Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘That’s a nuisance. I can’t remember what the bike I borrowed looks like.’

‘Didn’t your friend tell you what make it was?’

‘I didn’t borrow it from a friend, to tell you the truth, but from someone I don’t know who is probably, at this moment, combing the streets of Rouen and pouring his heart out to a policeman.’

‘Did you steal it?’ Jean said, horrified at the idea of a theft that affected him personally. The bank robberies and corruption of government ministers that Albert enumerated every evening left him cold. But a bicycle thief was a man without soul or scruples, who deserved the severest punishment.

Monsieur Carnac read Jean’s indignation on his face and hastened to reassure him.

‘I left a car in exchange, whose registration number the police know only too well.’

‘Oh I see!’

He didn’t see anything, but it didn’t matter. So long as the abbé Le Couec was involved, everything was all right. To locate the right bicycle all he had to do was decipher the compulsory registration plates above the excise stamp. Monsieur Carnac knew nothing about traffic regulations, so Jean pretended to tie his shoelace in order to crouch down and inspect the plates, among which he found one from Rouen. Monsieur Carnac hung his can of milk on the handlebars and fixed his loaf of bread on the front carrier before getting on clumsily. Night was falling as they left Tôtes, and a moment later found themselves halted by the beam of a flashlight.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home, where else?’ Monsieur Carnac said in an accent that was more Norman than the Normans.

The sergeant came closer and shone his flashlight on the can of milk and bread, which seemed to reassure him.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘On your way.’

The cool evening air reinvigorated Jean, but he felt as though he was dragging a heavy weight on an invisible thread behind him. Monsieur Carnac wheezed and spluttered and spat and loosed torrents of swear words, threatening continuously to get off and continue on foot, reduced to fury by the slightest gradient. The return journey took them more than two hours, and when they arrived outside the rectory they glimpsed through the lighted window the figure of the abbé Le Couec pacing up and down, his hands clasped behind his back. He opened the door in such a state of emotion that he could hardly speak as he enfolded Jean tightly in his arms.

‘Jean, my dear Jean, I was afraid … I should never have forgiven myself.’

Monsieur Carnac came in, carrying his bread and milk can. Yann appeared and shook his friend’s hand, before taking Jean by the shoulders and looking him squarely in the face.

‘My boy,’ he said, ‘we owe you a great debt, and one day it will be repaid! I won’t ever forget it.’

‘We might make a start by hiding the bike,’ Monsieur Carnac interrupted. ‘I stole it in Rouen.’

‘Stole?’ the abbé said.

Jean looked at Monsieur Carnac anxiously. He was a short man with thick hair that was already going grey, though he was certainly no more than forty. He looked like someone with a short fuse, hot-tempered and violent, but his face, weathered by the sun and creased with very mobile wrinkles, expressed a ruthless determination.

‘Yes, stole! One pinched bike is worth a man’s skin, I’d say.’

The abbé crossed himself and murmured a few almost unintelligible words.

‘Come on, my dear abbé,’ Yann said, ‘let’s not panic … the cause justifies the means.’

‘I would like to be as certain of that as you always are.’

‘If not, we would never have got our young friend of the poets mixed up in this business.’

‘Young friend of the poets?’ Monsieur Carnac said, arching his left eyebrow, as if he was about to screw in a monocle.

Jean felt transfixed by his hard stare.

‘And may one know which poets you honour with your friendship, dear boy?’

‘La Fontaine and Victor Hugo,’ Jean answered, swiftly forgetting Samain, whom Yann had thought fit for idiots.

‘Exactly right,’ Yann said, ‘just earlier on I was reciting those lovely lines from “Crépuscule”:

The dreamy angel of the dusk who floats upon its breezes

Mingles, as it bears them off in the flutter of a wing beat,

The dead’s prayers and the living’s kisses.

Monsieur Carnac burst into sarcastic laughter.

‘Oh, that’s a good one, that is! You’re forgetting — intentionally, I imagine — the first line that rhymes with “wing beat”:

Love each other! ’tis the month when the strawberries are sweet.’

‘Every poet has their weakness!’ Yann said, annoyed.

‘Unforgivable! Unforgivable!’

The abbé Le Couec was in a state of some irritation. The question that was bothering him was not Victor Hugo’s weaknesses, but the stolen bicycle. What were they going to do with it? Monsieur Carnac suggested throwing it in the sea. Jean shivered. The abbé wanted to compensate its owner or return his property to him.

‘Returning it is out of the question,’ Yann said. ‘It would be putting the police on our trail immediately. Let’s write down the owner’s name, and I’ll send him a postal order from somewhere in the north, when we get there.’

The abbé offered to go himself, under cover of darkness, and fling the bicycle into the sea.

‘Details, details, we can deal with all that later!’ Monsieur Carnac said. ‘At this very moment I am dying of hunger.’

Jean’s hopes rose. After the excursion hunger was gnawing at him too. The hot shrimps he had eaten that morning were a distant memory. The abbé opened his wire-mesh pantry door and threw up his hands.

‘A hunk of bread, a pot of cream, butter … but it’s true, I do have some buckwheat flour and a drop of sparkling cider left over from last autumn, two or three bottles.’

‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get the pancakes on,’ Monsieur Carnac said, dropping his jacket on a chair, turning on the stove and starting to prepare the mixture.

‘I can go home to my house,’ Jean suggested.

‘No, you can’t, young man,’ the abbé said. ‘Tomorrow at six you can serve mass.’

‘I haven’t confessed.’

‘I give you absolution. Two Paters and three Hail Marys before you go to sleep. Three because it’s the Holy Virgin who is particularly responsible for protecting us in this undertaking.’

They ate the pancakes off chipped plates with their fingers, standing up next to the range. The cider was undrinkable. The abbé offered calvados, which was refused, so he was obliged to replace the bottle on the shelf without touching its contents, after which he sent Jean to sleep in his bed, the only bed in the rectory.

‘My friends and I have matters to discuss.’

Even though he would have liked to hear what they said, Jean obeyed, and slipped between the abbé’s coarse bedclothes. A strong smell of leather pervaded the room, and when he peered under the bed he discovered an enormous pair of patched work boots, the priest’s pumps, and his seven-league boots that helped him take the word of the Lord into parishes that lacked a priest and to square up to the bishop of Rouen. Spent with fatigue, Jean fell asleep without even trying to overhear what the three men gathered in the neighbouring room were saying.

Monsieur Le Couec woke him up shortly before six, as the sun rose. He himself had slept briefly in an armchair after Yann and Monsieur Carnac had departed.

‘They won’t hear mass?’ Jean asked, disappointed not to see again the two strange characters who stole bicycles and tossed lines from Hugo at each other.

‘No question of mass for them for the moment. They’re in hiding. They’re good Christians. Brave too. Come on. We shall go and pray, you and me, so that they won’t be arrested.’