The Foundling Boy. Michel Deon

from every angle, but the Arnauds stood their ground. It must be said that she was also fighting a lone battle, her husband taking no interest in the affair. All of her ingenuity was rebuffed by Jeanne’s blinkered stubbornness, a stubbornness all the fiercer because the caretaker sensed, on two or three occasions, that some dark plot was threatening her possession. The plot finally failed, thanks to the sergeant at the gendarmerie, the mayor and the primary school teacher, who came down on the side of the Arnauds. Jean had found refuge with them. He would stay there, and no Joséphine Roudou or Marie-Thérèse du Courseau would be allowed to dote on him.

      Madame du Courseau still refused to surrender, but continued her campaign in such a way as not to make an enemy of the boy’s adoptive mother, and if she had any regrets she nevertheless rapidly understood, in the wake of two incidents that could have ended in tragedy, that the foundling’s place was not at La Sauveté. On the first occasion little Michel, just two years old, was found standing next to Jean’s cradle, trying to stab him. The baby was asleep in the sun in front of the lodge when Jeanne heard a scream. She dashed outside to glimpse Michel, his fist clutching the handle of a kitchen knife, struggling with Joséphine Roudou. In his cradle, Jean’s blood was running onto the pillow from a long gash on his left cheek. If Joséphine had not been there, Michel would have put his eyes out. On another occasion it was Antoinette who ran to warn Jeanne that her brother had stolen the rat poison and was trying to make the baby swallow it, although from that episode he suffered nothing worse than an attack of vomiting.

      Have I said anything yet about the physical appearance in which Madame du Courseau, née Marie-Thérèse de Mangepain, offered herself? No, because to me it seems that it goes without saying, but a person reading over my shoulder is worrying me somewhat by describing her as in her forties, ugly, simultaneously authoritarian and sickly-sweet, dressed like those ladies of good works who seem constantly to be watching out for the sins of others. Let us not allow free rein to anyone else’s imagination, apart from my own. At the time this story begins, Marie-Thérèse de Courseau is thirty-eight years old. In three years’ time she will cut her hair short, which will save her from too harsh a transition to her forties. She drives herself to mass in her own trap, swims in the Channel during the three summer months, cooks very admirably when necessary, teaches the Gospels to the children of the village and, as we have seen, presides over her workroom at Dieppe. Dressed by Lanvin, there is no trace in her of the provincial lady in her Sunday best. No one has ever seen her faint at a trifle. In fact, you could say that she is a woman with a strong head, although the head, in her case, is misleading: an expression of sweetness, a voice of honey, a kindness that is only withdrawn whenever she encounters an object in the way of her desires – as for example when Jeanne decided to adopt little Jean. The ambiguity of her character is apparent in her relations with her children. She was never interested in Geneviève until her daughter started coughing. She more or less ignores Antoinette, but repeatedly reveals her adoration of little Michel. If asked the question, ‘Do you have children?’ she will answer, ‘Yes, I have one child, Michel, and two daughters too.’ To go a step further and pierce the veil of intimacy, she fulfils her conjugal obligations without appetite, as a dutiful woman does. Antoine’s misdemeanours caused her pain at first, but now she is indifferent to them. She has not been insensitive to the ‘du’ that precedes Courseau, and is no less proud of having been born a Mangepain, the more so now that a brother of hers is a deputy, elected on a right-wing platform in Calvados. She knows perfectly well, however, that if the ‘du’ Courseaus have one or two pretensions, they do not feature in any directory of the nobility. Sometimes people address her as ‘baronne’, and she does not always correct those who do. Thus are titles forged, over a generation or two. I come back to that expression of sweetness that one can usually see on her face. It has not always been there: as a young girl Marie-Thérèse had a lovely complexion, fresh and pink, that made people forget a certain sourness in her features: thin lips, a sharp nose. As she has got older her complexion has faded, and her sweet expression has corrected the loss. Almost everyone is taken in, except, probably, the abbé Le Couec, whose own sweetness is not on the surface and who, by dint of hearing the confessions of Norman farmers, is more than a little sceptical of the innate goodness of humankind.

