Paris: The Novel

Paris these days, and Marc seemed to know them all.
    When she’d first started work at Joséphine, Marie had wondered if she should return with Claire to the area of the old family apartment, so that she would be near the store. She had hesitated for two reasons. First, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to a place where she lived before. Somehow, it seemed like a retreat. Second, Claire didn’t want to go there.
    “It’s so boring,” she said.
    For Marie, the main attraction of their present apartment was the charming Luxembourg Gardens, just nearby. For when King Henry IV’s widow, Marie de Médicis, had wanted a little Italian palace to remind her of her native Florence, she had unwittingly given future generations of Parisians their most delightful park. Sixty acres of gardens surrounded the building, with a big octagonal pool where children now sailed their toy boats, a puppet theater, a grotto, leafy alleys in which to stroll and lawns where one could sit and catch the sun. From the middle of the gardens there was an elegant view south toward the Sun King’s handsome Observatory.
    But for Claire, it was the area just to the south of the park that was the attraction.
    Montparnasse. Mount Parnassus. A place for the gods. And if the gods who lived in Montparnasse now were mostly very poor, they were surely touched by the divine. Artists, writers, performers, students—Montparnasse in the 1920s was like Montmartre the generation before, with one difference: Montparnasse was international in a new way. Italians, Ukrainians, Spaniards, Africans, Americans, Mexicans, Argentinians, a colony of artists from Chile—they all crowded into Montparnasse, and made it their home. They were international Parisians, and they were rapidly forming a sprawling cultural club that would spread from Paris to Buenos Aires, London, New York and the Orient.
    Marc decided the issue.
    “Both of you—Claire especially, but you too, Marie—need to live incontact with the avant-garde. The people running Joséphine need to be elegant, chic and absolutely up to date with everything that’s happening. We sell our goods to the bourgeoisie, near La Madeleine, but we need to know what’s going on in the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse.”
    It was quite convenient. Marie had considered using a motor car and chauffeur to get to work, but she often found it easier to walk the short distance to the Sèvres-Babylone Métro station; a few minutes later she’d be at La Madeleine. Marc had been right. So far, she hadn’t regretted staying on the Left Bank.
    Marc’s parties were always well judged—plenty of people, but never a squash. Claire had found a young designer to talk to. Marie had been chatting to a couple of writers she knew for five minutes when she saw the tall, aristocratic figure enter the room. His hair was gray now—it set off his blue eyes very well, making them seem brighter—but there was no mistaking Roland de Cygne. He came over to her at once.
    “Madame Fox, I think. Indeed, I am certain, for you are quite unchanged.” He made a slight bow. “Roland de Cygne.”
    “Monsieur de Cygne.” She smiled. “We are all changed a little. You have gray hair, but it suits you very well. What a pleasant surprise.”
    “Your brother did not tell you he had invited me?”
    “He never says who’s coming.”
    “Ah. First, madame, may I express my regret: Marc told me you had lost your husband—whom of course I remember well. You may not know that I married a few years before the war, and sadly my wife died two years ago, so I understand what it is to lose someone. You have a daughter, I believe.”
    “I have, monsieur.”
    “And I have a son.”
    They talked easily about their children. She explained that Claire was in Paris now and working in the family business. His own son was still only a boy, the aristocrat explained. “I was without a mother myself,” he said, “and I am very sad that the same thing should have happened to my son. I do my best, as my father did, but it worries me. I am so afraid that in my own blindness I shall repeat the mistakes of the past.”
    He had mellowed, she thought, and she liked his honesty. She found his worries about his son rather moving. And they continued chatting about her time in England, and his estate, and life in Paris, so that they hardly realized that a quarter of an hour had passed.
    “I go to the opera from time to time, madame,” Roland said finally, “and I