Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Monsieur du Courseau, owner of La Sauveté, of which Albert and Jeanne were the caretakers; Madame du Courseau, née Mangepain, who, the morning after the boy first appeared, had returned from a journey to Menton where her daughter Geneviève, nineteen years of age, was being treated for her lungs; Antoinette du Courseau, four years old (a home leave of Monsieur du Courseau’s after the battle of Les Éparges); Michel du Courseau, two years old (another leave of Monsieur du Courseau’s, before embarking for Salonika); Captain Duclou, Jeanne’s uncle and one of the last Cape Horners; Monsieur Cliquet, retired railway employee, Albert’s cousin; and last but not least Monsieur the abbé Le Couec, parish priest of Grangeville, a Breton exiled to Normandy by higher authorities nervous of his separatist fancies. This was not, we must acknowledge, a particularly large universe, but Jean could have fared worse, knowing only — until he finally left for military service — narrow-minded parents, an imbecilic schoolmaster, a numbingly dull priest, and a country house made gloomy by constipated proprietors.There are, actually, a couple of truly constipated characters lurking in this list. It will be clear who I mean in time. I prefer not to be specific, because it is after all possible that their attitudes will not seem constipated to readers of this story and may even be applauded by a silent majority. I am happy nevertheless to reveal that I am not talking about Monsieur du Courseau, whom Jeanne ran to inform as soon as it was light, pushing the baby into Albert’s arms and leaving him both paralysed by his responsibilities and furious at being forbidden to smoke his pipe in any room where little Jean was.

*

At about five o’clock in the morning, winter and summer, it was Monsieur du Courseau’s habit to get up, go down to the kitchen and make himself a large bowl of coffee, which he drank standing up in his dressing gown before going to his library where he closeted himself until eight. He was a tall, native Norman, ruddy-complexioned, blue-eyed, with a muscular neck and hands the shaped like paddles. Since being demobilised, he had put on weight around his waist but was unworried and even satisfied to note the reappearance of noble curves that the mud of the trenches and the diseases of the Army of the Orient1 had banished for a time. Nor did he worry about his baldness, which revealed a splendid skull, shining, smooth and emphasised by a corolla of greying hair. No one having ever seen a new book cross the threshold of his private library, it had to be assumed that he spent his time there rereading the same books, notably a complete Dickens in orange-red soft covers, a set of Balzac bound in shagreen, the works of Voltaire in the thirty-two-volume 1818 edition, and twenty or so biographies of William the Conqueror, his hero and the only man he admired, because he had defeated the English. Nothing of Antoine du Courseau’s reading ever surfaced in his conversation. When he was not eating, he liked to talk about food (when he was eating he was not talkative at all, being occupied with the sensations of eating and their analysis), about flowers (but only with Albert), about women (but only with the abbé Le Couec, who wasn’t afraid of them), about cars (but only with Ettore Bugatti whom once a year he visited at Molsheim to buy a new car), and about politics with nobody, having given up being outraged by anything. He had in fact ignored all political matters since his youth, when he had inherited La Sauveté from his mother and a fleet of trawlers from his father. Madame du Courseau was quite comfortably off too, being descended from three generations of millers who had long ago hung up their white jackets, the Mangepains of Caen. Yes, I know, how aptly named! But I can do nothing about that. The war had passed by without greatly troubling them, unlike many others whom it had enriched or ruined. Only two shadows darkened this happy picture: in Serbia Antoine had been wounded in the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel, and there was no question of his ever hunting again; and in 1917 Geneviève had begun to cough blood. Since then she had been living at Menton. Earlier in the summer they had feared for her future, but Madame du Courseau, who had rushed to her bedside, then announced that she was returning, Geneviève being out of danger …

Jeanne did not find Monsieur du Courseau in the kitchen, where his bowl still stood on the table next to the calvados bottle and the warm coffee pot, confirming that he had been there recently. Though fully aware of the instruction that he was not to be disturbed in his library, Jeanne did not hesitate and, instinctively understanding that there was no point in timidity, she opened the door sharply. A paraffin lamp lit the book-lined room and the desk, on which a china tobacco jar gleamed along with some other copper or silver objects. From a corner of the room there came a muffled cry, and a figure sat up. Monsieur du Courseau, for it was he, tidied himself, while on the day bed a black shape went on wriggling. Jeanne recognised Joséphine Roudou, a twenty-five-year-old from Martinique who, since Easter, had been looking after Michel and Antoinette in Madame du Courseau’s absence. In a gesture of modesty Joséphine pulled her nightdress up over her face, offering the charming sight of her brown belly and a sex darker than anything else in the library.

