“French, English or American?”
“French, of course, or I wouldn’t have bothered you. The Americans just got here, after all. Although they do find their way to Paris quickly, I’ll say that for them.”
“Show him in,” Eve decided. “Just give me time to put on my dress.”
In a minute the guardian was back, closely followed by a tall, impatient figure in a colonel’s uniform, carrying his cap under his arm.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Madame.” The formula of politeness was at odds with the intensity of the way he said the traditional words.
“Not at all, mon colonel.” There was a question in her voice. She couldn’t remember ever having met this big, blond man, with weatherbeaten skin and deep-set blue eyes, yet there was something disturbingly familiar about him, as if she had dreamed about him, forgotten the dream, and now was on the verge of remembering it again.
“I didn’t have any idea who you were until tonight,” he said, “and I didn’t know how to find you—but then when I heard you sing—at the very first note … I … that night …” He fell silent, as if he didn’t know what to say next, as if the urgent need to tell Eve something was too complex to put into words.
“That night?” she asked. There had been an eternity of nights since the war started.
“You can’t have forgotten, even though it was almost two years ago.”
“That night? Yes, oh yes, the night in the farmhouse! You … oh yes, of course—the officer—yes, I remember—naturally I remember—how could anyone forget that night? Now I remember your voice, I just didn’t remember your face. You fell asleep while I sang.”
“And I dreamed of peace,” he answered. “A happy dream … it stayed with me for days. Two of my men would not have lived through that night if it hadn’t been for you. I had to tell you that.”
“What is your name, mon colonel?”
“Paul de Lancel. Will you dine with me, Madame?”
“It would give me pleasure.”
“Tonight?” he asked, so hopefully that his deep voice almost cracked.
“Why not? As I remember, on the night we met we went hungry. And yet I sang for my supper … and almost for my breakfast as well. So I believe you owe me a dinner. But you must promise me two things.”
“Anything,” he said seriously. “Anything you ask.”
“You must not tell me again that I’m mad or a damn fool.”
“I’d hoped you’d forgotten how unforgivably rude I was.”
“On the contrary, it was too memorable ever to forget.”
In the past few years, Eve had been taken out to supper after the show night after night by military men from every part of France Distraction was what they sought in a restaurant, a feverish bustle and brightness that brought its own gaiety.
Paul de Lancel, however, chose to take her to the dining room of the Ritz. It was an exceptionally formal room, high-ceilinged, with elaborate moldings, deeply carpeted and hung with brocades of a quality that would be justified in a queen’s bedroom. The tables were placed far from each other, and one of its walls opened onto a semicircular garden where jasmine and trailing pyramids of geraniums surrounded a fountain. Each element of the service was attended to by a maître d’hôtel, waiters and busboys whose tasks were performed too silently to encourage bustle, the room was lit too discreetly to be bright, each table glowing in quiet invitation in a pool of light made by small lamps with pink shades.
Yet, for all its ornateness, the dining room of the Ritz was conceived under the spell of celebration and gaiety, and it had retained that mood throughout the war. Although the sum total of the details of the room made it the most splendid place to dine in France, Paul de Lancel was snugly and familiarly at home there. He ordered dinner without any unnecessary fuss, yet with an authority that was as complete as it was mild. As he spoke to the maître d’hôtel, Eve felt herself relaxing into a quietude of security that had nothing to do with the prospect of a peaceful meal.
In the soft light, Paul studied Eve intently. She sat with her normal serene confidence in the brocade armchair, her long earrings glimmering. Her hair was parted in the middle, and then brought forward so that it coiled, in the latest style, over her ears. Her dress had a low, square neckline trimmed in a band of lace, and two other broad bands of lace covered her shoulders, yet her strong, smooth neck and her slender arms were left completely bare.
