The Foundling's War (43 page)

‘I occasionally have them. As luck would have it, they’re not usually generalisations …’

Julius smacked the table. The conversation had taken a wrong turn and he regretted having shown so little severity until now that Jean felt able to make fun of him openly.

‘French irony has its charm, I don’t deny it, and I congratulate you on possessing it. But we’re dealing with something else here: you’re withdrawing from a mission whose secrecy is its strength. I’m warning you now: it’s impossible. If you withdraw I shan’t cover you. Not even knowing the affection Madeleine has for you.’

Jean believed him. Julius’s bald statement might have thrown him into a panic. As it happened, it came at exactly the right moment. He studied Julius closely, as if wanting to imprint on his memory the features, hardened by severity, that so ill suited this supposedly decent man mixed up in serious affairs who this evening was at home, having invited everyone who was anyone in the occupation to hear a performance of his two favourite Mozart sonatas. He understood that the time for games was over. The reality of the danger had not yet sunk in, but he sensed it nevertheless, and decided he needed a day’s grace to ensure his freedom.

‘I’m expressing myself badly,’ he said. ‘I need to think, that’s all. I have an idea to put to you. I need twenty-four hours to see if it’s workable.’

Julius was not easily deceived. There was too much at stake financially for him to allow Jean any leeway.

‘What is it, this idea?’

‘Give me till tomorrow and I’ll give you not just an idea but a plan.’

‘I can’t run that risk.’

‘In that case I’ll leave you.’

Julius got to his feet, his face relaxed. The justice he had meted out satisfied him entirely. He stifled a surge of pride, came to Jean and put his hand on his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘So am I. Will you do me a favour?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘If your guests haven’t cleaned out the buffet, I’d like to try your
foie gras
.’

‘With the greatest of pleasure!’

They returned to the drawing room. Madeleine had been keeping an eye out for them. When she saw Julius smiling and holding Jean’s arm, her anxieties vanished.

‘Jean, I’ve kept you a cold plate and a bottle of champagne.’

‘I’m leaving you in good hands,’ Julius said as he walked away.

Jean tried to see who he was making for, who in this varied and chattering throng, released after the concert like a flock of birds, would detain him at the exit, but Madeleine was urging him towards the buffet, where several guests were still lingering. At a sign from her a butler bent down and extracted from beneath the table a plate attractively heaped with
foie gras
and cold veal.

‘Madeleine,’ Jean said after his first mouthful, ‘your Julius has just warned me I’m in danger. I need to leave here without being seen. He assured me you’d help.’

She opened her eyes wide in astonishment. Her lover had never
involved her in his affairs, and if a word out of place was ever uttered in her presence she pretended not to have heard.

‘What? You want to leave without anyone seeing you?’

‘Exactly.’

Madeleine’s face tensed. She did not understand. Colour flooded her throat. Suddenly she was afraid, a defenceless woman in a world where, until now, her safety had always been guaranteed. Was it about to start all over again, the way it had been before, a life of obscure threats like those that had oppressed her during her hard life as a woman of the street? Moved by her disarray, Jean tried to calm her. ‘It’s nothing, absolutely nothing!’ What good did it do to alarm her, to tell her the truth about the milieu in which she had blossomed so innocently, believing herself, in good faith, saved? The mirror over the buffet reflected a part of the drawing room in which the guests, glass in hand, spoke in small, languid groups, still slightly listless after the concert which, the Germans excepted, had rather bored them. In the centre of the mirror was Julius. He had taken Palfy by the arm and was speaking in his ear. When he looked up and caught sight of Jean and Madeleine together, acute annoyance appeared on his face. His expression hardened. Palfy seemed not to have noticed and had his head half turned, observing another part of the drawing room. Doubtless Julius had told Palfy what was going on. But what could he expect from Palfy? His friend’s present course of action allowed no room for error. He was accumulating a fortune and would not sacrifice his ambitions for anything.

‘What are you looking at?’ Madeleine asked, curious at his sudden silence.

‘Julius, in a mirror.’

She clasped her hands.

‘I daren’t do anything without him,’ she said, sighing.

Her immaculately made-up face betrayed a moment’s weariness. Her easy, sheltered life had relaxed her. The resurgence of problems hollowed her features, emphasising a dark shadow under her eyes.

