Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Jean felt that he had been taken captive once more, having thought he had escaped Palfy for good, but in the distress that still held him in its grip he accepted that it was the only way out. In Paris he would have been miserable. At Cannes he would find a job, any job. The night in the sleeping car seemed endless to him. The rhythmic panting of the train paused only for a few minutes when they stopped at stations where announcers with robot-like voices chanted their names. From Montélimar onwards these voices spoke with southern accents, and his mind went back to Mireille and Tomate and the waitresses at Roquebrune. A different suffering had had him in its grip then, and he had escaped it by running away. Would it be the same with Chantal?? But his affair with Mireille had been nothing like the love he had just lost. She had been a terrible habit that could eventually be shaken off. Chantal had encompassed the memories of childhood and the promises of womanhood. He had overcome the pain of his first night at Malemort, and afterwards they had been happy. She would never be happy the way she had been with him. There, at least, was a comforting thought he could stir up like a sort of curse on Chantal.

Once they were past Marseille, Palfy knocked on his door.

‘Get up, you idler, and have some breakfast.’

From the window of the dining car they could see the Mediterranean, pale blue in the morning sun, and the palm trees of Hyères and the lazy coast.

‘However you look at it, it’s easier to be happy here,’ Palfy said. ‘Obviously it’s a little soporific, but we shall triumph over our laziness.’

‘I’m not lazy.’

‘And how wrong you are not to be.’

At Cannes they booked into the Carlton, where Palfy filled out his registration form without hesitation: ‘Baron Constantin Palfy’. Jean performed a rapid calculation: the money Antoinette had sent him would pay for his room for a week.

‘Don’t worry,’ Palfy said, ‘we’re using my seed capital. Now we have to find ourselves a vehicle worthy of our talents.’

They spent the day doing the rounds of the town’s garages. All they could find were mass-produced French saloons or Cadillacs that looked like hearses. Palfy wanted a convertible.

‘We shall be spending the summer here, remember. We may as well make the most of the fresh air. You need sun and wind, your face makes you look like a man who was recently exhumed. You don’t imagine we’re going to be nightclub doormen, do you?’

At the last garage, Palfy took a step back in admiration of an undeniable monster: an Austro-Daimler roadster, forty horsepower, garnet-red, and six metres long. The endless bonnet and enormous boot left barely enough space in between for two or three passengers to squeeze onto a bench seat of white leather. The salesman opened the bonnet to reveal an engine big enough to power a ferry: eight cylinders in line and quadruple carburettors. Palfy fell instantly in love with this behemoth, which had languished for a year at a knock-down price: no one wanted a car that did nine miles to the gallon. What tipped the balance for him was that the Austro-Daimler had belonged to a grand duke who had married a Texan and gone to live in the USA. It was a one-off that would never be built again, an absurd, pointless folly, the sort of car that had already earned its place in a museum. Although he was of average height, Palfy looked like a dwarf behind the steering wheel. Despite the power of its eight cylinders, its chassis and coachwork were so heavy that it could only reach 100 kilometres an hour, then 120 and finally 140 on very long stretches of road where it could be pointed straight ahead. In other words, in the Alpes-Maritimes and through the Esterel the best that could be said for it was that it would be stately. Palfy could not care less. He loved cars for their looks — as he had his elderly Mathis and his Rolls in London — not for their engineering.

They took delivery there and then, drove up and down the Croisette, and parked outside the Carlton, where they went straight up to Jean’s room to admire from above the garnet-red roadster, its white leather seat and the glittering chrome of its headlights and bumpers. They were standing on his balcony, Palfy as excited as a child with a new toy, when a yellow Hispano-Suiza, old-fashioned but with an immutable elegance and majesty, parked behind the Austro-Daimler, driven by a white chauffeur in a blue uniform who opened the door for a dark-skinned man in a plain grey flannel suit. Salah, for he it was, vanished with a rapid step into the hotel.

‘Fantastic!’ Palfy said. ‘I’ve always thought that when a black man prospers he ought to take on a white chauffeur.’

‘It’s Salah, the prince’s old chauffeur! I mean, old because he looks as if he’s been promoted. A wonderful man. The prince must be staying at the Carlton. He always comes to the Riviera in spring!’

‘Luck smiles on us, does she not, dear boy? I know now why I came to prise you from your garret in Rue Lepic. You were the very man I needed. You can’t believe how much you were … You must introduce me to the prince.’

Jean did not reply. He now knew that he would not escape Palfy and his grand schemes as easily as he had thought. He was a devil incarnate, and for the moment also a saviour without whom he, Jean, might well have drowned. He nevertheless promised himself to be more circumspect this time, and not end up having to pay with his body for Palfy’s squalid enterprises.

The concierge gave them the required information. Yes, the prince was living at the Carlton, as he did every year at this time. He was one of their longest-standing customers. The Côte d’Azur air calmed his asthma. Well, usually … although this year he had not left his room for two weeks, and a doctor, plus nurse, was in permanent attendance. His was telephone was never answered, apart from once a day, in the evening, always at the same time, when it took a call from London. A black secretary, an Egyptian, took care of all the practical details.

Jean immediately had a note sent to Salah, whom he met at the bar an hour later, before dinner. Salah had not changed, apart from a few grey hairs at his temples and early wrinkles that betokened a face of deep creases in old age. The last time they had seen each other was the evening they had spent at Via del Babuino.

‘I greatly regretted leaving in such a hurry the next morning,’ Salah said. ‘The prince wanted to go to Venice. The doorman at the Adler was meant to give you an envelope with 500 lira from the prince that I left in your name.’

‘Not only did he not give me the money, but he was also vile to me. Because of him I conceived a deep hatred for doormen, and have been punished for it. For six months I had to work as a doorman myself.’

He told Salah the story of his return from Italy, the year he had spent portering at La Vigie, his winter in London.

‘Yes, I knew you were there. The prince was not well. He couldn’t cope with the fog and cold. Afterwards he was in remission, but at the moment we are going through a difficult period: acute shortness of breath and neurasthenia. Madame is to come in the next few days, although every evening he does his best to reassure her …’

Salah stopped talking. Palfy was standing at Jean’s side in such a way that it was impossible not to introduce him. Salah’s expression changed barely perceptibly, as if he felt a secret aversion for this figure deliberately imposing himself on them, this man in blue blazer and white flannel trousers with a cravate tucked into his open shirt and an ironic smirk on his lips. In common with other former servants, Salah had learnt to judge at a glance those who belonged to the owning classes. Rich or broke, Palfy was one of them.