The Suitors

Nanny



I’m ten years old. No one suspects a thing. Not even Marie, who is incapable, luckily, of imagining Nanny’s duplicity. So I keep quiet. Just as I keep to myself all the terrible ways she mistreats me. Because I don’t want to spoil Marie’s fragile happiness by revealing how our governess tortures me as soon as we’re alone together. That madwoman actually beats me, using any pretext to take her resentment out on me with vicious blows. And I am in such fear of these violent episodes, which leave me staggering in terror, that I live mesmerized by her moods, like an appliance plugged into a wall socket, picking up on the fluctuations of her emotional current and preparing myself for the next crisis.

Her anger comes on like wind billowing a sail: I can see the rage course through her, taking over, and I await in despair the moment when Nanny will take me away with her, out of sight, to vent her fury by attacking me like an evil giant. A formidable opponent, she has endless tricks up her sleeve.

She has decided, for example, that I am absentminded and has made it her mission to root out this flaw that seriously threatens my chances in life, when in reality I have found in daydreaming a way to escape from the nightmare she forces me to live. The upshot is that Nanny spends her time testing me in front of my sister and parents by sending me to fetch a certain paper in the library, or a phone number in her address book, or some object on the night table in her room, when the object is actually in her closet.

Off I go, my eyes already blurry with tears. Beginning my search, I lose time looking without seeing, hunting without thinking about what I want to find in the room. Like Gretel, I am lost, as surely as in a forest at nighttime, but Gretel didn’t know how lucky she was to have Hansel by her side when she met the witch who ate children. I am alone when Nanny walks in, supposedly to help me in the task she has set me. “You’re useless, you stupid girl,” she screams, “clumsy and pathetic! You’d better hop to it, you hear me? Or I’m going to lose my temper!”

She often pulls my hair or slaps me, when she’s not throwing dictionaries, chairs, or even small tables at me. Sometimes she just crosses her arms and hisses through her teeth, “Go on, look, show me how you do it. Oh, you’re a fine sight, with your runny nose and that hair in your eyes, you poor thing, I feel sorry for you.” And before I find anything, always before I can succeed, she points a long finger at the object I seek: “And that? What’s that?” I bow my head in submission and defeat, but she piles on humiliation, stoking her fury: “What is that? Are you going to answer me or not!”

Then I tell her what she wants to hear, but I already know that her excitement has crested and must subside. And in fact, sated with violence, she quickly emerges from her trance to tell me coldly, “Go wash your face, it’s an ugly mess.” Then she turns on her heel to rejoin my parents, my sister, and the eventual guests before whom she immediately plays the model employee who has just had to deal with the teary tantrum of a poor neurotic child. And when I reappear, she pats me on the head, pretending to forgive me: “Oh! She’s still all upset …”

An apparently well-meaning exclamation I correctly interpret as an extra insult intended to let me know that my face is swollen from crying, so I now look a fright.

“There’s no reason to make such a fuss, after all!” she concludes, letting me know that the incident is closed, that I’d better not tell my mother about it, because Nanny is the boss, able to disguise her cruelty as affection and turn my tears of suffering into the whimpering of a little girl prone to overdramatize. I could have killed her.

After such episodes, Nanny avoids my eyes for a few hours, no doubt unnerved by the hatred she can read there, as well as my understanding of her pitiful attempt to dominate her charges by buying the good graces of Marie—who looks up to her—while trying to destroy me, even though I could unmask her.

She hasn’t even enough goodness in her character to realize that I would never do that, wouldn’t ever deprive Marie of the illusion of having a kind governess who dotes on the delightful little girl in her care. For that would spoil the tiny bit of joy my sister finds in her relationship with the woman we’ve nicknamed Louis XI because she shares that sour, stern profile found in our history books. I can tell that Marie quite often pretends to be happier than she feels. Why let her know about the vile injustice I endure? Complaining about it would make me seem jealous, as if I envied Marie instead of taking comfort in her naïveté for accepting at face value the simulated love of a substitute mother. For I have already understood that despite appearances, our governess doesn’t love Marie any more than she does me.

In reality, my sister isn’t better off than I am. When she worries about receiving bad grades in school, for example, Nanny tells her it isn’t serious instead of encouraging or helping her. Scholastic achievement, she says, is useless because the world is full of intellectuals with fine diplomas who amount to nothing in life. A speech offering the triple advantage of telling my sister that since she’s not an intellectual, she’s probably an idiot; informing me that my successes in school and supposed intelligence will get me nowhere; and playing the two of us off against each other, as usual.

Deep down, our governess is a fool. Wishing to dominate us, but incapable of fulfilling her ambition, she must both clip our wings and divide us, for fear that we might denounce her if we finally find strength in our true beauty and intelligence, and pool our forces to put together the puzzle pieces that will reveal her weakness.





