by Michel Déon
‘You’re unkind and unfair about Antoine. He was my only friend. It makes me happy to know that he got away from you both.’
‘Oh, I know you’ve always had a soft spot for him, and more than ever now you know you’re his grandson.’
Jean thought about this.
‘Actually you’re wrong. It makes me uncomfortable more than anything else. I feel tempted to believe in blood ties now, whereas before it felt like something more noble, an affinity between two men, which is something so rare it doesn’t happen more than once in a lifetime.’
Michel suggested they might agree to differ on the subject of Antoine, without coming to blows. Like a coward, Jean accepted the offered platitude, which got them both out of a situation that left them feeling awkward. They stopped on the forecourt of the Sacré-Cœur, turning their backs on the hideous basilica, looking out over an impassive Paris, a sea of roofs glittering in the cold winter sun. Children were playing on Square Willette and soldiers in green uniforms seated on the steps contemplated the El Dorado of a city below them, which in truth looked from this height like almost any other city, as long as they could not put names to the church steeples, domes and palaces. The absurd Eiffel Tower was the only landmark that wholly reassured them, and perhaps the wavering line of the Seine. Jean pointed, lower down, to Rue Steinkerque and a small bistro there.
‘Second on the left as you go down. I’ll meet you there tomorrow at one. It’s Wednesday. There’ll be black pudding. I hope you like black pudding?’
‘I’ll make do.’
‘See you tomorrow.’
Jean watched him go down Rue Foyatier and disappear, swallowed up by this Paris that succeeded, in so many different ways, in cloaking the most singular individuals in anonymity. He did not hate Michel, he had never hated him despite his deviously spiteful behaviour that had dogged his, Jean’s, childhood, despite all the scorn Michel had poured on him because he had thought, in those days, that he was the gardener’s son. The emotion he felt was simpler than hate: he did not understand him and would never understand such gratuitous and spontaneous spite. Michel had arrived in Paris like a provincial youth greedy for conquests. Perhaps it had not even entered his head that the city might not recognise his talent any more than it had the first time at the Salle Pleyel, on the occasion of his recital accompanied by Francis Poulenc. The audience then had not been able to appreciate his quality. Or had he sensed, from a lack of warmth and despite having a fine baritone voice, that he would never, in that sphere anyway, be in the first division? Painting offered him a second chance in a confused era. He was no less talented an artist than he had been as a singer, but would he again have to be satisfied with a succès d’estime? With music lovers thinking of him as a gifted amateur, and art critics as a talented dilettante?
Jean returned to the gallery. Blanche, sitting on a stool by the door, was observing the comings and goings of the passers-by through the window. Her chapped, reddened hands lay on the shiny cloth of her skirt, stretched tight by her bony knees. Rudolf von Rocroy had not appeared at the gallery for a week. The elation of their first meeting and the success of the first sale had begun to evaporate. That same morning La Garenne had reproached Blanche for not looking after her cousin.
‘The idiot’s buggered off! You didn’t know how to keep hold of him. He’s running around the other galleries now, where they’re robbing him and cheating him. And you, Mademoiselle de Rocroy, don’t care. Quite cynically, you do not give a tinker’s cuss. Telephone him.’
‘I have. He’s never there.’
‘Not there for you, perhaps. Because you’re always talking to him about family: Papa Adhémar, Cousin Godefroy, Aunt Aurore and Grandfather Gonzague. He doesn’t care a fig about your family, you goose. He came to Paris on his own, to enjoy himself. Take him to the Folies-Bergère, find him a girl, go to the Bois de Boulogne at night. Show the old aristo a thing or two …’
‘Me?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t be such a bloody goody-goody.’
Powerless, Blanche suddenly came face to face with her failure to help Louis-Edmond. Instead of taking a lunch break, she walked all the way to the Hôtel Continental to deliver a letter. Would he answer? Jean’s return produced a timid smile.
‘Your visitor is absolutely charming!’ she said. ‘Is he a relation of yours?’
‘My uncle.’
‘So young and already an uncle! Your mother must be very young, then?’
