Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

d) What a despicable lot domestic staff are. They really are the bottom of society’s barrel. With one exception: Salah. But he’s not a real servant. He has the manners and character of a lord. First prize for ignominiousness goes to that seedy Baptiste, the one in Chelsea who used to talk to me in the third person. In joint first place with the doorman at the Adler in Rome. The ancients were wise men: no free man was a servant. For all demeaning tasks they had slaves. When it abolished slavery, modern society started to dig its own grave.

Mireille, who had been born in a kitchen, knew everything there was to know about restaurant staff, whom she treated with a mixture of such severity, arrogance and pitilessness that she inspired respect. On two or three occasions she almost spoke to Jean the same way. He looked at her in such surprise that she realised her error. She was very fond of her ‘boy’, who filled her with delight and whose very inexperience was refreshing. He seemed tireless and took extreme pleasure in his lessons. He was learning quickly, and well. Yet Jean felt that the ardour he was showing was only lukewarm, because of the thought at the back of his mind: that his sweltering nights were followed by dismal mornings as his fitness routine plummeted. He was down to 120 press-ups now. A disaster. A letter from Joseph contained a warning. He was sliding down the slope of sexual obsession, a distraction that was fatal for a sportsman. At seventeen you couldn’t only think of that, or if you did you’d find yourself with a wife and kid at twenty. Self-control involved more rigorous observance of the rules of procreation. Yet when Mireille was once again absent, Jean realised that, like an addict, he was suffering from withdrawal. He was unable to sleep, reliving in a sort of waking nightmare the crudest scenes of his nights with her and her suppressed fury that had to be quieted ten times before daybreak. She was devouring him. Very soon he would be a human wreck. Abruptly, one afternoon Tomate emerged from his permanent listlessness. The mask of his stare was torn aside, and Jean had the impression that the chef from Marseille was a man like other men.

‘Jean, you’re getting on my tits,’ he said. ‘A fine lad like you shouldn’t fall into this trap. Go on, fuck off. Right now. No turning back. Another six months of this and you’ll be a dishrag. Then she’ll throw you onto the street. Fuck off, I tell you.’

Jean didn’t need to think twice. Tomate’s stare had glazed over again. The chef was returning to his dreams. He was right.

Mireille was due back that evening. Jean took what was owed him from the till, stuffed his things into a paper bag, and jumped on the bus to Nice, where he spent the night walking up and down the Promenade des Anglais, slumping only for a few moments on a bench from time to time, so afraid was he of the phantasms of insomnia. In the morning he drank several cups of coffee on Place Masséna, bought himself a knapsack and set out for Paris. The first truck dropped him off at Saint-Raphaël. The driver was going on to Saint-Tropez, a cul-de-sac from which Jean would have difficulty picking up a lift to Aix at the end of October.

I ask the reader’s permission to pause here. You could be forgiven for thinking that we were going to follow, in reverse, the same path as Antoine du Courseau. Given the route of that particular truck, it would have been easy, but stories that pile up too many unhoped-for meetings lose all credibility, for life, as we know so well, is much meaner with its miraculous happenings. So no, Jean will not go to Saint-Tropez and come across another sign saying Chez Antoine, where he will find board and lodging, if not more sensual pleasures. Marie-Dévote is now a wise and moderate woman and Antoine has taken up fishing with a hand-line. Toinette is still too young. At this stage they do not interest us. Let us leave them there, a few kilometres from Saint-Raphaël. What is the good of disturbing their tranquillity? Théo is smoking ‘the’ cigar on the bridge of his ‘yacht’, reviling equally the recent elections that have wrought havoc with salary scales and the paid holidays that will bring penniless peasants flocking to the Côte, whose aspect and multitudes will send the select few tourists who already come here running for cover. Oh yes: this government doesn’t give a damn for the luxury sector! Socialism would like to sacrifice thousands of respectable employees who like rubbing shoulders with high society to hordes of workers in caps and overalls. When he reflects on this, Théo shrugs his shoulders and makes a contemptuous, pitying face. Sometimes he sends a commiserating glance in the direction of Antoine, who in red linen trousers and vest is returning to port at the helm of the old boat whose motor leaves puffs of smoke in its wake. Oh yes, he’s taking it easy. Sure, he has been as good as gold since he came to stay, but because fellows like him don’t vote and don’t care what happens in Paris, France is going under. ‘She’s going under, yes she is. Me, Théo, I’m telling you.’