Nanny always wore a white smock and was dreadfully ugly, with skin tanned by the sun in Egypt, where she had spent much of her life. She had a slender hooked nose, lips as thin as a scar, red-rimmed, washed-out blue eyes, and breasts that rested heavily on her stomach. Marie’s beauty so bewitched Nanny that she really seemed never to tire of it. She would take Marie in her arms, touching her as if somehow to strengthen her claim on the child, and she photographed her everywhere, all the time.

Did my mother, who lived in constant fear of our governess giving notice, find this attachment convenient? Or did she allow herself to be swayed by our nanny’s preferences? In any case, following her lead, our mother crowned my sister the star of the family. Our closets contain entire albums devoted to Marie at all ages: an infant as perfect as an Ivory Snow baby, a giggly little Goldilocks, a mischievous young lady miraculously untouched by the indignities of puberty. And hundreds of snapshots of the ravishing and lissome blonde she became are tacked to the walls of my mother’s private rooms, framed on the chintz-skirted tables of her boudoir, or displayed on silver easels on the mantelpiece.

My mother could thus claim to have gone perfectly gaga over Marie, at least in the etymological sense of the word, as she literally spoiled her silly with the toys that cluttered our playroom: pretend grocery stands, playhouses shaped like castles (where we tried to hide from the governess), rocking horses with real horsehair manes (to which I was allergic), and pedal cars that seated four. In short, these expensive and exquisite playthings were accessories intended for the nanny’s own satisfaction, objects she could then parade before her colleagues to show off urbi et orbi the extravagance of her employer’s taste, lifestyle, and love for her children. Above all, this avalanche of toys allowed Miss Ross to savor the sight of Marie on a horse, in a car, or playing lady of the house, enjoying everything our nanny had never had as a child. Because she was really playing dolls with Marie, dressing her, arranging her hair, constantly asking my mother to buy my sister new clothes with matching barrettes and bows.

Of course, my mother didn’t buy clothes and toys only for Marie. I had some, too. But when she gave Marie a miniature kitchen with a working oven and real china, I received an exercise mat as well as a children’s encyclopedia intended to make up for the difference in the cost of our presents. Her unfairness to me was not that obvious, for my mother simply thought she was granting wishes we had supposedly expressed to our nanny and was thus taking into account our respective characters, which Miss Ross was actually inventing to gratify her own desires.

The same thing happened with our clothes. When it came to Marie, the governess would insist that we were growing so quickly that our mother needed to replenish our wardrobe. In my case, however, she thought it best to have my mother save a little money. So I often wound up wearing my sister’s old clothes, so tight they turned me into a sausage. In other words, I looked like the shabby plump one, trotted out as a foil for Marie’s charm when we were summoned to politely greet the guests. Even if we were already in our pajamas, we had to get dressed all over again, complete with matching hair ribbons, to perform to perfection our role of model little girls who knew how to bob a curtsy: Bonjour, Madame, how do you do …

With feigned modesty, our governess would caress Marie’s hair before pinching my cheek, in a brusque gesture of apparent affection and reinvigorating comfort for my desperate fate as a homely little ingrate. It was as if she were trying to say, Don’t worry, your mother loves you anyway, even if you’re not as pretty as Marie. While she was wearing a fake smile to fool my mother and her guests, however, she was really pinching me, and it hurt. She was punishing me, I realized sadly, punishing me for being less lovely than my sister and thus spoiling the pretty picture she wanted to present to these society people, and I steeled myself not to cry in front of “the grown-ups.”

I was too young, unfortunately, to confide in Marie about how I suffered from our mother’s neglect, or even to reveal the nanny’s treachery toward me, since her cruelty was so insidious that Marie would never have believed me and might secretly have thought me mean and twisted. This must have been what led me to psychoanalysis: the desire for enough knowledge and authority to persuade mothers not only to take a real interest in their children, but also to be intelligently aware of their own behavior, for mothers may well be irreplaceable—and with the wisdom of my experience (bolstered by that of Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein), I was certainly in a position to know!—but they may also do more harm than fathers, if they are all-powerful like the unhinged matron in charge of my upbringing.

As for my father, he paid hardly any attention to us at all. Like many men, he had handed over to his wife the bothersome chores of daily life, including the raising of their children. And so, vacillating between gratitude and guilt, he felt our mother was acquitting herself splendidly of this task through the aid of a governess, and he never gave a thought to protecting us. In any case, he considered our mother’s lack of interest far healthier than the obsessive attention mothers these days lavish on their children.

As a result, I did not know my father. Rather, I knew only what my mother said of him: “Hush, your father is sleeping” or “He’s working.” He was the figure at the end of the upstairs hall. A blond giant with bushy eyebrows, who made silly faces and smiled kindly when addressing his children. Although hardly a stranger to us, he was inaccessible, a sphinx enshrined in work that was never, ever to be disturbed. He was the Man of the House. And we were brought up in the cult of his well-being, thus burnishing the halo of prestige with which our mother had endowed him. Isolated by all this deference and devotion, however, my father was like a walk-on dignitary in an operetta: he never had a say in anything. My mother was merely giving him the illusion that he was the center of her life, for no matter how often she claimed that “between her husband and her children, she had chosen her husband,” I just could not believe in her self-styled role as a loving wife. Because in my eyes, she was as incapable of caring about her husband as she was about her children.

