Paris: The Novel

they will burn me alive. That is what the king’s action means for me,” he said miserably to his wife.
    “For us,” she corrected, grimly.

    But the Inquisition had left him alone. In his favor was the fact that the Jews of Paris so clearly hated him, and that, thanks to Renard, the congregation of the Saint-Merri parish continued to embrace him as one of their own.
    The family settled into a Christian life. It was strange to them not to celebrate the Sabbath on a Saturday anymore. The observance of the Christian Sunday was a far more lax affair. He missed the passionateintimacy of the Jewish Passover. He missed the haunting, melancholy sound of the cantor in the synagogue. But the Christian services had their beauty too.
    “Our life,” he told his family, “is not so bad.”
    Whatever she thought, Sarah saw no use in complaining. Little Jacob, growing up in an extended circle of the Renards and their friends, was too young to have known anything else. As for Naomi, she seemed to adapt. She made new friends. As far as Jacob knew, she never saw any Jewish children at all.
    Jacob rented a storehouse nearby where he kept the great bales of cloth in which he now dealt. He took on an apprentice, who slept in a loft over the store to guard its contents. A year after converting, he had bought the orchard of apple and pear trees by the hamlet on the slopes to the northeast of the city, and on Sunday afternoons the family, often accompanied by the Renards, would usually walk out there and, after inspecting the orchards and gazing down upon Paris, return by another path that led them past the fortress of the Temple Knights and thence into the city. It was pleasant exercise.
    Five years had passed in this manner, without incident.

    Perhaps because it developed slowly, he never saw the crisis with his daughter coming.
    He had taken the greatest care never to seem to neglect her for the baby. He continued to read and write with her and to teach her simple mathematics. He told her stories just as he had before. As little Jacob began to talk, he’d put the child on his knee and tell him a story, saying to Naomi, “Do you remember how I used to tell this story to you?” And sometimes he would get halfway through and say, “You finish it now, Naomi,” praising her when she did—so that soon she was proud of the fact that the little boy looked up to her as a second mother.
    Naomi would help Sarah dress the child, and take him for walks.
    “It’s good for her,” Jacob would say contentedly to his wife. “She’ll make an excellent mother one day.”
    He was also pleased to observe that his daughter was going to be a beautiful young woman. As a little girl, the most noticeable thing about her had been her wide-spaced blue eyes, set in a round face surrounded by a mass of dark curls. But by the time she was eleven, her face was alreadyturning into a lovely oval. The curls were becoming rich tresses that fell thickly below her shoulders. Men were starting to turn to look at her in the street.
    He had often wondered if she would make a good bride for Renard’s eldest son, who was five years older. He didn’t like to suggest it to his friend, who had already done so much for him. “If he doesn’t like the idea, I don’t want to embarrass him,” he explained to Sarah. And Renard, so far, had never broached the subject himself. Jacob was also constrained by the fact that on the one occasion he had gently asked Naomi what she’d say if the offer were ever made, she’d said simply: “I like him very well, Father. But I think of him as a friend, not a husband.”
    “Friendship is the best basis for a marriage,” her father had responded. “Your feelings might change.”
    “I don’t think so,” she said.
    And though he naturally had the right to choose her husband, Jacob loved his daughter far too much to make her unhappy.
    “I’ll never give you to any man against your will,” he’d promised.
    There was no shortage of offers from other families. He’d received three inquiries from worthy merchants in the city. He’d put them off for the time being, but there seemed little doubt that Naomi would have the chance to marry well.
    Meanwhile, she displayed a wonderful understanding that delighted him. For having treated her more like a son than a daughter when she was young, he had found he couldn’t suddenly change his intellectual relationship with her just because she had a brother. Often, therefore, he