The Suitors

Sunday



The next day saw the departure before lunch of Jean-Michel and the Braissants, who left for Aix in Jean-Michel’s car (the usefulness of which I now finally grasped) to attend some festival or other they needed to get to before the end of the day. Another highlight was my realization of the effect I was having on men ever since Rajiv had set my sensuality on fire. I must have had bedroom eyes, because I proved indecently popular with men at luncheon that day—a development I instinctively took care to conceal from my mother and Marie. Our male guests seemed to grow shy, blush, or make sheep’s eyes at me upon approaching, when they weren’t simply proposing a quickie in the bathroom, like the ruddy-complexioned fellow with hairy nostrils and ears, a curator from some provincial museum, who seriously thought he might carry that off by murmuring to me that I made the other women present look like goats.





Luncheon, Sunday, July 16





MENU



Onion and Tomato Tart Niçoise

Corsican Charcuterie

Crudités

Rabbit Terrine with Prunes

Lobster Fricassee

Saffron Rice

Zucchini Flowers

Cheeses

Melon Surprise





Even if I found it impossible to suppress my sensual awakening, which sprang from something too primitive to be denied, I could resolve to forget the thoughts and feelings about Marie that had so pained me the previous evening. And this I tried to do all during that last day before our return to Paris. Because there was no question of my allowing the slightest distance to grow between us, still less when we were already committed to our project, even if it was absurd.


1 In French, “Enchanté” may be tackier than “Delighted” is in English.

2 Adnan Khashoggi is a famous Saudi Arabian arms dealer.

3 French stock market index.





Weekend of July 21



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 ODDBALLS



Georgina de Marien Charles Ramsbotham

THE NEWCOMERS



Béno Grunwald Mathias Cavoye

Lou Léva




SECRETARY’S NAME BOARD



M. and Mme. Edmond Ettinguer Master Bedroom

Mme. Laure Ettinguer Flora’s Room

(Arrival from Paris Air France Friday 5:00 p.m.)

Mlle. Marie Ettinguer Ada’s Room

(Arrival from Rio de Janeiro Friday 6:00 p.m.)

Lady Gay Wallingford Peony Room

M. Frédéric Hottin Chinese Room

M. Odon Viel Turquoise Room

Count and Countess Henri DémazureM. Laszlo Schwartz Annex: Coral RoomLilac Room

Viscountess de Marien Annex: Peach Room

Earl of Stafford (Charles Ramsbotham) Annex: Lime Room

M. Béno Grunwald Yellow Room

(Arrival helicopter?)

M. Mathias Cavoye and Mlle. Lou Léva Sasha’s Room

(Arrival EasyJet Friday 7:00 p.m.)





The plot thickened the following weekend, when some friends of my father, Georgina de Marien and Charles Ramsbotham, arrived at L’Agapanthe. My mother called them the Oddballs and found them so tiresome that she regretted not having argued more firmly, at the moment of sending out her invitations, against their coming. She’d been particularly set against Charles Ramsbotham, who, although tremendously rich and upper-crust (being a lord, the seventh Earl of Stafford) did not “play the game” with the culture and refinement she had expected of him.

Charles was, it’s true, surprising in every way, beginning with his looks. Through a laudable desire to take care of himself, this middle-aged man had concentrated all his attention on his face, but since he had no taste whatsoever, he’d had his hair dyed as black as shoe polish. More or less insensitive to pain, he’d gone the whole hog: botched eyelid surgery had left his eyes in a permanent state of astonishment, while his skin—no doubt pockmarked even before his several face-lifts—had the texture of sandpaper and the color of a pear way past its prime. Through an inexplicable paradox, however, he had completely neglected to keep physically fit. He was fat. Quite fat. Which didn’t seem to bother him, but my mother couldn’t get over it, as if he’d meant his waistline to be a personal affront to her. Why else did he merrily stuff himself at every meal instead of being ashamed of his girth and trying to slim down?

The other game Charles seemed unable to play was the art of dressing stylishly. His own codes and predilections, for example, allowed the wearing of polyester shorts and a leopard-print short-sleeved shirt with an elastic bottom hem that puffed out over his paunch. And taking my mother’s suggestion of “casual” attire too literally, he could turn up for breakfast in a canary-yellow tracksuit he’d personally ordered from an Italian couturier shortly before the man was assassinated. In other words, Charles was the client for men’s ready-to-wear, of the kind one would have thought had long since vanished from this earth.

So he stuck out like a very sore thumb at L’Agapanthe, a temple of graceful conversation, and adding insult to injury, he was utterly indifferent to the charms of the mature women who formed the core of the feminine contingent there. The only women who interested Charles were breathtakingly beautiful prostitutes—or fighter pilots! And he made no effort to speak to my mother or her women friends at meals, except when he interrupted their noble attempts to entertain him by asking them to pass the salt, tell him the time, or inform him what make of car they drove. Because Charles really cared about only two things: automobiles, about which (delighted to be an expert at last on at least one subject) he loved to know and understand everything, and gorillas, which he truly worshipped. To the point of building more than a dozen supersophisticated cages for them at his home in Gloucestershire.

All this made it hard for my mother to put up with this boor whom she considered shallow and uncultivated and who did not blend in with her “little band,” like a gladiolus stuck in among orchids. And aside from her displeasure at being invisible to him, she found fault with Charles for the admiration he aroused in the imbeciles who, eager to appropriate some of his originality, made much of the funny stories he told about his gorillas. My mother therefore felt within her rights to expect that her faithful friends should openly share her disdain for Charles, whose shortcomings she pointed out at every opportunity.

