Free The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon Page A

it.’
    ‘Of course … write to my dealer. I’ll give you his card. He’ll tell you how much. That’s his business.’
    Antoine stayed standing alone on the beach, the canvas in his hand, like a stray object he had discovered on the sand. Dusk was falling. A cool onshore breeze began to blow and he shivered.
    ‘Saints! What’s up, Antoine? Are you dreaming?’ Théo shouted. ‘Come and have a pastis.’
    He walked back to the terrace. The bottle was waiting next to the carafe of cold water. Théo poured pastis, then water. Antoine placed the painting on the table and drank standing up.
    ‘Do you like it?’
    ‘I suppose so. Hey … it really looks like it.’
    ‘To decorate your dining room.’
    ‘Nice. The boat looks as if it’s about ready to go.’
    ‘Are you fishing tonight?’
    ‘I’m thinking about it.’
    It was part of the game. Antoine played with ill grace, and Théo brought it to an end by giving in, but only after enjoying Antoine’s discomfort. He left to go fishing with his lamp, and Antoine remained in the dining room with Marie-Dévote and the two painters, who acknowledged his shy nod with a smile. Marie-Dévote had rings around her eyes and the slightly too languorous and feline look of a woman who has spent the afternoon satisfying herself fully. Antoine still wanted her, but more calmly and deliberately this time, and as he sipped her
soupe au pistou,
served steaming in big blue china dishes, he felt to an extreme extent – to the point of oppression – the fear of loving and of experiencing an impossible passion for a woman who could never be his. It was a bewildering feeling, a feeling that, for all its desire, revealed the bitterness of a wasted life. He wished he had never met Marie-Dévote, and he cursed the appointment with fate that had driven him, on an August afternoon three years earlier, to this beach café where a young girl sat sunning her brown kneeson the terrace. At the same time he was forced to admit that, in the absence of Marie-Dévote, these last three years would have been pitiful, without any grace, joy or happiness. Without any happiness at all. He looked up.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ Marie-Dévote said. ‘Your eyes are watering.’
    ‘The soup’s hot. I burnt myself.’
    ‘Oh good. I’m glad it’s nothing worse!’
    She left to help her mother with the dishes and he turned to the painters, who were also finishing dinner, and raised his glass.
    ‘Why don’t you join us?’ the one who had sold him the picture said.
    ‘I’d be delighted.’
    They questioned him diplomatically, and he answered without bending the truth. One of the two men knew Grangeville.
    ‘I was up that way last year. I rented a little place near the cemetery. Very soft light. Grey gravestones, white cliffs, the sea. One of those places you wouldn’t mind dying in. I came back with a dozen seascapes, but that’s not what the dealers want. The only thing they can sell is the sun. Isn’t that true, André?’
    ‘Yes. And we’ll give them as much as they can handle, blue skies, blue seas, red sails, green boats. I know it like the back of my hand by now, I could go and paint it all in a cellar in Paris with a bare bulb over my head. This is the future, the Midi; people are going to make fortunes here …’
    They discussed their respective dealers with a scorn and aggressiveness that startled Antoine. He had been expecting revelations about art, some explanation of heaven knows what, and all he got instead was talk about money, names, exhibition dates and moaning about critics who only cared about official art, that great producer of war memorials. Antoine had never questioned whether these memorials were beautiful or ugly. In the course of his excursions he had seen them going up in every village, allegories in exaggerated drapery shielding a wounded soldier with a tender hand, proudbronze infantrymen watching over tearful women and children. They seemed unhealthy to him, full of