Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘I’m starting to ask myself how I’m going to pay you back for what you’re providing me with so generously. I haven’t got a penny to my name, or a single idea how to earn a living.’

‘I am a philanthropist of the sublime sort. I’m getting ready for a few personal shows of ingratitude, without which life would be a bed of roses.’

Dinner at Geneviève du Courseau’s was not what Palfy had been hoping for. They were the only guests, as if it was a test. With all the instinct his large nose was capable of, Palfy realised it and deployed his resources intelligently. Jean was surprised to see his friend so well informed about the theatre and cinema, which he never went to, and about exhibitions of painting and sculpture for which he ordinarily professed substantial scorn. He even displayed a certain genius by stopping dead in front of an unusual object, a spade onto which the sculptor had welded two nails. It looked like a praying mantis.

‘Admirable!’ he said, leaning forward. ‘The revenge of the world of things. The beginning of their animation. They will devour us all.’

‘Do you know who it’s by?’

‘In principle I’d have said it was by Natalia, but don’t laugh at me: I’m a complete ignoramus.’

‘It is by her!’ Geneviève said, surprised.

He had passed the test. He would be asked again. Walking back to Eaton Square on a delicious balmy night, Jean expressed astonishment at his knowledge.

‘Why do you think I read the papers with such care every morning?’ Palfy said. ‘You can find everything there. No need to move.’

‘But what about that sculpture you identified?’

‘I’d seen a photo of it in a magazine. No more difficult than that. If you want to know what I think, we went down all right. It’s very important. Next I would like to get to know the prince, about whom I am beginning to have my own theory.’

‘What about her?’

‘A marvellous person.’

Jean felt the same. His very limited experience of women was enlarging slowly. After Mireille, Antoinette and, on a platonic level, Chantal, he had discovered Geneviève, still clothed in the cachet of the du Courseaus, but freed from its bourgeois world. All evening long he had had the impression of meeting someone open, direct and without any false or naïve modesty. She was beautiful when she laughed, her laughter was genuine, and her fine blue eyes examined life with kindness, intelligence and lucidity.

A few days later Jean started to emulate Palfy and read the French daily papers. There was little mention of politics. The race for that year’s literary prizes preoccupied a reading public that was happy to be addressed on any subject except war. For the Prix Goncourt, the name of Joseph Outen was mentioned nowhere. Did this oversight suggest a shock announcement of the prize being awarded to an outsider that Monday at Drouant’s restaurant? When the name of Charles Plisnier was revealed — a forty-one-year-old Belgian novelist, author of a collection of short stories — Jean felt the scale of poor Joseph’s disappointment. What had happened? He wrote to him. A reply came back by return.

Make no mistake about what happened. A conspiracy has taken place. My book, despite being finished in good time, was not published. Without any reason. For, all modesty aside, it is easily as good as Plisnier’s False Passports . Put very simply: I’m still waiting for an answer from the NRF and Grasset, whom I offered it to simultaneously. My novel has been suppressed. Why? Because it upsets people . Yes, I upset people. Imagine! Someone who has something to say, and says it! That hasn’t been seen since Zola’s day. We are not permitted to impugn the honour of love or money. My novel will not be published. I have the bitter certainty of that now. If I want to continue writing, I shall have to confine myself to anodyne subjects: little birds, sunny days, and trips to the seaside. Count me out. You know me well enough. I’m leaving literature to the shopkeepers from now on. Even so, it hasn’t been time completely wasted. Scribbling down my 300 pages, I discovered that I can draw. My manuscript is covered in doodles down the side of every page. There’s no doubt that with patience and hard work I could have enough drawings for an exhibition in a year’s time. I’ve sold a piece of my mother’s jewellery that I’d held on to, which will be enough to keep me going until I start selling. You’re invited to my show of course, which will take place in Paris in January 1939. Between now and then, don’t count on me for much: I shall be a recluse for the duration. A single distraction: running. Yes, don’t laugh. I’m a runner, and my lungs are improving every day. How many press-ups are you up to?

Jean was down to zero press-ups. He felt guilty, got up half an hour earlier, and resumed his exercises with pleasure. At the same time he realised that, as he counted each upward push of his body, he thought about Geneviève. He had never met anybody like her. Not only was she attractive and desirable, but after he had left her, her charm continued to work on him. He found himself trying to remember the tone of her voice, the sparkle of her eyes, the shapes made by her pink mouth. He could not even compare her to Chantal de Malemort. They belonged to two different species. Jean reassured himself: he loved both of them. It was his misfortune that they both seemed unattainable.

Unattainability was not a feature of the middle-aged Englishwomen who invited him to the country with Palfy. Jean noticed that they were paying him more and more attention. He surrendered with a certain anxiety, not knowing where it would lead him.

‘Nowhere, absolutely nowhere,’ Palfy said repeatedly. ‘Rosalind and Margaret would walk straight past you tomorrow if they met you anywhere in the least bit smart.’

Palfy encouraged Jean’s pleasures of the moment. But why did he not sacrifice himself in the same way?

‘I haven’t talked much about myself,’ he admitted. ‘The truth is very simple: I’m neither homosexual nor impotent. Let’s just say that I don’t feel particularly strongly about “it”. I need rather special conditions, which aren’t very easy to bring together. To cut a long story short, I prefer professional women. It does no harm to anybody and actually enriches a sizeable group of idlers who look after the modest business it produces and keep it within the bounds of propriety. Having said that, the lovely Geneviève du Courseau has not called us. Many days have passed. Telephone that strange person, will you? I believe I have learnt how the prince who maintains her on such a lavish scale keeps his immense fortune topped up from day to day.’

‘How?’

‘That is a secret, dear boy.’

Jean felt he was groping his way through a world where he recognised nothing. Who were these society ladies who offered themselves to him in a bedroom adjoining their husband’s and the next day looked straight through him? What goal was Palfy pursuing? As time went on it became impossible to doubt that he had, at least that particular year, sufficiently large means to live extravagantly. He slipped easily into that relatively closed society in which money counted as much as titles. He was at ease in it from his years at private school, then Oxford. How far that person was from the priest who stole from collection boxes and coaxed his old Mathis up the Nationale Sept! Jean occasionally had to do a double take, for he had only known people who were always the same and incapable of concealing a second or a third face behind the first. The abbé Le Couec was never anybody else but himself. The same was true of Monsieur Cliquet, Captain Duclou, Marie-Thérèse and Antoinette du Courseau. The only person who did not fit the mould was perhaps Michel. With him in mind Jean found an excuse to call Geneviève.