‘Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I tell myself it’s not real and that if I pinch myself the dream will evaporate,’ she added.

With a gesture she took in her thirty or so guests, who in truth cared little for their hostess and spoke a language that was still largely foreign to her, though she tried valiantly to understand them. Yet she clung to them, for they symbolised her social rise. The dry pop of a champagne cork, eased out by the butler’s fingers, attracted attention. Two couples rushed to the buffet, jostling Madeleine, as indifferent to the mistress of the house as if she had been the lavatory attendant.

‘Nelly didn’t come,’ Madeleine said awkwardly.

Generously he lied.

‘She’s working tonight.’

‘Well, of course, that’s more important than anything … What’s she performing?’

‘Musset.’

Madeleine was not very sure whether Musset was a play or an author. She made a note to ask Blanche next day and assumed a knowing and admiring expression.

‘Are you and she still getting on?’

‘Yes, very well.’

He pictured Nelly in a restaurant on Rue de Beaujolais, for that was where she was, opposite Jérôme Callot who had managed to get away to see her for an evening. It was good that she had found an opportunity to be alone with her ham of a co-star and to see him in real life, away from the theatre, in his tight-fitting suburban clothes. She needed to be disappointed. She would be. Afterwards everything would be better.

‘I invited her,’ Madeleine went on. ‘Despite Blanche. Blanche thinks I mix anybody and everybody. It’s true that Nelly’s not always easy. She says quite impossible things. People get very annoyed. A month ago she took out General Köschel’s monocle and pretended to try it out, you know …’

‘In front or behind?’ Jean asked mechanically.

‘In front. She claimed her “brown eye” was short-sighted.’

Jean laughed. General Köschel was considered an utter fool, and an unpleasant fool to boot. Nelly’s aim was good. Nothing scared her.

‘It’s like Marceline,’ Madeleine added, enjoying a chance to confide. ‘I like her. She always amuses people, and Julius and Rudolf both say they never get bored when she’s here. For me it’s different: I don’t laugh at the strange things she says. I’d still be saying those things myself if I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet Julius. The truth is, I know all that too well … Oh, I don’t mean I worked like that … far from it … Anyway, you know all that … you! It’s impossible to imagine her as anything other than a madam. It’s written all over her red face. But she’s good-hearted and innocent, so innocent she’s like putty in Constantin’s hands.’

Julius released Palfy, who was left alone in the middle of the drawing room. He turned round, caught sight of Jean and Madeleine, and winked at Jean. Polo came up to him, frowning.

‘That Polo person is vile,’ Jean said.

‘Yes, that’s what I think, and I don’t know why.’

‘He’d sell his mother.’

‘Julius says he’s very intelligent.’

‘Success can turn the lowest of the low into a superior being.’

‘Do you think so?’

Jean sensed that these people intimidated Madeleine and that she would have given anything to send her guests away and stay on her own with Julius that evening, by their radio, listening to music. Julius genuinely loved music. As a young man he had played the organ. What had life made of this enthusiastic player of Bach? A conqueror, a businessman, and the beloved lover of a woman who had led the hard life of the street. Madeleine made Jean’s heart ache when he glimpsed her fear that she was not what Julius dreamt of. She had by no means forgotten the past and quaked at the thought of her salvation being taken away from her. It was a terror and it paralysed her. Her second destiny was imperfect, for it was always overshadowed by her
first. She could not get used to it. Yet no one had had the nerve to remind her of it. Besides, who, apart from Jean and Palfy, knew? No one here, not this evening.

Fortunately Blanche is there to watch over her. She corrects her blunders, points out the way forward. She may have spoilt her own life, but she will make sure Madeleine succeeds, and beyond her expectations. It is her cherished ambition. At this sort of evening she is like a chair attendant in the park: invisible and swooping down on the prey that fortune offers her. She has just noticed that Madeleine and Jean are having a private conversation. She whispers in Madeleine’s ear, ‘The lady of the house belongs to
all
her guests.’

