The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  ‘Jules-who, you’re mocking me.’

  They skirmished gently and rolled onto the couch. He saw her in Suréna as a Eurydice so passionate he felt she was talking to him, the only spectator in a full house. In the dress circle, between acts, he glimpsed Marceline Michette craning forward, an ecstatic smile on her lips. Having given Nelly her cues for so long, she was starting to think she was part of the company.

  In March 1943 Jean passed through Lyon and met his instructor.

  ‘You’ve been very useful,’ that precise man told him. ‘We can use you a little more effectively now that your probationary period is over. Do you speak German?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you know a number of Germans.’

  ‘They all spoke French.’

  ‘I suppose you haven’t seen any of them for some time.’

  ‘Since you ask, no. I’m rather keen on staying alive.’

  ‘Do they all feel the same about you?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘You couldn’t regain the trust of any of them?’

  ‘Definitely not, but … wait … I do know a German woman, the girlfriend of a friend of mine.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She works in an important organisation in Paris. I don’t know what exactly, but I should think she’s more than a secretary. She has a good deal of freedom and she even has a car …’

  A week later he was at Gif with Jesús, who was repairing the roof after a tree had fallen on it.

  ‘Jean, you is Providence itself. ’Old my ladder.’

  They talked for an hour, Jesús on the roof, Jean holding the ladder. Laura no longer returned every night. Petrol was running short. She stayed only from Saturday morning to Sunday evening. Jesús invited Jean to stay until she came. She would be very happy to see him; well, ‘happy’ was a figure of speech, for she showed her feelings as little as ever. Jesús felt that she lived with the constant memory of her brother’s death in Russia.

  ‘She’s comin’ tomorrow. ’Ave a walk. Go and see your Claude.’

  Claude was no longer at the clinic. He saw Dr Bertrand.

  ‘Madame Chaminadze was getting much better recently. She was well enough to leave with her mother and her uncle. I think they went to the country. You wouldn’t have recognised her. Her expression had relaxed – she was still prone to having that distant look in her eyes, but that’s understandable; she has some way to go. The affection of her mother and uncle had boosted her confidence.’

  ‘You can’t tell me where they are?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. You understand that because of her husband …’

  ‘Yes, I know. And what do you make of the uncle?’

  ‘A character … Anyway, I see enough of them to say that this one looked benign to me. He has a great fondness for his niece.’

  ‘So I see.’

  Jean was not unhappy. Claude belonged to the past. He was resolved to forget her, to forget Cyrille’s small hand in his. The following day Laura enlightened him.

  ‘She left three months ago. You wouldn’t have recognised the bearded man from the forest. Love transformed him. Washed, shaved, very presentable. Not afraid any more. He’s still careful though: they’ve moved into a house he bought for her.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I know where. But don’t you think it’s preferable for you not to know?’

  She was right. Even so, he was so close to the truth, it hurt him not to know it in its entirety. Common sense dictated that he should avoid causing himself pain. Otherwise one day he would be overwhelmed by sadness, gripped by a desire to see Claude, and he would be unable to resist.

  He had another conversation with Laura in which he took the risk of admitting to her what he was looking for.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for this opportunity for a long time,’ she said, looking him in the eye.

  ‘You can have me arrested.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it because of your brother that you’re willing to help me?’

  ‘Yes. You can count on me.’

  ‘Betrayal doesn’t scare you? You’re betraying Germany.’

  ‘No. Not the real Germany.’

  ‘The risks—’

  ‘I’ll take them. Like you. My only condition is that Jesús mustn’t know anything.’

  The short man in glasses was so pleased that he left his Lyon refuge to meet Jean at Fontainebleau. They walked along a bridle path in the forest that the instructor knew every inch of. Occasionally he bent down to move a stone aside or pick up a bramble or a piece of paper that could frighten a horse. Jean concluded that his companion had been a cavalry officer, but found it difficult to imagine him riding at a hard gallop or jumping obstacles: he seemed too cautious, not athletic enough. Then he remembered someone once saying in his hearing, ‘The officers of the Cadre Noir,33 when not in uniform, all look like worried notaries, and the NCOs look like their clerks.’

