Authors: Michel Déon
On the evening of his baccalauréat result, after a long series of skirmishes, Antoinette at last allowed Jean to go the whole way. It happened at La Sauveté. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was away, driving Michel to Switzerland. Antoinette organised things well, and the ceremony took place according to certain rituals that she had imagined for a long time. First they drank a bottle of champagne in the kitchen, and then she said, ‘My bra is awfully tight.’
‘Well, take it off then.’
He could not work out exactly how she managed to undo it without unbuttoning her blouse, but within a minute the bra was on the table and he was touching it, a simple, modest item of girl’s underwear, its only concession to decoration a tiny satin rose stitched between the two cups. He held it to his face and breathed Antoinette’s smell. She smiled and looked down. Her blouse was transparent, and Jean marvelled at the softness and poise of her breasts. He stopped listening to her almost as soon as she began to tell some inconsequential story, no doubt to hide her own confusion, equal to his, now that he knew the moment had come. All the pain of waiting, of being forestalled, was swept away. She was there, facing him, barely protected by the width of the pine table, in which the cook’s knife had scored dark lines that danced before his eyes like cabbalistic signs. The moment was approaching and, having desired it for so long, it was delicious to postpone it a little longer with bold teasing and feigned modesty. A few minutes later, as she walked upstairs, she unhooked her pleated
skirt, revealing her soft, prettily rounded bottom encased in girlish white cotton knickers. On the landing she took off her blouse. They kissed each other for a long time, standing up, leaning against the banister rail and stroking each other affectionately until Antoinette pulled Jean into her mother’s bedroom and onto a four-poster bed overlooked by a heavy crucifix. There she undressed him with disarming tenderness and countless kisses. Antoinette was no more beautiful than before, with a fairly ugly nose (her father’s) and dull blond hair (her mother’s), but her creamy skin and well-rounded figure, her deliciously soft thighs, her marvellous breasts, so free and mobile under his fingers, and the scent of her neck filled him with hunger. She was one of those creatures that you want to eat more than penetrate, as if their skin, when you bite it, will satisfy some deep, unacknowledged greed. What a mistake it would be just to enter her! He felt he would like the opposite to happen, for her to melt and disappear inside him, inside his chest, his stomach, his legs and arms, so that they would then be just one and the same being, taking its pleasure from itself. Of course he was clumsy the first time. He wanted her so much, and had so often dreamt of this precise moment, when she would squeeze him between her thighs, that he was unable to wait. Antoinette consoled him, stroking the back of his neck, before leading him into her father’s bedroom, where there was no crucifix, only some prints of the Battle of Hastings. There he managed to be less clumsy, and by the time they began again in Michel’s bedroom he had learnt how to watch for the beginnings of Antoinette’s climax by the way her pink mouth began to tremble. Finally she drew him into her own bed, where they stayed until dawn, repeating their caresses without drawing breath, and then one last time, on the floor in the hall, where she came to see him out and shut the door behind him.
‘That’s it, it’s done,’ he said to himself, heading back to the lodge, where Albert would soon be getting up, strapping on his wooden leg and making his coffee before starting his first round of morning’s
watering. Jean’s body was on fire; he was bruised all over and exhausted. In a few days he would be seventeen. It was not too early or too late. He spared a thought for Bergson and creative evolution, which had inspired such a brilliant philosophy essay that Antoinette had finally granted him the reward he craved. Thank you, thank you, Bergson! As that summer began, life was starting to open up for Jean. In future all women would be like her, except that perhaps they would not often have the same fresh and creamy taste, and going to bed with them would not be such a glorious act of bravado. That night, the two of them had exorcised La Sauveté, they had got their own back on Marie-Thérèse and Michel, and even though Jean slightly regretted having used Antoine’s bed, he would never forget their last lovemaking on the hard, threadbare rug in the hall.
Jean slept, recovered his strength and, waking, wanted Antoinette all over again, but she remained invisible. He thought himself liberated from desire the following day, taken prisoner again the day after, freed once more when he saw her with Gontran Longuet in his car, a Georges Irat two-seater convertible, an inept copy of the famous English Morgan. How dare the daughter of a Bugatti-lover agree to park her bottom on the seat of such a phoney sports car? He felt sorry for her inability to appreciate the gulf that separated the two machines.
