Paris: The Novel

we began the rule of the people. And it was actually working. But the government sent the army into the city, and they were too well armed for the ordinary Parisians, and the Communards were smashed.” He nodded to himself. “My father was a Communard. In the last, terrible weeks, a great many Communards were shot. Many were shot up there on the hill of Montmartre. My father—your grandfather—was shot in Père Lachaise. I vowed to revenge myself on the family of the man who did it, and when I had the chance, I failed.” He shrugged. “So much for me. But I have dedicated my life to completing my father’s work.” He paused. “The men who smashed the Commune, our enemies, had at least this in their favor. However mistakenly, they believed they were right. The man who shot my father probably thought he was fighting for God and the honor of France. His son, whom I failed to kill, was an aristocrat and a bourgeois lackey, and history should have swept him aside and thrown him into the fire. But he was brave, and proud, and honest, and he had a son he loved. That’s why I didn’t shoot him.”
    He stood up, and looked down sadly at his son.
    “But now, when we have the chance again, a better chance by far than we have ever had before, I find that it is not the monarchists and the bourgeois who are bringing in the troops, but the socialists, and the communists—our own side. And having spent my life trying to honor the memory of my father, I find that my own son is with the traitors. So perhaps if I can find some brave men to stand with me, I can defy your troops, and your treachery, and you and your Russian friends can watch them gun me down.”
    And with those last bitter words, he turned and walked away. And Max knew that there was nothing he could do but watch his father go, and wonder if, having hurt him so much, he had lost him.

    By 1936, L’Invitation au Voyage was a very special establishment. It was named after the famous poem in Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal
, whose refrain expressed everything the place hoped to be.
    Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté
    Luxe, calme, et volupté
    Order, and beauty, luxury, calm. And sexual pleasure. There were two further things for which the house had gained a reputation: It was spotlessly clean. And it was always changing. In fact, it was a work of remarkable imagination.
    The imagination of its owner, Madame Louise.

    The French government had a very sensible attitude toward brothels, Louise always thought. It regulated them. The laws went back to the time of the great emperor Napoléon.
    Not that regulation had been a new idea in Europe, even then. Back in the Middle Ages, the many brothels along the south bank of London’s River Thames were supervised by their feudal lord, the bishop of Winchester, who drew up the regulations.
    In Paris, however, it was not the Church but the civil authorities who licensed the brothels. There were regular inspections and twice-weekly medical checks for all the women employed there. It was pragmatic, logical and responsible.
    It was six years now since Louise had opened her brothel.
    Perhaps, if she’d been colder, a little more ruthless, Louise could have followed in the wake of Coco Chanel—whose lovers, like the Duke of Westminster, included some of the richest men in Europe. But Louise had been too slow to understand the lesson that a woman’s fortune depended entirely on the circuit in which she moved. On the arm of a man who was very rich, she would meet other equally rich men, who cared very little for the rules of society, because they could make the rules for themselves.
    True, in France—where it was well remembered that at the court of Versailles, a royal mistress might have more power and prestige than a queen—a mistress might be a highly fashionable woman, and not a person to be hidden away and looked down upon, as in many other countries. But even so, a well-to-do Parisian was unlikely to give her the social protection or the money she would need to progress beyond a certain point.
    So Louise lived quietly, and she did not become rich, but nonetheless, by the time she was thirty, she had been the kept woman of several menwho could afford to be generous, and together with the capital sum from her father when she reached that age, she had enough money to stop being dependent on others and to go into business for herself. That was when she had opened L’Invitation au Voyage.
    Luc had helped her find