Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘It’s Théo!’ she said delightedly. ‘He’s bringing the fish.’

She ran towards him in her bare feet. Antoine was eaten up with jealousy, and as he became aware of it he felt glad to experience the feeling. Something was moving inside him. A barrier was crumbling. He belonged to the world of the living, the world of Théo arriving with a bucket of fish, of Marie-Dévote running towards the young man with ill-concealed pleasure. Théo handed her the bucket and walked off, and Marie-Dévote lost her sparkle for a moment, became suddenly dull and lifeless, but the decline was brief. Antoine finished his carafe of rosé and asked for another, merely for the pleasure of seeing her get up, walk the length of the arbour and return with her light, swinging step, as if she were walking on the tips of her toes. Instinct demanded that he leave there and then, to nurse his appetite to return.

That evening he stopped again outside Charles’s garage at Aix. His work finished, Charles had his head under a tap of cold water.

‘All right, Captain? How’s the beast?’

‘Perfect, Charles. Are you free this evening?’

They had dinner together on a bistro terrace, talking naturally about the war they had shared together in the Balkans, a thankless and miserable episode but one that Charles, with a southerner’s talent for storytelling, had an ability to wrap in unexpected colours. Antoine, who remembered only mud, dysentery, thirst, hunger and wretchedness, listened with childlike attention as Charles crossed the Vardar on 22 September 1918, resupplied the Serbs at Gradsko two days later, raced in his truck to Prilep after the Bulgarians had set it on fire, and charged into Skopje alongside Colonel Gaspereau’s Chasseurs d’Afrique. Punctuated with a regular ‘crash, bang, wallop!’ that shook the table, his irresistible account attracted both waiters and patron to their table, making them briefly oblivious to the other diners. To Antoine Charles’s war was unrecognisable, as he juggled with entire divisions and possessed an incredible gift of ubiquity. But what did it matter? The former driver elevated the squalid, organised the disordered, gave reason to absurdity. When he at last sat down with the Bulgarian government to sign the armistice, the restaurant was in near rapture. The patron shook their hands, his eyes welling with tears.

‘You’re truly brave men,’ he said in a long sigh of garlic. ‘We owe you a great debt!’

A little unsteadily, drunk on stories and red wine, Antoine found a hotel room and slept a dreamless sleep.

Next morning Charles inspected the Bugatti, changed its tyres and spark plugs, and retimed the ignition. When the engine fired up, his mechanic’s eyes shone with pleasure. Back at the wheel, Antoine had one desire: to get back to La Sauveté, which he did at the astounding average of seventy kilometres an hour, seeing nothing but the road ahead, the dust, the bends, the trees that whistled past his ears.

La Sauveté had survived his absence. Driving through the gates, he saw Albert limping in front of a wheelbarrow being pushed by one of the village boys. Victoire Sanpeur was strolling hand in hand with Michel and Antoinette through the rose walks. Antoinette ran to her father and climbed up to sit next to him. They did a lap of the park and pulled up at the steps of the house as Jeanne was coming out with Jean in her arms. Marie-Thérèse showed her surprise in an offended frostiness.

‘Where were you?’ she said.

‘I went to see Geneviève.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you object?’

‘Not at all. I assume you’re joking.’

Antoine bent over Jean, who stared at him with wide eyes, and gently squeezed his cheek. The baby smiled and held out his arms.

‘Extraordinary!’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘Such a difficult child, and look at him smiling at you.’

‘He’s not difficult,’ Jeanne countered. ‘He just doesn’t like everybody.’

‘He’s not wrong!’ Antoine said.

Marie-Thérèse flinched, and said with feigned gentleness, ‘I thought that children could always sense whether you really love them or not.’

Antoinette drew herself up, her eyes thunderous.

‘But Papa does love children!’

Tears welled in her eyes.

‘Don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Antoine answered, distracted by the appearance of Victoire dragging Michel behind her. He succeeded in wriggling out of her grip and ran to bury himself in his mother’s skirts.

‘Maman!’ he yelled, trembling with fright. ‘I don’t want him to take you away in his car.’

‘There’s no danger of that, my darling. No danger at all!’

‘What an idiot,’ Antoinette said.

Antoine caught the Martiniquan’s gaze. She lowered her eyelids, fringed with long, curly lashes. It was a yes, but he would have to wait until tomorrow morning, at five o’clock, after his bowl of coffee laced with calvados, on the hard day bed in the library. He sighed.

I mention 1920 only as a reminder. It no longer interests us. But let us touch briefly on the things that were bothering Albert at that time. Paul Deschanel, preferred to Clemenceau by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate as president of the victorious French Republic, was found wandering in his nightshirt at a level crossing after the official train had passed by. He was suspected of being a delusional lunatic and unfortunately the suspicions proved correct. Forced to resign, he was replaced by Alexandre Millerand. In the United States, matters were no better: the president had disappeared. Intoxicated by the ovations he had received and his own verbal incontinence, Woodrow Wilson shut himself in his room and refused to see even members of his administration. His wife served as intermediary, deciding world affairs between two rubbers of bridge. The League of Nations — upon which, despite the United States’ refusal to join, Albert had pinned his hopes — did not prevent the Soviets from invading Poland, the Greeks from attacking Turkey, or the French from ‘pacifying’ the Rif. Albert lived from one disappointment to the next. When he held young Jean in his arms he sang to him, as a lullaby,

And all you poor girls

who love your young men

if they reward you with children

break their arms, break their legs

so they can never be infantrymen

so they can never be infantrymen.

Jean would never be a soldier. It was a promise, made on oath.

We jump forward then, to August 1923, three years later, to find ourselves again at La Sauveté, one fine afternoon when the sun sparkled on the sea that was visible from the first-floor windows. Monsieur du Courseau had lifted the edge of the lace curtain to admire his garden. Seated in a tub armchair, he kept his leg, encased in its plaster cast, up on a stool. A month earlier, as he had tried to avoid a cyclist without lights in the middle of the night on the waterlogged Tôtes road, he had slid off the carriageway and hit a fence that, fortunately, was made of wood. The car — the new Type 28 Bugatti, three litres, eight cylinders — had not been badly damaged (punctured radiator, bent front axle), but Antoine’s left knee, which was less sturdy, had shattered on contact with the dashboard. At the factory at Molsheim the car was being repaired, and would be delivered back to Antoine at the beginning of September. Even though there was no question of his driving anywhere in the near future, he was suffering from not having his baby in its garage, a loose box adapted for the purpose. He liked to know it was there, even when it was quiet, and he loved its sudden gleam whenever he pulled back the garage’s sliding door to let in the daylight. The bodywork shone a beautiful blue, the chrome flashed in the sunlight. Stuck in bed, then in an armchair, Antoine, deprived of his thoroughbred, felt his loneliness painfully acutely as he faced convalescent hours of desperate slowness. For at least another month there was no question of his being able to escape from his agonising melancholy and take to the road again.