my front door. God wills me to have him.’
‘I rather suspect that in her guilty haste the mother got the wrong door. Quite clearly she wanted to leave him at ours.’
‘With suppositions like that you can remake the whole world. This little boy – Albert and I have decided to call him Jean – belongs to us.’
‘His future—’ Madame du Courseau began.
‘He shall have a future. Money doesn’t buy you happiness. We’ll teach him to work hard and to love his parents.’
‘He’s a little young for that, don’t you think?’
‘We’ll wait.’
If Marie-Thérèse du Courseau thought she would find an ally in the priest, she was seriously mistaken. The abbé Le Couec sided with the Arnauds, and nothing would induce him to change his mind, even when the mistress of La Sauveté quite unscrupulously raised the subject of Albert’s atheism and anticlericalism.
‘Madame,’ the abbé said, ‘to state the matter briefly, God knows how to identify those among his lost or straying sheep who have Christian virtues and sometimes a charity greatly superior to those who go to mass regularly. Even as a freemason who subscribes to L’oeuvre, Albert is an example to many.’
‘I doubt that your bishop would be of the same opinion,’ she answered in a tone with an undercurrent of menace.
President of a ladies’ workroom at Dieppe, Marie-Thérèse du Courseau possessed some modest access to the see. They listened to her, flattered her, and she considered as great favours the self-interested kindnesses of the hierarchy. But the abbé Le Couec cared nothing for the hierarchy. He feared neither its reprimands, being bereft of pride, nor its threats of transfer, feeling himself in any case to be a stranger everywhere outside Brittany. Madame du Courseau continued to exert pressure from every angle, but the Arnauds stood their ground. It must be said that she was also fighting a lone battle, her husband taking no interest in the affair. All of her ingenuity was rebuffed by Jeanne’s blinkered stubbornness, a stubbornness all the fiercer because the caretaker sensed, on two or three occasions, that some dark plot was threatening her possession. The plot finally failed, thanks to the sergeant at the gendarmerie, the mayor and the primary school teacher, who came down on the side of the Arnauds. Jean had found refuge with them. He would stay there, and no Joséphine Roudou or Marie-Thérèse du Courseau would be allowed to dote on him.
Madame du Courseau still refused to surrender, but continued her campaign in such a way as not to make an enemy of the boy’s adoptive mother, and if she had any regrets she nevertheless rapidly understood, in the wake of two incidents that could have ended in tragedy, that the foundling’s place was not at La Sauveté. On the first occasion little Michel, just two years old, was found standing next to Jean’s cradle, trying to stab him. The baby was asleep in the sun in front of the lodge when Jeanne heard a scream. She dashed outside to glimpse Michel, his fist clutching the handle of a kitchen knife, struggling with Joséphine Roudou. In his cradle, Jean’s blood was running onto the pillow from a long gash on his left cheek. If Joséphine had not been there, Michel would have put his eyes out. On another occasion it was Antoinette who ran to warn Jeanne that her brother had stolen the rat poison and was trying to make the baby swallow it, although from that episode he suffered nothing worse than an attack of vomiting.
Have I said anything yet about the physical appearance in which Madame du Courseau, née Marie-Thérèse de Mangepain, offered herself? No, because to me it seems that it goes without saying, but a person reading over my shoulder is worrying me somewhat by describing her as in her forties, ugly, simultaneously authoritarian and sickly-sweet, dressed like those ladies of good works who seem constantly to be watching out for the sins of others. Let us not allow free rein to anyone else’s imagination, apart from my own. At the time this story begins, Marie-Thérèse de Courseau is thirty-eight years old. In three years’ time she will cut her hair short, which will save her from too harsh a transition to her forties. She drives herself to mass in her own trap, swims in the Channel during the three summer months, cooks very admirably when necessary, teaches the Gospels to the children of the village and, as we have seen, presides over her workroom at Dieppe. Dressed by Lanvin, there is no trace in her of the provincial lady in her Sunday best. No one has ever seen her faint at a trifle. In fact, you could say that she is a woman with a strong head, although the head, in her case, is misleading: an expression of sweetness, a voice of honey, a kindness that is only withdrawn whenever she encounters an object in the way of her desires – as for example when Jeanne decided to adopt little Jean. The ambiguity of her character is apparent in her relations with her children. She was never interested in Geneviève until her daughter started coughing. She more or less ignores Antoinette, but repeatedly reveals her adoration of little Michel. If asked the question, ‘Do you have children?’ she will answer, ‘Yes, I have one child, Michel, and two daughters too.’ To go a step further and pierce the veil of intimacy, she fulfils her conjugal obligations without appetite, as a dutiful woman does. Antoine’s misdemeanours caused her pain at first, but now she is indifferent to them. She has not been insensitive to the ‘du’ that precedes Courseau, and is no less proud of having been born a Mangepain, the more so now that a brother of hers is a deputy, elected on a right-wing platform in Calvados. She knows perfectly well, however, that if the ‘du’ Courseaus have one or two pretensions, they do not feature in any directory of the nobility. Sometimes people address her as ‘baronne’, and she does not always correct those who do. Thus are titles forged, over a generation or two. I come back to that expression of sweetness that one can usually see on her face. It has not always been there: as a young girl Marie-Thérèse had a lovely complexion, fresh and pink, that made people forget a certain sourness in her features: thin lips, a sharp nose. As she has got older her complexion has faded, and her sweet expression has corrected the loss. Almost everyone is taken in, except, probably, the abbé Le Couec, whose own sweetness is not on the surface and who, by dint of hearing the confessions of Norman farmers, is more than a little sceptical of the innate goodness of humankind.
So Jean stayed with the Arnauds. I shall not recount his early childhood, which was composed above all of little needs and great appetites, illnesses he had to catch, tears, laughter, cries and the smiles his adoptive mother was always looking out for on his lips. To Jeanne’s profound annoyance, Madame du Courseau insisted on interfering with the baby’s education, which had the result of exacerbating Michel’s jealousy. It was a strange thing to see this child of two years old, nearly three, grow pale with anger whenever Jean’s name was mentioned. It amused Michel’s sister Antoinette to provoke him. Perhaps it was to irritate him even more that she conceived a passion for Jean. Escaping from Joséphine, then from her successor, Victoire Sanpeur, she ran to hide in the lodge. Jeanne had no more faithful ally than this five-year-old child. Keeping a lookout at the kitchen window, as soon as Antoinette saw her mother approaching she would shout, ‘Watch out, it’s her!’ whereupon Jeanne would throw herself into some frenetic task – waxing the floor, polishing her copper pans – to justify her monosyllabic responses to Madame du Courseau.
As for Albert, he continued to grumble. For him, peace would truly have meant peace if his employers had found him a couple of assistant gardeners and some decent fertiliser. His grumbles met with no response from Antoine du Courseau, who, up until the war, had taken little or no pleasure in analysing his own feelings, and in his private moments was frightened to discover in himself a kind of unease for which he could not find a name. He would have been amazed to learn that the feeling in question was one of boredom. Boredom that he banished in his own way by straddling whichever Martiniquaise was working at La Sauveté at the time or by reversing his Bugatti out of the garage to race the country roads using every one of its thirty horsepower, scattering hens, dogs, cats and dawdling flocks of sheep as he went. It was thus that, one afternoon in the summer of 1920, at the wheel of his sports car, he reached Rouen, crossed the River Seine and, having sent a telegram back to La Sauveté telling them
