Scruples Two (22 page)

In surprise Quentin glanced at Burgo, and what he saw on the older man’s face made him head immediately for the cupboard in which the earthenware bowls were kept. Fool! Fool! Fool! What an utter, bloody ass she’d made of him. This must have been the hilarious running gag of the entire household, he told himself, scarcely able to see through his rage as he fumbled with the long loaves of fresh bread Gigi had left on a side table. As he looked around the crowd he saw smiling faces, all watching Gigi with the expression of people expecting a familiar treat, like theatergoers waiting for the curtain to rise on a well-loved play.

“Just in time,” Gigi said cheerfully, as she put a slice of bread into the bottom of each bowl and artfully arranged the shellfish. “Now we’ll all have time for a drink before the soup is ready, but with bouillabaisse it should be beer, not wine, for some reason or other that only the French understand. Or perhaps the chef can tell us? Can you explain it, Chef Quentin? No? Too bad, just open the beer in that case, and we’ll drink it without a good reason.”

Burgo helped find the glasses and pour the beer, taking pity on Quentin, poor bugger, although he didn’t quite know why, except that Gigi had been too much for him, as she was bound to be. Soon everyone in the kitchen had a glass.

“Wait!” Gigi’s voice rang out, as she hopped up on a kitchen chair. “Wait, everybody, we’re going to drink a toast! A good-bye toast to our friend, Quentin Browning. He’s leaving us tomorrow. Oh, stop that fuss, all of you, he has to leave and that’s that—so drink up quickly and we’ll all have time for another beer.” She lifted her glass high and looked Quentin directly in the eye, her pointed eyebrows raised in a gallant salute, her mouth curling upward in a frank smile, her expression knowing and understanding and full of compassion, the thin steel knife in her heart quite invisible.

“Good-bye, Quentin, bon voyage, return home safely, and
regrette rien
. You know that’s my own motto
—
I don’t mind sharing it—if you should ever feel the need. Regret nothing, Quentin,
rien
!”

8

T
he Comtesse Robert de Lioncourt, born Cora Middleton of Charleston, South Carolina, was a
jolie laide
. As usual with certain French expressions, a direct translation is misleading. A woman thus known as a “pretty ugly” is neither pretty nor ugly in any ordinary way. She can be alluring, if she knows how to use her looks; she can be formidably fashionable, if she knows how to wear clothes; she can be famous if she has personality and talent; but her general look is never so traditionally tilted as to have a claim to prettiness, nor so ill-favored as to remotely merit the word
ugly
. Barbra Streisand, Bianca Jagger, the Duchess of Windsor, and Paloma Picasso were or are all examples of the
jolie laide
at its best, its most cleverly cultivated, its most brilliant and powerful.

Cora Middleton, whose mother was a member of the great Cincinnati family of Chatfield, had not realized that she would mature to become a
jolie laide
when she married Comte Robert de Lioncourt. She had calculated her chances, as coldly she was to calculate all her qualities, and knew that in spite of her intelligence and her excellent lineage, she was as homely as a girl could get, destined to be first a wallflower and later an old maid.

During her adolescence her lack of physical attraction, particularly noticeable in a Southern city of famous teenaged beauties, had made Cora particularly shy and withdrawn. She had never learned to use the genuine charms she possessed—a beautiful speaking voice, perfect teeth and a mouth she hated because she thought it was too long and too thin, although it became delightful when she smiled—for she spoke as little as possible and smiled rarely. At nineteen, already a clear-eyed, opportunistic cynic, she accepted the proposal of a man of forty-nine, a selfish man who would never have considered marriage to Cora Middleton if he had not known that she possessed a fixed private income of seventy thousand dollars a year. She accepted him because she felt that marriage to a count with an authentic title was infinitely better than no marriage at all; she accepted him because he owned an enviable apartment in the best part of Paris and something of a position in French society, where he had long dined out as a useful extra man. He could offer her a life that in Charleston would seem glamorous to the popular classmates whom she had always envied so bitterly.

The count was the last of his line and wished no more from life than that it should be easy, idle, and spent in the pursuit of beautiful objects. His collection of antiques was the one passion to which he had dedicated all his time and much of his inheritance. Cora’s money would continue to keep him in comfort so long as they had no children, a subject on which they agreed, for Cora had no wish to be left a widow with growing children, a certain eventuality, considering her husband’s age.

