“I’m not teaching you that word in English, you degenerate.” I retrieved my spoon from the floor and wiped it on my apron.

“But you knew what I was talking about, eh?” He nodded. “She does, does she not?”

“Of course not. She’s only fifteen.” I stuffed a heaping spoonful of lentils into my mouth above Bauer’s cries of “Aha!” I’d slipped.

“Why have I not met her? She does not come to the café with you or to the courts at Île de Puteaux. Young girls like to watch men at sport.”

I swallowed and wiped my mouth. “She’s not in Paris. But I wouldn’t introduce her to you anyway.”

“You are afraid she would see what a real man looks like?” He winked.

I was more afraid she’d see the questionable company I kept.

“Ah, then she is a country girl?” he persisted. “Ein Süßling from home?”

“She’s not a sweetheart.” I bent my head to my plate and ate faster. “She’s my maman’s ward. I hardly know her.”

He leaned his elbows on the table. “This is why you go so often on the weekends to your château. And also why you do not bring me.”

I never invited him to Mille Mots, but it wasn’t because of Clare Ross. The urbane Bauer with his tailored Berlin suits, with his straw hats and his Horsman rackets, with his casual change tossed down on baccarat tables or in the laps of showgirls, he didn’t belong at Mille Mots. Maman, in her aesthetic dresses and reform corsets, Papa in his knickerbockers and painting smocks. The château’s crumbling walls, leaking roof, moth-eaten curtains, halls lined with terrifying paintings and nude sculptures. The maids in their brightly colored uniforms that Maman had designed, “because happiness is more dignified than black.” Marthe in her crowded kitchen, birdcages hanging between the dented pots. Papa’s lunchtime potage, Maman’s English tea, both of them feeding the dogs under the dining table. Papa’s habit of cheerfully coming down to breakfast in absolutely nothing but a dressing gown. Among all of that, Bauer wouldn’t belong.

“You’re right.” I pushed back my chair and picked up my plate. “If I never invite you, I never have to share.”

He nodded approvingly. “You are a sly weasel, Crépet.”

“See you tomorrow?” I reached across the table for a handshake, but he yanked his hand away and offered an obscene gesture instead. He lit a Murad cigarette and disappeared in the after-supper crowd.

Tucked deep in my satchel, I had to forget about the little letter until after my shift in the café. I simpered and scraped, I balanced trays and poured wine, I washed each table a dozen times over. I did three sketches of a young trio visiting from England and they rattled down far too many francs for the souvenirs. I didn’t complain. After the café closed, Gaspard let me sit and study, sharing the light, while he finished hanging up the washed glasses, ready for tomorrow. After he hung the last, he pulled a squat bottle of cognac from a hollow spot behind the bar. He poured a finger out and toasted the thin air. Once I asked him what he celebrated. He tugged at his beard and said, “Another day, conquered. Isn’t that something to celebrate?”

I waited until I was back at Uncle Théophile’s apartment, shut in my narrow bedroom with the desk lamp on, to take out Mademoiselle Ross’s letter again.

I don’t believe you that it is as dreary as you say. You’re in Paris, after all. Paris it was, but not the city I’d fallen in love with years ago. Between classes, study, tennis, and the evening jobs that helped to pay for all of that, I had no spare time. I didn’t have time to sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I couldn’t roam the museums on rainy days—the Louvre, with its brass air registers and Rembrandts, the Petit Palais, the Musée de l’Armée, the exquisite little Musée d’Ennery. Sometimes on the weekends I stayed in the city I’d trek up to the nineteenth arrondissement, to Parc des Buttes Chaumont, green and rippling with waterfalls. But I usually didn’t see much of Paris outside of the gray stone and leaning buildings of the Latin Quarter.

I wrapped myself in a sweater—Uncle Théophile kept the apartment as cold as November—and smoothed a sheet of paper on the desk.

Dear Mademoiselle,

If I were you, I wouldn’t envy the life of the university student. Indeed I am in Paris, but I’m not dining at the Ritz. I can’t afford more than beans for supper, washed down with the vilest of wine. I don’t ride omnibuses when my feet work perfectly well. I don’t go to the opera when I have the collective complaining of the three who share my turne.

And I don’t have much more freedom than I did at Mille Mots. I’m living with my uncle, you see. His name is Théophile, a dour, hairless gent who teaches Greek at the Lycée Montaigne. He’s Papa’s second oldest brother, but even Papa can’t stand to be in the same room as him for longer than four minutes. He has an overfondness for boiled eggs and for telling me what to do. I’d begged Maman to let me stay instead with Uncle Jules, who keeps an actress as a mistress and two parrots, but she seems to think Uncle Théophile more reliable. This, coming from a parent who used to send me into the woods with the dogs and call it “school.”

