The 6:41 to Paris Read Free Page B

Pourpre et Lys is one thetrendiest shops around. That with two stores in Paris, one in Bordeaux, one in Lyon, and projects to expand all over France, I should start getting used to the idea that I have become an entrepreneur. Someone who in the decade ahead will count for something in the business world. In spite of the crisis, or because of it, organic beauty products have a bright future—particularly when the pricesare still reasonable and the emphasis is placed on respect for regional traditions and on protecting the environment. Soaps that you cut yourself. Shampoo sold in reusable bottles. Ads printed on recycled paper. Clear, concise labels on plain brown paper, with the name of the product in black, and the ingredients below. Chic and sober. My brand.
    Valentine and Luc have begun to realize. Luc increasinglyshuts himself away in his study. A sort of rivalry has arisen between us and he’s struggling, even though he’s known from the start that he’ll lose. Soon I’ll be earning much more money than him.
    He’s been saying we have to move, we have to go back to Paris proper and leave our big house in thesuburbs behind, the house with the garden where Valentine grew up. She couldn’t care less either way.She’s finishing her lycée and would rather stay with her friends for another year, but she’s already informed me that she intends to have her own studio in a lively neighborhood right in Paris next year. The forty-five minute commute to Sucy, no thanks. Luc also thinks I should stop taking the RER now, but it’s out of the question. My brand is also about reducing the executive personnel’s expenditure.Even if I know that sooner or later we’ll move back to the city; for the time being, the business is too precarious, and it could vanish in a puff of wind—poor management, competition, unrealistic ambitions. I don’t want to add private loans to professional ones. At heart I’m still a provincial banker. After all, that’s what I was trained to do. After two years of training in marketing techniquesI found myself unemployed. So I got a vocational training certificate in banking. I pictured myself behind the counter in a branch in the town where I grew up. Sometimes life takes us a long way from the place we thought we were headed. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
    It has taken me quite awhile.
    That’s another of my character traits: I’m slow. But persevering. I thought about my project foryears, when I was barely making ends meet as an administrative assistant in a financial analyst’s office, then in one of those multinationals that are all about new technologies, cell phones, computers, and consoles. I sat there watchingwhile those gung-ho reps crushed their competitors. Then witnessed their fall a few years later. I learned how to be discreet and impeccable to a fault. To bethe model employee. To serve whoever was boss: the aging ones who couldn’t keep up to speed and sat around dreaming of their retirement in the Sologne; the young ones who were working up to their first heart attack; they could be warm, icy, scathing, offhand. And I figured out how it all worked. I spent a lot of time reading, too. Books about business, accounting, marketing. Luc just laughed at me.He thought I was immersing myself in all that in order to get closer to him, to what he did every day. Because Luc is one of those aging, interchangeable, middle management execs—for a stationery company that is relocating by the hour. They don’t even have a production site in France anymore. Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland: it’s all concentrated in Eastern Europe.
    Luc had his hour of glory when hewas able to negotiate a schedule that would allow him to take Valentine to school every morning and pick her up in the evening, when she was small. He would chat with the other moms and with the primary school teachers. He was their darling, they were ecstatic to see a man looking after his kids. Those very same women who think it’s