Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

At the beginning of September 1936, Joseph Outen was obliged to admit to Jean that business was not going well. In the face of the last three months’ economic and social tumult in France, everyone was reacting the same way. They did not go without a litre of wine or a can of petrol, but they went without books. Publishing’s doldrums had reached the bookshops.

‘I’m sacking you,’ Joseph said. ‘Without notice, with nothing. Since you’re not a union member, don’t even think of taking me to court …’

‘I’ll stay. For nothing. Not a centime.’

‘That would be capitalist exploitation. No. Let’s go our separate ways. I’ve infected you with a vice. It’s your bad luck. Deal with it the best way you can. Here’s your month’s money. Take your bike and go wherever you want.’

‘Wherever doesn’t exist. I want to know where.’

‘I don’t know … go and look for Stendhal in Italy.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘On his tomb it says, “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese”. Go to Milan. Look. You’ll find it.’

‘To Parma?’

‘That’s the one place he isn’t. You need to go further.’

‘Then I’ll go to Civitavecchia too.’

‘As you like. It’s nothing to do with me. Send me some postcards. Goodbye.’

Joseph Outen knew how to be offhand when he had to. He would continue, alone, the tireless task of bringing lost and lonely customers to the pleasures of literature. Jean would have liked to kiss him, as he would have a brother, but between two athletes it was not done.

‘I shan’t forget!’ he said.

‘We’ll see about that.’

We will come across Joseph Outen again, following a new destiny. He still has to go bankrupt, to start and abandon a thousand things, to join up in 1939, serve in the infantry on the Maginot Line, and answer the call in a prisoner of war camp. But let us not get ahead of the story.

The same day Jean began the task of winning his father over to the idea of his journey. Albert was so flabbergasted that he did not know what to say. He had consented to the London journey four years earlier because Antoine du Courseau had been the instigator of that escapade. But Italy! In that nation of Fascists, who knew what might happen? They assassinated socialist leaders like Matteotti, and force-fed their opponents with castor oil after throwing them into the fountains in Rome. At the Vatican there lived the world’s obscurantist-in-chief. Here Jeanne protested in the name of the Holy Father. If her son could receive the Sunday blessing from the window of Saint Peter’s, she would be as happy as if she herself had made the pilgrimage there. Jean saw a chink of light. Where Fascism was concerned, he was entirely in the dark. He wanted to see palaces, monuments, sculptures. He did not mention Stendhal, whose name would have meant nothing to his parents. Albert declared that there were more than enough monuments and châteaux in France for Jean not to need to bother to see what there was in Italy. The discussion might have gone on for ever without the intervention of the abbé, who took Jean’s side. He had been to Rome when he was young and had retained a dazzling memory of it, even though in his hotel for ecclesiastical visitors he had been robbed of two pairs of underpants and a missal. Albert gave in, with an obscure premonition that he was losing his son for good. But could he say ‘his son’? Each time he had the thought he found his paternal authority paralysed. Besides, Jean had earned the money for his journey. He could not, in all fairness, be refused the opportunity to use it as he wished.

Ten days after the sale of La Sauveté, Jean boarded the train for Paris. He had never visited the capital, but he did not stop there. A taxi took him and his bicycle to the Gare de Lyon. The bicycle was loaded into the baggage car, and the train for Milan pulled out. But that is another chapter.

Was this truly the town that Henri Beyle had so loved? You might not have thought so. Trams clashed in the narrow streets, shaking windows that remained permanently shut, cars chased pedestrians onto pavements, people advanced with urgent steps, head down and cheeks unshaven, a low cottony sky crushed Milan beneath its factories’ smoke, owners of palaces barricaded themselves behind studded doors guarded by bulky doormen in white gloves, and La Scala was shut. Of course in the Galleria, where it emerged onto the Piazza del Duomo, it was still possible to find some of that easy — going atmosphere Stendhal had liked so much: the disoccupati in sandals rolling cigarettes of dark tobacco, the girls in pairs, arm in arm, pausing in front of shop windows to examine their pursuers, the ice-cream sellers bawling their monotonous cries of ‘ gelati’ that ricocheted off the glasswork, a man in discussion with another suddenly making an obscene gesture with hand and elbow, a blind man offering lottery tickets beneath the suspicious gaze of a couple of carabinieri whose white leatherware and wide red stripes down their trouser seams were incongruous in the daily grind of a crowd surviving on espresso coffee and watermelon seeds.