Frédéric was always the first to oblige, with brief remarks that both soothed and enchanted his hostess, quips along the lines of, “So when may we expect him, our Goat’s Butt?” For nothing amused him more than to indulge his passion for nicknames, which he invented by translating or deforming the real name of his victim. “And George?” he added, meaning Georgina de Marien.

Georgina was my father’s acknowledged “platonic girlfriend,” and my mother had nothing nice to say about her, either. For at least ten years now, my mother had been in the habit of inviting a woman who would prove an amusing companion for her husband, since she had little time to pay attention to him herself, given that L’Agapanthe was as difficult to run as a busy hotel. The ideal woman for this task had to please my father, which implied gaiety on her part, good looks, and the ability to accompany him on his long swims in the bay. This lady friend should also, however, suit my mother, by not harboring any desire to flirt with my father for real or play at being mistress of the house—so she had to be astute enough to understand any such obvious prerequisites. Well, such a pearl doesn’t turn up every day. So once my mother had assured herself that Georgina was not an adventuress, she assigned her the part.

The drama in question had been running for a long time, though, and my mother shared the philosophy of one of our neighbors, who made it a rule never to rent her house more than three years in a row to the same person, to make sure of remaining the lady of the manor. My mother was therefore preparing to banish Georgina from L’Agapanthe once she had laid the groundwork with enough cutting remarks in that regard.

And yet Georgina was a nice person, who never spoke ill of anyone or had any intention of vamping my father. She would naturally have loved to have a touch of romance in her life, but she wasn’t prepared to go to the mat over it with my mother, whose temper she feared as deeply as she appreciated her hospitality. Besides, she was independent and happy to be so. Born Miro Quesada, she was the daughter of a man known as the Guano King, just as Patiño was the Tin King. A Peruvian, she came from a family that had Spanish roots and numbered among its members two presidents, many intellectuals, some newspaper magnates, and one hero of the hostilities with Chile during the War of the Pacific. With no need to work for a living, Georgina de Marien began traveling after the death of her husband, but she neither went off to spas nor embarked on short cruises. Rather, she traveled like a diplomat sent from post to post and had gone in succession to London, Rome, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and New York.





Friday, 6:00 p.m.



Hidden behind his Paris-Turf, Frédéric greeted me when I showed up at L’Agapanthe that Friday like a puppeteer announcing the arrival of Punch and Judy, with a jolly “Are we ever going to have fun!”

Charles Ramsbotham, who had shown up shortly before I did, had just broken all the rules in the book by giving my father a Jet Ski, even though he knew perfectly well that all guest gifts ought to be purely symbolic gestures.

A man of concrete and practical mind, Charles could never remember any of these rules of savoir vivre for very long, for he had no patience with such subtleties. As a guest, he thought it shameful to offer what he considered “crud,” which was doubtless suitable for the impecunious friends of my parents, but not for him, for his lifestyle was so opulent that one might well have thought him even wealthier than he was. Indeed, his generous character and personal ethics impelled him to treat his friends with the same lavish generosity with which he indulged himself. This led him, every year, to offer my father some costly gadget such as a GPS or a satellite telephone with worldwide coverage, a device that had the considerable merit of keeping Charles temporarily occupied (until he had mastered the operating instructions and tested his gift for his hosts) in a house where he was bored stiff.





“This is too much, simply too much! Just because this idiot charters private planes and helicopters to go have coffee in the Dordogne or in Moldavia where he requisitions entire hotels and dislodges all their clients, that doesn’t give him the right to do as he pleases!”

My mother was letting off steam in her bathroom, where she had taken refuge to explode in private.

“Don’t work yourself up into such a state!” pleaded my father, trying to calm her down.

“No, I mean really! That thing is expensive, the exhaust stinks, it makes a hellish racket, and it’s dangerous. Who knows if it’s even legal in the bay!”

“You know perfectly well that this Jet Ski will end up in the cellar, with all the rest of Charles’s presents. You can’t really see me revving up the motor just for fun!” my father replied, at which point I joined their company and added my two cents’ worth.

“At least that contraption might bring us more in line with our neighbors, because what do we look like, with our plastic kayak-canoe from the toy store in Juan-les-Pins, bobbing around next to their cutting-edge playthings?”

And it was true that wherever we went in the bay, we now seemed like amateurs in a world of professionals. Take children’s games, for instance. While we were satisfied with a sandbox on the terrace above the staff beach, our Russian neighbors provided their offspring with a miniature golf course, a go-cart racetrack, and inflatable castles featuring hiding places and slides worthy of an amusement park, all installed on a lot purchased for that purpose. It was the same situation with our antimosquito strategy, because our Saudi neighbor deployed extermination on an industrial scale with machines diffusing a blue light that vaporized the insects with ghastly zapping sounds, while we persisted halfheartedly in setting out yellow bug lights and saucers of citronella.

It was in the security department, however, that we failed the most ignominiously, since our alarm system, which we found perfectly satisfactory, looked ridiculous next to the armed guards of our neighbors and the motion detector lights that broadcast a booming electronic voice to explain, in a menacing tone and several languages, what dangers awaited any feckless fool who persisted in violating the perimeter of the property or its offshore stretch of bay.