Given the adults in our lives, L’Agapanthe was a fixed point in an unreliable world. Our life there was comfortable and unchanging, in spite of the onerous rules and prohibitions Marie and I had to observe, which left us with a faint but constant melancholy ennui. We knew that this misery sprang from a noble motive, which our parents called education. Ours was Jansenist in inspiration, except that far from inculcating in us a characteristically aristocratic and religious contempt for money, our austere upbringing made us familiar with luxury while forbidding us to enjoy it. As a result, impressed by the sumptuous décor of the house, guests at L’Agapanthe imagined us living pampered lives they would never have conjured up for us had we been observed in a house in Brittany or on a farm in Limousin, and they never suspected that not only were we excluded from the privileges reserved for adults, we were also deprived of their pleasures, such as swimming, which we could enjoy only while they were napping, and with strict instructions to abandon the beach under some pretext as soon as any grown-ups showed up, so that we would not be a bother to them.

We learned, therefore, to be self-effacing. A lesson in tactfulness for which I am grateful to my parents, although it condemned my sister and me to watch others take bold advantage of the opportunities of life, whereas in our chosen professions, we sit on the sidelines, interpreting their language or unconscious minds. With that same reserve, we have both conformed to the images assigned to us since childhood, Marie as the pretty girl who picked a career in which her beauty works wonders, even though she could have gone into academia, astrophysics, or banking, and I as the smart girl who decided on a profession in which I can use my mind without being put on display.

Still, L’Agapanthe did bond us together, my sister and I, as soon as Nanny began going on her own vacations instead of accompanying us there. Marie and I “rubbed off on” each other. I pushed Marie to break free of the idea that she was simply some dumb blonde, and I succeeded so well that she quickly rose to the top of her profession and set up her own agency. She no longer works as an interpreter for anyone but the President of the Republic, whom she accompanies on all his travels. And Marie in turn has helped me to find my own beauty, even though my work has always been more important to me than my appearance. I was so used to being not much to look at that I had to make a real effort to stop feeling invisible. Thanks to Marie’s guidance and assistance, though, the glances I get from men these days tell me that I’m nicely visible indeed.

And L’Agapanthe has become part of our identity. By demonstrating the subtle framework of our codes and contradictions, this house, all by itself, could illustrate our education, how we became who we are, as well as the refinement and culture of our parents. We had come to realize, of course, that L’Agapanthe was being changed by time, even deformed, in a way, through repairs and renovations, and we knew that the life we led there, already anachronistic, would soon become almost an aberration. But the house was still standing, and up and running for a few months every year. And I was glad that my young son was able to join me every August after spending a month with his father. That way, he could understand the upbringing I had received there and inherit this culture naturally, without any formal instruction. Because L’Agapanthe was also, like any other family house, a wonderful instrument of transmission linking the past to the future.

So it was hardly surprising that Marie and I were trying to save it from being sold. And I was thrilled by the idea of experiencing there for the first time an adventure with my sister, one in which we would more fully discover ourselves and each other.





The house



L’Agapanthe has nothing flashy about it. No balustrade or row of columns overlooking the sea. It is a Mediterranean villa, built around a loggia like a monastery around its cloister, the complete opposite of a house with a view. As if the sea had decided to behave like an experienced courtesan and simply suggest its presence, with bright touches shimmering through the shade of lush plants and undergrowth, instead of flaunting itself under the windows of L’Agapanthe like a trollop, as it does before the other villas along the Riviera.

Instead, the garden, with its graphic lines and dramatic effects visible from every part of the house, is an invitation to reverie. The lawn unrolls its green carpet beneath a canopy of umbrella pines whose long silhouettes, like slanting strokes of charcoal, are softened by the silvery grays of their rugged bark. A triangle of sea frames itself in the opening of a hedge at the end of the lawn, like a vanishing point on the horizon.

Here nature is tamed by constant care. The grass preserves the trace of our steps like fingerprints on silk velvet. Pine branches and trunks, like paintings, must be supported with cables to keep them from drooping or falling over one another. Thus domesticated, the garden takes on the artificial airs of a stage set, where one might glimpse a dirty old man trotting after some luscious creature, or a married couple making a scene.

And yet the garden, by creating harmony between indoors and outdoors, links the house to the sea. And that gradual movement from architecture to nature can be seen in the careful arrangement of the landscape. The olive trees, which make an almost urban impression on the front terrace, where they are set within flagstones like plane trees in a schoolyard, seem wilder a little downhill, among the clumps of lavender dotting the strip of open space halfway down the stone steps to the pine grove. There the cypresses and pink laurels must be content with their decorative role at the bottom of the steps, where hedges, in turn, complete the transformation from vegetation to the mineral world, framing the lawn down to the gorse-studded slopes among the rocks at the beach.

