The Foundling Boy

by Michel D

  The sergeant judged that this strange recruit was in urgent need of basic discipline and the full rigour of the regulations that constitute the strength of all armies. He sentenced both men to a week’s confinement. Across open fields – they would be given a key when they had earned the colonel’s trust, as the orderly subtly put it – they were led to a barn where several men, all completely drunk, were snoring in the straw. Palfy changed into his silk pyjamas, quite unbothered by the strong smell of rats.

  ‘You see,’ he said to Jean, who was still angry at their reception, ‘we are about to learn the hard way. They are going to temper us in the steel from which victories are forged. Vive la France!’

  Their neighbour, a hirsute ginger-haired man bristling with stalks of straw, sat up.

  ‘Vive la France? Shut your gob. Demob is all we give a shit about!’

  And lay down again. For the record, let us note that this rebel’s name was Boucharon, that, slowed down by his flat feet which prevented him from running, he was, in June 1940, taken prisoner by the enemy and sent to Silesia, where he had to wait another five years to be demobilised. Poor Boucharon, a victim of society, the state and himself. There were hundreds, thousands of Boucharons whose fates were sealed that night of 31 August. The following day, emerging from the aftereffects of their overindulgence in red wine, these warriors took a moderate interest in the news of the day: the Germans were invading Poland. A captain explained to them that the Polish cavalry were accomplishing marvels and that the Nazis’ armoured divisions were staring death in the face. With their lances the Poles were aiming at the firing slits and putting out the eyes of the German tank crews.

  The whole troop having been confined to barracks, Palfy and Jean hardly minded their week’s punishment. As the depot lacked new kit, the men were issued with blue-grey uniforms from the last war. An orderly appeared with clippers. In an excess of enthusiasm that had more than a whiff of insolence to it – the high command did not require such zeal – the friends had their heads shaved. They had to ask for new forage caps which did not slip down to their ears. Throughout the first week the Austro-Daimler remained parked outside the gate where they had left it. The colonel summoned Palfy.

  ‘Private Palfy,’ he said nervously, ‘I have decided to speak to you myself. You have arrived at this training depot in a car that demands financial resources well beyond the means of a private soldier, second-class. At such a moment as this, that represents something of a scandal. It must cease. Remove that Austro-Daimler, which offends the patriotic gaze of all of us, and let us see it no more. On another matter, having received a report from the officer in charge of mail, I must warn you that you do not have the right to receive letters addressed to you as “Private Baron Palfy, second class, Yssingeaux”. The use of titles, be they real or false, is forbidden in military correspondence below the rank of lieutenant. I could have had the duty sergeant inform you of these matters. I preferred to take them up with you myself. I trust that you understand the seriousness of my warning. You may go …’

  Palfy sensed that the colonel had been on the point of saying ‘my dear baron’, but had stopped himself in time. He saluted, replaced his cap and, after a sparkling about-turn, went out. The Austro-Daimler was sold, piece by piece, to Yssingeaux’s three garages. A scrap merchant bought the chassis. Crushed, it would be used to make artillery shells, an excellent way to return the steel to its country of origin. With the rest of the army watching France’s borders, the training of new recruits and reservists continued in the serenity and calm of an imperturbable, determined Auvergne. A warrant officer taught two hundred fighters the unbeatable way to win a battle: as soon as tanks were sighted on the horizon, all they had to do was dig a hole fifty centimetres wide and one and a half metres deep. When the tank reached the infantryman, he crouched down, waited for it to pass over him, then straightened up and shot the tank from behind. This clever tactic was known as the ‘Gamelin hole’ after the general who, from his operational headquarters at Vincennes, was commanding the Allies. Simple, but someone had to come up with it.

  Palfy, with his good humour and sarcastic comments, helped Jean put up with this idiotic life. Their evenings were spent writing enthusiastic letters, hoping that they would be read by the censors. Madeleine was the first to reply to Palfy. Jean received half a page from Albert.

  I have no right to judge you. Freedom is one and indivisible. My faith remains intact and I shall stick by it. I swore to myself that you would never be a soldier. My disappointment is very great. I expect it will finish me off. I’m an old man. Don’t ever turn up at my house in uniform, I shall shut the door in your face.