  So the short man in glasses had been a cavalry officer. He retained the ramrod-straight posture.

  ‘Jules, I don’t know when we shall see each other again. Perhaps never. A possibility we must never lose sight of. But with God’s help …’

  He crossed himself.

  ‘… with God’s help I shall watch over your future when the victory is won. We shall have to change our rhythm and make a difficult adaptation to peace, normal existence, and our real names. I’ve almost forgotten mine, which was too complicated in any case, and which I shall simplify if I get the chance …’

  He must have had a double-barrelled name, a source of family pride and the butt of jokes he could no longer bear.

  ‘… I don’t know yours either. Jules … it’s unusual. One hardly ever hears it these days. Who gave you the idea?’

  ‘An actress who liked to make fun of me.’

  ‘Yes, Jules makes people smile because of “pinching Jules’s ear”34 and a popular song that turned “Jules” into a synonym for “bloke” …’

  ‘Bloke’ was a word he did not use very often, pronouncing it with an affectedly proletarian accent.

  ‘We only notice those superficial details – name, rank, decorations, address, social standing. They all belie real friendships. I’m beginning to feel a genuine fondness for you, Jules, almost as if you were my son, which you could be, as I’m now fifty years old. After the war we shall lead very different lives from those we knew before the hostilities. I believe – I hope – that men will be more brotherly. Many of us feel that clandestine activity will lead to a political, moral and spiritual revolution. The word “revolution” frightens me a little. The truth is, I’m a traditionalist and a monarchist. I say “monarchist” because it’s a bit more general than “royalist”. My mentor, Charles Maurras, instilled anti-Germanism in me from my adolescence onwards. I’ve followed his teaching to the letter, although today I tend to think that Maurrassian anti-Germanism could have been more understanding and less virulent after the armistice in 1918, and by contrast ought to be more hardline now, during this occupation. I occasionally glimpse my old mentor in Lyon. He doesn’t know me, so I stop to watch him hesitantly, deafly crossing Rue de la République in that big cream-coloured coat of his, its pockets stuffed with books and newspapers. He’s still indomitable. I don’t think he’d criticise what I’m doing now, whatever he writes about it. Perhaps he doesn’t quite grasp the devastation of the men of my generation. But even if we can’t follow him in everything, he’s still, with Bainville, the only political thinker who saw the resurgence of Germany and the Nazis’ alliance with the Communists. His warnings were useless. Now we must triumph or die …’

  Jean was struck by the simple tone of this unpretentious man, who ran his network with professorial seriousness and left nothing to chance. He was filled with admiration for his discretion and his leadership, and his willingness to open his soul to a near stranger. In the months that followed, they saw each other regularly at different locations, walking together in woods and parks,
like two philosophers keeping each other informed about the evolution of their thoughts after they had exchanged the information Jean had received from Laura and Jean’s own next orders.

  In early August 1944 they met in Paris. The network had suffered two heavy blows, but the strict separation imposed by its chief had avoided a catastrophe. The final days of the occupation had been less uncomfortable than might have been expected. Marceline told Jean of Julius’s execution. Madeleine had vanished with Blanche. Palfy, now married to Geneviève, was already in Switzerland, his new fortune safe. The Théâtre Français had closed. Nelly was idle at home. Jean joined her. In the evenings they lingered on her balcony. Shadows hugged the walls. The Germans, barricaded in the Palais du Luxembourg, fired salutes that shook the area like a firework display. The telephone kept working, by some aberration, and people called each other all the time to pass on news. Nelly opened her mother’s last preserves: confit d’oie, duck pâté à l’armagnac, truffle salads, smoked eels. She started riding a bicycle, bare-legged and wearing a big beribboned hat, and came home with strange snippets of information: there was not a gram of caviar left in the expensive districts; there were only milk calves to be had at La Villette; all the children had pimples; the Café Weber was the secret command post of the Resistance; the Eiffel Tower was closed to visitors; at the Cherche-Midi prison the warders had asked the prisoners to protect them from possible reprisals; General de Gaulle, leading a commando unit, had liberated Champigny-sur-Marne himself and had a lunch of fried roach in an open-air café with General Eisenhower. Lovely, happy and free, Nelly invented stories with abandon. It was fine and hot. The days were long. People lived very well with an hour of gas and six hours of electricity a day. Jean raided Nelly’s library and discovered a German poet called Rilke whom she recited to him, standing up, wrapped only in a sheet.

