Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

He left the beach and came back through the woods. He loved the fragrance of the pine groves and the silvery-pale sheen of the olive trees. At Saint-Tropez, as he waited for school to finish, he paused at La Ponche beach and sat on the terrace of a fisherman’s bar. The weathered boats pulled up on the shingle were unloading red mullet, bass and rock lobster. He drank a second pastis, and his lost rapture returned. No one talked about the war here. Had it ever happened? He could almost have believed that the past twelve years had wiped it from memories and hearts, if he himself hadn’t continued to be troubled by terrible dreams. And then there had been the death of Léon Cece, from the live grenade he had clutched to his stomach so that he exploded like a pig’s bladder. Others like him were still suffering, but now they hid themselves away. Their morbid trains of thought disturbed the pleasures of peacetime and put the younger generation off their food. Léon had killed himself so that he would stop being a blot on the world’s happiness. At La Ponche Antoine gradually found himself talking to everyone. When he bought a round the fishermen exaggerated their southern accents, and he was not fooled: that too was part of the act that everyone was putting on and that seemed, year by year, to become more real than reality.

As soon as Antoinette appeared at the school gate, she ran towards the Bugatti and climbed in next to him.

‘Uncle Antoine, will you take me for a drive?’

He drove her as far as Grasse to buy fougasse flatbreads still warm from the oven, which they ate with bars of chocolate as they rolled slowly back to Saint-Tropez. They had bought perfume for Marie-Dévote, who loved to soak herself in lavender water.

‘How are you my uncle?’ Toinette asked. ‘You’re not my papa’s brother, or Maman’s, yet everybody says I look just like you.’

‘I’m the uncle of your heart. When you love a little girl very much from the day she’s born, she gradually starts to look like you.’

‘Is that really true?’

‘Truer than anything! I swear it.’

Antoine left then, before his heart got any softer. At Roquebrune he parked outside Léon’s restaurant, which had been renamed Chez Antoine after it was extended. Mireille greeted him with a well-rehearsed tantrum and then, when her sulking and reproaches were over, this strange little vine shoot wrapped herself around him, locked the kitchen door and gave herself to him among the pots and pans. A waitress drummed on the door and went away laughing. Antoine usually stayed for a day or two, never longer, attracted by a basic and violent desire, but was eventually driven away by Léon’s ghost, which wandered through the house with its terrible smashed face, impossible to contemplate. The restaurant was doing well, and Mireille had discovered that she had ambitions after she had been written up in the food columns of several newspapers. When Antoine arrived her mother faded into the background. Sitting on a chair at the roadside, her hands lying in her lap on a grey apron that partly covered her black dress and cotton stockings, she fixed things and people alike with a look of complete vacancy, like an Indian fakir trying to escape from his earthly self. Her relations with Antoine were limited to a nod when he arrived and left. Mireille was not, strictly speaking, beautiful in the way that Marie-Dévote was, but her ascetic skinniness, the fire in her eyes, her blue-black hair curled tightly about her small face, emphasising her sharp features, the nerviness of her body with its taste of saffron, and the impression she gave of being ready to flare up at the slightest spark, attracted Antoine irresistibly. Yet each time he left her without regret. She was too fiery for his temperament, and he was afraid of getting burnt. On the road back he stopped again briefly at Saint-Tropez, kissed Marie-Dévote and Toinette, listened distractedly to another of Théo’s new plans, and drove north to Aix where he stopped at Charles’s garage but, less vulnerable to its owner’s charm, listened noncommittally, not to his war stories this time — that era had been exhausted — but to his fabulous speculations for Provence’s future.

Ah, the wonderful way back! The Bugatti sang. Antoine worked the engine hard up the Rhône valley, and as though it preferred the roads that led to cooler climates where it could carburate more happily, it gobbled up the kilometres, glued to the road and without a squeal through the bends, flew up the hills and strained at the descents. At garages where he stopped, mechanics flattered the engine with their caresses, scarcely daring to touch it, so perfect did it seem, like the creation of some heavenly watchmaker or a wizard of the road.

When he arrived home from his trip of February 1930, Antoine was surprised to see that work had already started in the part of the park he had sold at the end of the previous year. In flagrant disregard of the agreement signed at the time of the sale, the new owner, a Parisian, Monsieur Longuet, the proprietor of two fashionable bordellos at Montparnasse, although he preferred to claim that he had made his fortune in hardware, had begun building what looked like a two-storey villa for himself, his wife and son. From the first floor they would be able to see everything that went on at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse was only waiting for Antoine to come back so that war could be declared. He had not got out of the car before she came running to him.

