Paris: The Novel

say a miracle—but a sign. And remember one thing, Roland,” the priest continued. “Do you know the motto of your family? It is very important.
‘Selon la volonté de Dieu’
—According to God’s Will.”

    Father Xavier turned his eyes up to survey the landscape all around. To the north rose the hill of Montmartre, where Saint Denis had been martyred by pagan Romans, sixteen centuries ago. To the southwest, behind the towers of Notre Dame, rose the slope above the Left Bank where, as the old Roman Empire was crumbling, the indefatigable Saint Geneviève had asked God to turn Attila and his Huns away from the city—and her prayers had been answered.
    Time and again, thought the priest, God had protected France in her hour of need. When the Moslems had first swept up from Africa and Spain, and might have overrun all Europe, hadn’t He sent a great general, the grandfather of Charlemagne, to beat them back? When the English, in their long, medieval struggle with the French kings, had even made themselves masters of Paris, hadn’t the good Lord given France the maiden Joan of Arc to lead her armies to victory?
    Most important of all, God had given France her royal family, whose Capetian, Valois and Bourbon branches for thirty generations had ruled, reunited and made glorious this sacred land.
    And through all those centuries, the de Cygnes had faithfully served those divinely anointed kings.
    This was the little boy’s heritage. He would understand it in due course.

    It was time to go home. Behind them, at the end of the Tuileries Gardens, lay the vast open space of the Place de la Concorde. Beyond that, the magnificent sweep of the Champs-Élysées, for two miles up to the Arc de Triomphe.
    The little boy was still too young to know the Place de la Concorde’s part in his history. As for the Arc de Triomphe, grand though it was, Father Xavier did not care for republican monuments.
    Instead, he gazed again at the hill of Montmartre—that site where once a pagan temple stood; where Saint Denis had been martyred; and where such terrible scenes had taken place in the recent upheavals in the city. How appropriate that this very year, a new temple should be arising there by the windmills, a temple to Catholic France, its pure, white dome shining like a dove over the city. The basilica of Sacré Coeur, the Sacred Heart.
    This was the temple where the little boy should serve. For God had saved his family for a reason. There was shame to be overcome, faith to be restored.
    “Could you walk a little way?” he asked. Roland nodded. With a smile, the priest reached down and took the child’s hand. “Shall we sing a song?” he asked. “ ‘
Frère Jacques
,’ perhaps?”
    So hand in hand the priest and the little boy, watched by several nannies and their charges, walked out of the gardens, singing.

    As Jules Blanchard reached the Louvre end of the Champs-Élysées and walked up toward the church of La Madeleine, he had every reason to be a happy man. He already had two sons, good boys both of them. But he’d always wanted a daughter. And at eight o’clock this morning, his wife had presented him with a baby girl.
    There was only one problem. And solving it would require a certain delicacy—which was why, at this moment, he was going to a rendezvous with a lady who was not his wife.
    Jules Blanchard was a well-set, vigorous man, with a solid family fortune. The century before, as the charming, rococo monarchy of Louis XV encountered the grand ideas of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution turned the world upside down, his ancestor had been a bookseller of radical views. The bookseller’s son, Jules’s grandfather, was a doctor who came to the notice of the rising general, Napoléon Bonaparte, during the Revolution and never looked back. A fashionable physician under Napoléon’s empire and the restored Bourbon monarchy that followed it, he’d finally retired to a handsome house in Fontainebleau, which the familystill possessed. His wife was from a merchant family, and in the next generation, Jules’s father had gone into business. Specializing in wholesaling grain, by the mid-nineteenth century he had built up a considerable fortune. Jules had joined the business and now, at the age of thirty-five, he was ready to take over from his father, whenever that worthy gentleman chose finally to retire.
    At La Madeleine, Jules turned half-right. He liked this boulevard because it led past the city’s