  ‘I live, and at that instant the century turns.

  One feels the wind from an enormous leaf,

  one of God’s and your and my written sheaf

  that on high in foreign hands revolves.

  One feels the radiance of a brand-new page

  on which everything can still become.

  ‘How appropriate that is, and from a German too.’

  One morning Laura telephoned from her office. Her department was moving out. Trucks were being loaded with the archives, under the protection of an armoured car. Jean dashed to the Étoile to find her. Alone in the square, she watched the procession of green vehicles moving out of the 16th arrondissement, heading east.

  ‘It’s a rout, Jean. I’m going to try not to follow and reach Gif on foot. They’re saying the Chevreuse valley has been liberated. I’m afraid for Jesús. Recently people have been turning their back on him, because of me.’

  Jean was a better judge of the situation than she was.

  ‘You’ll make things worse. Don’t go. I’ll talk to the chief and you come straight over to Nelly’s, but for heaven’s sake not in uniform.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything else.’

  ‘Go to a shop now and buy something.’

  She reached Place Saint-Sulpice at the end of the day, wearing a raincoat over her uniform. Nelly gave her something to wear. The short man in glasses came to fetch her and took her to stay at his command post.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude, but my powers are becoming limited. I thought I was the only one in the Resistance but I’m discovering that there are thousands, millions of us.’

  Marceline, who was now constantly at his side, added,

  ‘At setting out we were five hundred, but being speedily reinforced

  We saw ourselves three thousand on arriving at the port.’

  ‘Yes, Madame Michette, your quotation could not be more apt. Three thousand just seems to me to be something of an underestimate. We are living literature. Your passion for Corneille reminds me of my youth. The theatre of moral nobility! It’s certainly the moment for it. We shall badly need it …’

  With Laura safe, Jean began to worry about Jesús. Borrowing a bicycle, he cycled to Gif with a safe-conduct in his pocket for his friend, whom he found, as anticipated, a prisoner of the FTP,35 locked in a barn with twenty other ‘traitors’. The safe-conduct was no magic wand. Three colonels wearing new braid discussed interning Jean. Fortunately the telephone worked. They called Paris. The messenger’s credentials were confirmed, and he was able to go to a devastated Jesús.

  ‘To me! To me, a Spanish man! Jean, you saved my life. Where is Laura?’

  ‘Safe. She was very worried about you.’

  The local maquis controlled communications and vanished when a German convoy passed through. Jesús was given a hunting rifle. He was guarding the mairie by the time Jean reached Paris again, exhausted. At the beginning of September in Les Lettres Françaises he stumbled on an article devoted to two great painters of the Communist resistance: Pablo Picasso and Jesús Infante. There was talk of an exhibition. A photo in L’Humanité showed Laura kissing Picasso and described Jesús as a former Republican fighter living in exile.

