The Foundling's War (36 page)

‘You see,’ Nelly said, ‘I’m useful for something. You couldn’t be on your own. It would be unbearable.’

It seemed to Jean that Julius was welcoming him more warmly than usual, which made his earlier reticence all the more expressive. Thanks to his elocution lessons, Julius now speaks practically without
an accent. He has Frenchified himself far more by taste than necessity for the milieu in which he moves. Madeleine, meanwhile, continues to benefit from Blanche de Rocroy’s social skills. She can no longer be confused by those little details that tripped her up a year ago. She is in a period of transition nonetheless, and, conscious of what she still lacks, has lost her early assurance and not yet acquired the
self-confidence
she will be recognised for later. To put it another way, she is going through a timid phase, wholly understandable given the task she faces: to consign to oblivion the weary, pessimistic prostitute who would have foundered without the encounter with Julius. Julius adores her. Does he know where she comes from? Palfy thinks not. As foreigners do, Julius has accepted what he is offered at face value. He brims with that German generosity that finds everything good. When a German sets about being good, it’s enough to make a cat cry. Julius, in the grip of love, has transfigured Madeleine. He never noticed her suburban accent, and her newly refined speech has only just struck his ear. He marvels at her distinction and finds nothing too good for her. He has put in Madeleine’s name the property he bought recently at Montfort-l’Amaury, a ravishing little village which is not yet fashionable but whose fame Madeleine will contribute greatly to after the war. In reality, Julius is a man of simple tastes: all he wants is to live in France, in the country, in a reasonable house within striking distance of Paris so that they can come up to the theatre in the evening or to meet friends. In his eyes the outcome of the war has little to do with these plans. Should Germany win, its union with France will become closer, leading on to a golden age. Should it lose, France will find itself as it was before, immersed once again in easy living. Julius has done enough favours for those around him to hope that after a brief period in purgatory he will be welcomed back with open arms. He loves Paris, its theatres and concerts, French fashion, the outrageous, superficial and amusing conversation at grand dinner parties. And how can one live without going to Maxim’s two or three times a week? The mirrors, the rococo decor, the service from Albert, a head waiter one
might think had come straight out of a play by Édouard Bourdet,
28
those tables where everyone knows everyone else, exchanging kisses and secret phrases, have little by little become a second home to this man overflowing with human warmth. So it’s here that he deals with his increasingly important personal affairs. What else would such a perennial optimist be doing but preparing for life after the war?

In this happy atmosphere, this oasis of luxury and gourmandise, Jean found out what was expected of him, which was simple and required only his discretion, complete discretion. Little by little we shall find out, as he does, exactly what that means, and to be honest it hardly matters: needs must when the devil drives. Each week he has to pay the bill at the clinic, which is predictably exploiting him like a character in a Victor Hugo novel. It is a wretched business, though we can be reassured: Jean will not be forced to sell his teeth and hair, as Cosette’s mother is, to pay for Claude’s keep. Yet again in his short and already colourful life, he is facing temptation. We shan’t claim, hypocritically, that he succumbs to it. He grabs it by the scruff of the neck. Julius is blissful. Madeleine has not understood, or pretends not to understand. She nods, and the sommelier, quick to turn the slightest sign into an order, brings another magnum of champagne. Julius draws attention to the date: 1929. An exceptional year, and a good idea to drink it rapidly, before the army’s technicians get the idea of transforming this sublime liquid into a fuel substitute for their tanks.

‘Talking of the German army,’ Julius adds, immediately regretting his subversive sally, ‘the front has stabilised. All necessary matériel is being delivered to the lines in preparation for the spring offensive …’

Palfy is in a good mood. He does not contradict him. Why should he? The battle grinding on in that icy hell does not concern them. Julius believes himself as safe as he can be, having reconciled politics, the war and his own affairs. Everything is in place … So which was Liane de Pougy’s table? Ah yes, that one opposite. And Boni de Castellane’s? In the room at the end. Julius is not one of those superficial Parisians who don’t know their ‘little history’. He would have liked to live at
the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril and Chocolat. He drops their names the way one might drop illustrious titles of the nobility. Madeleine, who has only known the Moulin Rouge as a dance hall where girls found themselves lonely and impecunious lovers, refrains from joining in the conversation. She has discreetly passed Jean a packet of sweets for Cyrille and two pairs of stockings for Claude. She adds in his ear, ‘If you’re going to open that gallery for Palfy, you should see Louis-Edmond. He has contacts, but he’s going through a bad time at the moment. You have to help him.’