The Lioncourts met and married in 1950, in Paris, where Cora had been sent to learn French, and there they made their home, in Robert’s large, inherited apartment on the second floor of an ancient
hôtel particulier
on the Rue de l’Université. They traveled leisurely at least six months of every year, staying with friends as often as possible. Their travels were not those of tourists but
of
collectors, for Cora, like Robert, learned to worship antique furniture and porcelain, old glass, old silver and carved ivory: precious
things
became her religion, her children, her contentment.

The purchase of things, things of all sorts, so long as they were genuinely fine or, if not fine, highly original, and the arranging of them into collections that complemented each other, made up half the interest of Cora’s life. The other half was concentrated on getting to know people of social importance in every city to which they traveled. Just as she had no intention of being left a widow with children to worry about, she didn’t plan to become a widow without a wide circle of acquaintances.

Cora had her own connections, for the Chatfields and the Middletons had friends in Europe even though they rarely left their own cities, two of the prettiest in the United States, preferring them to anywhere else. Robert’s mother had been English, the third daughter of a baronet, and he knew everyone he considered worth knowing in London and Paris. People like the Lioncourts, who collect widely in Europe, inevitably make friends in New York, among other collectors. The Lioncourts inspired the respect of visitors to France many millions of times richer than themselves, for they entertained with formal hospitality whenever their friends passed through Paris, inviting them to dine in a setting that was unrivaled for sheer charm.

Everywhere their guests looked, there were dozens of things they would give a great deal to own themselves, possessions the Lioncourts had bought at the bottom of the market, never putting a foot wrong. Every good antiques dealer in Europe shuddered when they walked into his shop, for they bought the very pieces the dealer, against his own principles, had been covetously contemplating reserving for himself; antiques that were just on the verge of coming into fashion or objects so curious, so unusual that they had been overlooked until the Lioncourts started poking into the corners of the shop. Cora and Robert de Lioncourt would fly across Europe at a moment’s notice to attend an antiques dealer’s funeral, knowing that on such occasions, grasping families would provide the possibility of picking up something at half its value for ready cash. They became as adept at buying well at auctions as dealers themselves, for they never allowed themselves to be carried away in the heat of the chase. Few estate sales, important or unimportant, escaped their attention, and they had cultivated dozens of little old ladies who had been collectors in their youth and now sold their precious pieces, one by one, to support them in their old age.

The Lioncourts bought no painting and sculpture. They settled the question quickly; fine art, by the time it was accepted, was far beyond their means, and when it was experimental and still affordable it was too much of a risk. They crowded their walls with remarkable engravings and mirrors, and so rich with objects was their environment that no one had ever noticed the lack of art.

Every foreign acquaintance of the Lioncourts who visited them at home believed them to be enormously rich. Robert and Cora were emotionally united, as by nothing else, in the immense gratification this belief afforded them. However, there was no titled lady in the Seventh Arrondissement who paid her bills as reluctantly as did Cora de Lioncourt. She found fault with every service she required, with every item she bought for herself or the house. She complained viciously, keeping tradesmen and professionals waiting, she delayed payment for as long as possible while her dollars were earning bank interest at the Chase in the Rue Cambon; but she paid eventually, at a substantial discount for cash. In a country of high taxes like France, where people write personal checks for almost everything including cheap bistro meals, cash that doesn’t have to be declared, known simply as
liquide
, is so desirable that Cora’s wad of crisp banknotes paved the way for her to keep expenses down to the bone.

When Robert de Lioncourt died in 1973, Cora was forty-two, just the right age, she thought, to begin her well-anticipated widowhood. She felt a distinct gratitude toward her husband for having left the world at such an appropriate time, without any undue lingering. She had had little interest in sex when she married, and life with Robert had not increased it; she wasted no time casting about for another husband, for not only did she calculate to the centime the high value of her title, but she knew that any unmarried man her age or older would be seeking something else in a wife, someone younger, someone sexier, certainly someone pretty. She would find greater distinction in being a titled widow with a famous collection, she realized, than in being half of a couple.