L’Agapanthe is a theater à l’italienne, where the lawn is the stage, the rooms are the box seats, and the terrace forms the orchestra pit, with identical flights of steps on both sides.

One particularity of this house is its perfect symmetry. From the guest lavatories to the shower rooms, everything was conceived in duplicate, and often assigned separately to men and women. Which is certainly not the case for the two sets of steps on the terrace, so why do people always use the ones on the right?

Perhaps the inhabitants of every house establish tacit traffic patterns that may defy all logic and even the challenges of home improvements? At L’Agapanthe, the steps on the right draw us as if marked by invisible and imperious tracks, and we still instinctively avoid the other steps even though the new swimming pool is on that side of the house.





Weekend of July 14



THE FAMILY



Marie Ettinguer Laure Ettinguer

Flokie Ettinguer Edmond Ettinguer

THE PILLARS



Gay Wallingford Frédéric Hottin

THE LITTLE BAND



Odon Viel Henri Démazure

Polyséna Démazure Laszlo Schwartz

THE NEWCOMERS



Jean-Michel Destret Laetitia Braissant

Bernard Braissant




SECRETARY’S NAME BOARD



M. and Mme. Edmond Ettinguer Master Bedroom

Mme. Laure Ettinguer Flora’s Room

(Arrival Air France Thursday 8:00 p.m.)

Mlle. Marie Ettinguer Ada’s Room

(Arrival EasyJet Friday 5:00 p.m.)

Lady Gay Wallingford Peony Room

M. Frédéric Hottin Chinese Room

M. Odon Viel Turquoise Room

(Juan les Pins Station Friday 6:00 p.m.)

Count and Countess Henri Démazure Annex: Coral Room

M. Laszlo Schwartz Lilac Room

M. Jean-Michel Destret Yellow Room

(Arrival Air France Friday 5:30 p.m.)

M. and Mme. Bernard Braissant Sasha’s Room

(Arrival EasyJet Friday 5:00 p.m.)



In alphabetical order for the pantry and telephone switchboard.

In order of arrival, with departure dates, for chauffeurs and chambermaids.

In chronological order with the number in attendance at each meal for the kitchen.





My sister and I had no need to discuss how we would each prepare for the weekend of July 14. Relying on her charm, Marie managed to confirm that our father’s finances were still flourishing, while I scouted around to draw up a list of suitors to whom an invitation to L’Agapanthe would seem both welcome and perfectly natural.

Jean-Michel Destret had the advantage of being a friend of Laetitia and Bernard Braissant, who knew my sister. Destret was rich, but just how rich? Not as much as all that, probably, in spite of his astronomical salary, golden parachute, and holdings in the investment group he managed. A reliable estimate was difficult to come by with celebrity CEOs like him, over whom the newspapers went wild. At last: a French entrepreneur! As for the Braissants, they were delighted at the idea of bringing him along for a weekend at the house, thus introducing this new star in the financial heavens to such prestigious members of the Establishment.

The Braissants were by no means my cup of tea. They belonged to that category of phony leftists whom Marie ran into while on the job, important “cultural figures” who’d found their place in the sun by exposing the official cultural elite for their lack of social consciousness through their endless petitions and loudly righteous indignation. Their role models? Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for beauty and glamour; Sartre and Beauvoir for charisma, moral authority, and the art of pulling strings. Tirelessly trumpeting their political righteousness, they appropriated the allure and importance of any problem they championed, be it the tragedy in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, or the plight of illegal aliens. And they expected to be treated with the gravity and respect such weighty issues deserved. Anyone reluctant to show them enough deference they dismissed as callous, brainless or, even worse, bourgeois, in which last category they naturally filed me away as a rich “daddy’s girl.”

Marie, doubtless benefiting from her association with powerful people (and the Braissants’ healthy self-regard), escaped that fate. The couple treated her with a mixture of condescension and benevolence. They had selected her to be their “rich heiress,” the way anti-Semites invariably befriend a “good Jew.” Except that instead of proving they weren’t racists, they sought to show that while making an exception for my sister, they despised money. It was the least that could be expected from the editor in chief of a satirical magazine and the communications director for a politician, and from left-wing intellectuals in general. In short, the Braissants were freeloaders. I found them as unbearable as they were pretentious. Still, as Marie reminded me, they were serving us up Jean-Michel Destret on a silver platter.





Friday, 7:00 a.m.



“Can you possibly explain to me why this young man is bringing his car and chauffeur down from Paris when he’s flying into the airport at Nice this afternoon?”

Even at seven in the morning, my mother was determined not to be impressed by the prestige of her daughters’ guests, since a success achieved by anyone other than herself, my father, and their friends irritated her purely on principle.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Just imagine, his secretary called yesterday to ask if we could accommodate his driver. Couldn’t he rent a car like everyone else? It’s unbelievable! And so ill-bred.”

“I have to admit it’s rather strange, and certainly cheeky, but would you be able to put him up?”

“Yes, luckily enough, in one of those two small rooms over the garage.”

