by Michel Déon
‘So you were right. It is a baby,’ he said, stroking his thick moustache.
‘He can’t be more than a week old.’
She lifted the baby out of the basket and brought him closer to the lamp. A warm blue shawl tied with ribbons enveloped him. Next to him someone had placed a full bottle, a hairbrush, a tin of talcum powder and a sealed envelope that Albert opened. ‘I was born on 16 August. I don’t have a name. You can find one for me if you want me to stay with you.’
‘The bottle’s cold. You look after him while I warm it up,’ Jeanne said, with the decisiveness that characterised her at important moments.
She placed the baby in Albert’s arms. Never having held a child in his life before, he was petrified, and he remained sitting on the edge of the bed, his good leg sticking out, bare, hairy and muscular. He had not moved an inch when Jeanne came back and relieved him of his burden.
‘He’s a nice boy, anyway,’ he said.
The baby’s mouth opened wide and clamped shut on the teat. Air bubbles rose in the bottle as its level dropped. Twice Jeanne gently took the bottle away from him to burp him by patting him on the back. Albert, bending over him, received a blast of sour milk smell full in his face. In a cupboard Jeanne found some baby clothes that had been used nineteen years before, for Geneviève. She undressed the baby, washed, talced and re-dressed him.
‘He’s a handsome boy,’ she said, with an approving nod, referring to what she had just uncovered and covered up again, as though long experience and many patient measurements entitled her to identify a promising future.
He was hardly wrapped up again before he fell asleep, his fists closed, as two anxious faces bent over him: Jeanne’s round and moon-like, with small grey eyes marked with crow’s feet and a chin adorned with a small polyp, Albert’s long and hollow-cheeked, eyes yellowed by caporal tobacco smoke and calvados fumes, and a thick greying moustache as stiff as a brush.
These loving, anxious faces were the first to imprint themselves on the visual memory of the small boy who was christened Jean and took the name of his adoptive parents: Arnaud. Exactly as in a fairy tale, Albert and Jeanne placed gifts in his basket-cradle, the only possessions in which they were rich: courage and goodness, uprightness and charity, all the qualities that were largely responsible for Jean’s later misadventures and for the opinion, partly false, that he formed of the rest of humanity. I say ‘partly false’ because from his childhood onwards he also met with spite, hypocrisy and mistrust, of which wiser fairies might have thought to inculcate an instinctive recognition in him. But we know that evil always surprises, and it is trust’s task to be disappointed. Jean opened his eyes onto a marvellous world, filling his lungs with the air of peace and freedom, a world where the brave were rewarded and the guilty pardoned. A great epoch was dawning. There would no longer be need of soldiers: Albert, along with many other veterans, was seeing to it, and of all the politicians who held forth in those years he listened to, and read, with most warmth and emotion those who promised an end to those wars for which men departed joyously, flowers in their rifle barrels, and from which they returned with a wooden leg where their left leg had been. I forgot to mention that Jean was born in the year of the treaty of Versailles, 1919; that since our first sentence we have been in Normandy – the hawthorns, the sound of sea against cliffs; and that Albert’s leg was left behind in the mud at Verdun in the course of one of those futile attacks that some generals seem to have a knack for. Among the other faces that offered themselves to Jean’s wideeyed surprise, let us note immediately:
Monsieur du Courseau, owner of La Sauveté, of which Albert and Jeanne were the caretakers; Madame du Courseau, née Mangepain, who, the morning after the boy first appeared, had returned from a journey to Menton where her daughter Geneviève, nineteen years of age, was being treated for her lungs; Antoinette du Courseau, four years old (a home leave of Monsieur du Courseau’s after the battle of Les Éparges); Michel du Courseau, two years old (another leave of Monsieur du Courseau’s, before embarking for Salonika); Captain Duclou, Jeanne’s uncle and one of the last Cape Horners; Monsieur Cliquet, retired railway employee, Albert’s cousin; and last but not least Monsieur the abbé Le Couec, parish priest of Grangeville, a Breton exiled to Normandy by higher authorities nervous of his separatist fancies. This was not, we must acknowledge, a particularly large universe, but Jean could have fared worse, knowing only – until he finally left for military service – narrow-minded parents, an imbecilic schoolmaster, a numbingly dull priest, and a country house made gloomy by constipated proprietors.There are, actually, a couple of truly constipated characters lurking in this list. It will be clear who I mean in time. I prefer not to be specific, because it is after all possible that their attitudes will not seem constipated to readers of this story and may even be applauded by a silent majority. I am happy nevertheless to reveal that I am not talking about Monsieur du Courseau, whom Jeanne ran to inform as soon as it was light, pushing the baby into Albert’s arms and leaving him both paralysed by his responsibilities and furious at being forbidden to smoke his pipe in any room where little Jean was.
*
The Great and the Good
by Michel Déon
translated from the French
by Julian Evans
Gallic Books
London
This book is supported by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni as part of the Burgess programme.
www.frenchbooknews.com
A Gallic Book
First published in France as La Cour des grands
by Éditions Gallimard, 1996
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1996
English translation copyright © Julian Evans, 2017
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street, London SW1W 0NZ
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention
No reproduction without permission
All rights reserved
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–1–910477–28–1
Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books
Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4TD)
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Per Augusta ad angusta
‘You’re going to Switzerland? You should go and see Augusta. She—’
The lights turn green, unleashing a flood of cars that drowns out Getulio’s voice but fails to interrupt him.
