Paris: The Novel (103 page)

Her father was pleased with what he took to be signs of a new maturity. At the end of a year, Louise announced: “Mademoiselle says it would be a good idea for me to spend a few months with a French family,” Louise told her parents. “Total immersion, she calls it.”

Her mother was not so happy about this idea. Though she was quite accomplished artistically, she was a conventional woman of her class, and she felt it was unseemly for a girl to have too many intellectual attainments.

But her kindly, round-faced father was more amenable.

“It’s not as if she wanted to go to university,” he remarked. “No man wants to marry a girl who does that.” He paused. “But going to France, it’s more like a finishing school really, isn’t it?”

And so she was sent to stay with a suitable family, who lived in a small
manoir
, a farmhouse really, in the valley of the Loire, not far from the Château de Cygne. Her hosts were a retired official from the colonial service and his wife, who was from the
petite noblesse
, the minor nobility. Their children were all grown up, their son in Paris. And for more than six happy months Louise had lived with them like a daughter. By the end of 1920, although she might not be up to date with some of the latest idioms used by the young, Louise spoke perfect French.

•  1924  •

Claire was happy to be in Paris. “I’m just a wide-eyed girl,” she would say with a laugh, “whose mother took her to the most exciting place in the world.”

But it was her uncle Marc who really opened her eyes.

“The whole of Europe is devastated after the Great War,” he liked to say, “but in Paris, we are recovering with style.” Certainly for a struggling artist, a poor writer or a young person like Claire, Paris was heaven on earth. And nobody knew more about what was going on than Marc.

After Aunt Éloïse died, and left everything to him, Marc moved into her apartment. He kept all her pictures, adding his own, so that the walls were wonderfully crowded. More than once he had given Claire a guided tour, explaining where each picture came from, and something about the artist. One day, when she’d admired a painting of the Gare Saint-Lazare, he told her, “That picture really belongs to your mother. She can take it anytime she wants.”

But when she asked her mother about it, Marie told her: “Aunt Éloïse bought the painting for me, but I never paid for it.”

“What made you choose it?” Claire asked.

“That’s a little secret from long ago,” her mother replied with a smile. “Anyway, it looks very well in the apartment where it is. Let it stay there.”

Her uncle would tell her about the artists he’d met.

“I’d love to take you to Giverny to see Monet, but he’s getting so old now that I don’t like to trouble him,” he remarked.

“The last survivor of Impressionism,” she suggested.

“I’d say he’s lived right through it and out the other side,” her uncle replied. You have the post-Impressionists like van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Expressionists—people who created a world that seems almost more vivid, urgent, even violent than real life—though they’re all tending toward abstraction—Cézanne especially, I’d say. But Monet’s gone on for so long that those pools of water lilies and screens of willows he does have turned into a sort of dream world of color that’s almost pure abstraction.”

“Have you met Picasso?” she asked.

“Yes. He’s a brilliant draftsman, you know,” he said. “He could have been a pure classical artist. He has incredible facility. Instead of which, he decided to break every rule of art.” He smiled. “Naturally, if he was going to invent Cubism, he did it in Paris.”

They talked about Surrealism, which was all the rage just then. And Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. “They operate mostly in Paris, but they’re going to Monte Carlo for the winter now,” he explained. Her uncle had been at the stage scandal of
L’Après-midi d’un faune
, and the riot which took place when Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
was first performed.

“But what you must understand,” he would impress upon her, “is that all this excitement in Paris isn’t just about painting, music and ballet, interesting as they all are. It’s deeper and broader than that. We’ve just had a war. The German Empire, the ancient Hapsburg Empire in Vienna and the creaking old Ottoman Empire of the Turks are all broken. The Russian Empire has undergone a Bolshevik revolution. The old world order has gone. We’ve seen warfare on an industrial scale that’s not only killed millions but may even call into question our society and the nature of man himself.

“Naturally, most people assume that the comfortable old life with its solidity, its stratified classes, its masters and servants will gather itself together again. The world that is good to people like us.

“But the avant-garde are looking to the future with fresh eyes. These artistic movements you read about—the Constructivists in Russia, the Vorticists in England, or Futurists in Italy—they’re artistic movements certainly, each with their manifestos—but they’re reacting to this new reality, where the old certainties of humanity are all called into question, and the destructive industrial machines we’ve created seem almost to have taken on a fearsome life of their own. And if you want the best expression of that uncertainty, then read this.”

He gave her a slim book of verse:
The Waste Land
, by T. S. Eliot.

“It’s just published. Eliot’s an American in London—I suspect he may turn into an Englishman, the way Henry James did. His friend Pound, an American who’s been living in Paris, gave it to me.”

On other occasions, he spoke of some of the French authors—Apollinaire, the modernist and anarchist. He told her delightedly how Apollinaire and his friend Picasso were briefly arrested, for reasons known only to the bureaucratic mind, when the
Mona Lisa
had been stolen. “Turned out it was a crazy Italian who wanted to return the
Mona Lisa
to Italy. They found it in his lodgings.”