Having arrived late the previous evening, I was eager to take a tour of the house, making it my own again the way I did at the beginning of every summer. I felt that I bloomed at L’Agapanthe like those Japanese paper flowers that unfold their petals in water.

I went down to the beach. Carved out of the living rock and jutting like a promontory into the water, it nestled at the midpoint of a bay wide open to the horizon and that seemed to hold the sea within its arms. At this early hour, the water was as smooth as a slick of oil. I looked to the left, at a house that was constantly changing hands and where I’d once seen a James Bond movie being filmed. This time, the flag flying near the water’s edge was Russian. Probably a “Russkaya” mafioso. Mother must be tickled pink, I thought treacherously, forcing myself to stand at the edge of the boardwalk even though I felt dizzy. At the bottom of the ladder, I dipped a foot into the water but found it too pale and cold in the early-morning sun for swimming.

I breathed in a scent of curry from the plants growing among the rocks, and the smell of kelp, lying stagnant in the grotto fitted out as a shower, and the intoxicating musty odor of the little cave that had been made into a bar. Then I strolled along the seaside path to the other beach on the property, a triangle of flat rock at water level reserved for the household staff. An entertaining irony of fate thus made our servants neighbors with one of the world’s richest men, a Saudi prince who had bought several houses on the bay to the right of ours. Posted every thirty yards, the armed guards of his security force all stared at me intently as I walked along his beach, and I nervously quickened my pace. Wishing I’d thought to bring the cigarettes I allowed myself from time to time, I climbed back up to the house, arriving out of breath.

“So, all’s well, you’ve done your little victory lap? Ask for your tray and come sit with us,” Frédéric said firmly.

In the pantry, the butlers were already busy in aprons and shirtsleeves preparing the apricot and raspberry juices for breakfast, the pyramids of dainty cucumber sandwiches for teatime, and grating the lime zest indispensable for the evening’s cosmopolitans.

“Madame Laure!”

“Marcel! How are you? And your hip, it’s getting better? The children are well?”

Marcel was a sturdy, good-natured fellow from Mont-de-Marsan. He was married, had arthritis, and two daughters, one of whom was beginning a promising career in banking. And that was all I could say about him, because like the other members of our staff, he belonged to a shadow army about which we knew almost nothing.

Numerous and omnipresent, they worked so discreetly, silently, and invisibly that it remained a mystery to us how they managed to complete their tasks. Through what miracle were our rooms made up? And how did the living room, which we abandoned late at night, become spotless again by seven in the morning? Not to mention the towels left at the beach or around the pool that turned up, freshly laundered and neatly folded, in baskets by the pool or in the grotto down by the water.

The staff shifted constantly between work and discretion, at times preferring to quietly withdraw rather than attract notice. And their choreography—with the imperceptible refinement of our grandmothers’ hems, sewn with lead weights to muffle the rustling of their skirts—produced an effect close to perfection. Like a pleasure dome freed from all material contingency, the house inspired reverie, and even happiness. It was only upon leaving this womblike world that we could realize or remember that no one lived like this anymore. No one lived like us.





The Rules of the Game

FILM BY JEAN RENOIR (1939)



CHRISTINE de la CHESNAYE, lady of the house:

Jean isn’t here?

CELESTIN, kitchen boy:

Ah, no, Madame la Marquise! He has gone to Orléans in the van, for the fish.

CHRISTINE de la CHESNAYE:

Do explain to him about Madame de la Bruyère’s diet. She eats everything, but no salt.

MADAME de la BRUYERE, guest:

No, on the contrary, lots of salt, but it must be sea salt, added only after the cooking. Oh, it’s quite simple, a child would understand. After the cooking!

CHRISTINE de la CHESNAYE:

Do you have any sea salt?

…



(At the servants’ table)

LISETTE, personal maid to the marquise:



Some asparagus?

GAMEKEEPER:

No, thanks, I never eat canned. I only like fresh, because of the vitamins.

…



CELESTIN:

Chef, did you remember the sea salt for old lady la Bruyère?

JEAN, the chef:

Madame la Bruyère will eat like everyone else. I will put up with diets, but not with fads.

…



JEAN:

La Chesnaye may be a Jew, but the other day he summoned me for a dressing-down over a potato salad. As you know, or rather, as you do not know, for a potato salad to be worthy of the table, the white wine must be poured over the potatoes while they are still boiling hot, which Célestin had not done because he doesn’t like to burn his fingers. Well! The boss, he picked up on that right away. You may say what you like, but that—that is a man of the world.





“Roberto isn’t here?” I asked.

“No,” replied one of the butlers in the pantry. “He’s out shopping.”

“Of course, silly me …”

Roberto, the head butler, was responsible for buying our bread, newspapers, flowers to make up bouquets, the fruits and cheeses he arranged on serving platters, on dishes for the guests’ rooms, and in baskets for centerpieces. He was also in charge of slicing the larger fruits served at breakfast and shelling the fresh almonds set out on the little tables in the loggia during cocktails.