‘… recognise her immediately. Quite unchanged, in spite of—’
A cement mixer, its drum revolving as it chews gravel, slows in front of them.
‘… still awfully attractive … you know, I … her grace … her number …’
He pulls a dog-eared visiting card from his coat pocket and reads out a Lugano phone number. Arthur tries to memorise it, unsure if he will remember it an hour from now.
‘Excuse me, must dash,’ Getulio says, raising an odd tweed hat perched on his sugarloaf-shaped skull.
The lights change again, and in three strides he is on the far side of Rue des Saints-Pères. From the opposite pavement he waves a white handkerchief over his head, as if a train was already bearing Arthur away to Switzerland and Ticino. A bus drives between them. When it has passed, the Brazilian has gone, leaving Arthur alone with a phone number that has been so long coming, he isn’t sure he actually wants it any more. Especially not from Getulio.
*
As Arthur walks up Rue des Saints-Pères towards Boulevard Saint-Germain, his mind elsewhere (though not without looking back, half hoping Getulio will reappear behind him and carry on talking about Augusta), the phone number etches itself on his memory and he feels his chest gripped with anxiety. But why? To whom can he say, ‘It’s too late, too much time has passed. There’s no use reopening old wounds’? Not the hurrying Left Bank pedestrians, or the medical students queuing outside a pâtisserie who force him to step off the pavement, which he does, without looking out for traffic. A car brushes p
ast him and its driver yells a volley of insults that make the students giggle. To get himself run over and killed … that would be bitterly ironic, wouldn’t it, twenty years later, when he would have done much better to have died back then, so that he didn’t have to drag around the burden of a failure that still haunts him as an adult, even now.
He makes his way into the restaurant where two signatories from a German bank are expecting him. He likes business: it has taught him how to lie and dissimulate. Bit by bit, a sort of double has been born inside him, a made-up character who serves him remarkably well in his negotiations: a man of few words and a dry manner, who affects a careless inattentiveness while not missing a word of what’s being said, a sober figure, a non-smoker who, in the American style, takes his jacket off to talk in his shirtsleeves, always has a cup of coffee to hand, and switches to first-name terms the moment the deal looks done. ‘That’s not me. It’s not me!’ he says to himself, if he happens to catch sight of himself in a mirror behind the table where he’s sitting. But that ‘me’, his real self, is fading by the day. Does it still exist? If it does, it lies years behind him, a heap of fragments mixed up with the love affairs and illusions of his twenties. And if, very occasionally, in the heat of telling himself yet another lie, that self happens to rise from the ashes, it still carries the scent of Augusta.
Twenty years earlier, in the autumn of 1955, the Queen Mary had been making ready to leave Cherbourg for New York. The crossing normally took no more than four days but on this occasion would take six, the liner calling first at Portsmouth, then at Cork to take on more passengers. The prospect delighted Arthur. At twenty-two, everything was brand new to him, including the touching surprise his mother had prepared for him. Without telling him, she had exchanged his tourist-class cabin (which he would have been perfectly happy with) for a first-class stateroom. He dreaded to think what it must have cost her, she who was so careful, always going without ever since his father had died, so that she could keep up appearances and give Arthur every possible opportunity to be the bearer of her maternal ambitions. His recent award, after a remarkably unchallenging competitive exam, of a scholarship to an American university that specialised in commercial law had made her nurse even more extreme hopes for his future. The first-class cabin had been her reward for his success, but it was way beyond her means, sheer madness really.
There had been another such occasion, when he had been invited to the home of one of his classmates who lived in a big house in Neuilly, and his mother had sold a Japanese fan she had inherited from a distant aunt so that she could buy him a made-to-measure suit. She had silenced his protests, telling him sharply, ‘From now on you’re going to be with the great and the good, so you’d better know how to behave.’ When the day came he had been horrified to discover that the other birthday guests – all fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys and girls – had come in jeans and sweaters. In his blue pinstriped suit, tie and starched collar, a stranger to the way people lived in the city’s smart neighbourhoods, Arthur had died a thousand deaths.
This humiliating memory returned when, at the purser’s office, they handed him to a steward who swept him and his suitcases away to the upper decks while the neighbouring desk was besieged by a ruckus of shouting and swearing emigrants who elbowed their way forwards, stamping on each other’s feet: young Hasidim in frock coats and black felt hats, their faces hidden beneath reddish beards, ringlets in disarray; Italians, much noisier and more cheerful than everyone else; and refugees from central Europe with grey faces, eyes wide with worry, and saying little, mainly concerned to put an ocean between themselves and the hell they had left behind.
How his mother afforded his first-class ticket he never found out, despite repeating the question in almost every letter he wrote her, at least for the first few months. When he insisted, furiously underlining the question, she just wrote back, ‘All I care about is that from now on, you’re among the great and the good.’
As soon as he had unpacked – the liner was still in port, with a six-hour delay that would extend its crossing time by as long – Arthur went in search of the bar. It was deserted. The barman told him he would not be serving drinks till the ship sailed, and Arthur was about to return to his stateroom to escape from the noise in the passageways when a tall American in his fifties with