by Michel Déon
In his mouth the word ‘pleasure’ sounded so obscene that no one could doubt its meaning, and yet Michel merely intended to indicate how much the slightest distraction harmed his sense of himself as a Christian artist. Jean no longer had any illusions as to the state of mystical constipation in which his youthful uncle lived, but his complex personality, afflicted by some internal curse, and his increasing sanctimoniousness, combined with a talent that was going from strength to strength, made this unusual artist a subject for contemplation by Jean in his gradual understanding of his fellow human beings. At heart he felt that the distinction between Palfy’s cynicism and Michel’s unctuousness was minimal, and if he preferred the Palfian outlook by a long way, it was only because of its innate sense of humour. Between Michel and Alberto there orbited, like a Cartesian diver, the figure of La Garenne, whose gallery on Place du Tertre, reopened by an Aryan of impeccable credentials, now sold sunsets over beached fishing boats, cows drinking from a pool, unequivocal subjects that everyone could respond to. La Garenne, half tolerated, lived a marginal existence selling Alberto’s pornographic photographs on the sly, extracting small commissions from the distribution of copies executed by his company of painters down on their luck, fencing the odd picture here and there, keeping for himself a few rare works offloaded by real or phoney policemen who pillaged abandoned Jewish-owned apartments, and amassing, by means of loud lamentation, tears and hands clasped in despair, a fortune that he will never be able to enjoy. A multimillionaire at the Liberation, within a week he will find himself imprisoned at Drancy while the FFI empty his hiding places and distribute among themselves the gold, Picassos and objets d’art piled up in his garret in Rue de la Gaîté. In short, and even though he scarcely counts as a footnote in such a murky era, natural justice will take its course for La Garenne more harshly than he really deserves, making a scapegoat of him, without pity.
When he first encountered La Garenne at Michel’s studio, Jean wondered what could have brought together two such radically different beings. The truth was that Michel, disoriented by his move to Paris and hardly knowing his way around, had taken up with La Garenne as a guide, knowing nothing of his racketeering. The dealer had summed him up at a glance, put him in touch with Alberto by renting the apartment beneath him, and steered him towards a gallery that guaranteed his new agent a percentage.
‘I’m working for the future!’ Louis-Edmond had told Jean. ‘Your friend is greatly talented. I shall help him, even if I have to ruin myself in the process.’
He was not ruining himself, but at present was making little profit from Michel, who still had a provincial’s sense of thrift. So either at Alberto’s or Michel’s La Garenne would find a couch and a screen where he could lay his weary body in privacy when his long expeditions around Paris took him far from Rue de la Gaîté.
‘He’s repulsive, I grant you,’ Michel said to Jean, ‘but he has ideas, and Christian charity requires that we must not abandon him at such a time. There is no soul that is completely lost. He sometimes asks me extraordinary questions about salvation and grace. I sense that you’re hostile because you knew him at a time when he was brought low by a woman. This Blanche has been the great curse of his life. Without his mother whom, alas, I didn’t know, a real angel of mercy, of kindness and pity, whose name alone is sublime – Mercedes del Loreto; Loreto where the angels transported the humble abode of the Virgin Mary – without that sublime being he would have sunk into utter wretchedness. Beware women, Jean. There are Blanche de Rocroys everywhere. I don’t need you to tell me that you have a tendency to give yourself up to the pleasures of the senses. You should tread very carefully. A man can only be fulfilled in chastity …’
And are the boys provided by Alberto Senzacatso part of your scheme of chastity? Jean wanted to ask. But he did not. Michel, wrapped in himself, would have been so discombobulated by the question that Jean preferred just to listen to him, with a hypocrisy equal to that of Michel himself. In any case, who cared! There was no doubting his sincerity when he sermonised like this. Despite their past and their childhood when they had hated each other, Jean retained a scrap of affection for the du Courseaus, who had had such a profound influence on him; and remained fascinated too, like an entomologist, by that insect La Garenne and his breathtaking nerve, fooling everyone so completely for a time. Poor Blanche! And she was still trying to help the scoundrel who, not content with humiliating her, was now dragging her name through the mud.
