Paris: The Novel Read Free

if I had a daughter, I should call her after you.”
    She looked up at him, surprised.
    “That was a long time ago,
chéri
. It doesn’t matter.”
    “But it does matter. I wish to call her Joséphine.”
    “And what if your wife associates the name with me?”
    “She doesn’t know about us. I am certain of it. I mean to insist.” He sipped his champagne moodily. “You really think there is a danger?”
    “I shall not tell her, you may be sure,” Joséphine answered. “But others might …” She shook her head. “You are playing with fire.”
    “I thought I’d say,” he persisted, “that I want to name her after the empress Joséphine.”
    The beautiful wife of Napoléon, the love of the emperor’s life. A romantic legend—up to a point.
    “But she was notoriously unfaithful to the emperor,” Joséphine pointed out. “Perhaps not a good example for your daughter.”
    “I was hoping you’d come up with something.”
    “No.” Joséphine shook her head. “My friend, this is a very bad idea. Call your daughter Marie, and make your wife happy. That is all I have to say.”
    The next course was another specialty of the house: lobster, sliced in aspic. They spoke of old friends, and the opera. It was not until the dessert, a salad of fruits, that Joséphine, after looking at him reflectively for a few moments, took up the subject of his marriage again.
    “Do you want to make your wife unhappy,
chéri
? Has she done something bad to you?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Are you unfaithful?”
    “No.”
    “Does she satisfy you?”
    He shrugged.
    “It’s fine.”
    “You must learn to be happy, Jules,” she said with a sigh. “You have everything you want, including your wife.”
    It had not been a shock, nor even a surprise to Joséphine when Jules Blanchard had married. His wife was a cousin on his mother’s side, and brought a large dowry. As Jules had put it at the time: “Two parts of a family fortune have found each other again.”
    But Jules was still frowning.
    Joséphine Tessier had studied many men in her life. It was her profession. In her opinion, men were often discontented because their occupation did not suit them. Of others, one could even say that they had been born at the wrong time—a natural knight in armor, for instance, trapped in a modern world. But Jules Blanchard was perfectly made for nineteenth-century France.
    When the French Revolution had broken the power of the king and the aristocracy—the ancien régime—it had left the field open to the rich, the haute bourgeoisie. Napoléon had created his personal version of the Roman Empire, with his triumphal arches and his quest for glory, but he had also taken care to appeal to the solid middle classes. And so it had remained after his fall.
    True, some conservatives wanted to return to the ancien régime, but the only time the restored Bourbon monarchy tried that, in 1830, the Parisians had kicked out the Bourbon king and installed Louis Philippe, a royal cousin of the Orléans line, as their constitutional and very bourgeois monarch.
    On the other side, there were radicals, even socialists, who hated the new bourgeois France, and wanted another revolution. But when they took to the streets in 1848, thinking their time had come, it was not a socialist state, but a conservative republic that emerged, followed by an ornately bourgeois empire under Napoléon III—the great emperor’s nephew—that again favored the bankers and stockbrokers, the property men and larger merchants. Men like Jules Blanchard.
    These were the men to be seen riding with their beautifully dressed women in the Bois de Boulogne on the city’s western edge, or gathering for elegant evenings at the huge new Opéra house, where Jules and his wife liked to be seen. There was no doubt, Joséphine thought, that Jules Blanchard had the best of the present century.
    Why, he’d even had her.
    “What’s the matter, my friend?” she gently inquired.
    Jules