The Paris Hours

by Alex George

  “That’s exactly what I did.”

  Brataille sits up. “Au sérieux?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  The art dealer runs a hand through his tousled hair. “Putain,” he mutters. “You got caught up with the wrong people.”

  “I realize that now. The thing is, I’m late on my repayments. If they don’t get their money today—”

  Brataille cuts him off. “I can’t possibly help you.”

  Guillaume stares at him. “What?”

  “There’s no way I’m getting involved.”

  “But you probably have that kind of money just sitting in a drawer somewhere, don’t you?”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “No? What is the point?” asks Guillaume.

  “The point is that I don’t want anything to do with those bastards. They’re criminals. Le Miroir extorts cash from people like me. Why would I ever want to get on his radar?”

  “He would never know that the money came from you!”

  “You’d never tell him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Even with a knife pointed at your throat?”

  Guillaume is silent.

  “Anyway, I’m an art dealer, not a bank. Lending money isn’t my business. I sell paintings.”

  “So don’t lend me the money. Just give it to me.”

  Brataille shakes his head. “And what if they still manage to trace it back to me?” He gestures at the walls of the gallery. “Look around you, Guillaume. I have too much to lose to get involved with people like that.”

  Guillaume feels the last breath of hope escape from him.

  “I’m sure you understand. No hard feelings, eh?”

  “No hard feelings,” mutters Guillaume.

  The two men are silent for a moment.

  “Anyway,” says Brataille. “You were telling me about Thérèse.” He leans back in his chair and puts his hands behind his head, the small matter of the loan, and Guillaume’s survival, already forgotten. “Has she changed her mind?” he asks. “Did you convince her to see me again?”

  Guillaume thinks of Le Miroir’s thugs, who will soon be hunting him down. Then he remembers Léon, the giant who stepped out of the shadows while he was talking to Thérèse this morning.

  Léon, with his enormous fists.

  “Yes,” says Guillaume. “She will see you again.”

  Brataille thumps the desk in triumph. “I knew it!” he cries.

  “Here’s the thing,” says Guillaume. “She wants you to go to Le Chat Blanc tonight.”

  “Tonight?” The art dealer actually licks his lips.

  “She’ll be waiting for you in her room. She said you should just go right up.”

  “Splendid,” says Brataille.

  “And if anyone tries to stop you, or asks what you’re doing, she said you should ignore them. She’s going to take care of it.”

  Guillaume has never been inside Le Chat Blanc, but he is confident that there will be an army of goons the approximate shape and size of Léon whose job is to stop people getting to the prostitutes without paying what is due. He is equally confident that none of those men will take kindly to being ignored by an arrogant prick like Emile Brataille.

  Léon’s proclivity for violence had wafted off him like cheap cologne. Guillaume imagines those giant fists smashing into the art dealer’s face. He hears the crunch of cartilage; he sees the spray of blood.

  23

  The Bookshop

  THE CAFÉ NEAR THE CEMETERY gates is almost empty. Jean-Paul takes a sip of the steaming coffee that the waiter has just delivered to his table, and flicks through the notes he took that morning in Josephine Baker’s apartment. Except, he remembers, it isn’t Josephine. It’s Joséphine now. She was most particular about her newly acquired accent aigu, and had peered over his shoulder more than once to make sure that he was writing her name correctly in his notebook. So much more chic, don’t you think? she asked him. So much more French. Jean-Paul scratches his neck in bemusement. All the Americans he has met in Paris seem so eager to become something other than what they are. Each of them has arrived in France hoping to forge fresh existences for themselves. The Americans’ faith in the regenerative power of new geography astonishes him. It’s a myth, this idea that you can change who you are simply by climbing on a boat or boarding a train. Some things you cannot leave behind. Your history will pursue you doggedly across frontiers and over oceans. It will slip past the unsmiling border guards, fold itself invisibly into the pages of your passport, a silent, treacherous stowaway.

