The Foundling Boy

by Michel D

  ‘I’m trying to see in you,’ she said, ‘what I remember about your dear maman, whom I love so much.’

  ‘Maman died in June.’

  ‘Oh goodness … it’s happened … it’s my fault. I didn’t see enough of her.’ Tears welled in her eyes, and she smiled a melancholy smile.

  ‘How sad you must be! What about Albert?’

  ‘Since they sold La Sauveté, Papa’s been living with Uncle Cliquet.’

  ‘La Sauveté has been sold?’

  Jean reminded himself that nobody wrote many letters in her family, and that Geneviève had not even been told about his birth. He found her womanly open face beautiful, and so close that he leant forward impulsively to kiss her proffered cheek, fresh and without make-up.

  ‘What are you doing in London?’

  She possessed a rare gift: people who had known her for less than five minutes found themselves recounting their life story. Jean was startled to find himself almost telling her everything. The ‘almost’ is only to make clear that he did not recount Palfy’s French villainies. He painted his friend as he presented himself in London: a fashionable man who seemed to know everyone. Geneviève interrupted him to ask him frankly, ‘Dearest Jean, this … what do you call him … Balfy … or Malfy … isn’t he a little bit homosexual around the edges?’

  ‘It’s odd you should say that about him. I hadn’t thought of it, and then one day he assured me he wasn’t.’

  ‘Oh well … To tell the truth, I think I know something about him, but what? I’ve forgotten. Anyway, it doesn’t matter … Bring him to dinner on Thursday. I’ll be happy to meet him.’

  *

  Back at Eaton Square, Jean passed on the invitation to Palfy, who was exultant.

  ‘Splendid! At a stroke you open a door that was closed, to a circle that admits practically none of the people I’ve introduced you to. You were born under a lucky star, Jean, dear boy. Well done. Soon London will be ours.’

  ‘And what will we do with it?’

  ‘Nothing, as you’ve guessed already. Absolutely nothing. Look down on it from a very high place.’

  Jean did not entirely understand a plan that would end in scornful rejection of what had been conquered with such effort. The use Palfy made of his days also seemed singularly relaxed to him, in relation to their stated objective. In the morning his friend read the newspapers at length, walked in Hyde Park for an hour, had lunch at his club, went shopping or paid a visit to his tailor, returned home to change, went back to the club to play whist or bridge, and had dinner at home with friends or took Jean out to the houses of other wholly uninteresting friends. Apparently he was not short of money. In his garage he kept, in addition to the Rolls, a Morgan convertible, the cream of sports cars. If he had not had the means to pay from time to time the bills Price brought to him each morning on a silver tray, the existence of gilded idleness enjoyed by both of them would not have lasted very long. There was some mystery in this somewhere, but Palfy was not the sort of man you questioned with impunity. Jean approached him obliquely.

  ‘I’m starting to ask myself how I’m going to pay you back for what you’re providing me with so generously. I haven’t got a penny to my name, or a single idea how to earn a living.’

  ‘I am a philanthropist of the sublime sort. I’m getting ready for a few personal shows of ingratitude, without which life would be a bed of roses.’

  Dinner at Geneviève du Courseau’s was not what Palfy had been hoping for. They were the only guests, as if it was a test. With all the instinct his large nose was capable of, Palfy realised it and deployed his resources intelligently. Jean was surprised to see his friend so well informed about the theatre and cinema, which he never went to, and about exhibitions of painting and sculpture for which he ordinarily professed substantial scorn. He even displayed a certain genius by stopping dead in front of an unusual object, a spade onto which the sculptor had welded two nails. It looked like a praying mantis.

  ‘Admirable!’ he said, leaning forward. ‘The revenge of the world of things. The beginning of their animation. They will devour us all.’

  ‘Do you know who it’s by?’

  ‘In principle I’d have said it was by Natalia, but don’t laugh at me: I’m a complete ignoramus.’