  Jean appreciated the honour. From the cell in which they had been ten men scratching, moping, exchanging their life stories, passing on rumours and hearsay, imagining Paris ablaze and the armies of Field Marshal von Rundstedt regaining the offensive and driving the Allies back into the Atlantic, he had been moved to solitary confinement. Through the cell bars he could see the prison yard and the circle of prisoners from whom he had been separated. The overcrowding, the chatter, the complaints of the weakest, the lofty contempt of the strongest and even the dignity of the best had robbed him of his energy. Ironically solitary confinement returned it to him. He resumed the exercise regime he had begun at Dieppe Rowing Club years before. Press-ups, sit-ups, warm-up exercises, shadow-boxing; his fitness began to return. It would have returned faster if he had been properly fed. He would have liked more reading material too. A book a week did not satisfy his craving. He paced round and round inside his four walls, attempting to recall every detail of the battle of Waterloo as Fabrice del Dongo had experienced it, or the scene of Julien Sorel reaching for the hand of Madame de Rênal. In between he recited to himself lines Nelly had taught him.

  ‘Your brown hair and shining black mantle,

  Your hard bright eyes that are too gentle,

  Your beauty which is not one,

  Your breasts a cruel Devil corseted, perfumed

  with musk as he did your pallor

  Stolen from the moon at dusk …’

  He regretted not being able to remember how it went. Another couple of lines,

  ‘Time for a greeting, all bedazzled

  Time to kneel and kiss your slipper …’

  But they had left him a notebook and pencil and he resumed his previous discipline, his daily habit of noting down his thoughts.

  A lawyer had been appointed by the court, an intelligent and over-quick young man named Deschauzé. It was not his fault: Maître Deschauzé had thirty defendants like Jean to defend and mixed up their cases, histories and sometimes their names. His heavy briefcase was full of hot air.

  The first visitor Jean was allowed was the little man in glasses, whose real name he learnt at last: Jehan de la Ferté-Mondragon. He arrived in the uniform of a cavalry major. The warder, impressed by his decorations, left them alone.

  ‘You see me as an officer for the first time. I’m leaving for Alsace tomorrow to rejoin my regiment. I thought I might be of some use in Paris, but life here is impossible. They don’t want me. They’re right. Officers are made to command soldiers, not to play at being a policeman during a purge. I had a lot of difficulty getting to see you, but I had a good excuse: to bring you the medal of the Resistance and tell you I’ve also proposed you for the Military Medal. Here’s your Resistance medal. Don’t chuck it down the toilet until I’ve gone. It would hurt me. Obviously I shall look after your interests as best I can. I may as well tell you it’s very difficult. You have, it seems, en
gaged in proscribed activities. I’m not asking you to tell me all your secrets. All I require is for you to assure me you have not worked against your country’s interests …’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Jehan de la Ferté-Mondragon misunderstood him.

  ‘What? You can’t assure me?’

  ‘Yes. I can assure that I have not worked against my country’s interests.’

  The major looked relieved. He turned his blue képi in his short, chubby fingers. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  ‘It’s hot in your prison.’

  ‘Only in the visiting room. Lawyers catch cold easily. In the cells you have to break the ice to wash yourself in the morning.’

  ‘We didn’t fight for this. Full prisons, people condemned to death … torture … extra-judicial executions … I feel ashamed. I’m going back to the army.’

  ‘I hope you won’t feel ashamed of the army too.’

  Jehan de la Ferté-Mondragon raised his arms.

  ‘I hope so too … If I do, I shall resign and take holy orders. I’ve been tempted to for years. You know, the thing that pains me the most is that by doing this they’ll turn you into a rebel.’

  ‘Oh no … To rebel you have to have an idea. I don’t have one, and I shan’t do them the honour of acquiring one.’

  ‘I should very much like you not to be bitter.’

  ‘Don’t ask for too much. But all men should go through the test of prison. When I get out I’ll truly be free.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. I regret not having gone through that particular test.’

  ‘A man like you doesn’t need it.’

  The warder entered, his back straighter in an officer’s presence.

  ‘Major, the prisoner’s lawyer is here.’

  ‘Then I shall go.’

  ‘In any case I shan’t see him,’ Jean said.