Paris: The Novel
would want.” Marie was lucky not to catch the flu herself. Claire did not catch it either.
For the rest of that year she and Claire remained in London.
For Claire, at least, London was her home. She had gone to the Francis Holland School, near Sloane Square. This suited her parents’ religious compromise, for though Church of England, the school was so High Church that its observances could almost have been mistaken for Roman Catholic. Its academic standards were unsurpassed. French at the school was even taught by a Frenchwoman—a concession that lesser schools might have viewed as rather suspicious, but which Francis Holland could carry off with aplomb. Since Claire’s parents had always made a point of speaking French in the home, she always came out top of the class in that subject.
But her friends were English. The games she played, the entertainments she went to, the music she loved were all English. And her mother was content for this to be so. Marie had been happy with James in London.
As the months went by after James had gone, however, Marie could not help feeling a little lonely. She missed her own family in France. And toward the end of the year, she began to think that perhaps she should take Claire to see her family in Paris for a while.
“I should like you at least to know your French family a little better,” she told her. Matters were brought to a head in December 1919, when she received a letter from Marc to say that her aunt Éloïse was not well, and that he thought she should come over before too long.
A month later, she and Claire crossed the Channel. They had no particular plan.
Even in the depths of winter, the simple charm of the family house at Fontainebleau with its welcoming courtyard and its long garden brought Marie a sense of peace and restoration she had needed more than she realized. Her father was in his eighties now, rather smaller than she remembered him. Her mother was remarkably unchanged, except that she walked stiffly, and her hair formed a sort of fluffy, snowy white aureole around her head.
They were delighted with Claire, especially pleased that she still spoke near-perfect French.
“But it’s
formidable
how she resembles you,” her mother remarked to Marie.
It was true. Claire had the same golden hair and blue eyes. Was herface just a little longer than her mother’s? people might ask themselves. Perhaps. She was certainly an inch taller.
Claire was delighted to find herself with the old couple. She hadn’t seen them since before the war when she was a young girl. Now she had all sorts of questions she wanted to ask. She was delighted to learn that Jules’s grandfather had bought the house a century ago, and that he had been present in the French Revolution and known Napoléon.
“Can we stay here awhile?” she asked.
After two days, Marc brought Aunt Éloïse down to stay for a few days.
In many ways Marie found her aunt remarkably unchanged, but she did notice that she looked thinner, and that she was rather weak. That evening Aunt Éloïse took her aside.
“My dear Marie, I am very glad you came when you did. I’m perfectly all right, I am very fortunate to have lived in quite good health for so long. But the doctor tells me that I shall be leaving you in a little while.”
“How long?”
“About six months. So I shall be able to see the summer in. I love it so much when the chestnut trees blossom in May. But I shall be glad to go by August, when it becomes much too hot—unless, of course,
le bon Dieu
is planning to send me somewhere even hotter.”
“I’m sure He isn’t,” said Marie, with an affectionate smile.
But that decided her. She discussed it with Claire the next morning, who entirely supported her decision.
“Marc,” she said, “Claire and I will stay in Paris at least until the month of August. Will you help us rent an apartment? Somewhere near Aunt Éloïse, I think.”
“I was hoping,” he said, “that you’d do that.”
For the next six months, they lived in a delightful apartment just northwest of the Luxembourg Gardens, near the great baroque church of Saint-Sulpice.
Marie had never lived on the Left Bank before, and she found that she liked it. Two minutes’ walk northward and she was in the aristocratic Saint-Germain district. If she continued northward up the rue Bonaparte, in less than five minutes she was at the river, looking straight across at the Louvre. If she turned eastward, on the other
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