Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Madame du Courseau — I also forgot to mention that her first name was Marie-Thérèse — arrived back at Grangeville the same morning that Jean was settling in with his adoptive parents. After she had kissed Antoinette — largely indifferent — and Michel — who clung to her desperately — Marie-Thérèse hurried to Jeanne’s to see the baby. Events would almost certainly have taken a different turn if Monsieur the abbé Le Couec had not been present. That excellent man was in the kitchen, in the middle of an elaborate Cartesian discourse.

‘Religion,’ he was saying to Jeanne and Albert, ‘is shared more easily in this world than anything else. If this child has already been baptised, a second baptism will do him no harm at all. You must not hesitate. A good Christian cannot live properly without the succour of a patron saint. Let us put him on the right track, as Monsieur Cliquet would say. There will always be locomotives to pull him, and if he stays in a siding at least he will be relieved of his original sin. Albert, I know you have no religion, but the most profound sceptics can’t be against whatever it is, without contradicting themselves. Give the child a chance, I mean an extra chance, given that he already seems to have been so fortunate in the choice of his adoptive parents … Ah, Madame du Courseau, greetings. How is our Geneviève?’

‘Better, much better, Father. But what’s this news, Jeanne? A baby has fallen from the sky at La Sauveté? Where is he?’

‘He’s asleep, Madame.’

‘He’s just been fed,’ Albert added.

The priest had stood up after putting down his glass of calvados on the waxed cloth of the kitchen table. He was fearless in the face of his parishioners’ hospitality. His complexion, which was on the ruddy side, owed much to the visits he made after mass each morning, but his robust constitution allowed him these excesses. He had strength to spare, even after four years of carrying wounded men and digging the graves of the dead in the mud of the trenches. On his return he had put his old, worn cassock back on with its greenish and violet tints, his only vanity being to pin to it the ribbon of his Croix de Guerre. The presence of that decoration caused Albert to forgive the priest for still being a priest, and although he still had a number of quarrels with him on points of theology, these were little more than annoyances between the two men, rapidly erased by the evocation of the ordeals they had both undergone. Jeanne listened to them open-mouthed, her faith blind and immovable, unlike Madame du Courseau, who would have preferred a priest of greater worldliness at Grangeville, one with a fine speaking voice and more aptitude for the harmonium than apple-based spirits.

‘I’ll go up and see him,’ Madame du Courseau said, in a tone of great firmness.

‘You’ll wake him up!’ Jeanne moved to block her way.

‘Jeanne, don’t be ridiculous … It’s perfectly clear that you haven’t had children. A baby doesn’t wake up just because you bend over his cradle.’

‘Perhaps I haven’t had children, but I have had Geneviève. For long enough that she calls me “Maman Jeanne”.’

‘I haven’t forgotten, I haven’t forgotten … But—’

The discussion would have gone on indefinitely, and harsh words doubtless been exchanged, if Jean had not at that moment had the good sense to cry out. The two women went upstairs. In his Moses basket, fists clenched, the baby was yelling at the top of his lungs. Jeanne picked him up and calmed him immediately. Madame du Courseau wanted to rock him, but when she held him, he started howling again.

‘You see,’ Jeanne said proudly.

‘He’s certainly sweet. We shall look after him. I’ve given it some thought, and we’ll put him in Michel’s room. Michel can go to Geneviève’s.’

‘No,’ Jeanne said, ‘he’s staying here.’

‘Goodness me, dear Jeanne, what can you be thinking? You have neither the time nor the means to take care of a child.’

‘I’ll find the time and the means. This baby was put outside my front door. God wills me to have him.’

‘I rather suspect that in her guilty haste the mother got the wrong door. Quite clearly she wanted to leave him at ours.’

‘With suppositions like that you can remake the whole world. This little boy — Albert and I have decided to call him Jean — belongs to us.’

‘His future—’ Madame du Courseau began.

‘He shall have a future. Money doesn’t buy you happiness. We’ll teach him to work hard and to love his parents.’

‘He’s a little young for that, don’t you think?’

‘We’ll wait.’

If Marie-Thérèse du Courseau thought she would find an ally in the priest, she was seriously mistaken. The abbé Le Couec sided with the Arnauds, and nothing would induce him to change his mind, even when the mistress of La Sauveté quite unscrupulously raised the subject of Albert’s atheism and anticlericalism.

‘Madame,’ the abbé said, ‘to state the matter briefly, God knows how to identify those among his lost or straying sheep who have Christian virtues and sometimes a charity greatly superior to those who go to mass regularly. Even as a freemason who subscribes to L’oeuvre, Albert is an example to many.’

