Paris: The Novel (3 page)

He had been wonderfully fortunate, Jules considered, to have been Joséphine’s lover when they were both young. For all his wealth, he
thought, he probably couldn’t afford her now. A very rich banker indeed kept her these days. Nonetheless, he counted their relationship as one of the best that a man can have. She was his former mistress, his confidante and his friend.

The champagne arrived. They toasted the baby. Then they ordered, and chatted of this and that. Only with the appearance of a light, clear soup did he broach the subject on his mind.

“There is a problem,” he said. Joséphine waited. His face became gloomy. “My wife wants to call her Marie,” he said at last.

“Marie.” His friend considered. “It’s not a bad name.”

“I always promised you if I had a daughter, I should call her after you.”

She looked up at him, surprised.

“That was a long time ago,
chéri
. It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does matter. I wish to call her Joséphine.”

“And what if your wife associates the name with me?”

“She doesn’t know about us. I am certain of it. I mean to insist.” He sipped his champagne moodily. “You really think there is a danger?”

“I shall not tell her, you may be sure,” Joséphine answered. “But others might …” She shook her head. “You are playing with fire.”

“I thought I’d say,” he persisted, “that I want to name her after the empress Joséphine.”

The beautiful wife of Napoléon, the love of the emperor’s life. A romantic legend—up to a point.

“But she was notoriously unfaithful to the emperor,” Joséphine pointed out. “Perhaps not a good example for your daughter.”

“I was hoping you’d come up with something.”

“No.” Joséphine shook her head. “My friend, this is a very bad idea. Call your daughter Marie, and make your wife happy. That is all I have to say.”

The next course was another specialty of the house: lobster, sliced in aspic. They spoke of old friends, and the opera. It was not until the dessert, a salad of fruits, that Joséphine, after looking at him reflectively for a few moments, took up the subject of his marriage again.

“Do you want to make your wife unhappy,
chéri
? Has she done something bad to you?”

“Not at all.”

“Are you unfaithful?”

“No.”

“Does she satisfy you?”

He shrugged.

“It’s fine.”

“You must learn to be happy, Jules,” she said with a sigh. “You have everything you want, including your wife.”

It had not been a shock, nor even a surprise to Joséphine when Jules Blanchard had married. His wife was a cousin on his mother’s side, and brought a large dowry. As Jules had put it at the time: “Two parts of a family fortune have found each other again.”

But Jules was still frowning.

Joséphine Tessier had studied many men in her life. It was her profession. In her opinion, men were often discontented because their occupation did not suit them. Of others, one could even say that they had been born at the wrong time—a natural knight in armor, for instance, trapped in a modern world. But Jules Blanchard was perfectly made for nineteenth-century France.

When the French Revolution had broken the power of the king and the aristocracy—the ancien régime—it had left the field open to the rich, the haute bourgeoisie. Napoléon had created his personal version of the Roman Empire, with his triumphal arches and his quest for glory, but he had also taken care to appeal to the solid middle classes. And so it had remained after his fall.

True, some conservatives wanted to return to the ancien régime, but the only time the restored Bourbon monarchy tried that, in 1830, the Parisians had kicked out the Bourbon king and installed Louis Philippe, a royal cousin of the Orléans line, as their constitutional and very bourgeois monarch.

On the other side, there were radicals, even socialists, who hated the new bourgeois France, and wanted another revolution. But when they took to the streets in 1848, thinking their time had come, it was not a socialist state, but a conservative republic that emerged, followed by an ornately bourgeois empire under Napoléon III—the great emperor’s nephew—that again favored the bankers and stockbrokers, the property men and larger merchants. Men like Jules Blanchard.

These were the men to be seen riding with their beautifully dressed women in the Bois de Boulogne on the city’s western edge, or gathering for elegant evenings at the huge new Opéra house, where Jules and his wife liked to be seen. There was no doubt, Joséphine thought, that Jules Blanchard had the best of the present century.

Why, he’d even had her.

“What’s the matter, my friend?” she gently inquired.

Jules considered. He knew that he was lucky. And he valued what he had. He loved the old family house at Fontainebleau, with its enclosed courtyard, his grandfather’s First Empire furniture and leather-bound books. He loved the elegant royal château in the town, older and more modest than the vast palace of Versailles. On Sundays he would walk in the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau, or ride out to the village of Barbizon, where Corot had painted landscapes filled with the haunting light of the River Seine. In Paris, he was happy trading in the great medieval wholesale market of Les Halles, with its brightly colored stalls, and bustle, and the scents of cheeses, herbs and fruits from every region of France. He was proud of his intimate knowledge of the city’s ancient churches, and its ancient inns with their deep wine cellars.

Yet it wasn’t enough.

“I’m bored,” he said. “I want to change my career.”

“To what, my dear Jules?”

“I have a plan,” he confided. “It will astonish you.” He made a sweeping gesture. “A new business for the new Paris.”

When Jules Blanchard spoke of the new Paris, he didn’t mean only the broad boulevards of Baron Haussmann. Even from the days of France’s great Gothic cathedrals, Paris had liked to think of herself—at least in northern Europe—as the leader of fashion. Parisians had not been pleased when, a quarter century ago, in a dramatic palace of glass built for the occasion, London had captured international headlines with her Great Exhibition of all that was new and exciting in the world. New York had followed soon after. But by 1855, Paris was ready to fight back, and her new emperor, Napoléon III, had opened her Universal Exposition of industry and the arts, in a stupendous hall of iron, glass and stone on the Champs-Élysées. A dozen years later Paris did it again, this time on the vast parade ground on the Left Bank known as the Champ de Mars. This 1867 exhibition was the biggest the world had ever seen, featuring many marvels, including Siemens’s first electric dynamo.