‘Was it Blanche who told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does she still see him?’

‘She more or less has to. He pursues her, rings her constantly, weeps down the phone at her, begs her for money, disappears for ten days and then starts all over again. Do something!’

And she slips him a piece of paper with a telephone number at which La Garenne can be reached, at the apartment of a painter he is looking after.

‘La Garenne’s never looked after a painter in his life. He’s always exploited them.’

‘No, I assure you. Blanche is positive that he’s taking care of this Michel Courtot … or du Courtot admirably …’

‘Michel du Courseau.’

Madeleine is briefly embarrassed. Everything would be all right if she didn’t mangle people’s names. With ordinary people it didn’t matter, or was all to the good, but if it was an aristocratic name an error became a faux pas, and a faux pas made her look silly. It would be less embarrassing if she made Madame Michette’s sort of howlers. Everyone expected them and was unspitefully amused. They had become an essential part of the dinners Marceline was invited to, even if she was unaware that she was singing for her supper. Jean perceives Madeleine’s discomfort.

‘Anyone could mix the two up. I just happen to have known Michel since he was a child.’

‘Is he famous?’

‘No, not yet. One day perhaps … When I say I know him, he’s my uncle … I mean he’s my mother’s brother.’

He explains. Madeleine is delighted. Nothing pleases her more than discovering who is related to whom and adding them to her collection.

‘La Garenne sold me one of Michel du Courseau’s paintings. I haven’t put it up yet. I’m waiting to hear what you think.’

Jean reassures her: Michel has talent, a great talent even, though he is prickly and difficult.

‘You should invite him to dinner,’ Julius says.

‘I thought of it, but La Garenne assures me he doesn’t go out.’

‘What does one do with people who refuse to have dinner! They’re savages,’ Palfy says.

Madeleine does not know the answer. By issuing invitations to dinner, she has cultivated a circle of friends. Without these gatherings she would be merely Julius’s mistress. At least Rudolf von Rocroy is a man who dines.

‘I fear he’s doing penance at this moment,’ Julius observes. ‘I doubt Dr Schacht has summoned him to eat
foie gras
and sip champagne …’

And so Jean learns that Rocroy is involved, and that he has been unwise. The Finance Minister of the Third Reich is not the joking kind, and if he agreed to turn a blind eye to the smuggling of Reichsleiter Reinhard Heydrich, it was strictly on condition that no scandal resulted. Rocroy has made the mistake of drawing attention to himself … General Danke makes his entrance into Maxim’s. He has left his heavy overcoat in the cloakroom and appears squeezed into a uniform designed for officers kept trim by battle. General Danke eats and drinks too much. It is part of his duties. He dazzles and reassures. The prefect whom he has invited today is at Maxim’s for the first time, a special day in his life. By the time dessert is served, he will agree to whatever is asked of him. Danke greets Julius with a discreet
hand gesture; Julius, though in mufti, straightens and nods formally. Jean suppresses a surge of hatred, which is unjustified as Danke has no police powers and it would be stupid to hold him responsible for Claude’s torture. He is, Palfy has assured Jean, an enlightened man and a friend of France. The only question to be asked is why all these great friends of France seem incapable of procuring peace for it.

‘Jean,’ Madeleine says in a low voice, ‘you look uneasy. Do you still dislike the Germans?’

He shrugs.

‘Madeleine, that’s not a proper subject of conversation.’

