“Merci, madame,” Bruno said. He looked around the shop and swore it hadn’t changed in decades, except for the prices, which were higher and no longer in francs. But the summer sales were on, and Léa needed new sandals.
“Et votre maman?” the saleswoman asked, and Bruno realized that she must be Anne-Marie, the shop’s owner. “Vos soeurs?”
“They are all well, thank you,” he replied. Anne-Marie had somehow recognized him and knew that he was a policeman, but he hadn’t recognized her. “Maman and Papa are still very active,” he went on. “I’ll tell her you said hello.”
“Likewise,” she said. “And if you could tell your mother that we’re closing in two months, and we’ve appreciated her business over the years.”
“You’re closing permanently?”
“I’m afraid so,” she replied. “Early retirement. We just can’t compete with . . .”
Bruno nodded. “The chain stores. I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “You’re looking for shoes for your daughter?”
“Yes, sandals, in size 36. She wants the ones made in Saint-Tropez,” he answered. “I have specific orders. She wants them in light-brown leather.”
Anne-Marie smirked. “I’m not sure if I have any left in brown in 36, but I’ll check.”
She went in the back room, and Bruno smiled as the other client walked around the room, testing her new heels. “A summer wedding,” she said. “My niece.” She walked over to Bruno and whispered, “It’s costing a fortune. They’re renting the Château Grimaldi in Puyricard.”
“I’d better start saving,” Bruno said. “My daughter is almost twelve.”
The client laughed and walked over to a mirror to look at her shoes. Bruno realized that one of the most pleasant weddings he had been to recently was Antoine and Marine’s, a year ago, in a tiny Ligurian village. Anne-Marie came back with a shoe box in her hands. “Great,” Bruno said.
“Not exactly,” she replied. “They’re not brown, and I know how selective little girls can be. They’re the Tropeziennes brand, but in silver. It’s a very chic color right now.” She pointed to the small metal emblem on one of the straps, to prove the shoe’s authenticity.
He looked at the sandals, flat with five delicate straps that surrounded the foot. They had been favorites since Brigitte Bardot made them famous in the late 1950s. His sisters had always worn them, and he noticed that girls and women in Aix still did. “I’ll take them,” he said.
Marine left the café, kissing Verlaque good-bye and wishing both him and Jean-Marc a good day, and made her way up the rue Clemenceau in the direction of their apartment near the cathedral. For the first year of their married life they had each kept their apartments, but she recently sold hers, located in the chic quartier Mazarin, and they had just begun to look for a house in the countryside. The prices made her stomach flip, as did the fact that her husband didn’t flinch seeing renovated farmhouses near Aix selling for multiple millions of euros. He claimed it was because he was used to Parisian prices, but she knew that it was really because of the wealth he had grown up with. Antoine’s grandfather, Charles Verlaque, had earned the family fortune in flour mills, Antoine’s father, Gabriel, halfheartedly took over in the late 1970s. The mills were sold to a multinational in the late 1990s.
Marine cherished mornings in Aix, especially in summer, before the tour groups arrived. When she was a girl, she dreamed of living in a big city, Paris or Rome, and wished that her hometown wasn’t so sleepy. Now she found herself wishing there were fewer people in Aix. In a few minutes she arrived at the place de l’Archevêché, now called the place des Martyrs de la Résistance, but the former name would always be engraved in her mind. It was the one she had grown up with. Instead of turning right, toward their apartment, she decided to walk on and visit the cathedral. She had a long day ahead, researching the war years of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and needed a few moments of inspiration. When her book proposal, a biography on the couple’s working, and loving, relationship, had been accepted by a prestigious Parisian publishing house, she resigned from her position as a law professor at the Université d’Aix-Marseille. Quitting her job hadn’t been a rash decision—she had been thinking seriously about it for over a year—and with Antoine’s blessing her book deal helped her deliver her letter of resignation to the dean. Almost a year on, ex-colleagues told her that the university still hadn’t hired a replacement, and she felt relieved to be away from the slow-turning wheels of French academia.
Saint Mitre’s carved face greeted her as she stood outside Saint-Sauveur. The saint was beheaded in the fifth century, and he held his own head in his hands. It was so much more elegant, mused Marine, than having it lie on the ground at his feet. Or perch on a platter, as Judith often does with the head of Holofernes. She stopped to give a beggar beside the front doors a euro. The beggar said merci, and Marine saw that he was blind. She went inside, leaving the bright sunshine for the darkened church. It was mercifully cool, as the morning was already hot. As much as she loved living downtown, she relished the idea of their future country house, whose thick walls she imagined would keep them cool. She frowned, realizing that her guilt about the probable cost of the new house was quickly diminishing.
The chapel of saint Mitre was on the left-hand side of the nave, and Marine walked through the church with purpose. Her aim wasn’t to visit the saint’s sarcophagus, which was in the chapel (Who knows whose body is under all that stone, she thought). She wanted to do something she had been doing since she was a child and had always brought her luck—or at any rate helped her to think straight. On the column to the right of the tomb, about
