But, still, the daughter. Not quite like us. That was what they whispered behind her back. She might be tall like her father, have his straight, dark brows—de Courcelles brows, as distinctive as a royal birthmark, chiseled in stone on the effigies in the family chapel, immortalized in oils in portraits, displayed in the flesh on her father’s beloved face—but her hair was her mother’s, soft masses of fluffy ash-blond hair, like something out of an advertisement for soap. Common, they said. So like her mother, even though she wasn’t at all, not really, not if one really looked. But no one did.
Aurélie wished she had been born a man, to prove them wrong. Then, she might have distinguished herself in battle, proved her valor in fighting for her country. She might have been awarded the Légion d’honneur as her father had been, when he was only fifteen and had lied about his age to take sword against the Prussians back in the war of 1870. Admittedly, the French forces had been repulsed and her father had been forced with the rest of the troops to retreat to Paris, where they had endured terrible privations under siege, but no one denied his bravery. It was the first thing anyone mentioned when speaking of her father: “Do you remember the battle of Mont-Valérien?” And they would wag their heads in admiration over his audacity, as though it had been five years ago and not close on fifty.
Here was France in peril again, and what was she, Aurélie, doing? Sitting in a sulk in her mother’s salon while an elderly professor of ancient history droned on about Caesar’s wars and how they wouldn’t be in the bind they were in if only more military men had bothered to attend his lectures.
“Yes, but did Caesar have trains?” said her mother, taking the sting out of the comment by handing the professor another cake. Aurélie’s grandfather had made his fortune in something to do with trains, just after the American Civil War. Her mother rather liked reminding people of that. “Rilla, darling, will you ring for more coffee?”
As Aurélie went to tug the bell, she heard the professor saying stiffly, “He had baggage trains, which was much the same thing.”
“Somewhat slower, I imagine,” said Maman.
“No slower than our army at the moment.” Seizing the advantage, one of her mother’s other guests leaned forward to grab the countess’s attention. “Have you heard they haven’t enough trains to take the troops to the front? They’re requisitioning the taxis.”
“With all the taxis gone, how will we get to the opera?” murmured Maman.
“But the opera is closed,” said the professor blankly.
Maman briefly pressed her eyes shut. “Yes,” she said gently. “I know.”
It was, Aurélie knew, a dreadful trial to her that the clever men, the young men, had all gone off, most to war. Like Maximilian von Sternburg, fighting, one presumed, for the wrong side.
“Shall I see if the papers have come?” Aurélie said, too loudly, breaking into whatever her mother was saying. She wasn’t sure what had made her think of Herr von Sternburg. Germans, she supposed. “La Patrie should be here by now.”
Her mother glanced at the ornate ormolu clock on the mantel, a gilded Bacchus reclining on top of the clockface while two cherubs dropped grapes into his mouth. “It’s four o’clock. We should have La Liberté as well.”
Since war had been declared, they measured their days by the arrival of the papers, Le Matin with their morning chocolate, Le Paris-Midi at noon, La Patrie at three, La Liberté at four, and L’Intransigeant at six. It was the one sign Maman gave that she was at all concerned with the fate of her adopted country: the way her jeweled hands grabbed for the daily papers. Not that they were of terribly much use. The government had passed a law back in August banning any military information from the papers and anything that might serve to dampen national morale, which meant that one tended to read very little that actually mattered. But even that little was enough to make them check the clock and badger the porters for the papers.
“They’re saying it will be another 1870,” said the professor. “We’ll be roasting rats for supper.”
“I’m sure the chefs here can turn even rat into a delicacy,” said Maman, never mind that most of the kitchen staff had been called up, along with the rest of the male populace of Paris.
“I remember the last time,” said the professor gloomily. “The Germans at the gates.”
“Plus ?a change.” Maman shrugged her narrow shoulders, and her entourage laughed, as though she’d said something dreadfully witty. Aurélie hated all of them: the men about town with their lilac cravats, the artists with their paint-stained waistcoats, the poets who thought themselves above the vulgarities of war. There were no captains of industry here, no men of action; her mother had had enough of those, she said, in her youth in New York. Instead, she entertained the philosophers and the fainéants, the men too old or effete to don uniform.