Michel du Courseau was renting an apartment on the floor below Alberto Senzacatso, the photographer fascinated by Mannerism. After a short spell in prison Alberto had regained his freedom, for which he continued to pay with occasional pieces of information to the vice police. In his studio Michel was working on a four-metre by two-metre canvas of Christ surrounded by children. Alberto – whom he had given up the idea of informing on – provided him with models. The canvas, which was to cost him a year of gruelling work, was destroyed on the eve of the Liberation by Michel himself in the course of an acute attack of mysticism. He has spoken so many times in interviews since then about the painting’s destruction that it is unnecessary to revisit it. Spiteful tongues insist that the devastation was an essential sacrifice to a reputation that Michel wanted to be immaculate. Jean followed the work’s evolution without being able to show the enthusiasm Michel sought from his infrequent visitors, but was nevertheless struck by the anxious tone in which the painter said to him one day, ‘I’m worried that I’m taking too much pleasure in it.’

In his mouth the word ‘pleasure’ sounded so obscene that no one could doubt its meaning, and yet Michel merely intended to indicate how much the slightest distraction harmed his sense of himself as a Christian artist. Jean no longer had any illusions as to the state of mystical constipation in which his youthful uncle lived, but his complex personality, afflicted by some internal curse, and his increasing sanctimoniousness, combined with a talent that was going from strength to strength, made this unusual artist a subject for contemplation by Jean in his gradual understanding of his fellow human beings. At heart he felt that the distinction between Palfy’s
cynicism and Michel’s unctuousness was minimal, and if he preferred the Palfian outlook by a long way, it was only because of its innate sense of humour. Between Michel and Alberto there orbited, like a Cartesian diver, the figure of La Garenne, whose gallery on Place du Tertre, reopened by an Aryan of impeccable credentials, now sold sunsets over beached fishing boats, cows drinking from a pool, unequivocal subjects that everyone could respond to. La Garenne, half tolerated, lived a marginal existence selling Alberto’s pornographic photographs on the sly, extracting small commissions from the distribution of copies executed by his company of painters down on their luck, fencing the odd picture here and there, keeping for himself a few rare works offloaded by real or phoney policemen who pillaged abandoned Jewish-owned apartments, and amassing, by means of loud lamentation, tears and hands clasped in despair, a fortune that he will never be able to enjoy. A multimillionaire at the Liberation, within a week he will find himself imprisoned at Drancy while the FFI empty his hiding places and distribute among themselves the gold, Picassos and
objets d’art
piled up in his garret in Rue de la Gaîté. In short, and even though he scarcely counts as a footnote in such a murky era, natural justice will take its course for La Garenne more harshly than he really deserves, making a scapegoat of him, without pity.

When he first encountered La Garenne at Michel’s studio, Jean wondered what could have brought together two such radically different beings. The truth was that Michel, disoriented by his move to Paris and hardly knowing his way around, had taken up with La Garenne as a guide, knowing nothing of his racketeering. The dealer had summed him up at a glance, put him in touch with Alberto by renting the apartment beneath him, and steered him towards a gallery that guaranteed his new agent a percentage.

‘I’m working for the future!’ Louis-Edmond had told Jean. ‘Your friend is greatly talented. I shall help him, even if I have to ruin myself in the process.’

He was not ruining himself, but at present was making little
profit from Michel, who still had a provincial’s sense of thrift. So either at Alberto’s or Michel’s La Garenne would find a couch and a screen where he could lay his weary body in privacy when his long expeditions around Paris took him far from Rue de la Gaîté.

‘He’s repulsive, I grant you,’ Michel said to Jean, ‘but he has ideas, and Christian charity requires that we must not abandon him at such a time. There is no soul that is completely lost. He sometimes asks me extraordinary questions about salvation and grace. I sense that you’re hostile because you knew him at a time when he was brought low by a woman. This Blanche has been the great curse of his life. Without his mother whom, alas, I didn’t know, a real angel of mercy, of kindness and pity, whose name alone is sublime – Mercedes del Loreto; Loreto where the angels transported the humble abode of the Virgin Mary – without that sublime being he would have sunk into utter wretchedness. Beware women, Jean. There are Blanche de Rocroys everywhere. I don’t need you to tell me that you have a tendency to give yourself up to the pleasures of the senses. You should tread very carefully. A man can only be fulfilled in chastity …’

