There was little privacy here as the place filled up. Two men slid into the booth across from her, removing their hats and smiling greetings. They eyed the shifting shape beneath the shawl with openly lurid interest. They nudged one another like schoolboys. They made muttered remarks at the sounds Stephen was making on her breast. They giggled like children. Caroline pretended interest in a rather dreary landscape framed on the wall above the booth.
“A lady wishes to sit here,” a man standing at the opening booth said in a deep rumble.
The two men protested. The man, a big man in a leather-trimmed wool coat, grabbed fistfuls of their clothing and dragged them from the bench. He cast them toward the crowd standing at the bar. He tipped his head at Caroline. He had the face of a boxer with a crushed nose and scarring along his brows. But his eyes were kind.
“Would you excuse the company of my mistress?” the man said.
Caroline nodded in gratitude.
The big man stood aside to make way for an older woman dressed in conservative clothes of magnificent quality. She wore a coat trimmed in ermine or mink over a high-collared dress of black silk embroidered with jade insets. On her hands were dove-colored gloves, with a garnet ring worn on one finger.
She walked with the aid of a gold-capped walking stick. Despite whatever infirmity she suffered, she carried herself in a regal manner. The woman settled on the bench across from Caroline and removed her gloves, setting the ring on the table. The big man stood at the opening to the booth with his back to the ladies.
“Claude will make certain we maintain some degree of privacy,” the woman said. “You should not have to suffer unwanted attentions while seeking to see that your child is fed. War has made us all equally miserable but it is no cause to turn us to beasts.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said. “I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.”
“I am Madame Villeneuve,” the woman said. “I assume from your charming version of French that you are foreign.”
“Caroline Rivard. I’m Canadian, though my husband is French. I am learning the language from him.”
“The only place to learn any language is in bed,” Mme. Villeneuve said and smiled when Caroline blushed. “Your husband has left you and your child alone?”
“We were separated by the fighting. I am trying to find him.” Caroline resisted creating a more elaborate story than that. She opted for some partial truths. “Stephen, my baby, and I were evicted from our hotel. They did not believe I was married.”
“These filthy Germans have made a tragedy of all our lives. Now they are outside our gates. They will not stop until they have made us all into Germans.”
“Do you believe they will win? They will take the city?” Caroline wished she already knew the answer to that.
“I only know what I read in the papers, which means I know nothing.” Mme. Villeneuve sniffed. “It does not take a genius in military affairs to know that if their cannons are close enough to strike the Pantheon and the Sorbonne, then we will soon see Prussians marching on our boulevards.”
As if in emphasis to her remarks, the restaurant shook with a tremor of enough strength to set the chandeliers swinging. Dust streamed down from the ceiling. The clamor of conversation died across the dining room and bar for a few seconds then resumed as before. “You say you lost your lodgings,” Mme. Villeneuve continued. “Where will you and your child stay?”
“I will find a place,” Caroline said. Beneath the concealment of the shawl, she opened her dress further and shifted Stephen to her other breast.
“A woman alone? Don’t be ridiculous. You will only face the same ignorance at any hotel worth staying at. The two of you will find yourself in some horrid pensione, where you will be robbed and worse.”
“It’s that dangerous?”
“Can you not feel it in the air? Unrest. Disobedience. The uncertainty of these days has given men license to act unlike they would in a time of security. No woman is safe, even in as sophisticated an establishment as this once was. Those two pigs leering at you as they did! All decorum gone. Respect is a forgotten thing. It may become so anarchic that we will eventually welcome the Germans in to restore things to the way they should be.”
“Then I have no desirable opportunities for shelter then?” Caroline felt as trapped as she had back in her rooms at the Exemplaire.
“Nonsense,” Mme. Villeneuve said, pursing her lips. “You will come to my home. I will not see a young lady, even a Canadian, cast upon the street with a baby in arms.”
Caroline’s eyes welled with tears, and the older woman held up a hand to quell any displays of emotion or gratitude.
“We will wait here until just before curfew. Then Claude will escort us past the army barricades to my home. You will be far more comfortable there, and I will be far more comfortable with myself, knowing I did not leave two innocents to a fate unknown.”
“Thank you, Madame. Thank you for my baby more than for myself,” Caroline said and dabbed at her eyes with a cloth.
“Now, let us see if they have any brandy of quality here. Would you care for a glass, my dear?” Mme. Villeneuve tapped a finger on Claude’s broad back. The big man waved for a waiter.
“More than anything in the world, Madame,” Caroline sighed.
The street before the Hotel Exemplaire was filled with a choking mix of wood smoke and brick dust. A twelve-inch Krupp shell had dropped through the roof of a theater a block away. It buried itself deep in the orchestra pit before detonating. The resulting blast caused the ceiling to collapse, leaving the one thousand seat emporium a flaming ruin and covering the surrounding streets with a thick fog driving pedestrians before it.
A
