Paris: The Novel

by Edward Rutherfurd

  A genuine English aristocrat, of ancient lineage, was leading huge rallies of men in black shirts against his own British establishment.

  It seemed to Max, however, that Sir Oswald Mosley was far closer to the military men of the French right who were fearful of the communists and socialists, and disgusted with the liberal weakness of their governments. “If the left wants revolution and will use force to get it, then the only defense is to beat them at their own game.” Mosley doubtless considered that he was fulfilling the role he was born to, as a forceful leader of national regeneration.

  When there were scenes of violence at a big rally at Olympia, however, the placid British public turned against him and the movement fell apart.

  But Germany was another matter.

  Max found it easy to understand why the German fascists had arisen so rapidly. During the twenties, with the miseries that followed the war compounded by the crippling demands of reparations from the Allies, and a runaway inflation that wiped out everyone’s savings, the Weimar Republic had been brought to ruin and despair. It did not surprise him that people were looking for a strong leader who could hold out the promise of hope and regeneration.

  “Unfortunately,” his father had remarked, “Adolf Hitler is a messianic speaker, but he’s also a lunatic. There’s an imperfect French translation of his book Mein Kampf and I’ve actually read it. The most turgid stuff. But it sets out his whole plan. He seems to believe Germany’s problems are caused by the Jews, and he plans to conquer France and eastern Europe. The whole thing is evil, but it’s also insane.”

  “Yet people don’t treat him as a lunatic.”

  “No. And I think I know why. He’s anti-Semitic. So are most of the ruling class in the Western world, and most Catholics, too. Think of our own Dreyfus affair. Or the recent Stavisky scandal. A French Ukrainian financier defrauds a huge number of people and everyone says it’s because he’s Jewish. It’s absurd, yet everyone does it.”

  “But there’s a difference, surely,” Max had objected. “People aren’t saying that the Jews should be attacked.”

  “I believe you’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “As long as they don’t see it, Max, they don’t care. If a Jew is mistreated they think: Well, he probably asked for it. If a Jewish community were to say that women and children had been rounded up and shot, those same people will say: ‘These Jews are probably lying.’ They may think Hitler and his Nazis are extreme, but at the end of the day, they don’t want to know.”

  “And if he says he’ll conquer Europe?”

  “He’s against the communists. That’s his attraction to them. It’s the ancient principle: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The bourgeoisie of Europe fear communist Russia. Hitler is a buffer between Russia and the West. They think he’s defending them.”

  “Until he attacks us.”

  “They don’t believe he will.”

  “Why—when he says he’s going to?”

  “Because they don’t want to. They can’t bear to think it. The memory of the Great War is so terrible that no one wants to believe it could ever happen again. So if Hitler prepares for war but says he wants peace, they tell themselves it must be true.” His father had shrugged. “The bourgeoisie will always choose comfort over reality.”

  Max reminded his father of that conversation now.

  “Stalin’s no bourgeois, Father. He sees Hitler for the threat he is. Look at what happened this spring. Hitler marched into the Rhineland. Admittedly the demilitarized zone, but he was still breaking the German treaty with the Allies after the last war. Nobody seemed to think it mattered, but the message is clear. Hitler can’t be trusted, and he means war. Stalin knows that to protect Russia from Hitler, he needs strong allies in the West. So for the time being, at least, Russia needs bourgeois friends. That’s why the party doesn’t want a revolution here. We need to reassure the bourgeoisie, here and in other countries.”

  “But if the workers form committees in every factory, we can push straight through to a Marxist state. Then Russia will have a true, Marxist regime in France as her ally, instead of a bunch of timorous bourgeois.”

  “I know, Father. That’s what Trotsky is saying. But he’s wrong. It’s too risky.”

  “Revolution is about taking risks.”

  “Yes. But Russia is the only Marxist state at present. We have to protect her.”

  “And we’re to betray the workers for this?”

  “Blum is offering them almost everything they want. It will completely transform employment conditions in France. That’s revolutionary.”

  “But it’s not revolution. They’re prepared to stay out on strike. Believe me, I know. They want complete change.”

  “Yes, but they can’t have revolution. Not yet. The union leaders are going to tell them to take the deal, and go back to work. All the Communist Party boys are being mobilized to back the union leaders up.”

  “I haven’t heard this.”

  “It’s only just been decided.”

  “Where? By whom? Why don’t I know?”

  It was time to break it to him.

  “They knew what you’d say, so they didn’t ask you.”

  “It seems that you knew about this,” his father said quietly.

  “I work for L’Humanité. That’s how I heard.”

  “You may find,” his father said coldly, “that some of the workers refuse to obey orders.”

  Max looked down at the floor, and said nothing. His father stared at him for a little while.

  “So what else haven’t you told me?” Jacques said at last.

  The unkindest cut of all. But it couldn’t be avoided. Max took a deep breath.

  “Blum has troops gathering outside the city.” Max paused. “I’m sure they won’t be needed. But just in case …”

  He saw his father’s head fall. The tall man’s body seemed to shrink.

