Paris: The Novel (76 page)

“My wife is in charge of the plants, and I am in charge of the lawn and the orchard,” Jules explained. “Do you approve?”

“I certainly do,” said Fox. “I could almost be in England.”

“Almost?” Jules nodded. “My lawn isn’t quite right. It’s mown, but I have had difficulty in obtaining a roller. An English lawn would be rolled. How long does it take then, to get a truly English lawn?”

Fox looked at the two Blanchards, then at Marie, and gave a broad smile.

“Centuries,” he said.

They took him around the old château and walked in the forest and had a delightful weekend. And perhaps because he was not a threat to her emotional life, and because he was so clearly a nice man, Marie felt more contented during his stay than she had for some time, and was sorry to see him depart.

Later in July, Aunt Éloïse came down for a few days. She enjoyed that. While she was there, a letter came from Marc. He and Hadley were getting along famously. They were both very productive, he reported. And the company was excellent.

What did he mean by that? Who was Hadley seeing? She could only wonder.

“Do you think we should pay them a visit?” she asked Aunt Éloïse.

“It means going to Paris first and then up to Normandy.”

“That’s not so far.”

“I’ll think about it. Perhaps I can arrange for you to see Marc without going to Normandy,” she said. But this was not quite what Marie wanted to hear.

In the month of August, all the inhabitants of Paris who were able to do so deserted the city. Jules announced that he would spend the entire month at Fontainebleau.

It was a week into August when he informed them that Fox was coming by.

“He wanted to stop on his way down to Burgundy. Naturally I said he’s welcome.”

They were all glad to see him, but the manner of his arrival took them by surprise. For instead of a cab from the station, it was a cart that trundled through the iron gates into the courtyard. While the driver and his assistant went to the back of the cart, Fox got down looking pleased with himself.

“Are your bags so heavy?” Jules inquired.

“Not exactly. I have something for you.”

And then, down a ramp from the back of the cart, manhandled with some difficulty by the driver and his mate, there came a garden roller.

“Mon Dieu!”
cried Jules. “I can’t believe it. Look at this,” he cried to Marie and her mother. “
Mon cher ami
, where the devil did you get it?”

“From England of course. I had it shipped.”

Marie laughed out loud. One had to love him.

And he insisted on giving them a demonstration of how to use it.

“If you do it right,” he explained, “it’s wonderful for strengthening all your muscles and stretching the back.”

It was half an hour later, entering the empty salon while Fox and her father were on the veranda, that Marie heard a few words of conversation that she did not understand.

“Everything is fine. Our young friend will soon be installed in London. As for the banker and his wife, they are delighted. Their daughter is a lucky girl.”

“Should I meet them? I feel I should like to.”

“I strongly advise against it.”

“You’re right. I am very grateful to you.”

“Our firm is there to provide service to all our clients. But I think the business has gone well.” He paused. “I must catch a train shortly. May I have the pleasure of calling in on you on my return? I shall want to inspect the lawn.”

“We look forward to it.”

After he had gone, Marie asked her father if Fox had also come to transact business.

“Yes. A piece of English business I had, as it happens. He’s a good man.” He didn’t elaborate further, and she didn’t ask.

She did not hear a murmured conversation between her parents in their bedroom that night, however.

“I like Fox,” said Jules. “It’s a pity he’s a Protestant.”

“So do I,” agreed his wife. “But he’s Protestant, all the same.”

“Yes. It’s a pity, though.”

Nor did she hear a conversation a few days later when her aunt arrived to see her father.

“My dear Jules, it’s time to forgive your son.”

“Why?”

“The Petit girl is installed in England. Her daughter is safely born and she has been adopted by a charming family like our own. Our troubles in this matter are over. The Petit family have disowned their daughter, which I consider an abomination, but sadly it’s what many others would have done. The conventions of society are cruel. But Marc has been punished enough. God knows he has done nothing worse than many other young men of his age.”

“He hasn’t been punished at all.”

“Of course he has.”

“He seems to live quite well, after I stopped his allowance.”

“He gets commissions.”

Jules looked at his sister affectionately.

“How much are you giving him, Éloïse?”

“If I were, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“He’s not suffering at all.”

“He is suffering by being deprived of his father and mother.”

“It must be killing him.”

