Chapter One: The Road Down from Saint-Aubin

 

The bell in the chapel tower at the Institut Saint-Aubin had rung at six o'clock every morning for eight years, and on the first morning it did not ring for him, Conner Morris woke at a quarter to six anyway.

He lay still and listened for what was missing. No doors banging along the corridor. No Herr Brandt’s shrill whistle sounding outside the dormitory. No boys cursing in five languages as they fumbled for socks. Just a thrush somewhere in the linden trees and the faint sound of fisherman’s boat motor on Lac Léman.

Graduation had been the day before. Most of the others had been collected Mercedes sedans and a Rolls with Saudi flags on the fenders and even a helicopter for Marc boy whose father owned a steel foundry. Mothers in Hermès scarves had cried into the shoulders of sons who were taller than them now. Fathers had shaken Brandt's hand and looked relieved.

No one had come for Conner. He had not expected anyone.

He got up, stripped the bed and remade it with clean bedding. Tight hospital corners as he had done every morning since he was ten years old. He did this without thinking, which was the whole point. Eight and a half years of discipline by masters who believed that a boy who could not make a bed correctly could not be trusted to do anything important correctly.

Somewhere along the way the discipline had stopped being something required and had become what he simply was. The way a river follows the shape of its banks.

He had turned nineteen in April, the same week the telegram came from New York.

REGRET INFORM WALTER MORRIS DECEASED 11 APRIL STOP PEACEFUL STOP LETTER FOLLOWS STOP HOLLIS

The letter that followed ran to four pages and had been written by Mr. Arthur Hollis of Hollis, Wren & Batterman, who had managed the Morris family's affairs since before Conner was born. It explained that the funeral had been held quickly in accordance with his grandfather's wishes. That it had been judged better for Conner to complete his final term. That upon his graduation several trusts would come under his direction, subject to certain advisory provisions which Mr. Hollis would be pleased to explain at his convenience.

He was the sole heir. He was wealthy.

Conner did not really understand the wealth. Oh, he understood the arithmetic very well; he had taken advanced mathematics up to differential equations from Monsieur Delacroix. What he did not understand was what the money was for. For almost nine years his life had been bells and studies and examinations. Money had been something that arrived like the weather, and was spent by other people on his behalf.

Time, he had finally decided. The money was time.

Other kids his age, in Ohio and in Marseille and in Hamburg, would spend the next fifty years selling their time to someone else so that they could eat. They would sell eight hours to purchase food and shelter and Ford sedans. His grandfather and great grandfather had sold their hours a long time ago so a kid they didn’t even care to have around could sit on a stone wall in Switzerland and wonder what next.

The bed made he packed. The Swiss army surplus ruck he bought two summers ago in Zürich shop on a school excursion. Into it went: three shirts, two pairs of trousers, underwear, a heavy wool sweater his grandfather (probably his secretary) had sent last Christmas along with his passport and an American Express credit card, a shaving kit, a pocket knife, a leather notebook with two hundred blank pages, two fountain pens, a bottle of ink wrapped in a sock, a paperback Montaigne in French with the spine broken in four places, a German road atlas of Europe.

The guitar required some thought. It was a Spanish classical guitar, a good one, made in Granada. He had learned on it under Señor Albéniz who had taught him that the fingers must be made intelligent through repetition and that the brain was a busybody and must kept away from the music.

He carried it down to the kitchens.

Old Matthieu was already at work, as he had been every morning since the late 1950s. Matthieu had taught Conner to cook. He hadd been a boy who amassed historic amounts of demerits. The kitchen was punishment. He had learned because he was endlessly curious the baking and simmering, poaching and braising when the other boys were playing. Old Matthiew had had taught him that a good omelette is a matter heat and that you salt the water for pasta until it tastes of the sea, and that you never, ever apologize for food you cook.

"You are leaving," Matthieu said, in French, not turning around.

"Yes, master."

"No car."

"I'm walking."

Matthieu grunted.

Conner held out the guitar case. "For your granddaughter. She liked it at the fête."

The old man turned and looked at him for a long moment. He wiped his hands on his apron and took the guitar as though it were a baby someone had handed him to burp.

"Wait," he said. He disappeared into the pantry and came back with a paper parcel tied with string. Bread, still warm. A wedge of Gruyère. Two apples. A small, flat bottle with no label.

"For the train. The bottle is for when you are sad."

"I'm never sad."

"You will be. It’s the way of the world." Matthie hugged him hard, and turned back to the ovens, and that was that.

 

The headmaster was waiting at the front gate.

Herr Brant was spare man devoid of humor, who also taught Latin and Greek and deportment to generations of the sons of the wealthy. It had taken Conner three years to realize that Brandt did not hate him. It took another two to realize that the cold, relentless correction Brandt applied to him, every demerit, every misspoken accent, was the only form of love the man knew how to give.

He did not offer his hand. He looked Conner up and down: the leather jacket, the backpack, the boots.

"You are walking to Geneva."

"Yes, sir."

"It is twenty-two kilometers."

"Yes, sir."

"You could have taken the school car."

"Walking is more fun."

Brandt frowned at that. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were the color of old dishwater, and very sharp.

"You have been given a very dangerous thing, young Morris. Not the money. Money is only money. You have been given choice. Most men never have to choose what their life is for. Hunger chooses for them. Their children choose for them." He tapped the air the way he tapped the blackboard. "You get to choose for you now. That is the whole of your inheritance. Do not waste it being comfortable."

Conner did not know what to say, so he said, "Thank you, sir."

Brandt nodded once. Then he did something he had never done. He reached up, because Conner was a full head taller, and straightened his collar.

"Go," he said. "Before I become sentimental. It is unbecoming at my age."

The road down from Saint-Aubin wound through the vineyards in long, lazy switchbacks, and Conner took it at the steady pace he had learned from the mountain runs, the pace you could hold all day.

Conner’s mind stayed on the school:

He was eleven. The young lawyer had brought him across the Atlantic in a plane, then on a train from Le Havre to Paris and another to Geneva, and a big black car had brought them up the switchback road through the vineyards to gray stone buildings that stood on a hill above the lake. The lawyer had shaken his hand in the front hall, as though Conner were a business associate, and said, "Be good, Conner. Work hard. They'll make something of you," and got back into the black car and gone down the hill, and he stood in the doorway and watched it go.

He did not cry. He had been told not to.

The next afternoon there was a first meeting of the new boys in the Latin room, a cold, high-ceilinged classroom with the lake glittering far below its tall windows. There were eleven of them, all aged eleven or twelve, dressed in brand-new navy blazers that were slightly too big for them. At the front of the room, behind a high wooden lectern, stood a man with steel spectacles. He introduced himself as Herr Doktor Brandt, headmaster and master of Latin, Greek. He started by going around the room asking each boy, in turn, to stand and state his name, his country, and his father's profession in english.

"Albrecht von Hessler. Germany. My father is a banker."

"Sit."

"Pierre-Henri Dufour. France. My father is in the Assembly."

"Sit."

"Faisal bin Khalid. Saudi Arabia. My father is a minister."

"Sit."

"Morris."

Conner stood up.

He had been dreading this moment from the start. He had been dreading because the true answer to the third question was that his father had been a lawyer, who had taken his wife sailing off Mystic one July afternoon and they had not come back. That was all. It was the most unspeakable thing in his world and he could not say it now, in a cold room, to a man with hard gray eyes, in front of ten boys whose fathers were bankers and ministers and still alive.

He opened and what came out was:

"My name is Conner Morris. America. My father is a lighthouse keeper."

The room went quiet.

"A lighthouse keeper," said Herr Brandt.

