“I’d love to,” she said, her expression brightening.
“I am étienne Moreau, and these are my friends Mathilde Renault and Helena Parr.”
“I’m pleased to make everyone’s acquaintance. I’m Daisy Fields.”
No one spoke for a moment. The American girl simply had to be teasing them.
“Truthfully—that is your name?” étienne said, his eyes wide with amazement.
“Well, my real name is Dorothy, but my parents called me Daisy when I was little and I guess it just stuck. It’s pretty silly, I know.”
“Not at all,” étienne insisted gallantly. “I think it suits you very well. Now—where shall we go? Mathilde?”
“The Falstaff is not so very far.”
“The Falstaff it is. Allons-y!”
AS THEY FILED out of the grand salon and down the stairs, they were joined by a middle-aged woman who had been sitting on a stool in the corridor.
“Do you know her?” Helena whispered to Daisy, for the woman’s eyes were focused to a disconcerting degree on her new friend.
“That’s just Louisette. Daddy insists she accompany me everywhere. We hate one another.”
“Oh . . . I see.”
“I shouldn’t use the word ‘hate,’ I know. But she does get on my nerves. When Daddy first hired her, I tried to be nice. I’d invite her to sit with me, to have what I was having, but she always said no. So now I try to pretend she doesn’t exist.”
When they got to Falstaff’s, which was just down the street from the academy, Daisy politely but firmly banished Louisette to a table at the far side of the café and asked the waiter to bring the woman a glass of water. But she didn’t touch the water, or ask for anything else. All she did was sit and stare at Daisy and, by extension, the rest of them. It really was quite unnerving.
Soon, though, Helena was caught up in their conversation and having a grand time, though she barely touched the café noisette she had ordered. étienne was on his third café express before he noticed.
“Is there something not right with your coffee?”
“Nothing at all. It’s simply . . . well, it’s a bit strong for me. I would normally have a café au lait, but—”
“But the gar?on would faint if you asked for such a thing after nine in the morning,” étienne agreed. “The milk in the noisette—it isn’t sufficient?”
“I think the trouble is that it still tastes like coffee to me, and I’m used to tea,” she admitted. “Don’t mind me. I’m in Paris now, and this is how Parisians take their coffee. I’ll learn to like it.”
The Falstaff was a curious place—a café-bar in the heart of Paris that was decorated to resemble a British public house, with forest green banquettes, framed prints of hunting hounds and Scottish stags, and enough oak paneling to satisfy a Tudor. At least Helena assumed that had been the decorator’s intent, for she’d never actually been inside a public house.
Their conversation so far had centered on Ma?tre Czerny and their morning class. Daisy and Helena were still feeling bowled over, while Mathilde and étienne were more phlegmatic. It seemed that tyrannical behavior was not uncommon among the city’s art teachers.
“I was in a class once where the ma?tre ripped our drawings to pieces when they displeased him,” Mathilde recalled. “And there was another teacher—remember Ma?tre Homard, étienne?”
“God, yes. That wasn’t his real name, but we called him that because his face would become as red as un homard—how do you say it in English?”
“A lobster?” Daisy offered.
“Yes, that’s it. Once, I remember, he was so enraged by one student’s efforts—I think the poor fellow had overworked his paint—that he came leaping across the studio, waving a palette knife, and slashed the canvas in two. Right down the middle!”
“Goodness me,” Daisy said. “That does put things in perspective.”
“Do not be disheartened,” Mathilde advised. “Czerny will not always be so fierce.”
“How do you and étienne know one another?” Helena asked. He seemed to be in his early twenties, while Mathilde was nearer to thirty, she judged; as their accents when they spoke French were quite different, she doubted they had grown up together.
“We were students at the école des Beaux-Arts together, last year,” Mathilde answered. “But we both found it . . . I’m not sure how to say . . . désagréable?”
“Disagreeable.”
“Ah. Nearly the same. Yes, it was disagreeable. I thought the teachers too rigid. Too attached to old traditions.”
“I was asked to leave,” said étienne with mischief in his eyes. “I consider it a great honor.”
Thinking it impolitic to question him on the reason for his expulsion from the prestigious school, Helena turned to Daisy.
“Did you come over from America specially for the course?” she asked.