Paris: The Novel (152 page)

The next day they went to Père Lachaise. Roland de Cygne showed the little lighter to Esmé and told him that one day he should have it, as his father had before him. Standing together beside Charlie’s gravesite, they let a moment pass in silent remembrance.

CHARLES DE CYGNE
PATRIOTE
MORT POUR LA PATRIE
JUIN 1944

•  1968  •

If Paris in the spring was romantic, Claire thought, there was a beauty about the city in the autumn season that was just as lovely. And it brought new stirrings too. For after the traditional holiday month of August, when the place is strangely quiet, September marks the beginning of a new school and cultural year. And then, in October, comes the wine harvest.

She stepped out of the funicular and began to walk into Montmartre. She had spent all morning trying to come to a decision, but without success. Perhaps, she thought, if I get a little drunk up here, I shall know what to do.

She loved France. She knew that. All the years she’d been living in America, she’d always followed what was going on there. Not all of it had been happy.

After de Gaulle had brought some stability to the nation as it emerged from the war, Claire had been grateful to see France return to democracy. Given the deep richness of France, its economy would bear fruit under almost any government. It had seemed the French could even afford a generous welfare state. And the new European Community, thank God, had put an end to wars between France and Germany forever. But the internal politics of the Fourth Republic had been embarrassing. The mechanics of the French parliamentary model had been poorly arranged,
and in ten years, there had been twenty governments. De Gaulle had refused to have anything to do with them.

The remaining French empire had also crumbled. In northern Africa, Algeria had gone into revolt. With many French colonists wanting to keep the territory, there had been a virtual civil war. In Indochina, France had been pushed out of her colonies, and in one of those, Vietnam, the problems of communist insurgency had remained to become a nightmare for America too. Then, when Nasser of Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal, and France and Britain had hatched a plot for military intervention behind America’s back, they had been forced into a withdrawal that had destroyed their reputations as world powers, perhaps forever.

It was not until 1958 that the Algerian crisis had brought the Fourth Republic to an end, and that strange, lonely statue of a man, Charles de Gaulle, had finally returned from his retirement to take the reins of power.

Claire had mixed feelings about de Gaulle. His Fifth Republic had been nearer the American, presidential model. His prestige alone had made it possible for France to accept a free Algeria. He’d glorified the French Resistance and promoted the myth that only a handful of Frenchmen had been collaborators. He’d behaved before the world as if France was still a great empire. And France had regained some dignity.

And some glory too. André Malraux, the Resistance fighter and writer whom de Gaulle had made his culture minister, was busy transforming the dirty old buildings of Paris into a gleaming splendor that delighted the whole world. Notre Dame was looking better than it had since it was built.

Yet for all this glory, it seemed to Claire, something of de Gaulle’s personal spirit had also descended upon French society: proud, xenophobic and, socially, deeply conservative. Not that he was without humor, or didn’t appreciate the traditional regional chaos of old France. “How,” he had once famously asked, “can one govern a country which has 246 kinds of cheese?”

But it was one thing to love France—to visit every year or two—and another to alter her life. The message from Esmé had been outrageous. COME AT ONCE, he’d said. The cheek of the fellow. But then it was easy for Esmé. He was free. He could do whatever he wanted.

She loved Esmé de Cygne. Though they met only when she came over to see her mother, they’d gotten to know each other well over the years.

They’d always had an easy relationship. He’d been so young when he’d lost his parents that Roland and Marie had been the nearest thing to parents that he’d known. He always called Marie “Grand-mère,” and he’d cared for her so devotedly as she grew older that despite their difference in ages, he and Claire had come to treat each other almost as if she were his older sister and confidante.

It wasn’t until his teens that he’d come to know more.

As a child, Esmé had thought of Marc Blanchard as an honorary uncle. Roland had decreed that he should not know more than that. “The little fellow needs some simplicity in his life, not more complication,” he’d said. And both Marie and Marc had agreed.

But when Esmé was thirteen, and Marc became seriously ill, it was decided that he should learn the truth.

“And so I suddenly acquired another grandfather,” Esmé had told her. “And learned that I share the same blood with Grand-mère and with you, my dear Claire, which makes me very happy. I think it was then,” he added, “that I began to realize that all life is mysterious.”

Marc had seen quite a lot of his grandson during the last year of his life. He’d show the boy his paintings, and talk about Aunt Éloise, who’d started the collection, and about the old days when he would visit Monet at Giverny. When Marc died, he’d left Esmé both the art and his considerable fortune.

Roland had lived another five years after that. And after he’d died, very peacefully down at the château one summer, Esmé had inherited that as well. As an illegitimate heir, he could not have the title, but he had everything else. Fortune, it seemed, had smiled on him.

But not quite. There were still things that his family had concealed from him.