  Albert

  In mid-September Jean was summoned to the guardhouse. A lady was asking for him. It was Antoinette, in a grey dress and little provincial hat, her features drawn from two nights spent on trains. She started when she saw him with his head shaved, then smiled when he told her he had done it as an act of defiance. A good-natured lieutenant granted him a pass till midnight. Jean accompanied Antoinette to the Hôtel d’Auvergne, where she had booked a room. They had dinner in the low-ceilinged restaurant, not far from where the colonel was eating and watching them out of the corner of his eye, mildly disconcerted at this intake that contained barons and privates, second-class, their heads shaved like billiard balls, who held hands with elegant young women clearly of good family. Jean did not hide his pleasure at seeing Antoinette again. She was a link to a time in his life that it felt good to cling to, to remember what happiness had been. He did not look at her as he once had. Faded already, she was no longer the heady flower of their trysts beneath the cliff and in the barn, the sad lover of his last night at Dieppe before his departure for England. He found her gauche in comparison to Geneviève, and even to those worldly English wives who had slipped into his room at night during his weekends in the country. She lacked Chantal’s freshness. But she was Antoinette, his friend from the beginning, the first girl who had known how to make him happy and make him suffer. She had also braved two nights on a train to see him and bring him socks she had knitted herself, chocolate, books, and money. All pretexts that failed to hide the feelings that she no longer dared show him directly. She also brought him something even better than these presents: news from Grangeville. Chantal had returned to Malemort and taken over the farm from her father, who had been mobilised. Her mother refused to speak to her. In the evenings she rode to Grangeville on her bicycle to meet Antoinette. They spoke a great deal about Jean. Gontran Longuet, a corporal in the Train des Équipages, had turned up for two days’ leave dressed in a comicopera uniform and brandishing a stick. Chantal had refused to meet him. Michel had been enlisted in a signals company in which, along with other pigeon fanciers, he helped train carrier pigeons that, whenever the handle on the field telephone broke, connected the headquarters at Vincennes to General George’s forward command post fifty kilometres away. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, settled into a hotel at Compiègne very close to her son’s unit, had the great joy, thanks to the influence of her brother, deputy and member of the commission on the uses of tobacco in the Assembly, of dining with her son every evening. There was not a soldier in the French army more mollycoddled than he was. Joseph Outen, an officer cadet in a fortress regiment, was standing guard somewhere on the Maginot line, where he filled his spare time with the study of Zen Buddhism. The abbé Le Couec had got himself into serious trouble. Three days after war had been declared, a pious bigot had reported to the gendarmes that in knocking at the door of his rectory she had heard the abbé speaking German to two men who had hidden themselves in a bedroom before the abbé answered her knock. Monsieur Le Couec had been questioned for forty-eight hours by the military police before being released. He insisted that he did not know more than three words of German and had been speaking Breton to his friends. Now, every morning, he had to register at the gendarmerie. (Jean did not interrupt Antoinette, but the memory of Yann and Monsieur Carnac came back to him. What had become
of those two strange figures?? Let us not spoil the suspense by revealing too soon how they will surface once again.) Albert, likewise, had been arrested in Dieppe for insulting a deputy in the street. The deputy in question had voted for war in the Assembly. Having learnt that his attacker was a disabled veteran, highly decorated and mentioned five times in dispatches, the politician decided not to press charges. But Albert was under surveillance by the gendarmes and forbidden to leave Grangeville.

  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.

  Notes

  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 bet
ween 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.

  8 Édouard Herriot served three terms as Prime Minister in the Third Republic and for many years as president of the Chamber of Deputies.

  9 The nickname of a Genoese boy, Giovan Battista Perasso, who started a revolt in 1746 against the Habsburg forces occupying the city. Two hundred years later Italy’s Fascist government named the Opera Nazionale Balilla, a paramilitary youth organisation, after him.

  10 A youth movement aligned with the aims of the Parti Radical, France’s oldest political party.

  11 Leopoldo Fregoli, a famous Italian impersonator and quick-change artist of the early 20th century.

  12 The ‘Norman hole’: a measure of calvados drunk between courses that is intended to refresh the palate and reawaken the appetite.

  13 On the east side of the port.

  14 Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la Langue Française is a four-volume dictionary originally published in Paris in 1863–72.

  15 La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary magazine founded in 1909 that was the precursor of the publishing house, Éditions Gallimard.

  16 Le Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, first awarded by the Académie Goncourt in 1903 after its foundation by Edmond de Goncourt in memory of his brother Jules.

  17 ‘Motherland’.

  18 The logistics and supply corps of the French army, created by Napoleon in 1807.

  19 Service de Garde des Voies de Communication.

  About the Author