  He closes his notebook and sighs. His visit to the cemetery has summoned too many unwanted ghosts. He cannot concentrate. Anaïs and Elodie are his Sirens, luring him on to the perilous rocks of memory and regret, and he is helpless to resist their call.

  His loss is a blanket that he can never shuck off. Sometimes it suffocates him, sometimes it keeps him alive. The space beneath the blanket is dark with shadows, but it is where he lives now.

  His next interview is on the Left Bank. Another American, this one a bookshop owner. He checks his watch and decides to walk across the city to his appointment. Perhaps the stroll will clear his head. Today, he tells himself, he will become a flâneur, a modern-day Baudelaire, walking the streets of the city for no purpose other than his own pleasure. The waiter gives him a friendly nod as he pushes open the door.

  As he walks down the street he can see the Eiffel Tower above the city’s rooftops. The tower has dominated the city’s skyline for almost forty years now. Many Parisians despise it. They complain that it serves no purpose whatsoever, but that is precisely why Jean-Paul likes it. The combination of first-rate mechanical engineering and such manifest uselessness strikes him as being particularly, deliciously, French.

  At Place de la Bastille cars hurtle by him, belching clouds of black smoke in their wake, streaking the air with their angry horns. Men hurry past, clutching their hats to their heads. Women stroll by, languid and graceful. Jean-Paul walks at his own slow pace. He crosses the Seine at the eastern tip of Île Saint-Louis, and turns onto Boulevard Saint-Germain. At Carrefour de l’Odéon, he turns off the busy thoroughfare and walks up a quiet, narrow street. He stops in front of a shop whose windows are filled with books. They have been arranged on shelves with their covers facing out toward the street. No two volumes are the same. A metal sign hangs above the front door. It reads: SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY.

  The inside of the bookshop is dark. As the door closes behind him, Jean-Paul looks around the room. There are tables of various shapes and sizes, each of them bearing piles of books, some stacked precariously high. At the far end of the shop there is a fireplace, and on the wall above the mantel is a collection of framed photographs of serious-looking men. There is a large desk next to the fireplace. Two men and a woman are bent over it, looking at a painting. Another woman is standing silently to one side, clutching a handbag in front of her. None of them turns around to see who has come in.

  “What do you make of it?” asks a man in a brown corduroy suit. He is speaking in English.

  The second man strokes his mustache. “It’s a fine enough painting, I suppose,” he says. “But I don’t understand what it’s about.”

  Jean-Paul stares. He recognizes the man’s face. At once he picks up the nearest book and opens it at random, hiding behind its cover.

  “I like the blue door,” says the woman. “It’s quite beautiful.”

  “Ah, but it’s the blue door that makes me crazy,” says Ernest Hemingway. “The stupid thing is halfway up the wall!”

  “That’s exactly what I love about it.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense! What possible purpose does it serve?”

  “Must you always be so pedestrian?” asks the man in corduroy. “Since when does everything need to have a purpose?”

  “I’m not saying everything needs to have a purpose, Gertrude,” replies Hemingway crossly. Jean-Paul looks at the man in corduroy
more closely, sees his mistake, and realizes whom he is looking at. “But it’s a goddamn door. What’s the point of a door if you can’t go through it?”

  “Well, I think it’s charming,” says the woman. Jean-Paul peers at her over the top of his book. She has a kind face. Her wavy brown hair is pulled in a severe part. Sylvia Beach, he guesses.

  “In that case, dear girl, you should have it,” says Gertrude Stein.

  “What? Oh no, I couldn’t possibly!”

  “You could possibly,” replies Gertrude Stein. “And you should.”

  “But you’re too kind!”

  “Not really. I don’t actually like it that much.”

  “Why did you buy it, then?” demands Hemingway.

  A shrug. “I can’t resist a bargain.”

  “Well, I think it’s lovely,” says Sylvia Beach. “I accept your kind gift. Thank you.”

  “I’m glad,” says Gertrude Stein gruffly. “Well, we need to get home. Come on, Alice.”