“More than you know. He loves you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Marc and Hadley arrived at Fontainebleau for the last ten days of August. For Marie, it was a magical time. Sometimes they would go into the forest to sketch, and she would go with them, taking a book and a sketch pad herself, to keep them company. She and her mother conducted Hadley around the château, which he preferred to Versailles. In particular he liked the old tapestries that showed the courtly hunting scenes in their deep, rich colors.

In the evenings everyone would sit out on the veranda. Her father would often read the paper then, and Marc and Hadley would chat, while she quietly listened. At Marc’s prompting, Hadley would talk easily about his childhood, of tobogganing in the snow, of his rowing days at university, or his year of ranching. Sometimes he would mention little things. “When I was eighteen, my father gave me a pair of wooden hairbrushes. Dark hickory, with my initials carved on the back. I always take them with me. Some people have fancy ivory brushes, but I wouldn’t change the hickory brushes my father gave me for anything in the world.”

He talked of his parents also.

“If I like to travel, I dare say I get it from them,” he remarked once. “My father usually had spare time in the summer. Before I was born, they went to Japan, to England, to Egypt. And they’d take us children to all kinds of places too. When I marry,” he added easily, “I hope my wife will want to travel with me. It’s a wonderful thing to share.”

She listened to these and other things until, she thought, she knew everything about him.

One evening on the veranda, after they had spent the afternoon walking through the forest to nearby Barbizon where Corot had painted, Hadley threw back his head and closed his eyes.

“You know, I feel as if I’ve entered a beautiful, unchanging world,” he confessed to them. “There’s a softness in the light, a sort of echo everywhere in the landscape. I can’t really put it into words.”

“Everyone is seduced by the French countryside,” said Marc. “But you should also understand that we French are so conscious of our history—it’s everywhere around us—that we all feel as if we have lived many times before.” He smiled. “This may be a delusion, but it’s a rich one, and it gives us comfort.”

“We also find comfort in the Church,” his mother added.

“Same wine, same cheeses,” said Jules pleasantly. “Once a Frenchman, always a Frenchman.”

“French life has so much charm,” said Hadley with a contented sigh. “I could imagine living here.”

Could Hadley really live in France? Marie wondered. She tried to imagine him living in the house in Fontainebleau. She thought of his sketches on the wall of the passage that led to the kitchen; the picture of the Gare Saint-Lazare she would give him, in the salon perhaps; and his hairbrushes, on the table in her father’s dressing room.

Or would he live in America, and travel like his parents? He could have a house in France, she thought, and spend every summer here. Why not? His children could be bilingual.

One afternoon, Hadley and Marc were painting in the garden, and she came out to look at what they were doing. Hadley was painting a flower bed which contained some magnificent peonies in full bloom. So far, his painting looked like a glowing, almost formless sea of color.

“I see what it is, but I’d never have thought of it like that,” she said.

“The difficulty isn’t putting the paint on the canvas,” he answered quietly. “It’s seeing what you’re painting. I mean, looking at it without any
preconceptions about what it’s supposed to look like. If you think you know what a peony looks like, then you’ll never be able to paint it. You have to look at everything with fresh eyes, which is difficult.”

“I can understand that in painting and drawing, I think. I don’t think it works for other arts, does it?”

“There are some writers who are trying to do something similar. Especially in France. The symbolists like the poet Mallarmé. And there are political revolutionaries too, who say we should start all over again and decide what the rules of society should be. After all, they were doing that when they destroyed the monarchy and attacked religion back in the days of the French Revolution.” He smiled. “I dare say people have always been changing the rules ever since the Greeks invented democracy or man invented the wheel.”

“So do you want to change the world?”

“No. Because the world’s been pretty good to me. But I like to try to discover the truth about how things look.”

She left him to his work and went back to the shade of the veranda. Then she took out her sketch pad. She started a drawing of the puppy. It wasn’t any good, but if anyone asked what she was drawing, she’d have that to show them. Meanwhile, as her father buried himself in his newspaper, she turned to a fresh sheet underneath the drawing of the puppy, and she started to draw Hadley.

She tried to do exactly as he said, and just look at exactly what she saw. At first it didn’t seem right, but gradually she realized that by concentrating her eye, she had produced exactly the line of his jaw, and his powerful neck, and the way his hair tumbled down in its strong, unruly way. And she found herself smiling as she realized how perfectly she knew him.