The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  ‘I hope,’ he said to Palfy, ‘you didn’t tell her I was her son.’

  ‘You and I had already decided that it would be out of place. If she finds out, it won’t be from us. In any case, it would age her overnight. I suspect she has decided that she’ll always be thirty. An excellent age that she’s right to stick to. She hardly looks it. The mountains suit her fragility. She’s remarkably lovely.’

  ‘I’m wondering how you managed to find her.’

  ‘It wasn’t too hard. I had dinner one evening with a Lebanese banker. I talked about her to him. He supplied the key: Gstaad. A little bit of heaven on earth!’

  Allée des Acacias was almost deserted, its trees frozen, cold and grey on this January morning. Palfy liked this walk. It reminded him of his childhood Sundays, of his father and mother driving there in their Renault open tourer. The car would roll down the avenue, crowded with residents from all over the 16th: young girls in wide-brimmed hats, bare-headed boys, riders and a few remaining carriages conveying old ladies, their faces caked in cream and powder, their laps covered with real or imitation sable. He even claimed to have seen, on one of his last outings around 1921 or 1922, Mercedes del Loreto. His Sunday mornings belonged to the past. The only people to be seen now were women dressed like tramps, in worn greatcoats, stooped, shuffling, grey-faced and guilty-looking as they collected firewood, or riders in uniform, sitting stiffly as if at riding school, their boots black and gleaming. One greeted Palfy with a discreet movement of his hand.

  ‘You know all the Germans in Paris,’ Jean said.

  ‘No. A modest few. That was Captain Schoenberg, the blue-eyed boy of one of the generals. He won’t go to Russia. He’s been given the job of overseeing the national stud farms. Pleasure can’t go completely by the board – the French would revolt. By the way, while we’re on the subject, Rudolf von Rocroy’s got problems. The one time he’s ever shown any courage – to help your Claude – and they’re threatening to send him to the Eastern Front. It’s mayhem. Don’t worry, he won’t talk. I’ve got him under control. In any case he only needs to dig himself a tiny bit deeper into his racket to be forgiven …’

  Claude. Jean hesitated. He had come to meet Palfy to confide in him, but Palfy’s blithe self-assurance silenced him.

  ‘It’s bizarre, I can tell you, how far one feels from all that at Gstaad, even though Switzerland’s the only place where rationing is actually enforced. No strawberries and cream. Meat twice a week. The restaurants are quite inflexible and the Swiss are very disciplined. But I didn’t go there to eat …’

  ‘What did Geneviève say?’

  ‘She’s bored. She’s rented a floor of a country hotel, brought in a gramophone, made a place to read. She reads all the time when she’s not listening to music. The hotel’s stuffed with foreigners, who play cards while they wait for the motor shows and carnivals by the sea to resume, the selfsame world they knew before the war. In one sense, Geneviève’s isolation and loss of her little train of admirers has done her good. I found her a bit less of a bluestocking. You don’t feel you’re taking an exam every time you talk to her these days. And we talked … oh yes, non-stop. In her room, out walking, or on the sleigh. Ah, the sleighs of Gstaad! I never suspected I’d fall for their romance. A fat driver with a red nose and a leather apron tucks you in like babies. The horse wears ice shoes and trots as if there weren’t any ice. I had the great pleasure of holding Geneviève’s hand to keep it warm …’

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen your lyrical side!’

  Palfy looked embarrassed.

  ‘Listen, my dear boy, I can only say this to you …’

  ‘Are you telling me you’re in love with Geneviève? Don’t make me laugh. You’ll never love a woman …’