And if you also considered the yachts at anchor, the Riva speedboats, plus the floating docks and rafts that formed ramparts around our neighbors’ beaches against intruders of all kinds, we had by some strange paradox become the only wealthy residents on the bay on whom it was physically possible to spy.

Which was precisely the mission of the yellow boat out of Juan-les-Pins that crisscrossed the bay every hour under the clearly feeble pretext of studying the underwater scenery, thus allowing its passengers to examine us as if we were exotic fauna for the sum of 12 euros per adult and 6 euros per child (between the ages of two and eleven). Hugging the shore wherever possible, this boat actually came right up to our beach ladder, meeting with a reception that depended on our mood. Although we usually sheltered behind our books or newspapers to avoid the gaze of these vacationers who, camera in hand, hoped to grab a photo of some famous face or silhouette while snatching a glimpse of how the beautiful people live, we might also decide to wave cheerily at them, or hide in the grotto and launch a squirt gun attack.

My silly joke about the neighbors did nothing to cheer up my mother, of course, but she was not the only person whose patience and good humor were in short supply that day. I’d had a hard week in Paris. Too many patients, but above all I was missing Félix more and more as his month with his father dragged on. And I was worried about my ex’s mood swings and irresponsibility. To crown everything, Marie had gone off to who knows where to some conference or other, with a time change that meant we’d hardly spoken to each other since the previous weekend.

Frankly, I was in a tight spot, because my guests weren’t the kind to outshine Charles Ramsbotham. In fact, Mathias Cavoye was a walking cliché: a private dealer in the secondary art market, he was fifty, handsome, but getting on, with a nuclear tan and all the accoutrements of a seducer going gray at the temples but trying to look young in jeans and a blazer, with turtlenecks in the winter and colorful polo shirts in the summer.

I was fond of Mathias because he wasn’t pretentious, had never tried to hide the fact that his mother had a little grocery store in the Parisian suburb of Bourg-la-Reine, and he always invited me to the parties he gave at his home to fend off ennui. Until now, however, despite the many hints he’d made, I’d been very careful not to invite him to L’Agapanthe because I just didn’t trust him.

Was it because he was depressed? Hung out with celebrities? Or was constantly angling to swindle extra money out of every deal he made? I could just see him slipping coke to a pretty young thing to rev her up or keep her under his thumb. Bluntly put, with him and his pal Lou Léva, a starlet desperate to make it to the top, we were definitely in the demimonde, and it wouldn’t take my parents more than thirty seconds to figure that out. They would then conclude that I must have fallen on my head and lost all my bearings. Beyond the distinction they made between chic and cheap, my parents divided society into decent, respectable people and those who were not, a criterion based on moral judgments as antiquated as they were denigrated in our café society. This was one of the things I most liked about them, and I valued their good opinion enough that their parental disapproval would upset me. Especially since I had no intention of explaining to them that the whole point about Mathias was that he was bringing us Béno Grunwald.





To my surprise, my mother quickly composed herself after my father left for the beach, where Charles was already putting together the infamous Jet Ski. Then she asked me not about Mathias, but about his girlfriend.

“So, she’s an actress, is that it? Then why haven’t I heard of her?”

My mother affecting a shopgirl’s interest in show business, that was a new one for me, and I had to smile, given that she and my father knew nothing about any stars, not even the ones so famous their public appearances cause riots.

“Actually,” I replied, “I’d have been astonished if you did know her, because aside from her roles in two minor films …”

“Lou Léva? That’s her real name?”

“Of course not, what an idea! She must have chosen it carefully in the hope that the alliteration would help casting directors remember her name. But you can ask her yourself, she’s arriving with Mathias Cavoye just before dinnertime.”

“And young Grunwald?”

My mother invariably attached that adjective to all her close friends’ children. Irritated to think that I might have felt I was about to introduce her to someone “elegant” of whom she hadn’t heard, my mother probably meant to show me how familiar she was with the Grunwald family, and she twisted the knife with an innocent air while gossiping knowingly about them.

“How has he been doing? Because they haven’t a penny left, poor things, since they lost that manufacturing license, what was it for again?”

“A monopoly on photographic gelatin.”

“Oh, yes, that was it.”

“Actually, young Grunwald happens to be in his forties and he’s a lot more wealthy than his family!”

“Really! And how did he manage that?”

“Because he made a fortune!”

“Ah, he’s the one who married a model, or something like that?”

“Yes. Although I’m afraid he might turn out to be a bit of a show-off,” I confessed prudently to my mother, hoping that with her love of argument, she would immediately defend him if I went on the attack.

“Oh! That’s only natural if he’s earned a lot of money …”

“You’re right, of course, but I mean, is that any reason to arrive by helicopter—”

“What, he’s coming by helicopter? But that’s grotesque! Where will it land?”

“On a copter pad in Cannes, I believe.”

“That’s ridiculous. Besides, he’ll get caught in traffic. And it will be his own fault, too.”

“Whose own fault?” asked Marie, joining us in the bathroom.

“Darling!” exclaimed our mother delightedly. “When did you get here?”





“What’s wrong?” I asked Marie as soon as we were alone.

“Nothing, why?”

“Come off it, I know you. What’s going on?”

“Nothing, at least, not much, really … It’s stupid …”

“What is?”

