Paris: The Novel (111 page)

“So long as you’re all right,” she said.

But the next day she warned her daughter that she must be more careful with her reputation and that her uncle shouldn’t have let her wander
off with Frank as she had. She was quite relieved when Claire made no objection.

The month of August was quiet for the Joséphine store. Most Parisians were out of town, though foreign visitors to the city came in. The whole Blanchard family based itself at the house at Fontainebleau, and Claire and her mother took turns going into Paris for a day and a night each week to keep an eye on things.

Jules Blanchard and his wife had retired into one of the pavilions beside the courtyard now, leaving the main body of the house for the family. Gérard’s widow and her children were there, as well as Marc, Marie and Claire, but there was still room for guests, and so there were usually a dozen people sitting out on the broad balcony looking over the lawn on any August afternoon.

Claire was always happy to be at Fontainebleau. She loved her grandparents. Her grandmother had become a little confused lately, but old Jules, though somewhat forgetful, still liked to sit out on the veranda and chat, and she would ask him questions about the days of his youth, and he would describe the old people he could remember who had lived through the French Revolution and the age of Napoléon.

During those long, easy summer days there was only one shadow over her life. A cloud of uncertainty. Did Frank Hadley have any interest in her?

Perhaps it was because her parents had come from different countries that she was hard to please. As a girl being brought up in London, she liked the English boys she knew, but always felt that there was something lacking. It wasn’t only that they didn’t speak French. She was used to seeing things through her mother’s French eyes as well as her father’s. And indeed, her father had lived in Paris so long that, English though he was, he also saw the world in larger terms than most of his neighbors. True, there were English people—many of them—who had served the British Empire in far corners of the world, and whose imaginations had large horizons. But most of them still saw that larger world in imperial terms, secure in the knowledge that, at the end of the day, British was best. English people who had lived on the continent of Europe were a much rarer breed.

Similarly, when she returned to France with her mother, she found
Frenchmen interesting, and seductive—yet even while she was catching up with the cultural excitement of France, the Frenchmen she met began to seem a little less fascinating. They too, she realized, were part of a crowd—a different crowd, but still a crowd.

And almost without realizing it, she began to wish that she could find a different sort of man. A free spirit. A man for whom life was an open-ended adventure. He might be English, he might be French, he might come from any nationality. An explorer perhaps, or a writer, or maybe a diplomat … She really didn’t know.

And where did one find such a man? It had taken her a little while to discover that there was a community in Paris to which people of that sort were drawn.

The Americans.

Why was that? She soon came to realize that there were many reasons. Freedom was in their blood. It was their birthright. But almost to a man, these expatriates felt that the mighty engine of America was still too young, too raw to have developed the rich culture they were looking for. Whereas Europe had over two thousand years of culture, from Greek temple to English country house, or Parisian nightclub, all there for the taking. The Americans came, not arrogant, but eager to learn. They meant to have it all.

And so it was that Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach from America, and Ford Madox Ford the Englishman, and the Spaniard Picasso, and Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, and French writers like Cocteau, and young Ernest Hemingway could all find each other in the bookshops and bars and theaters of Paris on any day of the week—and did.

So when her uncle Marc asked her casually one day what she thought of the Americans in Paris, she answered: “I wouldn’t want to marry Hemingway, but I like his adventurous spirit.”

“Perhaps you could find yourself a younger version and share your adventures. Though you may have to work to get him the way you want him.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“Don’t you want a challenge?”

Perhaps she did.

So what did she have to do to get Frank Hadley Jr. to notice her?

He was friendly. He was easy to talk to. That evening after the Ballets Russes, they’d gone back across the river with her uncle Marc, and then walked down the long boulevard Raspail into Montparnasse where they’d met his friends, and she’d felt so easy in his company. He’d seemed to enjoy her company too. He’d laughed at her jokes. When they walked her home, there had been a party of six of them, walking along empty streets, and they’d all linked arms. Frank had been next to her, so that she’d felt his tall, warm body against hers, and they’d all kissed each other on both cheeks, in the usual French manner, before she went into the building where she lived. But she hadn’t been able to tell whether he was interested in her or not.

She’d seen him once again, at the very end of July. She’d agreed to meet him and the Hemingways early one evening at the big Dôme Café bar, where all the artists and writers gathered. “Lenin used to come here too, when he was living in Paris,” she informed him. “Uncle Marc told me.” It had been very pleasant. Hadley Hemingway had informed them proudly that Ernest had written maybe a dozen stories already that year, and then Hemingway had turned to his wife and asked if she’d seen any of Frank’s writing. Frank frowned, and she said, No, she hadn’t.