At Dieppe Rowing Club he asked his coach what he thought about women. The coach answered, ‘Jean, physical love is physical exercise like any other. Certainly it tires you, and I wouldn’t recommend it the day before a competition, but I’m not as rigorous as many coaches I know: there are muscular exertions a man can’t do without. Love, on the other hand, is a catastrophe: I mean being in love. I’ve seen first-class sportsmen reduced to crybabies because some salesgirl stood them up. Everything that happens below the belt is healthy. Everything that attacks an athlete’s competitive concentration is unhealthy. I hope you understand what I’m saying.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
So how, from this point onwards, should he think of Chantal de Malemort? Jean reflected that she had never tormented him nor beguiled him with false hopes, that when they met in secret in the forest of Arques they talked to each other as friends would, with genuine sincerity, though when she left him he always felt slightly light-headed. The meetings had become increasingly important during the summer of 1936. Early in the morning Jean would get on his bicycle and ride to the forest, where he would put on his spikes and set off on his training run, heading for an intersection of two paths marked by a handsome clump of beeches. It was unusual for her not to arrive at the same time as he did, on her bay mare. They would push on together, further into the underbrush, he running, she at a trot, for half an hour before returning to the cross-way, where they would finally sit down together on a stump, catch their breath and talk. Chantal had not disappointed expectations. She remained the same pretty, frail-looking creature, although I say
frail-looking
because you only had to see her on a horse to judge her energy and her strength. Her hair had darkened and the healthy life she led at Malemort, on horseback and on her father’s tractors, had put some pink into her complexion. Her voice was no longer small and shy, which at her age – the same as Jean – would have sounded vapid and sentimental.
What did they talk about? We might be surprised to learn that two such young people, feeling a more than negligible attraction, never confided to each other what they fretted about when they were apart. The subject remained taboo. An invisible barrier separated them, of which they were not even aware. Yet the more they believed they were talking about nothing in particular, the more they were confiding to each other.
‘Have you noticed,’ Chantal said, ‘how sad a season summer is? The days are shortening, and we’re getting ready to go into the dark. The weather is lovely, but it’s an illusion. I prefer winter, when the trees have no leaves, the woods are full of skeletons, and the days are
lengthening again. You feel as if you’re coming out of a tunnel.’
‘I don’t know any more, I can’t decide. I think I’d like to live in the tropics: six months’ wet season, six months’ dry. You know exactly where you are. Spring and autumn are both silly seasons, neither one thing nor the other.’
Or:
‘What are you going to do after your exams?’ she asked. ‘My father says studying is no use, you need to get to grips with life very early. Apparently the world is full of specialists and you can’t find anybody who knows how to do everything: harvest the wheat, drive a tractor, buy a horse, cook, sail a yacht, help a woman give birth on a desert island, or fix a tap.’
‘I completely agree with your father, but mine is self-taught, so knowledge fills him with suspicion and secret desire in equal amounts. He hoped he’d make a gardener out of me, but flowers bore me, and now he has decided that I should be, as he says, a “scholar”. You can see what he’s doing: it’s his dream, to make up for what he never had.’
‘What sort of scholar? You’re not very good at maths, are you?’
‘Do you suppose my father really makes a distinction between maths and literature?’
‘Well …’
‘I don’t think so!’
Having plucked up courage, he burst out, ‘I’m not Albert and Jeanne Arnaud’s son. I’m a foundling they adopted.’
‘I know.’
‘Does everybody know?’
‘Everybody? No. Some people.’
‘So I was the last to find out.’
‘Does it upset you?’
‘No, I’m just asking myself questions all the time. And I’d like to know everything about where and how I came into the world. Who’s going to tell me?’
‘You shouldn’t think about it.’
‘I can’t help it.’
Sometimes they liked to talk about their favourite sport.
‘Don’t you want to ride sometimes?’
‘No. I like having my feet on the ground. Or wheels. Or maybe a scull. In a scull I fly over the water. Speed isn’t everything, because there are ways of going a lot faster, but in a scull I feel weightless. The oars skim the surface. You can’t imagine the delicacy of what you’re doing. The drive, the catch, the recovery are all calculated to the centimetre. I’m the machine. I’m proud of that.’
‘But there’s one thing missing. The pleasure of control. I control my horse, and from the horse I control the places I go to, as if I was a giant.’
‘I’d be scared to marry a giant.’
Chantal was silent. He had contravened their unspoken agreement. Not by much, but enough to make her feel uncomfortable.
‘Some giants can bend their knees,’ she said finally.
‘That’s reassuring.’
One day he mentioned Michel.
‘You shouldn’t say anything against him,’ she retorted. ‘He not only doesn’t say anything against you, he actually admires you.’
