Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Jean was hardly aware of these changes. He quickly forgot the lost park. Antoinette filled his thoughts. Not all of them, to tell the truth, as though he had already guessed that a man lives better with two passions than one. Certainly Antoinette dominated, because she was there every day, but Chantal de Malemort reigned by virtue of an almost fairy-like absence and her pure, transparent graces. It was, therefore, the little girl he caught sight of once a month if he was lucky, in the course of a formal visit, who captured his heart’s most passionate impulses. If she had decided to reveal to him the same secrets as Antoinette he would have detested her, just as he would have detested Antoinette if she had decided to stop exciting his imagination with her carefully arranged exposures. In fact he did end up detesting her several times when, as much out of caprice as to gauge the extent of her power over him, she refused to show him that part of her body that had so fascinated him one afternoon at the foot of the cliff. She was also prudent: without her foresight and coolness they would definitely have been caught. Jean went slightly mad. He demanded his due everywhere, in the garage, in the woodshed, even in Antoinette’s bedroom when he managed to slip in there. Their difficulties increased when Michel’s attention was aroused and he began to follow them, but Antoinette knew how to shake him off with a mischievousness worthy of her age, and Michel would get lost in the back ways to the sea while the two accomplices sprinted down the gully and hid themselves under the cliff. Jean’s pleasure was spiced with remorse: what would Monsieur du Courseau think if he found out? Their secret understanding, born six years earlier after the incident of the punctured hosepipe, had continued and strengthened, without any need for great declarations. A wink from time to time, a word here and there, had been enough to reassure Jean. Actions and opportunities would come later — but what a disaster it would be if, before that happened, a shadow were to fall between them! Jean did not even dare imagine it. On the other hand, at Christmas there would be a problem: to receive communion he would have to go to confession, and there was no question of confessing to any other priest than the abbé Le Couec. But how would he react to what Jean would have to tell him? By early December Jean was feeling increasingly anxious, and he decided to ask Antoinette about his problem. She burst out laughing.

‘You stupid boy! Why should you confess it? It’s not a sin. Don’t be such an idiot, or I shan’t show you anything any more.’

‘I’m sure it is a sin. It’s called lust.’

‘Oh my gosh, just listen to him! Who do you think you are? A man? For heaven’s sake, there are no children left.’

Impressed, Jean did not say any more, and on Christmas Eve went to confession with the village children. The abbé Le Couec officiated in his icy church, chilled by a west wind that whistled through the porch and made the altar-cloth ripple magically. The dancing candle flames twisted the shadows of the Sulpician statues of Saint Anthony, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Joan of Arc in their niches. Huddled in his rickety confessional, the abbé Le Couec listened to the piping litany of childish sins. When it was his turn Jean kneeled, trembling, and with his voice shaking with emotion recited an Our Father as if he were clinging to a lifebelt, then fell silent.

‘I’m listening, my child,’ said the priest, who had recognised his voice.

Jean confessed to some venial sins that he wasn’t even sure were sins. The abbé’s silence worried him. Was he there, listening behind his screen? What trap was waiting, right next to Jean, in the darkness of the confessional? What if there were no priest on the other side at all, but a huge ear sitting on the wooden bench, an ear of God with hearing so acute it could listen in to the most secret thoughts.

‘Is that all? Well, that’s not too bad. Those are not really sins, more weaknesses that a boy like you ought to be able to put right with no trouble. Two Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. You can go.’

Jean left the confessional, hands clasped together and head bent, and walked to the altar where he kneeled and prayed, his heart heavy with his remorse at having deceived a man as good and generous as the abbé Le Couec.

At La Sauveté Antoinette was waiting in Jeanne’s kitchen, where Jeanne was ironing in front of the range on which she was keeping the iron hot. As soon as he walked in, his gaze met Antoinette’s, and he knew that she was waiting to make sure he hadn’t weakened. He held her look and grinned.

‘So did you make a good confession, little one?’

‘Very good, Maman. The abbé Le Couec told me my sins aren’t really sins.’

Antoinette’s eyes shone with pleasure. She kissed Jeanne on the cheek, shoved Jean playfully, and skipped back to La Sauveté. A few days later, when they were out for a walk together, she showed him her breasts, which had already grown into two charming, nicely firm little domes. Jean was filled with happiness, and his remorse at having deceived the good abbé steadily faded. He was beginning to lose his trust in the absoluteness of a religion that was unable to penetrate the secrets of people’s souls. You could escape from God’s omnipresence, and trick his ministers, without the earth opening up beneath your feet. The idea was not yet clear in his mind, but a glimmer flickered on the horizon: if a person watched where they were going, they ought to reach a world less full of threats and menace. Wasn’t Albert an unbeliever? And Jean could not imagine that a better person than his father existed.

However strong Antoinette’s hold on him was, she could not remove Chantal de Malemort from his thoughts, where she continued to reign discreetly as a figure of pale and dark beauty, pink-lipped, slender and modest. On New Year’s Day, Madame du Courseau drove the children to a party at the Malemorts’. That afternoon, during a game of hide and seek, Jean found himself alone with Chantal in the trophy room on the château’s ground floor. Dozens of stuffed birds crowded the shelves, and the whole of one wall was covered in the antlers of stags hunted in the forest of Arques by three generations of Malemorts. The room was icily cold and smelt of dust, a dead, faded smell that caught in Jean’s throat. Chantal pulled back a brocaded curtain that hid a recessed door.

‘Hide in there!’

‘What about you?’ he blurted out, so close to the object of his admiration that he was unable to stay calm.

‘I’m coming with you, of course!’

The heavy curtain fell back over them and they stood still for a moment, side by side, not touching, their backs against the door. Shouts rang out in the corridor. Michel was looking for them. He entered the room and called out, ‘Come out, I saw you!’

Chantal made a slight movement, and Jean put his hand on her arm. They held their breath, shoulder to shoulder. Michel marched around the room, looking under the table, opening cupboards.

‘I’ll give you three seconds to come out!’ he shouted.

Jean held Chantal’s arm more tightly and she didn’t move. They heard the door close again, and the sound of a stampede in the corridor.

‘He’s gone!’ she said.

‘It’s a trick. He’s going to come back as quietly as he can.’

Two minutes later the door creaked, and Michel burst into the room.

‘Hey! I saw you.’

Terrified, Chantal hid her face in the hollow of Jean’s shoulder. He felt pure happiness. For years afterwards he remembered that impulse she had had to claim his protection, and the firmness with which he had kept her close to him, wrapping his arm around her, with his nose in her fresh-smelling hair. Chantal de Malemort never belonged to him more than she did at that moment, as a child-woman.