“What would Madame like for breakfast?” asked Marcel, opening a large cupboard.

Some twenty trays laden with coffeepots, milk pitchers, and jam jars of brightly colored Vallauris china were lined up inside, next to a small notebook hanging from a hook. Warped and blistered by moisture, this recorded the customary preferences of our guests. Beneath Lady Wallingford’s name was written “Lemon tea + plain yogurt + fruit + Herald Tribune,” whereas the requirements of Laszlo Schwartz demanded an entire paragraph: “Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, croissant, toast, jam (no orange marmalade), café au lait, Herald Tribune, Nice Matin, Le Figaro, Le Monde.”

“Tea with milk?” replied Marcel, astonished by my request, “but usually you have—”

“Black coffee, yes, I know. I apologize for changing my mind like this, Marcel, which doesn’t make things easy. It’s a good thing not everyone is like me!”

I went back to the loggia, a sort of covered patio extended by an awning above the terrace, which looked out over the lawn and the sea. Furnished as a living room, the loggia was connected to all the reception rooms in the house, thus serving as a forum to the “city of L’Agapanthe,” a center for intrigues and conversation. I sat down beside Gay and Frédéric in one of the wicker armchairs from the 1940s, across from the huge green linen sofa where my mother held court from the moment breakfast began. Comments on the day’s news were enriched by the appearance of each freshly awakened guest, and everyone got quickly up to speed. What had the finance minister said yesterday evening? How many dead from that earthquake? How had this or that guest slept? Who wanted to go for a swim or into town?

“Which of your clients have already arrived?” was the first thing I asked my mother.

I should explain that my parents, always happy to “go slumming,” liked to call their guests clients, often comparing L’Agapanthe to a family boardinghouse and themselves to its “bosses.”

“Well, aside from Gay and Frédéric right here, there are the Démazures, Henri and Polyséna … and also Schwartz, who arrived two days ago.”

“Bingo!” I thought, wishing Marie had been there to exchange knowing smiles with me, because my mother had just betrayed once again her attraction to Laszlo Schwartz by using only his last name, unusual behavior for one so addicted to etiquette. In fact my mother was scrupulous about using absolutely everyone’s first and last names, saying for example, “Henri Démazure just telephoned.” If writing or making an introduction, she would add the person’s title, if necessary: “Let me introduce you to the Baroness de Cadaval” or “Lord Fraser.” Unless she were speaking of a merchant or other businessperson, in which case she graced the last name with a “Monsieur” or “Madame” that was all the more condescending for its appearance of respect. This led to remarks like, “Monsieur Lefèvre, you won’t forget that estimate for my living room curtains, will you?”

So, although my mother was careful to appear casual and unconcerned whenever she mentioned Laszlo Schwartz, modulating her tone with a care she imagined went unnoticed, we couldn’t help detecting her interest. True, Laszlo was attractive. Tall, elegant, with an imposing silver mane, and intimidating in the manner of those who make it clear that they follow only their own rules, he could even appear haughty. He did to my mother, in any case, who was timid and insecure by nature, in spite of all her elegance and irreverent airs, and who would have found him overpowering if he hadn’t been introduced to her by the Démazures, whose friend—inexplicably—he was.

Enthralled by his talent, fame, and freewheeling conversation, she was still amazed that he paid attention to her. For Laszlo, who had always been curious about the rich, had swiftly succumbed to her hospitality and had also begun to flirt with her. Openly, but without any real impropriety, for the pleasures of the chase, of gently teasing a sophisticated woman—and for the more refined rewards of experimenting with a dalliance from another age, which he had never had the time or means to explore.

“And Odon Viel, he’s not coming this year?” I asked her.

For we were still missing our astrophysicist, the Nobel Prize winner of the family, whose major failing was to believe us all capable of fathoming the nuances of quantum mechanics and molecular and atomic physics. Viel would complete my mother’s group of intimate friends—along with Gay, Schwartz, and the Démazures—whom she proudly called her little band, and whom Marie, my father, and I referred to as her pets. They were cultured people, intellectuals and, with the exception of Gay, sometimes crashing bores, according to my father, who much preferred eccentrics like Georgina de Marien or Charles Ramsbotham, whom my mother dismissed as “oddballs” or “duds.”

“As it happens,” she told me, “he’s arriving at Juan-les-Pins on the six o’clock train.”

“Someone,” intoned Gay lugubriously, “should perhaps explain to dear Odon that it’s now cheaper to travel by plane than by train. Because I truly doubt that his ticket was a better buy than the thirty euros for a ParisNice on EasyJet, even with his beloved senior-citizen card and those discounts he so adores.”

Her theatrically sinister delivery tickled Frédéric and me so much we couldn’t help laughing. To hear Gay talking about the price of public transportation was simply bizarre, because she was a great lady. An elderly one, now, but still lovely: she was tall, thin, and had such class! Like Ava Gardner in a Hollywood film, she always seemed ready to grab the spotlight, even first thing in the morning in her champagne-colored satin dressing gown and matching mules with Popsicle, her Maltese bichon, on her lap.

