Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

After dinner, under the envious gaze of the colonel and a major, they went upstairs to Antoinette’s room. Jean made to kiss her. She pushed him gently away.

‘No, my darling. Just on the cheek, please.’

‘Is there someone in your life?’

‘Absolutely nobody. I’m twenty-five and an old maid, I promise you, for the rest of my life.’

‘So?’

‘Sit down, dearest Jean. Do I always tell you the truth?’

He lowered his gaze. This time there was no escape. His heart was racing, and he turned so pale that Antoinette hesitated.

‘I could still say nothing.’

Jean breathed deeply. He needed his strength and courage to start out on this new stage of his existence, in which he would know whose son he was.

‘Go on,’ he said, closing his eyes.

She stroked the shaved nape of his neck, as if she were stroking a large, sad cat.

‘I love you,’ she murmured.

Her hand was soft, the light, gentle brush of a mother putting her child to bed. He would have liked to sink into sleep, his face buried in Antoinette’s thighs, lulled by her touch and smell.

‘Have you ever had any idea?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Not the slightest?’

‘Maybe.’

‘In that case, you’re right.’

‘You mean I am Geneviève’s son?’

He opened his eyes and saw her nodding, a serious smile on her unmade-up lips.

‘And of whom?’

Antoinette shrugged.

‘She probably doesn’t know herself. A doctor at the clinic, or another patient, one evening when she was bored. It was Maman who gathered you up and put you on Albert and Jeanne’s doorstep. I don’t know any more than that.’

Now he understood: everything was becoming clear. He would have liked to make love with Antoinette one last time, to roll on the bed, stroke her breasts and stomach. He put his arms around her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t tempt me. It’s become impossible since I found out, yet the only reasons I can find to refuse you are awfully bourgeois. I’m scared. There you are: as if it was an ancient curse. Before, I didn’t know. Let me go.’

She pulled away and kissed him on both cheeks.

‘Don’t be scared,’ she said, laughing, with tears welling up, ‘don’t be scared, I shan’t ask you to call me Aunt Antoinette. Goodnight, darling, go back to your barn. I need to sleep. I have a train to catch at five o’clock tomorrow morning.’

*

As he was making his way back to the depot on foot, the black Citroën belonging to the colonel stopped level with him. Lowering his window, this very superior officer invited him to get in.

‘It’s dark and cold. A colonel is father to his regiment.’

‘I could definitely do with a father,’ Jean said.

‘I understand: it’s not a bad figure of speech. You mustn’t let the news get the better of you …’

‘What news?’

‘The Soviets have invaded Poland in their turn. Tomorrow we will know officially. The information has been censored until we know exactly what to make of it. Friends or foes? We’ll soon find out. Anti-communist propaganda is already rearing its ugly head. Who can predict the future, especially what happens next? No one. Appearances suggest that the two nations, German and Soviet, have officially partitioned Poland between them, but just imagine the moment when the two armies, Nazi and Communist, find themselves face to face. The guns will start firing by themselves. Then we shall intervene, and cut through Germany like a knife through butter …’

‘I thought Germany had no butter, but plenty of cannons.’

The colonel laughed good-humouredly.

‘You’ve got a quick wit, like your friend Palfy.’

Then, sauvely: ‘You were with a very pretty young woman this evening.’

‘She’s my aunt.’

‘Hell! If I’d had aunts like that, my life would have been a lot less gloomy. And how long is she staying?’

‘She’s leaving tomorrow morning at five o’clock.’

The colonel, visibly chagrined, was silent. Five hundred metres before the depot he asked his driver to stop.

‘You’ll understand that for discipline generally it would be disastrous for the colonel to be seen giving a recruit a lift back to camp. Goodnight, my friend.’

Jean walked on, immediately forgetting the colonel, overcome again by the whirlwind of thoughts that assailed him. Poland occupied an infinitesimally small part of them. In the barn he woke Palfy, who had been asleep on his straw mattress.

‘The Russians have gone into Poland,’ he told him.

‘Mmm, that is bad news! I fear we’ll soon be overtaken by events.’

‘That’s not all …’

He reported what Antoinette had told him.

‘Marvellous!’ Palfy said. ‘We shall be invincible, with your uncle Michel in a pigeon-fanciers’ unit and Gontran Longuet as a brilliant corporal in the Train des Équipages, Théo guarding our lines of communication, the abbé Le Couec and your father being watched by the gendarmes, and the two of us at the bottom of our Gamelin holes. Long live the French army!’

‘Ye gods! Can’y you just shut up at this time of night? Demob!’ Boucharon grumbled.

‘Go back to sleep, old thing. Tomorrow France will have need of men like you.’

Boucharon turned over on his straw mattress and immediately started snoring.

‘So,’ Jean said in a low voice, ‘you don’t give a damn that I’m Geneviève’s son.’

‘Absolutely! But remember one thing: I stopped you on the edge of the precipice. One step further and you would have been sleeping with your Ma-a-man … Greek tragedy in all its horror!’

It was true: without Palfy’s intuition, irreparable damage might have been done.

‘Get undressed and go to sleep. I’ll bet you need it. Would you like me to tuck you in?’

‘No thanks,’ Jean said.

He took a long time to fall asleep. Images swarmed in his head: Antoinette’s pale body, lost for ever, Chantal refusing to see Gontran Longuet, Geneviève leaving for Lebanon, and tomorrow the war that would affirm the manhood he had at last attained. He had got there empty-handed, disowned by Albert, alone and with a heart of lead, his only talismans the prince’s white envelope, the volume of Counter-rhymes given to him by Salah, and his notebook as a witness to his past. What, or whom, was he going to believe in?

Next morning the officer in charge of the mail brought him a letter, to which he knew that from now on he would not dare to reply.

Dear godson, I send you my best warm wishes and a muffler. I hope it isn’t dangerous there, where you are. Don’t catch cold. Uncle Antoine sends you a thousand affectionate thoughts. He says you are his only friend. He kisses you, and I shake your hand.

Toinette

That is not an ending, the reader will say, irritated not to know what is in the sealed envelope given to Jean by the prince, or what role Yann and Monsieur Carnac have yet to play, or how Palfy’s war will turn out. Jean Arnaud’s life is full of promise, and it has hardly begun. He was a foundling boy. We shall tell in another book how he becomes a man.

1 The allied Army of the Orient, based in northern Greece in the last year of the First World War.

2. Royalist insurgents from western France during the French Revolution.

3 ‘Mirobolant’.

4 Route Nationale 7, the main road between Paris and the Italian border.

5 ‘Mirelingues’ means ‘of a thousand tongues’ and refers to Lyon’s status as a commercial centre, especially in the Middle Ages. ‘Mirelingue-la-brumeuse ’ = ‘foggy town of a thousand tongues’

6 A nationalist and monarchist daily newspaper.

7 In France’s general election of 1919 several new deputies were war veterans, and the Chamber of Deputies was nicknamed the Chambre Bleu Horizon in an allusion to the blue-grey colour of French uniforms.