“It’s a dog … in Rio … that I can’t get out of my mind. I found him on the lawn outside my room the evening I arrived. A little black dog with a white spot around his right eye. He sat down in front of the bay window. And he kept looking at me, without moving. Imagine! I tried to ignore him, then I closed the curtains, hoping to forget about him. That was impossible, obviously. I couldn’t stand it, I let him into my room. He was full of fleas, thin, and famished. So I ordered him a steak and I gave him a bath. He didn’t struggle, was so relaxed, trusting.… No, but I mean, are you getting what I’m saying? I’ve lost my mind! I’m worried about a stray dog, in Rio, the city of favelas! Isn’t that pathetic?”

“Yes, particularly since you seem to be ignoring world hunger and global warming …”

“Meaning?”

“That you have every right to get emotional without having to fix all the problems of the world.”

“You don’t think I’m being silly?”

“No, I really don’t. Go on.”

“Afterward he fell asleep. I left him on the floor although I wanted to bring him up on the bed. In the morning I gave him the slip in the hotel garden before going off to work. I thought about him, though, all day long, and I came back early to the hotel that evening, hoping to find him outside my bay window.”

“And was he there?”

“Yes. He was wild with joy, and I ordered him another filet mignon.”

Her voice suddenly broke. “He was there every evening. And I gave him the slip as usual, the morning I left, except that … And now I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Poor dear, I’m so sorry. But I’d have been worried if you hadn’t reacted just like that.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it simply means that you’re human, that you’re very sensitive. Which doesn’t keep you from being strong, doing everything well, and seeming absolutely perfect. You know, we always use something outside ourselves to open the door to our emotions. And since wars, famines, and earthquakes are tragedies too vast for us to feel directly concerned about them, we find something closer to us to cry over, or something more specific, like a doll with a shattered eye, an episode of Little House on the Prairie, or a dog.”

“But in this case, he was the one who chose me, and … I abandoned him.”

“Yes, and in fact that’s what’s at stake here.”

“What is?”

“Abandonment.”

“But what are you talking about?”

“I’m saying that this dog embodied all the moments when you felt abandoned, as lonely as he was, with no one to give you a bath or order you a steak. But don’t worry, you’ll get over it.”

“You think so?”

“Sure, but I also think you have love to give and nowhere to give it. Me, I’m lucky, I have Félix. Perhaps it’s time for you to deal with this. Maybe that’s what your dog is telling you.”





I was uneasy about imposing Mathias Cavoye on my parents, but my success in managing to bring Béno Grunwald to the house made up for that, because before suggesting Béno to my sister as a “blind date,” I’d done all the requisite research into his background. And he was so divine, according to Who’s Who, Google, and Fortune, that he seemed almost like a jackpot just waiting to be won.

Béno Grunwald was a self-made man from a family of means. Perfect, I’d thought, catching myself starting to hope that he would have both the good manners and sex appeal of a self-made man. No one had helped him in any way, neither his father, who had never wanted to see him, nor his mother, a worldly and uncaring woman.

Dyslexia had made studying difficult, so Béno started out by enjoying himself, but since he was charismatic, trusted his instincts, and had good business sense, he opted to make his fortune instead of self-destructing in trendy night clubs. He began by selling bonds and soon did fabulously well. Sniffing out good deals, he never stopped speculating, investing, even when on vacation. Quick off the mark, he would visit a house for sale in the Bahamas, then buy it and snap up all the surrounding properties as well, selling them off later, one by one, for huge profits. He knew how to plan far ahead, too, and in anticipation of the death of Castro, he had gone to Cuba to buy up all the photos of the Cuban revolution he could find, just as he had explored Panama in the expectation of an imminent economic boom, acquiring a forest there as big as a French département.

He lived large in London, with pieds-à-terre in Paris and New York, yet he also understood the real value of money, because he had already found out what it was like to go bankrupt. Down practically to the change in his pockets, he’d bought a Basquiat just before the graffiti artist took off, which allowed him to bounce back so high that he now managed a hedge fund worth more than twenty billion dollars.

At forty-five, twice divorced (first from an Anglo-Iranian beauty, then from one of the five highest-paid models in the world), he was single again. He was filthy rich, generous, ran an enormous charity he’d put together from scratch to support girls’ education in Africa, and he knew how to have fun. Plus he knew everyone, from Mick Jagger to Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela. The New York Post’s Page Six even claimed that the letter B in his address book listed, among others, Brad (Pitt), Richard Branson (the fifth-richest person in the United Kingdom), Bono, Bongo (Omar), Lord Balfour, Warren Buffett, while the letter K included Kaddafi, Kravis (Henry), Kravitz (Lenny) …

In fact, that might actually prove to be the sticking point—the fact that he frequented only the rich and famous, with a weakness for people whose family names are those of countries, like the Greeces, the Yugoslavias, Rania of Jordan, or Felipe of Spain.

He never stayed long in one place, and went only where it was in his interest to go, so why then was he coming to L’Agapanthe when the world was full of luminaries who were only too eager to welcome him?

Had he heard about the view, the cuisine, his hosts, or their guests? Was he expecting to find old friends or make new ones here? In that case, he risked being let down, because we were too low-key for him, and he wasn’t going to find anyone of transcendent interest among my parents’ Old Faithfuls. Unless he was coming to check out Marie and me … which might also prove a disappointment, because lovely and rich though we might be (as Frédéric never tired of telling us), we surely weren’t lovely and rich enough for Béno Grunwald, who deigned to look only at spectacular women.

