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.
‘You can go back to your room,’ Monsieur du Courseau said.
Jeanne barely saw her dart out of the library, run down the hall and upstairs, leaving behind a scent of peppery skin and a trail of luxuriant free-and-easiness which could, very evidently, turn a man’s head, but which Jeanne herself, immune to such charms, judged particularly harshly.
‘Where is this child?’ Monsieur du Courseau asked.
‘With Albert. Albert adores babies.’
‘In that case he couldn’t be in better hands. Without doubt the best thing to do is to inform Monsieur the abbé Le Couec. Now I need to read …’
Jeanne left the library, disappointed at not having been able to share her excitement with Monsieur du Courseau, although she knew him well enough to be aware of his character and unresponsiveness. And he had given her good advice. The abbé Le Couec was exactly the man she needed. Her bosom swelled with hope, and her generous imagination was already hatching a thousand plans. At last providence was answering her prayers, just when age was forcing her to give up what she had wished for so much: a child. She would keep him, he belonged to her; she made the resolution as she crossed the park, its colours awakening in the early morning with its yellow-tinged dawn and ragged grey strips of cloud. A delicious scented freshness was rising from the earth, from the long bluffs of rhododendrons and the beds of dahlias, begonias, roses and marigolds. Jeanne knew that she had never been as happy as she was at this minute. She forgot the scene she had just witnessed, which should have outraged her, but which later she would relate in detail to her husband, leaving him unable to stop thinking about the story, which took him back to an African woman in a brothel behind the lines, a week before he lost his leg. Her breasts had been like watermelons and he had experienced the most intense pleasure between her strong thighs, nothing like the honest conjugal embraces in which Jeanne had become less and less interested after she had stopped hoping for a child. When Jeanne told him about Joséphine they both swore discretion, but their vow was futile, for soon everyone in the district knew and admitted that Monsieur du Courseau had a partiality to dark skin. Captain Duclou explained that sailors who had tasted such charms remained spellbound for life. Antoine must have picked up bad habits in the Army of the Orient, and since that date there had always been black women at La Sauveté. Each year, at around the same time as he changed his Bugatti, Antoine paid off the Martiniquan or the Guadeloupean he had employed the year before and requested another, who would arrive on one of those banana boats out of Dieppe, fresh, plump and brightly dressed, with gold rings in her ears. I shall not say much more about Joséphine Roudou, whom everyone disapproved of and then rather missed after she exchanged La Sauveté for a fleeting fame in Montmartre before one of those unpleasant maladies that women catch from men of little hygiene carried her off in the space of a few weeks.
Madame du Courseau – I also forgot to mention that her first name was Marie-Thérèse – arrived back at Grangeville the same morning that Jean was settling in with his adoptive parents. After she had kissed Antoinette – largely indifferent – and Michel – who clung to her desperately – Marie-Thérèse hurried to Jeanne’s to see the baby. Events would almost certainly have taken a different turn if Monsieur the abbé Le Couec had not been present. That excellent man was in the kitchen, in the middle of an elaborate Cartesian discourse.
‘Religion,’ he was saying to Jeanne and Albert, ‘is shared more easily in this world than anything else. If this child has already been baptised, a second baptism will do him no harm at all. You must not hesitate. A good Christian cannot live properly without the succour of a patron saint. Let us put him on the right track, as Monsieur Cliquet would say. There will always be locomotives to pull him, and if he stays in a siding at least he will be relieved of his original sin. Albert, I know you have no religion, but the most profound sceptics can’t be against whatever it is, without contradicting themselves. Give the child a chance, I mean an extra chance, given that he already seems to have been so fortunate in the choice of his adoptive parents … Ah, Madame du Courseau, greetings. How is our Geneviève?’
‘Better, much better, Father. But what’s this news, Jeanne? A baby has fallen from the sky at La Sauveté? Where is he?’
‘He’s asleep, Madame.’
‘He’s just been fed,’ Albert added.
The priest had stood up after putting down his glass of calvados on the waxed cloth of the kitchen table. He was fearless in the face of his parishioners’ hospitality. His complexion, which was on the ruddy side, owed much to the visits he made after mass each morning, but his robust constitution allowed him these excesses. He had strength to spare, even after four years of carrying wounded men and digging the graves of the dead in the mud of the trenches. On his return he had put his old, worn cassock back on with its greenish and violet tints, his only vanity being to pin to it the ribbon of his Croix de Guerre. The presence of that decoration caused Albert to forgive the priest for still being a priest, and although he still had a number of quarrels with him on points of theology, these were little more than annoyances between the two men, rapidly erased by the evocation of the ordeals they had both undergone. Jeanne listened to them open-mouthed, her faith blind and immovable, unlike Madame du Courseau, who would have preferred a priest of greater worldliness at Grangeville, one with a fine speaking voice and more aptitude for the harmonium than apple-based spirits.
‘I’ll go up and see him,’ Madame du Courseau said, in a tone of great firmness.
‘You’ll wake him up!’ Jeanne moved to block her way.
‘Jeanne, don’t be ridiculous … It’s perfectly clear that you haven’t had children. A baby doesn’t wake up just because you bend over his cradle.’
‘Perhaps I haven’t had children, but I have had Geneviève. For long enough that she calls me “Maman Jeanne”.’
‘I haven’t forgotten, I haven’t forgotten … But—’
The discussion would have gone on indefinitely, and harsh words doubtless been exchanged, if Jean had not at that moment had the good sense to cry out. The two women went upstairs. In his Moses basket, fists clenched, the baby was yelling at the top of his lungs. Jeanne picked him up and calmed him immediately. Madame du Courseau wanted to rock him, but when she held him, he started howling again.
‘You see,’ Jeanne said proudly.
‘He’s certainly sweet. We shall look after him. I’ve given it some thought, and we’ll put him in Michel’s room. Michel can go to Geneviève’s.’
‘No,’ Jeanne said, ‘he’s staying here.’
‘Goodness me, dear Jeanne, what can you be thinking? You have neither the time nor the means to take