He realized that this denuded style suited Eve, as it did few others, for it emphasized the exquisitely curved angle at the widest part of her jawbone, and the marvelously fresh tint of her skin. It was impossible for him to see into the depths of her eyes in the available light, but as she talked, the slow flutter of her eyelids under her upslanting brows was mysteriously important. The striking immoderation that her Aunt Marie-France had first become aware of seven years earlier had been sculpted and firmed by life, but not in the least tamed, so that now it appeared as a startling independence of spirit, a freedom and a composure that joined to give Eve a quality that was noble in its lack of conventionality. As they talked, he recognized the dancing lance of her intelligence, the teasing contagion of her inner playfulness.
“Who are you?” Paul de Lancel suddenly heard himself ask her.
“What do you mean?” Eve asked, although the beat of her blood in her veins knew perfectly well what he meant.
“You are somebody other, somebody else than the famous Maddy, Maddy with no last name, who sings at the Casino de Paris. I know I’m right … tell me who you really are,” he commanded.
Eve considered her reply as she drank a few drops of wine. Since she had come to Paris four years before, she had not spoken of her origins, not even to Vivianne de Biron. Some deep instinct had told her not to share with anyone in the world of the music hall the knowledge that she came from a milieu that they sneered at, and were so profoundly scorned by in return.
But this man, this stranger, for all that she knew of his courage, his calmness and his endurance, this almost-stranger, Paul de Lancel, awoke a fearlessness in her and a curiously deep need, a thirst that literally compelled her to talk about herself. There was abandon in the feeling of challenge he aroused. She trusted him, she understood suddenly, trusted him so instinctively that it frightened her. She knew him so little. Yet, after that night in the bombed-out farmhouse, it seemed as if she already knew him too well to hide behind an identity that was only a part of her.
“I was born in Dijon,” she said with a sigh of memory, “and my name is not Maddy, nor can I be addressed as Madame. To be precise, I am Mademoiselle Eve Coudert, a bourgeois name not considered suitable for the marquee of a music hall. As a girl I wanted—too much, perhaps—to see what lay beyond the horizon. I came to Paris—or rather I ran away from home to Paris—when I was seventeen, with a man I scarcely knew. I was utterly innocent and utterly reckless. In fact—quite mad. I had been brought up to be a lady and to make a good marriage. I hated that thought, but it was the only future my family intended for me. I was ridiculously in love as well as very foolish. Soon the man broke my heart—which was only to be expected. However, I disgraced my family, as well as myself. My parents have never even come to see me, although I write to them every week. My father is a celebrated doctor, my mother is one of the most respectable women in Dijon. And I … I am known as Maddy.”
“He broke your heart, you said?” Paul interrupted, incredulous at the violent jealousy that had gripped him the minute Eve said those words. He had not paid attention to anything else from that phrase on.
“I thought so at the time. It felt that way.”
“Has it mended?” he demanded.
“I’m sure it must have. Although for years it may only have been frozen … Don’t all girls of seventeen have mend-able hearts?”
“And since this man?” Paul insisted, with stern vigilance.
“I have been very careful not to give my heart away again.”
“Are you absolutely sure of tha
t?” Paul had a mad impulse to uncoil her hair, unplait it and pull it back from her forehead, so that he could see just how she would look as she woke in the morning.
“One minute, mon colonel—is this an interrogation?”
“Does it matter?”
“Perhaps not,” Eve answered after a long pause. Her pulse beat visibly in her uncovered throat.
“You know it doesn’t. Here, give me your hands to hold,” he demanded.
“In public?” She had to lean forward so that he could hear her low tremulous question.
“You ran away with some wretch who hurt you, and now you won’t even give me your hands?”
“I told you I have been very careful.”
“You’ll have to forget all about that now,” Paul said sternly.
“Will I?” Her lips parted, her eyelids almost closed. A wave of emotion held her breathless, immobile, waiting for his next words. He had astonished her with his directness, his frank intensity, in a way she hadn’t felt since she had risen over Dijon in a big red balloon and seen the great possibilities that lay beyond the blue horizon. The beginning of rapture made the dining room of the Ritz fade as if it were only a backdrop in a darkened theater.