‘Yes, very young.’
‘I’d so like to meet her.’
‘Not much chance of that, at this precise moment. She’s in Lebanon.’
‘In Lebanon? How extraordinary! I’ve got a second cousin there. She must know him. Colonel Pontalet. A colonel in the Foreign Legion. Quite an old scrapper.’
‘Perhaps they’ll meet!’ Jean said kindly, doubtful whether the prince and Geneviève spent any time at all socialising with army officers.
At seven that evening Jean walked into the apartment building on Quai Saint-Michel. The concierge appeared from her stew-ridden lair.
‘You’re Monsieur Arnaud?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Madame Chaminadze has gone away. She left a letter for you.’
‘Gone away?’
‘Yes, gone away. Don’t you understand French?’
‘Yes.’
He took the letter. The concierge did not move, perhaps in the hope that he would open the envelope in front of her and tell her what was in it. She had tried hard to steam it open and had not succeeded. But Jean put the letter in his pocket and went out without hearing her affronted mutter. ‘And not so much as a thank you for it.’
He walked a hundred paces before stopping at an illuminated shop window. His hand was shaking. He felt sick and afraid.
Jean, I have to go away for a few days. Shut your eyes. Don’t try to find me. As soon as I get back I’ll let you know. Loving and kissing you, Claude
‘Already?’ Jesús said when he reappeared at the studio. ‘Hombre! You look like you ’as jus’ been to a funeral. Is you angry?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Ah the bitch!’
‘Just for a few days.’
He held out the letter to Jesús, who held up his arms to heaven.
‘My friend, ’e’s a crazy. Your Claude ’e’s comin’ back. I tell you is true. Is family business.’
‘Do you believe in those sorts of excuses?’
‘Yes, idiot, I do b’lieve. An’ tonight you is dinin’ with me at old Coco’s. She ’as got leg of lamb for us, real lamb.’
‘There’s no such thing as mock lamb.’
‘Shu’ your mouth, you argumentin’ boy.’
The door bell rang. A pretty, slightly over-made-up young woman stood in the doorway. Jesús kissed her and said to Jean, ‘This is Irma.’
He led the woman onto the landing and Jean saw him press a note into her hand. Irma frowned, sulking, but turned away.
‘Why don’t you have dinner with her?’ Jean asked.
‘’Cause I am ’avin’ dinner with my frien’ Jean.’
So Jean learnt that evening that Jesús was his friend.
So many loose ends need to be tied up, the reader will say, if only from time to time. It’s not fair to introduce new characters into a story when the old ones are still alive and kicking. The author feels the same, and he begs forgiveness for this unavoidable chain of events that leaves Jean no time to meet again those who knew him, helped him and loved him in the early part of his life. All we can do is try to keep up with him, hero that he is of this incredible adventure that we call the birth of a man. An adventure that begins all over again when a woman arrives and blots out her predecessors, when all of a sudden events overtake you that before seemed so distant, of concern only to others … those who don’t suffer in their own lives suffer from the infinite, vertigo-inducing distraction of being in love. So no, we shan’t slide into a pointless universalism but will regret and carry on
regretting the fading into the background of so many characters whom Jean, in his discovery of life, is leaving behind, leaving to their emotional (or physical) unhappiness – or even their modest happiness – and will not see again.
So it is with his adoptive father, Albert Arnaud, wounded equally by loneliness, the devastation of his pacifist dreams and of France, by the country’s occupation under those he continues to refer to as ‘the Uhlans’, and by Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s practical initiative to plant cabbages, carrots and potatoes where there should have been rhododendron beds, azaleas and oriental flowering cherries. Perhaps his reaction was absurd and disproportionate, but let us reflect for a moment on the kind of existence Albert Arnaud had had: a childhood and adolescence that was far from well-off, a coming of age at a local brothel and then marriage to a kind and generous woman who nevertheless could hardly be said to have lived her life with a deep sense of romance. Then had come the four years of the Great War and the loss of his leg at the bottom of a muddy shell-hole. The unexpected arrival of the baby Jean had swiftly turned into a mixed blessing, as Albert had watched his adopted son grow up with the children from La Sauveté, Michel and Antoinette du Courseau, and privately felt that nothing good could come of it. He sensed, not without reason, that Jean would be happy neither at home nor with the du Courseaus, tugged in two directions by different worlds that would both reject him as a hybrid, belonging to neither. And Jean would certainly not become a gardener.