‘Have you seen? A week! A whole week just to put up that scaffolding. We’ll be just in time to get the building stopped.’

‘Let’s plant trees instead.’

‘They’ll take fifty years to grow.’

‘Not if you plant pines or eucalyptuses.’

‘They’re not trees from around here.’

‘Then let’s put up with it.’

Marie-Thérèse shrugged angrily, turned on her heel and went back inside to scold the new Martiniquan, a Mademoiselle Artémis Pompon, who worked in the laundry, the children having grown too big to have a nurse. Artémis aroused no feelings in Antoine: she was a skinny nag, always barefoot in the house, with a disappointing bosom and a dropping lower lip. She was nevertheless a dutiful girl, who had been told that her employer would sleep with her for the same price as her predecessor, and had appeared on her first morning, giggling, at Antoine’s library door, where he, in his dressing gown and smoking the first cigar of the day, had received her with astonishment.

‘Artémis, you are mistaken. I want peace and quiet in my house. Go to bed. You need to rest. I know Madame treats you badly, but there’s nothing to be done, it’s the way she is.’

Satisfied — sometimes even beyond his capacity — he now preferred to devote his early mornings to reading, so much so that in a bold step, uncharacteristic of his conservative nature, he had bought in a sale at a Dieppe bookseller’s a complete edition of Alexandre Dumas, whose pleasure he had not yet managed to exhaust.

About fifty people had crowded onto the pavement facing the offices of La Vigie: pensioners with their caps on straight, young workers with theirs jauntily over their ears, children. No women. But many bicycles stood next to their owners, one in particular, that of Jean Arnaud, red and with derailleur gears and racing handlebars taped up with gutta-percha. Whenever an employee emerged through the glass door and placed his ladder against the wall beneath the blackboard above the exhibition area, there was an ‘ahh’ of satisfaction from the waiting crowd. Calmly, in a round, well-turned hand, the man wrote in chalk ‘Stage: Nice — Gap. 1st André Leducq, 2nd Bonduel, 3rd Benoît Faure’. In the overall placings, of course, Leducq had retained the yellow jersey. The crowd dispersed, disappointed, almost without comment. Reawakened in 1930 by the return to a system of national teams, French chauvinism was bored by a victory that lacked drama. That André Leducq, a great sprinter but lamentable climber, should have won a mountain stage proved that, unless the dice were loaded, it was all over. The 1932 Tour, in stark contrast to the previous year, when there had been victory for the great Antonin Magne combined with a heroic sacrifice by his young team-mate René Vietto on the Col du Lautaret, would finish in tedium. Jean got on his bike and set off for Grangeville, this time climbing the hill without standing up on his pedals. He had been feeling on top form since the beginning of the Tour, and his bike, a Peugeot, was worthy of a champion. He had bought it at Easter with his savings, supplemented by two postal orders from the mysterious prince. Nearly thirteen years old, he looked sixteen or seventeen; he was five foot seven, with long legs and a well-developed upper body. Jeanne now bought his clothes at the men’s department in the Nouvelles Galeries. The term before, he had liberated himself from Madame du Courseau’s yoke by starting to ride to school at Dieppe, refusing a lift with Michel in her new Ford V8, still rather high-bodied and old-fashioned, but powerful and silent. He preferred his bike, however steep the hill back up to Grangeville. His height earned him the frequent (cautious) mockery of his schoolfriends, who themselves wisely remained below average in that respect. Jean stood up to their meanness without pleasure. He recognised Michel’s sly handiwork in these skirmishes: in the year above Jean, he was the one anonymously orchestrating the taunts and rallying cries. Less innocent now, Jean began to keep a tally. One day he would put an end to Michel’s campaign. His fists itched, but for now Michel continued to enjoy the aura of his family. He was the brother of the delicious Antoinette, with whom Jean’s excitements were becoming more and more specific. He was also the son of Antoine du Courseau, with whom he, Jean, had made a secret pact that was still in force, despite Antoine’s frequent absences. And he would have wounded his parents deeply by attacking one of the du Courseaus who, despite their accumulating difficulties, retained a certain magnificence for Jeanne and Albert.