“I knew that Louise had been the child of Marc and one of his models,” he had told Claire on one of her visits, “that she’d been brought up by upper-middle-class English parents and left an inheritance. I knew that she was a heroine of the Resistance, like my father. But then in my twenties, I began to notice that people would sometimes give me a curious look. It was as if they knew something I didn’t know.” He’d shaken his head in wry amusement. “I had a vague memory of my early life, of course. I supposed that my mother had owned a hotel of some kind. It was
only after making more inquiries that I discovered my mother ran one of the most famous brothels in Paris!”

“Was it a shock?” Claire had asked.

“Yes. At first. I made Grand-mère give me all the papers she had about me. I discovered everything about my mother, including her own mother’s family, who are called Petit.”

“Did you meet them, too?”

“Yes. They had disowned Louise’s mother and we had nothing to say to each other. But I’m glad to have known everything. In fact, it’s been very useful to me.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s been a liberation. You know, bastards often feel that they have to make their own way in the world. Especially if there’s something shameful in their origins. Would William the Conqueror ever have conquered England if he’d been legitimate, and not the grandson of a tanner who stank of urine? Who knows. Probably not.” He shrugged. “But up until then, I had always thought of myself as—all right—the bastard son of Charlie de Cygne, but the inheritor of the estate, the son of two Resistance heroes. My place in life was set. Now, suddenly, my identity wasn’t so secure. And that was good.” He nodded. “I can understand those movie stars, you know, who go to Hollywood and reinvent themselves. That’s a wonderful freedom, to be able to do that. So I have completely reinvented myself.”

“As what, Esmé?”

“As an outcast. It’s wonderful. I come from the backstreets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. My mother was a whore and a brothel keeper. And I am also half an aristocrat. It’s a revolutionary story. The child of the streets takes over the château. I’m becoming quite famous. I’m the editor of a magazine now. They interview me on television.” He shook his head. “I feel sorry for aristocrats, actually, because no matter how good they are at what they do, nobody will take them seriously, which is quite unfair. But by being this outsider, I am probably better treated than I deserve.”

He was amusing company—and he had his feet on the ground. She liked that.

And he’d been wonderful to her that spring, when her mother died.

It hadn’t been a shock. She’d always encouraged Marie to come to America, despite her age, so that she could see her grandchildren. Last summer, Marie had spent a delightful month with her, but told her
frankly: “I don’t think we shall see each other again, my dear. One gets a feeling about these things, you know.”

Her mother had lived with her devoted housekeeper in the apartment on the rue Bonaparte right up to the end. Esmé had called in almost every day. And her departure had been entirely peaceful, in the first week of May, only hours after talking to Claire on the telephone. By the time Claire got to Paris for the funeral, Esmé had taken care of all the arrangements. There had been a large number of her mother’s friends and admirers. And then there had been her French family, of course.

She had not often seen the other Blanchards. Ever since the days when she and her mother ran Joséphine, she had always found her cousin Jules well-meaning but rather dull. His son David, instead of following in the family business, had reverted to his ancestor’s career as a doctor. Claire found him easier to talk to, and his wife and children were charming. She had found it a surprising comfort to know that her mother’s family were still represented in Paris, and in the old house down at Fontainebleau.

After that, she’d stayed another ten days to sort out the estate.

There had been one quite unexpected feature of her stay, however.

That weekend, a simmering dispute over university conditions had suddenly turned into a huge battle in the Latin Quarter. Staying in her mother’s apartment on the rue Bonaparte, Claire had been just outside the area of serious trouble, but only a short walk away from the excitement.

The night of her mother’s funeral had been the worst. Vast crowds of students hurling
pavés
—the heavy cobblestones they tore up from the old roadways—had fought the police who’d occupied the Sorbonne. There were barricades everywhere, burning cars, and the terrifying CRS riot police swinging their heavy
matraques
had done serious injury to many young demonstrators. Within days, the unions and factory workers of France had joined in. A huge general strike had brought the country to a standstill, and even General de Gaulle himself had seemed about to fall.

But the Quartier Latin had been the place to be. The students had been allowed to occupy the university. Night after night, she and Esmé had wandered into the quarter together. They’d gone down the rue Bonaparte to the chuch of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and had coffee and cognac in Les Deux Magots, and seen Jean-Paul Sartre coming and going more than once. They’d gone into the Sorbonne, and listened to students, workers and philosophers plan a new Paris Commune, and a new and better world. They might be somewhat Marxist, they were surely idealistic,
but they were the eager heirs of the French Revolution, after all. And where else could one see this mixture of rhetoric, philosophy and French wit, except in old Paris?

It was a time to be young. Before long, France would reelect conservative de Gaulle again. But if the protests against the Vietnam draft had ushered in a social change in America, Claire had a feeling that something similar was likely to take place in France.

She was glad she’d been there to see it.