The Comtesse Cora de Lioncourt had not neglected her own development in the course of twenty-three years of marriage to a man who had nothing to recommend him but exquisite taste. Robert had insisted that she patronize the best hairdresser in Paris; he had chosen her clothes himself until she learned how to do so; he had her taught to use makeup, supervising the lessons personally, for his wife, like his apartment, was a reflection on his taste.

At forty-two, Cora had grown into a
jolie laide:
her beaky nose, her too-small eyes, her straight hair, her too-high forehead somehow combined with her superb smile to make her look immensely interesting in her sophistication and style, a worldly exotic who gave the eye a great deal to wander over. She never entered a room without people asking each other who she was; she dressed severely, in black and white in winter and in white and black in summer; she never changed her center-parted, unadorned pageboy hairstyle that reached just below her ears, nor was she ever seen at night without the finely worked, large pieces of antique jewelry that had come to her from Robert’s mother. She had good legs; hand-made shoes from M. Massaro, who had invented the Chanel pump; a stringy, tall body on which clothes hung exceedingly well, and long hands with immaculate nails covered in invisible polish.

Her only problem, Cora de Lioncourt realized, was that seventy thousand dollars a year in 1973 was not enough money to live on in the style of the 1950s and the 1960s. She would have to go to work.

She sat up in bed, with her glasses on her nose and a notebook on her knees, considering the situation in the round. A job in Paris was out of the question, for she had retained her American citizenship and she wouldn’t be able to obtain a work permit. She could, with much red tape, probably open an antiques shop, but the thought of becoming a shopkeeper revolted her. She was of the class who bought, not of the class who sold.

Actually, the idea of a real job, a job at which she would have to spend eight hours a day, was repugnant. Not only was it impossibly dreary to consider spending so much time in the sordid surroundings of any ordinary office, but there was literally no job she could think of that wouldn’t cause her visiting friends to question her wealth, and that must never happen.

Cora de Lioncourt wrote down two words on her pad:
New York
.

She had always loved New York. She never felt so alive as when she spent time there. Everything in New York pleased her, particularly her friends who understood so little about her world and were so impressed by it, no matter how rich they were. Any one of them could have easily afforded a vast apartment or a house with a garden in Paris, but they were so ridiculously intimidated by the supposed difficulties of the language and the frightening idea they had created of the snobbishness and standoffish character of the French, that they admired her just for being able to live here happily.

It had indeed taken a bit of getting used to, she reflected, remembering the first years of her marriage, but then she had Robert’s family laundress and his family food purveyors and his family electrician and his family plumber and his family cleaning woman, all of whom were almost as valuable to her as his family background, when you stopped to consider the multitude of petty, maddening details of keeping house in Paris. Getting on with the French was a walk in the park compared to making a French electrician properly rewire a defective fuse box, Cora thought.

She wrote again on her pad:
Invisible job
.

What could she do that would be invisible, she wondered, her mind clicking as she surveyed her assets. She knew almost “everybody,” which merely meant that she knew many of those key figures who could introduce her to most of the people she wanted to meet. She and Robert had never entertained without a purpose, ruthlessly choosing to invite only guests who would be satisfied to find themselves in the same room with each other. They weighed their own importance, without vanity, down to the last centimeter and never distributed their intimacy or entry to their circle unless it added to their luster. However, they had never reached true intimacy within the highest levels of French society, a constant disappointment Cora had never learned to accept.

Cora and Robert de Lioncourt had long ago realized that the expression “flattery will get you nowhere” was a downright lie. Flattery, well applied, could get you almost anything but intimate friendship. Cora de Lioncourt’s greatest personal talent, by her own accurate reckoning, was the ability to use flattery. Through flattery she accumulated those acquaintances who could do her the most good, and through it she kept them. Her flattery was never obvious. It never consisted of mere compliments, but rather of enthusiastic interest in other people’s doings, their comings and goings, their problems and pleasures. Her enthusiasm, combined with the smile she had now learned to use so well, flattered people who thought themselves immune to it. Since no one suspected that this rich woman who owned so many precious things might want anything from them, they never realized that their relationship with her was based on her flattery.