“You know of this girl?”
“Everyone knows of this girl.”
“What are you talking about? And why do you look so sour? I’ve never heard of her.”
“A year before the war started, no one talked of anything else—no one in certain circles. She ran away, decamped, disappeared, whatever you want to call it, with, I understand, some dreadful man or other, something thoroughly disreputable, something terribly dishonorable that the Couderts kept as quiet as possible for as long as they could. Marie-France de Courtizot, her aunt, was in on it too. My cousin Claire is a friend of Baronne de Courtizot’s, and when it all carne out—well! It was even more disgraceful than they’d thought. Oh, my poor Paul!”
“What do you mean, ‘even worse’? Does she have a child?”
“Not as far as I know. That kind of woman makes sure not to have children. She’s … she sings. She performs in a music hall. In Paris.”
“A music hall! You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. The Couderts never speak of her, but apparently she has become a great success—‘famous,’ they say. They mean infamous. There’s no doubt about it. There was only one daughter, and this is the woman our son has married.” The Vicomtesse began to sob.
“Anette, Anette … stop, I beg of you. Remember that Paul loves her. Think how unhappy he’s been—isn’t it more important that he’s found someone to love?”
“A woman like that! Can’t you imagine why she married him? It’s a desperate grab at respectability, the classic last resort of a woman fallen so low. But she’s wrong if she thinks that she can ever hope to be accepted here. Worst of all, after this war is over, his career will be ruined.”
“Anette, how can you worry about that now? The essential thing is that Paul isn’t at the front, that he will survive the war. What is this nonsense about his career? I prefer to believe in his judgment—that she is good, brave and beautiful. So what if she does sing? And in a music hall? Kings have married women who sang in music halls.”
“And lost their thrones and been laughed at for the rest of their lives … and you know perfectly well that they never married those creatures, they kept them. This woman caused a great scandal. Her past will follow her all of her life. Do you honestly think that a diplomat with such a wife can hope to rise in his career?”
“A diplomat’s wife is as important to him as his brains—perhaps more so,” Jean-Luc de Lancel said with a profound sigh. Anette, as usual, was more practical than he was.
“This … person … he has married can never be the wife of an ambassador, you know that as well as I do. At the Quai d’Orsay he will never be forgiven for her. Our brilliant son has ruined himself for her, he has sacrificed his career.”
“I wonder how much he knew about her before this sudden marriage?”
“As little as possible, obviously,” the Vicomtesse said with visceral animosity.
“Perhaps not. Or perhaps he knew everything and believed that whatever it cost him, it was worth it,” Vicomte de Lancel said, but his wistful words had no conviction behind them.
“He is a man in love, in wartime—that is to say, a fool,” she retorted scornfully.
“Then he has been duped. He would never have married her in peacetime.” Paul’s father’s voice hardened as he crumpled his son’s letter.
“Now do you wonder that they got married so quickly?”
“No, now I understand it. Only too well.”
“You cannot be serious, Maddy,” Jacques Charles said, jumping up from behind his desk. “I refuse to believe you. How can you quit? If it were because some other producer had made you a better offer, I could see what you were trying to do … I wouldn’t like it. I’d wring your pretty neck and have to give you a bigger dressing room and a good hard kick in the ass—but to quit the stage! For good! It simply doesn’t make sense.”
“Does your wife sing at the Casino de Paris?”
“Well … no, but what does that have to do with it? She can’t carry a tune.”
“And if she could? Every night, when you got home for dinner, would you be overjoyed to learn that Madame Charles had already left for the theater, or was still busy fitting her new costumes, or had a rehearsal of her new songs, or was being interviewed by a journalist? Would you enjoy waiting till after midnight for her to return, every night of the week but the one when the Casino de Paris is dark?”
“No. I would not! Damn you, Maddy!”
“So you do understand. In spite of yourself.”
