Paris: The Novel

her feet. And the effect was astonishing. It was, indeed, as if she were floating away up the gallery. With the pale light coming in through the windows, her floating form passed like a ghost from mirror to mirror so that one could almost have imagined she were passing into some other age until, turning some hundred feet away, she glided back to them and to the present.
    Finally, when she stopped the gentlemen burst into a little round of applause.
    “Where did you learn that?” asked Marc in amazement.
    “I had a dancing teacher who could do it. She showed me how.”
    “Formidable!”
cried Roland enthusiastically. “More than that. Exquisite. You must have been at the court in another life.”
    “A remarkable performance,” said Fox. “Wonderful.”
    “It’s quite tiring,” said Marie with a laugh. “I’m glad I don’t have to do it every day.”
    They moved into the Queen’s Apartment. Redecorated several times in the eighteenth century, these had a lighter air.
    “Your family were at Versailles, Monsieur de Cygne?” Marie asked.
    “Yes. In fact, it’s rather a romantic tale. Back in the days of Louis XIV, my family almost came to an end. There was just one de Cygne left. He was getting old, and he had no heir. But then, here at Versailles, he met a young woman, of the D’Artagnan family. And despite the great difference in age, they fell in love and married.”
    “D’Artagnan like in
The Three Musketeers
?”
    “Exactly so. Dumas used the name in his novel, but it was based on a real family.”
    “And they were happy?”
    “Very happy, I believe. They had a son.” He smiled. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
    “I think that’s charming,” said Marie.
    As he guided them out of the Queen’s Apartment, Roland announced that he would show them the chapel, which lay across the courtyard. As they walked across the courtyard, Marie turned to him.
    “I was interested by the story you just told us,” she said quietly. “I always supposed it would be very difficult to have a happy marriage when there is a great difference between the husband and wife.”
    “A difference of age, you mean?”
    “Of age. Or other things.”
    A delicate question, he thought, but sensible. She was right to raise it. After all, he was an aristocrat, and she, though rich, was a woman of the bourgeoisie. Such a difference in traditional France was still huge.
    “I think that if there is affection, mademoiselle, and mutual respect, and if people have interests in common, then the differences can be solved as long as both parties make compromises. And compromise comes from affection.”
    She nodded thoughtfully. Then she smiled.
    “What you say seems very wise, monsieur.”

    The chapel was a baroque masterpiece, dedicated to the medieval king Saint Louis.
    “In the latter part of his reign,” Roland remarked, “the Sun King became increasingly religious.”
    “And this was entirely thanks to his second wife, Madame de Maintenon,” Marie added cheerfully, “who was a good moral influence on him.”
    Roland laughed.
    “She’s quite right, of course,” he told Fox and Hadley. “No doubt every man needs a wife to give him moral guidance. But Louis XIV certainly did!”
    Fox, however, did not seem to share their amusement. He nodded thoughtfully, but pursed his lips.
    “You must forgive me if I can’t be so enthusiastic about the religious feelings of Louis XIV. It was those feelings that made him kick my family out of France.”
    Roland looked at him in surprise.
    “You’re a Huguenot?”
    “We were.” Fox turned to Hadley to explain. “You’ve probably heard of the Huguenots, as the French Protestants were often called. We lived in France protected by an act of toleration known as the Edict of Nantes. But then in 1685, Louis XIV revoked that protection and told the Huguenots to convert. About two hundred thousand escaped, many of them going to England. My family was one of those.”
    “But you haven’t got a French name,” Marie said.
    “No. Some of the English Huguenots kept their French names. But others translated them into English. A family called Le Brun, for instance, became Brown. And Renard translated to Fox.”
    “Your name was Renard?” said Roland with sudden interest.
    “Yes. It’s quite a common name.”
    Roland looked thoughtful for a moment. He knew that his family had married a Renard heiress once, a woman of the merchant class—a girl like Marie Blanchard, perhaps.