So upon reflection, I’d decided that I should give up any idea of seduction where he was concerned. One, simply because I was no raving beauty, and two, such a competition depressed me from the get-go, leaving me without any desire to enter the lists. So I was counting on Marie—more gorgeous, feisty, and attracted to the glamour of her conquests—to meet the challenge and try her chances with him.

Instead of being insufferable, as I had feared, Béno turned out to be truly charming. Indeed, he became our hero as soon as he arrived, thanks to the grace and good humor with which he reacted to the incredible cock-up that greeted him at L’Agapanthe.

No doubt eager to downplay the bad impression produced by his arrival via helicopter, Béno countermanded the driver my mother had arranged for him in Cannes and drove up casually in a Mini Moke at 7:00 p.m. He had to ring several times at the front gate before gaining entrance to the property, because the servants were at dinner and the bell rarely managed to make itself heard on the first ring over their animated table talk. But to his surprise, greeted at last by Marcel, he was asked to park his car at the service entrance before being taken on a tour of the house!

Nevertheless, Béno complied, thinking that perhaps this was some peculiar family custom. He began to suspect a mix-up when Marcel, beginning with the garages, explained that we had originally had our own gas pump but now fueled our vehicles like everyone else at the local gas station, where we did not even maintain an account because the attendants there no longer knew what such a thing was and required payment via Carte Bleue with each transaction. Old Marcel’s indignation seemed genuine, but Béno could not understand why this man—the chauffeur? the butler?—had decided to engage him in a conversation that was doubtless urbane but singularly unusual.

As his guide led him off toward the servants’ quarters, Béno decided it was a case of mistaken identity, but he was enjoying the mishap too much to clear matters up just yet. Besides, before introducing himself as a houseguest, he was curious to discover for whom he’d been mistaken!

“There are ten bedrooms along this hall,” Marcel informed him, “but they are all essentially alike and I think you will have a good idea of them all if I show you just one.”

Was he supposed to be an architect? Were the Ettinguers contemplating some remodeling? But the other shoe didn’t drop until Marcel added, “I’ll show you the beaches; Madame advised me explicitly to take you along the service path so as not to attract the notice of the guests or the rest of the family, because not everyone in the house is happy with this idea, you understand.” A real estate agent! The Ettinguers were putting their house on the market, and trying to do it discreetly.

What kind of a hornets’ nest had he gotten himself into? Thinking quickly, Béno felt it was time to wrap up the joke before the butler said something more explicit he might later deeply regret. Since it was better to seem like a simpleton than to humiliate this man and upset the Ettinguers, Béno came up with something to save face all around.

“Ah, now I understand why you showed me the garages and servants’ quarters! But I must tell you, I’m not the architect you were clearly expecting. My name is Béno Grunwald, and Monsieur and Madame Ettinguer have very kindly invited me here for the weekend.”

When Marcel went pale at the thought of the gaffe he’d just committed, Béno gently reassured him.

“I’ll tell Madame Ettinguer how much I envy her, having someone like you in her employ, trustworthy enough to handle things as demanding as important renovation projects. And allow me to thank you, because I must be the only guest ever invited to such a house tour!”

Meanwhile, I was having a mirror-image misadventure, since my sister was still suffering from jet lag and had assigned me to welcome Béno. Up in my bedroom, it was impossible for me to distinguish among the different bells ringing through the house, so I’d been waiting with a book in the loggia to be certain of hearing his car arrive.

The pantry was in fact the only place where one could hear all the sounds of L’Agapanthe, a kind of acoustic pilot’s cabin allowing the staff to interpret such signals and respond accordingly. Hanging on the wall over the house telephone exchange was a bell board, an old-fashioned apparatus we used more frequently than the household phones that rang in jangling anarchy here and there and, for the most part, in vain.

In every bedroom were a pear-shaped wooden bell-pull by the bed and a push button near the bathtub, so that the occupant could summon help in case of need or ask for breakfast to be sent up. Each call bell had its distinctive tone; my mother’s sonic signature, for example, comprised two re notes in succession, whereas a short do and a long re meant Flora’s Room, where I was.

If there were the slightest doubt about two call bells with similar notes, the servants could consult an auxiliary panel on which the name of the room in question would light up.

The pantry was also equipped with the most modern technology, to wit: monitors for the security cameras around the house and grounds, in particular the one at the entrance gate, where the electronic chime had a hard time cutting through the summons of our good old bell rung at mealtime for the staff, a ringing that echoed easily all over the property.

I’d barely had time to watch a few lizards stroll out onto the veranda when Gérard appeared to announce Béno’s arrival.

“Monsieur Grunwald has just driven up, Madame. In a Bentley Continental GT coupé.” Probably taking my astonishment for curiosity, he added, “a model halfway between the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti and the Aston Martin DB9. I mention this simply for Madame’s information.”

I was just struggling to keep a straight face while thanking Gérard when a nattily dressed man strode into the loggia. Although I’d never met Béno, I had seen several photographs of him (half hidden behind his supermodel wife, to whom he was wisely ceding the spotlight), but I had the strange feeling that I’d never seen this dapper man before. Given the circumstances, I proceeded with caution.

Instead of introducing himself, he announced, “I’m so thrilled to find myself here. You cannot imagine how impressed I am!”

“Well, good, how nice,” I replied, playing for time in the hope he would soon say something easier to interpret.