  Jean was mistaken. If Palfy was not yet in love he was soon going to be, and at the age of thirty-five, just when he thought he was safe, his whole life, his unusual sense of right and wrong and his cynicism and scorn were about to be changed for ever. We can sense just how incredible this transformation is. Palfy himself cannot foresee its repercussions. He imagines one can let oneself be attracted to a woman like Geneviève while remaining as one was, and will find out – with a mounting sense of wonder – that, on the contrary, to love and be loved by her one must become more like her. That is how one deserves her. It is no longer a matter of surveying life with a cold and sarcastic eye, with the gaze that has so long served him as judge and defence; it is a matter of being worthy of Geneviève. Palfy cannot yet see where this metamorphosis demanded of him will take him. He will not be a second prince, for his contempt for humanity is of a lower quality, and in particular more greedy and opportunistic. The prince never experienced the vulgar temptation to become rich, for the simple reason that he always was rich. On the other hand, despite his generosity, he did not throw away his fortune and, however wise and unusual he was, it is doubtful whether he would have accepted his ruin with the elegance Palfy has displayed on several such occasions.

  Palfy is still looking for that pedestal from which he can defy his critics. He knows that once a certain level of success is achieved, impunity follows. Doors open wide, respect is blind. He has been admitted to this privileged circle two or three times. Without his appetite for risk, he might have stayed there. Deep down he loves starting again from nothing, disconcerting those who have believed in him. As we now see him on this January morning in 1942, in Allée des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne, walking briskly, his arm in Jean’s as if the better to persuade him of his sincerity, Palfy knows nothing of what awaits him. An inexpressible joy that he finds hard to contain, indeed is allowing to brim over, has taken possession of him. We have already guessed that he – the Palfy who has never felt a single moment’s tenderness – will shortly reproach Jean for not devoting his life to the delights of love. He believes his task is to be intelligent and insensitive. Geneviève will convince him that he is not as intelligent as he thinks he is and that he is almost bursting with sensitivity.

  Such a revelation, naturally, is not the work of a day. It will need many journeys to Switzerland, many sleigh rides and, that summer, a visit to Lake Lugano during which they will witness from a balcony Italy falling apart on the far bank. Geneviève will not tell him her life story; she has no need to. It will be his job to tell her his, and entertain her. Revealed, stripped naked, he will be in her power. He will be jubilant as he relinquishes his old self. For a moment he will lose his poise, that marvellous passport that has helped him so much in his life. Geneviève will smile. She will have won, and as the price of her victory she will give him back – albeit attenuated and civilised – the confidence in himself that he lost in an upsurge of passion.

  I’ll say it again: nothing can astonish us more than this metamorphosis. It is so unexpected that it surprises us as much as its victim, whose destiny seemed preordained. We had already interned him when France was liberated, ruined him, thrown him out on the street and, since his boats had been burnt all over Europe, watched him leaving to attempt some fabulous new fraud in South America. Indeed, that was certainly what awaited him, and in a sense Palfy’s good luck had always been his bad too, compelling him to resort to his genius for mystification. We are delighted to announce instead that this time, at last, Fortune is on his side, and not, as one might crudely think, Geneviève’s fortune of which he has no need, but that ravishing figure, her form barely veiled beneath a transparent tunic, who awakens those infants slumbering incautiously on the coping of a well. The tiny wings on her back do not allow her to fly to the aid of everyone. She must choose her targets. Seductive and seduced, she attaches herself to those who will not let her go. Why should it surprise us, then, that in her generosity to a few, she is cruel to the greater number? She will desert Salah and only much later pay any attention to Jean Arnaud, after he has endured those tests inflicted by Sarastro on Tamino in The Magic Flute.

  For the moment we are still on Allée des Acacias, where it is necessary to walk brisk
ly to keep out the dry cold of the winter of ’41–’42, which marks the decisive turning point of a war we have spoken little about, since it is happening far away and its impact on the majority of the French population is mainly the problem of finding enough to eat.

  ‘By the way,’ Palfy said, ‘how is your beloved?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘A cold?’

  ‘No. A breakdown. I’ve managed to get her admitted to a psychiatric clinic in the Chevreuse valley.’

  Palfy stopped and gripped Jean by the shoulders.

  ‘Good heavens! Do you think …?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. Those twenty-four hours were too much for her. She cracked. It has all gone downhill very fast in the last few days.’

  ‘My dear, that is what is called a trial.’

  He resumed walking, still holding Jean’s arm tightly.