"Yes, sir." He could not stop now. The whimsy had broken the surface and the rest came unstoppable. "In Patagonia. At the very bottom of the world. It's the loneliest lighthouse on earth. There's no one else on the island but him and a colony of penguins and a sea lion called Admiral Horatio. My father talks to the sea lion in the evenings. He says it's the only one who understands him. He sent me here because he says there are no schools in Patagonia, only penguins, and penguins can't teach Latin." He paused. "They can't hold the chalk."

One of the boys in the back row made a smothered noise.

Herr Brandt looked at him for a very long time over the top of his steel spectacles. Conner stood by his scarred oak desk with his hands trembling at his sides and his face burning, waiting to be destroyed.

"Sit down, Morris," said Herr Brandt at last, very quietly.

Conner sat.

Brandt moved on to the next boy. He said nothing more about it. The lesson went on: the first declension, puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puellā. And at the end of it, as the boys filed out into the corridor, Brandt said, without looking up from his lectern:

"Morris. A moment."

The others went. Conner stood in front of the lectern. Brandt finished writing something in a small black notebook, closed it, and put down his pen.

"Tomorrow," he said, "you will bring me a single sentence, in Latin, on a sheet of paper. It will be the true answer to my question." He looked up. "You will not say it aloud. You will not show it to anyone else. You will give it to me and I will read it and that will be the end of it. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"It will take you most of the evening. Your Latin is very poor. Use the dictionary."

It took him until eleven o'clock that night, by torchlight under the blanket in the new-boys' dormitory, with the dictionary propped on his knees. He wrote it out six times before he had it right. In the morning he handed it to Herr Brandt at the lectern, folded in half, and did not wait to see him read it.

Pater meus et mater mea in mari mortui sunt, cum duos annos natus essem.

My father and my mother died in the sea, when I was two years old.

 

It was early June, and the vines were bright with new leaves. Below him the lake spread out deep blue and on the far side the French Alps stood with snow still on their shoulders. The air smelled of cut hay. A tractor passed him going the other way, and the farmer lifted two fingers from the wheel, and Conner lifted two fingers back and grinned with the excitement of his new life.

He walked and let his mind go where it wanted, which was a thing he was only now learning to permit. At Saint-Aubin every hour had belonged to someone else. Now the hours belonged to him and the first thing his mind did with its freedom was run, like a horse let off the lead, in every direction at once.

He thought about the vines and how old the terraces were, and whether the Romans had planted here, and then about Roman agriculture, and then about Cato the Elder, who had written a book on farming and ended every speech in the Senate by saying Carthage must be destroyed, and whether a man could be a good farmer and a cruel statesman at the same time, and whether those were even different skills. He thought about his grandfather, whose face he could summon only in fragments now: the white eyebrows, the smell of pipe tobacco the week they had spent fishing in Maine, when Conner was eleven and had not yet been sent away to make a man of him.

He knew his America now mostly from the International Herald Tribune in the library, which that spring had been full of a scandal called Watergate. He knew the words to Bob Dillon’s songs but had never been to New York. He knew how to address a duchess and could decline in Latin and Greek. He could put a larger man on the floor in a second and a half, but he had never once in his life been kissed.

That last one he tried not to think about, and so of course he thought about it for a kilometer or so.

By noon he was in Nyon, and by three he was walking the lakeside road into Geneva, his shirt stuck to his back and his legs pleasantly heavy.

He ate Matthieu's bread and half the cheese on a bench by the water. A pair of American students on the next bench were arguing about whether to go to Amsterdam or Florence. They were about his own age. The boy had hair to his shoulders and a jacket with a peace symbol stitched on the back; the girl wore sandals and had the sunburned look of someone who had been on the road for weeks. Their accents were Midwestern friendly, and it was the strangest thing: he understood every word and they sounded, to him, more foreign than the Swiss.

The girl caught him looking and smiled. "You American?"

He hesitated, which was ridiculous. "Yes."

"You don't look American."

"What do I look like?"

She considered him, head tilted. "Like a really smart fullback" she said finally."

The boy laughed. Conner laughed too, a beat late, because he wasn't sure if she meant it as a compliment. They offered him a cigarette, which he declined and a swallow of cheap Chianti from a straw-wrapped bottle, which he accepted to be polite. They told him they had been in Europe since the end of May on money they'd saved working at a canning plant in Iowa, and that they'd slept in train stations and once, memorably, in a church in Lyon, and that they were broke now, down to their last forty dollars, and that it had been the best weeks of their lives.

"What about you?" the girl said. "Where are you headed?"

"Paris."

"And then?"

He opened his mouth and found that he did not know. The answer was anywhere, but when he tried to say it, it felt uncomfortable so he said nothing. The girl looked at him a little curiously and then let it go.

Afterwards, he wondered about the forty dollars, hoping they made it back to the canning plant and the little town in Iowa.

Gare Cornavin was loud and bright and wonderful

Conner stood in line at the ticket window behind a woman with a cage of canaries and bought a second-class ticket to Paris on the late-afternoon train, changing at Bellegarde. It did not occur to him to buy first class until he was already walking away with the ticket in his hand, and then it occurred to him that he did not want to, and he felt pleased with himself about that without entirely knowing why.

He had twenty minutes. He bought a copy of Le Monde and a newspaper cone of roasted almonds and was standing near the departures board, reading about the French presidential election that had just been decided, when he became aware of a situation.

It was the way a man with a gray flat cap who stood a little too close to an elderly couple who were wrestling with their luggage near the end of the platform. The man’s eyes moved: not at the board, not at the trains, but at pockets, at handbags, at the places where people keep things.

Avner had taught him that. Avner, the Israeli who came twice a week from Geneva to teach Krav Maga to the boys whose fathers worried about kidnapping, who was built like a fire hydrant and never smiled, and whose first lesson, before anyone threw a punch, had been simply: Watch the hands. Watch the eyes. Everyone is telling you what they are going to do. Most people are too polite to notice.

Conner folded his newspaper and watched.

The elderly man bent to lift a suitcase. His wife turned to help him. Her handbag, a boxy black leather thing, swung open on her arm, and the thin man stepped in, easy as a dancer, and his hand went in and came out, and he was already turning away.

Conner did not decide to move. That was the other thing the masters had beaten into him, figuratively speaking. Deciding was slow.

He crossed the six meters in four strides and caught the thief's wrist as it came around. Not hard. There was no need for hard. Okada-sensei, the old man from Kyoto who taught the Japanese joint locks in the gymnasium on Thursday evenings, had always said that strength was what you used when you did not understand the body. You took the wrist, you turned it along the line it already wanted to go, a little past where it was comfortable, and the elbow followed, and the shoulder followed, and the man followed, all the way down to one knee on the cold platform with his arm up behind him and a very surprised expression on his face.

The wallet fell out of his hand. It was a woman's wallet, red, with a gold clasp.

"Lâchez-moi, espèce de..." the thief started, and then said nothing else because Conner turned the wrist another two degrees and the man's breath went out of him in a hiss.

"Je pense que ceci appartient à madame," Conner said politely. He was aware that his heart was going very fast, and also that his voice sounded perfectly calm, and that these two facts seemed to belong to different people.

It was over quickly after that. The old woman shrieked, then realized what had happened and began thanking him in Swiss German so rapid and so heavily accented that he could only catch every third word. A railway policeman arrived, puffing, and took the thief by the collar. The old man shook Conner's hand in both of his and tried to press a fifty-franc note on him, and Conner refused it, and the old man insisted, and Conner refused again, and in the end the old man looked at him with a kind of baffled respect, as if Conner were a species of bird he had read about but never expected to see.

When the policeman asked for his name and address for the report, Conner opened his mouth to give the school's, and then stopped.

He did not have an address. Not anymore.

"Conner Morris," he said. "American. I'm... traveling."

