“I’ll loan you my best dress. The one with the indigo stripes. It will really bring out your pretty blue eyes. And just think, maybe the Marshal will like your artwork and want to shake your hand.”
Despite blushing at Anna’s compliment, I can’t help but cringe. I know we need the Vichy government’s help to keep the preventorium running. We need more doctors, a new X-ray machine, blankets, soap, and countless other things. And I know I should just keep my mouth shut about it, but I confess the truth. “I don’t want to meet Pétain, and I’m glad he’s not coming here.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Anna scolds me. “It would’ve been a great honor! Don’t you know how often Maman and Aunt Bea wished to get Pétain’s uniform from one of his great battles to put next to the others in our museum?”
She means the uniforms of Generals Foch and Joffre—other heroes of the Great War. I know how loved Pétain used to be by the people who lived in this castle, but that’s changing now. “That was before he shook hands with Hitler.”
Anna makes a face. “I know. It’s terrible that he had to do that. But war makes people do terrible things. We just need to keep people’s spirits up and keep our opinions to ourselves. Just think, if the Marshal likes your work, you could be famous too.”
I pretend that doesn’t matter to me. It does. I always wanted to be a somebody in the world, but I’m starting to think I’d rather be a nobody in this world.
* * *
—
Gone with winter went my last excuse not to visit Henri’s mother.
My bicycle needs a new tire, so I start out on foot until a cabbage wagon passes, and I convince the farmer to take me as far as the fountain in Paulhaguet, where the oxen stop to drink. From there I walk to the Pinton farmhouse, a squat structure of black volcanic stone. Given the harsh winter, I expect the farm to be run-down, so I’m surprised to see the old sagging thatched roof has been replaced, and the broken fence Henri’s mother was always nagging him to fix has been mended. A skinny brown cow moos from its pen, but no one answers when I knock. Smoke billows from the chimney, so I knock again, but it isn’t until I start for the barn that Madame Pinton finally throws open the door of the main house and motions me inside.
In kerchief and black sweater over an old polka-dot peasant dress, she busies herself with a pot of herb tea on the hearth. It’s a point of French pride to offer hospitality, and she pours me a bowlful like it’s breakfast. I take it, acutely aware of her ring on my finger, with its unique gold wreath. Anna convinced me that for this visit, I should wear it on my finger instead of on a chain around my neck so as not to insult my future mother-in-law.
“You have news of Henri?” she asks brusquely.
“Not yet, madame . . .”
Most everyone in the local villages who has sons, husbands, and fathers in those German prison camps has heard from them by now. Even Anna received a short note back from her husband. But nothing from Henri.
I’m worried sick, and Madame Pinton must be too.
So I say, “Sam escaped, though, and he saw Henri’s capture last summer, so at least we know he was alive then.”
She shakes her head, the deep lines of a difficult life etched onto her face. “Do you know what I think? I think Henri escaped too. I think he’s with General de Gaulle.”
Now that’s a curveball I didn’t see coming. Not that I believe it; it’s been nine months since the disaster at Dunkirk, and if Henri is now walking around London with the Free French Forces, sipping Earl Grey during the Blitz, surely he’d have got word to us by now. No, what gives me whiplash is Madame Pinton bringing up de Gaulle—and saying the rogue general’s name like he’s the Second Coming.
Nine months ago, hardly anybody in Auvergne had ever even heard of de Gaulle, and if they had, they spat his name as a troublemaker. Has that changed? Madame Pinton is of good old French peasant stock—one of those rural farmers the Marshal venerates as the salvation of France. In fact, a portrait of Pétain dangles precariously from a nail above her old iron stove. Yet here she is, hoping her son has gone off to fight for the same rogue general the Marshal has tried in absentia and condemned to death.
Not knowing how to make sense of this, I sip the tea. “Is—is there anything I can do to help you get along?”
“Non, I have boarders now.”
“Boarders?”
“Jews,” she says. “French Jews from Paris. The father was in the army; now he helps on the farm. His oldest girl helps cook and sew. I give them a warm bed and soup and they’re content.”