Olivier had come to the fashion industry in his youth as an entrepreneur. He had an instinct for business, and had gone to HEC, the Harvard Business School of France. His family had been the discreet owners of a famous haute couture house, and he had understood early on that haute couture was a slowly dying part of fashion, exquisite custom, handmade clothes at high prices for an ever-shrinking group of wealthy women he firmly believed would disappear in future generations. He had been right. His family had held fast to their beliefs and principles and refused to enter the ready-to-wear market. They thought it vulgar and common, and his family’s noble, historical haute couture house had died a quiet death twenty years earlier.
Olivier had wanted to hire young designers and head up a commercial ready-to-wear line for them, to save the business, and his father had refused to “cheapen” their name. So Olivier had used his entrepreneurial skills to start a handbag line of his own. Twenty-five years after he launched the brand, they were the highest selling commercial line of handbags in the world. They were mid-priced, mid-range, trendy, fashionable bags women wore for a season and then replaced with something new.
Long after the family haute couture house of beautiful women’s clothing was forgotten, Bayard was a household name. His father hadn’t lived long enough to see his son’s commercial success, which Olivier often thought was probably just as well. The new offerings four times a year were enticing in colors women couldn’t resist and shapes young women felt they had to have. Their typical customer was much younger than their haute couture clients had been. With today’s rapid transitions in fashion at midrange prices, the bags were almost disposable. Young women weren’t looking for bags to keep forever. They wanted the hot new fashion now. Olivier had never gotten into the flimsy low-end lines that looked cheap and fell apart in a short time. Bayard bags were durable, but didn’t need to be, because the women who bought them moved on with a new season and didn’t keep them for long. The bags were all about look, and not the highest quality. They weren’t junk, but they had nothing to do with bags like Hermès, or Saverio in Italy. They closely imitated some of their styles from time to time, in fun fabrics or outrageous colors, which gave them a fresh twist, and they flew off the shelves as soon as the stores that sold them put them on display.
In his heart of hearts, Olivier would have loved to own a high-priced brand too, just for the pleasure of it, but the big money was where he had positioned his line. The money was bigger still in the even lower-priced brands, but he had always maintained a certain standard and stuck to it. He wasn’t ashamed of the products they sold, but they were a long way from the standards of quality he had grown up with. His dream would have been to establish and own a high-quality brand as well, in addition to his original one. Financially, he couldn’t justify owning a brand that would be prestigious but less profitable. So he stuck with the lines he sold so well all over the world. It was business, not love. He was admired in the trade for how smart he was in business, how good his instincts were, and how honest he was.
Olivier had been less judicious in his personal life and had gotten off to a bumpy start. While at university, he had gotten a student at the Sorbonne pregnant. She was beautiful and sexy, and from a different world. Both his parents were well educated. His mother was from a fancy aristocratic family and exquisitely elegant. His father was from a respectable bourgeois family, and had studied to be a doctor, until he gave up his studies and went into his family’s haute couture business. They surrounded themselves with intellectuals and dignified people.
Olivier had never dated girls from his own background and preferred girls who were pretty and looser with their favors than the ones he had grown up with. He was briefly infatuated with the girl he’d been dating, but not enough to want to marry her. Her mother worked in a florist shop. Her father was a dispatcher at a trucking company and had been a trucker himself before he injured his shoulder. They were both decent people and Monique was the first person in her family to go to university, determined to better herself. She wanted to be an actress but had been wise enough to go to university first. It ruined everything for both her and Olivier when she got pregnant. Her father had landed a punch squarely on Olivier’s jaw, which even he felt he deserved for being careless. They were both eighteen and had been equally cavalier about the risk of pregnancy. Her family was staunchly Catholic, and an abortion was out of the question. She didn’t want one anyway. Olivier had done the honorable thing, much to his family’s dismay, and married her. Their brief marriage gave them both ample opportunity to discover how little they had in common. She hated being married and being held to Olivier’s standards for what he expected in a wife. She cheated on him several times soon after the baby was born. They separated when their son, Maxime, Max, was six months old.
Olivier’s parents paid for childcare for their grandson but didn’t want him living in their home. Monique’s parents grudgingly allowed the child to live with them, with the nanny the Bayards provided. Monique never went back to university, and soon left Paris to pursue her acting career around Europe with stars in her eyes. She got into drugs and died of an overdose when Max was two. He continued living with his maternal grandparents, and Olivier supported him as soon as he had a job and had done so ever since. Olivier saw Max regularly when he was a child, though not as frequently as he would have liked. Eventually he paid for a series of boarding schools for Max, most of which expelled him for cheating and stealing from other students and even teachers. Max was jealous of the other boys, and well aware that his father had money and he had been an early mistake. His maternal grandparents had explained that to him bluntly. He turned his relationship with his father to his advantage and played on his father’s guilt, but he had never been a loving, appealing child. He had his mother’s worst traits, and as he got older, he always hung out with the bad boys at school. Olivier had done his best to turn him in the right direction with no success. Hoping to guide him, Olivier had given Max a job at twenty-five, working for him.
Now Max was thirty and Olivier was forty-nine. Their relationship had never been easy. Max always felt cheated, and Olivier still felt a responsibility to him, even though his son had not turned out as he hoped. He did his best for him. Max was clever in business, but always looking for a shortcut, a fast deal, an easy way to get what he wanted. Olivier paid him a handsome salary to work in the marketing department of Bayard Bags. Max was abrasive and unappealing, but he was good-looking and used charm and lies to get what he wanted. To him, the end always justified the means. He spent all his money on women and flashy cars, and he loved to gamble. Olivier wasn’t proud of him, but took full responsibility for him, and Max made full use of it in any way he could.
Two years after he and Monique had divorced, when Max was two and a half, Olivier fell madly in love with a young artist. He was twenty-one and Héloïse was two years older. She lived in a garret with no heat and worked as a nude model in her art classes when she needed money. He fell in love with her, and they were inseparable from then on. He was still a student, and much to his family’s despair, he married her, and she got pregnant immediately. They had a son named Basile, and he was everything Max never had been, an easy, happy, sunny child who was easy to adore, and they both did. Olivier’s younger son was the sweet spot in his life.