The Foundling Boy

by Michel D

  ‘Is that all? Well, that’s not too bad. Those are not really sins, more weaknesses that a boy like you ought to be able to put right with no trouble. Two Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. You can go.’

  Jean left the confessional, hands clasped together and head bent, and walked to the altar where he kneeled and prayed, his heart heavy with his remorse at having deceived a man as good and generous as the abbé Le Couec.

  At La Sauveté Antoinette was waiting in Jeanne’s kitchen, where Jeanne was ironing in front of the range on which she was keeping the iron hot. As soon as he walked in, his gaze met Antoinette’s, and he knew that she was waiting to make sure he hadn’t weakened. He held her look and grinned.

  ‘So did you make a good confession, little one?’

  ‘Very good, Maman. The abbé Le Couec told me my sins aren’t really sins.’

  Antoinette’s eyes shone with pleasure. She kissed Jeanne on the cheek, shoved Jean playfully, and skipped back to La Sauveté. A few days later, when they were out for a walk together, she showed him her breasts, which had already grown into two charming, nicely firm little domes. Jean was filled with happiness, and his remorse at having deceived the good abbé steadily faded. He was beginning to lose his trust in the absoluteness of a religion that was unable to penetrate the secrets of people’s souls. You could escape from God’s omnipresence, and trick his ministers, without the earth opening up beneath your feet. The idea was not yet clear in his mind, but a glimmer flickered on the horizon: if a person watched where they were going, they ought to reach a world less full of threats and menace. Wasn’t Albert an unbeliever? And Jean could not imagine that a better person than his father existed.

  However strong Antoinette’s hold on him was, she could not remove Chantal de Malemort from his thoughts, where she continued to reign discreetly as a figure of pale and dark beauty, pink-lipped, slender and modest. On New Year’s Day, Madame du Courseau drove the children to a party at the Malemorts’. That afternoon, during a game of hide and seek, Jean found himself alone with Chantal in the trophy room on the château’s ground floor. Dozens of stuffed birds crowded the shelves, and the whole of one wall was covered in the antlers of stags hunted in the forest of Arques by three generations of Malemorts. The room was icily cold and smelt of dust, a dead, faded smell that caught in Jean’s throat. Chantal pulled back a brocaded curtain that hid a recessed door.

  ‘Hide in there!’

  ‘What about you?’ he blurted out, so close to the object of his admiration that he was unable to stay calm.

  ‘I’m coming with you, of course!’

  The heavy curtain fell back over them and they stood still for a moment, side by side, not touching, their backs against the door. Shouts rang out in the corridor. Michel was looking for them. He entered the room and called out, ‘Come out, I saw you!’

  Chantal made a slight movement, and Jean put his hand on her arm. They held their breath, shoulder to shoulder. Michel marched around the room, looking under the table, opening cupboards.

  ‘I’ll give you three seconds to come out!’ he shouted.

  Jean held Chantal’s arm more tightly and she didn’t move. They heard the door close again, and the sound of a stampede in the corridor.

  ‘He’s gone!’ she said.

  ‘It’s a trick. He’s going to come back as quietly as he can.’

  Two minutes later the door creaked, and Michel burst into the room.

  ‘Hey! I saw you.’

  Terrified, Chantal hid her face in the hollow of Jean’s shoulder. He felt pure happiness. For years afterwards he remembered that impulse she had had to claim his protection, and the firmness with which he had kept her close to him, wrapping his arm around her, with his nose in her fresh-smelling hair. Chantal de Malemort never belonged to him more than she did at that moment, as a child-woman.