  “Troops. Against our own people …”

  “It’s only a precaution.”

  Jacques Le Sourd did not speak for a little while. He stared up toward the domes of Sacré Coeur high on the hill above them, but whether he even saw the basilica’s pale form it was impossible to say.

  So it had come to this. Full circle. It seemed to Le Sourd that his entire life had suddenly become an illusion, an irony, an evaporation into the blue sky.

  At last he spoke.

  “Sixty-five years ago,” he said quietly, “in the Commune of Paris, we began the rule of the people. And it was actually working. But the government sent the army into the city, and they were too well armed for the ordinary Parisians, and the Communards were smashed.” He nodded to himself. “My father was a Communard. In the last, terrible weeks, a great many Communards were shot. Many were shot up there on the hill of Montmartre. My father—your grandfather—was shot in Père Lachaise. I vowed to revenge myself on the family of the man who did it, and when I had the chance, I failed.” He shrugged. “So much for me. But I have dedicated my life to completing my father’s work.” He paused. “The men who smashed the Commune, our enemies, had at least this in their favor. However mistakenly, they believed they were right. The man who shot my father probably thought he was fighting for God and the honor of France. His son, whom I failed to kill, was an aristocrat and a bourgeois lackey, and history should have swept him aside and thrown him into the fire. But he was brave, and proud, and honest, and he had a son he loved. That’s why I didn’t shoot him.”

  He stood up, and looked down sadly at his son.

  “But now, when we have the chance again, a better chance by far than we have ever had before, I find that it is not the monarchists and the bourgeois who are bringing in the troops, but the socialists, and the communists—our own side. And having spent my life trying to honor the memory of my father, I find that my own son is with the traitors. So perhaps if I can find some brave men to stand with me, I can defy your troops, and your treachery, and you and your Russian friends c
an watch them gun me down.”

  And with those last bitter words, he turned and walked away. And Max knew that there was nothing he could do but watch his father go, and wonder if, having hurt him so much, he had lost him.

  By 1936, L’Invitation au Voyage was a very special establishment. It was named after the famous poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, whose refrain expressed everything the place hoped to be.

  Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté

  Luxe, calme, et volupté

  Order, and beauty, luxury, calm. And sexual pleasure. There were two further things for which the house had gained a reputation: It was spotlessly clean. And it was always changing. In fact, it was a work of remarkable imagination.

  The imagination of its owner, Madame Louise.

  The French government had a very sensible attitude toward brothels, Louise always thought. It regulated them. The laws went back to the time of the great emperor Napoléon.

  Not that regulation had been a new idea in Europe, even then. Back in the Middle Ages, the many brothels along the south bank of London’s River Thames were supervised by their feudal lord, the bishop of Winchester, who drew up the regulations.

  In Paris, however, it was not the Church but the civil authorities who licensed the brothels. There were regular inspections and twice-weekly medical checks for all the women employed there. It was pragmatic, logical and responsible.

  It was six years now since Louise had opened her brothel.

  Perhaps, if she’d been colder, a little more ruthless, Louise could have followed in the wake of Coco Chanel—whose lovers, like the Duke of Westminster, included some of the richest men in Europe. But Louise had been too slow to understand the lesson that a woman’s fortune depended entirely on the circuit in which she moved. On the arm of a man who was very rich, she would meet other equally rich men, who cared very little for the rules of society, because they could make the rules for themselves.

  True, in France—where it was well remembered that at the court of Versailles, a royal mistress might have more power and prestige than a queen—a mistress might be a highly fashionable woman, and not a person to be hidden away and looked down upon, as in many other countries. But even so, a well-to-do Parisian was unlikely to give her the social protection or the money she would need to progress beyond a certain point.

  So Louise lived quietly, and she did not become rich, but nonetheless, by the time she was thirty, she had been the kept woman of several men who could afford to be generous, and together with the capital sum from her father when she reached that age, she had enough money to stop being dependent on others and to go into business for herself. That was when she had opened L’Invitation au Voyage.

  Luc had helped her find the place. There were many areas where brothels were to be found. Apart from the red-light district of Pigalle near the Moulin Rouge, there was the ancient rue Saint-Denis that ran up the edge of the Second Arrondissement just east of Les Halles. For male homosexuals, there were the bath houses on the Left Bank in the Luxembourg quarter; the best lesbian house was even grander, in a private mansion on the Champs-Élysées. Louise didn’t like the rue Saint-Denis. The girls who walked the street there were prostitutes of the lowest sort. Though she was sorry for them, and for their sad, degraded lives, she wasn’t going to have them on her doorstep. But Luc found a place a little to the east on the edge of the Marais quarter, on the old rue de Montmorency, where Nicolas Flamel, the medieval magician, had owned a neighboring house.

  Luc had also been useful at the start in helping her find the girls. And Louise had wondered if he would want her to make him a partner, which she didn’t want to do. But when she offered him a salary instead, for these and other services, he seemed quite content, and she realized that, even in middle age, he was happier with the freedom of the streets than the responsibility of a business. He still supplied cocaine to his large network of clients, and in its first year, he provided more than a dozen valuable customers to the brothel.