“Let’s admit that I can comprehend the situation as a man who is no different from other men. But for you—a star? Never! Do you even begin to realize what you’re giving up to be home for dinner? Why the devil couldn’t you have had a love affair with the fellow? Who told you to get married? Do you think that stardom is something you can throw away this year and expect to find again, next year, when—and it is always possible, in spite of the way you feel now about your gallant colonel—you discover that you are horribly bored with being married and desperately miss the audience, miss the applause, miss the love of the people who come to hear you?”
“Patron, a week ago everything you’re saying would have made absolute sense. I would have told someone like me the same thing. Perhaps even less tactfully. But now … when you speak of just being home for dinner … it’s all I want.”
“I can’t stand how happy you look, God damn it!”
“You’re too soft-hearted, Patron,” Eve laughed gleefully.
“Get out of here. And, Maddy, when you’re ready—if you’re ever ready, I should say—will you come back? The audience is more faithful than any lover, any husband. A revue just for you, the revue I’ve been planning—well, I can’t give you that again—but Maddy, if anything ever changes, you will come back?”
“Of course,” Eve said, still laughing, and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on both cheeks in farewell. What did the words cost her? It would never happen.
In 1912, when Paul-Sebastian de Lancel had married Laure de Saint-Fraycourt, the only child of the Marquis and Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt, his own family had been delighted. The Saint-Fraycourts were unhappily resigned. Laure, so dark, so fragile and already so elegant, was counted as one of the most beautiful girls of her generation. She was the only heir the Saint-Fraycourts possessed, and all of their fortune would go to her, a fortune as old as it was diminished.
However, to the Saint-Fraycourts, mere money was totally irrelevant. The marquisat of Saint-Fraycourt was a title so distinguished, so ancient, and so linked to the history of France that they considered it to be a vastly significant and powerful dowry. True, the title would die with the death of the present marquis, but Laure’s children, no matter whom she married, would always be known as Saint-Fraycourts, before anything else. In the small circle of the highest aristocracy of France, the fact that their mother had been born a Saint-Fraycourt would gain them instant acceptance and the highest status. The Saint-Fraycourts knew that it was impossible to overestimate the absolute importance of ancient blood, and in the world in which they moved, where everyone knew everyone else, they were not wrong.
Of course, it had always been expected that Laure would marry exquisitely well. The last of the Saint-Fraycourts, she had grown up like an idol, cherished, prized, almost venerated. As she began to show clear signs of future beauty, her parents became as besotted as was possible for any French to be.
When she chose Vicomte Paul-Sebastian de Lancel, they were profoundly disappointed. Yes, he came from an ancient family, but he was not the eldest son. True, the Lancels were unquestionably aristocrats, of the old regime, but they were not of the transcendent quality of aristocracy that the Saint-Fraycourts expected. Their name counted for much in Champagne, but it was not that of a Duke and Peer of France. Pre-Revolutionary Lancels had not spent their lives at Versailles, intimates of the King. Yes, Paul had a brilliant career, but it was largely in front of him. Eventually he would inherit half of the House o
f Lancel, no small fortune, but that was merely reasonable. However, there was nothing about Paul de Lancel they could reasonably oppose, they realized, no one thing serious enough to persuade Laure that she had made a mistake.
They could not find any saving grace in Paul’s future possession of the world-famous vineyards, which, one day, he would have to share with his brother. For their daughter to be connected to a château that had a name that appeared on the label of a bottle! The normal French esteem for wine-producing acres was not shared by the Saint-Fraycourts, who reserved their respect for direct, linear descendants of the house of Hugh Capet, first King of France, and those few whose ancestors had possessed high positions at court.
Laure had been happy in the first year of her marriage, and the Saint-Fraycourts might eventually have softened toward their son-in-law. However, he had the criminal insanity to throw himself into the army in spite of Laure’s pregnancy. Their patriotism, like all their other emotions, took second place to Laure’s welfare. Clearly, Paul’s true and first responsibility lay with his wife and his child, and with no lack of honor, he should have waited to go off to war until after the baby was born.