  When Michel finally gave up his search and left the room, Chantal detached herself from Jean, pushed back the curtain, and pulled him by the hand. They ran to the hall, where the Marquis de Malemort was pulling off his mud-plastered boots and drenched oilskin. He had just been out to take oats and straw to his horse and gave off a strong smell of stables. Jean admired this handsome and solid man, who owned a château and was favoured with a title that belonged in the kind of fairy tales in which kings and princes have daughters more beautiful than the dawn’s meeting with the night. That this character was real did not intimidate him, quite the contrary. He liked his strong, earthy presence, and the way he swore with the same manners as Madame de Malemort and the same gentleness as Chantal. A bond united this family – the château, the name – a bond whose subterranean ramifications Jean had only just begun to perceive, through snatches of conversations whose meaning he did not always understand, but which seemed to exclude him. In short, Chantal belonged to a caste that put her beyond his dreams, in a virtually magical firmament in which she glided on the tips of her feet without touching the earth at all. Left to himself, Jean might eventually have doubted the superior existence of Chantal de Malemort, but he had Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, née Mangepain, to influence his thoughts, a woman sugary to the point of crystallisation in her decorum, hungry to add ever more titles to her conversation and gather like nectar, from one country house to the next, the crumbs of a decaying society of which she would have adored to be a part, even if it meant being swallowed up along with it. Her admiration – stripping her character of every natural quality – helped to sustain the existence of a tradition that had been more overwhelmed by several years of recession than it had been in a hundred and fifty years of revolutions.

  However kind the Malemorts were to him, Jean never saw them without a feeling of guilt, as though his place was not among them. He was the son of Albert and Jeanne, caretakers of La Sauveté. If he ever forgot it for an instant, Michel made it his business to remind him with a wounding word. Michel’s unpleasantness hurt him because, even though he did not love Michel – how could he? – he genuinely admired him for his talents. He would have given anything to sing like him at mass, or create the crib figures he made with his own hands, or paint the colourful landscapes that had already been shown in a gallery at Dieppe, and then at Rouen. What did he, Jean Arnaud, possess that he could shine with, in the eyes of the Malemorts? Nothing, apart from his strength, his physical agility, and some secrets passed on to him by Monsieur Cliquet and Captain Duclou, incommunicable secrets that Chantal would never need to use: the history of locomotives through the ages, and how to predict the weather.

  I sense that the reader is eager, as I am, to reach the point where Jean Arnaud becomes a man. But patience! None of us turns into an adult overnight, and nothing would be properly clear (or properly fictional) if I failed to illustrate the stages of our hero’s childhood in some carefully chosen anecdotes. This is, after all, the period when Jean is to learn what life is, or, more specifically, when he is to experience a range of feelings, aversions and passions which will imprint themselves deeply on him and to which he will only discover the key very much later, around the age of thirty, when he begins to see things more clearly. At the time that I am talking about, he is still a small boy, and beyond the walls of La Sauveté the wide world that awaits him, with all its cheating and its pleasures, is a long way off. So far away that you might as well say it doesn’t exist. Jean had an idea of it, however, thanks to an encounter that I want to record and to which I implore the reader to pay attention. It happened under the premiership of Camille Chautemps, which is entirely irrelevant, I hasten to add, and which lasted for nine days, a record equalled in the Third Republic only by Alexandre Ribot and beaten by Édouard Herriot. Returning from an errand in Dieppe, Jean was pedalling back up the hill to Grangeville in a fine drizzle that was working its way through the cape he had spread across his handlebars. Despite his sou’wester, rain was also dripping down his neck, and his soaked feet were squelching on the pedals in shoes that were too big for him. Coming round a bend, he saw a car that had stopped on the verge.
It was a car that impressed as much by its size – it looked as large as a truck – as by its yellow coachwork, black mudguards and white wheels. A chauffeur in a light blue tunic and peaked cap was crouching next to the offside rear wheel, whose tyre was flat, and trying to remove the wheel. He must have been lacking an essential tool, because, seeing Jean, he hailed him. Jean slowed and stopped and stood open-mouthed: the chauffeur was black. His face, wet with rain, shone under his cap, and when he opened his mouth Jean was struck by the size and yellowish colour of his teeth.

  ‘Is there a mechanic near here?’ the chauffeur asked.

