The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  She hung up. Palfy was drinking tea in his dressing gown.

  ‘Jean, three-quarters of your life is taken up with women.’

  ‘Once, at least, that suited you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In London.’

  ‘That’s true; I’d forgotten. What a terrific scheme that was! Do you remember?’

  ‘It was a complete cock-up.’

  ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men … This time I’ve got it all worked out.’

  ‘Like you did at Cannes?’

  ‘No, you fond foolish boy. At Cannes I was just playing games.’

  ‘You lost everything.’

  ‘I picked up a barony.’

  ‘Yet another theft.’

  ‘You steal what belongs to someone else. Not what belongs to everybody. In any case you can’t overlook the way your friend the prince and his faithful chauffeur ruined my plans … Speaking of which, now would be a good moment to open the famous letter.’

  ‘I promised not to use it unless I absolutely needed to.’

  Palfy made a careless gesture.

  ‘Oh, let’s not wait for absolute need. We’ll call it a random act. Anyhow, it’s a little late for that.’

  ‘Why?’

  Palfy pulled the letter from his dressing-gown pocket. The envelope was open.

  ‘You really are a bugger!’ Jean said.

  ‘Yes, and your life’s too much of a mess. You should be admiring my tact. I’m saving you from any remorse.’

  Jean had little choice but to hear him out.

  ‘It’s fairly childish, and to be honest I doubted if it would contain anything valuable anyway, but I wanted to know the final recipient: an interesting character, rarely discussed, except by the brothel owners whose names were on the list in the first envelope.’

  ‘So who is it?’ Jean asked impatiently.

  ‘You know him.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. It’s Longuet, whose charming son Gontran you had a fight with and who took Chantal de Malemort from you. Yesterday in the Journal Officiel I saw that henceforth he has the right to call himself Longuet de La Sauveté. Soon it will be just Monsieur de La Sauveté, which will be a fine monicker for his little Gontran. I rather foresee another baron in the French peerage. What’s most interesting is discovering how powerful this person is. Yet again we find the mafia of the white slave trade deeply mixed up with politics and the police. Here, take your letter, dear boy. It could be useful to you one day. And go and shave. You’ve spent the night with your Claude and it does you no good, ever.’

  We shall not linger on Jean’s life in his new capacity. It would be pointless to be any more interested in it than he is himself. There is too much passing trade, faces coming and going whose outlines and voices are immediately forgotten, so that Jean numbers them to remember them more easily. Paris at the close of 1941 is far more captivating. After months of despondency, courage has returned, though events are scarcely conducive to optimism. Who is lying, who telling the truth? No one knows that the Wehrmacht, having become bogged down in the autumn mud, is now freezing at the gates of Moscow. Paris has resumed its role as the fun-loving and intellectual capital of Europe. The theatres have never been fuller, there have never been so many books read, and the film industry, so in the doldrums before the war, is basking in a new golden era. No thanks to Duzan specifically: he is content to follow in others’ footsteps, to jump on bandwagons and benefit from the gap in the market left by the dearth of Anglo-Saxon films. Nelly Tristan’s star is rising, she has been signed for three films that she will eventually not make. She will make others later, when the war is over, all equally bad until the day she finally meets a proper director.

  But Duzan was vain enough to like having her under contract and, from time to time, to warm his bed. It was a vanity that came at a price: Nelly had a gift for exposing it in public by treating him like a doormat. Humiliated, he complained to Jean, who wondered whether the producer wasn’t employing him to be sure of keeping Nelly. He would storm unannounced into Jean’s office.

  ‘Do you know what she’s just done to me?’

  ‘No.’

  There followed a tale of some joyful prank of which he had been the wretched victim.

  ‘She’s impossible. Yesterday evening, at the end of shooting, she was drunk, completely drunk—’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘When you’re there she doesn’t drink.’

  ‘I can’t be there all the time.’