The man’s age and corpulence seemed to match my image of Béno, but something still wasn’t right. He was too rich looking, too flashy to be the real thing, I finally decided, remembering the lesson I’d learned the first time I’d seen Laszlo Schwartz. He and I had landed in Nice at the same time and my mother had asked me to bring him in the car she’d sent to pick us up at the airport. The only description she’d given me, however, was, “I’m sure you’ll manage to find him somehow. He’ll be accompanied by a graphic artist whom you’ll drop off in Antibes on your way here.” Which I had done, except that I had mistaken that artist for Laszlo, and all because he’d seemed the spit and image of a painter, with his longish hair and a shirt with a ruffle at the neck, whereas the real Laszlo, having nothing to prove in the creativity department, had been dressed like a banker in a three-piece pin-striped suit. And it wasn’t until I saw the graphic artist leave the car in Antibes that I’d realized my mistake.

Well, this guy in the loggia was gleaming, impeccable. And his watch was too showy, his city shoes too polished for him to be Béno Grunwald, who was certainly going to show up in linen slacks and espadrilles with a plastic watch on his wrist.

“And what,” I ventured to ask, “may I do for you?”

After explaining who he was and what real estate company he represented, the fellow recapitulated the phone conversations he’d had with my parents prior to this visit and finally assured me he was quite aware of the discretion he should show regarding the houseguests and other family members, who had not been informed of this appointment. Obviously taking me for the secretary, he asked me a touch nervously if we shouldn’t leave this rather exposed veranda to begin viewing the house more “behind the scenes,” as it were.

“You’re absolutely right,” I agreed, ushering him into the pantry, where I asked him to await a colleague who would conduct him around the premises.

Then I summoned up enough courage to barge in on the staff in their dining room, causing a pall of silence to fall around the table. When I interrupted the secretary at her meal, she was so taken aback to discover that I’d found out about the hush-hush visit from the realtor that she seemed relieved to take charge of it, in return for my silence about this unfortunate incident.

Hardly had I placed the real estate agent in her hands, however, than I had to dash to my room for a good cry, because at their first mention of habitable square foot-age and exceptional luxury property, I’d thought I was going to throw up.

I realized that I had not for an instant believed my parents would actually put L’Agapanthe up for sale. I’d found it perfectly understandable that they might feel the need to play around with the idea, but I’d never doubted that they’d reject it. And that had left me feeling carefree enough to launch into husband hunting—an undertaking made appealing doubtless because it had little actual connection to its supposed raison d’être.

Now that a real estate agent had turned up, however, my parents’ idea had become a project they might just carry out. Even so, I still had trouble considering all its implications, as if the entire business were frankly unreal, like a sudden death. As if I could no longer feel what I knew and know what I felt. Which was why I kept telling myself, “They did it, I don’t believe it.”

I was in shock, chain smoking as I wondered if I should awaken Marie to break the news to her, when I noticed that Félix had tried several times to reach me on my cell phone. The message he’d left said nothing about why he’d been so eager to reach me, which left me high and dry, especially since he did say specifically that I would have no way of getting in touch with him before the next day. My throat tightened with anxiety.

So I was understandably light-years away from Béno Grunwald when my mother rang me in my room.

“I’m told your guests are wandering around the house. Really, you might pay some attention to them!”

Béno, Mathias, and Lou were indeed drifting on their own in the front hall of a house left to its own devices while the secretary and butlers were busy confessing their blunders to my mother, but it didn’t take me long to show the guests to their rooms, tell them when dinner would be served, and notice that Béno bore a slight resemblance to Steve McQueen. A dreamboat, this guy, I mused, and tried to stop worrying about my son, who kept interfering with my thoughts.

News of Béno’s misadventure had made the rounds of the house before cocktail time, but that didn’t stop him from stealing the limelight from Mathias and Lou Léva, who paled in comparison when he gave a hilarious account of the fiasco.

Béno may have been a dazzler, but he still set out to win over everyone in sight, as if he’d had a handicap or something to make up for. He began with my mother, whom he captivated in record time. To begin with, he had the good taste not to mention his helicopter trip, plus he brought her the ideal gift: a hundred matchbooks engraved with the name of L’Agapanthe. He then deployed in her direction a panoply of attentions between flirting and deference, by rising to his feet the moment she seemed about to move elsewhere in the room, by praising her voice (“You’ve never thought about a career in radio?”), and by flashing her a radiant smile whenever she spoke to him. Next he tackled my father, to whom he pledged allegiance with a few words over an apéritif: a modest and convincing spiel about his hedge fund, followed by a request for a five minute tête-à-tête sometime that weekend for a few words of advice—and that was that.

For his finale, Béno sent us all into stitches by making fun of his family’s embarrassment over the original recipe for that photographic gelatin, which turned out to be made with bones from India. “Okay, fine, sometimes there were a few femurs,” admitted his mother. And he didn’t spare himself, allowing that his expensive habits were such that he’d really had no choice but to make a fortune. He’d studied up on his Cap d’Antibes history, too, and was abreast of all the latest juicy inside scoops.

Béno commanded so much attention that Mathias attracted very little in spite of his glaring blunders, which were legion. With striking linguistic ineptitude, he proudly claimed to have been the “investigator” of my encounter with Béno, and he introduced Lou to my parents as an actress “destinated” for a great future. With a flourish, he then produced his gift, a particularly garish scarf, which he presented to my mother who, although she had an absolute horror of designer logos, nevertheless went into ecstasies with professional aplomb over the entwined pink and blue initials that formed the sole decorative pattern of her gift.