The policeman wrote it down, looked at him, and said, not unkindly, "Ça se voit." It shows.

The train was already at the platform when he got free, the long green carriages of the SNCF with their white stripe, doors open, a conductor looking at his watch. Conner swung up the steps and walked down the corridor until he found a compartment with only one occupant, and slid open the door.

The occupant was a young woman. She was perhaps twenty-two, with short black hair cut like a boy's and a man's white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and she was reading a book with her bare feet up on the opposite seat. The book was Simone de Beauvoir. She did not move her feet.

"C'est libre?" he asked.

She looked up. She had very dark eyes and an expression of great, weary patience, as though she had been interrupted by a great many men in a great many train compartments.

"Ça dépend," she said. "Vous allez parler?"

It depends. Are you going to talk?

"Only if you'd like me to," he said, in French, and then, because he could not help it, he smiled. It was not a calculated smile. He did not know how to calculate one. It was just the smile of a tired nineteen-year-old who had walked twenty-two kilometers and stopped a thief and given away his guitar, and who had just realized, sitting down, that he was absolutely starving and absurdly happy.

Something in her face shifted, very slightly. She took her feet off the seat.

"I saw you," she said, switching to English, which she spoke with a London accent laid over something Parisian. "On the platform. With the pickpocket."

"Oh." He felt himself going red, which was infuriating. "That was... he was..."

"You were very polite to him. I've never seen anyone be so polite to someone while breaking their arm."

"I didn't break it."

"No," she agreed. "You could have, though." She studied him with frank, unhurried curiosity. "Who are you?"

The train gave a lurch and began to move. Out the window, the platform slid away, and the station roof, and then the city opened up, and the lake flashed once, silver, between buildings, and was gone. Somewhere behind him, up in the hills he could no longer see, the chapel bell at Saint-Aubin would be ringing four o'clock for boys who were not him anymore.

He thought about the question. He thought about it seriously, because it seemed to deserve that. He thought about the number at the bottom of the fourth page, and about Brandt straightening his collar, and about the two Americans and their forty dollars, and about the fact that he did not have an address.

"I'm not sure yet," he said at last. "I think that's what I'm going to find out."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she closed Simone de Beauvoir over one finger to keep her place.

"All right," she said. "I'm Sabine. You can talk."

Outside, France was coming.

Chapter Two: Bellegarde to Paris

 

For the first ten minutes out of Geneva, Conner said nothing at all.

This was not shyness. He had never been shy. He had given a speech in Greek to a visiting bishop at fourteen and argued Hegel with Herr Brandt in front of the whole upper form at seventeen. He knew how to speak to people.

The trouble was that he had no idea how to speak to her.

She had gone back to her book, but not all the way. He could tell because she hadn’t turned a page. The sunlight came in low through the window and lay across her bare ankles and the compartment smelled faintly, of her scent, something lemony.

Conner sat very straight with his backpack on his knees. He pretended to be enthralled with the Rhône valley unrolling outside the compartment. He tried to think of something to say.

At Saint-Aubin there had been a something to discuss about everything. From the Rhetoric to the proper deportment of the gentleman. There had even been, at the start of every term, a dance lessons in which Madame Rousseau and her four friends taught the boys the waltz and the tango and the foxtrot by partnering them one at a time while the others stood along the wall and snickered at the hapless dancers. Conner had even been told by Madame he had danced divinement.

But Madame Rousseau had been sixty. And the whole thing had been a lesson, with explicit rules how to behave.

Nobody had given him the rules for this.

So, because he had been trained all his life that when you do not know something you ask the person most likely to know it, he turned from the window, and said:

“Excuse me. How should I act?”

She looked up.

“I’m sorry?”

“With you,” he said. “How should I act? I don’t know. I thought you might.”

For a moment she simply stared at him, the book open on her lap, her dark eyes very wide. A giggle erupted. Then full scale laughter..

It exploded out of her all at once. She put her hand over her mouth to stay the fit, but it came out around her fingers anyway. She laughed until her eyes were wet.

Conner waited. He was not offended. He was, if anything, interested. He had never made anyone laugh like that before. He was not entirely sure how he had done it.

“Oh,” she said finally, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. Nobody has ever asked me that. Men have asked me a great many things on trains, but never that.”

“It was a serious question.”

“I know it was. That’s what’s funny.” She shut the book properly now and set it on the seat beside her and turned to face him, pulling one knee up under her. “All right. Explain. Why on earth would you need to ask?”

So he told her.

He told her about being locked in the halls of Saint-Aubin. Eight years. Two hundred boys and forty masters and exactly four women on the whole property, three of whom were grandmothers who worked in the laundry and one of whom was Madame Rousseau. He told her that he could speak five languages and get by in a sixth. He could speak at length about Plato’s Republic, but that the sum total of his experience with girls his own age amounted to three school dances with a convent school from Lausanne, conducted under the eyes of twelve nuns, at which the approved distance between partners had been the length of a hymnal.

“A hymnal,” she repeated.

“Held vertically. Sister Agathe would walk among us and measure.”

She put her hand over her mouth again.

“So you see,” he went on, warming to it now, because it was a relief to say it out loud, “I decided last night to go on an adventure. I’ve been locked up for eight years learning how the world is supposed to work and now I’m off to see how it actually does.

And one of the things I know least about are…Girls. Or women. Or... females.” He frowned. “I’m honestly not sure which word is correct. Or which one is offensive. Is ‘girls’ offensive? You’re not a girl, really. But ‘women’ sounds like I’m writing a sociology paper, and ‘females’ sounds like I’m selecting the gender of a pony I want to buy.”

She laughed again, helplessly. And pulled her other knee up and wrapped her arms around both of them.

“So here I am,” Conner said, “On my very first day of freedom. On a train to Paris. In a compartment with a beautiful mysterious woman who reads Simone de Beauvoir with her shoes off. Can you see how extraordinary this is for me? But the problem is that it’s like being handed the final examination on the first day of term.”

She had stopped laughing. She was looking at him with her head a little to one side, the way the girl on the bench in Geneva had. As though he were a painting and she was trying to decide whether it was a forgery.

“Mysterious,” she said at last.

He went red. “Well yes….”

And she laughed again, but softly now. She shook her head, and held out her hand across the gap between the seats.

Conner gently shook her hand. It was cool with ink on the sides of the two writer fingers

“All right, Mr. Morris. I’ll tell you one true thing, as payment for all your honesty. My name isn’t Sabine.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. I tell men on trains that my name is Sabine, and that I’m a schoolteacher from Tours, and that my fiancé is a gendarme. It saves a great deal of trouble.” She held his hand a moment longer than was strictly necessary for a handshake, which he noticed and filed away for further study. “My name is Margot. Margot Fleming.”

“Margot Fleming,” he repeated. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“How do I know?”

“You don’t,” she said cheerfully. She let go of his hand. “Welcome to women. That’s lesson one.”

The lessons went on all the way to Bellegarde.

The girl numbered the lectures. She sat cross-legged on the seat with her back against the window and lectured him in a voice of mock gravity, like a professor at the Sorbonne.

Lesson two: Do not ask a woman how to act. It is charming exactly once.

Lesson three: “Women” is fine. “Girls” is fine if you are talking about girls. “Females” is only fine if you are a zoologist. “Ladies” is only fine if you are a sixty year old waiter.

Lesson four: When a woman tells you something about herself, do not immediately tell her something about yourself that is similar but more interesting.

“Did I do that?” he asked, alarmed.

“No. That’s why I’m telling you. You’re the first man I’ve met who didn’t.” She considered. “Of course, you haven’t asked me anything about myself either.”

“You said you wouldn’t tell me.”

“Lesson five: ask anyway.”

