Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

On the evening of his baccalauréat result, after a long series of skirmishes, Antoinette at last allowed Jean to go the whole way. It happened at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was away, driving Michel to Switzerland. Antoinette organised things well, and the ceremony took place according to certain rituals that she had imagined for a long time. First they drank a bottle of champagne in the kitchen, and then she said, ‘My bra is awfully tight.’

‘Well, take it off then.’

He could not work out exactly how she managed to undo it without unbuttoning her blouse, but within a minute the bra was on the table and he was touching it, a simple, modest item of girl’s underwear, its only concession to decoration a tiny satin rose stitched between the two cups. He held it to his face and breathed Antoinette’s smell. She smiled and looked down. Her blouse was transparent, and Jean marvelled at the softness and poise of her breasts. He stopped listening to her almost as soon as she began to tell some inconsequential story, no doubt to hide her own confusion, equal to his, now that he knew the moment had come. All the pain of waiting, of being forestalled, was swept away. She was there, facing him, barely protected by the width of the pine table, in which the cook’s knife had scored dark lines that danced before his eyes like cabbalistic signs. The moment was approaching and, having desired it for so long, it was delicious to postpone it a little longer with bold teasing and feigned modesty. A few minutes later, as she walked upstairs, she unhooked her pleated skirt, revealing her soft, prettily rounded bottom encased in girlish white cotton knickers. On the landing she took off her blouse. They kissed each other for a long time, standing up, leaning against the banister rail and stroking each other affectionately until Antoinette pulled Jean into her mother’s bedroom and onto a four-poster bed overlooked by a heavy crucifix. There she undressed him with disarming tenderness and countless kisses. Antoinette was no more beautiful than before, with a fairly ugly nose (her father’s) and dull blond hair (her mother’s), but her creamy skin and well-rounded figure, her deliciously soft thighs, her marvellous breasts, so free and mobile under his fingers, and the scent of her neck filled him with hunger. She was one of those creatures that you want to eat more than penetrate, as if their skin, when you bite it, will satisfy some deep, unacknowledged greed. What a mistake it would be just to enter her! He felt he would like the opposite to happen, for her to melt and disappear inside him, inside his chest, his stomach, his legs and arms, so that they would then be just one and the same being, taking its pleasure from itself. Of course he was clumsy the first time. He wanted her so much, and had so often dreamt of this precise moment, when she would squeeze him between her thighs, that he was unable to wait. Antoinette consoled him, stroking the back of his neck, before leading him into her father’s bedroom, where there was no crucifix, only some prints of the Battle of Hastings. There he managed to be less clumsy, and by the time they began again in Michel’s bedroom he had learnt how to watch for the beginnings of Antoinette’s climax by the way her pink mouth began to tremble. Finally she drew him into her own bed, where they stayed until dawn, repeating their caresses without drawing breath, and then one last time, on the floor in the hall, where she came to see him out and shut the door behind him.

‘That’s it, it’s done,’ he said to himself, heading back to the lodge, where Albert would soon be getting up, strapping on his wooden leg and making his coffee before starting his first round of morning’s watering. Jean’s body was on fire; he was bruised all over and exhausted. In a few days he would be seventeen. It was not too early or too late. He spared a thought for Bergson and creative evolution, which had inspired such a brilliant philosophy essay that Antoinette had finally granted him the reward he craved. Thank you, thank you, Bergson! As that summer began, life was starting to open up for Jean. In future all women would be like her, except that perhaps they would not often have the same fresh and creamy taste, and going to bed with them would not be such a glorious act of bravado. That night, the two of them had exorcised La Sauveté, they had got their own back on Marie-Thérèse and Michel, and even though Jean slightly regretted having used Antoine’s bed, he would never forget their last lovemaking on the hard, threadbare rug in the hall.

Jean slept, recovered his strength and, waking, wanted Antoinette all over again, but she remained invisible. He thought himself liberated from desire the following day, taken prisoner again the day after, freed once more when he saw her with Gontran Longuet in his car, a Georges Irat two-seater convertible, an inept copy of the famous English Morgan. How dare the daughter of a Bugatti-lover agree to park her bottom on the seat of such a phoney sports car? He felt sorry for her inability to appreciate the gulf that separated the two machines.

At Dieppe Rowing Club he asked his coach what he thought about women. The coach answered, ‘Jean, physical love is physical exercise like any other. Certainly it tires you, and I wouldn’t recommend it the day before a competition, but I’m not as rigorous as many coaches I know: there are muscular exertions a man can’t do without. Love, on the other hand, is a catastrophe: I mean being in love. I’ve seen first-class sportsmen reduced to crybabies because some salesgirl stood them up. Everything that happens below the belt is healthy. Everything that attacks an athlete’s competitive concentration is unhealthy. I hope you understand what I’m saying.’

‘Yes, Monsieur.’

So how, from this point onwards, should he think of Chantal de Malemort? Jean reflected that she had never tormented him nor beguiled him with false hopes, that when they met in secret in the forest of Arques they talked to each other as friends would, with genuine sincerity, though when she left him he always felt slightly light-headed. The meetings had become increasingly important during the summer of 1936. Early in the morning Jean would get on his bicycle and ride to the forest, where he would put on his spikes and set off on his training run, heading for an intersection of two paths marked by a handsome clump of beeches. It was unusual for her not to arrive at the same time as he did, on her bay mare. They would push on together, further into the underbrush, he running, she at a trot, for half an hour before returning to the cross-way, where they would finally sit down together on a stump, catch their breath and talk. Chantal had not disappointed expectations. She remained the same pretty, frail-looking creature, although I say frail-looking because you only had to see her on a horse to judge her energy and her strength. Her hair had darkened and the healthy life she led at Malemort, on horseback and on her father’s tractors, had put some pink into her complexion. Her voice was no longer small and shy, which at her age — the same as Jean — would have sounded vapid and sentimental.

What did they talk about? We might be surprised to learn that two such young people, feeling a more than negligible attraction, never confided to each other what they fretted about when they were apart. The subject remained taboo. An invisible barrier separated them, of which they were not even aware. Yet the more they believed they were talking about nothing in particular, the more they were confiding to each other.

‘Have you noticed,’ Chantal said, ‘how sad a season summer is? The days are shortening, and we’re getting ready to go into the dark. The weather is lovely, but it’s an illusion. I prefer winter, when the trees have no leaves, the woods are full of skeletons, and the days are lengthening again. You feel as if you’re coming out of a tunnel.’