“A woman as beautiful as you for a dinner companion, and he would rather go talk of war with his friends.” The widow sighed.
“You embarrass me, Madame Villeneuve,” Caroline said, looking longingly at Jeannot’s untouched dessert.
“Nonsense, my dear. I do not recall having ever seen any woman with such a complexion or so lovely a smile.”
Caroline sent a silent thank you to the sciences of dermatology and dentistry. If she learned nothing else in her trips to the past, it was that skin and tooth care were uniformly neglected.
“I can only credit a healthy diet and plenty of fresh air.” Caroline smiled.
“They must have an abundance of both in Canada, then.” Mme. Villeneuve smiled back with a hand before her mouth, as was the custom to hide missing or blackened teeth.
“Your son is certainly passionate.”
“About politics, absolutely,” the widow sighed. “I sometimes despair for future generations.”
Caroline reached for the remaining dessert plate still resting untouched at Jeannot’s place.
“Shall we?” she said, placing a knife in the center of the sweet confection.
“It would be a sin not to,” Mme. Villeneuve said with a solemn nod.
In the shuttered bar-parlor of the Hotel Exemplaire, the registrar lifted his glass for a refill. The dark man with the fleece of white hair was paying and pouring and doing both generously. He did not even balk when the registrar suggested they turn to cognac—the fine aged bottle from the very top shelf. At prices made dear by the siege, the well-spoken stranger was paying through the nose, and the francs were filling the registrar’s pockets as the Vieille Réserve filled his head and warmed his insides.
The dark stranger was clearly not French but spoke the language like an educated patrician. He intimated, without tacitly saying so, that he was with the Deuxième Bureau. The registrar was flattered by the attention. The soldiers of the guard had treated the registrar with scorn when he brought them back to the hotel to find the German woman was gone. Now all these questions from an important official were making the little man feel like a patriot.
The questions were all about the filthy German whore in Room 22. What name did she call herself? Was there a man with her? When did he leave? Did she tell anyone what the name of the child was? Were any objects of an unusual nature found in her room?
“Unusual? Unusual in what way?” the registrar asked.
“Anything you may not have seen before. A device. A machine. An article of clothing of a design and fabric strange to you,” the dark man said, and tipped the fat cognac bottle to refresh his new friend’s glass.
“An article of clothing?” The registrar was intrigued. “Was this woman known to wear clothing that was provocative?”
“Nothing like that. Something remarkable that she may have left behind. Perhaps your maids saw something in the rooms that they would remember?”
“Shall we wake them?”
“Vigilance never sleeps,” the stranger said in a hushed, conspiratorial tone that sent a thrill up the registrar’s spine.
In the master boudoir at 33 Avenue Bosquet, Madame Villeneuve was prepared for bed with the help of Corrine. The widow dismissed the maid and sat at her vanity, which also served as a writing desk.
From a drawer in the vanity, she retrieved a journal and turned to the blank page that would be the entry for the day. She recorded the events of each day faithfully and had done so since she was a young woman, a schoolgirl. The current journal, a fancy leather-bound book with vellum pages trimmed in gold leaf, was volume twenty and told the story of her life written simply, not artfully, as a list of each day’s occurrences.
She wrote in the book more out of habit than, as it was when she began the daily chore, as a way to divulge the secret passions of her heart.
Earlier volumes were often scandalous and were curiously made more so by her dry, matter-of-fact reportage of her dalliances. More flowery language would have made those trysts seem like romantic affairs of the heart indulged in by a young lady succumbing to the irresistible pull of infatuation. Told in her plain prose, they read like an inventory of outrages described in the basest vernacular rather than the fond reminisces of an ingénue new to the ways of love. And that was how Mme. Villeneuve wished to recall them, honestly and without embellishment. These words were for no one else to read, only her.
Her youth was behind her now. In these days of the winter of her life, she looked upon men with regret rather than hope. The last few volumes of her memoirs were taken up with luncheons or gallery exhibits or the events of her son’s life rather than her own. She was a witness to, rather than a participant in, life in her dotage and was content with that.
But today was worthy of two pages or more in her diary. The charming young woman she had brought home filled the house with life once again. And to have an infant under her roof was something that Mme. Villeneuve thought never to see. Jeannot was an intellectual, a thinker rather than a lover, and his mother did not anticipate a wedding or grandchildren anytime soon, if ever.
The widow unstopped the ink bottle and dipped the quill inside, to find the bottle contained only a gritty residue. She had forgotten that she’d used the last of the ink on the previous night’s entry. There was no real cause to call for Corrine to bring more. In any case, she was really much too tired to do today’s events justice even in her flat prose.
Mme. Villeneuve set her pen aside and made for her bed. The heavy drapes were pulled closed, turning the continuing barrage without into a series of muted thumps.
She had no way to know the changes she wrought in her future by delaying her entry until the following