  Jean felt contempt for Duzan. How could a crook such as he was be so feeble and snivelling as soon as a fragile woman came on the scene? Not for a second did he imagine that Duzan was in love and that, however embarrassing his love for Nelly might be, it was nevertheless an emotion that deserved sympathy. He thought Duzan old – over forty! – mean and stupid. The only things that mattered to him were a passion for money rapidly earned and the misplaced pride of being a producer. And what was he looking for when he came to Jean, if not the trace of Nelly’s perfume and the magic formula of the man to whom she gave herself for nothing?

  ‘Yes,’ Duzan said, ‘I know everything. I forgive her. She had an unhappy childhood. She tries to forget …’

  Jean, unkindly, decided to give him something to think about.

  ‘You forgive her because she’s the devil.’

  ‘The devil?’

  Visibly more anxious than privileged to have been sought out by the devil, Duzan left his office and did not return for three days. Nelly considered Jean’s idea excellent. Wasn’t everything permitted to the devil?

  ‘Now and then, Jules-who, you’re a genius. Here I am, cleared of guilt, forgiven, and seduction itself. And somehow you’ve flattered that idiot. The devil doesn’t go out of his way for just anyone.’

  She lived near Place Saint-Sulpice in a studio apartment filled with books, set models and signed photographs from her friends in the theatre. That was how he learnt she had won first prize for comedy from the Conservatoire for a scene from The Widow.

  ‘The Widow? Who?’

  ‘I love it when you say “who”, you scrumptious little Jules-who. Whose widow? Pierre Corneille’s. Listen to Clarice:

  ‘Dear confidant of all of my desires

  Beautiful place, secret witness to my disquietude,

  No longer is it with my sighing fires

  That I come to abuse your solitude;

  Past are my sufferings

  Granted are my longings

  Words to joy give way!

  My fate has changed its law from harsh to fine

  And the object I possess in a word to say,

  My Philiste is all mine …’

  Jean was discovering that this careless and chaotic woman possessed a feeling for poetry that was genuinely harmonious. She truly loved the music of words, and Palfy had not been exaggerating when he declared that she could have made an entire auditorium weep by reciting the telephone directory. She was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde rolled into one, or at least with such a brief interlude between the two that it was frightening. Absorbed in La Jeune Parque while the lighting was being readied on set, she would awake from her reverie and, seeing Duzan hiding behind a camera, yell, ‘Get him out of here!’

  ‘Nelly, he’s the boss!’ the studio manager would implore her.

  ‘The boss is an arse … Everyone repeat after me: The boss is an arse… the boss is an arse …’

  Duzan left, pursued from the studio by the shouts of the technicians and the actors. When the scene had been shot, was in the can, and on its way to the lab, Nelly called him.

  ‘I’m waiting for you! You and your bicycle-taxi bum! You surely don’t think I’m going home by Métro?’

  Duzan ran to her. He felt like weeping, but instead took her out to dinner in a restaurant where he hoped everyone would recognise her.

  ‘It’s Nelly Tristan!’

  And his assurance would return as she recounted her day to him, her tiffs w
ith the other actors, or complained at length about the screenplay’s excessive vulgarity. Then, if he was too high-handed with the waiters, she would summon the head waiter or the restaurant’s owner.

  ‘Pay no attention. He’s very spoilt. He’s just playing at the producer-taking-his-star-out-to-dinner.’

  To Jean, when she saw him the next day, she admitted, ‘He’s never loved me as much as he has since I’ve been cheating on him with you. I need to cheat on him much more. What a bore! Because then you’ll start getting jealous.’

  ‘No. Not a chance!’

  ‘Oh well …’

  She was not at all put out. She knew Jean had another love.

  ‘Is she kind to you?’ she asked.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Claude.’

  ‘Is that a woman or a man?’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘Are you sure she’s not a transvestite?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘Phew!’

  If Claude had dinner at her mother’s – which seemed to be happening more frequently, as though Anna Petrovna, apprised of the danger her daughter was running, was doing her best to take her in hand – he stayed the night at Nelly’s. Sitting on a deep-pile carpet in front of the fireplace where a wood fire crackled, she would question him.

  ‘What have you read, then?’

  ‘The Thibaults.’20

  She shrugged.

