But then the Nazis crossed into France.
Somehow in Paris the theaters and nightclubs played on but the streets filled with refugees streaming in from the north of France where the cities of Arras and Amiens had fallen. The British army ran home, leaving the French people to defend themselves. The boom of cannons became unceasing, the threat of planes was always overhead, the war right on their doorstep. But there were no French soldiers in the city. Just civilians—and not many of them, as most Parisians had begun to flee. First the wealthy had driven away in their cars in late May, but now even families like Éliane’s were leaving. Éliane had no idea where her father and Luc were: with the floundering French army in the north? Or had they been taken prisoner like so many others?
Some of her questions were answered that night when she was walking home along the passage. A hand on her arm dragged her into the void beneath the stairs.
“Luc!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”
Then she saw his face. Hard-set. All trace of her carefree brother gone.
“I’m a deserter,” he said bitterly. “The French government doesn’t deserve any more bodies. But you all have to leave. Go south. The Nazis will be in Paris within days.”
Éliane shook her head. “I have to stay,” she said. “Someone has to work. I’ll need to send money to everyone.”
“I knew you’d say that. Which is why I didn’t tell you first that Father has been taken prisoner, along with tens of thousands of men. I wanted you to choose to stay, not stay because you thought you had to.”
Éliane’s hand lifted to touch the cheek her father had liked to hit. She spared one thought for him—that his suffering would not be too great—and then she thought of Angélique and Ginette and Jacqueline and Yolande and their mother instead. “There’s no other choice,” she said. “The others will leave in the morning.”
“And I’m going to have one more night in Montparnasse.” The grim set of Luc’s face was more like someone taking what pleasure he could while it still existed, rather than someone who would treasure it.
And she knew then that she wanted something to treasure.
She didn’t go to the brasserie. She went to Xavier’s gallery and whispered in his ear.
“Are you sure?” he murmured.
“Yes.”
Not long after, she stood beside him in a hotel room: a Left Bank aging beauty with white voile curtains billowing charmingly at the window.
“I love you,” Xavier said to her, fingertips sketching her cheekbone.
“I love you too,” she said, almost helplessly, because it was impossible to put into words the disturbance in her body and in her mind and in the air whenever she was with him.
Xavier withdrew a package from his pocket and held it out to her. “They use ten thousand jasmine flowers from Grasse and twenty-eight dozen roses de mai in every bottle.”
Éliane slipped the wrapping off to find a square glass bottle filled with an amber-colored liquid, bearing the word Joy. She unstoppered it and the scent was almost as heady as inhaling Xavier.
“And they only make fifty bottles a year,” he continued. “So almost nobody else will ever smell the same as you. Which means I’ll always be able to find you.”
She stepped in closer to him.
“No matter what happens,” he finished.
She put the perfume down.
Then she half-turned and he half-spun her around, moving her long blonde hair to one side, and undoing one button on her dress, stroking the skin that had been revealed at the base of her neck. The next button parted from the fabric: more of her skin for him to explore. How would it be possible to survive this act? Her body was already alight and he hadn’t even kissed her.
“Xavier,” she whispered and he kissed her once, so lightly she almost missed it, on top of her shoulder.
There was one more button. He turned his attention to it, then to the new skin beneath. She was going to die.
In the quickest of movements, she pulled her dress over her head and let it fall to the floor.
So much skin revealed now, so much for him to discover, first with his fingers and then with his lips. Parts of her body she hadn’t even known were erotic were transformed into realms of hedonistic pleasure: her elbow, her earlobe, her hip bone, the small of her back. She hardly realized she was lying on the bed beside him; all she could think was how much she loved him, the way he was intent on her, on making certain she enjoyed this, her first time with a man. He would be the only person she would ever do this with. Until the end of time, his was the only body she would know, the only body she would ever want to know.
He looked up at her and smiled and that was almost enough to send her hurtling into whatever it was she could feel blazing, not far away. She touched his face, exerting just enough pressure to draw him upward so that his lips, for the first time since they’d entered the room, met hers.
And then there was nothing at all beyond Xavier and Éliane and their sudden and searing nakedness and the ache of something that was both inexpressible and hardly enough, something so towering she was almost afraid.
She fell asleep afterward and when she awoke, her breath caught at seeing Xavier, everything the same—darkest brown hair and eyes, the smudge of black on his cheeks and chin from stubble, the curve of his lips—but something different too, an intensity of expression more concentrated than ever.
He placed a box on the pillow. “For you.”
“You can’t keep giving me things, Xavier,” she said gently but firmly.
“I’ve given you two things,” he said. “The perfume and this. Do you know how hard it’s been not to give you more, these last few months? How hard it’s been not to give you everything? This is yours, if you want it.”
The way he said those last words—if you want it—made her untie the ribbon, peel back the paper and open the lid. A quick flash of blue, a rounded cabochon with a white star caught inside it, two square-cut diamonds on either side, a band of white gold.
“It’s a star sapphire,” Xavier said as he set the ring free from the box. “This one has twelve rays, making it even more rare and more beautiful. But not as beautiful as you.” He smiled as he slipped it onto the ring finger of her left hand. “Will you marry me? Please?”
It was that final word, the quiver of vulnerability within it—as if this handsome, bewitching, confident man worried that she might refuse him—that made her fall so far in love with him that there was no end to her fall.
She kissed him, breathing her answer—Yes, of course—into his mouth and then it was happening all over again. Kisses. Bodies. Hands. Mouths. She imagined the second time would be a disappointment, that nothing could match the first. But it surpassed it in every way.
When she woke next it was after midnight and Xavier was sitting on the window ledge, the curtains rustling like spirits around him. The way he was looking at her, so intently, as if he were memorizing her, had her smiling and stepping out of the bed and over to him. Beyond them lay the spires of the city, the moon, the artistes speaking furiously of both art and war in the cafés below.
Xavier’s hands reached for her hips and drew her closer to him. “I’m… I don’t know how to say this.” He closed his eyes and her heart shuddered. He looked as if everything inside him hurt.