Paris: The Novel

Champs-Élysées, and a handful of Sephardic families near the Parc Monceau, few people could maintain such houses now.
    But Marie had thought of a clever compromise. For two seasons, the de Cygnes had entertained brilliantly in the mansion. This had given Roland a chance to show off his wife to all his old friends and many new figures she was able to entice to the house. With her practice at organizing and her knowledge of the fashionable world, Marie made these parties memorable. They culminated in a magnificent party for Roland’s son.
    In the summer of 1929 they sold the house for a huge sum. Three months later, the Wall Street crash came. The next year, for a fraction of the proceeds from the house, they acquired a splendid apartment on the nearby rue Bonaparte. Into this went the best of the furniture from the house. The effect was breathtaking.
    Meanwhile, without disturbing the rustic charm of the château—which might have been considered an act of vulgarity—Marie was able to redecorate a salon in the eighteenth-century part of the house, create a magnificent dining room and improve several of the bedrooms with furniture left over from Paris.
    Her relationship with the château was particularly happy. Before they married, she had asked Roland for his advice about how to approach the people on the estate, whose workings would be new to her.
    “When you started Joséphine,” he said, “it was your own creation, soyou were the boss from the start. But the estate has been there for centuries. It’s like joining an old regiment. I’d advise you to ask everyone how things are done. Let them adopt you, before you make any changes.”
    It had been sound advice and she had followed it. Everyone at the château knew that she was a rich and powerful woman, and they had been bracing themselves for the new regime. So they were charmed when she came to them so modestly and showed herself so ready to learn.
    And the life she encountered there was, indeed, new to her. In the château’s ancient, vaulted kitchen and larders, she found hams, sides of beef, churns of milk, as well as, naturally, the produce of the fruit and vegetable gardens, which had all come from the estate. Her husband would walk out into his woods in the early evening and return with pigeons he had shot as they returned at dusk. For the first time in her life, she was in the real, rural France, where man and nature existed side by side as they had for thousands of years. And chatelaine though she was, she was quite determined to learn how to do everything, including skinning a hare and plucking a pheasant. It was not long before her husband, passing by, heard laughter from the kitchen and guessed that his wife was with the cook in there.
    Perhaps her happiest day was when Roland asked her parents to spend a long weekend with them during the summer. Her mother had become so vague in her mind that she was no longer up to it, but her father came.
    Roland could not have behaved better. Dinner was becoming a little too taxing for old Jules, so Roland gave a luncheon party to which he invited a number of his neighbors, and made a most gratifying speech welcoming Jules not only as his father-in-law but as the dear friend of his own father.
    “Indeed,” he added gallantly, if not quite truthfully, “had it not been for my father’s sudden and unexpected death, and my regiment’s posting to the east of France, I might have asked for your daughter’s hand many years ago. But before my battle dispositions were made, another lucky man stepped in and married her.”
    Despite his age, old Jules was quite lively. He took a great interest in the estate, and she discovered that he knew more about farming than she had realized. Before he left, he told her: “I was so pleased and proud when you took on Joséphine. But now I am happy to see you here.” He’d smiled. “You did not know, in the days when you were a little girl, how much pleasure I used to take in visiting the farms with whom we used todo business. For it’s the countryside—the farms and villages as well as the estates like this one—where every Frenchman belongs. This is the true France.”
    Marie also took up riding in earnest. Roland gave her instruction, and she soon made progress. Each morning she would ride out with the head groom, and in no time she was taking small fences. There was an enthusiastic hunt in the local forest: mostly stag, sometimes boar were hunted. The riding