“You know you will. You know it perfectly well, Mademoiselle Eve Coudert.”
“You are very good at giving orders,” Eve said, with the last resistance she possessed.
“You’ll have plenty of time to get used to it.”
“How … how long …?” she whispered.
“A lifetime,” he said as he took both of her shaking hands and raised them to his warm lips. “I promise you a lifetime.”
The maître d’hôtel, who had been observing Paul and Eve from a well-disciplined distance, was not surprised to see Colonel de Lancel signal him for the bill halfway through the perfectly prepared and presented meal that he and his beautiful companion had virtually ignored. He had known the colonel since he was a boy, visiting Paris for the first time with his parents, who always stayed at the Ritz, but he had never seen the young vicomte in love before, no matter how many times he had dined at the Ritz since he became a man. In fact, the maître d’hôtel had made a bet with himself that they would not manage to get as far as their main course before they abandoned all pretense of eating. He lost his bet, for the colonel allowed it to be served, and managed to take one bite of it, yet he won, for the colonel tipped him five times as much as was normal.
Outside the Ritz, Paul hailed an open horse-drawn carriage. “Drive along the river,” he directed the coachman as he handed Eve into the carriage. Cheerfully the man swung his horse around the Place Vendôme and down the Rue de Castiglione in the direction of the Seine at a pace that was at one with the lingering warmth of the May night, as if this trip down the quai were a voyage of discovery, leisurely, yet new in all its elements, rather than a circuit that he and his horse had made a thousand times before.
In the restaurant of the Ritz, Paul and Eve had been able to talk with a sense of freedom because they were surrounded by spectators whose presence put limits on their intimacy. However, the lack of privacy and the need to pretend to eat soon became unendurable, but now, alone except for the indifferent back of the coachman, they suddenly found themselves tongue-tied, awkward and confused.
He had promised her a lifetime, Eve thought. What did that mean? Was it a figure of speech? Was it a soldier’s bravado? Were his words those of a man who wanted a brief affair before he returned to the business of war? Was Paul de Lancel the kind of man—and there were many such—who would use big words for that small purpose? In the course of the greetings he had exchanged with the maître d’hôtel at the Ritz, she had learned that he was a vicomte and a member of the Lancel champagne family. If a man from such a background promised her a lifetime, would it not be as his mistress, a woman he would keep in the background of his life? What exactly did he expect, this man whom she had allowed to take her to dinner—to half a dinner, to be precise—only tonight? This man who already knew more about her than anyone in the world?
He had promised her a lifetime, Paul thought. Did she understand that he wanted to marry her? Had he made himself sufficiently plain? No clearly defined plans had been discussed because a waiter had arrived at their table with the first course at the moment he uttered those words. Somehow they had been left suspended in the air, and with food set before them, the evanescent mood had changed in a maddening way that prevented him from returning to the subject. How could he reasonably expect that a woman who had never known him until a few hours ago would understand the way he felt about her? How could she possibly return his emotions? Was Eve the kind of woman who would let him declare himself and then play with him, enjoying her power? He knew nothing about her except the brief sketch of her life he had extracted from her, and she knew even less about him.
They sat silently, not touching, as the carriage turned left when it reached the riverbank and proceeded toward the oldest part of Paris, the heart of the city, where a tribe of riverboat fishermen called the Parisii made their first settlements on an island in the middle of the Seine. If the driver of the carriage had turned right, they would have passed the vast spaces of Imperial France, the Place de la Concorde and the Grand Palais, monumental symbols of an unequaled grandeur, but in turning left the coachman brought them quickly into humble, lively quarters where everything is scaled for humans and nothing is symbolic unless it is the tower of a church.
“Stop here, please, driver,” Paul said as they reached the Pont Neuf. “Would you like to walk on the bridge?” he asked Eve.