And are the boys provided by Alberto Senzacatso part of your scheme of chastity? Jean wanted to ask. But he did not. Michel, wrapped in himself, would have been so discombobulated by the question that Jean preferred just to listen to him, with a hypocrisy equal to that of Michel himself. In any case, who cared! There was no doubting his sincerity when he sermonised like this. Despite their past and their childhood when they had hated each other, Jean retained a scrap of affection for the du Courseaus, who had had such a profound influence on him; and remained fascinated too, like an entomologist, by that insect La Garenne and his breathtaking nerve, fooling everyone so completely for a time. Poor Blanche! And she was still trying to help the scoundrel who, not content with humiliating her, was now dragging her name through the mud.

In March Antoinette came to Paris for a few days. At twenty-seven, in the eyes of the world in which she lived, she was already an old maid, only fit to be married to a widower with children who would accept her for her dowry if there was one and would close his eyes to a scandalous past. Antoinette brought butter, two chickens killed the previous day and some pâté made by her mother for Michel. Of the gaiety and carelessness that had once enlivened her face, there was no longer any trace in her insipid features. Dressed in black and wearing the sort of felt hat beloved by ladies of good works, she looked older than her years. Her mother had imposed mourning on her for her Mangepain uncle, suddenly departed after an excessively good meal with the Germans, to whom the former radical socialist and freemason had been a most faithful vassal in an obscure pact of collaboration. Oppressed by an absurd observance that meant nothing to her, Antoinette’s youth had vanished. Jean hardly recognised her, yet their last meeting had only been in 1939, two and a half years earlier, an interval that at their ages should have meant nothing. Perhaps at Yssingeaux, when she had come to tell him that he was Geneviève’s son, he had already noticed the first signs of her vitality fading. That day he had desired her, but everything had become impossible with the sudden shift in what was right and wrong, and they had gone their separate ways, sad and disappointed in each other, frozen by inhibition. Antoinette’s arrival in Paris in March 1942 was a serious shock to him. The restraint, humility and awkwardness of the provincial woman in a capital city that frightened her, despite its state of calm and near torpor, robbed him of the happy images of his childhood, of the discovery of love, the scene at the cliff when she had shown him her pretty, plump bottom and the melancholy, tender last night in a Dieppe hotel before his departure for England. He could not believe that this woman in flat-heeled shoes, cotton stockings, and without make-up had inspired in him the first passion of his life. Close to her, he sought in vain the smell of the beaches where they had caressed each other, the barns where they had kissed and fumbled,
and the dream of their first night together, when they had made love in almost every room at La Sauveté. Life had swiftly worn Antoinette down, leaving its mark on her once irresistible features. She had started to look like her mother, though she would never inherit Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s character. Women’s lives and men’s march to the beat of different drums. Beauty – strictly speaking, Antoinette had never been beautiful but she had radiated health and a love of pleasure – beauty fades too fast and exposes its blemishes, while in men the same blemishes are taken for signs of character. Jean had felt none of time’s ravages. His discovery of its hold over Antoinette in the space of just a few years was sudden and disagreeable.

The news she brought from Grangeville seemed to come from another country. Albert Arnaud, ill-resigned to growing vegetables, was dragging his leg and grumbling more than speaking; his cousin, Monsieur Cliquet, with whom he was still living, was conducting (with such a mysterious air that it was transparent) a secret campaign on the railways, where he had gone back to working as an
interpreter-auxiliary
for the German railway workers; Captain Duclou had built a home-made radio and hidden an aerial in the anemometer in his garden to receive the BBC’s French service broadcasts and pass on their news to the village; the Longuets increasingly believed themselves to have been born de La Sauveté; Monsieur Longuet, having reinvented himself as a civil engineer, had signed a contract with the Todt organisation to build bunkers up and down the coast. Thanks to him, there was not a man left unemployed in the neighbourhood, although work appeared to be far from the chief ambition of his son Gontran, who had just married a Mademoiselle de Beausein (the ‘de’ was as doubtful as it gets) from the Rouen bourgeoisie; she had already had visiting cards printed bearing the name ‘Baronne L. de La Sauveté’; the Marquis de Malemort, released from his oflag with a group of other farmers and outraged by this act of usurpation, had insulted Gontran after Mass; the gendarmes, acting on a complaint from the Longuets, had threatened to send him back to his prison camp but
he had thrown them out with such aristocratic finality that nothing more was heard of the affair; Chantal was working with her father – Jean wouldn’t recognise her: heavier all round, ruddy, foul-mouthed as a trooper, the last of the Malemorts downed her calvados with all the assurance of the marquis; and the abbé Le Couec, more destitute than ever and fed by the measured charity of his farmers, travelled the countryside on foot, dispensing the one asset in which he was rich, a saintly generosity: people said he was a member of the Breton Liberation Party but at the same time hid Allied airmen shot down over France and guided them to a secret organisation that repatriated them to Britain.