“You should show her your stuff,” said Hemingway to Frank. “She’d be a good judge.” But Frank just looked awkward and said it wasn’t good enough yet, and probably never would be.

“You need to stay in Paris for a good while,” said Hadley. “We think it suits you.”

“That’s right,” said Hemingway.

“Don’t go disappearing on us, like Gil,” said Hadley.

“Who’s Gil?” asked Claire.

“Oh, he was a nice young American that we all thought had promise,” said Hadley. “And then suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. Disappeared without a word.”

“I won’t do that,” said Frank.

After that, he’d walked her back, and he’d talked about his home in America, and asked her all kinds of questions about Joséphine and the plans for the store. He seemed quite interested in what her mother did there as well. In fact, he seemed rather fascinated by her mother. Then he told her that he was going to spend part of August in Brittany. So she hadn’t expected to see him again until September.

It was the third week of August when Marc, after an absence of a few days in Paris, returned not alone, but with Frank. “I’d just looked in at the Dôme to meet a man, and there he was. I told him to come down to Fontainebleau with me.”

Since the house was almost full, Marie told Claire that she’d better let Frank have her room.

“There’s the little boudoir beside my room,” she told her daughter. “We can put a bed in there for you.”

Frank seemed a little embarrassed that he might be inconveniencing everybody, especially Claire; but Marie assured him that it was a family house and everyone was used to making room for friends.

And indeed, Marc soon made Frank into a family project.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for you,” he declared. “Here you are in the middle of a French family, and we shall teach you how to be French.” He smiled. “An even better Frenchman than your father was.”

Every morning, Claire was to spend an hour teaching him to speak French. Then he’d spend another hour with Marie. She might take him to the kitchen and show him how all kinds of dishes were made. Or she might take him to the market to shop. She simply involved him in whatever activity she was employed upon at the time, and gave him a running commentary. As for Marc, he would take Frank and anyone else who wanted to come to the old château, or across to the village of Barbizon, or show him books in the small library and talk of French history and culture. In ten days of this regime, Frank learned an astonishing amount.

One lunchtime, Frank confessed that he had still not fully understood how Paris was organized geographically. And here everyone had something to tell him.

“First,” Marc explained, “you must understand how Paris has grown from a modest Roman town to a medieval city.” And he told him how the city had expanded, like a growing egg, as he put it, enclosed by a series of walls taking in further suburbs each time.

“So we have, for instance, the ancient Île de la Cité, and the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève where the university is, which was once a Roman forum. Across the river you have the Temple area, once a suburb where the Templars lived, and near it the Marais, so called because it was once
a marsh. Most of the other quarters keep the names either of former villages or churches. And each has its own character—though many smaller quarters practically disappeared when Baron Haussmann knocked them down in the last century.”

“But what about the arrondissements?” Frank asked. “That’s where I get confused. They have numbers, but there seem to be two sets. And they also seem to have their own reputations, don’t they?”

Marc turned to Gérard’s son, young Jules.

“To be precise,” Jules told him, “soon after the Revolution the inner parts of Paris were divided into twelve arrondissements—and people sometimes still refer to them as the old arrondissements. But in 1860, the whole of Paris was divided into a new set of twenty arrondissements. They start with the Louvre area and the western part of the Île de la Cité: that’s the First Arrondissement. Then they continue in a clockwise spiral, the first four on the Right Bank. The Third contains the Temple, the Marais is mainly in the Fourth. Then you cross the river to the Fifth, which is the Latin Quarter, the Sixth, which is the Luxembourg Gardens area, and the Seventh, which is maybe a little cold, but rich, and includes Les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower. Back across the river, you’re in the huge area that runs south to north from the river right up to the Parc Monceau, and west to east from the Arc de Triomphe, right down the Champs-Élysées to the Madeleine and the Opéra. That’s the Eighth. It’s socially grand.

“Then you go around the city again. The Ninth to the Twelfth Arrondissements are on the Right Bank—the Twelfth runs out from the Bastille, along the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine to the old Vincennes gateway. Then to the Left Bank: the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, which is Montparnasse, and the Fifteenth.

“Across the river again for the last five. The Sixteenth is long and runs right up the west side of the city to the Arc de Triomphe and the avenue de la Grande-Armée. The Bois de Boulogne lies beyond it. There are old villages like Passy, where Ben Franklin lived, in the Sixteenth, and the avenue Victor Hugo. It has a reputation of being smart and international. Above that, on the northwest edge of the city, is the Seventeenth, with the old village of Neuilly to the west of it. Neuilly is chic. The Seventeenth is respectable but dull.”

“The Seventeenth is not so bad,” said his mother.