So he asked. Where was she from? London and Paris, and a little bit of everywhere, and none of it for long. What did she do? Oh, this and that. What was in Paris? An apartment with a leaking tap and an article I should have finished a week ago. What kind of work? She smiled and did not answer.

He noticed, too, the other things. The camera in her canvas bag was an old Leica, well used, brass showing through the black paint at the corners. The ink stained writing fingers. The way she had watched the people embarking, when the train stopped briefly at a small station. Not at the platform but at the people on it, one by one, quickly, the way Avner had taught him to look.

“You notice things,” she said.

“I was taught to.”

“By whom?”

“An Israeli named Avner. A Japanese man named Okada. A German named Brandt.” He shrugged. “Mostly Herr Brandt. He used to say that the educated man is the one who can see what is in front of him. Everyone else mostly sees what they expected.”

“And what do you see in front of you, Conner Morris?”

He thought about it honestly, because that was the only way he knew to think about things.

“Someone who’s very good at half-answering questions,”

Margot Fleming looked at him for a long time. Then she picked up her book, opened it to a page at random, and held it up between them so he could not see her face.

“Lesson six,” she said from behind it. “Don’t be too honest. It’s unsettling.”

When they got to Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, the connecting train to Paris was late.

It was a small, sleepy frontier station, the last stop before the long run across France. There was a café on the far side of the tracks with tin tables set out under a striped awning and a radio playing somewhere inside. It was warm summer twilight that was perfumed with lilacs that were blooming beside the station.

Conner carried both their bags. Margot let him, which he took to be a sign, though he wasn’t sure of what.

They sat at a painted I table and ordered coffee. Conner, suddenly remembering, unwrapped the rest of Matthieu’s parcel: the heel of the bread, the Gruyère, the two apples. He cut the cheese with his pocket knife into neat, even slices and laid them on a napkin between them like a small feast.

“You’re very tidy,” she observed.

“Neatness was built into me.” He handed her an apple. “The cook at school gave me this for my adventure.

She bit into the apple and looked at him over it, chewing.

Then the song on the radio changed.

It was old romantic French chanson, a slow three-quarter-time thing with an accordion and a woman’s voice, husky and sad. Conner knew the song. He knew the rhythm

He stood up and held out his hand.

“May I have the honor.”

Margot stared at it. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re on a train platform. In Bellegarde. There are people.”

He looked around. There was a railway porter asleep on a luggage cart, a very old woman knitting on a bench, and a dog.

“The dog won’t mind,” he said.

“You don’t even know how…”

“The dance,” said Conner Morris grandly, “is the thing I am famous for..”

And maybe it was the way he said it, with the first real confidence she’d heard from him all afternoon, or maybe it was the smell of lilacs.

She wiped her fingers on her trousers. She took his hand.

Conner held her the way he had been taught, properly, his right hand flat against the small of her back, his left hand holding hers at shoulder height. He lost himself in the music and the moment. He sang the refrain softly to her;

Ramasse-moi quand tu voudras

Embrasse-moi quand tu voudras

Ramasse-moi quand tu voudras

 

Pick me up whenever you like

Kiss me whenever you like

Pick me up whenever you like

 

For the first three bars she was stiff. By the fourth she had stopped thinking about it. By the end of the first verse they were turning formal slow circles across the empty platform between the tables, her sandals whispering on the concrete. Margot Fleming was looking up at him with an expression of soft astonishment.

“Where on earth,” she said, “did you learn to do this?”

“A sixty-year-old woman who smelled of violets.”

She laughed, and he turned her under his arm, and she came back around into his arms as if she’d done it a thousand times.

When the song ended, they stood still for a second in the middle of the platform, not quite letting go.

Conner found he was a little out of breath. Though not from the dancing.

Down the line, a horn sounded. The Paris train was coming.

The old woman on the bench applauded, slowly and firmly, three times, and went back to her knitting.

The Paris train was crowded, and they did not find a compartment to themselves. They sat side by side in the corridor with their backs against the wall and their knees drawn up, while outside the windows France went by.

They talked about everything and nothing. About Montaigne, whom she had read and he had nearly memorized. About whether it was better to know exactly what you wanted from your life or to have no idea at all.

“I have no idea at all,” he confessed. “That’s the strange part. I’ve got more freedom now and I don’t know what to do with it. I thought maybe I’d just... follow things. Whatever I’m curious about. Study it until I understand it, then follow the next thing.”

“Like a dog following a scent trail.”

“I was going to say like a scholar. But yes.”

“And what are you curious about right now?”

He looked at her. It was dark enough in the corridor now that he could only see the outline of her face against the window, and the gleam of her eyes.

“Well…You,” he said simply.

She did not laugh this time. She turned her head and looked out the window for a while.

Somewhere past Mâcon, he remembered the flat, unlabeled bottle Matthieu had given him. For when you are sad. He took it out and held it up.

“The cook said this was for when I’m sad. He said everyone is sad on trains.”

“Are you sad?”

“No. Not even a little.”

She took the bottle out of his hand, unscrewed the cap, sniffed it, and made a face. “Oh, God. It’s marc brandy. Homemade. This will strip paint.” She took a sip anyway, coughed, and handed it back. “There. Now I’ve been sad for you. We can share.”

He sipped. It tasted like molten grapes and he coughed too. They both laughed quietly so as not to wake the man asleep against the next window.

At some point after that, without either of them remarking on it, she leaned her head against his shoulder and fell asleep.

Conner sat very, very still.

He did not know what this meant. He suspected that lesson eight or nine would have covered it. He could feel the warmth of her through his jacket and smell the lemony scent of her hair. He sat and watched the lights of France slide past in the dark.

He thought that if the whole of his grandfather’s fortune had bought him nothing but this one hour, it would have been a fair price.

The train came into the Gare de Lyon a little after eleven, under the great iron-and-glass roof, into a roar of brakes and loudspeakers and porters and pigeons and a thousand people going somewhere. Margot woke with a start as the train jolted. She sat up quickly, and put a hand to her hair, then looked embarrassed. It was the first time all day he’d seen her look anything other than amused.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to...”

“You ain’t heavy…” he sang.

She laughed and he was pleased.

On the platform, she stopped and turned to him as the crowds of people rushed by. She looked, suddenly, a little uncertain.

“Where are you staying?”

He had absolutely no idea. It had not occurred to think about it.

“I’ll find somewhere.”

“At eleven at night. In Paris. With no reservation.”

“It’s the adventure,” he said.

She shook her head, then reached into her canvas bag, took out a pen, tore the corner off the back page of her Simone de Beauvoir and wrote something on it using him as a desk. She folded it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“There’s a hotel on the Rue Jacob. The Hôtel des Marronniers. Tell Madame Aubert that Margot sent you and she’ll find you a room, even at midnight. And the other number...” She hesitated. “The other number is mine. For when you’ve learned a few more lessons.”

“How will I know when it’s right to call?”

“You won’t,” she said. “Welcome to women.”

She stood up on her tip toes and kissed him, quickly and lightly, on the cheek and then she was gone into the crowd.

He stood on the platform with his backpack on one shoulder and read the note. The hotel name was there, in quick slanting handwriting. And the phone number.

And below the number, smaller, almost as afterthought, was a sentence he did not understand at all.

Don’t call from the hotel.

Chapter Three: Bread and Fish Stew

 

The taxi was a black Peugeot 404 with a cracked windshield and a plastic Virgin Mary glued above the speedometer. The driver was a wiry, unshaven man in a cardigan who chain-smoked Gitanes.

"Rue Jacob," Conner said, climbing in with his pack on his knees. "L'Hôtel des Marronniers, s'il vous plaît."

