Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘Hello, old boy !’ he said in English, folding up his paper. They were practically the only words he remembered, because, despite having been brought up by English nurses until he was ten, he had forgotten it all, as was proper. The smattering that remained so thrilled him that, whenever he chanced to string three words together, he nearly knocked down his interlocutor with the most enormous thump on the back. Jean was the recipient of the thump this time, and it affected him no less than the sudden attention he found himself receiving from the Marquis de Malemort. He would have sworn that this man, unsophisticated and elegant at the same time, had never noticed him before, had walked past a small boy named Jean Arnaud a hundred times without seeing him. Could it be the same as had happened with Grosjean, who now raised his cap at the sight of his former whipping boy? Jean did not yet appreciate that his journey to England had taken on, in the narrow milieu of Grangeville, the dimensions of an adventure to El Dorado. He had returned like the prodigal son, impecunious and wreathed in glory, full of experience. The marquis gave them a lift in his solid Peugeot 301, more often seen on potholed byroads than on Dieppe’s macadamed streets. It gave off a smell of hay, flax and damp leather, belched like a pig at every gear change, but cantered up the hills in a clattering of old iron. It was a far cry from Palfy’s Rolls! The marquise had cooked dinner. For a long time now, farm girls had ceased to consider it a sign of honour and promotion to empty the château’s chamber pots. Jean faced a string of questions and sat up straighter: dinner at Malemort, served by the marquise and Chantal, seated opposite the marquis whose booted feet stuck out in front of him, was something he could never have dreamt of before his departure. He felt grateful to Palfy. Without him, nothing like this would have been possible. The dull resentment towards his friend that he had experienced since he left, lightened. Unfortunately conversation with the marquis turned out to be difficult. He was only interested in the English countryside, about which Jean had the most superficial idea, after spending several weekends in country houses set amidst romantic gardens, totally ignorant of external realities. However, he collected together his memories of conversations half listened to and realised that he could carry off a pretence of knowledge, that Chantal too was silent and listening to him with interest.

‘Here it’s all over!’ the marquis broke in. ‘In the space of a hundred and fifty years the Napoleonic Code has destroyed property ownership. The estates are disappearing one after another, parcelled up, subdivided and disposed of. We’re condemned to having a single child. Since Napoleon, Paris has been governing France with its eyes closed. They see us as Chouans. There’s not a single countryman in the government. Just professors, lawyers and mathematicians. Once every four years they notice us, in time for us to go out and vote for the conservatives.’

The marquis was happy to have an audience for his precious ideas. Jean listened to him, steeling himself to pay attention and trying to disregard the lovely figure of Chantal, who was busying herself around the table. In the farms nearby, Jean knew, women also served and kept quiet. The marquis began yawning. His day had started at dawn, he had ridden out for two hours with his daughter, and that afternoon had had several drinks while he waited for Jean and Chantal at the café.

‘My boy, no standing on ceremony: you’ll sleep here tonight. Monsieur Cliquet shares his only bedroom with your father. Captain Duclou goes to bed very early since he had his little attack, and the abbé is away at Lourdes with the young maids of Grangeville. Tomorrow you’ll tell us your plans. Goodnight .’

He shook Jean’s hand vigorously and left, shambling slightly from the effects of the pre-dinner pastis, red wine at table, and cognac warmed and cradled in his hand in a large snifter. Madame de Malemort put more logs on the fire and sat in an armchair next to the fireplace with a tapestry on her lap. She would not forget the proprieties: one did not leave a young woman of marriageable age and a young man alone together. Chantal sat on a sofa, making a place for Jean, and showed him photos taken during the summer at horse shows at which she had entered her mare. Having heard nothing from the English he had met but talk of lawns, rain, dogs and horses, Jean was able to answer with a few well-chosen words. Chantal was astonished.

‘I thought you were only interested in cycling and rowing.’

‘I’ve changed.’

‘Very much?’

‘Basically, no,’ he said.

Chantal returned his gaze, paling a little. The marquise was ozing. Her days started early too. Her head rested on a wing of the armchair, stretching the folds of her neck. She was ageless; perhaps she had never even been young, just as she would never be old. With a face that was free of wrinkles but vacant too, her fine features expressed a distinguished absence of character.

‘Don’t stop talking,’ Chantal whispered, ‘if you stop she’ll wake up.’

‘Everything I want to say to you isn’t ready to be said. I only started thinking about it today, on the ferry from Newhaven.’

‘And before?’

‘I was looking for you.’

‘In other women?’

‘Yes and no. No, because you’re not in any of the ones I meet.’

‘Why did you come back?’

‘Is it a reproach?’

‘No, but tell me the reason.’

Admit Geneviève? It was out of the question. Anyhow, that encounter had perhaps been no more than an illusion, mischief-making to throw him off his chosen path. He took a deep breath.

‘An irresistible desire came over me, to find out who my mother is. To be clear — I don’t care a damn about my father, who must be totally ignorant of my existence.’

Chantal lowered her head and was silent. Madame de Malemort started, opened her eyes and picked up her tapestry with a limp hand.

‘I must show you,’ Chantal said in a normal voice, ‘the filly and the colt that were both born on the same day last week. Papa is giving them to me.’

The marquise’s eyelids gradually closed on her vacant stare, her head fell forward and her work-worn hands opened on her tapestry. She was not yet fifty. This family ate horrible reheated stews but did so from Limoges china, drank table wine but from crystal glasses, sliced their meat with chipped knives whose silver handles were engraved with their initials. They owned saddle horses and draught horses and arrived at mass in a trap, but drove to town in a 301 that was as old-fashioned as it was battered. They were lost between two worlds — the one they had come from and the one they were going to — that were entirely unalike. To forget that fatal contradiction, they shut themselves away in their mansion and accepted one invitation in ten. At no time had it ever crossed their minds that Chantal might break with tradition and marry someone other than a country gentleman.

‘Why does it matter so much to you?’ Chantal said with a sigh.

‘I don’t know: a physical need.’

‘No. There must be a reason.’

Jean thought that she was more perceptive than she looked.

‘Someone said to me, with great certainty …’

He stopped, embarrassed.

‘Said what?’

‘That I look physically as if I’m related to the du Courseaus.’

Chantal put her hand on his arm.

‘It’s true. And I’m not the only one to have noticed it.’

‘Do they know?’

‘No. They don’t see themselves.’

‘No one sees himself.’

Jean thought for a moment. In the du Courseau family one person had examined his features with extreme attentiveness. The album Michel had given him on the eve of his departure for England was perhaps also an admission. And hadn’t Marie-Thérèse du Courseau — before the unpleasant story at the cliff — shown a possessive generosity towards him that could not just be explained by her ostentatiously charitable behaviour? Finally, in the realm of the unsayable there was also the secret pact he had sealed with Antoine on the occasion of the punctured hosepipe, and then his alliance with Antoinette that had reached its culmination on the night he passed his baccalauréat, and lastly his attraction for Geneviève, and the way she had responded, holding him at arm’s length.