The Foundling Boy

“I loved this book for the way, in its particularities and its casual narration, it admitted me to a world I knew nothing about and the many ways it made me care. It is not just a glimpse into the past, but the study of the heart of a man and his times.” Paul Theroux

“The Foundling Boy is a legitimate, if not yet fully grown, heir to the great line of storytellers running from Fielding to Giono.”
Le Figaro

“This is a book to devour, savouring every last mouthful.” Pierre Moustiers

Jeanne could not find a way through the hawthorn hedge. The stiff branches slashed at her face and arms. She ran along the path in the hope of finding an opening, but the hostile, aggressive hedge was impenetrable. Clasping her large barren bosom with both hands to stop it bouncing, she felt her heart’s panic-stricken thumping as a sharp pain under her left palm. But she could not give up. Behind the hedge, in the young birch forest, a child was wailing, and its fitful cries, carried on the evening air, were calling for her help. She badly wanted to rescue the baby lost in the wood, but her heavy legs felt glued to the earth and her lungs were failing her. She gasped for breath. If she did not hurry up, the child would die and Albert would never forgive her. What made her panic most was that, although she must have run the best part of a kilometre to try to find a way through, the cries were as close as ever, as if the baby was following her behind the hawthorns. Then she realised that the path must go in a circle around the wood, whose dappled foliage was rustling in the fading light. The wailing broke off, and Jeanne stopped, paralysed by fear, with such a lump in her throat that when she tried to call out, only a croak passed her lips.

‘What’s the matter?’ Albert said.

A strong hand, with its calloused palm, squeezed her arm, and Jeanne’s anxiety vanished. She opened her eyes onto the darkness of the bedroom, made out its shape and the position of the window, saw the curtains stir in the breeze. Albert’s thumb stroked her forearm with a reassuring gentleness.

‘There’s a baby crying,’ she said.

‘No there isn’t, it’s nothing … go back to sleep.’

‘There is, there is, I promise you. Listen.’

They stopped talking and heard nothing, and then there was a wail from somewhere close by, weaker than in Jeanne’s dream, a last exhausted whimper.

‘Oh,’ Albert said. ‘You’re right! It sounds like an injured hare.’

‘I’m sure it’s a baby.’

‘At this hour … outside our window?’

He had a literal mind that had no room for anything unexpected. Jeanne sat up in bed, listening intently. There was another plaintive, desperate wail.

‘Maybe it’s Old Souillet’s crow. It imitates anything that moves.’

‘I’m going to see,’ Jeanne said, stretching out her hand to grope for the sulphur matches on the bedside table.

The Pigeon lamp gave out a gloomy, yellowish glow that shed almost no light. Jeanne adjusted the wick, put a dressing gown on over her nightdress, and went down the wooden staircase. The house had two entrances, one opening into the park, the other onto the road. Without hesitation, Jeanne went to the door to the road and opened it. A wicker basket sat in the middle of the steps, festooned with ribbons. Her hand made contact with a wool blanket. Bringing the Pigeon lamp closer, she saw a minuscule face screwed up against its glimmer. The baby gave a weak cry and its mouth twisted up.

‘Jesus! Mary! It is a child! Come down quick, Albert.’

She forgot that Albert could not come down quickly. He had only one good leg and needed time to strap on the other wooden one, pull on a pair of trousers and grip the banister, step by step.

‘Are you sure?’ she heard him shout from upstairs.

‘Am I sure? Listen to you!’

‘Bring it up then, and we’ll see. Is it just one?’

Only then did she think to look up and down the road, but the dark night only revealed what she knew already: a bend to the right, another to the left, the hawthorn hedge opposite. A light, almost warm breeze caressed the shapes of the shadows. A few stars
twinkled in the sky. The moon was not yet up. On windy nights you could hear distinctly the waves buffeting the cliffs, but tonight the sea was calm and far away, as if blotted out by the summer night. Jeanne cautiously picked up the basket and carried it to the bedroom. Albert was waiting in his nightshirt, sitting on the edge of the bed with one leg dangling, holding a paraffin lamp.

‘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
wide-eyed
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.