The driver grunted, flicked the meter, and pulled out into the traffic in front of the Gare de Lyon as if he had a personal grudge against every other vehicle in Paris. Another cab driver leaned on his horn when he was cut off. The driver leaned on his, and they were off.

Conner sat back and let Paris happen to him.

He had been here once before, when he was thirteen, marching with the others like ducklings in blazers from the Louvre to Notre-Dame to the Invalides with Herr Brandt at the head of the column. He remembered it as a city of monuments. What he had not seen back then was this: the city at midnight in early summer. A couple kissing against a wall. Music, a saxophone moaning from somewhere and then gone. The dank smell of the river coming through the half-open window.

I live here now.

The thought made him grin at the back of the driver's head.

He felt the inside pocket of his jacket for his money. The bursar at Saint-Aubin, in accordance with instructions from Mr. Hollis, the lawyer in New York, had given him an envelope containing what seemed to Conner an enormous amount of French and Swiss francs. Enough for the journey. After that, you must see American Express. Conner made a to-do note in his notebook. Herr Brandt again:

The difference between an intention and an action plan is a note.

They crossed the river on the Pont d'Austerlitz, raced along the Left Bank past the lit-up bulk of Notre-Dame on its island, and plunged into a tangle of narrow streets that the driver took at a speed that made Conner hold onto the door handle. And then, abruptly, they stopped.

"Voilà. Rue Jacob."

It was a narrow street of tall, pale buildings with iron balconies, very quiet. The hotel had a green door with a brass plate. There was a dim light in the lobby.

Next door to it was a working man's café, narrow and deep. A chalkboard menu was propped next to the door, which stood open. Inside were men in work clothes. A laugh sounded loud and hoarse. A radio was playing football results. And from the open door came a smell that stopped Conner on the pavement like a hand on his chest: fish stew with garlic and fennel.

He had eaten half a loaf of bread, some cheese, and part of an apple since six in the morning. He had walked twenty-two kilometers, stopped a thief, danced on a railway platform, and fallen a little bit in love.

He was starving.

He paid the driver, tipped him too much (the driver's eyebrows went up and quickly back down before Conner could notice his mistake), shouldered his pack, and went into the café.

The chalkboard menu said SOUPE DE POISSON.

There were no free tables, but there was one stool at the end of the counter. Conner took it, setting his pack between his feet. When the waiter, who had a stained white apron and forearms like hams, raised a questioning chin, Conner ordered the soup, a glass of red, and bread.

The waiter shouted the order through a hatch into the kitchen, poured the wine, and slid it across to him.

The soup arrived in a wide, chipped earthenware bowl, deep orange-red, steaming, with chunks of white fish and mussels still in their shells, and a slick of oil on top. Beside it on a separate plate was a hunk of bread with a crust so dark and hard it crackled when Conner picked it up. There was a little pot of rouille, garlicky and rust-colored, and a bowl heaped with croutons.

Conner ate like a starving man. He tore the bread and dunked it, and floated the croutons in the soup the way Matthieu did.

For five minutes he thought about nothing in the world except the taste of that stew.

"C'est bon, hein?"

Conner looked up. The man on the next stool was watching him with amusement. He was young, twenty-two or three, broad-shouldered, with a round, cheerful face and enormous hands that were marred with small white burn scars. He wore white cotton trousers, a white T-shirt, and an old army jacket over the top.

"C'est extraordinaire," Conner said. "Et le pain..." He held up the hunk of bread and turned it over, looking at the crust, the big irregular holes in the crumb, the faint sour smell of it. "This isn't ordinary bread."

The young man's face lit up. "It's ours."

"Yours?"

"My father's bakery. Rue de Buci, three streets over. Boulangerie Lemaire. We supply Gaston here." He nodded at the waiter, who lifted a hand. "I'm Pierre."

"Conner."

They shook. Pierre's hand was like shaking hands with a warm, friendly brick.

"Conner," Pierre repeated, frowning a little at the name. "That's not French."

"No. I'm American."

Pierre stared at him. Then he laughed and slapped the counter. "Non. Get out. You're from the fifteenth. I'd bet my father's oven on it. You talk like my uncle Raymond."

"I practiced my French with a cook who grew up on the Rue de Vaugirard."

"Ça alors," said Pierre, delighted, and ordered himself a petit café and a calva and turned all the way around on his stool to face Conner properly. "An American who talks like a Parisian taxi driver and knows good bread when he eats it. It's a good start to my day."

---

They talked for an hour.

Pierre, as it turned out, was just coming on shift. He came into Gaston's every night at a quarter to midnight for a coffee and a Calvados, and then at half past midnight he walked the three streets to his father's shop, let himself in by the back door, and lit the ovens.

"Every night?"

"Every night except Monday. Since I was fifteen."

"When do you sleep?"

"In the afternoon. My girlfriend insists that I'm a vampire because she's never seen me in daylight."

Conner instantly wanted to know everything. So he asked, and Pierre, who clearly had not been asked about his work with real interest by anyone in a very long time, if ever, answered.

He explained the difference between a baguette made with commercial yeast—fast, white, pretty, but tasteless—and the pain de campagne his father made the old way with a levain, a sourdough starter that was kept alive in a wooden trough in the back of the shop. It had been fed flour and water every single day since before the war. "My grandfather started it in 1936. When the Germans came, my father's mother hid it in the cellar under the potatoes. When the Germans left, she took it out and fed it. Same starter. Same bread you're eating now."

Conner looked at the hunk of bread in his hand with reverence. Then the ridiculous part of his brain that caused so much trouble over the years instantly went to a scene with the Führer demanding of the SS, "I must have some sourdough baguettes from Boulangerie Lemaire in Paris. Bring them to me or heads will roll..."

He managed to quell that line of thinking and and get back to paying attention.

Pierre explained how most of the bakers in Paris had gone over to the fast method since the fifties—the machines, the bleached flour, the bread that looked perfect and tasted of nothing—and how a few stubborn old men like his father, and a crazy fellow on the Rue du Cherche-Midi named Poilâne who wood-fired his loaves like a medieval peasant and had the whole Left Bank queuing around the block, were holding out. He explained fougasse and pain de mie and pain aux noix and why rye flour was a devil to work with. He explained the croissant: how you took a cold dough and a cold slab of butter and folded one into the other, and turned it, and rolled it, and folded it again, three times, four, until there were hundreds of layers, "Mille feuilles, you see? A thousand leaves," and how the whole thing had to be kept cold, cold, cold, or the butter would melt into the dough and the layers would vanish and you would have a tough bread roll instead of a croissant.

"The hardest part is summer," Pierre said. "In July, I make croissants at three in the morning with the windows open and a block of ice in a bucket beside me, and I swear to God, Conner, I pray to Saint Honoré every night in July."

"Saint Honoré?"

"Patron saint of bakers." He crossed himself and grinned.

Conner asked what it was like to work all night while everyone else slept.

Pierre was quiet for a moment, turning his little cup of Calvados in his enormous fingers.

"It's lonely, sometimes," he said finally. "But there's a moment... about four, four-thirty. The first batch is out. The whole fournil (bakery) is hot, the street outside is dark, everybody's asleep, and I think: in two hours, three thousand people in this neighborhood will wake up, and the first thing they'll put in their mouths is something I made while they were dreaming." He shrugged, embarrassed. "I don't know. It's something. It's not nothing."

"No," Conner said quietly. "It's not nothing. Could I come and see your bakery?"

Pierre blinked. "Now?"

"In the morning. When you're finishing. I'd just like to see it."

"You're serious."

"I'm always serious," Conner said. "It's a character flaw. Someone told me so on the train today."

Pierre laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Come at seven. Back door, in the courtyard off the Rue de Buci. Warning, though, my father will try to put you to work."

"I wouldn't mind that."

