The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon

kitchen. Mosquitoes descended on him and he stayed awake till first light, his head heavy with grappa fumes and his senses sharpened by the thought of Marie-Dévote lying in Théo’s arms.
    Léon came in, bringing a cup of coffee.
    ‘It’ll wake you up for your visit to your daughter,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, it will.’
    But Geneviève was no longer at the clinic and Antoine, a prisoner of his family’s habit of secrecy, did not dare admit it. Two years earlier, she had left Menton to spend the winter at Marrakesh. From there she had gone to Brazil, and recently they had received a postcard from her, sent from Japan. Who she was travelling with, who she was spending time with or, to be more accurate, was keeping her in such luxury – since she seemed to lead a sumptuous existence whatever latitude she found herself in – nobody knew. At La Sauveté nobody spoke of her. A fiction had taken root: Geneviève needed to get away from unhealthy climates. She would never return to Normandy. She needed air, sunshine, and the sea or snow-covered mountains outside her windows. Questioned, not without mischief, by her friends, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau invariably answered, ‘Our children are nothing like we were. Geneviève is in love with freedom. It’s the gift the war gave to her generation. I think we’re modern parents. In 1923 you don’t bring up children the way they were brought up fifty years ago.’
    So Antoine pretended to spend a couple of hours at Menton, greeted Léon Cece with a blast on his horn on the way back, stopped to kiss Marie-Dévote, and slept at Aix after a second evening with Charles. On the road from Aix to La Sauveté he did his best to knock a few more minutes off his previous record. As he drove through the gates that evening in October 1923, he glimpsed Adèle Louverture, with Michel under her arm gesticulating and trying to kick her. He had just broken Jean’s tricycle by taking a hammer to it, and Antoinette was kissing Jean to try to make it better.

3
    Jean was pretending to read. The lines were dancing in front of his eyes. If he rested his forehead on his hand, he could lower his eyelids, make the unreadable page disappear, and go back in the minutest detail to the circumstances in which he had seen and then very gently kissed Antoinette’s bottom. It had happened that afternoon at the foot of the cliff, behind a heap of fallen rocks. Of the scene, which had hardly lasted more than a minute, he retained an anxious feverishness, as though they both had deliberately committed a sin that defied the whole world. He felt proud of himself, and at the same time wondered to what extent his feverishness, which periodically felt just like dizziness, wasn’t the punishment he risked, the sign that would betray him to the abbé Le Couec, his father, his mother, and Monsieur and Madame du Courseau. But between four o’clock and six that evening most of them had had plenty of time to read his thoughts, to question him, to notice how he blushed when they talked to him, and now he felt that their blindness was a serious blow to an infallibility that they had, in their different ways, fashioned into a dogma. Hadn’t Antoinette said, ‘If you don’t tell, no one – do you understand? No one on Earth – will ever know.’
    ‘Well, my dear Jean, you’re not getting very far with your reading. Aren’t you interested?’
    At the sound of the priest’s voice, Jean jumped as if he had been caught red-handed. The abbé was behind him, ensconced in the only armchair in the kitchen, his legs flung out straight and wide apart, stretching the coarse threadbare cotton of his cassock.
    ‘That boy’s ruining his eyes with reading. Always got his nose in a book,’ Jeanne said, quick to take her adopted son’s side.
    ‘I wasn’t blaming him!’ the abbé answered. ‘I’m just used to seeing him more engrossed in what he’s reading.’
    Albert, who was playing
trictrac
with Monsieur Cliquet, raised his