Paris: The Novel

must be more careful with her reputation and that her uncle shouldn’t have let her wanderoff with Frank as she had. She was quite relieved when Claire made no objection.

    The month of August was quiet for the Joséphine store. Most Parisians were out of town, though foreign visitors to the city came in. The whole Blanchard family based itself at the house at Fontainebleau, and Claire and her mother took turns going into Paris for a day and a night each week to keep an eye on things.
    Jules Blanchard and his wife had retired into one of the pavilions beside the courtyard now, leaving the main body of the house for the family. Gérard’s widow and her children were there, as well as Marc, Marie and Claire, but there was still room for guests, and so there were usually a dozen people sitting out on the broad balcony looking over the lawn on any August afternoon.
    Claire was always happy to be at Fontainebleau. She loved her grandparents. Her grandmother had become a little confused lately, but old Jules, though somewhat forgetful, still liked to sit out on the veranda and chat, and she would ask him questions about the days of his youth, and he would describe the old people he could remember who had lived through the French Revolution and the age of Napoléon.
    During those long, easy summer days there was only one shadow over her life. A cloud of uncertainty. Did Frank Hadley have any interest in her?
    Perhaps it was because her parents had come from different countries that she was hard to please. As a girl being brought up in London, she liked the English boys she knew, but always felt that there was something lacking. It wasn’t only that they didn’t speak French. She was used to seeing things through her mother’s French eyes as well as her father’s. And indeed, her father had lived in Paris so long that, English though he was, he also saw the world in larger terms than most of his neighbors. True, there were English people—many of them—who had served the British Empire in far corners of the world, and whose imaginations had large horizons. But most of them still saw that larger world in imperial terms, secure in the knowledge that, at the end of the day, British was best. English people who had lived on the continent of Europe were a much rarer breed.
    Similarly, when she returned to France with her mother, she foundFrenchmen interesting, and seductive—yet even while she was catching up with the cultural excitement of France, the Frenchmen she met began to seem a little less fascinating. They too, she realized, were part of a crowd—a different crowd, but still a crowd.
    And almost without realizing it, she began to wish that she could find a different sort of man. A free spirit. A man for whom life was an open-ended adventure. He might be English, he might be French, he might come from any nationality. An explorer perhaps, or a writer, or maybe a diplomat … She really didn’t know.
    And where did one find such a man? It had taken her a little while to discover that there was a community in Paris to which people of that sort were drawn.
    The Americans.
    Why was that? She soon came to realize that there were many reasons. Freedom was in their blood. It was their birthright. But almost to a man, these expatriates felt that the mighty engine of America was still too young, too raw to have developed the rich culture they were looking for. Whereas Europe had over two thousand years of culture, from Greek temple to English country house, or Parisian nightclub, all there for the taking. The Americans came, not arrogant, but eager to learn. They meant to have it all.
    And so it was that Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach from America, and Ford Madox Ford the Englishman, and the Spaniard Picasso, and Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, and French writers like Cocteau, and young Ernest Hemingway could all find each other in the bookshops and bars and theaters of Paris on any day of the week—and did.
    So when her uncle Marc asked her casually one day what she thought of the Americans in Paris, she answered: “I wouldn’t want to marry Hemingway, but I like his adventurous spirit.”
    “Perhaps you could find yourself a younger version and share your adventures. Though you may have to work to get him the way you want him.”
    “That sounds like a challenge.”
    “Don’t you want a challenge?”
    Perhaps she did.
    So what did she have to do to get Frank Hadley Jr. to notice her?

    He was friendly. He