The Paris Hours
Page 25
Sure enough, behind the stage there is an open door. He tears through it, his chest bursting, and gratefully gulps down the fresh night air. Around him, the musicians are milling about, shaking their heads, watching the building burn.
He scans the crowd for Suzanne.
She is not there.
* * *
The crowd spills out into the street, and finally Camille is on Rue des Abbesses. A metal sign swings in the night breeze above the entrance to the club: a white cat standing on a rooftop in the moonlight, its back arched in a languorous feline stretch. A fire truck arrives, and a posse of men hurries into the building. She looks up. The fire is clearly visible from the second-floor windows. There is now a sizable crowd in the street—not just the refugees from the club, but also residents who have emerged from their homes to watch the conflagration.
Let it burn, thinks Camille.
Finally, the notebook will be incinerated, just like its thirty-one brothers and sisters, and just as Monsieur Proust intended all along.
Camille takes her scarf out of her bag and pulls it over her head.
At last her secret is safe.
* * *
All around him people are coughing, crying, and clutching each other in relief. Jean-Paul limps through the crowd and looks up into the sky.
He is tired. He is leg is hurting, and he wants to go home. He should have known better than to come here, he thinks ruefully. These Americans only ever look out for themselves. What a fool, to imagine that Ernest Hemingway might help him! Jean-Paul does not need his story published, anyway. He wrote it for himself, and nobody else. He looks down fondly at his notebook, and then he stops walking.
Something is not quite right.
He opens the black leather covers and stares down at the neat lines that span the page. He flicks through the notebook, baffled. The words are not his. The handwriting is not his. It’s as if someone has performed an elaborate conjuring trick. Where has his story gone? Where is Elodie? He turns and looks back at the burning building, and is baptized by fresh sorrow.
At the front of the notebook there is a loose sheet of paper. It’s a piece of hotel stationery. Jean-Paul examines it in the dim light of a nearby streetlamp.
The hotel is on Rue des Canettes.
* * *
Guillaume walks the streets. There are small groups of people huddled on each corner, reluctant to return to their beds after such excitement. He looks at each person, but does not see the face he is hoping to see.
Suzanne has not waited for him.
He looks at his watch. Le Miroir’s goons will have discovered his escape hours ago. He imagines the rat-faced man’s fury, and Claude’s silent gloating. Arnaud the giant will be trying to hide his disappointment that he won’t be meeting Gertrude Stein, after all.
They will be watching for him now.
Guillaume plunges his hands into his pockets. There will be no trains to the west coast until the morning. He has the rest of the night ahead of him. He turns up the collar on his coat, and sets off across the city. He is going to walk to the train station.
He shakes his head. Montparnasse at last.
* * *
Camille Clermont walks away from Le Chat Blanc. The night air is cool on her face. She wanders along the narrow cobbled streets of Montmartre, lost in a memory.
That evening, nine years ago, after the Easter service at the Église Saint-Gervais.
After the bomb fell.
Olivier was in the choir.
He appeared at the door of the kitchen, covered in dust and debris, his face streaked with dirt. He held a baby in his arms.
I found her in the rubble, he said.
For two days they fed her, rocked her, sang her to sleep. They agreed that they would return her to the authorities after the Easter weekend.
Monday came, then Tuesday, then Wednesday.
Camille could not tear her eyes away from the child. Olivier watched his wife as she stared down at the baby, her body stilled by longing.
Thursday, Friday.
They called her Marie.
42
Morning
“MARIE!”
Camille stands in the lobby of the hotel, hands on hips. Moments later she hears footsteps patter down the staircase. She sees her daughter, pretty in a dark green pinafore, and her heart performs a small somersault.
“Oui, maman?”
“We have work to do,” says Camille. The breakfast service is well under way in the dining room. Berthe is pouring coffee and taking orders. Some guests have already eaten and are getting ready to leave for the day. Camille looks around the place with a critical eye. She takes one day off, and there is dust everywhere. She points to the reception desk. “Why don’t you sit there? I’ll bring you the silver we never got around to cleaning yesterday. You can work on that, and you can take people’s room keys when they leave. You remember how to hang them up on the hooks?”
Marie nods. She likes to watch the hotel guests come and go. She fetches two extra cushions, so she’ll be able to see everything that’s going on. She clambers up onto the chair.
