Grand-mère had given me my mother’s bedroom on the second floor and her studio in the bell tower. The oldest part of the house, that ancient wing dated back to the fifteenth century and had been imbued with magick by my ancestor, the original La Lune.
For all my parents’ concerns, Grand-mère was quite liberal. One of France’s great courtesans, she believed in women’s equality and freedom and wanted me to explore all the opportunities her great city offered. She gave me a generous allowance on top of what my father provided and set few rules. The one she stressed was that if I chose to take a lover, I would promise to be careful and follow all the steps she outlined to prevent pregnancy.
Nothing, she insisted, could ruin a woman’s life more than an unwanted child. Just as nothing was as rewarding as having a wanted one. Her son, my grandfather, had died before I was born, and Grand-mère could never speak of him without a smile accented by tears.
The war had ended in late 1918, and by 1919, there was a certain fierceness to Paris. As if people had been holding their breath and were finally letting it go and couldn’t get enough fresh air. My brother was attending the Sorbonne and studying business administration, since his ambition was to open an art gallery and sell both my work and my mother’s. He was also living at Grand-mère’s house. As a man, he could come and go as he liked, but when it came to me, he was even more overprotective than our great-grandmother. Sebastian checked up on my whereabouts all the time. Mostly, he was worried that a young man would try to seduce me.
“You’re vulnerable,” he’d remind me. “You’re not a city girl. These Parisians, especially those back from the war, are wily and know how to turn a girl’s head.”
“I’m not interested in romance, Sebastian. I only care about painting,” I always told him.
“You say that now, but there’ll be a man who comes along, and you’ll feel differently. He’ll sweep you off your feet, and you’ll forget you ever picked up a paintbrush.”
I’d laugh at him, and as soon as he went out or retired to his bedroom, I’d sneak out and meet my friends in the bars in Montmartre, or in their studios, where, unlike me, they lived in squalor and artistic glory.
I’d meant what I’d told him. I really wasn’t romantically interested in the young men I met. I was in love with painting. With seeing. Losing my sight for that long year and then regaining it had given me an appreciation that ruled my world. I yearned to learn all the tricks and hone my ability, so that one day, I could put down on canvas the strange dream world that I saw all around me, with all of its shine and gloss.
Despite my freedom, I didn’t take a lover the first few months I lived in Paris. I fraternized with the other students, joining them after class around the corner for coffee or wine at La Palette, visiting museum exhibits, going to nightclubs.
The war was over, but everyone was still learning how to live without a threat hanging over them. Paris was trying to heal, but she was wounded. And there seemed an endless flow of young disfigured or wounded men. Most of the men and the boys who’d been to war still had a glazed look in their eyes. What they had seen at the front couldn’t be unseen. What they had endured couldn’t be unlived.
During those first months at L’école, in addition to studying painting, I began learning more about my esoteric heritage at the feet of one of my mother’s mentors, the publisher and mystical leader Pierre Dujols, who owned the Librairie du Merveilleux at 76 rue de Rennes, only a few blocks from Grand-mère’s maison.
The bookshop also functioned as a salon frequented by all sorts of occultists, magicians, kabalists, hermeticists, and alchemists. France had been home to mystics since the Middle Ages. Spiritualism had been popular since the nineteenth century, and even the most respected dignitaries dabbled in the dark arts. In 1853, Victor Hugo began conducting a series of more than one hundred séances to contact his drowned daughter. The painters Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Moreau, the writers Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, and the astronomer Camille Flammarion, just to name a few, were all fascinated with alternative beliefs.
Aside from the serious occultists and magicians, the bookshop also catered to people who were simply curious, like the Manhattan partygoers at the Stewards’ penthouse who were fascinated by the idea of psychics, séances, and so on but would never have gone so far as to step into witchcraft.
Dujols had spent his whole life studying various disciplines and searching for the philosopher’s stone. Often in the evening, his wife, Marie-Louise, offered card readings, palmistry, and séances. Although she was only in her early fifties, she had long white hair. With her very black eyes and strong bone structure, she looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting I’d once seen of a Delphic oracle.
After the war erupted, the police began to reinforce an ancient law against fortune-telling in order to protect the country’s desperate citizens who were trying to make contact with deceased loved ones. So many had been duped by charlatans. Madame Dujols had a true gift and the deepest respect for those who came to see her. Even so, she was forced to conduct readings in a hidden room of the bookshop in order to avoid arrest.
Immediately after meeting me, she asked if she could study my palm. Hesitant at first, I relented when she told me how she’d read my mother’s palm when she was only a little older than I was and how she’d seen me in my mother’s life line.
“I told her she would have four children,” Madame Dujols said. “And Sandrine pulled back her hand as quickly as if I had burned it.”
I laughed.
“I saw you and your brother, twins, caught in the currents. I told her that one day, you would save him from drowning.”
“Very close,” I said, impressed. The stories I’d heard about her and her remarkable clairvoyance were true. “He saved me. Not the other way around.”
During the evenings and afternoons I spent with Marie-Louise, we talked about my second sight, and she shared stories of her own abilities and how she had come to integrate them into her life and not be afraid of them. Her advice came too early for me. I wasn’t yet scared of my powers. They hadn’t been exposed to the world yet. They remained untested. By the time I discovered how destructive my gifts could be, she was in Paris and I in New York, and I could only remember some of what she’d imparted.
Madame Dujols read my palm several times. She said she saw a break in my life line, a brush with death. And we both decided it was the afternoon that Sebastian and I had been swimming, when the rope had come loose and I’d almost drowned.
“And there will be two men in love with you.”
“Only two?” I was twenty, and it didn’t seem like enough.
She laughed and then said, “To have one man truly love you is a gift. Two is a miracle.”
“Which will I marry?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“Do you see something wrong?”
I knew that unlike some clairvoyants, Madame Dujols didn’t hold back when she saw danger or disaster or death.