  ‘Average. What else?’

  ‘Remembrance of Things Past.’

  ‘Better. Who’s your favourite poet?’

  ‘Before I met you, I didn’t know anyone who knew how to recite poetry.’

  ‘What do you want to hear?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  She closed her eyes, suddenly absent again, and her voice rose, so poignantly that it enveloped Jean.

  ‘My heart beats only with its wings

  I can follow no further than my prison wall

  Oh my friends, lost beyond all recall

  It is but your hidden lives I’m listening to …’

  ‘Who’s that by?’ he asked.

  ‘Reverdy.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘You scrumptious boy.’

  When they were alone together, she did not drink.

  ‘With you,’ she said, ‘I don’t need to be unbearable in order to exist. You’re kind. You’re actually extraordinarily normal. Not machosistic, as old Madame Michette would say, not machosistic for a second. I might be unhappy for a few minutes the day you leave me.’

  ‘Who says I’m going to leave you?’

  ‘Me. I know you are. And deep down I don’t care, just like I don’t care about you. You’re not irreplaceable.’

  ‘I know. What about Duzan?’

  ‘Dudu? Oh, he’s for life. I’m his Omphale.’

  ‘He’s not Hercules.’

  ‘No, he’s not … but I’ve told him he’s an arse so often that he believes it.’

  ‘He told me you had an unhappy childhood.’

  ‘Me? Not for a second. I love my papa and maman. He works on the railways, she’s at home. Stationmaster at a little village in the south-west. He’ll never get another promotion and he doesn’t mind a bit. Ever since he was a child he’s written poetry, and all his poems are as bad as each other, but he doesn’t know that. He’s a member of the Société des Gens de Lettres and he thinks it’s something very similar to the Académie Française. He’s kind and generous and has always got his head in the clouds. A poet, you see. He’s had several near-misses changing the points. Otherwise he’s a very good stationmaster. One day we’ll go and see my parents. You’ll see my mother look at me wide-eyed. She says I’m like my father, artistic. He adores me because I’m his revenge on the people who don’t understand him. When a magazine rejects his poems he’s unhappy and shouts at everyone at the station. Otherwise he’s awfully nice. One in a million. I tell myself it’s from him that I have inherited the little light burning in me, that makes me not like the other actors around me, and him not like the other railway workers around him.’

  *

  Jean should have been torn between Claude and Nelly and he felt confused not to be, failing to grasp, in the happy surprise of it all, that the two women complemented each other and left him no freedom whatsoever. He went from one to the other as if to two different pleasures. Claude’s beauty had the appearance of tranquillity, yet was anything but tranquil. Nelly’s was that of a charming, false muddle. One was half hidden behind a stubborn secret, the other was open and laughed and glittered like diamonds. He could not have borne Nelly without Claude, and without Nelly he would not have been able to put up with the kind of relationship Claude offered him. Nelly was visible to everyone. Claude remained hidden. That was why he did not want Palfy to see her again or want Madeleine to know her. He thought about Jesús and decided that he was allowed.

  Earlier it seemed to us unimportant for this account of Jean’s life to know whether he went to the Chevreuse valley with Nelly the day after their first night together. This was a mistake. In fact it was extremely important, and let us say here and now, having made enquiries, that they didn’t, giving in instead to Madeleine’s pleading that they should come and meet her Pole, another key individual in the Germans’ organised plunder of France. But Jean felt that Jesús was one person he wanted to introduce Claude to. He wrote to him. From Paris, where she returned to work every day, Fräulein Bruckett telephoned Jean’s office. They would expect him that weekend.

  ‘That’s good timing,’ Nelly said when she heard the news. ‘I was about to feel bad about leaving you on Saturday and Sunday. Dudu’s taking me to a château whose name I’ve forgotten. Some people he swears aren’t in the least bit annoying. Go to your friend’s. A bit of fresh air will do you good.’

