Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Jean showed the letter to Salah when he came to the agency later that day. He read it, handed it back and said, ‘It confirms everything the prince has predicted. In any case, we are leaving for Lebanon tomorrow. Madame is arriving this evening.’

Geneviève in Cannes! Jean felt his legs turn to jelly. At a distance Geneviève was an abstraction, a practically imaginary person who spoke into telephones and only appeared trailing a shimmering, mocking light in her wake. Close to, she would really exist again, and despite holding out no hope that temptation would spark off its simultaneous awkwardness and pleasure between them, he had had a febrile fear of it, ever since Palfy’s whispered warning.

‘I won’t manage to see the prince, after all,’ Jean said.

‘You’ll see him this very evening. That’s why I came to the agency. I’ll take you to him.’

At the Carlton Jean looked anxiously for Palfy, but the Austro-Daimler was missing from its usual parking space. They went up to the fourth floor, and Salah asked Jean to wait in a small anteroom. Five minutes later he reappeared, standing back from a door that opened into a bedroom with half-drawn curtains that let in the ochre light of late afternoon. An indefinable scent permeated the room. Was it medicine, or some subtle, oriental perfume? He could not tell. Sitting at a small desk by the window, the prince closed a folder. The transparent and waxy skin of his face was attached to a death mask in which there lived, velvety and shining, two heavily lashed eyes which seemed enormous beneath the broad, low projection of his brow, crowned with grey hair full of blue glints. All Jean could see of the rest of him was a torso enveloped in a garnet-coloured silk jacket and a neck delicately protected by a white scarf knotted like a hunting tie.

‘So here is Jean, my friend Jean from the hill at Grangeville, from Rome and London and Cannes … a boy who has grown up greatly, seen many things, and works valiantly.’

He held out a cool, thin hand that felt weary and that Jean merely brushed for fear of breaking it.

‘I have wanted to see you for a long time, Monseigneur, but Salah told me you have been too tired. I’m happy you’re feeling better.’

‘I’m not better, but we must leave. War will be declared within a month. I do not get involved in such quarrels. But you? It worries me. You will be sucked into this great machine. You will have to survive, Jean. It’s too ridiculous to die at twenty. For nothing, so that the world of tomorrow can be worse still than that of today. I cannot take you with me, you would be a deserter, but I want to do something for you. Here is a sealed white envelope. You are to open it only in case of extreme need. Inside it there is a second envelope, with a name and address. You can at any time present yourself to the addressee and give him the second, sealed envelope. If, at the end of the war, you have not needed it, destroy it in its entirety, without ever seeking to know to whom I was directing you. I have been glad to see you, Jean. There is a good chance that it may be for the last time. You cannot imagine how cruel it is to say farewell to objects and people and to repeat to yourself: this is the last time. There are so many pictures of which one would like to preserve a memory … But I am very calm and I am ready. The war will seem long to a man who is weary, very weary.’

‘Monseigneur …’

‘Goodbye, Jean.’

He extended his hand, which Jean pressed gently, trying to convey his emotion. Salah made a sign, beckoning him to the door. The prince was already opening his folder again.

In the Carlton’s lobby Salah took hold of Jean’s arm.

‘Come over here. I have something to say to you.’

They sat on a sofa next to a window, through which cars could be seen stopping and guests coming and going. The luxury hotel resembled an anthill, animated by unceasing movement: the ants arrived with their suitcases and left again with their hands free, while doormen channelled this ebb and flow of motion, running to the cars, opening doors. Dusk was falling red upon the sea. In the middle of the bay a cruise ship was switching on its deck lights.

‘Never speak about that envelope,’ Salah said. ‘I say that in deadly earnest. It’s your secret, your talisman. Even your best friend must know nothing about it.’

Jean realised that ‘best friend’ meant Palfy, the very person whom he feared might materialise at any moment and swoop down on them.

‘We don’t know if Monseigneur can survive the voyage. I hope he can. Madame’s arrival will help him, but it will be a great shock for her. He has hidden his state of health from her.’

‘Does he love her?’

‘Immensely.’

Jean felt profoundly uncomfortable. In his appetite for life, and in the muddle of his feelings, he had, in his imagination, betrayed the prince, a singular man who had shown him nothing but goodness. Was every life subject to this series of temptations that couldn’t be kept in check, from which only happenstance or some ruthless decision could save you? He felt ashamed and promised himself that he would spell out his resolve to do better, in black and white, that evening in his notebook.

‘Lastly, there is another thing,’ Salah said in a different voice, as if he wanted to inject a more serious note of warning into his words. ‘Yes, one other … I doubt you will understand, but you’ll pass on the message, I’m sure. You are to warn your friend, “Baron” Palfy, that he is involved in a much more dangerous game than a person of his sort should be. If he weren’t your friend, he would already have found himself in serious trouble. Some well-informed people have granted him a reprieve. But it is only a reprieve.’

Salah saw that his words had disturbed Jean, and he placed his hand on his arm to reassure him.

‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you. Now let us talk about something else. When this war is over and Monseigneur and I come back to Europe — or perhaps I alone — I should like to see you. Paris and London are both enormous. We could pass each other a hundred times without seeing each other.’

Jean thought hard. The only lasting affections that he could count on were those of the abbé Le Couec and Antoinette. Albert would not survive a war that had insulted his only article of faith: peace at any price.

‘I think you could always write to Antoinette du Courseau, Geneviève’s sister. She will know where I am.’

Salah wrote the address in a notebook.

‘Do not let us lose sight of each other, my dear Jean. How the time here has flown past! I’ve hardly seen you. We haven’t talked about anything. I would have liked to share my admiration for a marvellous poet with you … You must have heard of him, and you must not make fun of me because I am completely self-taught. I have had to go a long way on my own down a path along which you were guided at a very young age.’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘Paul-Jean Toulet.’

‘I’ve never read him.’

Salah raised his arms.

‘You fortunate man! You have a delightful writer to discover. I envy you. Tomorrow I’ll send a copy of his Counter-rhymes to you at the agency. I’ll leave you the joy of hunting through bookshops for the rest: The Stripling Girl, The Misses La Mortagne, Monsieur du Paur, Public Figure. Reading him, you will think of me, and above the fray we shall maintain a Touletian friendship.’

A bellhop appeared in front of Salah.

‘Monsieur … The prince is asking for you. Urgently.’

Jean walked out of the hotel. Night was falling. He did not know where to go in this elegant and handsome town that was so cold in the evening, without secrets and so aloof that to encounter it in the darkness was to feel immediately uneasy. His solitary evenings usually ended in a small restaurant at the port where Palfy sometimes joined him, but mostly he returned to his hotel room to read. He had started on a reading list of epic proportions: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , Roger Martin du Gard’s The Thibaults , Jules Romains’ Men of Goodwill. Many of his nights were now spent with his nose in a book, and whether excited or disappointed, he felt that his life was gaining a new dimension as his curiosity was awakened and he measured the narrowness of his own experiences against other destinies of so many different stamps. At twenty, he felt he had seen nothing. His work at La Vigie , his six months in London, his job at the agency were dead ends. He would have given anything to go to Lebanon with the prince, and then maybe to Egypt. At least war — if there was going to be war — would make some space and movement. For a short time that evening he wished it would come, in the form in which it is often imagined by naïve eyes: a masculine adventure that disrupts the monotony of a cowardly and gloomy world in which boys of his age encountered only brick walls to bang their heads against.