"You say that now." Pierre stood, knocked back the last of his Calvados, and pulled his army jacket tighter. "It's half past. I've got to light the ovens."

When the waiter slid the chit across the zinc, Conner put his hand over it before Pierre could reach for his own pocket.

"Laisse," Conner said. "Mine. Both."

Pierre started to protest. "Non, non, c'est pas..."

"You gave me a lesson," Conner said. "An hour ago I didn't know what a levain was. Where I come from, you pay for lessons."

Pierre looked at him for a moment, then laughed again. He was a cheerful soul for a lonely baker.

"Fine. But tomorrow the croissants are on me. And don't be late, American. Bread doesn't wait for anybody."

He went out into the dark street, whistling. Conner watched him go through the fogged window, a short, broad figure under the streetlamp, turning the corner toward the Rue de Buci. He felt an odd, warm glow in his chest that he could not immediately identify.

It took him a moment to realize it was the feeling of having made a friend.

At Saint-Aubin there had been boys he got along with. Boys he'd played football with, studied with, and sat beside at dinner for eight years. But they had been assigned to him, the way the sheets were, and the bell. He had never before in his life simply walked into a room and talked to a stranger and made a friend.

He had done it twice now, in one day.

He paid Gaston, over-tipped again (Gaston, being a more honest man than the taxi driver, pushed half of it back across the zinc with a grunt), and went out and rang the bell of the hotel.

---

It took a long time for anyone to answer.

When the green door finally opened, it was a woman of about sixty in a quilted blue dressing gown and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She had a narrow, clever face. She eyed Conner, all six-foot-three of him, with a total absence of enthusiasm.

"Monsieur. Il est minuit et demi."

"I know, Madame. I'm very sorry. I don't have a reservation." He took a breath. "Madame Aubert? Margot sent me. Margot Fleming."

Madame Aubert's face did not exactly change. But something behind it went very alert, very quickly, and she looked past him, up and down the street. Then she looked back at him, more carefully this time.

"Margot," she said. "When did you see her?"

"This evening. On the train from Geneva. We came in together at the Gare de Lyon."

"She was well?"

"Very well. She gave me lessons."

That, for some reason, made a faint smile twitch one corner of her mouth. "Did she," she murmured. "Well. Well, well. You'd better come in before the neighbors see a giant on my doorstep and call the police."

The lobby was tiny and immaculate and smelled of furniture polish. Behind a reception desk with a wooden rack of pigeonholes, keys hung from heavy brass tags. On the table alongside was a gray cat who opened one eye at Conner and closed it again with contempt.

Madame Aubert took a card from a drawer and slid it across. "Name."

He wrote Conner W. Morris, and after a moment's hesitation, under Address, he wrote None at present.

She read it upside down. Her eyebrows went up over the reading glasses.

"We are full," she said. "Entirely. But there is the little room on the fourth. The chambre de bonne off the Suite Jacob. It was the maid's room, in the old days, when ladies traveled with their maids. It's very small. The suite itself is let, but the gentleman is away until Thursday and the connecting door is locked." She looked at him over the glasses. "It stays locked."

"Of course, Madame."

"And you will not smoke."

"I don't smoke."

"And you will not bring anyone upstairs."

He felt himself go red to the ears. "I don't... I wouldn't know anyone to bring."

Madame Aubert studied him for a long moment. Then she took a key down from the rack, a small iron one on a brass tag, and held it out.

"Margot," she said, half to herself. "Of all the things for that girl to bring home from Geneva." And then, to him, more briskly: "Breakfast is from seven to ten. There is a bathroom at the end of the corridor. The hot water takes four minutes. Bonne nuit, Monsieur Morris."

---

The room was, as promised, very small. It was tucked up under the slope of the mansard roof, with a ceiling that came down so low on one side that he banged his head on it immediately, and then again, three minutes later, in almost the same place. There was a narrow iron bed with a white comforter, a chair, a wooden peg for his jacket, and one small round window like a porthole, set low in the wall, that he had to crouch to look out of.

When he did, he caught his breath.

Rooftops. Hundreds of them, gray zinc and red chimney pots, stretching away in every direction. Below, the chestnut trees along the Rue Jacob, their leaves stirring. And far off, to the left, just visible between two chimneys, a thin line of lights that he realized after a moment were the lights of the Eiffel Tower.

He undressed, folding his clothes neatly on the chair out of habit, hung his jacket on the peg, and then took Margot's scrap of paper out of his breast pocket and sat on the edge of the narrow bed and unfolded it under the lamp.

The hotel’s name. The telephone number. And beneath the number, in the same slanting hand:

Don't call from the hotel.

He thought about Margot's head on his shoulder and the smell of her hair.

He put the paper carefully inside the cover of his notebook, where it would be safe. He switched off the lamp. He lay down on the narrow bed with his feet hanging over the end of it and listened to the sounds of Paris coming in through the little round window: a car door, a woman's laugh, a church bell somewhere striking one.

Pierre is lighting the ovens now.

Then sleep.

On the second morning of his adventure, he woke at eight o'clock to full sunlight pouring through the porthole window. For a long, confused moment he had no idea where he was.

Then he remembered, leaped out of bed, and cracked his head on the ceiling for the third time.

He was late.

Chapter Four: The Royal Bakers of the Rue de Buci

He ran the whole way. Out of the green door past Madame Aubert, who watched him go with her coffee cup halfway to her lips; down the Rue Jacob; left, right, through a little street full of antique shops just rolling up their shutters; around a corner so fast he nearly took out a woman pushing a stroller and into the Rue de Buci, which at half past eight in the morning was the loudest, most crowded, most delicious-smelling street Conner had ever seen in his life.

Stalls lined the market street on both sides: pyramids of fruit and vegetables, wheels of cheese under cloth, fish laid out on ice with their eyes still bright, strings of garlic, buckets of flowers.

A man selling live chickens out of a crate was having a loud argument with a housewife holding a string bag.

And halfway down the street a shop with a faded green front and gold letters on the glass: BOULANGERIE — PÂTISSERIE — E. LEMAIRE — Maison fondée en 1921.

There was a queue out the door.

Conner went around, found the back door and knocked. It was opened not by Pierre but by a short, round man of about fifty, bald as an egg. He wore a white apron over an enormous stomach and had a welcoming smile on his face.

"Ah!" said the man, before Conner could open his mouth. "The American!"

"I'm very sorry, Monsieur. I was supposed to be here early and I overslept. I've never overslept in my life, I..."

"Pierre has gone to bed. He waited. He doubted you would come. I said, Pierre, a man who asks about the baking comes back. And here you are! Late! Like a real Parisian! Come in, come in."

He seized Conner's hand in both of his, which were soft and warm and floury, and pumped it. "Ernst Lemaire. Pierre's papa. Welcome. You are hungry? Of course you are hungry. Sit."

The bakery's back room, the fournil, was hot as July at noon. There were two great ovens set into the brick wall, a long scarred wooden table now dusted white with flour, racks of cooling loaves stacked to the ceiling, and in the corner, under a damp linen cloth in a wooden trough, something that Conner knew without being told was the levain. Pierre's grandfather's starter. Hidden from the Germans under the potatoes. Saved from the Fuhrer's appetite.

Ernst put a croissant in front of him, and a mug of café au lait and then another croissant, and then a pain au chocolat for good measure.

He talked the whole time. Ernst was from Alsace, which explained the German name, and had come to Paris at seventeen to apprentice under Pierre's grandfather. He had married the boss's daughter, "the most beautiful woman on the Left Bank, Conner, and the most terrifying, I say it with love."

He had been making bread in this room for thirty-three years. He switched to German halfway through a sentence. When Conner answered him in German, with the slight Swiss lilt the school had given him, Ernst clapped his hands together so hard that flour flew up in a cloud.

