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,
Do you remember the Galerie Porte d’Or, that place on the Quai du Voltaire with the shifty-eyed Neapolitan fellow? I was by there today and, Maman, I saw a painting of Madame Ross. I saw a painting of Clare’s mother.
Clare told me she didn’t know where her mother was, but she must be in Paris. One painting shows the stage of the Lapin Agile cabaret. And then for all the paintings to be here, for sale on the Quai du Voltaire.
M. Santi would know the artist, who can tell us where his model lives. I know you’ve been looking for her. Will you write to M. Santi, Maman? All Clare wants, more than anything, is her mother back.
Luc
I stayed in Paris that weekend, too. I walked down again to the Quai du Voltaire and loitered outside of the gallery, but didn’t go in again.
Clare sent me a letter, something light and wistful, recounting a story about how her nanny had bought her a Little Folks’ Painting Book for her birthday, so she could be a “lady artist” like her mother. When Mother comes for me, she wrote, I can show her all I’ve learned since then.
When she comes.
Maman’s letter arrived the next day.
My Luc,
Maud was in France, it’s true. You were away at school in Switzerland, so you weren’t here when she appeared at our front door. She’d only just left Scotland. I was angry that she left, angry that she came here, to Mille Mots. I won’t get into the reasons. Clare was scarcely eleven.
