I imagine he would. If a man as prominent as the Baron de LaGrange somehow diverted his travels to join the rebel General de Gaulle in London, it would be a black eye for the Marshal’s regime. Even if the baron simply stayed in America like an exile, he’d likely be condemned and stripped of his French citizenship. All this reminds me that Anna is half-American and doesn’t need to be here starving and freezing with the rest of us. “Are you going with them?”
Anna gives a sad shake of her head. “I can’t leave France while my husband rots in a prison camp.”
Even though her words echo my earlier feelings, I argue, “Just because he’s in a cage doesn’t mean you need to be.”
“I think that’s what marriage is. If one of you is stuck, you both are.”
Is that what Henri would want because we’re engaged? I’m not used to thinking of myself as half of a whole, and while I ponder it, suddenly somber, Anna gives me a little nudge to lighten the mood. “Besides, I can’t go to America—what would you do without me here to help manage your art career?”
I grin. “Oh, is that what you’re doing?”
Anna grins back. “Just wait until you’re done with your first sketches. On Saint Joan’s day I’m going to talk you up to every village provincial. Today the Church of Saint-Roch, tomorrow a gallery in Paris!”
I feel the tingle of longing as she resurrects my old dream to go to Paris, the city where I was born, and walk the streets where the family I never knew might have walked. To live the big-city life I might’ve lived if I hadn’t been orphaned. But I beat those thoughts down and blow out an incredulous laugh, because Paris is also the center of the art world. Amateur sketches like mine would elicit nothing but mockery from any honest art critic.
Of course, there isn’t any honest art in France right now; just the kind the fascists sanction, and if they sanction mine . . .
Anna hands me a pencil and pretends to crack a whip. “So you’d best get to work—and not just because we need better rations.”
We do need better rations. We’re running out of food. If it weren’t for Madame Simon’s stealth missions to the black market and all the baroness’s pickling and bottling of early autumn, we’d be in real trouble. As it is, we’re eating rutabagas every day. If we have meat, it’s rabbit from the hutches or pigeon from the dovecotes. We’re out of coffee too, forced to make café au lait with a bitter brew of chicory.
I’m not sure that making over the castle in Adrienne Lafayette’s image is going to get us real coffee or convince Vichy officials that we’re not a hotbed of so-called antinationalist ideas, but if Anna and the baroness are right that my work helps secure government assistance with food and supplies, I’m happy to try.
Not that I have much to work with. Just a few dry old books about Lafayette’s wife that I took from the castle library. Now I crack them open and flip open my new sketchbook too, cheered for the first time in a while by the sight of a fresh blank page.
Meanwhile, Anna looks for something to read on Madame Beatrice’s bookshelf, until her attention is captured by something else. “Mon Dieu, Marthe. Is this you as a little girl?”
I tilt my head in confusion. “What?”
“In this photograph,” she says, pointing at the wall.
Wondering if I somehow missed an old picture of the first class of orphans, I go over to look, hoping I’ll see me and Henri and Sam as kids. But the photo shows a younger Madame Beatrice standing in front of the castle and wearing a nurse’s apron, smiling beatifically at a handsome French soldier who holds a little pigtailed girl in his arms.
I squint, because the girl does look a bit like me, but I have almost no photographs of me as a child—and none at this age—so I can’t be sure. Besides, I don’t remember the man or the moment. “I don’t think it’s me. A lot of kids and a lot of soldiers came through here in those days. Maybe that soldier was someone important, but I can’t think of any reason why Madame Beatrice would keep a photograph of me.”
Anna laughs. “Why does Aunt Bea do anything?”
“Madame Beatrice is your aunt?”
At my obvious surprise, Anna asks, “Don’t we seem like we’re related?” They don’t look alike, but Anna is certainly more like the colorful preventorium president than she is like her own mother, the militant baroness. And as I squint, Anna laughs. “I’m teasing. She’s not my aunt by blood! Just an old family friend, but she says we’re so much alike because she practically ushered me into the world during the First World War.”