  Gertrude Stein and her companion march out of the shop without another word. Ernest Hemingway glares at their retreating backs.

  “Here.” Sylvia Beach hands him a book. “Your new treasure.”

  “Ah, yes!” The American’s face brightens. He flicks through the book’s pages, brings it up to his nose and inhales deeply. “My God!” he exclaims. “You can practically smell the genius wafting off it.” He looks up with an unguarded grin on his handsome face. “Thank you, dearest Sylvia. You’ve made my week.” He tucks the book into his pocket and looks toward the door. “Do you think it’s safe to leave?”

  “Honestly, I don’t see why the two of you can’t be more civil.” Sylvia Beach sighs. “Your constant bickering is exhausting for the rest of us.”

  “Gertrude started it,” says Hemingway, petulant.

  “That’s not what she says.”

  “No, well, it wouldn’t be, would it?” The American raises his arm in a farewell salute, then turns to leave. As the door closes behind him, Jean-Paul finally lowers the book from his face. Sylvia Beach is still standing over the painting, examining it closely. He approaches and clears his throat. “Mademoiselle Beach?”

  The woman looks up. “Can I help you?”

  “Jean-Paul Maillard. I’m here for our interview.”

  “Of course,” she says. “You’re the journalist on the hunt for Americans.”

  “Perhaps I should just spend my days here,” says Jean-Paul, pointing toward the front door. “I daresay they all come in eventually.”

  “It certainly feels that way,” agrees Sylvia Beach with a smile. Just then a piano starts to play somewhere nearby. The notes clash together sharply. “A case in point,” she says, pointing to the ceiling. “That’s George. He’s from New Jersey.”

  They listen for a moment. The music continues, angrily dissonant.

  “Goodness,” says Jean-Paul.

  “I think that’s supposed to sound like an industrial air turbine,” explains Sylvia Beach cheerfully. The jarring piano chords crash through the ceiling. “Although I wouldn’t mind the occasional Chopin nocturne every now and again,” she whispers, rolling her eyes.

  “It’s very—” Jean-Paul stops, unable to find the right word.

  “Yes, isn’t it? He never would have written such a thing in Trenton, you can be sure of that.”

  “Paris has inspired him to greater things?”

  She pulls a rueful face. “There’s a wonderful line in a poem by one of our American poets, Walt Whitman. It goes: A thousand singers—a thousand songs.”

  Jean-Paul nods. “Clearer, louder, and more sorrowful than yours.”

  She looks at him in surprise. “Yes! Well, it rather feels like that around here these days. Everyone is so busy singing their sorrowful songs that it can be difficult to hear yourself think.” She picks up the painting. “I rather like this, though.”

  Jean-Paul looks at the painting of a little white house in a forest. It is quite beautiful. “This song seems a little quieter,” he says.

  “Perhaps that’s why I like it,” says Sylvia Beach. She carries the painting to the other side of the shop and puts it in the window. “There,” she says. “That ought to brighten someone’s day.”

  They walk back to the large desk at the back of the shop. Jean-Paul sits down and pulls out his notebook.

  “Tell me about Paris,” he says.

  24

  Paris, 1915: Confidences

  OUTSIDE THE APARTMENT, the war raged. Olivier remained stationed at the front. Finding themselves increasingly alone, the two occupants of the apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann began to talk more and more.

  “Tell me about Auxillac,” Marcel Proust said one afternoon, watching Camille carry the tray of coffee and croissants across the bedroom.

  “Oh, monsieur, you’re not interested in where I came from,” she demurred. “I’m a simple country girl from the Lozère.”

  He looked amused. “And?”

  “You spend your evenings talking to duchesses in tiaras! What possible interest could my childhood be to you?”

  “My dear Camille, why on earth do you imagine that those people are more interesting than you? Because they’re duchesses? Or because they wear tiaras?”

  “Now you’re mocking me, monsieur.”

