The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon

with the carafe of calvados and the box of cigars. A strong smell rose from the abbé, who did not always take great care of hiscassock. Domestic matters did not preoccupy him. He lived in one room of the rectory, which functioned simultaneously as bedroom, library and kitchen and which, very occasionally, he allowed a female parishioner to sweep and dust. But as a former infantryman, trained by the
Manuel d’infanterie
, he paid very particular attention to the health of his feet. The faithful souls who visited him often found him sitting in a chair and reading his breviary with his cassock hitched up to his knees, revealing his sturdy legs and hiker’s calves and his feet soaking in a bowl full of water, in which he had dissolved coarse salt collected from the hollows of the rocks. Grangeville’s parish priest needed this treatment: he walked a great deal. To walk to Dieppe and back did not trouble him in the slightest. He had walked to Rouen in twelve hours once, to answer a summons from his bishop, and returned the following day at the same pace, relieved of a number of bitter feelings after a stormy audience.
    Antoine, whose nose was sensitive, offered the abbé a cigar, which the priest lit after clearing his throat.
    ‘Not bad! So how goes it? I’m not talking about your knee, naturally.’
    ‘Another fortnight and I’ll be as nimble as a deer,’ Antoine responded, pretending not to understand.
    ‘It’s been two months, hasn’t it?’
    ‘Yes, two months.’
    ‘Two months without sin! Some people up there will be very interested in your soul.’
    ‘How very kind of them.’
    Antoine recounted the story of Jean and Michel, of the punctured hosepipe and the cut-up headscarf. The abbé listened less than attentively. The first glass of calvados, drunk a little too quickly because he had been thirsty, distracted his attention. He would have liked to know its vintage, but when Antoine began to think aloud he was not to be interrupted.
    ‘I’m very drawn to Jean. If you could see how serious he is, howclosely he looks at you, if you could read his thoughts as they pass across his face, you’d be asking yourself the same question as I do: where does he come from? And it is doubly frustrating that when I look at him, I say to myself every time: I know that face, I’ve seen it somewhere before. In a dream? In the real world? Impossible to tell. Will we ever know?’
    The abbé maintained a prudent silence. He knew, but no one would make him betray a confidence. Or possibly later, if circumstances demanded it. He poured himself another glass of calvados and sipped.
    ‘One thing at a time. Don’t get too interested in Jean Arnaud. Your son has priority, and he needs it. Jean, on the other hand, has all sorts of advantages: a mother of admirable virtue, a father who is both a hero and an idealist …’
    ‘You’re suggesting that Michel doesn’t have those advantages?’
    ‘I’m not suggesting anything. By the way, how are matters at Saint-Tropez?’
    ‘Excellent,’ Antoine replied, put out and instantly withdrawing into himself in the wake of his rebuff. Quite understandably, he did not hold with a priest reminding him, in conversation, of things said in the confessional. But the abbé Le Couec, a man of excessive integrity, could not forget words murmured in an unguarded moment. Antoine’s life, both internal and external, belonged to him, and he intended to maintain his right to oversee it outside the church as well as inside.
    ‘You’re fortunate,’ the abbé said. ‘You might have been a lot less lucky.’
    ‘I’m obliged to you!’ Antoine said drily.
    ‘As a matter of fact, I have never understood what drove you away from Madame du Courseau.’
    ‘If only I knew myself!’
    ‘She has great qualities.’
    ‘I shan’t contradict you on that point.’
    ‘She’s an excellent mother.’
    ‘Without a doubt.’
    ‘She is beyond reproach.’
    ‘Who would dare say anything to the