She wasn’t the type to sit around mulling over her memories, so no one ever asked her about her life. Except me, and the one time I did ask her I learned she’d had her share of tragedies. She had started out in life as an adventuress, at least so I imagined, by reinventing herself with a new name, Gay. That career had ended in the camps, however, a part of her life she never mentioned. After that, she’d collected husbands, the last of which, Lord Wallingford, had brought her into society and left her a widow.

Frédéric and I were still laughing when my mother—who has always been peeved by our complicity—asked me loudly about Marie.

“And your sister, when does she get here?”

“At five. On EasyJet, actually. With the Braissants.”

When she pretended to be momentarily confused, I added, “You know, Laetitia and Bernard Braissant, friends of hers …”

“What is it they do again?”

“They work in the media, communications.”

“Oh, yes, television, or something along those lines,” she replied with a shrug of disgust.

“Well, let’s say public relations for her and journalism for him.”

“How awful! When I think that your father and I had managed until now to avoid having any journalists in this house …”

Her comment was all the more unfair since our parents hadn’t raised the slightest objection when Marie and I had gone over our guest list with them. And Marie had been particularly careful to reassure them about the exclusively political nature of the Braissants’ professional interests, because she knew how much they distrusted journalists. Besides, Marie and I thought largely as our parents did, since we considered journalists incapable of loyalty to anyone once they smelled a possible scoop, and they were often disinclined to respect the boundary between what was fair game or not—that famous “off the record” they flung all over the place to create a climate of confidence they would betray the first chance they got, overwhelmed by the desire to release an exclusive report or write the breaking story.

Our parents had often told us: If you’re a public figure, it’s impossible to be friends with a journalist. How can you ask a friend to put feelings before professional interest? Besides, such discretion represents a sacrifice so exorbitant that you’ll wind up paying for it ten times over. The proof? Allow a journalist “friend” to write an article about you: afraid of being accused of concocting a puff piece, the writer will come down harder on you than anyone else. And it’s always possible that the critique, based on intimate knowledge of your life, will wind up being too painfully intimate by far.

My mother, however, had picked the wrong target, because if any one of our guests was open to her accusation, it was surely Jean-Michel Destret. Marie and I really did think it hopelessly vulgar to chase after notoriety the way he seemed to do, waltzing delightedly across television sets and through photo sessions on his way to the ghastly stardom of the VIP: a catchall category comprising the likes of sarcastic old novelists, decrepit social butterflies giddy with gratitude for a photo in the advertising section, and empty-headed pundits pontificating at full blast in televised debates. So if either Marie or I took an interest in this Destret, his deplorable taste for publicity would require prompt correction, because the Duchess of Windsor’s “You can never be too thin or too rich” paled in importance, in our eyes, before the wisdom of “You can never stay too far away from the press.”

Fortunately, my father chose to make his appearance at that moment, nipping my mother’s growing ill humor in the bud.

“Good morning, everyone!” he cried cheerily, then gave me a kiss.

Raising an eyebrow in my direction, he asked how I was doing, to which I replied with a demure flutter of eyelashes and a smile. He must have sensed that I’d be well advised to cede center stage to my mother, leaving her to reign uncontested over her husband and guests, so I sat back, and a child once again, let the grown-ups do the talking.

My father couldn’t keep quiet for long about his passion for art. For a good part of the night, three Renaissance paintings had kept him awake, lost in the contemplation of color slides sent to him by Sotheby’s, which he quickly showed us with greedy zeal.

There was a Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) titled Young Woman Holding Grapes and Apples; a Titian (1485/90–1576), Mary Magdalene Repentant; and Descent into Limbo by Andrea Mantegna (1430–1506).

His enthusiasm was touching.

“So, you’re tempted by all three?” Gay asked him.

“Oh, no! I’d love that, but it’s impossible. Besides, I’m not really captivated by the Mantegna. It’s superb, but the subject is quite austere. And it’s simply too expensive.”

“But it’s tiny! 38.8 by 42.3 centimeters, that’s eensy-weensy!” cackled Frédéric, holding the Ecktachrome up to the light. “Me, I’d go for the Cranach, and what do you know, it’s a steal at only one and a half million!”

“Yes, but the Cranach’s 81.5 by 55 centimeters: it’s smaller than the Titian estimated at four to six million dollars, which measures 119 by 98.5 centimeters. And that comes to, per square centimeter …”

“You sound like a couple of accountants!” exclaimed my mother. “It’s shocking!”

My mother was not really shocked at all by these trivial comments and was herself often quite blunt when speaking of artworks, which were all the less sacred in her eyes because we lived among them. My father was the collector and scholar of the family, a man who studied art history for several hours a day, but my mother wanted to remind us that she had a good eye, too. And it was true that through her familiarity with the works coveted or purchased by my father, and by visiting assiduously all the museums in the world and observing dealers in art and antiques at their trades, my mother had acquired such expertise that she rarely erred in her evaluation of a canvas. As on the day when she had appalled a well-known dealer in New York who was showing us a Caravaggio.