He killed her, they told each other after Laure died, he killed her as surely as if he’d wrung her delicate neck with his brutal farmer’s hands. Laure had never been the same after he left for the front; in her despair she had not eaten properly, she had not taken any exercise, she had literally pined away for him, and when the baby came, she had been too weak, too sad, to survive. He had taken away their only treasure and treated her with such cruelty that it amounted to torture.
Broken, and so far beyond bitterness that there was no word for their emotion, the grandparents took the baby, Bruno, and went to Switzerland, where at least there was the possibility that their priceless heir, Laure’s one legacy, the child for whom she had given her life, would not be harmed.
In wartime as in peacetime, rumors travel faster than the mails, and by the time Paul’s letter to the Saint-Fraycourts, announcing his marriage, arrived in Geneva, they had been informed of every detail, down to the particular shade of red in the costumes Eve wore on stage.
Normally, scandals involving the upper classes of the bourgeoisie, to which the Couderts belonged, would never have reached their ears, since no one they knew well would have been interested in discussing such people.
However, Baronne Marie-France de Courtizot existed on the far fringes of their world, for, in spite of the fact that her father had been nothing more than a rich merchant of cassis, she had managed to achieve acquaintance with certain members of the innermost aristocracy, the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Baron Claude de Courtizot spent a major part of his large income on maintaining his own hunt. The Courtizot horses and the Courtizot hounds ran over land on which deer abounded, and the baron was open-handedly generous with them, a fact that could not remain long unappreciated by members of the hunting-mad nobility whose purses had been restricted over the passage of time. Even when their ancestors had lost their heads and their lands, they had passed on their titles and their love of the hunt. The Courtizot title was newly minted, as far as they were concerned, almost worse than no title at all, given, as it had been, by that fellow Napoleon, but Claude was suitably humble about it.
But now! Throughout the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain a cloud of gossip rose over the teacups of the possessors of the oldest names in France. In 1914, when it had come out that there existed a Courtizot niece, a niece who, unthinkably, incredibly, performed in a dreadful common place, a vulgar music hall—the next thing to a bordel—in which she was doubtless surrounded by naked showgirls, if she was not actually one herself—or worse—the scandal that had been created had almost cost the Courtizots their small place in the world.
However, they had been forgiven because they simply weren’t important enough to be treated as outcasts. But now! That niece, whom one kindly never mentioned to a rather pathetic Marie-France, had become the stepmother of the only grandson of the Saint-Fraycourts. Now the scandal reached directly into the heart of their own world.
Was it not, one bored and malicious duchess asked another, almost too good to be true? Yes, of course, it was a dreadful tragedy for the Saint-Fraycourts—those poor people, one simply had to feel sorry for them. Who would ever have believed that such a thing could happen to people who were so haughty, when actually their rank was no different from ones own? One had never been terribly fond of them, to be frank, but one had to grant them their right to their pride. They were people one had always known, no matter how cold and arrogant they were. Should one try to pretend that one hadn’t heard about it, or should one, as tactfully as possible, of course, show the Saint-Fraycourts that one felt the most delicate sympathy? Should one write a note, just a few words? Or should one retire into a discreet silence, as if it had not happened? What a fascinating, what a downright—should one admit it even to oneself?—delicious dilemma.
“How are you going to answer Lancel’s letter?” the Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt asked her husband.
“I’m not sure. As long as he was at the front, I prayed every day that I would hear that he had been killed.” The Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt spoke dryly and concisely. “Millions of Frenchmen dead, and Lancel merely wounded. Indeed, there is no justice under heaven.”
“What if he should send for Bruno, now that he has a wife?”
“A wife? He has thrown filth on the grave of our daughter. I beg you, my dear, do not speak of this person as his wife.”
“Nevertheless, he may want to take Bruno back, now that he is settled in Paris.”
“Paris is under attack. There can be no question of such a move.”
