Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

At the end of the year Joseph Outen declared bankruptcy, closed his bookshop and started work at La Vigie in charge of the regional sports page. The film club swallowed half his salary, but a small core of cinephiles had formed, twenty or so young men and women who shared the costs. Their ambition was to collect enough money to invite a director to come and talk about his art. Joseph had written to René Clair, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, and all had responded favourably but regretted that they would be too busy in the months ahead. This had not discouraged him, and he still had a long list of interesting film-makers he intended to approach. Jean realised that the admirable thing about Joseph was his ability to rise above any disappointment; he was one of those men born to undertake all sorts of projects and never see a single one succeed. At the newspaper, Grosjean the supervisor looked furiously askance at the visits by one of the sacrosanct editorial staff, disturbing his drudge’s labours. He disapproved of the mixing of ‘classes’; it disturbed the rigid structure of a society founded on a hierarchy of workers and supervisors.

The winter was cold and gloomy and seemed to Jean like a long tunnel, and, because of his youth, he was scared that he could not see the light at the end of it. In an apathetic Europe France continued to show itself to be the least imaginative of nations. The one and only idea it could be commended for was the government’s creation of a Ministry of Leisure, run by a charismatic socialist called Léo Lagrange. It was now on this man, far more than on Léon Blum, that the French rested their hopes. The number of strikes went down. Wages were no longer the unions’ objective. They sought instead to purge the socialists from their own ranks of officials, while the communists reserved their fire for Blum, whom they nicknamed the ‘social traitor’, an insult that must have seemed mild to him in comparison to what Maurras called him, refusing to refer to him as anything other than ‘that jackal-camel-dog’. But Jean could not get interested in politics, although people around him discussed it endlessly. He heard news from Ernst, who was going on with his history and philosophy course and researching a dissertation about Nietzsche. His solemn, enthusiastic letters were sprinkled with Nietzsche quotes, in which the democratic tendency was characterised as ‘a decadent and enfeebled form of humanity, which it reduces to mediocrity at the same time as lessening its value’. Germany had found the ‘new philosophers’ Nietzsche had called for, he emphasised. Their names were Hitler and Rosenberg. German youth had found itself an incomparable leader in the shape of Baldur von Schirach. Jean showed the letters to Joseph Outen, who roared with laughter.

‘Let them dream. They’ll have a cruel awakening. The French army will retake the Rhineland in a week. In a fortnight it will be in Berlin. The Germans have no petrol or steel, and their army corps have no officers. A fortnight, I promise you, three weeks at the most. You can sleep soundly in your bed.’

That was all Jean wanted to know, even though he disliked the idea of a military excursion to Berlin. What would he do if he ever found himself face to face with Ernst? Shoot? Or throw open his arms? He gave up trying to decide the answer to that dilemma. Circumstances would tell. Meanwhile life felt pretty vile, so vile sometimes that he missed Mireille, her sunny restaurant balcony that looked out over the coast and the blue sea, and the life of relative ease there. He did not see Antoinette again until January. After her confession to him she had disappeared, and at Christmas Madame du Courseau moved into her house, which was finished at last. Albert had a job again: to create a garden where before there had only been a meadow and a few apple trees. Marie-Thérèse had nowhere for him to stay, however, and every morning he had to cover the two kilometres to the house on foot. The way back in the evening was, if anything, more painful. At the slightest effort his orthopaedic leg hurt him badly, and he had developed varicose veins in the other leg. At least at La Sauveté he had had his own place, while at the new house, which was bourgeois and tasteless, he considered himself merely an employee. Not a word of complaint passed his lips.

At the end of January, coming home exhausted from his job at La Vigie, Jean learnt from the abbé that an ambulance had been called that morning to take Antoinette to hospital. The abbé knew nothing more.

‘Go and see her at lunchtime tomorrow, when you see your mother. And let me know what’s wrong. I feel everyone is spinning mysteries around me.’

Jean saw Antoinette the next day. She was in a room on her own, pale and swollen-faced. Lying without a pillow, she was not allowed to raise her head.

‘I was waiting for you,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you, no one else. Come here. Do you remember when you were a little boy and I adored you? I protected you …’

‘I haven’t forgotten.’

‘I love you even more now.’

‘You had a funny way of showing it.’

‘Maybe. At least it taught me that I really love you.’

‘I’d prefer you to tell me what’s wrong with you.’

‘Do you remember what I said to you that last evening we saw each other?’

‘I didn’t believe it.’

‘It was true, and even if you find it boring I’m going to tell you what happened afterwards. I was pregnant—’

‘You aren’t any more?’

No. Gontran Longuet got me in trouble. He was like you, he didn’t believe me. I threatened him and yesterday morning he took me to Anna, you know, that woman who lives in your old house. She convinced me that it was nothing at all, and then she cut me up like a torturer, the witch, and when she couldn’t stop me haemorrhaging she and her husband got scared. They put me in Gontran’s car, and he drove me to the last bend before the house. It was a hundred metres from the door. I couldn’t make it and I fell down. Michel came out and saw me. If I’m not dead, it’s because of him.’

Jean took her limp hand, lying on the sheet. He studied her face, disfigured like the night she had wept in the deserted house. She was weak and defenceless, and above all she had reminded him of their childhood and the protective love she had wrapped him in then, before all the games that had led to their misunderstandings. Perhaps something else could grow between them now, a brotherly, watchful feeling. He squeezed her hand and kissed her fingers. A smile appeared on her bloodless lips.

‘Promise?’ she said. ‘We’ll tell each other everything—’

She did not finish. Her brother entered the room.

We have not seen Michel for a long time, apart from his recent furtive appearance at mass. Years have passed since his morbidly jealous childhood. He is tall and good-looking, if charmless, and the gaze he directs at others is one of haughty attention. Last December he gave a recital of songs from Fauré to Debussy at Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon, and was commissioned by an art-book publisher to produce twenty plate illustrations for a luxury edition of the Song of Songs. This recognition of his dual talent has contributed in no small measure to the making of the high idea he has of himself, and in a bedroom drawer he secretly keeps a scrapbook bound in red leather, in which his mother has religiously pasted the smallest newspaper cutting about him. His father’s departure seems to have liberated the nervous boy he once was. The house was not big enough for two men, and the day Michel was asked about his ambitions and replied, ‘I’m good at music and engraving,’ Antoine had raised his eyebrows, looked at his son in astonishment, as if he were an impostor, and answered unexpectedly,