Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘You know,’ Chantal added, ‘people talk without any selfrestraint. Only one person could tell you: the abbé Le Couec. Even though he doesn’t like you to raise subjects that embarrass him …’

The marquise raised her head.

‘Children, it is getting late … Chantal, you ought to show Jean his room.’

She collected together her tapestry and wools and put both into a work-table, yawned unrestrainedly, kissed Jean on the cheek, stroked her daughter’s face, and left the room after quenching the last of the blaze with a glass of water.

Chantal led Jean to a round room in the tower, the guest room, with an enormous bed swollen by a red quilt.

‘I find all this strange,’ he said. ‘This morning I was still in London. Now I’m here with you. Where do you sleep?’

She did not answer, and began to unfasten her dress. Jean was afraid. An idea about what love should be was shattering in front of him as Chantal’s body was exposed, white, slender, exquisite and fragile as a Dresden figurine. She kept her gaze fixed on him and, so as not to miss her looking at him, he hardly dared look at her. When she put her arms around his neck he was seized by a terrible anxiety.

He awoke at dawn, on his own in the great bed. A cock was crowing under his window. He patted the sheets with the flat of his hand to find a trace of the body that had vanished while he slept. No, he had not dreamt it. What an awful cheat life was! The one being he had respected endlessly had given herself to him without a word, and he had not ravished a virgin. Chantal knew as much about love as he did. He wanted to cry. He had never felt so lonely as he did for the two hours that preceded a discreet knock at the door and Chantal’s voice calling, ‘Jean, breakfast is ready.’

He stuck his head under the cold tap and went downstairs. The marquis was pushing away his soup plate before he sugared his bowl of coffee. Madame de Malemort was in her dressing gown, adjusting the toaster. Chantal, already dressed, looked down so as not to see Jean. A much more extraordinary thing than leaving London in the morning and going to bed the same night in a Norman château was being Chantal’s lover now, and enjoying with her a confused pleasure in which were mingled images of Geneviève. The one, the girl, inspired all his desire; the other, the woman, inspired his admiration.

‘Good morning!’ the marquis roared in English. ‘We’re having a lazy start. Well, guests are allowed, but only on the first day.’

At eight in the morning he had already driven his cows out, fed the horses, cut down a tree and given the hens their grain. He had a full schedule for the day: to ride with his daughter, train a young Brittany spaniel, cut back the yews at the gates, get the churns ready for the milk collector, and that afternoon wait for the combine harvester hired for the week.

‘I feel ashamed,’ Jean said.

It was true, but for reasons that the Malemorts could not suspect. Standing behind them, Chantal looked at Jean. Nothing gave her away, except perhaps a faint shadow under her eyes. He no longer knew whether he loved her, now that she had given herself to him. The fallen veil had stripped of its attractions an old dream born in his childhood. He would have given everything to erase the night just past and go on living with his illusions.

‘I need to go and see my father,’ he said.

‘How he will love that!’ the marquise said, with the same conviction as if she had forecast that it would rain that afternoon. ‘I saw him the day before yesterday at Marie-Thérèse’s. He was watering.’

Yes, what else would he have been doing, dear Albert, but watering, planting, pruning trees and cutting back rose bushes? It was all he had left, now that he was without a home, a wife, a son. Life had been excessively unfair to him. And to rub salt into the wound, here was war looming once more, delivering a fatal blow to his life’s hopes. On 11 March Hitler had invaded and annexed Austria. So Ernst had been right. You only had to read Mein Kampf . Jean had been expecting the usual litanies of life at Grangeville, but everything was changing. When, after seeing Chantal and her father off on their morning ride, he borrowed the marquis’s old bike to cover the ten kilometres from Malemort to Grangeville, he was assailed by memories. He knew every bend, every farm, every spinney. On the hills he had paced himself on the way up, then thrown caution to the wind on the way down. He remembered a happy time that had posed few more challenging problems than that of keeping fit. Today his legs were like cotton wool, and he laboured half-heartedly along the road. A feeling of unease gripped him, something that would perhaps never leave him, a nausea he refused to identify. At last he saw Monsieur Cliquet’s burr-stone cottage: a closed world, remote from the foolish drama that had taken him by surprise. Albert appeared on the doorstep; he was leaning on a walking stick, having for years refused to use one out of pride. A few steps from his adoptive father, Jean experienced a sudden lightening of spirit: this man was simple and good, narrow-minded but of a rectitude that nothing could break. There was a moment of uncertainty, a hesitation. Albert was not sure that the elegant young man in front of him, in a shirt and tie and wearing a cap of the same cloth as his jacket, was his son. They kissed each other, and Jean recognised the familiar prickle of his father’s moustache and smell of cold caporal tobacco and coffee mixed with calvados that had been the smell of every morning of his childhood.

‘Have you just arrived?’

‘Yesterday evening.’

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘At the Malemorts'.’

Albert raised his eyebrows. He was not very happy about it. The classes ought not to mix, despite the marquis looking more and more like any other farmer. But how could he make Jean see it? Times were changing; the golden rules of twenty years ago meant nothing to the new generation. Jean saw his father’s unhappy astonishment and tried to explain.

‘They offered so kindly and naturally that I couldn’t say no. And apparently the abbé is away on a pilgrimage.’

‘Then you did the right thing. What about tonight?’

‘I’m staying with them again, as long as you don’t mind.’

‘Me? You must be joking. Your uncle’s still asleep. He’s a late riser. You can say hello on the way back. Come to Madame du Courseau’s with me. They’ll be pleased to see you.’

They walked together to the new villa, completed at long last and standing in the middle of a garden in which Jean recognised his father’s fixations: squares of lawn, ruthlessly symmetrical flowerbeds, saplings in staggered rows, with none of the exuberant, romantic untidiness of English gardens.

‘It’ll be all right in two or three years’ time,’ Albert said, looking for Jean’s approval. ‘But will I see it? You’ve no idea how old I feel since your mother died.’

‘I can imagine.’

They pushed open the gate with its painted plaque: ‘La Michelière.’ So Marie-Thérèse was clear about who she wanted this house to go to after Antoinette left home. The first person they saw was Michel. He was crouching with his hand extended over an ornamental pond, holding out birdseed to a pair of white pigeons that were flapping their wings on the far side, not daring to fly to him. Jean’s appearance made him stand up.

‘How did you get here? I wanted to write and thank you, but ask you to stop: I’m not ready.’

It took Jean a few seconds to remember that Geneviève had shown the album of drawings to a London gallerist, who had offered Michel a show in October.

‘I can’t do everything at once,’ Michel went on. ‘I’m still working on my engraving, but the most important thing I’m doing is practising for a recital at Pleyel in a year’s time: nothing but Francis Poulenc. He’s going to accompany me himself. You can’t imagine how wonderful he is. From the first moment we met, we understood each other perfectly. He’s writing two new songs for me based on poems by Cavafy … you must know him, the Greek poet …’