Paris: The Novel

she smelled the aroma of Gauloises in his clothes, and she felt comforted. Then they walked up the hill of Montmartre toward his house.

    The affair between Luc and Louise lasted several months. At first, they would meet in the afternoons at his house. But after a little while, he found her an apartment. “It belongs to a businessman I know and it’s in a good quarter of the city, just north of the Palais-Royal and near the stock exchange, the Bourse. That’ll be convenient for getting to Chanel as well.”
    “Won’t it be expensive?”
    “No. He’s a rich man. His daughter was using it, but she’s left and he hasn’t decided whether to sell it or let it. For the time being, he’d be glad to have a respectable person there. Assuming he thinks you’re respectable, he wouldn’t charge you any rent, but you’d have to leave if he wanted the place back. That ought to suit you rather well.”
    She’d met the man, a middle-aged stockbroker with a respectable family, who had been suitably impressed by her background. Sometimes Luc would join her there for the night, and sometimes she would go up to his house on the hill of Montmartre.
    She quite liked the house. It was a little masculine, as one might expect, and it was permeated by a faint aroma of coffee and Gauloises, like a bar, but it was comfortably furnished with pieces that he had probably found in sales over a period of time. The salon contained a large sofa in the Directoire style, some Second Empire chairs, prints of Napoleonic soldiers on the walls and a thick carpet which, he informed her, he had laid himself. The bedroom contained a large bed made of the best Africanmahogany and handsomely inlaid. The kitchen contained a gas cooker and a fridge. He was a good cook, on the rare occasions that he took the trouble, but she liked to cook for him.
    Luc was a wonderful lover. He was skillful, strong and considerate. In later years, she would say simply: “It was the right time for me.”
    They met several times a week. Often they would explore the city together. She had thought she knew Paris fairly well, but soon she began to see it not as a big city but as a series of communities. She shared his memories of characters who had lived their eccentric lives in every corner of the city. She discovered ancient street markets, the places along the river where she could buy good flowers cheaply; he showed her where to eat the food of Normandy, or Alsace, or Provence; he showed her where the licensed brothels were, and where the old prisons and gallows had stood. He paid for everything, for he always seemed to have cash, and since she was living free, she could save not only her modest allowance but the small sums she got from modeling as well.
    One benefit of working for Chanel was that, once in a while, she might be given small items of clothing. But most of all, she found that she was developing an eye for fashion. And with the advice from the other models, and information from Luc, she was able to assemble a little wardrobe that was getting quite chic.
    It also amused her that, though he did not always say anything, Luc’s eye missed nothing. A grunt of approval meant that he had noticed the new blouse she was wearing. And once in a while, if she was carrying some elegant little bag she’d picked up somewhere, he’d ask sharply, “Where did you get that?” For he didn’t like to think that there was any bargain in the city that he didn’t know about. And she would say, “I shan’t tell you. A girl has her secrets.” And then, on and off, he might question her, “Was it one of those secondhand shops behind the rue Saint-Honoré, or that Moroccan dealer on the rue du Temple?” And even if he guessed right, she would always deny it. And though he would pretend to be annoyed, she knew he liked the challenge of these little games, and others that she learned to play, to tease him.
    Yet despite all the time they spent together, she never discovered anything about his business. If he was out, he was out. That was it.
    “Never ask a man his business,” he told her. “He’ll either get his whip or get bored.”
    “Bad alternatives,” she said with a laugh.
    “Voilà.”
    She had the impression that he might be part-owner in other bars and clubs, and that there might be properties from which he collected rents, but that was all she knew.
    Meanwhile, she was happy in the new quarter where she found herself. With the stockbrokers and financial men