Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Jean fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and brought it to Eliza’s lips. She grimaced with disgust.

‘Oh no, not like that! This water stinks!’

With her thumb and index finger she took out her dentures, dropped them in the water and closed her eyes again.

‘Put it on the floor!’ she said. ‘And now goodnight.’

She was already asleep. Jean left on tiptoe and went to his room. He had landed in a strange world, where old ladies got shamelessly drunk. What would Chantal de Malemort think about it? Late as it was, in the darkness the image of Chantal, so fragile and lovely, would not leave him. How he would have loved her to admire him, all in one day crossing the Channel, setting foot on British soil, and spending his evening in a pub! He felt capable of astonishing her with even greater feats than this, of crossing vaster seas, of discovering unknown lands, and being as much at ease among the Kanaks as the old ladies of Newhaven. He had made up his mind. He would travel far away to win Chantal and her parents’ respect, and come back to her loaded with knowledge, or perhaps he would even take her away with him, a long way from her château and from her family who stifled her, from the covetousness of Marie-Thérèse du Courseau. You are not truly a man until you have, there in front of you, a woman’s happiness to complete, an immense task with which to fill your heart with joys and anxieties. Jean swore to himself to be worthy, to yield no longer to any weaknesses, to disregard Antoinette and her cheap ways. Love demanded purity. Antoinette confused his vision of love with her delicious whiff of sin, her plump thighs and her pretty pink breasts. Yes, they were very pretty, Antoinette’s breasts, soft when his fingers squeezed them, her skin of a tenderness that inspired respect. He must not think about them any more; but at night when sleep was slow to come, her ‘girlish’ games unsettled the sternest of resolutions. What if Antoinette was actually the devil? After several false starts Jean finally fell into a sleep that mingled Chantal’s pale blue eyes, sweet almond smell and white skin with the softness and perfume of Antoinette du Courseau’s silky down.

He was woken by the noise of wirelesses. He was alone in bed, in an unknown bedroom, an unknown town, on the brink of discovering London, the home of Scrooge and Jack the Ripper. Grey daylight filled the window. He got up and went into the corridor with the firm intention of fleeing Mrs Pickett, who would surely be ashamed to see him, but the sizzle of frying greeted him, and as he came into the hall Eliza Pickett appeared in her dressing gown, made up like a china doll, bright-eyed and every inch the happy hostess. Breakfast was waiting in the kitchen. He thanked her in French and she looked at him, astonished.

‘I don’t understand French!’

He attempted to explain to her that the previous evening she had expressed herself perfectly in that language, and in a charmingly superior manner she responded that he must have been dreaming. Jean’s vocabulary was too limited for him to argue. Breakfast was there, he was hungry, and before he set off he needed to build up his strength. Without too much disgust he ate a fried kipper, Brussels sprouts, toast and marmalade in the time it took Mrs Pickett to polish off two cans of beer.

Half an hour later he rode out of Newhaven on the London road, making sure that he kept to the left. I shall not linger on his long ride through the countryside and small towns of Sussex and Surrey, during which he did his best to keep up a solid average so that he would arrive in the capital before it got dark. The English roads were easy, well surfaced and used by streams of high-bodied cars that swayed through the bends like Madame du Courseau’s old Model T Ford. On the other hand, he met few cyclists, except around the villages he passed, and when he did they were usually girls perched on antediluvian machines. Their sit-up-and-beg riding position forced them to show their legs, which they did with a charming immodesty and, it seemed, inconsequence. Towards the end of the afternoon he arrived at the outer suburbs of London and, believing that it was the city itself, was horribly disappointed. Everything was ugly, and appallingly monotonous. He asked the way to Kings Road, and was directed to a narrow street where children were playing among the rubbish. Mademoiselle Geneviève could not live there, she who had departed from La Sauveté in a prince’s Hispano-Suiza. He retraced his steps and looked for a policeman whom he eventually found, very preoccupied, at a crossroads. The policeman studied the address Antoine du Courseau had written down and mumbled something incomprehensible. However, his gestures indicated that Jean should follow the cables of a trolleybus. Jean obeyed and pedalled on over oily and slippery roads until he saw signposts pointing towards Chelsea, Westminster and the City. It was already dark when he cycled over the Thames at Battersea Bridge and finally discovered the Kings Road and, off it, a lovely street lined with pretty houses painted in a motley of reds, whites and greens. Geneviève lived in Chelsea’s artists’ quarter.

And here I would be glad to be allowed a small digression about Geneviève, a character who remains minor and intermittent so far, but whom we will see more of later. If, despite the temptation I have felt on several occasions, I have forced myself only to talk about her when she actually appeared, Geneviève is none the less one of the keys to this story. In 1932 she is about thirty years old and at the peak of her beauty, a beauty of the kind that nowadays makes us smile affectionately: shingled hair, dripping with real and paste jewellery, eyes made up from the moment they open in the morning, short skirt, and oversize sweater on a bust that might belong to a boy. She speaks English and Italian and occasionally swears in Arabic. In London she could easily live in Eaton Square or the nicer parts of Kensington if she chose, but she knows that it would not be appreciated, because she is a kept woman. Judicious, intelligent, perfectly in tune with her times, she surrounds herself with actors, painters, musicians, writers. In the more chic districts she would be snubbed for her pretension. In Chelsea people beat a path to her door precisely because, absurdly, they want to slum it, to meet some real artists who dare to despise the gentry and their boring dinners. Her house in Chelsea is a witness to the Thirties. In it you could see, hanging on exposed wires from the picture rails, the same painters as those at Chez Antoine at Saint-Tropez, a drawing room strewn with black and white furs and no other furnishings, apart from a red Steinway and Negro masks under glass globes placed directly on the rugs. Guests sat Indian-style on the floor, and Salah, the black Egyptian in a black and white boubou, passed around coffee, cigarettes, sweetmeats and a hookah.

One can imagine Jean Arnaud’s disorientation when, with his knapsack on his back, he knocked at the door and it was opened by a servant in frock coat and white gloves. The Ali Baba’s cave that he was entering bore no resemblance to anything he had known. He had landed on another planet from the one inhabited by Jeanne and Albert, or even the du Courseaus and the Malemorts in their antiquated luxury. Here everything was new and scary, including this valet who immediately turned out to be French. Yes, he had been waiting for Monsieur Arnaud, but Madame was not in London. She had telephoned to ask that her young guest be looked after. After his first astonishment, Jean grew anxious about his bicycle. He could not leave it outside the front door. The valet picked it up with infinite delicacy and parked it between two statues of Negro boys in polychrome wood, bearing gilded candelabra.