The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon Page B

hold back from biting, a maddening impulse that suddenly started up like hunger somewhere between his teeth. He had not been upset when in an abrupt movement she covered up her two marvels, for their contemplation was making him dizzy. Mademoiselle du Courseau straightened her skirt, and they dashed back up the gully together, hand in hand, to fetch their bikes and pedal frantically all the way to La Sauveté …
     
    ‘Yes, Father,’ Jeanne said, ‘you’re right. In books we learn how we must behave in life. But there are also books that are dangerous for people’s good sense.’
    ‘What are you reading, Jean?’
    ‘Treasure Island, Father. It was a present from Uncle Fernand.’
    ‘Always stories about sailors!’
    Fernand Duclou looked up. ‘Well then, father, perhaps you’ll tell us what you’ve got against the navy, you, a Breton?’
    ‘Nothing, my dear man. It’s perfectly true that stories about sailors are generally a good healthy read.’
    ‘Because there are no women on board sailing ships’ Monsieur Cliquet said mischievously, taking the dice cup from Albert. ‘Whereas,’ he added, ‘there are women on trains and even Madonnas in sleeping cars.’
    He was referring to a novel that had sold a fabulous number of copies, whose title was known even to those who were illiterate. Jeanne coughed, covering her embarrassment, and pulled her chair closer to spread her knitting over the kitchen table, above which hung an electric bulb and its china shade. The light was yellow and it flickered, but it was a novelty they were becoming accustomed to, not without the anxiety that it would be more expensive than their oil lamps. Jeanne stretched out the sleeve of the jumper she was knittingand compared it with the one she had just finished. Captain Duclou poured warm blue wax into the bottle, and the three-master bobbed on a sea stirred up by a swell.
    Albert had won. He sat back and lit a pipe, reached for his newspaper and after reading a headline, said bitterly, ‘They’ll have his hide, and then we’ll have another war.’
    ‘The war is over, for all of us,’ the abbé said.
    ‘Oh, they’ll wait until Jean’s old enough to be called up.’
    ‘Well, that gives us a bit of time, and as for your Aristide, no one will miss him.’
    ‘Briand equals peace!’ Albert said forcefully.
    ‘Peace equals a good navy,’ the captain said. ‘We no longer have one.’
    ‘And a decent transport system,’ Monsieur Cliquet said firmly. ‘How can we mobilise today’s wonderful modern armies with a network as out of date as ours? If the government thought that there would be another war, it would take the railways in hand. It’s not doing that, and I therefore deduce that there is not going to be a war in the near future.’
    ‘Now, now!’ Jeanne said. ‘There’s no need to go having an argument when everyone agrees.’
    The abbé protested. He did not agree, and he did not care for Briand, calling him an ‘orator’ and beginning to imitate rather grotesquely his famous ‘Pull back the machine guns, pull back the cannons’ speech. He then raised the embarrassing matter of his criminal record. In his eyes Briand embodied the worst aspects of the centralising republic that got itself mixed up in the affairs of the world willy-nilly, while denying its provinces their rightful cultural freedoms.
    ‘Just listen to the Chouan!’ 2 said Monsieur Cliquet, who had voted radical socialist since his youth.
    The priest roared with laughter and leant over to borrow Albert’s tobacco pouch to roll himself a cigarette between his fat peasant’s fingers.
    Jean was no longer following their talk, his mind having gone back to the delicious picture of Antoinette’s bottom. He now badly wanted to see it again, and stroke its cool skin.
    ‘It’s time you went to bed,’ his mother said. ‘You have to be up at six tomorrow.’
    Jean closed his book. In bed he would be alone in the dark, with no one to interrupt his