  “Not in the slightest. It was an entirely serious question.” Proust reached for a croissant. “Most of those women are stupendously boring. They’re obsessed with trivialities, they have no opinions of their own, and they are uniformly dim. An aristocratic pedigree is no guarantee of anything these days, least of all a discernible character.” He took a bite. “You, though,” he said, after chewing for a moment. “I see still waters running deep within you.”

  Camille blushed, quite undone.

  “Never let anyone tell you you’re boring, Camille. If they tell you that you don’t matter, that you’re of no consequence, don’t believe it for one moment.”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “I like you so very much, Camille! Will you promise me something?”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “Be a strong woman. Most of all, be yourself! Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to do. Especially not a man.” He paused, a small smile on his lips. “Except me, of course. You should always follow my instructions to the letter.”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “So, tell me about Auxillac.” He took another bite of croissant.

  And so, hesitantly at first, she began to tell stories of her childhood. She was sure that Monsieur Proust would quickly become bored by the tedium of her family’s simple, bucolic life, but he appeared quite enchanted, and asked for more. Once she was sure he was not teasing her, she obliged. She resurrected old family legends that she had heard told around the dinner table countless times as a child. She reminisced about the carefree summers of her youth, and the hard, cold winters. She recalled old friends that she had not thought about in years. Most of them were still living in Auxillac. Sometimes Camille did not know whether to laugh or cry when she thought of them now, so very far away.

  Marcel Proust listened to every word, his eyes never leaving hers while she talked. Occasionally he would elicit an extra detail from her, but for the most part he remained silent. He wanted to know about Olivier’s courtship, those long drives along the country lanes with the wind in her hair.

  “Ah, youth is wasted on the young, Camille,” he said softly.

  He began to tell her stories about his own childhood. He recalled long-ago weekends spent at an uncle’s house in Auteuil, summers at another uncle’s house in Illiers. He recounted tales of the mischief that he and his brother, Robert, would get up to when out of sight of their parents. He told her of the dreadful trip to the Bois de Boulogne when he was nine years old, when there had been so much pollen in the air that he’d suffered his first asthma attack. “That was when everything changed, Camille,” he said. “It’s only when you have to fight for every breath that you re
alize how essential air is to life.”

  He spoke lovingly of his parents, especially his mother. “She was the greatest love of my life,” he told her. “From the moment I was born, my world revolved around her, until she drew her last breath.” He was silent for a moment. “I remember the day she died so clearly. I walked through the apartment one last time before they took her poor body away. There was a floorboard near her bedroom that creaked every time someone walked on it. Whenever my mother heard it she would make a little noise. It was her way of saying she wanted me to go and kiss her.” He gave Camille a sad smile. “That day I stepped on the floorboard, and it creaked as usual. But there was no little noise from the bedroom. No kiss.”

  “But you still have your memories,” said Camille.

  “Memories, yes.” He gestured around the room. “And all this helps, of course.”

  “All this?”

  “Why do you think this apartment has so much furniture in it?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” lied Camille. Every day she had to navigate the forests of tables and chairs, keeping all the mahogany surfaces polished and free of dust, and had often wondered, somewhat irritably, what it was all doing there.

  “These pieces all belonged to my parents,” explained Proust. “When my mother died I couldn’t bear the thought of parting with any of them. The idea of a stranger’s clothes hanging in that armoire, of someone else sitting at that desk—” He waved a hand around the room and shuddered. “It was too much to contemplate. So I kept it all.” He paused. “When I look at an empty armchair, it’s not empty to me. I see my mother sitting in it, reading a book.”

  “I have nothing like that,” said Camille.

  Proust looked at her kindly. “Well, you don’t really need such things, you know. The only place where you can regain lost paradises is in yourself.”

  * * *

  One morning there was a knock on the apartment door. One of Olivier’s sisters stood in the corridor, her face white and drawn. She was clutching a blue envelope tightly in her fist. Camille looked down at the telegram and her world collapsed messily in on itself. Her tongue felt thick inside her head. She croaked one hoarse word: “Olivier?”