What was Renée to do with her sports-mad husband and distant son?
BY ALISON CARTER
Set in 1900
THESE games, Reneé told her husband, were getting in the way of daily life. But Louis was taking quite the opposite view.
“This is the Olympics,” he told her. “The most ancient of all sporting tournaments. Paris is honoured to have the games. People will come from all over the world.”
Louis Deltour adored all things sporting.
Now that the Olympics had begun, he had taken to nipping out of the house whenever he could, to see all the athletes practising.
Everywhere there were young men in leggings, cycling jerseys and fencing masks.
It was May of 1900, and the games were due to go on until October. October, for heaven’s sake!
Louis was making a list of what was to come as the summer went on.
He trekked about Paris after work, occasionally persuading their son to go with him.
He went to all the various venues to watch men warming up and taking part in friendly heats.
He came back chatting about football, fencing or men swimming up and down a pool (which to Reneé seemed a pointless activity).
He’d even go across town on an expensive omnibus to the athletics stadium to watch things being thrown – discuses and javelins – and muscled fellows hurtling round a track.
She regretted, as the month went on, that the Deltours lived so close to the centre of Paris.
So many opportunities to be a spectator.
Louis usually left her in the house with his mother, a brooding presence in the corner, dressed all in black.
She disapproved of Reneé, even after 15 years of marriage to her beloved son.
Madame Deltour Senior did not like the way Reneé and Louis’s only child was being raised.
She felt Emile had too much free rein, and never hesitated to say so.
But how did a mother rein in a boy of twelve, really?
Reneé mostly took no notice of Madame Deltour.
She handed her mother-in-law a cup of her favourite tisane, and a madeleine cake, as she might feed a cat titbits from the table to keep it quiet.
But she did worry about Emile. She had to wonder if other mothers had boys who were so ungrateful, so undutiful, so unwilling to communicate.
He was the jumpiest creature she had ever seen.
Getting him to stay at the table after a meal was hard, because he had another thing to be doing.
And getting him to come to church . . . Well, that had been nigh
