The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

‘You’ll wait outside …’

  And more energetically than expected, she let fly a kick that connected with Palfy’s shin and dislodged him. The door shut again.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you you wouldn’t get in?’ chuckled the ghastly old man.

  Through the grille the woman called out that she would call the police if they continued to make a scene in a street of respectable citizens. But Palfy was not to be deterred. He knocked again with the mermaid’s tail. The grille slid half-open.

  ‘What are you wanting now?’ the haughty, shrill voice demanded.

  ‘The correct form is, “What do you want?” but it’s a small detail and we shan’t let ourselves get hung up on grammar. I want to see Monsieur Michette. I have a message for him.’

  ‘Monsieur Michette is doing his duty. He’s gone to war.’

  ‘Allow me to point out to you that the war is over.’

  ‘Madame Michette will be here shortly.’

  The grille slammed shut. It was clear this time that the door would stay closed. The assistant madam had her orders. Monsieur Petitlouis almost burst with pleasure. He spat into a checked handkerchief. Have I mentioned that on this particular day in July 1940 the temperature had risen to 31 degrees in the shade, overwhelming a town far more used to a temperate climate? Jean and Palfy had been running. Their throats were parched. Monsieur Petitlouis offered to take them to a bistro where they served home-distilled pastis, on condition naturally that they bought him a glass.

  ‘My sister will never know!’

  He laughed so hard he almost choked again. Jean looked anxiously at Palfy. The night before had left them with no more than a few francs in their pockets, hardly enough to buy half a baguette and some mortadella. As the reader will have realised, Palfy was not a man to let such a detail bother him. One on each side of the arthritic old devil, they reached a café at the bottom of the street. Back from the parade, the patron, in a black jacket and homburg hat, was raising the shutter. He served them at the counter, philosophising about the morning’s spectacle.

  ‘Well, Monsieur Petitlouis, you really missed something at that parade! You have to hand it to our army and how it’s put itself back together, two weeks after the armistice. The Germans won’t want to brush with them a second time, I tell you. You can see it in our chaps’ faces: they’re raring to go. It’s the government that’s not. A fine bunch of traitors in the pay of Adolf, I tell you … That armistice business was all for show, with a fat lot of cash changing hands to stop us pulling off another Marne like we did in ’14, on the Loire …’

  Monsieur Petitlouis agreed. Traitors were everywhere. Customers were arriving, red in the face and breathless. They listened to the patron, nodding or choosing their words carefully to express mild doubts. The pastis was served in cups, in case a policeman came past and decided to apply the new law on the consumption of spirits. Jean kept an eye on the street. In the distance he caught sight of about a dozen women, led by a matron in a blue skirt, white blouse and red hat, walking up the middle of the street. They fanned themselves with little paper tricolours, and as they passed the café he saw, sashaying in the middle of the group, a black woman with straightened hair, her back hollow and her buttocks stretching the pink satin of her skirt. She reminded Jean of the girls from the Antilles who had brought up Antoinette and Michel du Courseau and simultaneously been their father’s bit on the side. And what an odd coincidence: one of them, Victoire Sanpeur, had come to live at Clermont after her departure from La Sauveté. He decided to tell that part of the story to Monsieur Petitlouis, who was sipping his pastis like a greedy child.

  ‘You really knew Victoire!’ the old hog exclaimed. ‘You were lucky. They say she’s still living with her député. She comes back sometimes to see her old girlfriends. She’s been known not to turn down the odd customer, even now. For fun – know what I mean? Ah yes, that’s a real establishment, a proper family if you’re with the Michettes. Not one of those nasty whorehouses where they chuck the girls in the street when they’re a bit past it. No. They teach them a trade, how to spell and use a knife and fork; then they find them a job somewhere …’

  The women walked past, looking straight ahead and ignoring the customers’ ribald comments. Madame Michette glared at those responsible for the coarsest comments. Two girls giggled. Palfy ordered another round of pastis and made a sign to Jean.

  ‘We’ll be back in a couple of minutes,’ he said to the patron. ‘Look after Monsieur Petitlouis, he’s a friend of ours.’

