The Suitors (6 page)

We learned, therefore, to be self-effacing. A lesson in tactfulness for which I am grateful to my parents, although it condemned my sister and me to watch others take bold advantage of the opportunities of life, whereas in our chosen professions, we sit on the sidelines, interpreting their language or unconscious minds. With that same reserve, we have both conformed to the images assigned to us since childhood, Marie as the pretty girl who picked a career in which her beauty works wonders, even though she could have gone into academia, astrophysics, or banking, and I as the smart girl who decided on a profession in which I can use my mind without being put on display.

Still, L’Agapanthe did bond us together, my sister and I, as soon as Nanny began going on her own vacations instead of accompanying us there. Marie and I “rubbed off
on” each other. I pushed Marie to break free of the idea that she was simply some dumb blonde, and I succeeded so well that she quickly rose to the top of her profession and set up her own agency. She no longer works as an interpreter for anyone but the President of the Republic, whom she accompanies on all his travels. And Marie in turn has helped me to find my own beauty, even though my work has always been more important to me than my appearance. I was so used to being not much to look at that I had to make a real effort to stop feeling invisible. Thanks to Marie’s guidance and assistance, though, the glances I get from men these days tell me that I’m nicely visible indeed.

And L’Agapanthe has become part of our identity. By demonstrating the subtle framework of our codes and contradictions, this house, all by itself, could illustrate our education, how we became who we are, as well as the refinement and culture of our parents. We had come to realize, of course, that L’Agapanthe was being changed by time, even deformed, in a way, through repairs and renovations, and we knew that the life we led there, already anachronistic, would soon become almost an aberration. But the house was still standing, and up and running for a few months every year. And I was glad that my young son was able to join me every August after
spending a month with his father. That way, he could understand the upbringing I had received there and inherit this culture naturally, without any formal instruction. Because L’Agapanthe was also, like any other family house, a wonderful instrument of transmission linking the past to the future.

So it was hardly surprising that Marie and I were trying to save it from being sold. And I was thrilled by the idea of experiencing there for the first time an adventure with my sister, one in which we would more fully discover ourselves and each other.

The house

L’Agapanthe has nothing flashy about it. No balustrade or row of columns overlooking the sea. It is a Mediterranean villa, built around a loggia like a monastery around its cloister, the complete opposite of a house with a view. As if the sea had decided to behave like an experienced courtesan and simply suggest its presence, with bright touches shimmering through the shade of lush plants and undergrowth, instead of flaunting itself under the windows of L’Agapanthe like a trollop, as it does before the other villas along the Riviera
.

Instead, the garden, with its graphic lines and dramatic effects visible from every part of the house, is an invitation to reverie. The lawn unrolls its green carpet beneath a canopy of umbrella pines whose long silhouettes, like slanting strokes of charcoal, are softened by the silvery grays of their rugged bark. A triangle of sea frames itself in the opening of
a hedge at the end of the lawn, like a vanishing point on the horizon
.

Here nature is tamed by constant care. The grass preserves the trace of our steps like fingerprints on silk velvet. Pine branches and trunks, like paintings, must be supported with cables to keep them from drooping or falling over one another. Thus domesticated, the garden takes on the artificial airs of a stage set, where one might glimpse a dirty old man trotting after some luscious creature, or a married couple making a scene
.

And yet the garden, by creating harmony between indoors and outdoors, links the house to the sea. And that gradual movement from architecture to nature can be seen in the careful arrangement of the landscape. The olive trees, which make an almost urban impression on the front terrace, where they are set within flagstones like plane trees in a schoolyard, seem wilder a little downhill, among the clumps of lavender dotting the strip of open space halfway down the stone steps to the pine grove. There the cypresses and pink laurels must be content with their decorative role at the bottom of the steps, where hedges, in turn, complete the transformation from vegetation to the mineral world, framing the lawn down to the gorse-studded slopes among the rocks at the beach
.

L’Agapanthe is a theater
à l’italienne,
where the lawn is the stage, the rooms are the box seats, and the terrace forms the orchestra pit, with identical flights of steps on both sides
.

One particularity of this house is its perfect symmetry. From the guest lavatories to the shower rooms, everything was conceived in duplicate, and often assigned separately to men and women. Which is certainly not the case for the two sets of steps on the terrace, so why do people always use the ones on the right?

Perhaps the inhabitants of every house establish tacit traffic patterns that may defy all logic and even the challenges of home improvements? At L’Agapanthe, the steps on the right draw us as if marked by invisible and imperious tracks, and we still instinctively avoid the other steps even though the new swimming pool is on that side of the house
.

My sister and I had no need to discuss how we would each prepare for the weekend of July 14. Relying on her charm, Marie managed to confirm that our father’s finances were still flourishing, while I scouted around to draw up a list of suitors to whom an invitation to L’Agapanthe would seem both welcome and perfectly natural.

Jean-Michel Destret had the advantage of being a friend of Laetitia and Bernard Braissant, who knew my sister. Destret was rich, but just how rich? Not as much as all that, probably, in spite of his astronomical salary, golden parachute, and holdings in the investment group he managed. A reliable estimate was difficult to come by with celebrity CEOs like him, over whom the newspapers went wild. At last: a French entrepreneur! As for the
Braissants, they were delighted at the idea of bringing him along for a weekend at the house, thus introducing this new star in the financial heavens to such prestigious members of the Establishment.

The Braissants were by no means my cup of tea. They belonged to that category of phony leftists whom Marie ran into while on the job, important “cultural figures” who’d found their place in the sun by exposing the official cultural elite for their lack of social consciousness through their endless petitions and loudly righteous indignation. Their role models? Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for beauty and glamour; Sartre and Beauvoir for charisma, moral authority, and the art of pulling strings. Tirelessly trumpeting their political righteousness, they appropriated the allure and importance of any problem they championed, be it the tragedy in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, or the plight of illegal aliens. And they expected to be treated with the gravity and respect such weighty issues deserved. Anyone reluctant to show them enough deference they dismissed as callous, brainless or, even worse, bourgeois, in which last category they naturally filed me away as a rich “daddy’s girl.”

Marie, doubtless benefiting from her association with powerful people (and the Braissants’ healthy self-regard), escaped that fate. The couple treated her with a mixture
of condescension and benevolence. They had selected her to be their “rich heiress,” the way anti-Semites invariably befriend a “good Jew.” Except that instead of proving they weren’t racists, they sought to show that while making an exception for my sister, they despised money. It was the least that could be expected from the editor in chief of a satirical magazine and the communications director for a politician, and from left-wing intellectuals in general. In short, the Braissants were freeloaders. I found them as unbearable as they were pretentious. Still, as Marie reminded me, they were serving us up Jean-Michel Destret on a silver platter.

“Can you possibly explain to me why this young man is bringing his car and chauffeur down from Paris when he’s flying into the airport at Nice this afternoon?”