‘I doubt that your bishop would be of the same opinion,’ she answered in a tone with an undercurrent of menace.

President of a ladies’ workroom at Dieppe, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau possessed some modest access to the see. They listened to her, flattered her, and she considered as great favours the self-interested kindnesses of the hierarchy. But the abbé Le Couec cared nothing for the hierarchy. He feared neither its reprimands, being bereft of pride, nor its threats of transfer, feeling himself in any case to be a stranger everywhere outside Brittany. Madame du Courseau continued to exert pressure from every angle, but the Arnauds stood their ground. It must be said that she was also fighting a lone battle, her husband taking no interest in the affair. All of her ingenuity was rebuffed by Jeanne’s blinkered stubbornness, a stubbornness all the fiercer because the caretaker sensed, on two or three occasions, that some dark plot was threatening her possession. The plot finally failed, thanks to the sergeant at the gendarmerie, the mayor and the primary school teacher, who came down on the side of the Arnauds. Jean had found refuge with them. He would stay there, and no Joséphine Roudou or Marie-Thérèse du Courseau would be allowed to dote on him.

Madame du Courseau still refused to surrender, but continued her campaign in such a way as not to make an enemy of the boy’s adoptive mother, and if she had any regrets she nevertheless rapidly understood, in the wake of two incidents that could have ended in tragedy, that the foundling’s place was not at La Sauveté. On the first occasion little Michel, just two years old, was found standing next to Jean’s cradle, trying to stab him. The baby was asleep in the sun in front of the lodge when Jeanne heard a scream. She dashed outside to glimpse Michel, his fist clutching the handle of a kitchen knife, struggling with Joséphine Roudou. In his cradle, Jean’s blood was running onto the pillow from a long gash on his left cheek. If Joséphine had not been there, Michel would have put his eyes out. On another occasion it was Antoinette who ran to warn Jeanne that her brother had stolen the rat poison and was trying to make the baby swallow it, although from that episode he suffered nothing worse than an attack of vomiting.

Have I said anything yet about the physical appearance in which Madame du Courseau, née Marie-Thérèse de Mangepain, offered herself? No, because to me it seems that it goes without saying, but a person reading over my shoulder is worrying me somewhat by describing her as in her forties, ugly, simultaneously authoritarian and sickly-sweet, dressed like those ladies of good works who seem constantly to be watching out for the sins of others. Let us not allow free rein to anyone else’s imagination, apart from my own. At the time this story begins, Marie-Thérèse de Courseau is thirty-eight years old. In three years’ time she will cut her hair short, which will save her from too harsh a transition to her forties. She drives herself to mass in her own trap, swims in the Channel during the three summer months, cooks very admirably when necessary, teaches the Gospels to the children of the village and, as we have seen, presides over her workroom at Dieppe. Dressed by Lanvin, there is no trace in her of the provincial lady in her Sunday best. No one has ever seen her faint at a trifle. In fact, you could say that she is a woman with a strong head, although the head, in her case, is misleading: an expression of sweetness, a voice of honey, a kindness that is only withdrawn whenever she encounters an object in the way of her desires — as for example when Jeanne decided to adopt little Jean. The ambiguity of her character is apparent in her relations with her children. She was never interested in Geneviève until her daughter started coughing. She more or less ignores Antoinette, but repeatedly reveals her adoration of little Michel. If asked the question, ‘Do you have children?’ she will answer, ‘Yes, I have one child, Michel, and two daughters too.’ To go a step further and pierce the veil of intimacy, she fulfils her conjugal obligations without appetite, as a dutiful woman does. Antoine’s misdemeanours caused her pain at first, but now she is indifferent to them. She has not been insensitive to the ‘du’ that precedes Courseau, and is no less proud of having been born a Mangepain, the more so now that a brother of hers is a deputy, elected on a right-wing platform in Calvados. She knows perfectly well, however, that if the ‘du’ Courseaus have one or two pretensions, they do not feature in any directory of the nobility. Sometimes people address her as ‘baronne’, and she does not always correct those who do. Thus are titles forged, over a generation or two. I come back to that expression of sweetness that one can usually see on her face. It has not always been there: as a young girl Marie-Thérèse had a lovely complexion, fresh and pink, that made people forget a certain sourness in her features: thin lips, a sharp nose. As she has got older her complexion has faded, and her sweet expression has corrected the loss. Almost everyone is taken in, except, probably, the abbé Le Couec, whose own sweetness is not on the surface and who, by dint of hearing the confessions of Norman farmers, is more than a little sceptical of the innate goodness of humankind.