‘Was it Blanche who told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does she still see him?’
‘She more or less has to. He pursues her, rings her constantly, weeps down the phone at her, begs her for money, disappears for ten days and then starts all over again. Do something!’
And she slips him a piece of paper with a telephone number at which La Garenne can be reached, at the apartment of a painter he is looking after.
‘La Garenne’s never looked after a painter in his life. He’s always exploited them.’
‘No, I assure you. Blanche is positive that he’s taking care of this Michel Courtot … or du Courtot admirably …’
‘Michel du Courseau.’
Madeleine is briefly embarrassed. Everything would be all right if she didn’t mangle people’s names. With ordinary people it didn’t matter, or was all to the good, but if it was an aristocratic name an error became a faux pas, and a faux pas made her look silly. It would be less embarrassing if she made Madame Michette’s sort of howlers. Everyone expected them and was unspitefully amused. They had become an essential part of the dinners Marceline was invited to, even if she was unaware that she was singing for her supper. Jean perceives Madeleine’s discomfort.
‘Anyone could mix the two up. I just happen to have known Michel since he was a child.’
‘Is he famous?’
‘No, not yet. One day perhaps … When I say I know him, he’s my uncle … I mean he’s my mother’s brother.’
He explains. Madeleine is delighted. Nothing pleases her more than discovering who is related to whom and adding them to her collection.
‘La Garenne sold me one of Michel du Courseau’s paintings. I haven’t put it up yet. I’m waiting to hear what you think.’
Jean reassures her: Michel has talent, a great talent even, though he is prickly and difficult.
‘You should invite him to dinner,’ Julius says.
‘I thought of it, but La Garenne assures me he doesn’t go out.’
‘What does one do with people who refuse to have dinner! They’re savages,’ Palfy says.
Madeleine does not know the answer. By issuing invitations to dinner, she has cultivated a circle of friends. Without these gatherings she would be merely Julius’s mistress. At least Rudolf von Rocroy is a man who dines.
‘I fear he’s doing penance at this moment,’ Julius observes. ‘I doubt Dr Schacht has summoned him to eat foie gras and sip champagne …’
And so Jean learns that Rocroy is involved, and that he has been unwise. The Finance Minister of the Third Reich is not the joking kind, and if he agreed to turn a blind eye to the smuggling of Reichsleiter Reinhard Heydrich, it was strictly on condition that no scandal resulted. Rocroy has made the mistake of drawing attention to himself … General Danke makes his entrance into Maxim’s. He has left his heavy overcoat in the cloakroom and appears squeezed into a uniform designed for officers kept trim by battle. General Danke eats and drinks too much. It is part of his duties. He dazzles and reassures. The prefect whom he has invited today is at Maxim’s for the first time, a special day in his life. By the time dessert is served, he will agree to whatever is asked of him. Danke greets Julius with a discreet hand gesture; Julius, though in mufti, straightens and nods formally. Jean suppresses a surge of hatred, which is unjustified as Danke has no police powers and it would be stupid to hold him responsible for Claude’s torture. He is, Palfy has assured Jean, an enlightened man and a friend of France. The only question to be asked is why all these great friends of France seem incapable of procuring peace for it.
‘Jean,’ Madeleine says in a low voice, ‘you look uneasy. Do you still dislike the Germans?’
He shrugs.
‘Madeleine, that’s not a proper subject of conversation.’
Michel du Courseau was renting an apartment on the floor below Alberto Senzacatso, the photographer fascinated by Mannerism. After a short spell in prison Alberto had regained his freedom, for which he continued to pay with occasional pieces of information to the vice police. In his studio Michel was working on a four-metre by two-metre canvas of Christ surrounded by children. Alberto — whom he had given up the idea of informing on — provided him with models. The canvas, which was to cost him a year of gruelling work, was destroyed on the eve of the Liberation by Michel himself in the course of an acute attack of mysticism. He has spoken so many times in interviews since then about the painting’s destruction that it is unnecessary to revisit it. Spiteful tongues insist that the devastation was an essential sacrifice to a reputation that Michel wanted to be immaculate. Jean followed the work’s evolution without being able to show the enthusiasm Michel sought from his infrequent visitors, but was nevertheless struck by the anxious tone in which the painter said to him one day, ‘I’m worried that I’m taking too much pleasure in it.’
In his mouth the word ‘pleasure’ sounded so obscene that no one could doubt its meaning, and yet Michel merely intended to indicate how much the slightest distraction harmed his sense of himself as a Christian artist. Jean no longer had any illusions as to the state of mystical constipation in which his youthful uncle lived, but his complex personality, afflicted by some internal curse, and his increasing sanctimoniousness, combined with a talent that was going from strength to strength, made this unusual artist a subject for contemplation by Jean in his gradual understanding of his fellow human beings. At heart he felt that the distinction between Palfy’s cynicism and Michel’s unctuousness was minimal, and if he preferred the Palfian outlook by a long way, it was only because of its innate sense of humour. Between Michel and Alberto there orbited, like a Cartesian diver, the figure of La Garenne, whose gallery on Place du Tertre, reopened by an Aryan of impeccable credentials, now sold sunsets over beached fishing boats, cows drinking from a pool, unequivocal subjects that everyone could respond to. La Garenne, half tolerated, lived a marginal existence selling Alberto’s pornographic photographs on the sly, extracting small commissions from the distribution of copies executed by his company of painters down on their luck, fencing the odd picture here and there, keeping for himself a few rare works offloaded by real or phoney policemen who pillaged abandoned Jewish-owned apartments, and amassing, by means of loud lamentation, tears and hands clasped in despair, a fortune that he will never be able to enjoy. A multimillionaire at the Liberation, within a week he will find himself imprisoned at Drancy while the FFI empty his hiding places and distribute among themselves the gold, Picassos and objets d’art piled up in his garret in Rue de la Gaîté. In short, and even though he scarcely counts as a footnote in such a murky era, natural justice will take its course for La Garenne more harshly than he really deserves, making a scapegoat of him, without pity.
When he first encountered La Garenne at Michel’s studio, Jean wondered what could have brought together two such radically different beings. The truth was that Michel, disoriented by his move to Paris and hardly knowing his way around, had taken up with La Garenne as a guide, knowing nothing of his racketeering. The dealer had summed him up at a glance, put him in touch with Alberto by renting the apartment beneath him, and steered him towards a gallery that guaranteed his new agent a percentage.
‘I’m working for the future!’ Louis-Edmond had told Jean. ‘Your friend is greatly talented. I shall help him, even if I have to ruin myself in the process.’
He was not ruining himself, but at present was making little profit from Michel, who still had a provincial’s sense of thrift. So either at Alberto’s or Michel’s La Garenne would find a couch and a screen where he could lay his weary body in privacy when his long expeditions around Paris took him far from Rue de la Gaîté.