  ‘Yes, at the bottom of the hill.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Maybe a kilometre.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to go and get him for me, would you?’

  ‘It’s hard to ride back up the hill. I’ve already done it once.’

  ‘Will you lend me your bicycle?’

  ‘It’s too small for you.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  The chauffeur took off his cap and tapped on the rear window, which opened with a squeaking sound. A face appeared, pale and with grey semi-circles under the eyes. The neck disappeared into a tightly tied blue silk scarf. It was impossible to say whether it was a young man ravaged by a hidden illness that gave his cheeks and forehead a parchment-like translucency, or a much older man whom death would soon blow apart, splitting an envelope stretched to breaking point over a fragile skeleton.

  ‘Monseigneur,’ the chauffeur said, ‘this boy is lending me his bicycle to go and fetch a mechanic. There’s one at the bottom of the hill, he says.’

  ‘Hurry then! We have to pick Madame up again at five o’clock.’

  The man’s voice matched his physique, thin and fragile. Jean was dazzled: he had heard the chauffeur call his passenger with the blue scarf ‘Monseigneur’. This passenger now turned and looked at him sympathetically and added, ‘You’re not going to stand out there in the rain. Come and sit by me.’

  The chauffeur opened the door and Jean shook out his rubber cape and climbed into the passenger compartment, where the man pointed to a folding seat.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked immediately.

  ‘Jean Arnaud.’

  ‘And do you live near here?’

  ‘At Grangeville.’

  ‘It looks as if it rains rather a lot here.’

  ‘Oh, it depends! There are fine days too.’

  Jean’s eyes began to get used to the half-darkness inside the car, whose luxury seemed fabulous to him. The seats were of glossy black leather, the carpet of animal fur, and another pelt covered the knees of the traveller, who was bundled up in a black overcoat with an otter-skin collar. A tortoiseshell telephone connected him to the chauffeur, who was separated from his passenger by a glass panel. Beside the folding seat there was a drawer of some rich hardwood, filled with crystal decanters and silver goblets.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Everything … everything, Monseigneur.’

  ‘I see that you’re well brought up. This is a great strength in life. What do your parents do?’

  ‘My parents are the caretakers at La Sauveté. My father’s a gardener. He lost a leg in the war. He doesn’t want me to be a soldier.’

  ‘He’s right.’

  ‘What kind of car is this?’

  ‘Hispano-Suiza. Have you ever seen one like it?’

  ‘Never. It’s beautiful. It must cost a lot of money.’

  ‘I don’t know. They bought it for me. I’m a very lazy man. I don’t buy anything myself.’

  ‘Then people must steal from you.’

  ‘Perhaps, but never mind. That’s the price of my peace of mind.’

  The man coughed into his closed fist. He peeled off one of his tan kid gloves to take a phial out of a small box next to him, from which he dripped a few drops onto a handkerchief. A strong medicinal smell filled the car.

  ‘Are you ill, Monseigneur?’

  He nodded his head, put the handkerchief over his nose and breathed in deeply before answering.

  ‘I have asthma.’

  ‘Can’t the doctor cure you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s very sad!’

  ‘You are a very kind boy.’

  Jean looked at him intensely, and the man smiled back.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Jean said.

  ‘Yes, but I cannot promise I’ll answer it.’

  ‘How do you become a monseigneur?’