  ‘It is by her!’ Geneviève said, surprised.

  He had passed the test. He would be asked again. Walking back to Eaton Square on a delicious balmy night, Jean expressed astonishment at his knowledge.

  ‘Why do you think I read the papers with such care every morning?’ Palfy said. ‘You can find everything there. No need to move.’

  ‘But what about that sculpture you identified?’

  ‘I’d seen a photo of it in a magazine. No more difficult than that. If you want to know what I think, we went down all right. It’s very important. Next I would like to get to know the prince, about whom I am beginning to have my own theory.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘A marvellous person.’

  Jean felt the same. His very limited experience of women was enlarging slowly. After Mireille, Antoinette and, on a platonic level, Chantal, he had discovered Geneviève, still clothed in the cachet of the du Courseaus, but freed from its bourgeois world. All evening long he had had the impression of meeting someone open, direct and without any false or naïve modesty. She was beautiful when she laughed, her laughter was genuine, and her fine blue eyes examined life with kindness, intelligence and lucidity.

  A few days later Jean started to emulate Palfy and read the French daily papers. There was little mention of politics. The race for that year’s literary prizes preoccupied a reading public that was happy to be addressed on any subject except war. For the Prix Goncourt, the name of Joseph Outen was mentioned nowhere. Did this oversight suggest a shock announcement of the prize being awarded to an outsider that Monday at Drouant’s restaurant? When the name of Charles Plisnier was revealed – a forty-one-year-old Belgian novelist, author of a collection of short stories – Jean felt the scale of poor Joseph’s disappointment. What had happened? He wrote to him. A reply came back by return.

  Make no mistake about what happened. A conspiracy has taken place. My book, despite being finished in good time, was not published. Without any reason. For, all modesty aside, it is easily as good as Plisnier’s False Passports. Put very simply: I’m still waiting for an answer from the NRF and Grasset, whom I offered it to simultaneously. My novel has been suppressed. Why? Because it upsets people. Yes, I upset people. Imagine! Someone who has something to say, and says it! That hasn’t been seen since Zola’s day. We are not permitted to impugn the honour of love or money. My novel will not be published. I have the bitter certainty of that now. If I want to continue writing, I shall have to confine myself to anodyne subjects: little birds, sunny days, and trips to the seaside. Count me out. You know me well enough. I’m leaving literature to the shopkeepers from now on. Even so, it hasn’t been time completely wasted. Scribbling down my 300 pages, I discovered that I can draw. My manuscript is covered in doodles down the side of every page. There’s no doubt that with patience and hard work I could have enough drawings for an exhibition in a year’s time. I’ve sold a piece of my mother’s jewellery that I’d held on to, which will be enough to keep me going until I start selling. You’re invited to my show of course, which will take place in Paris in January 1939. Between now and then, don’t count on me for much: I shall be a recluse for the duration. A single distraction: running. Yes, don’t laugh. I’m a runner, and my lungs are improving every day. How many press-ups are you up to?

  Jean was down to zero press-ups. He felt guilty, got up half an hour earlier, and resumed his exercises with pleasure. At the same time he realised that, as he counted each upward push of his body, he thought about Geneviève. He had never met anybody like her. Not only was she attractive and desirable, but after he had left her, her charm continued to work on him. He found himself trying to remember the tone of her voice, the sparkle of her eye
s, the shapes made by her pink mouth. He could not even compare her to Chantal de Malemort. They belonged to two different species. Jean reassured himself: he loved both of them. It was his misfortune that they both seemed unattainable.

  Unattainability was not a feature of the middle-aged Englishwomen who invited him to the country with Palfy. Jean noticed that they were paying him more and more attention. He surrendered with a certain anxiety, not knowing where it would lead him.

  ‘Nowhere, absolutely nowhere,’ Palfy said repeatedly. ‘Rosalind and Margaret would walk straight past you tomorrow if they met you anywhere in the least bit smart.’