  *

  Jesús was waiting for them at the station at Gif-sur-Yvette. He had got fatter. Not in his face so much, but his waistline had thickened. He carried Cyrille on his shoulders for the two kilometres to the farm. Laura came home early every evening, and left again at dawn in her little car. She was the vital force of their house. As soon as she arrived she would shed her field-grey uniform, put on a pair of corduroy trousers and a sweater, and cook, dust and pickle vegetables. Jesús had turned a barn into his studio. Jean saw immediately that he was working for himself, feverishly and with a pleasure that transformed him.

  ‘You see, Jean, I’m on my way again. I’m paintin’, do you hear, I’m paintin’. No more bollocks. I am an artis’! No’ a clown for La Garenne. You know’e came to see me?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yes’erday.’

  The previous day, in fact, La Garenne had turned up at the farm, puffed out from the two-kilometre walk, brandishing a piece of paper.

  ‘I’ve got the certificate, I can reopen my gallery! Jesús, you can’t leave me now. All this nonsense has cost me a fortune. Not counting my mother’s burial. She wanted it all first-class, the organ at Saint-Sulpice, six horses, mountains of red roses and invitations for all of Paris society …’

  Jean disabused Jesús. Louis-Edmond had conducted his mother to Montparnasse Cemetery with the least possible pomp. As for the certificate, it was yet another fraud. A Professor Montandon, a so-called ethnologist approved by the Commissariat of Jewish Affairs, had certified on official notepaper that the subject of his examination had been circumcised in his youth for medical reasons. La Garenne had sworn that his name was unimpeachably authentic, that he was indeed the descendant of a crusader, and that because his true father was not in a position to recognise him he had had him adopted by a proxy. So yes, he was officially called Levy and had suffered for it since childhood, because he could not stand Jews.

  ‘’E disgust’ me,’ Jesús said. ‘I’ave chucked him out. In Spain is no Jews! We is all a lil’ bit Jewish, thanks to thee Inquissición. Yes, all converted an’ good Christians. If you’ad seen him! He was cryin’ … Get out, fil
thy antisemite, I tol’ him. Laura drove him back to the station …’

  The studio looked out onto an orchard whose trees were bare with the approach of winter. Beyond the orchard a line of poplars bent in the wind. Jesús took no notice of the gold and grey Île-de-France countryside. His easel stood in front of the window, and he painted the Andalusia he knew, the Mediterranean, its skies purged of all content by the noonday heat. Jean wondered if Jesús really was a great painter, a marvellous force of nature exploding into colour.

  ‘Wha’ do you think?’ Jesús asked, anxious at his friend’s silence.

  ‘Very beautiful.’

  ‘Then don’ say me anythin’ else.’

  Laura appeared before nightfall. She brought a suitcase of food and a present for Cyrille, a model car made of painted wood. Jean would not have recognised her if he had met her in the street. Physically small, a brassy blonde, she was as insignificant as a woman can be. Despite her strong accent and timid voice, she spoke excellent French. This nondescript person had had the wit to keep Jesús, to isolate him so he could work, feed him properly and divert him enough at night so that he didn’t go looking elsewhere. Under her spell, he had forgotten his theories on love. He had spent far more than two nights in a row with Laura – six months of nights – and settled into the well-considered comfort she had organised around him. Every evening she brought back from Paris food she was able to obtain as a result of her post in the Department of Supply for the occupying army. Jesús, with the help of a carpenter and a stonemason, had refurbished and installed the big kitchen, his studio and two bedrooms. Each morning he pushed down the pump handle three hundred times and the pump, connected to the well, pumped water into a tank in the attic. He strongly recommended Jean to have a go himself: the exercise would transform him from a weakling into a bodybuilder. Sawing wood for the farm’s fires and stove also helped Jesús stay fit, because the rest of the time he was in his studio, working without a fire, in shirtsleeves. An Andalusian is never cold. It was only people in the north who complained of the cold and people in the south who complained of the heat. A world government endowed with a modicum of common sense ought to organise, in the near future, when the war was over, massive migrations to make people happy once and for all. Jesús was convinced that if ever he returned to live in Spain one day, he would paint nothing but the landscapes of the Île-de-France, or Rue Norvins in the snow.