  ‘It’s a very old story. I didn’t become a “monseigneur”. My father was a prince. And my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. You would have to go a long way back into history to find the first of my ancestors who became a prince, in the year 318 of the Hijra, which is to say in AD 940, which you will understand better, I dare say, being a little Christian. At that time there reigned at Bab al Saud an extremely powerful king, named Salah el Mahdi. He was good, but arrogant, and had a serious fault, which was never to know when people were lying to him. When I say “serious fault”, it was almost an illness with him, he made so many mistakes about other men. Haroun, his vizir, who looked after the affairs of the kingdom in the company of a dozen or so emirs who had sworn loyalty to him, used his position to accumulate an immense fortune by extorting money from country people and merchants alike and by using the royal fleet for pirate raids across the Mediterranean, as far as the coast of France. The king suspected nothing. He believed that his kingdom’s finances were prospering, because the vizir very skilfully denied him no luxury. When the vizir offered him a sumptuous present he did not suspect that it was the hundredth fraction of the pirates’ booty, of which the wretched band in power kept the other ninety-nine hundredths. His harem was populated with beautiful, pale, almost diaphanous creatures captured from Christian ships, whom Haroun assured him were gifts from foreign kings dazzled by his reputation, when they were really poor Greek girls snatched from their families or passionate light-skinned Sicilians kidnapped by the crews of pirate feluccas. Haroun and his henchmen were so greedy that after several years had passed they began to believe that what they were giving the king was still too much, that the hundredth of the spoils that they were forgoing to keep him happy would do just as well in their own chests. So they arrested Salah el Mahdi and would certainly have cut his head off if a prophecy known to everyone had not promised that decapitated kings would turn into vampires when it got dark and return to suck their executioners’ blood. Instead they shut him up in a fortress where he was to be guarded by a company of warriors, the fiercest in the kingdom, incorruptible mountain fighters commanded by an officer who knew only his duty. The poor king understood nothing of what had happened to him. Shut up in a narrow cell where he hardly had room to lie down, he was only allowed to walk for two hours each night, chained to his gaolers. A hole in the wall allowed him to glimpse a tiny square of sky and a mountain peak, which he saw covered in snow three times before the vizir, deciding that it was another unnecessary expense to keep under such heavy guard a deposed king who was too lazy to escape, dismissed the warriors and ordered their commanding officer to escort him to his tribe. That officer, Abderrahman al Saadi, which means the Avenger of the Just, was my ancestor. He knew only his orders and that, as he had been told, the king was responsible for the country’s great misery. He treated him like a slave and made him clean his weapons, forcing him to carry out tasks that normally were only done by women. The king humbly accepted his lot. The years of captivity had matured his spirit and he recognised his error – a capital error for a sovereign – in having surrounded himself with double-dealers, toadies and grasping officials. He never complained, suffering his ill-treatment with resignation. Then one day it happened that Abderrahman al Saadi discovered that his prisoner, even though he was famished himself, was sharing his miserable rations with a hunting dog that had been wounded during a chase and could not compete with the other dogs for its supper. He was astonished that such a vile being, whose cruelty
and rapacity had been so vividly described to him, could have any such impulse. He had him brought to his tent, and the two men talked all night. Abderrahman al Saadi understood the injustice of which he had been made the instrument. He prostrated himself before Allah and swore to deserve his name of Avenger of the Just, and then went to the king to beg his pardon for having so insulted him. Within a few weeks Abderrahman had raised an army of fighters, every man among them as fierce and as courageous as could be. This small army represented less than a tenth of the vizir’s army, but on its side it had faith and the desire to avenge a king too easily abused. Instead of confronting the regular army head on, Abderrahman decided to act by stealth. He invited Haroun to a great celebration at the gates of the capital. His best horsemen were to compete against each other at a game of skill that would later be called polo. Flattered and pleased to be entertained without it costing him a penny, the vizir accepted, and a great camp was set up in a field. Abderrahman insisted that Haroun come with his personal guards, who would be massed around the main stand. These were all black warriors of two metres in height, chosen for their colossal strength and skill with a spear. On the appointed day Haroun arrived at the celebration and watched the game and then the races until nightfall, when Abderrahman announced an archery competition. Mounted on galloping horses and led by a masked rider, the competitors were to fire their hundred arrows at a target in the middle of the hippodrome, held by an impassive warrior. Filled with enthusiasm for their skill, the vizir asked for the crack bowmen to be introduced to him. Led by the masked rider, the archers formed up in a line in front of the vizir’s stand.

  ‘“Who are you?” Haroun asked.

  ‘“Do you truly want to know?”