‘What is it that is so serious, my dear Jeanne?’ Antoine asked in an untroubled voice, since he was one of those men whom pleasure never left distracted for longer than two or three seconds.

‘We found a child on our doorstep in the night.’

‘Which one? Antoinette or Michel?’

‘No, somebody else’s child!’

‘But how very interesting. And what is his name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name. He’s about a week old.’

‘Goodness me! It must be some sort of joke …’

‘Who would dare to make a joke like that?’

‘Very true … Madame du Courseau is coming back today. She’ll know what to do. While we’re waiting, Joséphine can take care of it.’

‘Joséphine! Her? Never.’

There was a clucking from underneath the nightdress, and Monsieur du Courseau turned round as though he had just discovered a third person between Jeanne and himself. The sight of her belly still twitching with gentle spasms reminded him what had just happened.

‘Put that away now, Joséphine, please, come along.’

She lowered her nightdress and her face appeared, wild-looking, with the whites of her eyes showing. Without the madras headscarf that usually covered her head, her thickly corkscrewed hair gave her a Gorgon’s head that was frightening enough to make Jeanne shiver.

‘You can go back to your room,’ Monsieur du Courseau said.

Jeanne barely saw her dart out of the library, run down the hall and upstairs, leaving behind a scent of peppery skin and a trail of luxuriant free-and-easiness which could, very evidently, turn a man’s head, but which Jeanne herself, immune to such charms, judged particularly harshly.

‘Where is this child?’ Monsieur du Courseau asked.

‘With Albert. Albert adores babies.’

‘In that case he couldn’t be in better hands. Without doubt the best thing to do is to inform Monsieur the abbé Le Couec. Now I need to read …’

Jeanne left the library, disappointed at not having been able to share her excitement with Monsieur du Courseau, although she knew him well enough to be aware of his character and unresponsiveness. And he had given her good advice. The abbé Le Couec was exactly the man she needed. Her bosom swelled with hope, and her generous imagination was already hatching a thousand plans. At last providence was answering her prayers, just when age was forcing her to give up what she had wished for so much: a child. She would keep him, he belonged to her; she made the resolution as she crossed the park, its colours awakening in the early morning with its yellow-tinged dawn and ragged grey strips of cloud. A delicious scented freshness was rising from the earth, from the long bluffs of rhododendrons and the beds of dahlias, begonias, roses and marigolds. Jeanne knew that she had never been as happy as she was at this minute. She forgot the scene she had just witnessed, which should have outraged her, but which later she would relate in detail to her husband, leaving him unable to stop thinking about the story, which took him back to an African woman in a brothel behind the lines, a week before he lost his leg. Her breasts had been like watermelons and he had experienced the most intense pleasure between her strong thighs, nothing like the honest conjugal embraces in which Jeanne had become less and less interested after she had stopped hoping for a child. When Jeanne told him about Joséphine they both swore discretion, but their vow was futile, for soon everyone in the district knew and admitted that Monsieur du Courseau had a partiality to dark skin. Captain Duclou explained that sailors who had tasted such charms remained spellbound for life. Antoine must have picked up bad habits in the Army of the Orient, and since that date there had always been black women at La Sauveté. Each year, at around the same time as he changed his Bugatti, Antoine paid off the Martiniquan or the Guadeloupean he had employed the year before and requested another, who would arrive on one of those banana boats out of Dieppe, fresh, plump and brightly dressed, with gold rings in her ears. I shall not say much more about Joséphine Roudou, whom everyone disapproved of and then rather missed after she exchanged La Sauveté for a fleeting fame in Montmartre before one of those unpleasant maladies that women catch from men of little hygiene carried her off in the space of a few weeks.