But I do have my tennis. The Racing Club, the Tennis Club, Stade Français—Stefan Bauer and I borrow time on any court that will let us in. Véronique, Uncle Jules’s mistress, calls him my grand adversaire, which is dramatic enough to suit her. Stefan is very good, even better than me, though I’ll disavow all if you tell him so. We’ve been keeping a mental tally of our matches (which he always takes seriously, no matter how casual) and our wins. He’s currently up on me, 26 wins to my 18.

How goes the reading of Mère l’Oye? Have you expanded your French vocabulary beyond talk of princesses and ogres?

Luc René Rieulle Crépet

“Monsieur, extinguish that light!” Uncle Théophile pounded on the bedroom door. “Do you hear me?”

I sighed and folded the letter.

“How can a man get to sleep when it is lit up like a bordello?” he grumbled.

I crossed my eyes at the closed door. “Have you been to a bordello, then, Uncle?”

The pounding resumed. “Go to sleep!”

Thursdays we had afternoons off from classes. With promises to meet Bauer later at the Tennis Club de Paris, I changed into my brown jacket and blue scarf and set off for a stroll along the Seine.

The bouquinistes sat on their stools, smoking, as customers browsed the sagging wooden boxes of secondhand books on the stone quayside. I rarely stopped—I barely had enough left at the end of the week for my train ticket home—but today I did. I had those extra francs from the generous tourists. Across from a café where women in flowered hats ate lemon ices was a stall selling English books. The proprietor was a retired English colonel, or so he always said, and had been there as long as I remembered. He wore a filthy khaki army jacket, smoked Latakia tobacco, and always kept a spyglass in his box for the children to peer out over the river.

Sometimes I picked up something for Maman—Jane Eyre, a translation of Madame Bovary, or whatever new he had by Edith Wharton. Today I idly flipped through the stacks. Some mysteries, a fair copy of The Ghost Pirates, a crumbling book about the Welsh education system.

“Je peux vous aider, young monsieur?” He took the pipe from his mouth and squinted up at me. “I have a copy now of The Last Egyptian. You were looking for it before, non?”

“Maybe.” I jingled the coins in my pocket and wondered about an ice cream later.

The bouquiniste got heavily to his feet. “Your maman, she likes Cassell’s Magazine. And this issue has the newest Father Brown story.”

I tugged on my jacket collar. “Do you have any translations of Perrault?”

“His fairy tales? I think so.” He dug through stacks, sending up a cloud of dust. Finally he held one up. “Tales of Passed Times, yes?” He brushed off the cover before passing it to me.

The volume was small enough to fit in a pocket, but printed with a color frontispiece. The illustrations weren’t Papa’s, of course, but they were nice enough.

“It’s been hiding there for a while. I don’t sell many children’s books.” He wiped off the stem of his pipe. “C’est la vie.”

It was too cold for ice cream anyway. “How much?”

Clare could read it side by side with the French, learn more than the few words she could pick out on her own. The best things began with fairy tales. I paid and tucked it in my jacket pocket.

The day was golden, with meringues of clouds above Notre Dame. I didn’t want to go back to that dark apartment smelling of cabbage and cheap cigarettes. I passed the art students with their pads of paper and their portable easels. One was doing a passable painting of the Louvre buildings across the river. He frowned down at a palette of blues and grays.

I walked past the galleries lining the Quai du Voltaire. Watercolors and ink drawings hung in the windows, above the occasional nude bronze statue. Everyone wanted to be Rodin. I’d never bought anything from the galleries—not on the little I had left at the end of the week—but looking cost nothing. Once, I’d seen one of Papa’s paintings in the window of the Galerie Porte d’Or. It was a portrait of his friend Olivier, one that had sat in the room off Papa’s studio after Olivier went bankrupt and fled to Patagonia. I never told Maman he brought it to sell in the Quai du Voltaire, but I did help him pick out a new hat for her with the proceeds.

Today it wasn’t the portrait of a penniless poet hanging in a window that caught my attention. It was a painting of a red-haired woman in a bottle-green evening dress. I froze before the window.

There were Clare’s gray eyes, her long white fingers, that defiant tilt to her chin. That pile of auburn curls. I pushed open the door. Inside were more paintings of that same woman in other evening dresses. Sapphire blue, purple, rich cabernet red. In some her hair was pinned up in a mass, in others it cascaded over bare shoulders. No painting was the same. They showed different moments of Paris life. She was sometimes on a stage, sometimes on a sofa, sometimes in the center of a glittering party. A dancer, a courtesan, a society lady. In one she stood before a bed with that jewel-colored evening gown in a puddle at her feet.

The gallery owner, Monsieur Santi, came to my side, his nose twitching as he noticed my interest. “Excusez-moi, je peux vous aider?”

I left before asking who the artist was.

I forgot the golden afternoon and stopped in a stationer’s for a paper and envelope. I crossed the Pont Neuf to the Square du Vert-Galant, that little teardrop of green caught in the Seine. Sitting on a bench, I wrote a letter with the drawing pencil in my pocket.

Dear Maman,