Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

They began to list a number of others who might be willing to help Jean.

‘The Malemorts?’ the abbé wondered. ‘Hmm … alas, I fear that their own situation is not very splendid. The marquis has dismissed two farm workers, and I’m not sure I can see you working on a farm. There’s the Longuets …’

Jean snorted, and the abbé reddened. He still had a soft spot for Madame Longuet and felt sincerely sorry for her having a crook for a husband and a future thug for a son. He felt that she was a victim. She had, apparently, pleaded the Arnauds’ cause in vain to her intractable husband.

In the end it was Joseph Outen who found a job for Jean, at La Vigie. The newspaper also printed announcements, handbills, menus and cards. A dozen women made up the orders, and Jean stored them and delivered them in a van. It did not demand great genius, just physical strength and a character sufficiently cheerful to be able to withstand the crudity of the supervisor, a man named Grosjean who had fulfilled Jean’s own role for nearly twenty years and whose promotion at his career’s end, elevating him to the rank of supervisor, had dangerously intoxicated him. Jean left Grangeville on foot at six in the morning, started work at eight, and finished at six. In his lunch break he had a sandwich and went to Dieppe Rowing Club, where he rowed and trained with weights for an hour before going to see his mother in hospital.

Jeanne was not on the road to recovery. In truth she had quickly become used to the relative comfort of the ward on which she lived alongside several women older than she. Driven out of the place she had long considered her home, she found a ready-made community there, and unexpected company. Her neighbours’ chatter delighted her and she realised that until that point in her life she had only ever talked to her family circle. The women’s gossip, their fears and dreams, their nasty comments, opened up an unknown world to her. And for the first time in her life there were people serving her and she enjoyed it. The sound of the trolley that brought her meals — the only interludes of those long days that began with the taking of her temperature and ended with her nightly infusion — filled her with pleasure. It made her quite forget the visitors sitting at her bedside, who suddenly discovered that their charitable gesture no longer interested the patient, who was overcome with joy instead at a very average hospital lunch. She rambled incoherently, especially with Jean and Albert, managed to mix up Madame du Courseau, Antoinette and the marquise de Malemort, and then the abbé Le Couec and Monsieur Cliquet, all of whom left each time with the impression that the doctors were keeping Jeanne captive, and that her stay in bed was making her weaker and weaker. Jean contemplated her with a sinking heart, remembering how often this half-disoriented woman, too unsteady on her feet to walk without help, had been good to him, how she had opened her heart to a baby abandoned in a Moses basket on her doorstep. He would have liked to question her — perhaps she knew the truth — but was afraid to upset her any more than she already seemed to be. Each time he saw her she asked him to tell her again the story of his papal blessing in Rome, and each time he patiently started again and watched her face take on a look of delight and serenity, her hands clasped together on the coarse brown bedspread.

Jean worked hard to erase his memories of recent weeks and was relieved to find that Mireille was easily forgotten, although her image nagged at him on certain nights so violently that it produced a real, physical pain. He did his utmost, walking, rowing and lifting weights, discovering that his youth required an almost demented expenditure of physical energy to resist the temptations of memory and imagination. He still had not seen Chantal de Malemort, and in a way he dreaded their eventual inevitable meeting, as if she would instantly be able to see on his face that he was no longer the same, that some inner torment had devoured him and left him changed, even after it subsided. Antoinette on the other hand used every ruse she knew to meet him, and he could not avoid her. On the pretext of visiting the house her mother was building at Grangeville, she walked over from Malemort every afternoon and waited for Jean at the top of the hill. He would see her at the last bend and slow his pace. As night fell they walked on side by side, Antoinette talking volubly, Jean saying little, answering with a yes or no. He could not understand why she now came looking for him after having behaved so casually towards him before, but Antoinette, who was more perceptive, had guessed without him saying so that something had happened, something that had spoilt the memory of her joyous reward for his bac. Now she wished she could forget him, for the bitterness of other flings whose short-lived pleasure had never come near the state of sweet tenderness she had felt with him had torn away the veil: it was Jean and no one else that she loved, fled from, and tempted back, and the certainty of being able to lure him back every time had concealed the one fact that makes love insistent and nearly unbearable: its fragility. Jean’s absence, which was now no longer a physical absence but the absence of a response, profoundly distressed Antoinette without her being able to name the feeling that drove her to look for him every time she could slip away without attracting her mother’s attention.

One evening she succeeded in persuading him to come with her to visit the new house. It smelled of fresh plaster, varnish and paint. The electricity had not yet been connected, so she lit a candle which they took with them as they pushed open squeaking doors and wandered through deserted rooms. The new floor creaked sharply under their feet. Antoinette led Jean by the hand through the labyrinth of bedrooms and bathrooms to a room that faced north for Michel to paint in and set up his printing press. Jean said nothing, and his silence put Antoinette into a state of panic. She could not understand, she did not understand anything any more, and looked desperately for the slightest sign that might bring back the closeness they had had before. Why didn’t he speak, why didn’t he hold her hand more tightly? In one of the rooms a bed had been set up for a cabinetmaker from Caen who had worked there for several days. Antoinette pulled Jean down onto the bare mattress. Despite the discomfort and the chill of the unheated house, she felt a pleasure so intense that afterwards she burst into tears. The candle’s harsh glow lit her wet face with grimacing shadows and Jean was touched to see her suddenly ugly, stripped of her attractiveness.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

He sat up, irritated. The guilt that had once weighed on him in his games with Antoinette had disappeared, and he felt only repulsion and sadness and even a sort of resentment towards her.

‘Well, don’t cry in front of me then. Let’s get out of here. I hate this house.’

‘Why?’

‘It reminds me that my parents don’t even have a roof over their head for their last years on this earth.’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘No, it’s nobody’s fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault. I’m beginning to believe the whole world is under the spell of some sort of total irresponsibility. It’s really comfortable, and I wonder why there are still a few idiots who worry about other people. Let’s get out of here, I said, I hate this place.’

In a childish gesture, she dried her eyes with her cuff. She couldn’t understand Jean’s bitterness. What was he talking about? About a roof over someone’s head, about ageing parents without a penny to their name, while inside her was a sorrow she didn’t dare utter, and her distress felt to her like the greatest and the only distress in the world. Outside the rectory, Jean said goodnight to her. She picked up her bicycle, pedalled a few metres, turned round and came back.