  *

  This time Madame Michette herself opened the door and asked them, disdainfully, what they wanted. The house was closed. The ladies were having lunch.

  ‘We won’t disturb them. We merely wanted to have a word with Monsieur Michette and deliver a letter to him from a mutual friend.’

  ‘And who might that be?’ she asked, with the suspicion of someone accustomed to the kind of subterfuge her business inspired.

  ‘It’s a matter between Monsieur Michette and ourselves.’

  ‘Monsieur Michette is still serving in the army.’

  ‘In that case we shall come back later.’

  It was a risky move. It depended entirely on the curiosity and high regard in which Madame Michette held herself, after having taken over the reins of the establishment. The two workmen rightly inspired very little confidence, although the older one talked very correctly and the younger one had a handsome, open face. These were tumultuous times. Clothes no longer made the man.

  ‘Come in!’ she said, in a more accommodating tone.

  We shall not linger over a description of a brothel interior at Clermont-Ferrand in 1940. It would be tedious. There is a whole literature full of such images of the good old days, when lonely men could take themselves to a so-called ‘house of ill repute’ and find a family to welcome them, to provide tenderness and a sympathetic ear to their preoccupations large and small. Let us merely say that at the Michettes’ (another fateful name, but the author cannot help that)2 a very strict code of discipline and morals was applied. Monsieur Petitlouis was not exaggerating. Madame Michette was convent-educated and Monsieur Michette had had an exceptionally distinguished war in 1914–18, coming out of it as an infantry sergeant-major. The sum of physical and spiritual human misery that found respite and forgiveness in their establishment was incalculable. One might, without irony, describe the Michettes as belonging to that category of society’s benefactors that provincial life shunned, stifling it in the straitjacket of moralistic disapproval. Lastly – a supreme luxury in a town whose relative enlightenment as the capital of the Auvergne did not stop gossip being rife – the Michettes had made discretion the watchword of their profession. No large number over the door, and obviously no red light. A stranger could walk past the house a dozen times without suspecting anything, unless his gaze should rest for a second upon the little mermaid whose fish’s tail curled to form the knocker and gave its name to the establishment.

  The diocese valued this self-effacement and the punctuality with which its rent was paid. Seminarians were offered concessionary prices and popular opinion had it that senior clerics paid by handing out absolutions. Numerous were the Clermontois who remembered with feeling having lost their virginity there before their marriage. In the arms of Nénette, Verushka or Victoire they had learnt many imaginative alternatives to the missionary position, alternatives that they would later teach their wives. Those violated, humiliated, ashamed and overwhelmed brides, at first taken horribly by surprise at what marriage involved, would later be secretly grateful to the girls of Michette’s. Not for them the harrowing labours of Mesdames de Rênal and Bovary, pursuing experience with clumsy youths. I am being perfectly serious. France’s brothels – the serious ones, in any case – contributed to both the moral welfare and mental stability of her people. They were her universities of sex. Anatomy was taught there and love acted out with far greater talent than was to be found in a marriage arranged by a notary. They were, in fact, where men
passed their exams in licentiousness before setting out on the business of life. Suppressed after the war by a prudish republic, they were so sorely missed by the French that a generation later the state was forced to take measures to introduce the theory and practice of sexual matters into schools. We then witnessed the spectacle of a generation of benighted adolescents receiving the cobbled-together guidance of schoolteachers and demonstrating just how far the civilisation of love had regressed.

  There is no need to remind ourselves that our two heroes had different conceptions of love. Palfy, as a gentleman, kept his preferences to himself, and Jean, thanks to his physique, had not had to go to the same school as everyone else. As a result, coming across such a place for the first time, he found Madame Michette’s establishment gloomy, especially its large sitting room with its walls decorated in a design of pale-skinned mermaids with crimson lips and golden tresses, where Madame received them standing up, not inviting them to sit as she would have done for the humblest customer before the girls processed past him. A scent of cheap face powder hung in the air, along, perhaps, with other odours less pleasing to fastidious nostrils. Tall, solidly large, with the physique of a grenadier, with workman’s hands, and hairs sprouting from her animated chin, Madame Michette banished from their minds any further thought of playing practical jokes.

