‘There is no right time for denouncing or not denouncing,’ Michel went on agitatedly. ‘Evil is evil, whether France is occupied or free.’
‘Now you’re annoying me,’ Jean said. ‘Go and enjoy your painting and leave me alone.’
Michel flinched, wounded, cross and surprised. He had arrived with good intentions, wanting to bury an awkward past. Why was Jean unwilling to take the olive branch he was offering?
‘You sound bitter,’ he said.
‘Bitter? Well … now you mention it … I am. And it’s a very mediocre emotion. So forgive me. Did you bring any of your canvases?’
‘Five. Not enough for an exhibition, but I’ve several pictures in progress: a Last Supper that’s nearly finished, a “Suffer the little children …” I’ve just started. Nothing but sacred subjects. A great Christian revival has taken hold in France. Artists cannot stand idly by.’
Jean suppressed a shrug of his shoulders. Generalised ideas like Michel’s bored him to death. He found his pompousness beneath sarcasm.
‘I’ll ask who you should introduce yourself to,’ he said. ‘La Garenne knows all that sort of thing. But don’t say he was the one who sent you. He’s a crook.’
‘In that case I don’t want to have anything to do with him.’
‘Save your fine words for later. At the moment he’s the only possibility I can offer you.’
‘I’ll leave it to you in that case.’
Jean walked a short distance down the street with Michel, and in doing so learnt that Antoinette had been ill with a stubborn bout of influenza that she could not shake off, that Marie-Thérèse du Courseau was astonishing Grangeville with her energy, and that there remained, as expected, no news of Antoine.
‘I suppose he’s in the southern zone,’ Michel said. ‘Antoinette knows his address, but she’d let herself be cut into little pieces before she’d tell Maman or me. Anyway, neither of us is insisting. Papa has gone from our life. Now that he can’t get hold of petrol to keep his Bugatti on the road, he must be a shadow of his old self. He’s one of those men who only have a personality when they’re behind the wheel. If you’d known Gontran Longuet better, you’d understand why I put them both in the same boat, or rather car. Did you know Gontran is currently impressing the Norman coast with a wood-gas car …’
‘You’re unkind and unfair about Antoine. He was my only friend. It makes me happy to know that he got away from you both.’
‘Oh, I know you’ve always had a soft spot for him, and more than ever now you know you’re his grandson.’
Jean thought about this.
‘Actually you’re wrong. It makes me uncomfortable more than anything else. I feel tempted to believe in blood ties now, whereas before it felt like something more noble, an affinity between two men, which is something so rare it doesn’t happen more than once in a lifetime.’
Michel suggested they might agree to differ on the subject of Antoine, without coming to blows. Like a coward, Jean accepted the offered platitude, which got them both out of a situation that left them feeling awkward. They stopped on the forecourt of the Sacré-Cœur, turning their backs on the hideous basilica, looking out over an impassive Paris, a sea of roofs glittering in the cold winter sun. Children were playing on Square Willette and soldiers in green uniforms seated on the steps contemplated the El Dorado of a city below them, which in truth looked from this height like almost any other city, as long as they could not put names to the church steeples, domes and palaces. The absurd Eiffel Tower was the only landmark that wholly reassured them, and perhaps the wavering line of the Seine. Jean pointed, lower down, to Rue Steinkerque and a small bistro there.
‘Second on the left as you go down. I’ll meet you there tomorrow at one. It’s Wednesday. There’ll be black pudding. I hope you like black pudding?’
‘I’ll make do.’
‘See you tomorrow.’
Jean watched him go down Rue Foyatier and disappear, swallowed up by this Paris that succeeded, in so many different ways, in cloaking the most singular individuals in anonymity. He did not hate Michel, he had never hated him despite his deviously spiteful behaviour that had dogged his, Jean’s, childhood, despite all the scorn Michel had poured on him because he had thought, in those days, that he was the gardener’s son. The emotion he felt was simpler than hate: he did not understand him and would never understand such gratuitous and spontaneous spite. Michel had arrived in Paris like a provincial youth greedy for conquests. Perhaps it had not even entered his head that the city might not recognise his talent any more than it had the first time at the Salle Pleyel, on the occasion of his recital accompanied by Francis Poulenc. The audience then had not been able to appreciate his quality. Or had he sensed, from a lack of warmth and despite having a fine baritone voice, that he would never, in that sphere anyway, be in the first division? Painting offered him a second chance in a confused era. He was no less talented an artist than he had been as a singer, but would he again have to be satisfied with a succès d’estime? With music lovers thinking of him as a gifted amateur, and art critics as a talented dilettante?
Jean returned to the gallery. Blanche, sitting on a stool by the door, was observing the comings and goings of the passers-by through the window. Her chapped, reddened hands lay on the shiny cloth of her skirt, stretched tight by her bony knees. Rudolf von Rocroy had not appeared at the gallery for a week. The elation of their first meeting and the success of the first sale had begun to evaporate. That same morning La Garenne had reproached Blanche for not looking after her cousin.
‘The idiot’s buggered off! You didn’t know how to keep hold of him. He’s running around the other galleries now, where they’re robbing him and cheating him. And you, Mademoiselle de Rocroy, don’t care. Quite cynically, you do not give a tinker’s cuss. Telephone him.’
‘I have. He’s never there.’
‘Not there for you, perhaps. Because you’re always talking to him about family: Papa Adhémar, Cousin Godefroy, Aunt Aurore and Grandfather Gonzague. He doesn’t care a fig about your family, you goose. He came to Paris on his own, to enjoy himself. Take him to the Folies-Bergère, find him a girl, go to the Bois de Boulogne at night. Show the old aristo a thing or two …’
‘Me?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t be such a bloody goody-goody.’
Powerless, Blanche suddenly came face to face with her failure to help Louis-Edmond. Instead of taking a lunch break, she walked all the way to the Hôtel Continental to deliver a letter. Would he answer? Jean’s return produced a timid smile.
‘Your visitor is absolutely charming!’ she said. ‘Is he a relation of yours?’
‘My uncle.’
‘So young and already an uncle! Your mother must be very young, then?’
‘Yes, very young.’
‘I’d so like to meet her.’
‘Not much chance of that, at this precise moment. She’s in Lebanon.’
‘In Lebanon? How extraordinary! I’ve got a second cousin there. She must know him. Colonel Pontalet. A colonel in the Foreign Legion. Quite an old scrapper.’
‘Perhaps they’ll meet!’ Jean said kindly, doubtful whether the prince and Geneviève spent any time at all socialising with army officers.