Nothing, as it happened, was more vulgar in my parents’ eyes than luxury brands, two words they considered a perfect oxymoron. The offspring of marketing and manufacturing, brands—Walmart, H&M, Monoprix, Zara—were used to put objects within the reach of everyone, whereas luxury implied the made-to-measure expertise of craftsmen skilled at rendering material goods worthy of interest. Which ruled out any desire to possess the latest accessory de chez Dior, Vuitton, or Prada, an ambition my parents found as pointlessly petit bourgeois as going into raptures over the purchase of an ice-cream maker or a fondue set.

When Lou Léva made her appearance at cocktail time, I felt a ripple of disappointment pass through every man present. The gentlemen had doubtless envisioned some sexy creature, bold as brass, and had hoped to find the actress dripping with sensuality à la Marilyn Monroe, a girl whose heart would belong to daddy. Instead of which, in walked a thin, pale young woman who rather disappointingly resembled an orchid: exotic, true, but somewhat off-putting. With short black hair, a hank of which fell across one side of her face (when it wasn’t held back by a girlish barrette), she was pretty, but in an ethereal way. She might even have been touching, if she hadn’t affected a fragile and sorrowful air she hoped might lend her some gravitas, for she thought that sadness was chic.

Lou seemed to have stopped short of achieving the desired level of soigné manners, however, for she approached my mother with an utterly unchic, “Come on, let’s kiss-kiss-kiss.”

A greeting devoid of elegance, from the appallingly informal “Come on” to the grotesque “kiss-kiss-kiss,” not to mention the excessive familiarity toward my mother, whose customary welcome was a genteel nod or, at most, a handshake. As for triple cheek kisses, nothing was more provincial.

For everyone in France should know by now that Parisians give only two pecks on the cheeks, unlike the rest of the country, where regional differences gave rise to all sorts of variations with three or even four kisses, to which the average Parisian good-naturedly adapts by attempting to imitate an embrace of unknown rhythm and duration, like a beginning dancer following the lead of an experienced partner.

Then, when the butler announced that dinner was served, Lou exclaimed with a shriek, “I’m starving! I haven’t had a bite since noon!”

This was another botch, since she should not have used the slangy “a bite” so baldly.

In short, Lou was not one of us, because she was unable to grasp the subtleties of our particular jargon, a fact that we initiates—who recognize one another, like freemasons of refinement—noticed immediately, without comment, but did not dismiss. And we had every right to hold it against her, strange though that might appear, for fewer and fewer people still understood what we were talking about when we talked about such things.





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Seated next to Charles Ramsbotham, Lou quickly struck up a conversation.

“I believe I heard that you were English. How come you speak French so well?”

“My mother was Swiss and silent,” intoned Charles in a sinister voice that did not discourage Lou in the least.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you bring your wife with you?”

“Because she is boring.”

Charles’s reply happened to fall loudly into one of those unexpected moments of silence that occur during conversations, and so, after a moment of astonishment, our table collapsed into hilarity in spite of my father’s attempts to restore order. After all, none of us had seen Lady Sally for years because, like an exotic fruit, she did not travel well, given that she cared only—in order of importance—for white wine, gardens, dogs, and horses.

Georgina came nimbly to the rescue. “Edmond, these oeufs à la Chartres are heavenly, perfectly poached and with just enough tarragon. I’m tempted to have more, but that depends on the main course. What will come next?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” added Frédéric. “This sauce is to die for. What is it? Madeira? Veal stock?”

“Help me out, Marcel,” said my father, turning toward the butler. “I’ve no idea what to tell them …”

“Veal stock, Monsieur. And the next course will be dorade, and for dessert, ice cream, I’ll have to inquire about the flavor.”

The episode with the real estate agent had so shaken me that I didn’t feel up to helping my father with his duties as host, and I left the handling of table conversation completely to him. Art was often the chief topic of our dining discussions, and it cropped up all the sooner in this case since Mathias spoke right up in his capacity as a dealer, thus proving he was keeping his eye on the prize.

“Do you buy much?” he asked my father.

While I was guessing whether Mathias would have the nerve to try selling him something before dinner was over, Polyséna began deploring the contamination of the art market by money.

“Money as pollutant, or money as patronage, it’s a classic debate,” my father told her.

In his eyes, Polyséna’s besetting and inconvenient sin was to be both intoxicated by her own learning and stuffed with opinions so conventional that she became the very caricature of a pedant, so my father couldn’t help condescending to her slightly when he focused the argument on money as the sole common denominator of our fragmented societies, and the trendsetter henceforth of an artistic taste forged in the past by European courtly life. Vexed at being caught en flagrant délit de cliché, Polyséna played her trump card, making a daring rapprochement between a Renaissance painter and Damien Hirst in a bold attempt to leave my father speechless.

Frédéric, who had no particular desire to take part again in another discussion on art, turned quietly to Georgina. “So, it seems you live like a deluxe nomad …”

Georgina countered by observing that travel gave her the impression of making some progress. At first, lost in a new city and sometimes even unable to speak the language there, she would feel alone and disoriented, but since she thus had every reason to feel bad, this dispensed with the need to ask herself existential questions and brood over the latent depression that plagued her. Besides, the challenge of establishing herself in a strange place made her feel brave, adventurous, even heroic. And that persuaded her to accept the austerity of her life while awaiting the blossoming of her adjustment to her new home.

I was overhearing Georgina while listening to Polyséna as she developed her theory.