  ‘Do you have the letter you mentioned?’ she asked Palfy.

  ‘I have it with me, but its sender, Monsieur Salah, was very insistent that we deliver it personally. It’s a shame Monsieur Michette isn’t yet back from the war.’

  Jean patted his back pocket. The famous letter he had been given by the prince, in case he ever found himself in difficulty, was not there. His friend’s latest deceit infuriated him. He would happily have strangled Palfy, who intercepted his glare and gave a forced half-smile, half-grimace. Madame Michette, whose eyes had opened wide at Salah’s name, took the smile as a shared understanding. She was dying to know the letter’s contents.

  ‘I have the same authority as my husband to receive Monsieur Salah’s orders. His friends are our friends.’

  ‘It’s a delicate matter,’ Palfy murmured in a reticent undertone.

  Jean decided that if Palfy showed the letter to Madame Michette, he would grab it and make a run for the nearest exit, but a diversion saved him from such an extreme step. A face framed by red curls appeared in the half-open doorway.

  ‘Madame, the lamb’s done. Shall I pour the sauce over the flageolets?’

  ‘Wait for me, Zizi, I’m coming. Serve the asparagus first and leave the lamb in the oven.’

  Zizi’s head disappeared.

  ‘We shall leave you,’ Palfy said.

  Madame hesitated. Despite her position and her responsibilities, she was still a woman. Suspicious but curious. She would have that letter.

  ‘Come and join us for lunch. We had a gift of a shoulder of lamb, and it’s sitting waiting for us.’

  Jean felt his resistance weaken. Palfy was already accepting, begging Madame Michette to forgive his and his friend’s state of dress.

  ‘We trust you, Madame, but I must ask you not to enquire as to the reasons for what we’re wearing. We are on our way back from an ultra-secret mission and haven’t yet been able to change …’

  The reader will find his excuse less than subtle, but I ask him or her to remember the period. Over the next four years numerous people would live in disguise and under borrowed identities. The world would lose count of the colonels and generals who popped up like jack-in-the-boxes, only to disappear again immediately; of the bogus priests and phoney nuns concealing sub-machine guns or explosives underneath their skirts, and the inflated numbers of commercial travellers, an easy profession to assume for those who carried false papers. A great intrigue was on the wing, undertaken by amateurs who would dazzle the readers of adventure and espionage fiction. Madame Michette, ordinarily exceptionally sceptical and trained by years of experience at sniffing out men’s lies, felt so flattered by Palfy’s half-confidence that she instantly adopted an expression of complicity.

  ‘I promise you we shall say nothing.’

  So they went through to the dining room, where the residents had already sat down. They stood up again as Madame entered, and for a moment Jean wondered if she was going to say grace. He and Palfy were introduced as ‘friends’ to Nénette, Claudette and one or two others. Indicating the young black woman, Madame added, ‘– and our black pearl, Victoire from Guadeloupe. Her real name is Jeannine, but the customers have such fond memories of the first black resident we had here that they demanded we call her successors Victoire as well. Since our motto has always been “put the customer first” …’

  At the Sirène, behind closed shutters, life carried on in the glare of electric light. Jean noticed the poor girls’ anaemia, their skin coarsened by make-up, the rings round their eyes and their bodies’ lack of firmness beneath their thin dressing gowns. Their eyes were the only part of their faces that still showed signs of a life of joy and pleasure. They nudged each other and giggled, and there was general hilarity when Madame scolded Zizi for eating her asparagus in a manner that might have given pause to those with dirty minds.

  Palfy liked to put his friends on the spot. Jean’s silence made him feel disapproved of, so he swung the spotlight back on him.

  ‘To be perfectly honest’ – he leant towards Madame’s ear – ‘I know Monsieur Salah very slightly. It’s more my young colleague who knows him well. Before this absurd war they saw each other often, in Rome, in London and even, I believe, at Grangeville in Normandy.’

  ‘And how old are you, young man?’ she asked Jean.

  ‘I’m just twenty.’

  ‘Twenty years old, and you’ve already seen the world!’

  ‘Not the world: only Italy and England.’

