Paris: The Novel

the place. There were many areas where brothels were to be found. Apart from the red-light district of Pigalle near the Moulin Rouge, there was the ancient rue Saint-Denis that ran up the edge of the Second Arrondissement just east of Les Halles. For male homosexuals, there were the bath houses on the Left Bank in the Luxembourg quarter; the best lesbian house was even grander, in a private mansion on the Champs-Élysées. Louise didn’t like the rue Saint-Denis. The girls who walked the street there were prostitutes of the lowest sort. Though she was sorry for them, and for their sad, degraded lives, she wasn’t going to have them on her doorstep. But Luc found a place a little to the east on the edge of the Marais quarter, on the old rue de Montmorency, where Nicolas Flamel, the medieval magician, had owned a neighboring house.
    Luc had also been useful at the start in helping her find the girls. And Louise had wondered if he would want her to make him a partner, which she didn’t want to do. But when she offered him a salary instead, for these and other services, he seemed quite content, and she realized that, even in middle age, he was happier with the freedom of the streets than the responsibility of a business. He still supplied cocaine to his large network of clients, and in its first year, he provided more than a dozen valuable customers to the brothel.
    But he and Louise had one understanding. None of her girls were allowed to take drugs of any kind, especially cocaine. It was a rule she had made right at the start, and she never deviated from it.
    “I’ve seen too much of what cocaine can do,” she told Luc. “I want all the girls to look wholesome. I won’t have them getting skinny and rattled, no mood swings, no girls without septums in their noses, no lying. Girls in other places may be like that, but not here.”
    Luc had understood. All the girls were clean.

    When Louise received the note from Jacob, one morning early in September, she decided to go to his gallery that very afternoon. Every so often, when he had something that he thought she might like, Jacob would send her a little note. His judgment was usually excellent, anddown the years she’d bought a number of paintings from him, including one by Marc Blanchard—a small landscape of the very street in which her establishment was situated.
    She’d often thought about the portrait of the girl who might have been her mother. But she’d never bought it. She’d developed an aversion to false hopes, and disappointments. Had she discovered for certain that the girl in the painting was her mother, she’d have wanted it. But she preferred to ignore the picture altogether rather than invest her emotion in a possible delusion.
    She liked Jacob. It was clear that he loved the work he was selling, and once he got to know her, he would give her frank advice. His prices were always sensible. She looked forward to seeing what he had to show her.
    First, however, there was the daily business of the establishment to be attended to.
    Every morning the house was cleaned. Though they were always kept shuttered on the street side, all the windows were opened, the bedclothes were completely changed. Every tile and bathroom was washed, scrubbed and disinfected. By noon, the house smelled as if it had just been fumigated, and Louise inspected it with the thoroughness of a strict hospital matron. Not until teatime would little sprays be used to perfume the rooms again.
    At one o’clock, a potential new girl arrived for an interview, and Louise saw her in the little office on the upper floor where she had her own apartment.
    The girl was the cousin of Bernadette, one of the most reliable of the twenty girls who already worked for her. During the last couple of years, most of the new girls had come to her in a similar way. Indeed, the two that Luc had found had proved to be unsatisfactory, and she had been obliged to send them away.
    At first sight, the girl looked promising. She was fair-haired, slim, elegant. Her manners were excellent, she was well-spoken, but her face had a cool distance that was intriguing.
    The interview was thorough. Beyond the official medical tests, Louise explained, she would insist on the girl visiting the doctor that she used for an even more thorough screening. She also asked in detail exactly what her experience was, and what she was not prepared to do. But this was by no means all. She made the girl walk about, so that she