Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘You don’t miss the forest of Arques too much, do you?’

‘No. Apart from the days when you came with me, I thought it was a lonely place. I saw stags and hinds but no human beings. In Paris there are human beings.’

Jean was beginning to doubt that the beings of Paris were human. But they were beings, at least, and you approached them with curiosity. At Match he earned a decent wage, especially if he counted the obnoxious business of gratuities, and it enabled them to eat out in the evenings at restaurants that made Chantal’s eyes shine with pleasure. One evening a drunken Italian, whose car he had been to fetch from its parking place at Pigalle, slipped a thousand-franc note into his hand to thank him. With it Jean bought Chantal a gold chain and a new coat that was very welcome at the end of autumn. She owned nothing, having left Malemort with what she stood up in and a practically empty suitcase. He was dressing her, piece by piece.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘I don’t need it. I only go out to go to the market. In the morning, when you’re asleep, I look out of the window and I say to myself: there is Paris, and there are millions of people who live the way we do, who don’t know us, and whom we will never know. It’s infinite, like space.’

Slowly he forgot that in his absence she had known another man, and not any other man but a decisive and demanding man. On the occasions when he allowed his thoughts to dwell on that fact, his fists clenched and he took out his anger on the first ill-mannered or drunken customer he was asked to eject from the club. In December he was cold, and kept warm by stamping his feet on the pavement under the illuminated sign. The bar girls came outside in their plunging necklines to bring him scalding hot toddies. There were three or four of them with their interchangeable assumed names, Suzy, Dolly, Fanny, pretty enough in the dark but already haggard and ravaged, despite their frequent nose-powderings and other restorations, by the time they left with an unsteady client. He could have slept with any of them, without consequences, but it did not occur to him. Chantal filled up his life. They were playing at husband and wife in a real world, where no one stood in their way to overwhelm them with sound advice or predict stormy days ahead as a result of their insouciance. They asked Jesús to lunch or dinner and he brought his peanuts with him, accepting only as an extra, with a startled tentativeness, a sardine in oil or an apple. He was dependably happy until the first of each month, which was the day he was due to deliver his five pictures to the gallery. Every time he returned humiliated. The owner, who knew about his collages and liked to mock him coarsely about them, greeted him with a ‘Hello, Papiécasso’. Jesús would willingly have knocked him down, but he needed the monthly payments. To lose them would mean misery all over again, the way life had been when he first arrived in the city.

‘You un’erstan’,’ he would say to his friends, ‘I pu’ up with it for my love of art. For my work! But I will smash him in his crooked face if he ask me to put a few mo’ hairs in the bums of the girls if I wan’ to sell them. Hairs in the bums, I say to him, hairs in the bums, Monsieur, my models don’ have them! They are too poor to pay for some with the money zat I give them, an’ you know wha’ he say to me. “My boy, you only have to give them yours” …’

He opened his shirt to expose his well-muscled chest bristling with its thick, black curly growth. Chantal wept with laughter, and Jean loved to watch her listening to Jesús’s obscenities without blushing.

Where was the future in all of this? A long way off, and the time to worry about it was when it came over the horizon. Sufficient unto the day were the pleasures of love and Paris which opened up to them when in the afternoons they came down from the Butte Montmartre to go to the cinema or the theatre, to walk in the Cité or on the Île Saint-Louis, to buy books from the booksellers along the quais and then go home and read them, lying together on the bed until it was time for Jean to leave for Match.

Apart from Jesús Infante, the building housed only shuffling, bad-tempered pensioners, two tarts who worked Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and a dirty old man constantly on the lookout for skirts walking up the steep staircase. They were a long way from the Parisian society of which Balzac had made himself the chronicler. Chantal spoke to no one, except at the market from which she returned with their shopping twice a week. She waited for Jean, without impatience, because everything seemed new to her, putting up with the crudity of Jesús’s conversations and the whiff of stewed meat that permeated the building, and had not even seen him dressed in his hireling’s uniform because he changed when he got to the club. One day, when she was feeling particularly happy, she sent her mother the cruellest card imaginable in the circumstances. ‘Am very happy. Warmest wishes.’ To her father she sent nothing, not a word. The days passed, distancing her from Malemort and the massive boredom that seeped from its walls. She also thought about the one who had come before Jean and had rehearsed her so well in the drama of love. From that point of view she had no remorse, no regret. She had discovered the pleasure of living life in the instant, and there was no one there to reproach her for her failure to behave properly or her breaches of respectability. To tell the truth, she did not really care in the slightest what people had thought of her after she left.

And so she and Jean came through the dark and freezing winter that preceded, like an omen, the even darker and more freezing winters of the war and occupation. Jesús, frantically filling his coal-fired stove to keep his models warm as they posed in the mornings, nearly set fire to the building. Waking with a start, Jean refused to comply with the fire brigade’s evacuation instruction and went back to sleep, watched over by an amazed and impressed Chantal. She feared nothing as long as he was there. A girl who had scampered from Jesús’s apartment when the alarm was raised sat with them until it was over. She was naked underneath her robe. At Pigalle they called her Miranda. In private, far from her clients, she liked to be called by her real name, Madeleine. She began to come over after lunch to have coffee with them and tell the story of her night. Jean marvelled at the indulgent warmth Chantal displayed in listening to her. How could the Malemorts’ daughter entertain such a friendship? No two women could be more disparate. Jean pricked up his ears when he heard Miranda-Madeleine say a few words of English. She had spent two years in London around 1932, which put her there at the time of his first visit. He recounted the story of his meeting with Madame Germaine.

‘Did I know Madame Germaine?’ she said. ‘Course I did! She taught “French” to masos; she was a funny old girl, needed no encouragement to get her whips out. She ended up with her throat cut but her stash wasn’t touched, a nice little nest egg she left to her nephew, an invalid who went around in a little car. Her pimps found the bloke who did her in, a French waiter, a casual, jealous and nasty. He turned up a week later on a pavement in Soho, bleeding like a pig, his femoral artery cut, nice bit of specialist work. How old were you then?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘You’re not telling me that at thirteen you were going round looking for tarts!’

‘No, I was looking for my friend Salah.’

‘Salah! You know Salah! The Negro with the Hispano.’

‘What do you know about him?’

Madeleine’s expression turned stony. She pulled her peignoir close across her drooping breasts and made her excuses to leave. It was impossible to get another word out of her, however circumspectly on subsequent occasions Jean brought up the subject of London and Salah. Only once did she talk to Chantal, one morning at the market when it was just the two of them.