Jean rapidly discovered his inability to see behind the mask of this foreign city, where the only people who addressed him were those who had something to sell and the only people who smiled were tarts painted as though they were on their way to mass. He wrote a postcard to Joseph Outen: ‘Arrigo wasn’t at the meeting place. I’m pushing on further.’ Further was Parma, 150 kilometres away, covered in two days at the meandering speed of a tourist, sleeping in a barn and washing himself in a fountain where an old woman, cackling, drenched him with a large bucket of water. The weather was ideal for a fine ride along a well-maintained road between plump fields bordered by young poplars. If not for the cars that nearly grazed him as they raced past at terrifying speed, he would have felt complete pleasure at letting himself roll southwards on his comfortable bicycle. What was it with Italians and cars? They drove around in patched-up Fiats and Lancias with open exhausts and thought they were Tazio Nuvolari, the wraith-like champion in the yellow shirt who walked off with every prize for Alfa Romeo, or the burly Campari in his checked cap, or the battler Ascari. Jean noted that they rarely rode bicycles. Cycling had been in decline since Bottecchia’s 1925 Tour de France victory. The country needed a new champion. People were starting to talk about a pious, athletic young man named Gino Bartali, but the lack of international prizes in the last decade had kept bicycles out of fashion, while the successes of Alfa Romeo and Maserati, battling wheel for wheel with Bugatti, Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union, had raised Italians’ mechanical passion to fever pitch. The country was in the grip of a hysteria of popping exhausts and speed. Jean was thus delighted when, after his wash at the fountain, he saw a boy of his own age approaching on a black bicycle with sit-up-and-beg handlebars. He had straw-coloured hair, a blushing complexion, and wore leather shorts with shoulder straps. He was also shirtless. Luggage elastics kept a sleeping bag and large satchel strapped to his carrier. He spoke French very well, with a strong German accent, and introduced himself straight away by his first name: Ernst.

Ernst is called on to play a role in this chapter, for which I crave your forgiveness. The proper thing to do would have been to talk about him in the opening pages, as also another character, Constantin Palfy, who is about to make an appearance. But I am not writing a novel. All we are talking about is the life of Jean Arnaud, and it is inevitable that in the course of the story this boy found in a basket will see a good many people enter his life: some will stay with us, others will detach themselves, like the lowest branches of a tree. So let me say here and now that, even though we are still four years away from 1940, we will see Yann and Monsieur Carnac again, and, soon, the prince and Salah. Geneviève, the invisible Geneviève, will appear at a moment of her choosing. We will be bringing back, briefly, Antoine du Courseau. As for Marie-Thérèse, Antoinette and Michel, they are not the sort of characters to let themselves be tossed aside. Mireille Cece is not far away. Marie-Dévote, Théo and Toinette will keep us waiting, but their return will not lack for unforeseen elements. Sadly we must lament the passing of a few faces. Captain Duclou is getting old. He will die the day the Germans excavate his garden on the cliff top to build one of the bunkers for their Atlantic defences, take down his weathercock rigged on the highest ridge of his roof, and remove his aneroid barometer, which they judge to be dangerous. He will have himself buried with weathercock and barometer in his coffin. Monsieur Cliquet will fare no better: obsessed by the go-slow strikes of 1936, he spends his time calculating impossible itineraries to Nice, Lille and Istanbul, though he has not moved from Grangeville for more than fifteen years. The delays he encounters, however fictitious, demoralise him to such an extent that people begin to wonder if he is not becoming a little strange in the head. His absurd end is something I shall recount later. Saddest of all is undoubtedly the fate of Albert and Jeanne. We shall come back to them in good time. But let no one accuse Jean of ingratitude. He loves his adoptive parents dearly and will be loyal to them till the end, yet he is from a different stock, and now that he has broken out from their very restricted universe by travelling to London, sleeping with Antoinette, reading the books lent to him by Joseph Outen, and, at this moment, riding far and wide with Ernst over Italian roads, he will never go back.