At about five o’clock in the morning, winter and summer, it was Monsieur du Courseau’s habit to get up, go down to the kitchen and make himself a large bowl of coffee, which he drank standing up in his dressing gown before going to his library where he closeted himself until eight. He was a tall, native Norman, ruddy-complexioned, blue-eyed, with a muscular neck and hands the shaped like paddles. Since being demobilised, he had put on weight around his waist but was unworried and even satisfied to note the reappearance of noble curves that the mud of the trenches and the diseases of the Army of the Orient
1
had banished for a time. Nor did he worry about his baldness, which revealed a splendid skull, shining, smooth and emphasised by a corolla of greying hair. No one having ever seen a new book cross the threshold of his private library, it had to be assumed that he spent his time there rereading the same books, notably a complete Dickens in orange-red soft covers, a set of Balzac bound in shagreen, the works of Voltaire in the thirty-two-volume 1818 edition, and twenty or so biographies of William the Conqueror, his hero and the only man he admired, because he had defeated the English. Nothing of Antoine du Courseau’s reading ever surfaced in his conversation. When he was not eating, he liked to talk about food (when he was eating he was not talkative at all, being occupied with the sensations of eating and their analysis), about flowers (but only with Albert), about women (but only with the abbé Le Couec, who wasn’t afraid of them), about cars (but only with Ettore Bugatti whom once a year he visited at Molsheim to buy a new car), and about politics with nobody, having given up being outraged by anything. He had in fact ignored all political matters since his youth, when he had inherited La Sauveté from his mother and a fleet of trawlers from his father. Madame du Courseau was quite comfortably off too, being descended from three generations of millers who had long ago hung up their white jackets, the Mangepains of Caen. Yes, I know, how aptly named! But I can do nothing about that. The war had passed by without greatly troubling them, unlike many others whom it had
enriched or ruined. Only two shadows darkened this happy picture: in Serbia Antoine had been wounded in the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel, and there was no question of his ever hunting again; and in 1917 Geneviève had begun to cough blood. Since then she had been living at Menton. Earlier in the summer they had feared for her future, but Madame du Courseau, who had rushed to her bedside, then announced that she was returning, Geneviève being out of danger …

Jeanne did not find Monsieur du Courseau in the kitchen, where his bowl still stood on the table next to the calvados bottle and the warm coffee pot, confirming that he had been there recently. Though fully aware of the instruction that he was not to be disturbed in his library, Jeanne did not hesitate and, instinctively understanding that there was no point in timidity, she opened the door sharply. A paraffin lamp lit the book-lined room and the desk, on which a china tobacco jar gleamed along with some other copper or silver objects. From a corner of the room there came a muffled cry, and a figure sat up. Monsieur du Courseau, for it was he, tidied himself, while on the day bed a black shape went on wriggling. Jeanne recognised Joséphine Roudou, a twenty-five-year-old from Martinique who, since Easter, had been looking after Michel and Antoinette in Madame du Courseau’s absence. In a gesture of modesty Joséphine pulled her nightdress up over her face, offering the charming sight of her brown belly and a sex darker than anything else in the library.

‘What is it that is so serious, my dear Jeanne?’ Antoine asked in an untroubled voice, since he was one of those men whom pleasure never left distracted for longer than two or three seconds.

‘We found a child on our doorstep in the night.’

‘Which one? Antoinette or Michel?’

‘No, somebody else’s child!’

‘But how very interesting. And what is his name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name. He’s about a week old.’

‘Goodness me! It must be some sort of joke …’

‘Who would dare to make a joke like that?’

‘Very true … Madame du Courseau is coming back today. She’ll know what to do. While we’re waiting, Joséphine can take care of it.’

‘Joséphine! Her? Never.’

There was a clucking from underneath the nightdress, and Monsieur du Courseau turned round as though he had just discovered a third person between Jeanne and himself. The sight of her belly still twitching with gentle spasms reminded him what had just happened.

‘Put that away now, Joséphine, please, come along.’

She lowered her nightdress and her face appeared, wild-looking, with the whites of her eyes showing. Without the madras headscarf that usually covered her head, her thickly corkscrewed hair gave her a Gorgon’s head that was frightening enough to make Jeanne shiver.