“Yes,” she answered. Anything to break this stiff trance of incomprehension in which she was caught, her mind bristling with a thousand questions and her lips incapable of expressing even one of them.
The Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, cuts across the tip of that island, the Ile de la Cité, where the Parisii built their first huts, and it possesses a particular gentle magic that exists only where man has lived longest. Friendly ghosts seemed to promenade along the stone pavement, keeping up with Eve and Paul as they strolled to the middle of the bridge, joined only by his hand at her elbow. The wide bridge was almost abandoned, and when they reached its center they turned into one of the twelve semicircular bays that hang out over the Seine. Leaning on the edge of the bay, they had an uninterrupted view of the length of the river as it rushed with surprising speed through the city toward the ocean, the moonlight falling in such a broad path on the water that Paris itself seemed to have disappeared.
“Isn’t it like being on shipboard?” Paul asked.
“I’ve never made a sea voyage,” Eve answered.
They lapsed into a new silence, but the few words they had managed to exchange had eased their embarrassment and they turned toward each other at the same instant. Paul took Eve into his arms and kissed her lips for the first time.
She drew back and looked up into his eyes, which were so deeply set under his brows that she couldn’t puzzle out his expression.
“Why … why did you want me to sing ‘Till We Meet Again’ that night in the farmhouse?” Eve asked, amazed that among all the complicated questions that crowded her mind, she had asked about an unimportant detail of an event that had happened when she hadn’t even known Paul’s name.
“Perhaps it was … foolish of me, but I knew none of the men understood English and I wanted to hear you sing something for me alone, something I could remember forever, without sharing it with anyone,” Paul answered slowly. “I … I fell in love with you … while you were singing to the men in French. There were words in the song that I wanted to imagine you saying to me, and it was the only way I could think of—do you remember those words? ‘Wedding bells will ring so merrily, every tear will be a memory, so wait and pray each night for me, till we meet again.’ ”
“Wedding bells?” Eve whispered.
“Even then. I knew it was the only thing I wanted. Wedding bells—Eve, will you marry me?”
She hesi
tated, frightened again by the way Paul de Lancel stripped her of all her hard-won self-protective instincts. And yet … and yet … could she now fail to dare? Could she draw back from adventure? Could she try to avoid … love? For that was what she felt for him, nothing less than love.
“It has been more than three hours since you came to my dressing room,” Eve temporized, for one last earthbound instant. “Why have you waited so long to ask?”
“It took me two years to find you again.”
“Ah … in that case …”
“ ‘In that case’?”
“Yes, mon colonel, yes!”
Vicomte Jean-Luc de Lancel, Paul’s father, looked up from the letter he had just torn open.
“Wonderful news, darling!” he announced joyously to his wife, Anette, “Paul’s getting married—in fact, from the date on this letter, I think he must be married already.”
“Thank God! Oh, how I’ve prayed for this! After poor Laure died, I thought he’d never laugh again. Show me that letter. Who is she? Where did he meet her? When did they get married?” the Vicomtesse asked eagerly.
“Just a minute—let me read more. Ah—she’s from Dijon, almost a neighbor, Anette! Eve Coudert—by God, Doctor Didier Coudert’s daughter—he’s the man everyone goes to for liver, darling. Your brother-in-law consulted him only a few years ago, don’t you remember? They’ve known each other for—that’s odd—he says that they met briefly the end of the first year of the war, and now, it appears, they met again—only last week! No one could get married in just a week before the war, but now they’ve changed the rules, eh? He writes that she’s good and brave and beautiful—can’t ask for more than that, can you? Of course, they won’t have a honeymoon, but what does that matter? The important thing is they’ll be in Paris now that Paul’s working as liaison with the Americans. When can we go and visit them, Anette? I want to lay my eyes on my new daughter-in-law.”
“Doctor Coudert’s daughter, you said?”
“Yes. Why, does he have several of them?”
“Only one that I know of,” she said grimly.
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