“Ah, look at you, Marie! All ready for business, I see!” Olivier walks in, a big smile on his face. “She’s a natural, eh, Camille? Before we know it she’ll be running this place.”
Camille takes her husband’s hand and gives it a squeeze. He looks down at her and grins. He does not understand how much she has to be grateful for, and with luck, he never will.
She has not told Olivier what happened at Le Chat Blanc last night. She has not told him that she found the notebook, or that it has now finally been destroyed. She can see no good reason to enlighten him. He need never know how close they have sailed to disaster.
When she returned to the hotel, Olivier was both magnanimous and smug, and still not remotely apologetic about what he had done. Camille was too relieved to feel especially irritated. She climbed into their bed and they held each other close. Marie was fast asleep in the next room. My family, she thought.
Now she places a drawer full of knives and forks on the reception desk in front of her daughter. Marie sits up straight. She enjoys polishing the silver. She likes how the tarnish vanishes beneath the rub of the cloth, leaving everything looking perfectly new. Camille watches as she sets to work. She looks so prim and proper, perched behind the desk. Marie looks up and grins at her mother.
The notebook has gone for good, thinks Camille.
Everything looks perfectly new.
* * *
Jean-Paul Maillard suppresses a yawn as he walks slowly along Rue Saint-Sulpice. He has not slept well. The night was spent tossing and turning, restless with regret.
He does not understand how he left Le Chat Blanc with the wrong notebook under his arm.
His own will be ashes now.
Elodie has disappeared for good.
He nearly threw the other notebook away when he realized what had happened, but his own loss gave him pause. The hotel stationery he found tucked inside its pages is the only clue he has as to its provenance. Perhaps the management will be able to find its rightful owner. He has not read a word of it. He does not care whose pen has filled its pages.
It’s another beautiful day in Paris. Jean-Paul turns onto Rue des Canettes. He pauses for a moment in front of the hotel to check he has the right address.
He pushes open the front door and steps inside.
Acknowledgments
When A Good American was published in 2012, I used to tell a story about how a hotshot editor in New York read an early draft of the manuscript and rejected it. A year later, after I had rewritten half the novel, my agent somehow persuaded the same hotshot editor to read the book again, at which point she bought it. Then she made me rewrite the other half. This story will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Amy Einhorn. She sends me back to my desk to revise and rework, time and time again, until things are exactly right. For such editors, writers should be eternally grateful; I know I am.
It has been a joy to move to Flatiron Books and work with Amy again on The Paris Hours. And, once again, she has pushed and prodded and inspired me to make the best of this book, and I could not be more grateful to her. My thanks to everyone else on the brilliant team at Flatiron, including Marlena Bittner, Cristina Gilbert, Bob Miller, Conor Mintzer, Caroline Bleeke, Amelia Possanza, Nancy Trypuc, Katherine Turro, and Julianna Lee.
As always, Emma Sweeney in New York and Andrew Gordon in London have advised and guided me with skill and assurance.
I’m eternally grateful to my oh-so-smart and generous early readers: Pamela Klinger-Horn, Bibi Prival, Allison Smythe, Alexandra Socarides, and Stephanie Williams.
Only now that I’ve become a bookseller myself have I really begun to understand the devotion and smarts that are needed to succeed at what is simultaneously a quixotic and utterly necessary undertaking. Make no mistake, booksellers are superheroes. Every last one of them deserves a cape and their own Marvel franchise, and I thank and celebrate all of them. I am so proud and happy to have joined their ranks. In particular, I’m grateful to my business partner, Carrie Koepke. I never would have dreamed of opening Skylark Bookshop without her. Thank you for all of it, Carrie. And thanks and love to our amazing team at Skylark: Becky Reed, Carol Putnam, Beth Shapiro, Faramola Shonekan, Erin Regneri, and Chris Talley.
P. G. Wodehouse once dedicated a book to his daughter, Leonora, “without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.” Families can be like that sometimes, and thank heavens. To Alexandra Socarides and our children—Hallam, Catherine, Archer, and Nate—I offer up all my love and thanks. I could not wish for a better distraction.
Author’s Note
One of the joys of writing novels is all the travel. Not actual travel, mind you, but the journeys you get to take in your imagination. While I was writing my last book, Setting Free the Kites, I spent countless hours on the coast of Maine, even while I was stuck in landlocked Missouri. So it was with The Paris Hours. For the last few years I’ve had a lovely time strolling up and down the boulevards of Paris without ever leaving my desk. (Added bonus: no jet lag.)