Jean wondered whether, apart from what concerned his adoptive father and the dear abbé, these pieces of news still had any meaning for him. That world was no longer his, and never would be again. He had bid it farewell the day he had challenged it and fled to Paris with Chantal de Malemort. He no longer had a refuge there and he was sufficiently wise now not ever to want to see Chantal again. Even Antoinette bored him a little by reminding him of the milieu in which he had lived. He found her drab and lifeless, far from his own preoccupations; he took her to the theatre where she was mystified by Giraudoux, and to the Opéra where she fell asleep during a ballet. They talked about Michel, whom she admired as a man about Paris, without a hint of irony. He became annoyed with her for her awkwardness that tarnished his picture of the past. Yes, he was shedding his baggage or, to put it another way, he was discovering his solitude, the daunting wasteland in which he would have found himself if it had not been for Nelly. He would have liked to talk to Antoinette about the young woman who had given his life so much colour, about Claude who had sunk so deep into the darkness. But it was easier to say nothing, and those withheld confidences separated him from the woman who had been his first love.

He went with her to Gare Saint-Lazare. On the platform neither of them knew what to say. Antoinette put her cardboard suitcase up in
the luggage rack and rested her arms on the open window.

‘I’m happy to have seen you again, looking so well,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Same here.’

‘You won’t forget?’

‘We don’t forget anything.’

She still hesitated.

‘I do! I forgot to tell you I met one of your old friends, Joseph Outen. He’s been released from his stalag. He asked for news of you.’

‘What’s he doing?’

She put a finger to her lips. Jean knew she had not forgotten to tell him about Joseph. She had not dared. German soldiers smelling strongly of leather and coarse cloth passed behind him, looking for their reserved carriage. Antoinette followed them with her eyes.

‘Come closer,’ she said.

He went closer, and she held out her hand. He squeezed it.

‘He’s full of odd qualities,’ she added with unexpected warmth. ‘He’s interested in all sorts of things. He’s learning English at the moment …’

‘He was learning Chinese once too.’

‘Oh, that’s all over … A youthful mistake. English is more useful for what he’s doing now.’

She put on a knowing look. The platform staff were slamming the doors.

‘It looks as if the train will leave on time. Monsieur Cliquet will be happy.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Joseph I’ve seen you. He was worried about you. He’s always saying how talented you are and that you were the best oarsman at Dieppe Rowing Club. He told me to tell you that you should take up yoga, like him. I don’t really understand what all the exercises are about, but apparently it helps concentrate your mind …’

At the last minute she was confessing what she had not dared to admit since she had arrived: that in Joseph Outen she might have
found a last hope. Jean was moved and reproached himself for not having helped her.

‘You should come to Dieppe,’ she said. ‘You get on so well together. He has big plans …’

All his life Joseph would have big plans, which would fail one after another. Now it was Antoinette’s turn to be on the receiving end of his fervour. Her face lit up because she was talking about him. He was probably waiting for her at Dieppe, where they saw each other in secret. Antoinette would only ever have guilty love affairs. The finger on her lips, the knowing look meant that Joseph had got himself involved in clandestine activity, that he was riding a new hobbyhorse. But he was not up to it, and it would beat him the way he had been beaten by his previous enterprises. Poor Antoinette! The widower and his children would be waiting at the end of the line.