“I want a department store,” said Jules. New York had department stores: Macy’s was thriving. London had Whiteleys in the suburbs and a few cooperatives, but nothing dramatic yet. Paris was already ahead in size and style, with Bon Marché and Printemps. “It’s the future,” Jules declared. And he began to describe the store he had in mind, a great
palace selling all kinds of merchandise to a huge audience. “Style, keen prices, right in the center of the city,” he explained with growing excitement, while Joséphine watched him with fascination.

“I never knew you could be so passionate,” she remarked.

“Oh.”

“I mean, in the head.” She smiled.

“Ah.”

“And what does your father think?”

“He will not hear of it.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait.” He sighed. “What else can I do?”

“You would not go off on your own?”

“Difficult. He controls the money. And to disrupt the family …”

“You love your father, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Be kind to your father and to your wife, my dear Jules. Be patient.”

“I suppose so.” He was silent for a while. Then he brightened. “But I still want to call my daughter Joséphine.”

Then, explaining that he must get back to his wife, he got up to go. She laid a restraining hand on him.

“You must not do this, my friend. For my sake, also. Don’t do it.”

But without committing himself, he paid the waiter and left.

After he had gone, Joséphine was thoughtful. Did he really mean to call his daughter Joséphine? Or, remembering a foolish promise made long ago, had he just played a pretty scene, putting her in a position where he could be sure she would free him from that promise? She smiled to herself. It didn’t matter. Even if the latter, it was kind and clever of him.

She liked clever men. And it amused her that she was still left wondering what he would do.

The tall woman paused. She was gaunt. Beside her stood a dark-haired boy of nine, his hair cut short, his eyes set wide apart. He looked intelligent.

The widow Le Sourd was forty, but whether it was the drab clothes that hung loosely from her angular body, or that her long hair was gray and unkempt, or that she had a stony face, she seemed much older. And if she looked grim, it was for a reason.

The night before, not for the first time, her son had asked her a question. And today she had decided that it was time to tell him the truth.

“Let us go in,” she said.

The great cemetery of Père Lachaise occupied the slopes of a hill about three miles to the east of the Tuileries Gardens, from which Father Xavier and the little Roland had departed an hour before. It was an ancient burial ground, but in recent times it had become famous. All kinds of great men—statesmen, soldiers, artists and composers—were buried there, and visitors often came to admire their tombs. But it was not a grave that the widow Le Sourd had brought her son to see.

They entered by the gateway on the city side, below the hill. In front of them stretched tree-lined alleys and cobbled walks, like little Roman roads, between the sepulchers. It was quiet. Apart from the guardian at the gate, they had the place almost to themselves. The widow knew exactly where she was going. The boy did not.

First, just to the right of the entrance, they paused to view the monument that had made the place famous, the tall shrine of the medieval lovers Abelard and Héloïse. But they did not stay there long. Nor did the widow bother with any of Napoléon’s famous marshals, nor Corot the painter’s recent grave, nor even the graceful tomb of Chopin the composer. For they would have been distractions. Before she told her son the truth, she had to prepare him.

“Jean Le Sourd was a brave man.”

“I know, Maman.” His father had been a hero. Every night, before he went to sleep, he would go over in his mind everything he could remember about the tall, kindly figure who told him stories and played ball with him. The man who would always bring bread to the table, even when Paris was starving. And if sometimes the memories became a little hazy, there was always the photograph of a handsome man, dark-haired and with eyes set wide apart, like himself. Sometimes he dreamed of him. They would go on adventures together. Once they were even fighting in a street battle, side by side.

For several minutes his mother led him up the slope in silence until, below the crown of the hill, she turned right onto a long alley. Then she spoke again.

“Your father had a noble soul.” She looked down at her son. “What do you think it means, Jacques, to be noble?”

“I suppose …”—the boy considered—“to be brave, like the knights who fought for honor.”

“No,” she said harshly. “Those knights in armor were not noble at all. They were thieves, tyrants, who took all the wealth and power they could. They called themselves noble to puff themselves up with pride, and pretend that their blood was better than ours, so they could do what they liked. Aristocrats!” She grimaced. “A false nobility. And the worst of them all was the king. A filthy conspiracy that went on for centuries.”

Young Jacques knew that his mother revered the French Revolution. But after the death of his father she had always avoided speaking about such things, as though they belonged in some place of darkness that she did not want to enter.

“Why did it last so long, Maman?”

“Because there was a criminal power even worse than the king. Do you know what that was?”

“No, Maman.”

“It was the Church, Jacques. The king and his aristocrats supported the Church, and the priests told the people to obey them. That was the bargain of the ancien régime. An enormous lie.”

“Didn’t the Revolution change that?”

“The year 1789 was more than a revolution. It was the birth of Freedom itself. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: these are the noblest ideas that men can have. The ancien régime fought against them, so the Revolution cut off their heads. It was absolutely necessary. But more than that. The Revolution released us from the prison that the Church had made. The power of the priests was broken. People were free to deny God, to be free of superstition, and follow reason. It was a great step forward for mankind.”

“What happened to the priests, Maman? Were they killed, too?”

“Some.” She shrugged. “Not enough.”

“But the priests are still here today.”

“Unfortunately.”

“So were all the men of the Revolution atheists?”

“No. But the best were.”

“You do not believe in God, Maman?” asked Jacques. His mother shook her head. “Did my father?” he pursued.