Paris: The Novel

fashionable goods at the best price. So we have to make people come to us because of the way we sell the goods, and because we always have the latest style, almost before it’s arrived! We must follow the old French military maxim:
Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace
. We need audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”
    “You make it sound like a theater,” Claire laughed.
    “But that’s it, exactly,” cried Marc. “A great store is not just a useful place. It’s an experience. It needs drama and surprise, like a theater.”
    And he proved it. The Joséphine store was a constant surprise. Mannequins were being used in store windows now. But the windows at Joséphine didn’t only show off the dresses. They told a story, like a painting. Marc also had a gallery inside the store, where new artists’ work was shown. Every month something happened at Joséphine, something that was talked about, something that one had to go and see before it disappeared. It was a sensation.
    The beauty parlor and the hair salon were huge successes too. Joséphine was the best place for young women to get the new, short, boyish haircut, the gamine look.
    By the spring of 1924, Marc was running with a new theme for the summer.
    The Olympics.
    It was quite remarkable really. The ancient sports festival had been revived only in 1896. Appropriately, the first games had been in Athens. With one gap during the war, the games had continued every four years. Paris had been the venue in 1900, followed by St. Louis in America; then London, Stockholm and Antwerp had all had their turns. But now the games were returning to Paris again: proof indeed, the French thought—as if any were needed—that the capital of France was the finest city in the world.
    Already Marc had his plans for windows with themes like track events, swimming, boxing, cycle racing. The store’s theme that summer wouldbe sportive, with sportily cut tweeds and jaunty little cloche hats lined up for the months of September and October.
    It was going to be a spectacular year. All three of them—Marc, Marie and Claire—had been working harder than ever, and enjoying every minute of it.

    Only one thing was missing from their lives.
    “It’s time you girls got married,” he remarked to Marie and Claire one day.
    “I have been married, and very happily,” Marie replied.
    “It’s you who ought to get married,” Claire told her uncle.
    “I’m too old,” he said with a smile.
    “He’s too selfish,” Marie observed to her daughter.
    “Unfair,” said Marc. “Look at all the things I do for you.”
    “I can’t imagine Uncle Marc allowing any wife to rearrange the pictures in his apartment,” said Claire.
    Marc considered.
    “She could do what she likes in the kitchen,” he said. “And maybe the bedroom. I have my dressing room, after all. But seriously”—he turned to Claire—“your mother was wonderfully fortunate in marrying your father, but it’s nearly five years since he died. Don’t you think your mother should marry again?”
    “If she wants to,” said Claire. “If she finds a man she really likes.” She looked at her mother. “I think you should.”
    “I haven’t the time,” said Marie.
    And they were all certainly going to be busy as the month of May approached, when the Olympic Games officially began.

    By July, Roland de Cygne would normally have been in the country at his château for the summer. This year, however, he had lingered because of the Olympics. Not that he was interested in most of the proceedings, but there was a week of polo at Saint-Cloud at the start of the month and the equestrian events were taking place toward the end. So he’d decided to stay for them. As he would still be in the city then, he’d bought a couple of tickets for the ballet at the Opéra right at the end of the seasonand told his son, despite the boy’s protests, that he’d take him. “It will be good for your education,” he said cheerfully.
    As compensation, however, he’d taken him out to the stadium on the western outskirts of the city where the track events were being held, and they’d seen some thrilling races, culminating in the hundred-meter final when a British athlete named Abrahams had taken the gold.
    “One doesn’t think of a Jew being an athlete,” he’d remarked mildly to his son. “There was once a famous boxer named Mendoza, mind you, but he was a Spanish Jew, which is