Albert’s accumulated knowledge – his only capital – that he would have liked to bequeath to the boy, Jean did not want. In any case, he did not have green fingers: whenever he planted something, it almost never turned out well. So let us not mock Albert’s disappointment when, instead of his flowers, he sees vegetables growing, and let us compare him to a man who has spent his life reading and suddenly finds himself in a universe purged of books. Without twisting words and their meaning, let us say that flowers are his culture. Without flowers, existence lacks the one gratuitous element that justifies it: the creation of beauty. They are his poetry, the thoughts he can’t manage to articulate, the pictures he dreams of and that the earth has given him, perfect and complete, the symbols of a world of exquisite grace.
Jean had not wanted flowers, or political ideas; instead, in 1939 he had enlisted. Albert had felt deeply wounded and the wound had been, in the larger sense of destiny, like a denial of justice. The abbé Le Couec’s patient explanations were to no avail. The facts were there. Albert did not reproach Jean. His elevated and democratic notion of individual liberty forbade it. Adoptive father and adopted son will not see one another again. Jean writes phrases of such banality that even he finds them depressing. From Antoinette, their go-between, he gets conventional answers: ‘Your father’s in good health and hopes you are too.’ She faithfully writes down these sentences, adding as a PS, ‘He’s sad, grumpy, stoical and never smiles.’
When Jean finally has an opportunity to travel to Grangeville, it happens to be on 19 August 1942, the morning a commando unit of Cameron Highlanders from Winnipeg lands at the foot of the cliffs, slips between the German bunkers and reaches the village. At Puys and on the esplanade at Dieppe the remaining commando units are pinned down by the German defences. But at Grangeville and a little further south, at the Pointe d’Ailly lighthouse, Lord Lovat’s No 4 Commando at the foot of the cliff – at the spot where Antoinette first showed Jean her bottom – and the Cameron Highlanders have met no resistance. They blow up a coastal artillery battery, the one placed in the former garden of Captain Duclou, Jeanne Arnaud’s uncle, and for a time their advance is practically a victory parade as they hand out cigarettes and sweets, pat children’s cheeks and then, joining up with the South Saskatchewan Regiment which has surrounded Pourville without succeeding in taking it, return to their landing craft. Albert is at the roadside. He recognises the khaki uniforms and the soldiers in their tin hats.
His memories of 1914 are like a lump in his throat. Forgetting his neutrality, he limps as fast as he can towards them, waving his arms to stop them turning onto a path where a Wehrmacht patrol is lying in wait. German and Canadian bullets riddle his body, easily a hundred or more, for no one counts the bullets when they’re waging war. Let us merely record that when it is over, there is nothing left of Albert. The pieces of him are collected with a fork and spade and tipped into a sack.
Jean is turned back at Rouen without explanation. He nevertheless manages to get through to Antoinette by telephone and from her learns that Albert, according to his oft-expressed wish, has been buried without a religious service. The ceremony is attended only by the du Courseaus, Captain Duclou, stunned and muttering and making no sense, Monsieur Cliquet who repeats over and over again, ‘That’s what happens to pacifists’, and the abbé Le Couec, who is wearing an ordinary suit so as not to disturb his friend’s soul’s rest but who, through the long night that follows, will pray for him at the foot of the altar. It is all over for Albert, and we shall miss him. He will no longer pitch his stubborn ideas against an unreliable and inconstant world in which men and women of his ancient stamp have no place. A little of France as she once was has been extinguished with his passing.