"Wunderbar! French like a Parisian, German like a Swiss banker! What else do you do?"

Conner thought about it. "I can cook a little. And fight. And dance."

"Can you count?"

"Yes."

"Can you smile?"

Conner smiled.

Ernst studied him for a beat. Then he leaned in close and dropped his voice, as if someone might be listening.

"My wife," he said, "is in Rouen. Her sister is sick. She is gone one week, maybe two. Before she goes, she makes me promise, on my mother's soul, Conner, that I will not work the front of the shop."

"Why not?"

"Because I give things away."

"What things?"

"Everything. A child comes in, she looks sad, I give her a pain au chocolat. An old man comes in, he says his pension is late, I give him a loaf. A pretty girl comes in, I give her a tarte aux fraises because she is pretty and it is spring. The priest comes in, I give him a brioche for the poor. It is not for the poor, Father Anselme eats it himself." He spread his floury hands helplessly. "When she finds out, she banned me."

"So who works the front?"

"Nicole." Ernst pointed at a slender girl of about seventeen with her dark hair formed into a tight bun. She was working the counter with grim efficiency. "Nicole is very good. Nicole also cannot serve forty people at once and I must bake. My wife's cousin who was supposed to help has broken her foot falling off a Vespa."

He looked at Conner, and his round face went beautifully hopeful. "You said you would not mind working."

Conner looked at the queue out the door. He looked at the ovens. He looked at the trough of levain under its linen cloth, saved from the Fuhrer.

"Where do I get an apron?"

---

He could tell at once that Nicole did not approve. It was obvious within the first ninety seconds, when Ernst brought him out front and announced that this was the American and he was going to help.

She looked him up and down:

"Madame's orders are that no one gives anything away. No one gives credit. No one sells the day-old bread at half price until after four o'clock. The tartes are counted at eight in the morning and counted again at noon and the numbers must match the till. Madame will ask me."

"That seems fair," said Conner.

"You do not touch the till. You wrap. You smile. You say merci, bonne journée. That is all."

"Merci, bonne journée," Conner repeated obediently.

Nicole narrowed her eyes and turned back to the queue.

For the first hour, Conner wrapped. He wrapped baguettes in their little paper sleeves and pain de campagne in brown paper and tied the cake boxes with string in a bow. He learned the prices in ten minutes and the names of everything in the case in twenty. He smiled. He said merci, bonne journée. He was, by any reasonable standard, a model assistant.

The silliness emerged at half past ten.

A little boy, holding his mother's hand, had his nose pressed against the glass of the pastry case where the croissants were piled up in a golden heap. He looked at them, and then he looked up, and up, and up, at Conner, and said:

"Why are they shaped like that?"

His mother shushed him. Nicole did not look up from the till. And Conner, who had been taught for eight years that a question deserved a real answer, leaned down over the counter until his face was level with the boy's and said, with perfect seriousness:

"They weren't always that shape. They used to be as round as the moon."

The boy's eyes went round.

"You see," Conner went on, lowering his voice to the tone of someone sharing a state secret, "the recipe for the croissant was invented for Napoleon himself, by his personal baker, who incidentally was Ernst Lemaire, the owner of this shop's great-great-grandfather. His name was Gustave. It was shaped like a crescent moon because Napoleon liked to eat them at night, on the battlefield, when planning the fight. The recipe was kept locked in a box of pure gold that was stored in the Louvre, guarded by ten soldiers day and night."

"Really?"

"Really. But one night, a wicked thief came England crept into the Louvre dressed as a cleaning lady and copied it down on the inside of his sleeve and snuck it out. The King of England had been demanding croissants like these with his tea."

"What happened?"

Conner glanced left and right, as if checking for spies or the secret police. He dropped his voice even further.

"Napoleon found out. He was very, very angry. He gathered his Army rode all the way to Bretagne on his white horse. He found the wicked thief, and he challenged him to a duel. With baguettes."

The boy gasped.

"Napoleon won, of course. He always won. That's why he's on the money. And ever since then, every croissant in France has been made in that shape in his honor."

He straightened up, took a croissant from the heap with the tongs, laid it on a square of paper, and presented it to the boy's mother. "One franc twenty, Madame. Merci, bonne journée."

The mother, who had been standing with her mouth as open as her son's, paid, took the croissant, and walked out of the shop in a slight daze. At the door, the boy turned around, clutching the paper bag to his chest as if it contained a holy relic, and gave Conner a look of pure worship.

Behind the till, Nicole had stopped counting change.

"None of that," she said, "is true."

"No," Conner agreed cheerfully. "But it should be."

By Wednesday, he gave up trying to control the nonsense.

A dignified old gentleman with a white mustache and a cane asked, quite innocently, whether the pain de seigle was very sour. Conner explained, with the same grave, scholarly earnestness he had once brought to Thucydides, that it was precisely as sour as it had been in 1505, when it had been the favorite bread of King Louis XII, who had insisted on eating it every morning with a single raw onion and a glass of goat's milk, which was why, according to history, he had lived to be fifty-two, a very great age for a king in those days.

That also explained why his wife would not kiss him before noon.

The old gentleman bought two loaves. And an onion from the stall next door.

It went on from there.

The tarte Tatin had been invented by two sisters who had dropped an apple pie on the floor of their hotel kitchen while being chased by a bear.

"A bear, Monsieur? In France?"

"A very small bear, Madame. From the circus. It had escaped. It was a very confusing day for everyone. They were all glad it wasn't the elephant who decided to go for a swim in the Seine."

The éclair had been named for the flash of lightning that struck the Pâtisserie Lemaire in 1921, on the very day it opened, and set Ernst's father-in-law's mustache on fire; you can see the scorch mark it made on the ceiling. (He pointed to a water stain in the corner.)

The pain aux raisins was spiral-shaped because Joséphine had liked them that way. Two of them eaten with wine calmed her nerves before she had to dance a minuet with Napoleon on one of his victory celebrations.

"All lies," hissed Nicole. She had spent the days muttering to the cash register that there would be a reckoning when Madame came back.

"They're all lies that would have been truths, except for an accident of fate," Conner whispered back happily.

Of course, the customers knew. That was the beautiful thing. Nobody believed for a minute that Napoleon had fought a duel with a baguette. But Conner told it all with such steadfast, wide-eyed sincerity, looking every questioner straight in the eye with his clear baby blue eyes, that the bakery became a joyful theater of nonsense.

Women came back a second time in one morning to see what he'd say about the brioche. His stories changed from one moment to the next. Schoolboys came in after lunch and begged to hear about the mille-feuille.

"Why is it called a thousand leaves?"

"Because the first one was made by a monk who had taken a vow of silence and could only communicate by writing in food coloring on folding pastry. Rumor is that he spent his life writing the entire Bible in it in tiny tiny letters. The Pope ate it one morning by mistake."

The queue stretched further down the street every day. Stallholders from the market wandered over on their breaks. The till, Nicole discovered, with an expression of dawning dismay, was up by nearly a third.

Conner had never had so much fun.

On Thursday morning, Pierre had been baking since midnight. He was eating a baguette with butter in the fournil in his undershirt, getting ready to leave and go to bed, when Conner put his head through the door and said:

"Pierre, come with me. Stand up straight."

"What? Why?"

"Just stand beside me and look noble."

"Noble?"

"Yes, you bake for the Duke after all."

Conner took him by the arm and marched him out into the crowded shop, where twenty-three customers waited to be served.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Conner announced, his voice dripping with self-importance. "May I present, on a very rare visit to our bakery, Monsieur Pierre Lemaire. He is Maître Boulanger to the Grand Ducal Court of Luxembourg."

