Her father grunted, pulled off his apron and strode out, not waiting for her mother, who kissed Éliane’s cheeks before she left. Then Éliane returned to Xavier with a bottle of wine, poured him a glass and heard her sigh of relief echo through the now-empty restaurant.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not used to being here and doing nothing.”
Xavier sipped his wine, studying her as if she were a portrait worthy of contemplation. “Do you still take care of your sisters? Luc said you’re studying at the École with him. And working at the Louvre, as well as working here. But I think I remember that you used to paint. Like Luc.”
Éliane gave a short laugh. “Not like Luc, no,” was all she said.
Xavier waited. Éliane swallowed wine, twirled the glass around and studied the old rings of spilled Bordeaux on the table.
“I used to paint,” she said carefully. “But canvases are expensive. And you need time to practice. I only take art history classes now. In the mornings. Just until my shift starts at the Louvre.”
“Do you still have any of your work?” Xavier tilted his head down, trying to lift her eyes from the table and back to his face.
She let them drift upward. “I had to paint my canvases over in white and sell them,” she said simply, finding herself studying him now.
The dark hair and the dark eyes and the blue shirt and the well-built physique all made him handsome but the thing that made him almost impossibly attractive was his manner. If his father owned art galleries around the world and Xavier met with artists like Matisse, then he had money and power and certainly his bearing and clothing suggested the confidence and self-assurance of someone who knew their place in the world. But rather than telling her stories about celebrated artists, he was asking her about her own art.
It was so heady—his kindness, the warmth and genuine interest glimmering in his eyes—that she pushed her wineglass away, not needing any further intoxication. “You started to tell me about your father’s gallery,” she prompted, wanting to know more about him too.
“I’ve just finished a law degree,” Xavier replied. “It was my compromise with my father: I’d go to Oxford, and he’d let me have what he calls my final fling with oil and canvas. A year in France to learn the gallery business from him, and to paint in my spare time”—he grinned ruefully at the palette of blues on his right hand—“and then I’ll stay in Paris to take over the gallery’s European interests, and my father will take care of America and England. With Hitler so unpredictable, we need to be here to make sure everything is secure in case…” He paused.
“Do you think there’ll be war?” she asked somberly.
“I don’t know.”
Éliane leaned forward, into the conversation. It was a topic her parents seemed wholly uninterested in, that Luc laughed off, and that she didn’t want to frighten her sisters with.
“I hope Hitler thinks he’s done enough,” Xavier said. “He has Austria, he has Czechoslovakia; he now has an alliance with Russia. And he’s either expelled every artist from Germany and his newly claimed lands who’s Jewish, or who doesn’t paint exactly what he wants, or he’s made sure they’ll never work again. He’s not just seizing nations; he’s destroying their art and culture too.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Éliane said slowly. “How something like war might affect art. Which is silly, because all I have to do is look at history to see it isn’t only people who suffer when countries fight.”
“Everything suffers when power and money are put in front of avaricious men. And I’m starting to think there are more avaricious men than there are decent ones.” Xavier sipped his wine and shook his head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to come here and talk about melancholy things. I came because…”
He looked at her with those eyes, as startling as the chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt painting, then blinked, and she somehow felt as if he had scratched her heart with his eyelashes. “I wanted to make you smile,” he said, not looking away, unabashed by the regard for her that his words implied. “Like you smiled at your brother this afternoon on the street. You have a beautiful smile.”
She couldn’t help it. Not just her mouth, but her entire face was suddenly recast into a beam of happiness, which Xavier returned. She didn’t say, even though she wanted to, Your smile is beautiful too.
TWO
On her way to work, Éliane saw more and more people buying gas masks and torches. Then, as she sat at the desk at the Louvre, her mind bounced between newspaper headlines claiming that Belgium and the Netherlands had mobilized troops to defend themselves against Hitler’s likely ambitions, and Xavier. She’d seen him every night over the past week, always after ten o’clock when the brasserie was closing and they could have a glass of wine together and talk.
She’d told him things she’d never spoken aloud to anyone, disloyal things about her family—and about Luc. That her brother’s perpetual absence from the École du Louvre, where he was supposed to be studying and was thus excused by her parents from having to work, sometimes made her so angry—or perhaps envious—
that no such option was open to her. Had she the time to sit in a Montparnasse café all day and all night, she would produce something more than wine-headaches and gossip.
“Not that I have any illusions about my ability as a painter,” she’d said, eyes fixed to her glass rather than Xavier’s face, which was etched with a compassion that made her eyes want to fill up. “Having no time to spend with paints and canvases means that what little talent I might have had would never develop into anything. But to write about and study art all day long, rather than just at the École in the mornings would—”
She broke off, cheeks reddening as she realized she’d been saying everything that was in her heart even though she hardly knew the man opposite her. Except that he left Luc and Montparnasse each night to come and sit with her.
“Would what?” he had asked, voice soft. “Give you something fine in a day marked from dawn to midnight with work and family responsibilities?”
She felt as if she were betraying her whole family, including her sisters who were not to blame, when she said, looking at him at last, “Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” he’d said.
One tear escaped at the futility of her wish. Xavier had watched it fall, hands tightening into fists, brow tautening into a frown, as if he too wished for her to have that impossible future.
A museum patron, asking for directions, drew her back into the Louvre and once she’d sent him into the sculpture gallery, her restless eye landed on the Uccello painting The Battle of San Romano. A wild black horse reared for attack in the foreground, the red spears of lances foreshadowing what would happen.
She shivered. Art did not always soothe; it sometimes spoke too clairvoyant a truth.
“Mademoiselle Dufort.” Before her stood the tall and dignified Monsieur Jaujard, face as grave as a Renaissance portrait.
“We’re closing the museum tomorrow for three days for essential repair work,” he said. “I need as many people to help as possible. Will you come? And your brother?”