*
In March Antoinette came to Paris for a few days. At twenty-seven, in the eyes of the world in which she lived, she was already an old maid, only fit to be married to a widower with children who would accept her for her dowry if there was one and would close his eyes to a scandalous past. Antoinette brought butter, two chickens killed the previous day and some pâté made by her mother for Michel. Of the gaiety and carelessness that had once enlivened her face, there was no longer any trace in her insipid features. Dressed in black and wearing the sort of felt hat beloved by ladies of good works, she looked older than her years. Her mother had imposed mourning on her for her Mangepain uncle, suddenly departed after an excessively good meal with the Germans, to whom the former radical socialist and freemason had been a most faithful vassal in an obscure pact of collaboration. Oppressed by an absurd observance that meant nothing to her, Antoinette’s youth had vanished. Jean hardly recognised her, yet their last meeting had only been in 1939, two and a half years earlier, an interval that at their ages should have meant nothing. Perhaps at Yssingeaux, when she had come to tell him that he was Geneviève’s son, he had already noticed the first signs of her vitality fading. That day he had desired her, but everything had become impossible with the sudden shift in what was right and wrong, and they had gone their separate ways, sad and disappointed in each other, frozen by inhibition. Antoinette’s arrival in Paris in March 1942 was a serious shock to him. The restraint, humility and awkwardness of the provincial woman in a capital city that frightened her, despite its state of calm and near torpor, robbed him of the happy images of his childhood, of the discovery of love, the scene at the cliff when she had shown him her pretty, plump bottom and the melancholy, tender last night in a Dieppe hotel before his departure for England. He could not believe that this woman in flat-heeled shoes, cotton stockings, and without make-up had inspired in him the first passion of his life. Close to her, he sought in vain the smell of the beaches where they had caressed each other, the barns where they had kissed and fumbled, and the dream of their first night together, when they had made love in almost every room at La Sauveté. Life had swiftly worn Antoinette down, leaving its mark on her once irresistible features. She had started to look like her mother, though she would never inherit Marie-Thérèse du Courseau’s character. Women’s lives and men’s march to the beat of different drums. Beauty – strictly speaking, Antoinette had never been beautiful but she had radiated health and a love of pleasure – beauty fades too fast and exposes its blemishes, while in men the same blemishes are taken for signs of character. Jean had felt none of time’s ravages. His discovery of its hold over Antoinette in the space of just a few years was sudden and disagreeable.
The news she brought from Grangeville seemed to come from another country. Albert Arnaud, ill-resigned to growing vegetables, was dragging his leg and grumbling more than speaking; his cousin, Monsieur Cliquet, with whom he was still living, was conducting (with such a mysterious air that it was transparent) a secret campaign on the railways, where he had gone back to working as an interpreter-auxiliary for the German railway workers; Captain Duclou had built a home-made radio and hidden an aerial in the anemometer in his garden to receive the BBC’s French service broadcasts and pass on their news to the village; the Longuets increasingly believed themselves to have been born de La Sauveté; Monsieur Longuet, having reinvented himself as a civil engineer, had signed a contract with the Todt organisation to build bunkers up and down the coast. Thanks to him, there was not a man left unemployed in
the neighbourhood, although work appeared to be far from the chief ambition of his son Gontran, who had just married a Mademoiselle de Beausein (the ‘de’ was as doubtful as it gets) from the Rouen bourgeoisie; she had already had visiting cards printed bearing the name ‘Baronne L. de La Sauveté’; the Marquis de Malemort, released from his oflag with a group of other farmers and outraged by this act of usurpation, had insulted Gontran after Mass; the gendarmes, acting on a complaint from the Longuets, had threatened to send him back to his prison camp but he had thrown them out with such aristocratic finality that nothing more was heard of the affair; Chantal was working with her father – Jean wouldn’t recognise her: heavier all round, ruddy, foul-mouthed as a trooper, the last of the Malemorts downed her calvados with all the assurance of the marquis; and the abbé Le Couec, more destitute than ever and fed by the measured charity of his farmers, travelled the countryside on foot, dispensing the one asset in which he was rich, a saintly generosity: people said he was a member of the Breton Liberation Party but at the same time hid Allied airmen shot down over France and guided them to a secret organisation that repatriated them to Britain.
Jean wondered whether, apart from what concerned his adoptive father and the dear abbé, these pieces of news still had any meaning for him. That world was no longer his, and never would be again. He had bid it farewell the day he had challenged it and fled to Paris with Chantal de Malemort. He no longer had a refuge there and he was sufficiently wise now not ever to want to see Chantal again. Even Antoinette bored him a little by reminding him of the milieu in which he had lived. He found her drab and lifeless, far from his own preoccupations; he took her to the theatre where she was mystified by Giraudoux, and to the Opéra where she fell asleep during a ballet. They talked about Michel, whom she admired as a man about Paris, without a hint of irony. He became annoyed with her for her awkwardness that tarnished his picture of the past. Yes, he was shedding his baggage or, to put it another way, he was discovering his solitude, the daunting wasteland in which he would have found himself if it had not been for Nelly. He would have liked to talk to Antoinette about the young woman who had given his life so much colour, about Claude who had sunk so deep into the darkness. But it was easier to say nothing, and those withheld confidences separated him from the woman who had been his first love.
