Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Arriving at La Sauveté, Jean found his mother sitting, very straight, on a chair in the kitchen. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was a picture of suffering too deep to be expressed, but she managed nevertheless to stutter, ‘Your father’s waiting for you with Madame.’

He had just stepped into the hall when Antoinette, half-opening the door of the small anteroom, grabbed his arm and hissed imperiously, ‘Say it was you!’

She shut the door again immediately, and Jean walked into the drawing room, where his father, Marie-Thérèse and Antoine du Courseau were waiting for him. He understood that he was facing a tribunal and that this tribunal, presided over by a woman flanked by two further judges, did not expect to show clemency. Albert’s face expressed a vivid wrath, while Antoine’s was indifferent, almost absent. As for Marie-Thérèse, after several rehearsals in front of her mirror she seemed ready to play her role with the necessary dignity. It was she who found the first words, the most idiotic, obviously, that revealed very clearly her understanding of her relations with those around her.

‘Jean, we must speak to you very seriously, as we would to a man, since you insist on behaving like a man, despite being only thirteen years old. Do you recognise that up until today we have treated you as we would one of our own children?’

‘Of course, Madame.’

She sighed, and pretended to hide her face in her hands for a moment before continuing.

‘To Michel you’re like a brother—’

‘Do you really think so?’

She dismissed his doubt with a wave of her hand.

‘Oh, I know … little rivalries between boys. When you both grow up they’ll be quite forgotten. I should add — which is of capital importance — that to Antoinette you’re also a brother—’

‘Of course I am!’ Jean exclaimed. His legs were shaking.

‘You little beast!’ Albert shouted, raising his hand as if to slap him, in a gesture that was entirely out of place.

‘Calm down, Albert,’ Antoine said.

‘Captain, he is a little bastard.’

‘What have I done?’ Jean asked in a strangled voice.

Marie-Thérèse intended to lead the investigation in a proper judicial manner.

‘Where were you this afternoon?’

‘In Dieppe. I was waiting for the Tour results. Leducq won the stage.’

Marie-Thérèse’s smile indicated that she had expected just such an alibi.

‘With whom, may I ask?’

‘With his team, of course.’

‘I’m not talking about your grotesque Tour de France, whose vulgarity exasperates me beyond measure, I’m talking about you. Who were you with at Dieppe?’

‘I was on my own.’

Her smile widened.

‘Naturally! And you didn’t speak to anyone!’

Jean hesitated for a moment, thinking who he could have seen that afternoon.

‘No. No one.’

Antoine looked at him intensely. Jean met his eyes fixed upon him and found new courage.

‘What are you accusing me of?’

‘You know very well. This afternoon you were not at Dieppe. You were at the bottom of the cliffs, at the far end of the gully, well concealed behind some fallen rocks.’

Jean paled. He did not notice that she had said ‘this afternoon’ and thought he had been found out. Tears welled up in his eyes.

‘Good!’ Marie-Thérèse said triumphantly. ‘We have no need to spell it out to you. I hope you recognise the seriousness of what you have done. Is today the first time you have done such a thing, you and Antoinette?’

Jean realised his error and straightened up.

‘I was in Dieppe today.’

‘Don’t lie!’ Albert exclaimed. ‘Or I’ll disown you.’

‘I’m not lying.’

He was not lying. He never lied. He might have sinned by omission at confession with the abbé Le Couec, when he ‘forgot’ his and Antoinette’s games. Then his heart sank as he remembered what Antoinette had hissed in his ear: ‘Say it was you!’ He would not say it, but he felt a chasm open up at his feet: who had she been with this afternoon at the bottom of the cliff? He wanted to die. Antoine’s gaze gave him the courage to withstand his despair. Wanting to save Antoinette, he bowed his head and said nothing.

‘What you did is disgusting!’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘You are not the only guilty party. She is too. But I shall no longer look on you as one of my children.’

‘You ungrateful wretch!’ Albert said.

‘Now, now,’ Antoine said. ‘Let us just strike it from the record, and never mention it again.’

‘I’m confiscating his bike for the rest of the summer.’

Jean looked at his father meekly, despite his anguish.

‘That will hardly undo the harm he has done!’ Marie-Thérèse said acidly.

Antoine broke in. ‘All right! It’s done, it’s over. And may it never happen again.’

He stood up, to put an end to Jean’s ordeal, which he shared. Albert led his son away, grasping his arm as if he was going to try to escape. He himself was too agitated to speak. Jean walked past his mother, who pretended to be scouring a saucepan in order not to see him, and went to his room. Through the open window he caught sight of the Longuets’ villa, which a trellis covered in ivy failed to conceal. Jean shook his fist at the house, an enemy twice over, closed his shutters, and threw himself on his bed and sobbed. Over, it was all over. He would never speak to Antoinette again. A tart, an utter tart, the worst bitch of all the bitches. And how would he ever see Chantal de Malemort again? He wept until midnight, eventually falling asleep, and woke up early the next morning, his only thought that it must all have been a bad dream. But as daylight filtered through the slats of his shutters, he again felt the sinking feeling that had finished him the day before. It was completely true: Antoinette’s betrayal, Michel’s victory, his bike confiscated, and, even worse, perhaps worse than all the rest: he would never be taken to Malemort again, he would never see Chantal again. His life spread out ahead of him like a desert. He cried again briefly, then got up and, his eyes still blurred with tears, pushed back the shutters. Albert was watering marigolds along the boundary wall. Behind that wall lurked his rival, the big pimply lecher, Gontran Longuet, whom he had seen shamelessly hanging around Antoinette since the beginning of the summer. What was he doing with a name like Gontran? None of it would have happened if René Mangepain, Madame du Courseau’s brother, had not re-established relations between the two warring families. Albert, militant as ever in politics, had been outraged. It had almost been enough to make him subscribe to Action française ,6 which every morning directed its spotlight on the depravities of the majority-party politicians. After keeping a low profile as a deputy in the Chambre Bleu Horizon,7 René Mangepain had switched to full-blooded radicalism. He spoke of ‘my party’, tensing his already enormous neck. Politics for him was little more than the crumbs of his daily bread, but they were crumbs he clung to with a fierce appetite. No deputy could ever remember him mounting the gallery to address the Chamber, and his rare contributions recorded in the official register provoked hilarity, even among party colleagues. What rottenness connected him to the ghastly Longuet, the sources of whose enrichment Jean was perfectly well aware of? And how adroit they were, these traffickers in human flesh! Hadn’t even the abbé Le Couec taken to repeating ‘To every sin its pardon!’ since Madame Longuet had paid for the repairs to the church roof? Life was truly vile. He would go and punch that Gontran-my-arse in the face. The thought gave him the courage to brave the disapproval of the adults who had condemned him blindly the day before, in the absence of any evidence. And then there was Antoinette: he could already feel the satisfaction of the slap he was going to give her. Jean took one of those decisions one feels one will definitely stick to for ever, and which evaporated at the first application of her charm. Although for a few days he strenuously avoided her, it was impossible for the situation to go on without an explanation, and one morning when Jeanne sent Jean to the grocer’s at Grangeville to buy some butter, he walked straight into Antoinette, stopped on the bend in the path, wearing a tennis skirt, her legs bare, pushing her bicycle. The slap that Jean had promised himself did not happen. Antoinette may have been disappointed. She was expecting a torrent of reproaches, and did not suspect that her sudden appearance, her hair pulled back in an Alice band and her pretty breasts unconstrained under her white sweater, would confuse Jean to the point that he would forget everything he had sworn to himself to say to her. Thus did he become acquainted at the very early age of thirteen with that immense power that women have to disarm us by their innocence even when they are guilty.