‘Michel admires me? Now you’re making fun of me. He’s hated me since we were children.’
‘Perhaps he envies you.’
‘He has everything. I have nothing. He draws really well. Maybe he’ll become a great painter. His name is Michel du Courseau, and his mother will give him anything he asks for.’
‘Then why do you think he’s always drawing portraits of you?’
‘I didn’t know that. His main models are the neighbours’ son, who’s very handsome, or Élias, the Longuets’ young gardener.’
‘His mother has shown us lots of drawings of you. Apparently his bedroom walls are covered in them.’
Jean tried to remember the night he had made love to Antoinette
on Michel’s bed. He hadn’t looked at anything surrounding him, hadn’t looked at anything at all apart from Antoinette’s white body.
‘The idea gives me the creeps,’ he said. ‘Anyway, why is his mother always pushing him in your direction?’
‘I know, it’s a bit comical. In the beginning I thought he was shy, then I thought he must have some sort of aversion to me. Now I don’t really think about him at all. I think we could be friends. But he’s so strange …’
She mounted her mare and rode off at a slow trot down the empty path, which the sun riddled with shafts of light between the leaves. Jean waited for her to disappear before sprinting back to his bicycle at the edge of the wood.
In the first two months of 1936 Jean had found a part-time job in a bookshop at Dieppe. The bookseller was a young man, Joseph Outen, who had started the business recently and was full of enthusiasm. Jean had met him at the Rowing Club, where they trained together on Sundays. In the changing room Joseph expressed surprise at Jean’s absence the last three Sundays.
‘You’re wrong not to train regularly. Regularity counts more than anything else.’
‘I was taking my philosophy bac.’
‘Did you pass?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you you get?’
‘Distinction.’
Joseph looked at Jean in a different light. Questioning him, he perceived that he was intelligent but incredibly ignorant. He explained to Jean that sport for sport’s sake was a folly as great as literature for literature’s sake … The young bookseller was an agile, muscular athlete who had a nicely dark, clipped beard and smoked a
pipe. He loved literature and sport with an equal passion, and treated all writers with suspicion until he discovered their view on the subject. For a single excellent page about boxing, he had read everything Maeterlinck had written. He thought highly of Giraudoux, a former university 400 metres champion, Morand who drove racing Bugattis and hunted foxes, Montherlant because he had written
The Eleven Before the Golden Door
, Hemingway for his short story ‘Fifty Grand’, Byron for having swum the bay of La Spezia from Portovenere, Maupassant because he loved sailing. One can hardly disagree that, though not the only way to get interested in books and writers, as biases go it was far from stupid, and there were and are plenty of others a good deal less reliable. Jean’s ignorance, however, was not because of sport but because he lived in a house without books. Yes, we have seen him reading one evening, in the kitchen, during one of those family gatherings from which he preferred to keep his distance. He could borrow books from the lycée’s library, but had to wait his turn. Albert and Jeanne had never read a book in their life. Albert would say it wore out your eyes to no purpose, and Jeanne that, once read, a book was no more than a dust trap. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, having given Jean several volumes of the Hetzel edition of Jules Verne for Christmas, had stopped giving him presents after the alleged incident with Antoinette. Captain Duclou had given him an atlas and Monsieur Cliquet a book about railways. The school curriculum betrayed a considerable mistrust of literature, using it simply as a pool of texts selected for their value as grammatical examples, of which Lamartine’s ‘The Lake’ was the apogee. Joseph Outen, with his passion for books, broke through this torpor. He had wanted to write, but had rapidly resigned himself to not being the equal of his great models and to introducing them instead to a public intimidated by such literary audacity and diversity. His job, as he saw it, was to guide those timid souls who came into a bookshop on the pretext of buying an envelope, and as they did so stole secret glances
at its forbidden fruits, in the shape of the new books on display. Practised as an apostolic mission, bookselling is a philanthropic task. Joseph Outen began the conversion of his Rowing Club
teammate-cum-
sales assistant, and immediately found such fertile ground that they decided to shut the shop at five o’clock to give themselves up completely to reading. Jean was overwhelmed. He had imagined writers merely as glorious statues, yet here was a man as famous as Stendhal confessing his youth in all the naïve unsophistication of its first impulses and presenting his account to his readers with perfect ingenuousness. There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. We fought at Verdun. When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ According to Stendhal, it was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer. Writers whose memories were preserved by literature revealed their youth, unvarnished.