“But one day,” the Marquise said somberly, “the war will be over.”
“You know as well as I do that Bruno belongs to us. Even if Lancel had married someone worthy of becoming Bruno’s stepmother, I have never had any intention of letting him go back to that man.” His voice was thinner than ever, like the sound of wind on a dead leaf.
“How can you be so calm?”
“My dear, some things in life are so evident, so right, that they leave no room for question. Bruno’s future is one of these things. He is not a Lancel, he is a Saint-Fraycourt, and he will never be soiled by contact with that murderer and the person he has chosen to live with. I would kill Paul de Lancel myself before I would let him have Bruno. The less he understands us, the less trouble we will have with him. I believe I will answer his letter after all.”
“What will you say?”
“Why, I shall wish him happiness in his marriage, of course.”
“How can you bring yourself to do that?”
“To keep Bruno with us, I could embrace his … whore.”
In late September of 1918, two months before the Armistice brought the war to an end, Eve gave birth to a daughter, Delphine, named after Paul’s maternal grandmother. Paul was demobilized three months after the war ended, and on his return to the diplomatic service early in 1919, he was posted to Canberra as First Secretary of the French Embassy in Australia, the Quai d’Orsay’s equivalent of Siberia.
Eve was overjoyed by the move to Australia because of Delphine. The baby was afflicted with the malady called croup, which attacked her without warning, signaled only by a sudden cough that sounded exactly like the barking of a dog, followed by anguished gasping for air. The only way to ease the croup was to hold Delphine in a cloud of steam until her throat expanded and she was able to breathe normally, but steam was a priceless commodity in France during the first year after the war. The shortage of coal was worse than it had been before the peace, and electricity was still so precious that the Métro ran on a wartime schedule.
Australia, with its plenty, was a blessing to the anxious parents. There, in one of the comfortable Victorian villas of Canberra, with its wide verandas and large garden, Eve could almost relax, secure in the knowledge that she could fill the large bathroom with hot steam
in a matter of minutes. The best pediatrician in Canberra, Doctor Henry Head, examined Delphine and pronounced her perfect in every respect.
“Don’t worry yourself too much about the croup, Madame de Lancel,” he said. “There’s nothing you or I can do that you don’t know about already, and I can promise you that this young lady will grow out of it. There’s a theory that it’s caused by a baby’s short neck. As soon as her neck grows longer, and it will, you know, all by itself, you won’t hear that cough again. Keep a steam kettle going, night and day, in her room for three days after an attack and call me at any time if you need me.”
On the ninth of January, 1920, not even a year and a half later, another daughter, Marie-Frédérique, was born to Eve and Paul de Lancel. Doctor Head, who had been called in by Eve’s obstetrician to look over the new baby, hoped fervently that this little girl wouldn’t be a victim of croup too. He knew how often Delphine had given her parents days and nights of tormenting worry, and in the privacy of his thoughts, he wondered why they had had another child so soon. It seemed to him that Madame de Lancel had more than enough on her plate, coping with the constant crises caused by the sickly baby, without the burden of another infant.
Eve had engaged a capable nurse for the two children, but in the year following Marie-Frédérique’s birth she rarely slept for more than an hour or two at a time, waking constantly during the night to listen for Delphine’s breathing, only able to return to the bed she shared with Paul after she stood listening, by the child’s crib, for a half hour at a time.
At first Eve had been anxious for Marie-Frédérique too, but the baby demonstrated the kind of good health the British called “rude.” Just looking at her was a reassurance. She had the red hair of the Lancels, and the blue eyes as well. She was as plump and sturdy and red cheeked and smiling as her sister was delicate and pale and given to crying for no reason anyone could discover.
Yet Delphine was of a rare and ravishing beauty, a beauty that had nothing childlike about it, a beauty so exceptional that her parents could take little pleasure in it, since it was so often threatened by that doglike barking cough in the night.
Judith Krantz Page 14