Madeleine follows her meekly, ready to obey. She has not offered to help Jean, and he has not insisted. Let us watch her once more as she joins the prefect of police, who is getting bored talking to a German official with mediocre French. Her dressmakers and new young hairdresser (sought-after throughout Paris) have fashioned a new woman with such skill she cannot be taken for anything other than a lady. And as only appearances matter, she is actually in the process of becoming one, of erasing her past. We have mentioned that she was accomplishing her second destiny. She has a third she is not expecting, of which she remains unaware. As we shall not see her again, better to speak of it at once and salute this modest woman to whom Palfy gave her start in life, who has no other ambition than to feel secure, and whom Blanche will push to become what she herself can never be. In fact, Madeleine is to carry on living happy and carefree with Julius until that dawn of 21 July 1944, when the SS raided their apartment in Avenue Foch. The previous day, von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life had failed. The repression had begun. Julius, who had played the Wehrmacht card, was in the first wave. He was shot the same afternoon. Madeleine shut up the apartment, leaving it in the butler’s care, and fled to Montfort-l’Amaury and the house Julius had bought for her. Let us remember the dates, which are important: the Allies are still in Normandy but Paris’s liberation is not far off. The
German army is packing up. Polo has already left for Spain with his treasures; Palfy is married and living in Switzerland, free from want; Rudolf von Rocroy, posted to the front, has managed to get himself rapidly taken prisoner by the British. One society is scattering, and a new one has yet to take its place. Madeleine, who in her innocence has committed to neither side, awaits in starry-eyed trepidation the arrival of the officers in crepe soles. One of these, a major commanding a parachutists’ unit, purposely seeks her out to inform her that he is the owner of the Avenue Foch apartment. He is deeply sorry to hear of the death of Julius, his friend of pre-war days, and reassured to know that nothing has been stolen. The only damage that occurred was when the SS raided the apartment and stupidly broke a Chinese vase.

‘It’s the price of war,’ he says. ‘I should like you always to consider that apartment your own. Julius was my business partner. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have nothing left. Whenever you come to Paris, you must make yourself at home.’

Madeleine does not hesitate. Major Bernstein is a gallant officer. So gallant that she marries him, partly to be back among the same servants, rather more in order to survive, because Julius had no time to leave her anything. She can return to Paris, head held high, under her new name. Her third act has begun, leaving her former life, her depressing Montmartre existence, far behind in the past. Now, when she talks about her memories, she feels no need to delve into her Pigalle period. She has another past to replace it with, that of her Avenue Foch years with Julius, her musical evenings among friends. At the same time she is able to negotiate the ordeal of the purges unscathed. Who would think of making trouble for Madame Bernstein, whose husband is fighting at Bastogne with his regiment of parachutists? Major Bernstein is, in short, an ideal husband, so undemanding in every way that he dies discreetly from a bullet in his abdomen in February 1945, leaving Madeleine a widow, Madame Bernstein, and in possession of a fortune large enough for her to live without cares from that day forward. In truth she would happily have retired to the
countryside, the dream of city dwellers who have pounded the streets in their younger years, but Blanche is there, pushing her to become the muse of a small artistic clique. And so Blanche fulfils herself through another woman whom fortune has smiled on more broadly than her. Madeleine will enjoy an affair more intellectual than physical with a poet who makes frequent retreats to Solesmes. From it she will gain a discreet and fashionable glory. Ten years later, her Tuesdays will be the most sought-after in Paris. Every August she will sponsor an annual music festival in an ancient abbey. Age will suit her very well, and in her sixties she will take to wearing a velvet choker that hides the wrinkles on her neck. Need we add that Blanche will not leave her, hating her a little more each year and concealing it very well, wounded in her self-esteem to the point of feeling poisoned, to see Madeleine succeed where she herself has failed …? Madeleine will only become aware of Blanche’s hatred in the last moments of her life, laid low by a fatal bout of influenza in 1970, when Blanche tears from her ring finger a large emerald given to her by Major Bernstein on the last night of his final leave. She sees Blanche’s mad stare in a face disfigured by greed and a haste to see her benefactress dead and buried. La Garenne had been right to mistreat his mistress and demand lewd favours from her. He would have made her a saint. Freed from his clutches, she stole from Madeleine, blighted her final moments with hatred, and discovered that when she in turn wanted to invite artists and writers to her own Tuesdays, not one of them was at all interested in her.