To pass the time, Anna and I huddle together in front of the fireplace in Madame Beatrice’s tower room, where I’m trying to sketch, and she says, “You know, every year since we met, my husband took me to a Paris Christmas market to buy a new decoration for the crèche. We’d visit the vendor stalls for mulled wine and warm crepes . . .” We both groan at the memory of crepes. “How many Christmases did you spend with Henri?”
“All of them.” I start to say that holidays here at Chavaniac are nothing special—but I realize how much I’ve taken for granted, and what a coward I’ve been, because it’s been more than a year since Henri left for war and I haven’t visited his mother even once. Before snow blocked the roads, I could’ve made the half-hour journey by bicycle, but maybe I worried she’d want her ring back or say I never had any right to it in the first place. The truth is that I’ve never liked Madame Pinton and she’s never liked me, but I promise myself I’ll go see her after the thaw.
The BBC is jammed, so we’re listening to Radio Vichy, which is intolerable. Endless prattle about family, farms, and folktales—as if every advance since serfdom has caused France’s doom. We’re told our defeat at Hitler’s hands was actually a divine surprise through which we can now redeem ourselves by returning to our roots in the land. In the Marshal’s Christmas Eve address, he said, “Tonight a New France is born, made by your trials, your remorse, your sacrifice. Take courage and swear to aid this great rebirth so that your children again will know happy Christmases.”
At hearing it mentioned again, Anna turns the radio off.
I think she must be as disgusted as I am. “Why should we feel remorse?” I ask as she pulls out her knitting. “Is it our fault France’s soldiers stood in the way of Hitler’s plans?”
And if it was, I don’t see why we should feel sorry about it.
Anna, who is making a scarf to send to her husband, just shakes her head. “Our men should’ve been home now. Can you imagine how cold it must be in those POW camps?”
I squeeze the charcoal pencil in my hand, unable to hold my anger in anymore. “I learned in an orphanage full of boys that a bully only stops hitting when you bloody him. So why did we stop fighting? Why agree to an armistice if the Germans are going to starve and freeze us all?”
Anna presses her lips together, as if afraid to say more. Then she does anyway. “Papa says the armistice was necessary to save the young men of France, but he worries the collaboration is a terrible mistake; he blames the ministers.”
“No one forced the Marshal to shake Hitler’s hand,” I say a little heatedly, then regret it because Anna has offered a glimpse into the baron’s thinking, and now I’ve shut her up again.
For a long time, the only sounds in the room are the pop of burning logs, the clack of her knitting needles, and my charcoal pencil scratching on paper. I have to admit, even if I wouldn’t have chosen Adrienne Lafayette as a subject again on my own, it’s an almost euphoric feeling to have fresh pencils and paper and permission to create once more. Still, I’ve started over again at least a dozen times, and I’m ready to crumple the latest attempt too, because if I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.
When I sigh, Anna asks, “What’s wrong?”
“Your mother wants me to portray Adrienne Lafayette as an icon of motherhood, but I’m not exactly an expert on that.”
Anna rolls her eyes. “Neither is Maman.”
“What do you mean?”
Anna shrugs, looking a little sorry she said anything. “There was . . . an incident when I was a small child, when she left me for a year. And now she tries to make up for it by smothering me.” The idea that the baroness would have left Anna is a complete shock, and it must show, because Anna colors. “It was really nothing.”
It doesn’t sound like nothing, but I see she doesn’t want me to pry. I have noticed a tendency of the baroness to hover over Anna and supervise her as if she were not a married woman of nearly twenty-four, but I can’t imagine complaining about it. “Well, you’re lucky to have her now.”
Anna bites her lip. “Of course, you’re right. If you don’t mind my asking . . . what happened to your mother?”
I shrug. “No one knows. They say I’m a veritable foundling left by the faeries in the streets of Paris during the Great War.”
As a kid I used to look at picture books of that city and tell myself stories about who my parents might have been. Maybe a young soldier on leave visiting his glamorous wife, both of them dying bravely during church service in a zeppelin attack. Maybe a couple who owned a bakery near the Pont Neuf who died suddenly of the Spanish flu . . .