Paris: The Novel (129 page)

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, so
you 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 to
do 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 itself was not arduous, and though it was mostly men taking part, a few of the women rode. One day Roland suggested that Marie might like to ride with him at the next meet, and with some uncertainty she agreed. But when the head groom asked anxiously if she was still intending to hunt, she went to Roland and asked him if he thought the groom was trying to suggest that she should not. To her delight, Roland only chuckled.

“It’s the other way around,” he said. “He’s so proud of you that he’s been boasting about it to all his friends. He’s only terrified you won’t show up.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because he told me.”

Having organized the decorating of the house, Marie had turned her attention to the library. It contained some fine old volumes from the eighteenth century, but almost nothing since. So she set to work. “You’re indefatigable,” he laughed, as she imported the classics from the nineteenth century and some of the more interesting productions of modern literature—none of which he had any intention of reading. But he didn’t stop her.

Of more interest to Roland was another, longer-term project Marie undertook.

The de Cygne family archives were not in good order. “My father meant to sort them out,” Roland told her, “but he died before he got very far.”

There were boxes of letters tied with ribbon in cabinet drawers. There were trunks of unsorted documents in the attic, and lead-lined strongboxes of parchment, going back to the sixteenth century.

“It’s probably a treasure trove,” Marie informed him, “if we can ever sort it out.”

“It will keep you occupied for years,” he replied with a grin. “And future generations will bless your name.”

These researches were not only significant because anything relating
to one’s ancestors was important to an aristocrat. One day Marie even discovered that the family owned some quite valuable fields a few miles away that, during the confusion at the time of the Revolution, they had forgotten that they possessed. Roland was both proud of the fact that his noble family could forget such a detail, but equally delighted when Marie managed to recover the fields for him.

And then there had been the evening when she had come into the old hall carrying a small box of letters and asked him: “Did you know that your family went to Canada?”

“No.” He frowned. “In fact, I’m sure they did not.”

“Well, there are a whole collection of letters here, written with great affection, from the brother of a former owner of this house. They date from the early seventeenth century. He’d gone out to Canada and settled there. It’s clear that the two brothers were in quite regular correspondence. I wonder if there were descendants.”

Roland was silent. For some reason she didn’t understand, he looked awkward.

“I seem to remember hearing from a Canadian once,” he said. “But I don’t know that he had anything to do with this seventeenth-century fellow.” He shrugged. “I may have written him a rather unfriendly letter.”

“You could always write again.”

“It’s all a long time ago,” he muttered. And since the business seemed to embarrass him, she didn’t bring it up again.

Meanwhile, she continued to archive the material, and see if she could find any more hidden treasure for her husband.

She was enjoying being chatelaine of the estate, and she believed that she might be getting quite good at it.

In fact, she only had one regret. She wished, now, that she had married Roland a few years earlier. Not because of Roland himself, but because of his son. She would have liked to be more of a mother to Charlie.

Everyone called him Charlie. The serious boy she’d first met at the Gobelins factory had still been at school when she’d married his father. He was already a tall, good-looking young fellow by then, though still a little gangly. He looked quite like his father, except that his hair was dark where his father’s had been fair, and Marie suspected that before he was thirty, his hairline would be receding. Like many boys, he’d been a little
unsure of himself, and occasionally withdrawn, but she had been very straightforward and friendly with him, and he seemed to like that. She’d never pressed him to confide in her, but she’d ask him what he thought about all sorts of things, and freely shared her own thoughts about everything from politics to marriage. She hoped she’d made his home a warm and comfortable place for him.

But they’d only really gotten to know each other for about a year before it was time for him to do his military service.

The liberal French governments of the twenties had no great wish to build up the military, which had always been their enemy. So Charlie’s military service had lasted only one year. But that had been long enough to transform him from a gangling boy to a strong, athletic young man. The experience hadn’t awakened any desire to follow a military career, however, nor did his father encourage it. Charlie had begun to study law at the Sorbonne, though he didn’t study very hard. But that didn’t mean that he had no ambition. Indeed, his ambition soon became absolutely clear.