Jean is a few kilometres from them, sitting on a milestone. He jumps up and sticks out his thumb in the direction of Aix every time a car or truck comes past. Let us leave him there for a moment and not forget Mireille completely, even though her part in the story is coming to an end; as you will have guessed, it is far from easy to get rid of someone so overwhelming. She hangs on like a leech, shouts, weeps, scratches, flies into terrible rages, then sinks into despondency before terrorising everyone around her.

When she came back that evening, she could not find Jean and thought he must be at Menton, although she had never known him go there, and then suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, she opened the drawer of the till in which her lover had left a receipt for the sum that she owed him. The scene erupted in the kitchen, where Tomate greeted her with admirable coolness.

‘Gone? Well … it’s better that way. You were going to kick him out, weren’t you?’

‘Kick him out? Me?’

‘I swear you were.’

‘What do you mean, you swear? It’s me who knows.’

‘And what about me, then? Forget it, let’s have a pastis together.’

The waitresses came in and out, looking poker-faced and sending the patronne into a fury. She was about to throw out several customers who had already arrived, but Tomate just managed to stop her.

‘You’ll regret it tomorrow. A fuck’s only for the night, but the restaurant’s your life.’

She drank two pastis in succession that were so strong she became instantly drunk and burst into tears. Once the explosion had occurred, Tomate clammed up and went back to his corner. Eyes drooping, slack-jawed, he watched his stoves, glass in hand. Alcohol had at least had the virtue of confining his interest in Mireille to two nights only, a fact on which he congratulated himself. Now he could treat her like a grumpy father. Mireille locked herself in her bedroom, came out a dozen times to make sure that Jean had not left a message with anybody, attempted to arouse Tomate’s interest in her distress but did not succeed. The chef was back at his cooking, an ethereal realm where her problems had no purchase. Left to herself, she measured the extent of the disaster, which was not just emotional. Jean’s young, pale, gilded body materialised in her dreams. She hugged him frenziedly to her without either of them coming to orgasm. In a decision worthy of antiquity she resolved to sacrifice the prefect to her vanished lover, hoping that by some magic this offering would bring young flesh back to her. Out of the futility of this sublime sacrifice she conceived a great bitterness and fastened more than ever onto Stefano, whose regular appearances helped make the excessively long nights bearable. She took a long time to recover, discovering in the process that excesses of sexual passion involve dangers that are sometimes fatal. Stefano saw nothing of this, or perhaps pretended to see nothing. He was a more mysterious character than one at first gave him credit for. Mireille should have expected it: he read books! Nearly four years after these events, at the end of June 1940, when Italian troops, thanks to the armistice, entered Menton, he turned up as an officer in the bersaglieri , with a captain’s pips, and it rapidly became known that from his command post he controlled the intelligence service for the region. Since his affair with Mireille he had been covering the area with a close network of spies. Mireille and he renewed their relationship and, thanks to his influence, the restaurant at Roquebrune lacked for nothing during the four years of occupation, until suddenly the Italian soldiers — whose kindness and genuine distress at being involved in this absurd adventure against the French south, to which they felt so close, had not been sufficiently appreciated — were replaced by field-grey uniforms who began fortifying the hillsides against an enemy as yet invisible. Mireille hid Stefano for several weeks until he was able to join a group of partisans in the Abruzzi. At the liberation the French Forces of the Interior set up their command post inside the restaurant. Mireille was locked in the cellar, where at first, as she satisfied her new guests’ urgent needs, she thought briefly that she might succeed in extracting herself at this lesser price, but the appearance of a rival group put paid to that hope. She was tried, and hanged from a tree. But not any tree, no! The oldest known olive tree in the world, planted nearly two thousand years before by the Romans. For two days her corpse swung there in the gentle summer breeze, until some sensitive souls found her a burial place in the cemetery next to her father and her mother.