Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

When Michel finally gave up his search and left the room, Chantal detached herself from Jean, pushed back the curtain, and pulled him by the hand. They ran to the hall, where the Marquis de Malemort was pulling off his mud-plastered boots and drenched oilskin. He had just been out to take oats and straw to his horse and gave off a strong smell of stables. Jean admired this handsome and solid man, who owned a château and was favoured with a title that belonged in the kind of fairy tales in which kings and princes have daughters more beautiful than the dawn’s meeting with the night. That this character was real did not intimidate him, quite the contrary. He liked his strong, earthy presence, and the way he swore with the same manners as Madame de Malemort and the same gentleness as Chantal. A bond united this family — the château, the name — a bond whose subterranean ramifications Jean had only just begun to perceive, through snatches of conversations whose meaning he did not always understand, but which seemed to exclude him. In short, Chantal belonged to a caste that put her beyond his dreams, in a virtually magical firmament in which she glided on the tips of her feet without touching the earth at all. Left to himself, Jean might eventually have doubted the superior existence of Chantal de Malemort, but he had Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, née Mangepain, to influence his thoughts, a woman sugary to the point of crystallisation in her decorum, hungry to add ever more titles to her conversation and gather like nectar, from one country house to the next, the crumbs of a decaying society of which she would have adored to be a part, even if it meant being swallowed up along with it. Her admiration — stripping her character of every natural quality — helped to sustain the existence of a tradition that had been more overwhelmed by several years of recession than it had been in a hundred and fifty years of revolutions.

However kind the Malemorts were to him, Jean never saw them without a feeling of guilt, as though his place was not among them. He was the son of Albert and Jeanne, caretakers of La Sauveté. If he ever forgot it for an instant, Michel made it his business to remind him with a wounding word. Michel’s unpleasantness hurt him because, even though he did not love Michel — how could he? — he genuinely admired him for his talents. He would have given anything to sing like him at mass, or create the crib figures he made with his own hands, or paint the colourful landscapes that had already been shown in a gallery at Dieppe, and then at Rouen. What did he, Jean Arnaud, possess that he could shine with, in the eyes of the Malemorts? Nothing, apart from his strength, his physical agility, and some secrets passed on to him by Monsieur Cliquet and Captain Duclou, incommunicable secrets that Chantal would never need to use: the history of locomotives through the ages, and how to predict the weather.

I sense that the reader is eager, as I am, to reach the point where Jean Arnaud becomes a man. But patience! None of us turns into an adult overnight, and nothing would be properly clear (or properly fictional) if I failed to illustrate the stages of our hero’s childhood in some carefully chosen anecdotes. This is, after all, the period when Jean is to learn what life is, or, more specifically, when he is to experience a range of feelings, aversions and passions which will imprint themselves deeply on him and to which he will only discover the key very much later, around the age of thirty, when he begins to see things more clearly. At the time that I am talking about, he is still a small boy, and beyond the walls of La Sauveté the wide world that awaits him, with all its cheating and its pleasures, is a long way off. So far away that you might as well say it doesn’t exist. Jean had an idea of it, however, thanks to an encounter that I want to record and to which I implore the reader to pay attention. It happened under the premiership of Camille Chautemps, which is entirely irrelevant, I hasten to add, and which lasted for nine days, a record equalled in the Third Republic only by Alexandre Ribot and beaten by Édouard Herriot. Returning from an errand in Dieppe, Jean was pedalling back up the hill to Grangeville in a fine drizzle that was working its way through the cape he had spread across his handlebars. Despite his sou’wester, rain was also dripping down his neck, and his soaked feet were squelching on the pedals in shoes that were too big for him. Coming round a bend, he saw a car that had stopped on the verge. It was a car that impressed as much by its size — it looked as large as a truck — as by its yellow coachwork, black mudguards and white wheels. A chauffeur in a light blue tunic and peaked cap was crouching next to the offside rear wheel, whose tyre was flat, and trying to remove the wheel. He must have been lacking an essential tool, because, seeing Jean, he hailed him. Jean slowed and stopped and stood open-mouthed: the chauffeur was black. His face, wet with rain, shone under his cap, and when he opened his mouth Jean was struck by the size and yellowish colour of his teeth.

‘Is there a mechanic near here?’ the chauffeur asked.

‘Yes, at the bottom of the hill.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Maybe a kilometre.’

‘You wouldn’t like to go and get him for me, would you?’

‘It’s hard to ride back up the hill. I’ve already done it once.’

‘Will you lend me your bicycle?’

‘It’s too small for you.’

‘I’ll manage.’

The chauffeur took off his cap and tapped on the rear window, which opened with a squeaking sound. A face appeared, pale and with grey semi-circles under the eyes. The neck disappeared into a tightly tied blue silk scarf. It was impossible to say whether it was a young man ravaged by a hidden illness that gave his cheeks and forehead a parchment-like translucency, or a much older man whom death would soon blow apart, splitting an envelope stretched to breaking point over a fragile skeleton.

‘Monseigneur,’ the chauffeur said, ‘this boy is lending me his bicycle to go and fetch a mechanic. There’s one at the bottom of the hill, he says.’

‘Hurry then! We have to pick Madame up again at five o’clock.’

The man’s voice matched his physique, thin and fragile. Jean was dazzled: he had heard the chauffeur call his passenger with the blue scarf ‘Monseigneur’. This passenger now turned and looked at him sympathetically and added, ‘You’re not going to stand out there in the rain. Come and sit by me.’

The chauffeur opened the door and Jean shook out his rubber cape and climbed into the passenger compartment, where the man pointed to a folding seat.

‘What is your name?’ he asked immediately.

‘Jean Arnaud.’

‘And do you live near here?’

‘At Grangeville.’

‘It looks as if it rains rather a lot here.’

‘Oh, it depends! There are fine days too.’

Jean’s eyes began to get used to the half-darkness inside the car, whose luxury seemed fabulous to him. The seats were of glossy black leather, the carpet of animal fur, and another pelt covered the knees of the traveller, who was bundled up in a black overcoat with an otter-skin collar. A tortoiseshell telephone connected him to the chauffeur, who was separated from his passenger by a glass panel. Beside the folding seat there was a drawer of some rich hardwood, filled with crystal decanters and silver goblets.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Everything … everything, Monseigneur.’

‘I see that you’re well brought up. This is a great strength in life. What do your parents do?’

‘My parents are the caretakers at La Sauveté. My father’s a gardener. He lost a leg in the war. He doesn’t want me to be a soldier.’

‘He’s right.’