  Palfy encouraged Jean’s pleasures of the moment. But why did he not sacrifice himself in the same way?

  ‘I haven’t talked much about myself,’ he admitted. ‘The truth is very simple: I’m neither homosexual nor impotent. Let’s just say that I don’t feel particularly strongly about “it”. I need rather special conditions, which aren’t very easy to bring together. To cut a long story short, I prefer professional women. It does no harm to anybody and actually enriches a sizeable group of idlers who look after the modest business it produces and keep it within the bounds of propriety. Having said that, the lovely Geneviève du Courseau has not called us. Many days have passed. Telephone that strange person, will you? I believe I have learnt how the prince who maintains her on such a lavish scale keeps his immense fortune topped up from day to day.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That is a secret, dear boy.’

  Jean felt he was groping his way through a world where he recognised nothing. Who were these society ladies who offered themselves to him in a bedroom adjoining their husband’s and the next day looked straight through him? What goal was Palfy pursuing? As time went on it became impossible to doubt that he had, at least that particular year, sufficiently large means to live extravagantly. He slipped easily into that relatively closed society in which money counted as much as titles. He was at ease in it from his years at private school, then Oxford. How far that person was from the priest who stole from collection boxes and coaxed his old Mathis up the Nationale Sept! Jean occasionally had to do a double take, for he had only known people who were always the same and incapable of concealing a second or a third face behind the first. The abbé Le Couec was never anybody else but himself. The same was true of Monsieur Cliquet, Captain Duclou, Marie-Thérèse and Antoinette du Courseau. The only person who did not fit the mould was perhaps Michel. With him in mind Jean found an excuse to call Geneviève.

  ‘I wondered what had become of you,’ she said. ‘I thought you had vanished. London is so big. Every day dozens of people go up in smoke here, leaving no trace. Yes, yes, I promise you, it’s a bewildering city, where cannibals, serial killers and vampires prosper mightily. You wouldn’t think so: everything’s so gentle and subtle, and Londoners are so tactful that you never know whether the man who’s so kindly giving you directions to the West End is really a murderer …’

  ‘I’m still alive.’

  ‘Well, try and stay that way.’

  ‘There’s something I wanted to show you: an album of your brother’s drawings.’

  ‘Michel draws? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. I should never have expected to find an artistic temperament in our family. What does he draw? Pigeons, the sea at Grangeville, the sailors’ cemetery?’

  ‘No. Portraits. He’s already had several exhibitions.’

  ‘Bring me the album. Tomorrow. At lunchtime. I imagine that your friend Calfy—’

  ‘Palfy.’

  ‘… your friend Palfy has lunch at his club. Come without him. We’ll talk.’

  When Jean told him about the invitation, Palfy smiled.

  ‘I would happily have made an exception for that delicious creature, but it’s better this way. Having said that, what an idea, inviting you to lunch at home! She’s remained very French, from what I can see.’

  *

  We shall not recount Jean’s lunch in detail, which he experienced as if in a trance. Geneviève was startled by her brother’s talent and kept Jean’s album to show it to a gallerist she knew. She smiled without comment when she saw that all the portraits were of Jean, as himself, as a cyclist, as an oarsman. She made him talk, laughed at their failed meetings in Grangeville, London and Rome, and let him know that the prince, whom she called Ibrahim, would be coming back with Salah in a few days’ time. Oh yes, Salah was an extraordinary man: he knew and understood everything, and you could never give him orders because he anticipated them all. Then, passing quickly on, with a mischievousness that went unnoticed by Jean, she probed him about his girlfriends. He said nothing about Antoinette – out of respect for her – and regretfully too, because far away from her as he was, and knowing nothing of her actions, whenever he thought of her he was assailed by waves of tenderness – but he spoke at length about Mireille, who was roughly the same age as Geneviève. Her questions were spontaneous and subtle. He also confessed to his feelings for Chantal de Malemort, and by placing her on a high pedestal made Geneviève aware that he was capable of love. Later he became aware of her skill at questioning him; but I repeat, at this moment he felt that he was just opening his heart to her with all the impulsiveness of youth and no sense whatsoever of the risks he might be running. She questioned him about his successes since he had been in London, and he blushed. Palfy might have been happy to boast of his protégé’s fleeting conquests; Jean would willingly have drawn a veil over them, but now he did not know how to stop, and mentioned some names. Geneviève reproved him mildly: this was not done. It was clumsy; if women found out he was indiscreet, they would not come near him. But he needn’t worry: she would not say anything. He could trust her. By now Jean would happily have gone down on his knees to speak to her. He had never met such an attractive woman. She kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Come and have dinner with your friend Palfy,’ she said. ‘He’s an interesting man. Call me one morning.’

