Paris: The Novel

Fontainebleau for the last ten days of August. For Marie, it was a magical time. Sometimes they would go into the forest to sketch, and she would go with them, taking a book and a sketch pad herself, to keep them company. She and her mother conducted Hadley around the château, which he preferred to Versailles. In particular he liked the old tapestries that showed the courtly hunting scenes in their deep, rich colors.
    In the evenings everyone would sit out on the veranda. Her father would often read the paper then, and Marc and Hadley would chat, while she quietly listened. At Marc’s prompting, Hadley would talk easily about his childhood, of tobogganing in the snow, of his rowing days at university, or his year of ranching. Sometimes he would mention little things. “When I was eighteen, my father gave me a pair of wooden hairbrushes. Dark hickory, with my initials carved on the back. I always take them with me. Some people have fancy ivory brushes, but I wouldn’t change the hickory brushes my father gave me for anything in the world.”
    He talked of his parents also.
    “If I like to travel, I dare say I get it from them,” he remarked once. “My father usually had spare time in the summer. Before I was born, they went to Japan, to England, to Egypt. And they’d take us children to all kinds of places too. When I marry,” he added easily, “I hope my wife will want to travel with me. It’s a wonderful thing to share.”
    She listened to these and other things until, she thought, she knew everything about him.
    One evening on the veranda, after they had spent the afternoon walking through the forest to nearby Barbizon where Corot had painted, Hadley threw back his head and closed his eyes.
    “You know, I feel as if I’ve entered a beautiful, unchanging world,” he confessed to them. “There’s a softness in the light, a sort of echo everywhere in the landscape. I can’t really put it into words.”
    “Everyone is seduced by the French countryside,” said Marc. “But you should also understand that we French are so conscious of our history—it’s everywhere around us—that we all feel as if we have lived many times before.” He smiled. “This may be a delusion, but it’s a rich one, and it gives us comfort.”
    “We also find comfort in the Church,” his mother added.
    “Same wine, same cheeses,” said Jules pleasantly. “Once a Frenchman, always a Frenchman.”
    “French life has so much charm,” said Hadley with a contented sigh. “I could imagine living here.”
    Could Hadley really live in France? Marie wondered. She tried to imagine him living in the house in Fontainebleau. She thought of his sketches on the wall of the passage that led to the kitchen; the picture of the Gare Saint-Lazare she would give him, in the salon perhaps; and his hairbrushes, on the table in her father’s dressing room.
    Or would he live in America, and travel like his parents? He could have a house in France, she thought, and spend every summer here. Why not? His children could be bilingual.
    One afternoon, Hadley and Marc were painting in the garden, and she came out to look at what they were doing. Hadley was painting a flower bed which contained some magnificent peonies in full bloom. So far, his painting looked like a glowing, almost formless sea of color.
    “I see what it is, but I’d never have thought of it like that,” she said.
    “The difficulty isn’t putting the paint on the canvas,” he answered quietly. “It’s seeing what you’re painting. I mean, looking at it without anypreconceptions about what it’s supposed to look like. If you think you know what a peony looks like, then you’ll never be able to paint it. You have to look at everything with fresh eyes, which is difficult.”
    “I can understand that in painting and drawing, I think. I don’t think it works for other arts, does it?”
    “There are some writers who are trying to do something similar. Especially in France. The symbolists like the poet Mallarmé. And there are political revolutionaries too, who say we should start all over again and decide what the rules of society should be. After all, they were doing that when they destroyed the monarchy and attacked religion back in the days of the French Revolution.” He smiled. “I dare say people have always been changing the rules ever since the Greeks invented democracy or man invented the wheel.”
    “So do you want to change the world?”
    “No. Because the