  ‘How did you notice?’

  ‘There were certain warning signs I should have paid attention to sooner.’

  ‘What signs?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  They walked as far as the Cascade without speaking. Jean’s memory filled with episodes from Claude’s illness, whose progression had remained confused to him until the final crisis. Episodes that had in an obscure way heralded Claude’s gradual deterioration: the awful emptiness of her gaze, her indifference towards Cyrille, her periods of silence, as though she was speaking privately to someone not there, the rapidity with which she moved from formality to informality, her sudden shedding of her defences and the fevered pleasure she took in lovemaking – lyrical, elated, carried away by frenzy – followed by a deep torpor, as if only sex gave her burning body the fathomless rest she craved. That she had not been stupidly, fussily modest during their long period of unconsummated love had pleased Jean. Unable to reveal everything, she had offered her only truth, a physical one. It has not gone unnoticed – and perhaps been exasperating – that she let Jean come close to her on so many occasions without letting go. Let us say again that she loved him, and probably loved him more than he loved her. Jean was sowing wild oats and slow to mature, though several women had already been clear about their wish to hurry him. Claude had been ahead of all of them by a long way, with her seriousness, her thoughtfulness, the understanding she had had, even in their passion, of the consequences of her acts. We might possibly have wanted her to be less thoughtful, more susceptible to passion, but we cannot remake her. That is how she is. Or more precisely, how she was, for now, abruptly, she is quite different, no longer on her pedestal, transformed in a sense as radically as Palfy, in reverse. And so Jean must learn through her, as through his friend, that there are no beings who stand still and that it needs only a meeting or an upheaval for a secret truth to be born. Claude had broken down. If Jean had resisted – but heroism has its limits after such a long wait – she would perhaps not have given way as she had. He could not reproach himself. It was too late. Since their first afternoon she had thought of nothing else but making love, casting aside all modesty, disregarding Cyrille’s presence asleep in the bedroom, murmuring streams of obscenities that froze Jean’s desire instead of fuelling it. That these words had come out of Claude’s mouth seemed monstrous. Jean had felt he was back with Mireille Cece, the sex-mad bistro keeper of Roquebrune. He felt a deep revulsion, not for Claude but for himself. A great hatred rose in him at the same time: monsters of cruelty and dishonour had destroyed the woman he loved. They were all-powerful. There was no defence against them. Jean reflected on his earlier indifference to war. It had, at last, dealt him a blow, sweeping away an image of beauty that, however pointless it seemed in the prevailing horror, mattered more to him than anything else. He had been superficial, careless, preoccupied with his own life, and now Claude lay in a clinic, stupefied by sedatives that smothered her obsessions.

  *

  They reached the Cascade and saw the Longchamp racecourse with its bleached turf, long sweep of stands and winter trees that hid the Seine. The roofs of Suresnes glittered in the blue morning. A large Mercedes sped past them.

  ‘General Danke,’ Palfy said. ‘The best he can hope for is to be shot, or he might even lose his head. He’s convinced Germany has lost the war in the East. He’s what they call a traitor in his country and a man of honour here.’

  ‘You see! You do know them all.’

  ‘No, only one or two. The important ones. It’s better to be prepared. Let’s go back to the car. We must do something for Claude.’

  ‘What? There’s nothing we can do. Except look after her. I haven’t enough money to keep her in the clinic, and if she goes into hospital she’ll die. They warned me: the Germans have ruled mental patients to be useless mouths to feed.’

  ‘Dear boy, now you’re being stupid. I’ll help you.’

  ‘You’ve always helped me, but now I need money.’

  ‘I never lend money. I’ve offered you a job, the gallery …’

  ‘And I’ve accepted it, but it’s idiotic: I don’t know anything. I’ll fall flat on my face.’

  Palfy looked thoughtful. The walk had put colour into his yellow complexion.

  ‘I’ve got an idea, but there are risks. In any case, take the gallery. It will serve as cover …’

  ‘I don’t mind risks.’

  ‘Oh, at the moment they’re non-existent … But later … when Germany collapses. You’ll have to be ready for some score-settling.’