And while we are on the subject of the dead, let us mention too that a year earlier, in the summer of 1941, the prince slipped away at Beirut. That enigmatic figure simply stopped breathing one night. At dawn his secretary/chauffeur/right-hand man, Salah, bent over him to wake him up. He lightly touched the hand that lay on the sheet, and it was cold. The prince was a wax statue, his papery yellow skin stretched over a bony mask. He was buried according to the rites of his religion, and that afternoon friends gathered at Geneviève’s. She displayed impressive dignity. Perhaps she was already aware of what the prince’s will contained. She had inherited a substantial fortune, but not its management. Salah with his dark complexion was stepping into the light, and there were those who murmured spitefully, in Beirut as in Alexandria, that he was now more than merely Geneviève’s legal representative, which was untrue. And she herself was at risk. Lebanon’s climate did not suit her. She felt she needed to get to Switzerland, which, despite her possessing influential contacts, looked to be almost impossible, and it took her until December 1941 to make it happen and find her way to a small village in Valais, hidden away in the mountains, called Gstaad, where she rented the first floor of a modest country hotel.
As for the famous letter given to Jean by the prince before the outbreak of war, it remains unopened. To be honest, Jean attaches no importance to it, and the only person to suspect its true value is Palfy. Which is, one imagines, why his first question when he arrives in Paris on Christmas Eve of 1940 is, ‘Have you still got the letter?’
Jean is no longer even very sure where he has put it, and it has to be said that at that moment it is the least of his worries. Claude left him the day before, and he has not yet got over this latest sudden twist of fate. During the night Jesús and he have polished off a bottle of calvados between them, a present in a parcel from Antoinette. Waking up has been exceptionally painful and there is no respite: here is Constantin Palfy, knocking at the door in an elegant grey flannel suit.
‘You’re my first port of call,’ he says. ‘You look like death warmed up. I bring you “real” coffee and “real” croissants. Everything is real!’
‘Even me, who’s a real idiot.’
‘Ah, delectatio morosa … that is you all over, my dear Jean.’
Jesús was no more awake than Jean but glimpsed, standing behind Palfy on the landing, the girl who had come to pose for him. She was called Josette and had generous breasts, and portraits of her in outrageous style already furnished the rooms of several German officers and their most bountiful dreams.
‘Not today, Josette! Is the wrong time …’
She cried and he pressed a note into her hand, a remedy he considered, not without justification, to work very effectively whenever disappointment manifested itself. Once Josette was gone, they boiled water
for ‘real’ coffee, which they drank with ‘real’ warm croissants. Palfy, finding it hard to sit still, went to the window. Paris was enveloped in a purifying cold, its roofs covered in frost in the clear light of the end of December. A city unlike all others, whose gentle blue and pink breath misted the windows and broke up the sun’s rays.
‘You’re not about to say, “It’s between you and me now!” are you?’ Jean said.
‘Don’t worry. Not a bad idea, though.’
‘Is it all thanks to Madeleine that you got your permit to cross the demarcation line?’
‘Of course! The dear girl. She’s complaining that she never sees you. We saw her last night. Marceline’s very impressed with her.’
‘Marceline?’
‘Ah yes, you didn’t know … Marceline Michette.’
‘The patronne at the Sirène?’
‘So what?’
‘You’re not going to tell me you’re shacking up with the patronne of a brothel now?’
‘No, you ninny! Zizi’s the one I’m after …’
Jean tried to remember the foxy, mocking features of the redheaded Zizi at the Sirène, apparently Palfy’s sort of girl.
‘What about … Marceline’s husband?’
‘Taken prisoner, dear boy! Bravely falling back to Perpignan, his regiment left him behind. There are, sadly, some colonels not worthy of being called the father of their regiment. Now our dear sergeant-major is atoning for France’s sins. Let us salute a warrior and a gentleman. Monsieur Michette! A hero! Not to mention his wife, who yearns to serve her country. Her talents cannot be allowed to lie fallow. In Paris there’ll be no stopping her.’
Jesús poured himself more coffee.
‘The best I ’ave ever drunk!’ he said. ‘This war ’as got to be made to las’.’
‘We’re working on it in high places,’ Palfy assured him. ‘And what about dear Claude? Are you still seeing her?’