In the meantime, the preventorium will be left to the supervision of the Baroness de LaGrange, who is currently explaining to a dizzying array of diamond-bedecked middle-aged women sipping at rose-hued vermouth cocktails that this ballroom, the so-called philosopher’s salon, has been lovingly restored to its eighteenth-century splendor with tall gilded mirrors and a freshly polished parquet floor. Meanwhile, her husband, the baron, is cloistered with the board’s most prominent members—cigar-chomping government officials and pipe-puffing French industrialists, all ranting about the communists and fascists and whether we’re ready for a war with Hitler.
All this war talk makes the spirit of the party faintly desperate—people talking too fast, eating too much, and laughing too hard, as if we might never get another chance . . .
“This is over-the-top,” says our friend Samir, gesturing at the lavish buffet, buckets of champagne, and rose garlands hanging from the gilt-edged carved doors. “But I guess the moneyed class wouldn’t trek into the mountains for a bake sale, so while they’re here we’d better soak them for every penny, pound, and franc.”
I smirk. “You sound like a communist, Sam. Keep talking like that and I’ll tell the baron.”
Sam grins. “You’re not that competitive, are you, Marthe?”
“Orphan’s motto,” I remind him. “Always look out for me, myself, and I.”
He laughs, but I mean it. We’re pals, so I know Sam wants this scholarship, but I want it more. I can already hear Parisian professors pronouncing my name with French sophistication instead of in the clumsy American way that sounds like Marta. I can already feel the fizz of excitement in visiting the Louvre for the first time, I can almost taste the espresso I’ll drink at cafés with a view of the Eiffel Tower, and my fingers are already itching to sketch by the river Seine. My exciting new life starts tonight!
At eight, between bites of crudités, I force myself to listen patiently to speeches about the charitable endeavors here at Lafayette’s chateau, where the orphanage I grew up in has been shuttered in favor of an advanced medical preventorium for malnourished and tubercular children.
At nine, Henri tells me I look like Greta Garbo, and dancing with him to “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” I feel like Cinderella.
Then at ten sharp they announce the winner of the scholarship, and my coach to a better future turns out to be a big fat pumpkin . . .
By eleven I’m drunk and brooding on a bench in the rose garden with a half-empty bottle of champagne, a pilfered tray of hors d’oeuvres, and my bust of Lafayette’s wife. Having stolen her off her pedestal display, I now glare at her like a critic. “I admit this isn’t your best look . . .” But those fat eyebrows give a little interest to a sculpture. The judges should have appreciated that.
Philistines.
I take another gulp of champagne straight from the bottle because I’m not drunk enough yet to go back inside, where the party roars on without me. I’m feeling sorry for myself. In the blackest of moods. Ungrateful too. “Oh, don’t look at me that way,” I say to the stone marquise, like her doe eyes can see into my guilty heart. “You had the world handed to you on a silver platter. Title, riches, castles . . .”
I trail off, hearing footsteps. Merde. I didn’t think anyone noticed when I slipped down the back stairs. The rose garden should be the last place anybody would look for me—anybody but Henri Pinton, who’s known my hiding places since childhood. Now he asks, “Who are you talking to?”
“La Femme Lafayette,” I confess, cradling her stone head. “She’s a good listener.”
Henri chuckles, fishes a cigarette from his pocket, and lights up. “Listen, I know you’re bent about losing the scholarship . . .”
I’ve always liked his habit of using French-accented American slang, but it annoys me now because I’m more than bent. And he should know it. We grew up here together—went to school together, even before the foundation could afford separate classrooms for girls. He’s always known that I dreamed about being more than a schoolteacher—a profession to which I’m singularly ill suited, which I prove by stealing the cigarette right out of Henri’s mouth.
He lets me do it but asks, “Trying to get fired?”
“Wouldn’t that just be another kick in the pants?” I ask, taking a puff.
Teachers here at the preventorium’s school are expected to set a good example. That means no smoking or drinking for unmarried young women like me. Even forward-thinking Madame Beatrice expects me to at least pretend to be ladylike. Unfortunately, that train left the station a bottle of champagne ago. “Do you think the marquise de Lafayette will rat me out?”