  But he and Louise had one understanding. None of her girls were allowed to take drugs of any kind, especially cocaine. It was a rule she had made right at the start, and she never deviated from it.

  “I’ve seen too much of what cocaine can do,” she told Luc. “I want all the girls to look wholesome. I won’t have them getting skinny and rattled, no mood swings, no girls without septums in their noses, no lying. Girls in other places may be like that, but not here.”

  Luc had understood. All the girls were clean.

  When Louise received the note from Jacob, one morning early in September, she decided to go to his gallery that very afternoon. Every so often, when he had something that he thought she might like, Jacob would send her a little note. His judgment was usually excellent, and down the years she’d bought a number of paintings from him, including one by Marc Blanchard—a small landscape of the very street in which her establishment was situated.

  She’d often thought about the portrait of the girl who might have been her mother. But she’d never bought it. She’d developed an aversion to false hopes, and disappointments. Had she discovered for certain that the girl in the painting was her mother, she’d have wanted it. But she preferred to ignore the picture altogether rather than invest her emotion in a possible delusion.

  She liked Jacob. It was clear that he loved the work he was selling, and once he got to know her, he would give her frank advice. His prices were always sensible. She looked forward to seeing what he had to show her.

  First, however, there was the daily business of the establishment to be attended to.

  Every morning the house was cleaned. Though they were always kept shuttered on the street side, all the windows were opened, the bedclothes were completely changed. Every tile and bathroom was washed, scrubbed and disinfected. By noon, the house smelled as if it had just been fumigated, and Louise inspected it with the thoroughness of a strict hospital matron. Not until teatime would little sprays be used to perfume the rooms again.

  At one o’clock, a potential new girl arrived for an interview, and Louise saw her in the little office on the upper floor where she had her own apartment.

  The girl was the cousin of Bernadette, one of the most reliable of the twenty girls who already worked for her. During the last couple of years, most of the new girls had come to her in a similar way. Indeed, the two that Luc had found had proved to be unsatisfactory, and she had been obliged to send them away.

  At first sight, the girl looked promising. She was fair-haired, slim, elegant. Her manners were excellent, she was well-spoken, but her face had a cool distance that was intriguing.

  The interview was thorough. Beyond the official medical tests, Louise explained, she would insist on the girl visiting the doctor that she used for an even more thorough screening. She also asked in detail exactly what her experience was, and what she was not prepared to do. But this was by no means all. She made the girl walk about, so that she could study her deportment, she made her read aloud, she asked her questions about clothes and fashion and she wanted to know if she had ever acted.

  By the end of the interview, she had decided that the girl was certainly a prospect. Well worth a trial.

  “Come with me now,” she instructed, “and you can see some of the rooms.”

  At this, the young woman’s calm face lit up.

  “I’ve heard about the rooms, madame,” she said. “I’m quite excited.”

  There is nothing new under the sun. Certainly not in a brothel. But it could truly be said that, of its kind, L’Invitation au Voyage was exceptional. And if it was, Louise knew, the inspiration for her work hadn’t come from a house of pleasure.

  It had come from the Joséphine department store.

  She’d gone in there so many times. Her only concern had been that she might encounter Marc Blanchard. It was possible of course that he might not recognize her, but she preferred not to take the chance. And having learned from the shop assistants that he almost never went in
to the store in the morning, she went then, and had never seen him.

  But she had seen his work. And it was spectacular.

  She was fascinated by the way that the store was like a changing stage set. There was always something new, to dazzle or surprise. Even the mannequins in the windows or the floor displays seemed to be engaged in some action in which, perhaps mysteriously, they had been suddenly frozen.

  Though she avoided Marc, she had on one occasion talked to Marie, who had come up while she was engaged with one of the assistants. Louise had complimented her on the way the store was run.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Marie replied. She seemed genuinely pleased. “We do our best. Sadly, however, my daughter, who married a charming American last year, is going with him to America shortly. She’s the one who scouts for talent and keeps us up to date. It won’t be easy to replace her.”

  “I wish I could help you,” Louise said on impulse, “but I don’t know enough.”

  She realized her folly as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but saw a light of interest in Marie’s eyes.

  “What do you do?” the older woman asked.

  “I study art, and model for Chanel.”

  “Really?” Marie looked quite thoughtful. Louise knew the impression she made on people. Her clothes, her manners, and her elegant French always impressed them. “I wonder if you should talk to my daughter and my brother,” Marie mused. “You’re the right sort of age …”

  “It’s a charming idea,” Louise said quickly, “but not possible, I’m afraid. I wish you luck, though, madame.”

  Marie was still looking at her curiously as she beat a hasty retreat.

  Whatever her exact relationship to Marie might be, Louise liked and admired her. And she was quite taken aback when, a year later, the Joséphine store suddenly announced that it was closing.