  ‘Well, I had to wait forty years before I went on a pilgrimage to Rome. That was the year I brought Maria back.’

  Across the table from Jean a girl with brown hair and bright eyes smiled. Less pale than the others, she revealed behind her plumply rolled lips the compact teeth of a Roman she-wolf.

  ‘And do you speak Italian?’ Madame enquired, making at the same time a gesture to Nénette that she should extend her little finger when drinking her glass of wine.

  ‘Only a few words, but I speak English.’

  ‘Education always comes in handy. I say it again and again to my young ladies.’

  The young ladies, who usually chattered non-stop at the arrival of a customer, whoever he might be, had understood that a certain decorum was called for at this lunch in the company of two strangers. Madame fortunately was well versed in the art of what she called ‘lathering’ her customers, and secretly hoped that the two messengers would take flattering reports back to Salah about the way her establishment was run.

  ‘Who knows where that man is now?’ she said with an anxiety that was only half feigned.

  ‘In Lebanon,’ Jean said.

  Questioning looks were exchanged around the table, but no one dared ask where Lebanon was. Madame Michette’s anxiety was not allayed.

  ‘There’s no war there, I hope?’

  ‘Not yet!’ Palfy said with a knowing air.

  Zizi, the establishment’s cook, had prepared a surprise: a chocolate gateau topped with whipped cream. Everyone clapped. Madame Michette injected a melancholy note.

  ‘Cream is getting hard to come by. Apparently the Germans are commandeering whole trainloads of it. If we let them, they’ll take it all. However, Monsieur Cassagnate, who is a little in love with our Zizi, has promised to keep some by for us. From his farm! Real cream.’

  ‘He’s such a sweetie!’ Zizi said.

  ‘A sweetie filled with cream,’ Nénette added.

  Madame tapped on the table with her spoon.

  ‘Nénette always talks too much,’ she said. ‘When she was little her parents took her to pray to St Lupus, who cures the timid. He cured her too well.’

  Palfy played up
to her, listening attentively, and when the Bénédictine was served (what else, in such a right-minded establishment?) Madame Michette and her young ladies launched into stories of their favourite saints with healing properties: Saints Cosmas and Damian who would cure you of anything at Brageac in Cantal, St Priest at Volvic who restored the infirm (although, as Victoire observed, he had had a failure with Monsieur Petitlouis), Notre-Dame de la Râche at Domerat who was good for getting rid of impetigo, and at Clermont itself a pair of saints who were not short of work: St Zachary who restored the power of speech and St George who eliminated the harmful effects of embarrassing diseases …

  Madame protested. They had no need of him at the Sirène. It was a decent establishment, very hygienic. The girls cleared the table and carried the dishes to the kitchen. In half an hour the first customers would be arriving. They had just enough time to make themselves up and slip on the négligées they wore for work. The assistant madam, who had received Jean and Palfy so disagreeably, appeared looking pinched and officious and summoned the young ladies. The bedrooms needed to be clean and tidy.

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ Madame explained to her guests. ‘And after that parade we’ll be seeing a fair few soldiers. Oh, if only Monsieur Michette were here …’

  ‘He won’t be long now.’

  ‘One often needs a man on such occasions. Military men are such children.’

  ‘My colleague,’ Palfy said, ‘has exactly the physique you require to preserve respect for the conventions. If he can be of any use to you … I can’t personally: I’ve a very hollow chest, and at thirty my reflexes aren’t as quick as they were.’

  Before accepting his offer, Madame Michette again expressed her keenness to know more about the letter. Might she not just see the envelope? Palfy put his hand in his pocket and turned pale.

  ‘I had it a moment ago.’

  Jean let him search for it. Madame Michette, her face flushed a little from red wine and Bénédictine, started to look suspicious. Palfy ran to the sitting room and Jean took advantage of his absence to get out the letter he had surreptitiously removed from his friend’s pocket. The outer envelope had already been slit. It contained a typed list of town names, and next to each town someone’s name. Against Clermont-Ferrand was the name ‘Michette, René’, underlined by Palfy. This addressee was to be given a second sealed envelope, which he would open and reveal the important person whose intervention would save Jean, if it ever became necessary.