He went with her to Gare Saint-Lazare. On the platform neither of them knew what to say. Antoinette put her cardboard suitcase up in the luggage rack and rested her arms on the open window.
‘I’m happy to have seen you again, looking so well,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Same here.’
‘You won’t forget?’
‘We don’t forget anything.’
She still hesitated.
‘I do! I forgot to tell you I met one of your old friends, Joseph Outen. He’s been released from his stalag. He asked for news of you.’
‘What’s he doing?’
She put a finger to her lips. Jean knew she had not forgotten to tell him about Joseph. She had not dared. German soldiers smelling strongly of leather and coarse cloth passed behind him, looking for their reserved carriage. Antoinette followed them with her eyes.
‘Come closer,’ she said.
He went closer, and she held out her hand. He squeezed it.
‘He’s full of odd qualities,’ she added with unexpected warmth. ‘He’s interested in all sorts of things. He’s learning English at the moment …’
‘He was learning Chinese once too.’
‘Oh, that’s all over … A youthful mistake. English is more useful for what he’s doing now.’
She put on a knowing look. The platform staff were slamming the doors.
‘It looks as if the train will leave on time. Monsieur Cliquet will be happy.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Joseph I’ve seen you. He was worried about you. He’s always saying how talented you are and that you were the best oarsman at Dieppe Rowing Club. He told me to tell you that you should take up yoga, like him. I don’t really understand what all the exercises are about, but apparently it helps concentrate your mind …’
At the last minute she was confessing what she had not dared to admit since she had arrived: that in Joseph Outen she might have found a last hope. Jean was moved and reproached himself for not having helped her.
‘You should come to Dieppe,’ she said. ‘You get on so well together. He has big plans …’
All his life Joseph would have big plans, which would fail one after another. Now it was Antoinette’s turn to be on the receiving end of his fervour. Her face lit up because she was talking about him. He was probably waiting for her at Dieppe, where they saw each other in secret. Antoinette would only ever have guilty love affairs. The finger on her lips, the knowing look meant that Joseph had got himself involved in clandestine activity, that he was riding a new hobbyhorse. But he was not up to it, and it would beat him the way he had been beaten by his previous enterprises. Poor Antoinette! The widower and his children would be waiting at the end of the line.
The train began to move.
‘I’ll come,’ he said. ‘This summer. Definitely.’
He walked beside the carriage. Antoinette was smiling and crying at the same time. Their fingertips touched. Jean stopped and soon saw only an arm and a hand waving a handkerchief. The reader already knows that there was no return to Dieppe in the summer of 1942, when the Canadians landed. Jean did not see his adoptive father again. As for Joseph, it is the author’s turn to know more than the reader and to anticipate the story. The former bookseller, who has had no further impact on Jean’s life after being his first mentor, has resurfaced in his mind almost by accident, one afternoon on a station platform. Yes, he is Antoinette’s lover. Flimsy, furtive encounters that only bring them, because of their blindness, a brief elation that disguises a reality both mediocre and without a future. Lacking any experience, Joseph has set up an intelligence network that he has christened, with some pomp, Light and Truth. The network is composed of amateurs whose best weapons are faith and naivety. Each day Monsieur Cliquet provides a breakdown of the German convoys bringing equipment and troops to the Normandy coast. The Allies will take no account of this information that summer and find themselves massacred quite unnecessarily. Aside from Monsieur Cliquet, transport expert, the network’s other members know no more than Madame Michette, but Marceline is supervised, used by professionals whom she obeys as only women who wield authority themselves know how to obey. Joseph’s team, knowing nothing about secrecy, take grossly innocent risks that for six months produce a number of results. With the disaster of the butchered Canadians, Joseph learns his lesson. The Allied high command has refused to listen. In disgust he decides to dismantle his network. But it is too late. A woman has been arrested by chance. Within minutes she provides the names of the entire Light and Truth network.
Monsieur Cliquet dies in the carriage taking him to Germany and Joseph is deported with his companions, apart from the woman who so kindly betrayed them and who is then turned to work for the Sicherheitsdienst. As he already speaks German and knows the conditions in the camps, Joseph survives; the only one. At the end of May 1945 he is repatriated and parades through Dieppe with other former prisoners in their striped uniforms under a banner that reads, ‘Never again!’, a declaration all believe in, until the moment the world is covered in new concentration camps which humankind’s finer feelings this time forbid it from describing in such terms.
