De Potter's Grand Tour Read Free

your letters. Let us know if you need extra blankets. Our days have been quiet now that Papa isn’t traveling so often. We take long walks and go to the flower markets. Papa will come on Friday at five o’clock promptly to bring you home for dinner. We send bundles of love, Maman.”
    She included a note at the bottom of the card: “PS—we like our villa so well that we have extended the lease another three months.”
    They celebrated Christmas with roast goose and plum pudding. In the early spring they began visiting properties for sale in the area. On Easter of 1903, wearing a spring costume made by a dressmaker in Nice, a pink, lacy affair with a tulle skirt and silk jacket and a hat crowned by a magnificent white feather that might have been plucked from the same bird the porter on the Noordland had almost dropped into the water, Aimée announced to the friends who had gathered for dinner that the de Potters would finally have a permanent home. After looking all across Cannes, they had purchased a seventeen-room villa on the avenue de Vallauris.
    The Villa du Grand Bois had a swooping marble staircase leading to the front entrance, a white stucco façade crowned by a bracketed cornice, and two flanking towers, one encircled with three tiers of wrought-iron balconies. It had been closed up for two years and would need a good airing out. The garden was overgrown with borage and nettles. The basin of the fountain had cracked in half, and a stone nymph had fallen from its pedestal. But the top floor had a view of the sea, the perfume from the thick wisteria vines hung in the air, and when the de Potters first came through the front gate, the splash of afternoon light gave the villa the sheen of fine marble. They knew at once that they had to make this magnificent estate their own. They thought themselves especially lucky when the owner agreed to lower the price.
    They moved in September, and by their anniversary in October they had the help of a full-time staff that included a cook, a maid, and a gardener. On November 20, the furniture and boxes they’d left in storage back in New Jersey arrived, and Aimée and Armand devoted themselves to unpacking. They set out the crystal, sorted through clothes, and repacked their woolens in their steamer trunks. While Armand organized his curios on the shelves of the fine gilt cabinet that had traveled with them from France to America and back to France, Aimée put their books and photograph albums in order in the library.
    On November 26, Armand had a meeting at the bank all morning. As planned, Aimée met him for lunch at La Réserve in the center of Cannes. He was uncharacteristically late and arrived disheveled, with his coat open and his hat in his hands, as if he’d run all the way from the bank. But he said grandly, “ Ma chérie , one day I shall prove myself worthy of your affection,” kissing her gloved hand in his courtliest fashion. And later, when they were at Galleotti’s furniture shop, he sprang out from behind a set of bureaus on display, swinging her into his arms. They’d come to look over the Stevens cane-mesh reclining chairs that were for sale, and they had a laugh trying them out, kicking their feet up and testing the levers.
    It was a pleasant day all in all, though not until evening, when she was writing a note in her diary, did Aimée remember that it was a holiday. Back in America, friends were sitting down to their Thanksgiving feasts. Here in Cannes, the de Potters were quite too busy to celebrate.
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    Aimée was a farmer’s daughter and used to waking early. She didn’t think it strange to work right alongside the servants. She would go after a clogged drain with a plunger while Felicie prepared dinner, or she’d follow Ernestine from room to room with a second feather duster, chattering about anything in an effort to practice her French.
    After finding a