  She rang for Baptiste, and as soon as he was outside Jean felt that he had been ejected. He was at such a loss that he went into a cinema and sat through a stupid film in which he thought he could spot a thousand allusions to the state he was in. That evening Palfy guessed everything.

  ‘You are a billy goat, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I thought as much. That exquisite woman is just at the age when young flesh starts to seem tempting. Her feelings for you are twofold, sensual because she’s ripe for something new and different, motherly because you could be her son. Having said that, she is upsetting my intentions. A good general never lets himself be taken by surprise. Let us therefore change our plans …’

  ‘Our plans? I don’t even know what they are.’

  Constantin thought for a moment, lit his pipe, and asked Price to bring the brandy decanter and leave them alone for the rest of the evening.

  ‘In three months’ time, I shall not have a penny to my name.’

  This news landed on Jean like a ton of bricks, as he suddenly realised how, in a very short space of time, he had let himself fall into the trap of a life of ease. Even Price – whose judgement had turned out to be so sound – even Price considered him a gentleman, and had stopped laying out for him every morning his most worn-out shirt and saggy drawers and darned socks that brought back his hard year as an unskilled labourer at La Vigie. It all seemed very long ago. And how easily one got used to all this luxury and the well-timed provision of life’s pleasures. Jean, who ordinarily drank very little, poured himself a large glass of brandy and downed it in one.

  ‘You will no doubt point out to me,’ Palfy went on, ‘that I could reduce my expenses. For example, sell the Rolls and the Morgan and make do with an Austin, dismiss Price and take on a charwoman for two hours a day. An error, a profound error! We would merely be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. No one would ever trust us afterwards. The only thing that counts in the world, believe me, is pure show. Yes, dear Jean, one must appear. Because if one fails to appear, one is scorned
by fools.’

  Jean thought about Geneviève. She didn’t ‘appear’, she was exactly what she was: a woman whose face does not lie.

  ‘Who are you thinking about?’ Palfy asked.

  ‘Geneviève du Courseau.’

  ‘Do you believe in her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A little tedious! But … at your age …’

  ‘I’ve never met anyone like her.’

  ‘She isn’t as rare as all that.’

  ‘You don’t know who you’re talking about!’

  ‘You’re in love with her!’

  ‘No, not yet, but if it happened it would be marvellous.’

  ‘We’re getting a long way from the matter in hand.’

  ‘What matter?’

  ‘Do you want to know?’

  ‘I’ll take a chance.’

  The idea was ambitious. The plan was to sell, via interested amateurs, a new and extraordinary toothpaste. Different levels of vendors were planned, each purchasing their stock and reselling it to subcontractors who, in turn, would subcontract to others. From the outset, an unpaid capital was guaranteed by the first vendors. The company would launch without a penny in the bank and sell before manufacturing began.

  ‘What is so extraordinary about your toothpaste?’

  ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing. It will be a toothpaste just like the others, any old paste perfumed to taste like English sweets, a minty flavour or, I don’t know, whatever works at the time.’

  ‘Do you mean that you haven’t got a product organised yet?’