  Jean was surprised, and we may share his astonishment. Yes, the Wehrmacht had failed to take Moscow, but it still held Europe and its army remained intact. Everywhere else it was racing from victory to victory, and the United States, grappling with Japan, had so far made no more than symbolic gestures towards Britain. It is easy today to have a character in a story which, to many, will seem made up, announce in 1942 that Germany will lose the war, since we know that it subsequently did. Yet well before that date Palfy had realised it would happen: he was one of the few witnesses of this period to judge events clearly. He will not be wrong. He has coldly assessed the situation, seen there is no way out and has his plans ready: first, to exhaust the immense possibilities offered by this difficult period, and then to prepare his withdrawal. His most important task is not to give himself away. One word too many carries an enormous risk. Already, even with Jean, he feels he may have said too much. Yet he will help him, because of Geneviève.

  ‘I’m going to give you a single piece of advice. Do not trust anyone.’

  ‘Not you?’

  Palfy shrugged.

  ‘What did I just say to you?’

  ‘Not to trust anyone.’

  ‘I cannot say it any more clearly.’

  Jean rebelled. Trusting by nature, by naivety or from lack of an alternative, he found deception hurtful and dismal. The idea of living with suspicion put him off. Palfy, by contrast, was a born deceiver, anticipating traps with an instinctive pleasure, almost regretful when he encountered loyalty, as if the world was trying to steer him away from his natural infamy.

  ‘But you’d still trust me?’ Jean asked.

  ‘Yes, reluctantly, and perhaps because there are times when I wonder about your naivety. I just can’t believe it’s feigned.’

  Jean smiled. Nelly had said something similar: ‘Dear Jules-who, your naivety is your poetry.’ His trials were curing him, but slowly. So Palfy was right, and Jean saw himself compelled by necessity still to turn to him.

  ‘In that case I have no alternative but to accept.’

  ‘Honestly, you are a most royal twit. In Paris alone there are ten thousand fellows a lot less fussy than you who’d jump at the chance, and here you are holding your nose.’

  They had reached the Pavillon d’Armenonville, where their car was waiting. Émile jumped from the driver’s seat and stood by the rear door.

  ‘Come and have lunch tomorrow at one at Maxim’s,’ Palfy said.

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘Julius?’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes.’

  Émile drove towards Porte Maillot. Palfy was silent, perhaps regretting having revealed more than he should.

  ‘Can you drop me at the Étoile?’ Jean said.

  ‘Of course. Where are you staying?’

  ‘At Nelly’s. But not for long. Jesús is lending me his studio in Rue Lepic. I’m moving back next week.’

  He did not admit that he could have moved in immediately, and had returned to Nelly’s as much because he was unable to be miserable on his own as because he still found Nelly physically desirable.

  ‘I’m not sure I entirely understand you,’ Palfy said.

  ‘I’m not sure I entirely understand myself.’

  ‘Notice that Nelly has the gift – rare in women – of never being boring. She and Geneviève are the only ones I know who fall into that category. Having said that, don’t fall into her clutches. She’s rather a tough nut.’

  Jean did not doubt it. On that point at least he had no illusions. But he loved Nelly, as a sort of incestuous sister who displayed such an appetite for life that one forgave all her inconsistencies.

  They turned off before Place de l’Étoile, which was blocked by a line of police. A regiment was about to parade down the Champs-Élysées, led by its band. Émile stopped in Rue de Presbourg, outside Palfy’s building.

  ‘Can I offer you lunch?’ Palfy asked.

  ‘No thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow at Maxim’s. I’ll walk back. I need to walk.’

  He had walked a great deal in the last few days, as a way of thinking and trying to understand what was happening. He was tired out by the time he reached Rue Saint-Sulpice and sat down to wait for Nelly. From there, at least, he could telephone the clinic. The supervisor answered irritably. Once, he had been put through to Claude, who had begged him to come, but the supervisor had come back on the line and repeated the doctor’s orders: no visits in the immediate future …