Paris: The Novel

I’ll think about it.”
    “Don’t wait too long. I should like to see your children.”
    Roland gave him a quick look. The priest was thinner than when he last saw him. Was he unwell? Seeing his look, Father Xavier smiled. “I am not sick, Roland, but none of us is getting any younger. Besides, I have already decided how to die.”
    “Really?”
    “I think that I shall know when it is approaching. And at that time, I intend to go to Rome.”
    “Why?”
    “Where else to die,” said the priest with a wry smile, “if not in the Eternal City?”

Chapter Sixteen
    •  1911  •
    It was a quiet Sunday morning in September, and Édith and the girls were at Mass when Luc came to his brother’s lodgings.
    “Can you give me some help this evening?” he asked. “We’ll need that handcart of yours. I have some furniture to shift.”
    “All right. Shall I bring Robert?” His eldest son was a strong young fellow.
    “No. I want to talk with you in private.”
    “What about?”
    “I’ll tell you later,” said Luc. “I must go now. Meet me with the handcart at the restaurant this evening. Six o’clock.”
    Thomas Gascon shrugged.
    “As you like.”

    He’d owned the handcart for half a dozen years now, and it had been a good investment.
    The loss of their lodgings at Monsieur Ney’s establishment had been a great blow to the Gascon family. There was rent to pay, and with her six young children, Édith hadn’t been able to earn much. Thomas had been ready to move up onto Montmartre, on the edge of the Maquis, but Aunt Adeline and Édith wouldn’t hear of it. When Aunt Adeline had found work as a housekeeper near the Pigalle district, however, they had moved to lodgings close by.
    This brought them into the vicinity of the Moulin Rouge and the foot of Montmartre—hardly a respectable area, and frequented in the evenings by ladies of the night. But Édith wanted to be near her aunt, and Thomas, at least, was not unhappy to find himself near his brother.
    As a foreman, Thomas earned good wages. But there had been two more girls born since then, and so money was often tight. Sometimes Aunt Adeline had to help them with the rent.
    One weekend, an old carrier living nearby had asked Thomas if he would help him on a Sunday. He did all kinds of odd jobs carrying furniture and delivering goods in the area. After helping him a few times, Thomas realized that this could be a useful way of supplementing his earnings. Soon, complaining of a bad back, the old man had given up his trade, and Thomas had bought a new handcart for himself, which he kept in a local stable yard. Before long, anyone in the area who wanted a piece of furniture moved, or some sacks of flour, or a load of firewood, would probably ask Thomas Gascon if he’d be free on a Sunday afternoon.

    When Édith got back from Mass, she wasn’t too pleased to hear about Luc.
    “I hope he’s going to pay you,” she said.
    “He will if I ask,” answered Thomas.
    “Be careful what he wants you to carry. It may be stolen goods.”
    “No it won’t.”
    “Just make sure it isn’t the
Mona Lisa
.”
    It was hardly a month since Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting had been stolen from the Louvre. Apollinaire, a writer thought to be an anarchist, had been arrested; and then a friend of his, a young painter no one had ever heard of, named Picasso. But though they remained under suspicion, no proof against them had been found so far. Nor was there any sign of the painting.
    “You always think the worst of my brother, for no reason,” Thomas complained. Some years back, a grateful client had given Luc enough money to expand his bar into a restaurant. “He must have stolen the money,” Édith had declared. “He saved the man’s life,” Thomas assured her. But she only sniffed. “So he says,” she said. “You can believe it. Not me.”
    Her unreasonable dislike of Luc was one of the few sources of frictionin their marriage. If she ever regretted her hesitant acceptance of Thomas that magical evening after the Wild West show in the Bois de Boulogne, she had never shown it. If she’d wished she had married a man with a little money—and how she must have wished that, after they suddenly lost their lodgings—her only reaction had been to apologize to him. “I never thought that could happen. We had always counted on Monsieur Ney.”
    After ten pregnancies, with six healthy children, she still had a good figure. You couldn’t say that of