“It was largely for his contacts that Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, hired Vasari in 1555 to decorate the interior of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, which displayed works by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Pontormo, and Il Rosso. Why Vasari? Because, like Damien Hirst, he was professionally and socially ambitious. He lacked originality but displayed sound judgment formed by the cultivation of his peers and the demands of his patrons, as well as the genius of the zeitgeist, the mood of the times, which he caught like no one else.”

Uncommitted, I couldn’t manage to become engrossed in either of these conversations, so I decided to amuse myself by both following the story of Georgina’s peregrinations and keeping an expression of rapt enchantment turned toward Vasari, thus learning how hard it was to listen to a conversation without watching the person speaking!

Georgina was describing to Frédéric the marvelous moment when a city became familiar to her, when the mystery of its language was resolved and expressions, turns of phrase, grammatical rules and correct intonations would appear in her mind like revelations: the “far or near corner” indispensable for getting around New York in a taxi, as were lado montaña and lado mar in Barcelona (the mountain side, the sea side), or “Gung hay fat choy!” so essential in China for the New Year.

In spite of my efforts to follow Georgina, however, staring intently at Polyséna led me to pay attention to what she was saying.

“I mean, Vasari was a marketing genius. He gathers a team to renovate the site with what we would now describe as installation art. Hirst does the same thing today with his 160 employees. And Vasari thus became the artist of the decision makers of his day …”

Getting a grip on myself, I then strained to hear Georgina’s voice without taking my eyes off Polyséna.

“So now I gain confidence, I try out the local specialties, the foul-smelling durians of Asia, American cupcakes, crumpets, British Marmite, Spanish 5J ham. And soon the streets are filled not with strangers but with neighbors and acquaintances …”

The discussion of art now shifted without warning from a guarded tone of civil conversation and took on a more vehement turn that caught my attention.

“But it’s sheer nonsense!” my father exclaimed abruptly. “The way those people who dabble shadily in contemporary art say, ‘One must live with one’s times, risk the adventure of discovering artists, open oneself to what is new, dare to leave the beaten paths,’ when contemporary art is the rendezvous of every cliché in the book!”

“Meaning what?” replied Mathias, who was clearly responsible for this angry outburst.

“Well, retorted my father, it really takes some nerve to drape oneself in virtue, courage, and intellectual audacity—only to do exactly what the rest of the herd does! Because collecting today’s art is in reality the surest way of broadcasting the fact that one has money. And it’s a way to pose as a person of taste without having to possess the slightest artistic education, simply getting by on only the thinnest veneer of culture. Which is a lot easier than studying the history of art! In any case, there are very few people in the field—as in any field, by the way—who know what they’re talking about. Which explains the supercilious and pedantic airs of the others who tackle the subject, meaning the ninety-five percent of people who are simply afraid of betraying their ignorance.”

“You’re not being fair,” Mathias protested. “For these collectors, it’s often a real commitment.”

“A commitment!” sputtered my father, whom I’d never seen so agitated. “When the calendar of events in contemporary art, with its fairs, salons, openings, biennales, and atelier visits, provides them with a social whirl in an international playground to which they would never have access on their own!”

Unruffled, Georgina continued the tale of her adventures. “… And then one day, I have the feeling I’ve gained the advantage over the unknown, as if I’d managed to outrace the wind. I take the plunge, give a dinner party, because I feel familiar enough with the customs of the country to avoid making any gaffes. For example, in China I never dress in white, or invite four people to a bistro (since four’s the number of death), and I don’t open the gifts I’m offered in front of others, so as not to make any of my friends lose face.”

“But then, explain to me,” asked Frédéric, “why you don’t stay in the city where you’ve done so much to feel at home!”

“Because as soon as I begin to feel comfortable, the anguish returns. So I give myself a few months until I move again. I’m well aware that I’m in headlong flight, but I console myself with the thought that the need to have some kind of project is part of human nature, and that by moving from city to city, I’m behaving no differently from a film director or a playwright.…”

“… It’s not that complicated, after all! Everyone loves contemporary art, they all find it fascinating!” my father exclaimed. “That’s suspicious right there! Do you know of any other subject as popular? No, and here’s why. Simply because all these idiots who want to pass for what they are not—discerning, cultivated, intellectually curious, wise, and (of course) original—are drawn to contemporary art, which makes for quite a crowd!”

“You can’t say a thing like that!” Mathias interjected.

“I’m going to lose my temper!” said my father. “But hold on a minute, don’t have me saying what I haven’t said: I’m not claiming that everyone who takes an interest in today’s art is an imbecile …”

Like a brief gust of wind, the conversation about art suddenly subsided, and Mathias kept a low profile for the rest of the dinner. Unlike Lou, who had only just realized who Frédéric was and the profit she might find in the company of this celebrated playwright. She seized the chance to sell herself with a certain aplomb and a flurry of mannerisms, confiding that she’d recently spent a week workshopping with Andréas Voutsinas at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris in the company of Nathalie Baye and Fanny Ardant, just to get back up to speed before a casting call for an important American director who’d bought the rights to the latest Dan Brown best seller.

“But who is Andréas Voutsinas?” Charles asked Frédéric.

“An Actors Studio guru who makes you return to the ‘essentials’ with improvs like ‘Dig down into yourself to find your first cry at birth,’ ” Frédéric whispered back with a straight face, before sidling up to me as we left the table to say, “She is one tough cookie, that girl!”