The Foundling Boy Read Online Free

that one can usuallysee 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, hadtaken 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 not to wait, continued via Bernay and Évreux deep into an agricultural Normandy that was foreign to him. France seemed terrifically exotic to him, so full was his mind’s eye still with the memory of landscapes burnt by the sun, cracked by cold or glowing with poppies that he had encountered in southern Serbia and Macedonia. This was a France he did not know, unless he had forgotten it, and it worked its way back into his mind via neat villages full of flowers, hundreds of delicate churches, and a countryside drawn in firm and well-finished lines and softly coloured in grey, green, and red brick. The war had not passed this way, and to see the parish priests out walking, mopping their brows with big checked handkerchiefs, the postmen on bicycles in their straw hats, the children mounted atop hay carts bringing in the second cutting, you would have thought the whole conflict merely a bad dream born of men’s unhinged imaginations.
    The greedy Bugatti gobbled up the kilometres, trailing a plume of ochre dust behind it, its engine burbling with a joyful gravity that communicated itself to the driver. The indefinable malaise Antoine suffered from was left far behind, at La Sauveté. At petrol depots he stopped to stretch his legs