Paris: The Novel

shook her head in mystery. Gérard, who’d been betraying her since she was a child. She might have cried out, “May he rot in hell!” though she did not. But she stopped walking for a moment, and stared at the ground. Hadley put his arm around her to comfort her, and neither of them moved. Then she indicated that they should walk on, and he offered his arm again, and this time she clung to it so that her head rested against his shoulder.
    “You know,” she said, “I always felt that I missed my chance. So if Claire wants to go away to America with Frank, I can’t stand in her way. I don’t want her to miss hers.”
    “I’m sorry I caused you pain,” he said quietly. “I don’t know if I would have proposed. But I might have.”
    “It’s nice of you to say so.”
    “It’s true,” he said simply.
    They had crossed the park now, to its eastern corner, where there was a pond, partly enclosed on one side by a charming Roman colonnade. It was a romantic place.
    Marie straightened herself and turned her face up to him.
    “You know,” she said with a smile, “we could make up for lost time. While you are here in Paris.”
    He stared at her.
    “Are you suggesting …?”
    “It’s nice to close unfinished history.”
    “No doubt.”
    She could tell from the way he said it that the idea was not at all unattractive to him. That was something, at least.
    “I’m a married man.”
    “You’re in Paris. Nobody will know.”
    “There are things to think of,” he said.
    “One can think too much.”
    “One can think too little. And what about my son and your daughter? If they were to marry?”
    She shrugged.
    “It’s good to keep these things in the family.”
    “Only a French person could say that.”
    “We’re in France.”
    He sighed and shook his head.
    “Marie, I swear to God I’d like to. But I can’t.”
    “Let me know,” she said, “if you change your mind.”
    But he never did.

    In May 1925, Mr. Frank Hadley Jr. and Mademoiselle Claire Fox were married in Fontainebleau. The bridegroom’s father came across the Atlantic to attend the wedding. He could stay only a few days. But everything went off very well.
    The following week, Marie received a visit from her friend the Vicomte de Cygne. He was looking very spruce and handsome in a pale gray suit, with a flower in his buttonhole.
    He asked her to marry him. She asked for a little time to consider.

Chapter Twenty-three
    •  1936  •
    All sons are wiser than their fathers. And as Max Le Sourd looked at his father, Jacques, he felt concern. Max wasn’t thirty yet, his father was past seventy. But there were things his father did not understand.
    And Max was wondering: Was he going to have to tell him?
    Early afternoon. A weekday in June, in a fateful year.
    From all over the world, athletes had already started making their way toward a new Olympic Games, to be held in Berlin, and hosted by Germany’s Nazi regime. Russia was not attending, but despite individual protests, other nations were.
    In Spain, the election of a Popular Front of leftist parties had left the old conservative forces furious, and summer arrived, and left- and right-wing forces eyed each other tensely, there was danger in the air.
    And in France …
    On any normal day, there should have been cars in the Champs-Élysées, and people crowding the broad walkways under the small trees. But there were almost no cars, and few people. It was eerily quiet. As they gazed down toward the distant Louvre, it seemed that all Paris had fallen strangely silent.
    Jacques Le Sourd turned to his son.
    “I thought I wouldn’t live to see it,” he confessed.

    Once before, he’d thought it had begun. There had been that moment during the war, when the army had mutinied. He’d thought it was starting then. But he’d been premature. France had not been ready.
    Russia had been ready, though. The Russian Revolution had succeeded. And with that massive example before all Europe, it had seemed inevitable to Jacques Le Sourd that now it would spread. The question had been: Where next?
    By the mid-twenties, all eyes had fallen on Britain. France might be the cradle of revolution, but Britain was also a logical choice. Wasn’t Britain the first home of capitalism, colonial empire and exploitation? Wasn’t London where Karl Marx had written
Das Kapital
?
    The Zinoviev letter of 1924, forgery or not, might have frightened the British middle classes into electing a Conservative