, an armchair or some leather-bound books, and the simple room, whose only window looked out onto the park, was set apart by its taste from the rest of the house, where waxed tablecloths, the chimes of Big Ben and kitchen chairs reigned. Albert naturally disapproved of such luxury, which seemed to him devoid of sense.

‘One day that boy will be ashamed of us,’ he said.

Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. She did not believe it, and little by little had begun to indulge herself in dreams of a great future for the child who had fallen into her lap. Besides, how could she refuse? Despite being repeatedly rebuffed, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau interfered relentlessly in Jean’s upbringing. Hadn’t she recently been talking about him having tennis lessons, as Michel and Antoinette did, and wasn’t she always picking him up whenever a Norman accent crept into his speech? But for the moment Albert’s fears were unjustified: Jean admired him and adored Jeanne, and even if he showed enthusiastic gratitude to Madame du Courseau for her many kindnesses, he didn’t really understand her attitude and its apparently arbitrary mixture of reprimands and generosity. He remained scared of her and never entered La Sauveté without apprehension, equally on his guard against Michel, who continued to nurse a deep, though veiled, hostility towards him that was more dangerous than kitchen knives or rat poison.

*

A few days later the Briand cabinet fell. Its end affected Albert deeply. War was around the corner, now that the one man who could prevent it had been removed. His successor, André Tardieu, nicknamed ‘Fabulous’3 in political circles for his cigarette-holder and personal elegance as much as his grand bourgeois manner, inspired confidence only among the bankers. They doubtless needed it, being in the middle of a recession, but the magic formulas that were apparently overflowing from Tardieu’s pockets were already too late. The country’s industrial base, including its armaments industry, was crumbling. Antoine du Courseau himself, having for a long time done no more than glance indifferently at his notary’s warnings, found himself having to contemplate the sale of half the La Sauveté estate. The ink was barely dry on the contract when he left for the Midi, as though unable to bear Albert’s reproach-laden look or his wife’s indulgent smiles, laden with commiseration. Marie-Thérèse was admirable in her stoical dignity. She might of course, without straining herself an inch, have used her own fortune to save the park, but such an idea never occurred to her, and, it has to be said, nor did it cross Antoine’s mind to ask her to do so. A wall went up, which Albert covered with ampelopsis. The view out to sea vanished and was forgotten, its only reminder the herring gulls that swooped over the beeches and continued to land on the lawn in front of the bluffs of rhododendrons. They alone betrayed the continued presence of the great disappeared space, the infinity of the sea that had been rendered so finite.