Paris: The Novel

brakes?”
    “Yes.”
    “When Georges was cutting the cables finally, I saw you staring up toward the top elevator, and when he cut the final cable, I saw you flinch.”
    “Did I?” Thomas nodded. “I was pretty certain,” he admitted, “but”—he shrugged—“I could have been wrong.”

    For Louise, the second half of 1940 was a strange time. In the first place, after the beautiful spring and the sudden, terrifying month of war, everything seemed normal.
    France still had a French government: Marshal Pétain himself, military hero, in his eighties now, but with all his faculties. France had fought bravely and lost a hundred thousand men. Like Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, she had been unable to withstand the German blitzkrieg. If Marshal Pétain addressed them as Frenchmen and told them to cooperate with the German occupiers, who needed to argue? It wasn’t as if there was an alternative.
    True, the lone voice of de Gaulle spoke from London. But in practical terms, he had nothing to offer. The British army had completely collapsed when they tried to fight the Germans, and been sent scurrying back home. Only the narrow waters of the English Channel had saved the British from being overrun at the same time as France. Their turn would come soon enough.
    Meanwhile, the Germans had left France with her honor. Pétain’s French government was still in charge.
    Well, more or less. Pétain himself was based in the south, in the town of Vichy, whose pure waters made it such a pleasant spa. The Mediterranean coast, Provence, the Midi, the deep central countryside of Limousin and the huge open hills of Auvergne were all in the Vichy zone. But the north of France, roughly from the Loire valley to the English Channel,was under German military occupation, for which the French government had to pay. So was the western, Atlantic seaboard, from the Spanish border up through Bordeaux, the mouth of the Loire and into Brittany. Within these northern and western occupied zones, the Pétain government was technically in control, and French police maintained law and order, but the presence of German troops reminded everyone that France still had a German overlord whose will would prevail.
    Yet Louise had to admit that, so far at least, the Germans had behaved politely. They had occupied certain buildings, of course. The Luftwaffe had taken over the charming Luxembourg Palace. Göring himself liked to live at the Ritz where, Louise soon heard, he liked to wear jewelry, and dress up in silk and satin dresses—though his tastes, it was soon confirmed, were not for men but for women, with whom he was regularly supplied. Other German generals were looking for mansions they could use. It was clear that the orders of the day for the German occupiers were simple: Don’t annoy the natives, and enjoy yourselves.
    As for the Parisians, after the initial exodus, the city was filling up again. Life had to go on. Pétain the patriot had told them so. For many on the old military, monarchist right wing, and some of the bourgeoisie too—who, like Pétain himself, had never been so enamored of democracy in the first place—the new regime was not so bad. On the left, the communists had been ordered by Moscow to collaborate with the Germans because, since the new pact, Hitler was now Russia’s ally.
    True, Hitler had come to Paris for a few hours on a Sunday in June and found that he couldn’t go up the Eiffel Tower because the elevator cables had been cut. But no one knew for sure who’d done it. The rumor was that some fellows from the Montmartre Maquis area had been behind it. But the old shantytown had a vow of silence. No one would ever get to the bottom of that business.
    The question for Louise had been, what should she do?
    She had formed her plan even before the baby was born. She didn’t want to bring the child up inside a brothel. So she had taken a modest but pleasant apartment not far away, opposite the Musée des Arts et Métiers. She engaged a nanny, and here the baby slept. She spent as much time in the new apartment as she could, but continued to use her apartment in the rue de Montmorency house to supervise that establishment.
    By the time the little boy was ten, she estimated that she would havepaid off all her debts and accumulated enough money to retire from business and eventually leave him a good little inheritance. That was the plan.
    She had named him Esmé, the old French name meaning “Beloved.” He was