Most important of all, however, he introduced her to the novels of Proust.

“The Prousts were our neighbors on boulevard Malesherbes,” he told her. “We just thought Marcel was a show-off and a dilettante. So did everybody. Who would have guessed he was hatching this work of genius in his head?”

“Does he still live there?”

“He moved just a block up the street and around the corner on boulevard Haussmann—only five minutes’ walk from Joséphine. He lived there until just after the war. But they say he’s dying now, and his brother may have to finish his work.”

The following year, Proust had died. But by then Claire had finished
Swann’s Way
; now she was halfway through
Sodom and Gomorrah
.

She’d never read anything like it before. Proust’s search through his extraordinary memory, his re-creation of every detail of the passing world, his ruthless portrayal of every aspect of human psychology, were fascinating to her.

“I’m delighted to see you taking such an interest in literature,” Marc said. “I’m only sorry you can’t share it with Aunt Éloïse anymore. She’d read everything. But don’t forget,” he added, “people like Eliot and Proust are writing radically new work, but they are still quite conservative politically. They’re looking for meaning at the end of the old world. Many of the avant-garde have a very different outlook.”

“They believe in revolution, don’t they?”

“Paris has always prided itself on being home to revolutionary thought. Ever since the French Revolution, we believe that all radical ideas belong to us. And people with radical ideas have always come to Paris to discuss them. A lot of radical Paris believes that only world revolution will
solve all these new problems. Now we’ve had a Russian revolution, they think the rest will follow—or should. I’m sure Picasso’s a communist, for instance.”

But if Claire was excited by the cultural ferment of Paris, most of her time now was spent working on a grand commercial enterprise.

Joséphine. When her mother and Marc had reopened the family store, they had asked her to come and help just to give her something to do. But that was two years ago. She was an integral part of the operation now. “I don’t know,” her uncle was kind enough to say, “how we’d have done it without you.”

Of course, her mother was the central figure upon whom everything turned. She had a wonderful way with all the people working there. She was always calm, sympathetic, but very firm, like a mother in control of a large family. She inspired loyalty.

Marie controlled all the day-to-day running of the operation, and dealt with the biggest and most important suppliers—couturiers like Chanel, and others. But she soon delegated a smaller but very important task to Claire.

“I want you to find new designers and clothes makers. The ones who are going to attract girls of your generation. You find them, then you bring them to me, and we’ll see if we can make a deal.”

She had found them—in Paris, sometimes in the provinces, in Italy. And she would sit in on the meetings they had with her mother, and see how quickly and cleverly her mother discovered the strengths and weaknesses of their operations.

“How are you so good at business?” she asked her mother once. “You never did it before this.”

“I don’t know, to tell the truth. I suppose it must be in the blood.” Her mother smiled. “Do you think I’m good, then?”

“You know very well you are.”

Two years of working together had changed their relationship in subtle ways. They really were like a pair of sisters now. Sometimes they disagreed about whether to take on a supplier, or how to price the goods. When they did, they argued it out, and although Marie had the final say, she always respected Claire’s opinion and her intellect.

But they would both have agreed instantly on one thing. The Joséphine store could never have succeeded without the guiding hand of Marc.

“Our greatest competition is the Galeries Lafayette. They are just along the boulevard from us. They are much bigger. The business is well run and constantly innovating. There’s no point in trying to mimic all their departments, like haberdashery. We compete, as we always did, on fashionable goods at the best price. So we have to make people come to us because of the way we sell the goods, and because we always have the latest style, almost before it’s arrived! We must follow the old French military maxim:
Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace
. We need audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”

“You make it sound like a theater,” Claire laughed.

“But that’s it, exactly,” cried Marc. “A great store is not just a useful place. It’s an experience. It needs drama and surprise, like a theater.”

And he proved it. The Joséphine store was a constant surprise. Mannequins were being used in store windows now. But the windows at Joséphine didn’t only show off the dresses. They told a story, like a painting. Marc also had a gallery inside the store, where new artists’ work was shown. Every month something happened at Joséphine, something that was talked about, something that one had to go and see before it disappeared. It was a sensation.

The beauty parlor and the hair salon were huge successes too. Joséphine was the best place for young women to get the new, short, boyish haircut, the gamine look.

By the spring of 1924, Marc was running with a new theme for the summer.

The Olympics.

It was quite remarkable really. The ancient sports festival had been revived only in 1896. Appropriately, the first games had been in Athens. With one gap during the war, the games had continued every four years. Paris had been the venue in 1900, followed by St. Louis in America; then London, Stockholm and Antwerp had all had their turns. But now the games were returning to Paris again: proof indeed, the French thought—as if any were needed—that the capital of France was the finest city in the world.

Already Marc had his plans for windows with themes like track events, swimming, boxing, cycle racing. The store’s theme that summer would
be sportive, with sportily cut tweeds and jaunty little cloche hats lined up for the months of September and October.