He wanted to be a hero.

It was only natural, Marie supposed. He was a young aristocrat, heir to a fine estate. He’d fallen in with a crowd of young men who obviously expected him to play a certain part. And he’d found he could do it.

He already rode well, and hunted. The first winter after his return, he took up skiing. And his father let him buy an open-top Hispano-Suiza in which he drove about in great style.

He and Marie continued to get along famously. They’d hunt together with his father. He’d drive her at breakneck speeds through the countryside, on condition that she never tell his father how fast they went. In 1934 he had replaced the open-top with something rarer—one of the latest, aerodynamic Voisin C-25 coupés, whose powerful, American-designed engine and elegant Art Deco body was a wonder to behold.

In Paris, she had shown him the things a man might need to know about women’s fashion, and dropped gentle hints—about what made a man attractive to women, and what they liked—that might be useful to him in life. He learned these lessons quickly. He was seen with beautiful women on his arm at the fashionable race meetings at Longchamp and Deauville. He went to shoot on the estates of rich men and nobles. He was everything a young aristocrat should be. His father was proud of him, and it gave Marie pleasure to see her husband so happy.

She was also there to observe him acquire a new passion.

His father had always been partial to musical entertainment. From the Folies-Bergère of his youth to the Casino de Paris in the years after the war, he’d always gone to revues. “I wish I could take you to see Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett performing together,” he told Charlie, “but Chevalier’s gone to Hollywood now, and I doubt that he’ll come back.”

But Charlie had discovered jazz.

They called it rag at first. The earliest performers had started to trickle across the Atlantic when Charlie was still a boy, but during the twenties, a stream of black performers had come to Paris. To their amazement they found that the French made little distinction over race. The segregation they were used to in New York, even in places like the Cotton Club, was unknown in Paris. Soon Montmartre became known as a second Harlem. Charlie became an habitué of the area. Since the jazz scene would go on into the early hours, there were cafés up there which served breakfast twenty-four hours a day, and Charlie would often be out until dawn.

And supreme above all the black entertainers was Josephine Baker. She danced almost nude. She sang—so well that with training she could even triumph in light opera. In America she was a black performer, who could be refused entry to a hotel or restaurant. In Paris she was a diva, welcomed as a star wherever she went. Charlie went to see her perform in nightclubs. Marie was taken by Roland to her more sedate performances. Charlie had even gotten to meet her, given her flowers and received a photograph.

There was only one thing missing from Charlie’s life. Something that would be even more glamorous than his car: he wanted to fly an airplane.

And his father refused to buy him one.

“I have to refuse Charlie something,” he told Marie, “or he’ll end up spoiled.”

Marie stared at her husband. Surely he must be joking. His son was already spoiled—charmingly, but massively.

Yet Roland wasn’t joking at all. And this reminded Marie of a very great difference between her and her husband.

She hadn’t realized it at first. Roland had all sorts of quirks about the way he did things: small prejudices—things one didn’t say, or wear, or do—which belonged to his class. As a man of the world, her father had shared some of these, but Roland had others that she had not encountered. She found these amusing, and he had no objection if she teased him about them, since they were all signs that he was an aristocrat.

But behind them lay something more fundamental. And this she found harder to understand.

Despite his heroic social life, there were still times when Charlie was moody. And during those periods, he could still seem a little lost, and vulnerable, like an adolescent boy. Marie assumed that it was partly just his character to be this way. But she could not help thinking that if he had more to do, Charlie might be happier.

It used to astonish her how little he accomplished in a day. If he spent the morning being fitted for suits by his tailor, Charlie thought he’d had a fruitful day. When she considered how much she had crammed into a day when she was running Joséphine, she found the pace of his life almost comical. Not that he was inherently lazy. If, for instance, there was some new agricultural method that might be useful for improving the estate, he would throw himself into it wholeheartedly. When he and his father decided they might grow mushrooms, Charlie turned himself into an expert on the buildings for the mushroom beds, and on the entire process, and the ensuing business was a big success. But when that was all set up and running, he immediately returned to his social life again.