“Actually, it should be cut in two! Because the infant Jesus lighting up the picture is sublime, as is the angel in the bloodred robe whirling above him. But the entire right side is a botch …”

And she was right, because carbon 14 dating revealed that the right side of the painting was speckled with pentimenti and overpainting.

“I’m with Frédéric, I’m leaning toward the Cranach,” announced my father. “Especially since it’s the gentlest, most civilized version of a subject he used several times. In general the young woman holds a severed head, whether it’s Judith with the head of Holofernes, or Salome with John the Baptist’s, or Jael with Sisera’s.”

Henri and Polyséna Démazure, wearing varied shades of blue, now made their entrance into the loggia to such spectacular effect that everyone suddenly realized we were all dressed in blue, except for Gay, who was in yellow.

“What happened?” Frédéric asked her in mock dismay. “You didn’t receive the bulletin informing us that blue was the color of the day?”

After a courteous little laugh, Polyséna hurried to revive the conversation about art, eager to take advantage of this chance to mention the beautiful book she was working on, in which photographs of current celebrities—actors, politicians, singers, sports icons, and TV stars—were paired with their doubles from the past, immortalized in famous portraits dating from the quattrocento. James Gandolfini, lead actor in The Sopranos, revealed a striking resemblance to the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, as painted by Gentile Bellini, while Sonia Rikyel seemed to have inspired Otto Dix’s portrait of the dancer Anita Berber.

“I suppose Cate Blanchett corresponds all by herself to a number of Holbein portraits,” observed Gay.

“And Nicole Kidman might find herself as a beauty with rippling red hair by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” added my mother.

I saw my father’s face cloud faintly with annoyance. Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman meant little to him in comparison to the grandmasters of painting, about whom, on the contrary, he could hold forth forever, but he preferred to keep quiet rather than offend Polyséna.

“Well, Laure,” said Frédéric brightly. “It’s high time to get a move on! You promised to drive me into town, remember?”

Like many fun people who disdain to conform to modern life, Frédéric had no idea how to drive. Surprised for a moment, then grateful for the diversion, I was about to reply when my mother beat me to it.

“Don’t be silly!” she told Frédéric. “Roland, the chauffeur, will take you. And if it’s to buy your Paris-Turf, I don’t see why you can’t ask Roberto to get it for you.”

“Flokie, darling,” said Frédéric, rising to kiss her hand, “you’re a sweetheart, tried and true, but I absolutely need Laure for my little jaunt because I’m going hunting for a present for her birthday, which—as you know—is only a few days away.”

Mollified by this logical explanation for Frédéric’s desire for my company, my mother let us go.

“Just give me time to call my son,” I told him.

“Fine, come get me in my room when you’re done—I know it might take some time …”

And he was right. I missed my son so much when he was with his father that I could bear the separation only by breaking it up with phone dates, replacing “See you next month” with “Till tomorrow” or “Talk to you later.” And he missed me. He was only seven, and he needed me. But his moods varied, and that day, busy getting ready for some fishing with his father, he barely said hello. I felt hurt, but relieved as well, because that meant he was happy.





“So, what’s the form?” said Frédéric after we’d settled in with our coffee on the terrace of the Hôtel du Cap.

He always came on like a punter checking bloodlines when asking about the pedigree of one of my lovers or a guest at L’Agapanthe.

“Jean-Michel Destret? But haven’t you seen his picture? It’s in all the newspapers.”

“You mean the one who looks like the class nerd with his hair parted on the side?”

“Exactly.”

“Hoo boy! Are we in for some fun. Who’s he for, you or Marie?”

“Whoever gets the first hit—we’re going to play it by ear.”

“Like flipping a coin?”

“That’s great, laugh at me! You know what I mean … and by the way, this is the first time you haven’t told me that a guy isn’t good enough for me.”

“I’m on my best behavior, just for you! I’m keeping my beady eye on the sugar daddy prize.”

“Hey, real sugar daddies are old, so if you don’t mind, I’d rather call this a blind date.”

“Blind date? I’m good with that! See how nice I’m being?”

I have always confided in Frédéric about my love life and always been able to count on him whenever I wanted to go AWOL or hit the hottest underground club of the moment.

“I think that’s a stupid idea,” he usually told me, “but I’ll totally support you in whatever stupid idea goes through your head.”

And he meant it, like the year when I had a crush on French movie star Daniel Auteuil. I went on and on about him to Frédéric (who knew him a little), asking what he was like and if there was a chance that he might like me. I always got the same answer.

“You’re pissing me off with your Daniel Auteuil!”

Until my birthday. I was blowing out my candles when he handed me the phone with a mischievous look. “Call for you.”

“Who is it?”

“Some guy named Auteuil, I think,” he told me, casual as you please, when he’d been pestering the actor relentlessly to please call me up and invite me out for coffee.