Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

He paused and seemed to reflect briefly before offering his next confession.

‘Do you want to know part of my secret?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m enormously amused by human stupidity. It’s a rolling performance, no breaks, no intervals. In a few weeks, a few months, you’ll see it unleashed when war is declared …’

War? Jean heard people around him talking about it and listened with half an ear. In his childhood he had heard them keep bringing up the same stories, and he scarcely believed in them any more. Albert had protested too much to be credible. But the rumble of war talk amplified and began to weigh upon even the most careless and egotistical, closing down people’s enthusiasms and facial expressions and drawing a blood-red line through the future.

Jean’s task was to escort groups of British visitors on holiday in Cannes. He accompanied them to the Îles de Lérins and to the perfumeries of Grasse, to the lavender fields and the fortified villages at Èze and Cagnes. His charges, elderly couples for the most part, pink and pale-skinned, found it very beautiful and marvelled at the slightest thing. They never talked about war, even though there were often old soldiers among them. They had come to soak up the sun and enjoy the still-fresh air of the last of springtime, and were indifferent to the rest of the world’s affairs. They were either reassuring or ridiculous, depending on your point of view, but Jean liked them and, if only for the pleasure of hearing them say, ‘How lovely!’ he did his best to widen the scope of their sightseeing. Remembering the unbounded delight of the old ladies on the boat up the Thames to Hampton Court, he suggested to the owner of the agency that they should hire a small yacht to explore the inlets of the Esterel as far as Saint-Raphaël. The idea met with approval, and he was given the name of a skipper from Saint-Tropez who rented out a motor yacht, the Toinette . The owner himself came to the agency to introduce himself to Jean. At forty-five he still had the figure of a young man, and the odd crease in his suntanned face added the merest hint of weariness to his rough charm. As he kept his skipper’s cap on, his baldness went largely unnoticed: to greet female passengers he simply raised two fingers to the peak of his cap. His accent, nonchalance and affected coolness charmed Jean. They quickly came to terms: the Toinette would anchor at Cannes twice a week to take his tourists out for the day.

‘British?’ he said. ‘They’ll be fine. They know the sea. I wouldn’t be so keen if you’d said some other nationality. Me, I go out whatever the weather. No excuses!’

He was exaggerating. The first two or three times the Toinette stayed at her moorings; the mistral was blowing, and the skipper claimed there was a problem with the engines. Finally they got out to sea, where he told Jean his story. He had racketed across all the oceans of the world before finally coming home to settle at Saint-Tropez with a wife who owned a hotel there, Chez Antoine — it was known all over the region — a proper museum, full of Picassos, Derains, Segonzacs, Braques, Frieszs, Tanguys, Dalís, Ernsts. With a gesture he indicated that the quantity was such, no one knew exactly how many. It would all go to the little girl, Antoinette, ‘Toinette’ for short, who looked like an angel and was the apple of her uncle’s eye, the uncle who lived with them. As the weeks went by, his accounts varied sufficiently for Jean to entertain doubts. But people nodded and assured him that the hotel existed, and its walls were covered with beautiful pictures. Théo, the skipper, was perhaps not a complete liar, except when he was recounting his round-the-world voyages, for clearly he had only ever navigated in coastal waters and always made for port at high speed the moment he glimpsed the slightest hint of fleecy clouds on the horizon. Rashly Jean mentioned to him that his uncle, Captain Duclou, had rounded Cape Horn several times. Théo made a derisively dismissive gesture.

‘Cape Horn! Know it by heart. And I tell you: there’s no love lost between us.’

Jean was enchanted by it all: the politeness of the tourists he accompanied, the Côte d’Azur’s beauty before the July and August crowds, the inconsequential singsong charm of the accents he heard. He forgot his sorrow, and the sharp memory of Chantal’s disappearance, even though he would have liked to have her beside him to share the new, wild beauties of this coast. Unthinkingly, he went on wishing that Geneviève would come. Salah told him that the prince, who was feeling stronger, had dissuaded her from joining him. The former chauffeur frequently came to fetch Jean for lunch. One day brought up the subject of Palfy.

‘I know he is your friend, but I don’t understand him. What is he doing here? One sees him everywhere. One sees him too much. If the scheme he is setting up here is as shady as the one he set up in England, he’ll have problems.’

‘Salah, I don’t know. I like Palfy. He’s a happy rogue. He makes genuinely grand gestures. I shall never be like him, and perhaps I ought to regret that.’

‘No. Don’t regret anything. One needs to be better armed than you are to ward off his wiles.’

Jean closed his eyes in vain, he could not ignore everything. Madeleine moved out of the hotel and up to a studio on the hillside, which she would have liked to decorate with prints and pompoms on the lampshades. Palfy forbade it. He chose the furniture, the curtains, the carpets, the prints. She understood none of it, and acquiesced with a humility learnt from years in men’s company. She was his creature now.

The reader, better informed than the hero of this story, will be surprised that Jean has not made the connection between Théo’s hotel and Antoine du Courseau, especially after the information Antoinette had given him. Antoinette, Toinette , Chez Antoine — Mireille Cece’s as well as its Saint-Tropez counterpart, not to mention the garage at Aix — there were enough clues there to put any detective wise about Antoine’s whereabouts. But Jean had loved that good, generous, absent man. The idea of pursuing him to his hideaway did not even cross his mind. He would have considered it a betrayal of their ancient, secret pact, and of that last night spent together at an empty, echoing La Sauveté. At the beginning of July, nevertheless, the Toinette arrived at Cannes with an extra crew member on board: a slim girl of fifteen with light-coloured eyes and chestnut hair. She spoke with the same appealing singsong accent as her father. To be fifteen in 1939 was still to be a young girl, to lower one’s eyes without shame, not to speak until one was spoken to. She looked after the bar, the picnic on board, the children and the old ladies. When she was there Théo stopped swearing and telling tales of round-the-world voyages.

‘Have you seen many as beautiful as her?’ he asked, over and over again.

Business remained good until the beginning of August, and then there was something in the air that was not yet anxiety, nor simple worry, but more a sort of instinctive, animal-like drawing back. Only the British seemed not to share it. They came in organised groups, got themselves sunburnt and drunk on rosé wine from the Var, were enraptured at the slightest treats offered by the agency — the bus excursions, boat trips, evenings out at the Palm Beach casino — and had a flutter at boules. Jean, who had not had any news from Ernst for a long time, opened a letter one morning in which his friend imparted some disturbing information.

Dear old Hans, I’m writing to you on a Sunday afternoon, during our six hours of weekly rest. There’s a thousand of us, boys my age, in a wonderful camp in the Black Forest, living close to nature while we undergo intensive training. Yes, these are university holidays, and I’m using them to do basic military training. It’s very exciting and we all feel it gives our life a meaning when our country is so threatened by Poland’s constantly aggressive stance. We turn our thoughts towards our German-speaking brothers living beyond our frontier under the insolent tyranny of Colonel Beck. For now it’s just humiliations and skirmishes. Tomorrow there could be a massacre. Poland must know that the Reich will not sit idly by while genocide is committed. Our Führer has warned the Poles. Dantzig is German at heart and in spirit. The present injustice is too blatant for our young hearts to accept it. Do not let any of this disturb you! The new Germany only wishes France well … And even Great Britain. There will be no war in the West. The Munich agreement is signed and sealed, on the honour of two veterans of the last war, who knew the horror of the trenches: Daladier and our Führer. Send me your news. How are your studies going?