Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘If people get kinder and kinder the further south you go,’ Ernst said, ‘what must they be like at the equator? There must be a limit.’

‘Why don’t you go and find out! I’ll wait here.’

‘Don’t be an idiot. Every country has its south.’

‘Even Germany?’

‘Even Germany. The Bavarians are our Italians.’

Jean still thought of himself as a Celt. He was wary of the south, believing it would soften him. Yet these Italians were bursting with pride. They seemed cheerful and welcoming, laughed easily, offered everything they had to impoverished passing strangers. What if Albert was wrong? What if the country luxuriated in Fascism the way Poppaea Sabina luxuriated in her bath of ass’s milk? Ernst was a Nazi. Didn’t he laugh all the time? Jean needed some explanations.

They asked if they could sleep in a barn. After supper they were shown to a double bed into which they fell, snoring like pigs, to be awoken the next morning by a fine male voice singing a popular song.

‘Why don’t we help them?’ Ernst suggested.

They picked olives all day, with their backs aching and their legs weak from the pitcher of white wine being urged on them too often.

‘I bet you,’ Jean said during a brief pause, ‘that your Goethe never picked an olive in his life.’

‘What about Stendhal?’

‘Nor him, as far as I know. But maybe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries it wasn’t thought good taste to speak of the fruits of the earth. Having said that, I grant you that just this once Goethe and Stendhal stand shoulder to shoulder.’

At the end of the day they said goodbye to the farmer and his wife and son. It was time to get on to Florence. But they must have drunk too much white wine, and had to stop to sleep at the roadside. Finally, at midday the following day, they arrived at Florence and made straight for the Arno and Ponte Vecchio, greeting them with shouts of admiration. Muddy water of a handsome cream colour flowed either side of its enormous pillars. Ernst reached for his Goethe, then looked up, crestfallen.

‘What’s the matter?’ Jean asked.

‘I cannot tell a lie. These are the four lines he devotes to Florence: “I hastened through the city, saw the cathedral and its baptistery. Here again there opened to me a quite new world in which I did not wish to linger. The Boboli gardens are delightfully situated. I left as precipitately as I arrived.” What about your Stendhal?’

It was Jean’s turn to burst into laughter.

‘He’s no better. Listen: “Florence, situated in a narrow valley in the middle of bare mountains, has an unjustified reputation.”’

‘Ah, you reassure me. Might they both be mistaken?’

‘Definitely.’

They spent two days in Florence, staying in a noisy and dirty small hotel. The Uffizi and the Duomo aroused their admiration, but no one addressed a word to them. They agreed that Florence was much too secret a city for the time they had to devote to it. In truth, Goethe and Stendhal had had the same impression, the first dreaming only of the Rome of the Caesars, the second only of opera.

‘We’ll come back,’ Ernst said. ‘Another time, when we have the key to Florence. I’m afraid that for now we’re wasting our time.’

‘You could be right.’

Eight years later Ernst was to pass through Florence again, after the battle of Monte Cassino. Standing in a truck, all he saw was Italians with their backs turned, the fires that had broken out in the wake of the shelling of the city, and the bombed Ponte Santa Trinità. He would never know Florence. He thought about Jean then, wondering what the great cataclysm had done with his companion from his first visit to Italy. In the pitiless mess of war, those who were forsaken looked vainly for their former brothers and encountered only the face of the enemy.

After Florence Goethe and Stendhal’s routes had diverged. One had gone on via Perugia and Terni, the other had headed for Rome via Viterbo. Jean observed that Stendhal had overtaken the German. Ernst declared that it was not worth coming to Italy just to do everything as fast as you could. Besides, Goethe had talked to everybody, soldiers, carriers, smugglers and gendarmes, while Stendhal had only sought out the devotees of bel canto. The two young men halted at the roadside to discuss again at length the merits of their respective guides. In fact neither was being entirely sincere. Ernst found Goethe heavy and pontificating, and Jean was uncomfortable at Stendhal’s pursuit of pleasure, which seemed too similar to his own. Had he been more sure of himself, he would have recognised in the little consul of Civitavecchia, so mischievously caricatured by Alfred de Musset’s pencil, an equal in sensitivity and a fellow enthusiast.

Their one point of agreement was that, as they continued south, their haste gradually left them both. They pedalled with hands loosely gripping their handlebars, casual, relaxed, eyeing up girls who refused point-blank to notice them. How could they attract the attention of these fabulous Italians who paraded slowly across the shimmering road in front of them, their legs bare, in black skirts and white blouses?

‘Have you ever made love?’ Ernst asked.

‘Yes, once. Or rather, lots of times, but the same night, with the same girl.’

‘And you didn’t try with someone else straight afterwards?’

‘Who else? It’s not that easy.’

‘Next year I’ll invite you to one of our summer camps. They’re mixed. We never have that problem, on condition that we restrict ourselves to girls from our race.’

‘What race?’

‘The Aryans, of course. Poor Hans, you really are an idiot. Didn’t anyone ever tell you you were an Aryan?’

‘I can tell you that I don’t even know what it is.’

Ernst demanded that they stop, on the shore of the lovely pale green waters of Lake Bolsena, while he explained what Aryanism was to his ignorant Celtic friend. Jean also learnt that ‘his’ prime minister was Jewish. Later, when he was better informed, he regretted not having pointed out that Ernst’s Hitler was also a little Jewish. Generally his friend’s theory seemed flimsy and fairly absurd. At school, for rhetoric, he had had a teacher called Monsieur Pollack, a charming man who had shown unflagging kindness towards his class of little blighters, all of them grossly ignorant. Monsieur Pollack had also fought at Verdun, for which he had been awarded the Légion d’Honneur. In what way could he possibly fit the description Ernst gave, apart from the fact that he was bald and had a curved nose and large ears?

‘Your theory doesn’t stand up,’ Jean said. ‘I know a Jewish teacher —’

‘Blah blah blah … Everyone has their good Jew.’

‘There are others.’

‘Well, your reaction doesn’t surprise me. You French are rotten to the core. You don’t even realise the difference between an Aryan and a non-Aryan. When the next war comes, we’re just going to thrash you.’

‘Will you shoot at me?’

‘No. Not at you. At your friend, yes. You can be my good Frenchman.’

They swam in the lake. Jean swam faster and better than Ernst. He beat him over a short distance, and as the price of his victory held Ernst’s head underwater for a good minute.

‘You’re not completely rotten!’ Ernst spluttered as he surfaced, red in the face.

‘I’m not rotten at all.’

‘Let’s be allies, the whole world will be ours.’

‘We won’t do anything with it.’

‘Wretched dilettante.’

‘I’m not a dilettante. At the next Olympics in 1940 I shall win gold for my country with my scull.’

‘That I have to see!’

‘No question about it.’

They quarrelled like this as far as Rome, happy to be alive, to confirm themselves in opposition to each other. Jean could not resist the pleasure of reading to Ernst the pages Stendhal had devoted to Goethe. ‘“The Germans possess only one man, Schiller, and two volumes worth reading out of Goethe’s twenty … We shall read the latter’s biography, for his excessive absurdity is worth reading about: a man who believes himself sufficiently important to tell us in four octavo volumes the manner in which he had his hair dressed at the age of twenty, and that he had a great-aunt called Anichen. But this proves that in Germany they do not possess the sense of absurdity … In literature the Germans have only pretensions.”’