Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘I don’t know any more, I can’t decide. I think I’d like to live in the tropics: six months’ wet season, six months’ dry. You know exactly where you are. Spring and autumn are both silly seasons, neither one thing nor the other.’

Or:

‘What are you going to do after your exams?’ she asked. ‘My father says studying is no use, you need to get to grips with life very early. Apparently the world is full of specialists and you can’t find anybody who knows how to do everything: harvest the wheat, drive a tractor, buy a horse, cook, sail a yacht, help a woman give birth on a desert island, or fix a tap.’

‘I completely agree with your father, but mine is self-taught, so knowledge fills him with suspicion and secret desire in equal amounts. He hoped he’d make a gardener out of me, but flowers bore me, and now he has decided that I should be, as he says, a “scholar”. You can see what he’s doing: it’s his dream, to make up for what he never had.’

‘What sort of scholar? You’re not very good at maths, are you?’

‘Do you suppose my father really makes a distinction between maths and literature?’

‘Well …’

‘I don’t think so!’

Having plucked up courage, he burst out, ‘I’m not Albert and Jeanne Arnaud’s son. I’m a foundling they adopted.’

‘I know.’

‘Does everybody know?’

‘Everybody? No. Some people.’

‘So I was the last to find out.’

‘Does it upset you?’

‘No, I’m just asking myself questions all the time. And I’d like to know everything about where and how I came into the world. Who’s going to tell me?’

‘You shouldn’t think about it.’

‘I can’t help it.’

Sometimes they liked to talk about their favourite sport.

‘Don’t you want to ride sometimes?’

‘No. I like having my feet on the ground. Or wheels. Or maybe a scull. In a scull I fly over the water. Speed isn’t everything, because there are ways of going a lot faster, but in a scull I feel weightless. The oars skim the surface. You can’t imagine the delicacy of what you’re doing. The drive, the catch, the recovery are all calculated to the centimetre. I’m the machine. I’m proud of that.’

‘But there’s one thing missing. The pleasure of control. I control my horse, and from the horse I control the places I go to, as if I was a giant.’

‘I’d be scared to marry a giant.’

Chantal was silent. He had contravened their unspoken agreement. Not by much, but enough to make her feel uncomfortable.

‘Some giants can bend their knees,’ she said finally.

‘That’s reassuring.’

One day he mentioned Michel.

‘You shouldn’t say anything against him,’ she retorted. ‘He not only doesn’t say anything against you, he actually admires you.’

‘Michel admires me? Now you’re making fun of me. He’s hated me since we were children.’

‘Perhaps he envies you.’

‘He has everything. I have nothing. He draws really well. Maybe he’ll become a great painter. His name is Michel du Courseau, and his mother will give him anything he asks for.’

‘Then why do you think he’s always drawing portraits of you?’

‘I didn’t know that. His main models are the neighbours’ son, who’s very handsome, or Élias, the Longuets’ young gardener.’

‘His mother has shown us lots of drawings of you. Apparently his bedroom walls are covered in them.’

Jean tried to remember the night he had made love to Antoinette on Michel’s bed. He hadn’t looked at anything surrounding him, hadn’t looked at anything at all apart from Antoinette’s white body.

‘The idea gives me the creeps,’ he said. ‘Anyway, why is his mother always pushing him in your direction?’

‘I know, it’s a bit comical. In the beginning I thought he was shy, then I thought he must have some sort of aversion to me. Now I don’t really think about him at all. I think we could be friends. But he’s so strange …’

She mounted her mare and rode off at a slow trot down the empty path, which the sun riddled with shafts of light between the leaves. Jean waited for her to disappear before sprinting back to his bicycle at the edge of the wood.

In the first two months of 1936 Jean had found a part-time job in a bookshop at Dieppe. The bookseller was a young man, Joseph Outen, who had started the business recently and was full of enthusiasm. Jean had met him at the Rowing Club, where they trained together on Sundays. In the changing room Joseph expressed surprise at Jean’s absence the last three Sundays.

‘You’re wrong not to train regularly. Regularity counts more than anything else.’

‘I was taking my philosophy bac.’

‘Did you pass?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you you get?’

‘Distinction.’

Joseph looked at Jean in a different light. Questioning him, he perceived that he was intelligent but incredibly ignorant. He explained to Jean that sport for sport’s sake was a folly as great as literature for literature’s sake … The young bookseller was an agile, muscular athlete who had a nicely dark, clipped beard and smoked a pipe. He loved literature and sport with an equal passion, and treated all writers with suspicion until he discovered their view on the subject. For a single excellent page about boxing, he had read everything Maeterlinck had written. He thought highly of Giraudoux, a former university 400 metres champion, Morand who drove racing Bugattis and hunted foxes, Montherlant because he had written The Eleven Before the Golden Door , Hemingway for his short story ‘Fifty Grand’, Byron for having swum the bay of La Spezia from Portovenere, Maupassant because he loved sailing. One can hardly disagree that, though not the only way to get interested in books and writers, as biases go it was far from stupid, and there were and are plenty of others a good deal less reliable. Jean’s ignorance, however, was not because of sport but because he lived in a house without books. Yes, we have seen him reading one evening, in the kitchen, during one of those family gatherings from which he preferred to keep his distance. He could borrow books from the lycée’s library, but had to wait his turn. Albert and Jeanne had never read a book in their life. Albert would say it wore out your eyes to no purpose, and Jeanne that, once read, a book was no more than a dust trap. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, having given Jean several volumes of the Hetzel edition of Jules Verne for Christmas, had stopped giving him presents after the alleged incident with Antoinette. Captain Duclou had given him an atlas and Monsieur Cliquet a book about railways. The school curriculum betrayed a considerable mistrust of literature, using it simply as a pool of texts selected for their value as grammatical examples, of which Lamartine’s ‘The Lake’ was the apogee. Joseph Outen, with his passion for books, broke through this torpor. He had wanted to write, but had rapidly resigned himself to not being the equal of his great models and to introducing them instead to a public intimidated by such literary audacity and diversity. His job, as he saw it, was to guide those timid souls who came into a bookshop on the pretext of buying an envelope, and as they did so stole secret glances at its forbidden fruits, in the shape of the new books on display. Practised as an apostolic mission, bookselling is a philanthropic task. Joseph Outen began the conversion of his Rowing Club teammate-cum-sales assistant, and immediately found such fertile ground that they decided to shut the shop at five o’clock to give themselves up completely to reading. Jean was overwhelmed. He had imagined writers merely as glorious statues, yet here was a man as famous as Stendhal confessing his youth in all the naïve unsophistication of its first impulses and presenting his account to his readers with perfect ingenuousness. There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. We fought at Verdun. When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ According to Stendhal, it was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer. Writers whose memories were preserved by literature revealed their youth, unvarnished.