But Joseph has come back too late. The scramble for the spoils is over. The gluttons have scoffed the lot; the jobs are all taken and Antoinette has married Pierre du Gros-Salé, a squire from thereabouts, a widower as we foresaw with six children who need to have their arses wiped and their noses blown and be brought up without, of course, displaying a scrap of gratitude. Joseph is a decent man. He will not bother her. His consolation prize is a post as tutor at Dieppe’s lycée. For a moment he believes himself to be a guide to young souls to be moulded, but rapidly
discovers that they are frightful brats who like to mock his skeletal thinness, imitate the lisp he acquired when the Gestapo knocked all his teeth out and which he cannot afford to fix because he has no money for dentures, and make fun of his ugly demob suits and hollow, hacking cough. So he leaves, for black Africa where he has discovered that his status as ‘resistant and deportee’ is enough to earn him a headmastership. Here he feels for a time that he is contributing to the radiance of France and introducing its values to the young and awakening intelligences of his pupils. It does not take him long to realise that this too is a mirage. The ‘young, awakening intelligences’ are only interested in kicking him out, him and his radiant France. He will die stupidly in Douala in 1956 from a scorpion bite, mourned by his companion, a pretty Fula woman with copper-coloured skin who has given him a daughter they christened Antoinette. Exit Joseph, whose life is remarkable in one respect, that it is as touching and insignificant as it is a failure from start to finish. In short, he is one of those beings from whom those of a superstitious bent do well to keep their distance: he brings bad luck, and worse, poor man’s bad luck. He himself realises it in the few minutes before he dies, in one of those dazzling visions the grim reaper apparently allows, like a condemned man’s last drink. Lucid at the finish, he is relieved to slip away. His daughter, his honey-coloured baby, is brought to him and he smiles at her but refuses to kiss her, for fear of contaminating her with his bad luck. His precaution is wise: at the age of twenty, named model of the year in New York, Antoinette Outen will marry Peter Kapp III, heir to the fashion stores that bear his name. At the time of writing, after three months of marriage she has divorced and is making her first film. There lies the proof: Joseph Outen’s life was not completely pointless.
I hear you say that this is a long digression about characters who, in this second part of Jean’s life, no longer play any part. Yet a tree only grows if one prunes it. Two branches have been cut. Jean is still not truly free, he still has new steps to take, but he already knows the value of these symbolic separations. When one is no longer tempted to lean on anyone, the future takes on a sweet taste of adventure. Driven by necessity, he has set out on a hard path, and that is our subject now. Do I mean the gallery in Rue La Boétie? No. We shall barely refer to that any more than the production company where Jean spent a few lacklustre months working for Émile Duzan. He has a handsome office and two salesmen, both experts on the Impressionist period. His clientele is mainly composed of a particular group of nouveaux riches that in times of scarcity thrive on other people’s misery. The black market is the only economic force in France. It controls everything. But money earned too fast by those who have been hard up burns a hole in their pocket. No one is taken in by the fiction of price controls. The new rich no longer keep the money launderers in business. They invest in haste in reliable commodities: paintings, gold, objets d’art, jewellery, property. Easy to dupe and flatter, like those drunk with rapid social success they step delightedly into an antique dealer’s or a private gallery, talk headily in hints and whispers with a moneychanger, or visit a chateau for sale. You see them driving in cars, taking the sought-after places in the few sleeping cars still operating on the main lines, lunching and dining in restaurants whose supply chains the economic police turn a blind eye to, because the other half of their clientele is German. In fact a large-scale and still hardly noticeable revolution is taking place. France is being transformed because wealth is changing hands; a class of owners is disappearing, gradually ruined, selling its traditional possessions, lovingly amassed and preserved from generation to generation, and another class is taking its place, vast, infatuated, its pockets filled with cash, over-made-up, its women dripping with costume jewellery. There wafts around this new category of French citizens an atmosphere of happiness and self-confidence that provokes endless supplicants to line up and cadge a favour or money. Jean sees it all, indeed had observed its beginnings before the war at the time of Antoine du Courseau’s sale of La Sauveté to the Longuets. He watches and says nothing. It is not his job to mix with the customers. If he were to listen to them, he would be unable to stop himself from throwing them out, these philistines snapping up a Bonnard because the subject is a nude next to her bathtub (‘for our bathroom, darling, don’t you think, over the bath’), a Matisse (‘it’ll amuse the children’), a Renoir (‘for my wife, she does love her roses’). He has been put there to certify transactions that benefit a clique whose names he affects not to be aware of. At its head stand Palfy, Rudolf, Julius. He lends his name and will be the one who pays if anything goes wrong. He knows it, but at the end of the month there is the cheque that just covers the bills for the clinic where Claude lies sedated. We shall return to Claude. She is there, she exists, from time to time Jean can see her, gaze back at her heavy, imploring eyes, kiss her warm mouth. She does not know, she will never know, he swears to himself, what he has got himself involved in to bring her back to life. Before we do, we must speak of the other business proposed by Palfy, and of Jean’s first journey.