Read Online The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon - Free Book Online

spent the best part of the journey throwing up out of the window, and the black woman was never invited. And sometimes out on the road they would see the blue Bugatti overtake them or pass them going the other way, and for a split second they would make out Monsieur du Courseau at the steering wheel, his cap back to front and his big mica goggles shielding his eyes from the wind and dust. As soon as his plaster cast came off he had started training again, criss crossing the country to get back into condition. One day, on a bend he was deliberately taking as tightly as he could, he nearly collided with the Ford. Wrenching the wheel over to avoid him, Marie-Thérèse put her nearside wheels into the ditch. Antoine reversed back to her.
    ‘Nothing broken?’ he asked, not getting out of the car.
    Antoinette was crying with laughter, Michel was moaning. Madame du Courseau, pale and furious, snapped, ‘No!’
    ‘I’ll ask them to send the oxen then.’
    An hour later a farm worker hauled the Ford out of the ditch, but that evening Antoine was not to be found at La Sauveté. He had left for the Midi.
    For three years his route had not changed by a kilometre. The only difference was that he now followed it less madly, no longer sleeping in ploughed fields, stopping instead to rest at Montargis before pushing on to Lyon where, at the same bistro each time, a sausage and a jug of Beaujolais were waiting for him. At Montélimar he stocked up on nougat, and at Aix he stopped to have dinner with Charles and listen to his stories of an imaginary war so much more glorious and heroic than the one they had lived through that it was almost a pleasure to recollect it. Charles’s skill lay in never merely going off into fables of his own heroism, but instead weaving Antoine into them with such conviction that Antoine let himself be carried away, involuntarily holding himself straighter, looking forthe stripes on his sleeve, covering his ears when the crash-bang-wallops of his former driver rang out, marvelling at his own cheek towards his colonel, and at the offhand way he treated the liaison officers dispatched by headquarters. He protested mildly at Charles’s story of how he had picked him up at the roadside, wounded in the buttock by a Bulgarian cavalryman’s lance, but Charles – who, like every good storyteller, brooked no interruptions – stuck to his version and refused to back down, even when Antoine, by now rather tipsy, jumped up and began to drop his trousers to prove that his buttocks bore no trace of the alleged shameful gash. The restaurant owner halted this affront to public decency just in time, and Antoine resigned himself to accepting that the shrapnel wound in his right shoulder had metamorphosed into a less dignified laceration as the result of a heroic confrontation with a moustachioed horseman who had the yellow-tinged face of a Tatar and had been terrorising and violating the gentle Serbian peasant women in the countryside all around. In fact, Charles’s conviction was so strong that Antoine surprised himself on his return to his hotel by contorting himself in front of his wardrobe mirror to try to verify the mechanic’s words. All he could see was his slightly fat, fairly white and very ordinary bottom, and he went to bed nursing a pang of regret that he had not really had a truly heroic Balkan war.
    Antoine’s appreciation of Charles Ventadour had grown at each meeting since their first in 1920. He was particularly grateful for Charles’s substitution of his own appalling and pitiful memories by an epic of men’s valour, an adventure in which Justice advanced in triumph at the head of armies marching to drive out the oppressors and restore the happiness of the oppressed. Alas, there remained the memory of Les Éparges, from which a man could not free himself so easily, and often at night Antoine woke up covered in an icy sweat, the taste of earth in his mouth, his temples thumping as if a mortar had just