      So Jean stayed with the Arnauds. I shall not recount his early childhood, which was composed above all of little needs and great appetites, illnesses he had to catch, tears, laughter, cries and the smiles his adoptive mother was always looking out for on his lips. To Jeanne’s profound annoyance, Madame du Courseau insisted on interfering with the baby’s education, which had the result of exacerbating Michel’s jealousy. It was a strange thing to see this child of two years old, nearly three, grow pale with anger whenever Jean’s name was mentioned. It amused Michel’s sister Antoinette to provoke him. Perhaps it was to irritate him even more that she conceived a passion for Jean. Escaping from Joséphine, then from her successor, Victoire Sanpeur, she ran to hide in the lodge. Jeanne had no more faithful ally than this five-year-old child. Keeping a lookout at the kitchen window, as soon as Antoinette saw her mother approaching she would shout, ‘Watch out, it’s her!’ whereupon Jeanne would throw herself into some frenetic task – waxing the floor, polishing her copper pans – to justify her monosyllabic responses to Madame du Courseau.

      As for Albert, he continued to grumble. For him, peace would truly have meant peace if his employers had found him a couple of assistant gardeners and some decent fertiliser. His grumbles met with no response from Antoine du Courseau, who, up until the war, had taken little or no pleasure in analysing his own feelings, and in his private moments was frightened to discover in himself a kind of unease for which he could not find a name. He would have been amazed to learn that the feeling in question was one of boredom. Boredom that he banished in his own way by straddling whichever Martiniquaise was working at La Sauveté at the time or by reversing his Bugatti out of the garage to race the country roads using every one of its thirty horsepower, scattering hens, dogs, cats and dawdling flocks of sheep as he went. It was thus that, one afternoon in the summer of 1920, at the wheel of his sports car, he reached Rouen, crossed the River Seine and, having sent a telegram back to La Sauveté telling them not to wait, continued via Bernay and Évreux deep into an agricultural Normandy that was foreign to him. France seemed terrifically exotic to him, so full was his mind’s eye still with the memory of landscapes burnt by the sun, cracked by cold or glowing with poppies that he had encountered in southern Serbia and Macedonia. This was a France he did not know, unless he had forgotten it, and it worked its way back into his mind via neat villages full of flowers, hundreds of delicate churches, and a countryside drawn in firm and well-finished lines and softly coloured in grey, green, and red brick. The war had not passed this way, and to see the parish priests out walking, mopping their brows with big checked handkerchiefs, the postmen on bicycles in their straw hats, the children mounted atop hay carts bringing in the second cutting, you would have thought the whole conflict merely a bad dream born of men’s unhinged imaginations.

      The greedy Bugatti gobbled up the kilometres, trailing a plume of ochre dust behind it, its engine burbling with a joyful gravity that communicated itself to the driver. The indefinable malaise Antoine suffered from was left far behind, at La Sauveté. At petrol depots he stopped to stretch his legs and answer the questions of mechanics who walked respectfully around the car, examining it. The same model, a Type 22 driven by Louis Charavel, had recently won the Boulogne Grand Prix, and the automotive world was beginning to talk about Ettore Bugatti and his little racing cars that were beginning to eat away at the supremacy of the monsters made by Delage, Sunbeam, Peugeot and Fiat.

      Antoine felt so relaxed that he stopped to have dinner at Chartres, after changing his tyres and four spark plugs and filling up with petrol. Afterwards he drove straight out of the city and into the night. His headlamps lit no more than a few metres of the road ahead and he had to ease back on the throttle, driving inside a small, tight circle of light that threw trees up as he passed and pierced the thick shadows of sleeping villages. Two or three times on the outskirts of a town he almost drove into an unlit farmer’s cart. He felt as if he was playing Russian roulette and stepped on the accelerator once more, drinking in deep draughts of the cool night as dense as a mass of black water rolling over him. At about two o’clock in the morning, apparitions began rearing up at the roadside. He was driving in a trance that was close to drunkenness: columns of soldiers in sky-blue uniforms were marching northwards, followed by towed artillery,