Pierre stood there with a baguette half-eaten in one hand and his mouth full. Frozen in shock.

"Monsieur Lemaire," Conner went on smoothly, "is in Paris for only a few days. He is leave from his duties at the Château de Berg, where he prepares the breakfast bread of His Royal Highness the Grand Duke. It is a very great honor that he has agreed to bake for the Rue de Buci during his holiday. The Grand Duke, I'm told, is not amused."

A woman at the front of the queue grinned and curtsied.

Pierre turned slowly, very slowly, and looked at Conner. His face had gone the color of the cherry filling in the tarts.

"What the hell are you doing?" he said, through a mouthful of baguette.

"Monsieur Lemaire says it is his pleasure to serve the people of Paris," Conner translated serenely, "and that he hopes you enjoy the pain de campagne, which is made to a recipe personally approved by the Grand Duchess's mother-in-law, the Queen of England."

There was a smattering of applause. After a nudge from Conner, Pierre drew himself up to his full height of one meter sixty-eight and inclined his head graciously to the room.

Afterward, back in the fournil, he shoved Conner so hard in the chest that it would have knocked a smaller man into the ovens, giggling so much he had to sit down on a sack of flour.

"Luxembourg," he wheezed. "Why Luxembourg?"

"It's small," Conner said. "Nobody can check."

Ernst, who had been pulling loaves out of the oven with his wooden peel, was laughing too, his whole belly shaking under the apron. He was also, Conner noticed, looking worriedly at the calendar on the wall, where Saturday had been circled twice in red pencil and marked with a single initial: M.

That week was the happiest of his life so far.

He rose in the tiny maid's room under the eaves of the Hôtel des Marronniers at five, took a quick shower in cold water because he couldn't wait for the hot, dressed, and was in the fournil by half past. Just in time to help Pierre pull the last batches from the ovens.

Conner came to know the regulars by name: old Monsieur Fabre with the cane; Madame Guérin, who bought éclairs every day for her husband; twin teenaged girls from the Rue de Seine who came in for pains au chocolat and took turns asking questions so as to hear the stories.

Father Anselme, who came in every morning for his brioche. When he was informed that the brioche recipe had been blessed by Pope Pius the Ninth for the specific purpose of being eaten by priests, he laughed so hard he had to be given a glass of water.

On Wednesday afternoon, he went to the American Express office on the Rue Scribe by the Opéra, a place full of American tourists in loud shirts cashing their checks.

He sat across a desk from a young woman with red hair and a Boston accent who looked at his passport and then at a telex from New York that was in the file. The manager, who had heard the clerk repeat his name, had rushed out of his office and bowed and assured him that he was at Conner's service for whatever he needed. The other customers stared at him with new respect. Conner did not enjoy the experience.

On Thursday evening, from the telephone booth at the back of Gaston's, with a handful of jetons bought at the bar, he dialed the number on Margot's scrap of paper.

It rang eleven times. Nobody answered.

Conner stood in the booth for a while with the dead receiver against his ear, looking at the scrawled numbers on the wall where a hundred other people had written a hundred other phone numbers, and thought wistfully about the girl's head on his shoulder. Then he hung up and went back out to Pierre, who took one look at his face and ordered him a brandy without asking.

Madame Lemaire arrived on Saturday at a quarter past ten in the morning.

The shop was packed. It was the busiest Saturday anyone could remember. Monsieur Fabre was in his corner with his cane. The twins were there. There were, by Nicole's later estimate, three separate women who had come from other arrondissements entirely because they had a relative who had told them about the crazy American.

Conner, who stood with a lemon tart balanced on a paper square in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, was in the middle of explaining to a rapt semicircle of customers that the tarte au citron had been developed for the Knights Templar as a cure for scurvy during the Crusades, and that the last surviving Templar, a knight named Alphonse who was now eighty-seven years old, had come on the anniversary of the fall of Acre to buy one.

"He wept a single tear, Madame, right there where you stand today."

When Madame arrived, the laughter in the shop went silent.

She was not large. Conner had expected, from Ernst's descriptions, a Valkyrie. She was a small, straight-backed woman of about fifty in a navy-blue coat and a sensible hat, holding a small suitcase. She had iron-gray hair and a pair of black eyes that took in the entire room: the queue, the crowd, the till, Nicole, Conner and the semicircle of enchanted customers.

"Ernst," she called, not loudly.

From the back, in the fournil, there was the sound of a baking tray being dropped.

Ernst appeared in the doorway, pink to the top of his bald head, arms spread wide. "Mon amour! Tu es rentrée! How is Hélène? We missed you, we were desperate, look how busy, look..."

"Who," said Madame Lemaire, "is that?"

Everyone turned to look at Conner.

Conner set down the lemon tart. He took off the apron. He came around the end of the counter and stood before Madame Lemaire, very straight, with his heels together, the way he had once stood before the Headmaster of Saint-Aubin, at age thirteen, prepared for yet another punishment. He bowed his head slightly.

"Conner Morris, Madame," he said. "I'm a friend of Pierre's. I've been helping at the counter while you were away. I hope your sister is recovering."

Madame Lemaire looked up at him for a very long time. The fact that he was a full head and a half taller did not seem to matter.

"You are American," she said at last.

"Yes, Madame."

"My sister is better. Thank you." A pause. "And what, precisely, were you telling Madame Chevalier about my lemon tart?"

There was silence in the shop.

Conner considered, briefly, the Knights Templar story. Then he forced the nonsense back in its place and

reluctantly told the truth.

"Nonsense, Madame," he said. "Complete nonsense. Every word. It is my sin."

Madame Lemaire's eyebrows rose half a centimeter.

"All week?"

"All week."

"Napoleon," said Madame Lemaire, "and a duel?"

He swallowed. "You've heard about that."

"I heard about it in Rouen," she said. "My sister's neighbor's grandson told her about it. On the telephone."

And then, in the same flat, dangerous voice: "Nicole. The till."

Nicole, her expression triumphant now that the sword of justice had arrived, turned the tally book around on the counter and pushed it across.

Madame Lemaire set down her suitcase, took a pair of spectacles, put them on, and read down the column of figures for the week with one finger, slowly, while the whole shop held its breath and Ernst stood in the doorway, a man waiting for his sentencing.

She reached the bottom. She read it again. She took off her spectacles.

"Thirty-one percent increase," she said.

"Yes, Madame," whispered Nicole.

"Nothing given away?"

"Nothing, Madame. I watched. I swear on my mother."

Madame Lemaire turned and looked at her husband, who smiled at her hopefully. She looked at Conner.

And then, very slightly, at one corner of her severe mouth, there twitched a tiny smile.

"Well," she said. "The nonsense stops now. This is a bakery, not a cabaret." She unbuttoned her coat. "Madame Chevalier, there were no Templars. It is lemon, sugar, eggs, and butter. It is very good. That will be one franc fifty."

She picked up the apron Conner had set down and tied it around her own waist with a single sharp tug.

"Monsieur Morris. You will come to lunch tomorrow. Sunday. One o'clock. Upstairs." She turned to the customers. "Next."

And that was that.

---

Lunch on Sunday was roast chicken with tarragon, a potato gratin, a green salad, a cheese board, and a tarte aux fraise.

Madame Lemaire, whose name was Solange, and her husband talked about her sister. She told Conner, over the cheese, that her husband was the best baker in the sixth arrondissement and possibly the worst businessman in France. She said that she had married him for his baking and stayed with him for his heart. Ernst watched her say that with eyes soft with love.

Conner, watching them, understood something about marriage that he had not understood before.

When he stood to go, Solange took both his hands in hers at the door of the little flat above the shop, and looked up at him with those sharp eyes.

"I know you're not a baker," she