It helps that I know the place well. I went to boarding school there when I was thirteen years old. Ten years later I returned, this time working as an attorney for an international law firm. When I sat down to write this book, it was a joy to revisit some of my old haunts.
But writing about Paris is not without its challenges. After all, there are already more books and movies set in the French capital than there are croissants in the city’s boulangeries. The symbol of Paris is the most recognizable architectural structure on the planet. So how to tell a story that offered a fresh perspective?
First, I set the novel on the streets and in the parks where real Parisians live and work, away from all those famous tourist attractions. (In all the time I lived there, I never once visited the Eiffel Tower.) Second, I chose to set my story in 1927. Back then the city was in a postwar explosion of creative brilliance, populated by an army of geniuses whose artistic legacies survive to this day. Finally, and perhaps counterintuitively, I resisted the allure of all that celebrity. Some of those characters appear in the book, but by design they exist on the periphery of the novel, not at its heart. As a writer I am subject to my own preoccupations, and I am drawn to quieter stories. And so I redrew the focus away from all that dazzling genius. My four protagonists had their own tales to tell.
On the subject of dazzling genius, a brief word about the tune that appears at various points throughout the novel. Passacaille is the third movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio, which is, for me, one of the most sublimely beautiful pieces of music ever written. Performed as intended, you will hear not only a piano, but also a cello and a violin. I reimagined the music as a solo piano piece, although I’ve never heard it played that way.
The character of Camille Clermont is based in large part upon Marcel Proust’s real maid, Céleste Albaret—but this novel is not, and is not intended to be, an accurate representation of Céleste’s life. While I have used some of her biographical details, I have also taken substantial liberties with ascertainable facts. For example, to the best of my knowledge Céleste’s devotion to Marcel Proust was absolute and unwavering, both during his life and afterward. But when I read that she burned all of his notebooks at his request, the novelist in me immediately began to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t followed his orders to the letter. And, with that one small question, this journey began.
Recommend The Paris Hours for your next book club!
Reading Group Guide available at
www.readinggroupgold.com
ALSO BY ALEX GEORGE
A Good American
Setting Free the Kites
About the Author
A native of England, ALEX GEORGE read law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He has lived in the Midwest of the United States for the last sixteen years. He is the founder and director of the Unbound Book Festival and is the owner of Skylark Bookshop, an independent bookstore in downtown Columbia, Missouri. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Stitches
2. A Rude Awakening
3. Rhapsody
4. Ritual and Remembrance
5. Passacaille I
6. A Promise Abandoned, A Promise Delivered
7. Ritual
8. Jealous of the Dead
9. Eastern Anatolia, 1916: A Mother’s Dress
10. The Deal
11. An American in Paris
12. Auxillac, 1913: Country Girl
13. Sons and Brothers
14. Paris, 1915: The Circus Medrano
15. The Language of Flowers
16. The Search Begins
17. Vaucluse, 1917: The Kindness of Strangers
18. Thérèse
19. Paris, 1918: The Treble Clef
20. Paris, 1913: An Upside-Down Life
21. Vaucluse, 1917: The Suitcase Under the Bed
22. Best Served Cold
23. The Bookshop
24. Paris, 1915: Confidences
25. Overheard Memories
26. A Fleeting Vision
27. The Jardin du Luxembourg
28. Paris, 1919: The First Betrayal
29. Performance
30. The Cost of Six Hundred Francs
31. Verdun, 1916: Passacaille II
32. An Unanticipated Development
33. Eastern Anatolia, 1915: Hector
34. A Priest’s Advice
35. A Reconfigured Heart
36. Paris, 1922: The Second Betrayal
37. Penance or Remembrance?
38. Arielle
39. Hope, Rekindled
40. A Woman Scorned
41. Le Chat Blanc
42. Morning
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Also by Alex George
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are eit
her products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE PARIS HOURS. Copyright © 2020 by Alex George. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.flatironbooks.com
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover photograph © Michael Trevillion/Trevillion Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: George, Alex, 1970– author.
Title: The Paris hours: a novel / Alex George.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Flatiron Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054653 | ISBN 9781250307187 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250307194 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6107.E53 P37 2020 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054653
eISBN 9781250307194
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First Edition: May 2020