Same thing goes for gauze, he thought as he drove, disapproving of gauze in front of a lens. Suddenly he was angry at himself and a little scared. Now he might fail, which would be worse than not being able to help in the first place. Luc would never know. Neither would Cathérine or David, her husband. But Jules would.
And why did he tell Jack Cheatham that Cathérine would email the demo, as Jack called it? There was no possibility of that. He could not ask for a favor at this time in her life, when her child was slowly dying, unless it was in an effort to save the child, which it was. But if she knew, and her hopes were raised only to be dashed, it would be unconscionable. He would have to get someone else to do it.
He had now to compose a sixty-second piece that would magically elevate the spirits of people waiting to speak to a telephone representative or eating popcorn in front of a television set. The prize was, perhaps, the life of his grandchild, the happiness and safety of his daughter, and a proper end for him. But the judges of his success or failure would be people who, though powerful and clever, seemed like they might have come from another planet. They flew around in their giant airplanes, drank too much, had wives with names like Cheyenne, were used to skinny assistants who wore ten-thousand-Euro suits and apparently stayed up twenty-four hours a day, and who thought that he, Jules Lacour, was one of the leading composers in all of Europe and could work miracles on order, when in fact he had such performance anxiety that the last concert he had given, thirty years before, had been a spectacular failure.
He had thought then that he could play Bach’s Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, because he loved it so much and often played it when alone. But, in front of almost a thousand people, he could not. He froze, dropped his bow, bowed his head, and wept. People said it was a nervous breakdown, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. Still, it was the beginning of a trajectory that fairly quickly rendered him unknown.
Writing a Jingle in Saint-Germain-en-Laye
AS THE SEINE COILS through lower elevations it is forced by the terrain to mimic a wave. That which it avoids and works around are the hills that rise above it. Some sites near Paris afford a better view than the heights of Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Mont Valérien to name just one. But although in Saint-Germain-en-Laye one cannot see the whole of Paris, nonetheless the tops of its towers old and new, Eiffel and La Défense, are visible to the east. At the bottom of the slope is the river. The trees bend right into it at high water, their leaves brushing the glassy surface as it slowly glides by. And at the top of the slope, looking over Le Pecq on the opposite bank, are the park, the long terrace, the gardens, and the great houses.
The gardens – where part of the palace where Louis XIV was born still stands – are superior to those of Versailles. Here, Le N?tre was not driven by the royal megalomania that in Versailles rises at every turn to compromise the genius of the design. Instead, what he accomplished in Saint-Germain-en-Laye is the perfect marriage of man’s skill and nature’s glory. Simple, almost minimalist planes that mate with the horizon, long allées of soldier-like trees standing at attention, and in the fecund gardens flowers as healthy and bright in October – blooming in red, yellow, and a hundred other shades – as in May. In the sheltered market square at the center of town, palms in huge boxes remain well into autumn, as if, on its little mountain just a few minutes from Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye thinks it’s Taormina.
Sometimes it seems that all the children of France have come to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, with parents fleeing the dangers and disorders of Paris, or as students in the pléiade of the many schools located there. On the streets and in the squares, adolescents flock like birds, their movements and exclamations sudden and explosive as their energies overflow and ignite. Jules didn’t think that when he was an ado he was anything but quiet and contemplative, and though he wasn’t sure, he was right.
Younger children are not only quiet but less predictable and more interesting, in that they are fascinated by the world rather than straining to make the world fascinated by them. In the winding shopping streets laden with fairy-tale rows of luxury-good purveyors, there are always little children, morning and afternoon. Jules once counted the number of times a small boy turned in a complete circle as he walked a short block – twelve, and as many jumps and skips. But the most wonderful were the infants, their angelic beauty reminding him of Cathérine when she was wheeled around in a carriage or a stroller. He imagined that to see these children every time he went out was worth a hundred days in a Swiss health spa. Saint-Germain-en-Laye will never be fashionable or dazzling, but there is no end to the praise of a good and peaceful place high on a hill.
Shymanski had bought the greatest house on the crest of this hill and added to it with better taste and judgment than he had exercised in picking his second wife. A dowdy and inconspicuous gate in ill-repair, its squares of sheet metal almost as rusted as if it led to a junkyard, opened onto a two-hectare private compound completely invisible to neighboring streets, a lovely island floating high above the river and partitioned off from everything on every side, its high, long, eastern retaining wall creating an elevated terrace resting upon a secure battlement. The view east was open and stunning, almost an ocean view when the trees were in leaf and the wind moved through them.
In the compound were the main house and a guesthouse one-fifth its size, a small pond, gardens, a tennis court, an enormous swimming pool, and expansive lawns. The main house was as big and as elegantly furnished as a ministry or a museum. A huge, cobbled courtyard at the end of the driveway afforded enough room for the comfortable repose of a dozen automobiles if necessary, but it was usually empty, for a garage disappeared beneath the house. On the lower floor of its eastern side – five meters over the lawn, overlooking the river and out toward Paris and the sunrise, Jules had lived for many years.