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restaurant.”
    Unaccustomed to being home in the evening during the week, Louis lay awake most of the night rehearsing his approach with Cardin and his options if there were no more hours for him to work at the café.
    The Café Royal was not extending anyone’s hours, Cardin had told Louis; in fact, business had dropped so much that he was considering going with less waiters and serving on tables himself. With many Parisians having left the city and few travelers visiting the city, the restaurant business wasn’t flourishing. Cardin, a compassionate man with a wife and child himself, knew of Louis’ large family and offered to keep Louis on his regular shift. He even was willing to give Louis first coverage when another waiter either left or could not work because of illness. Surely, that would give him some additional hours from time to time. This would mean that Louis had to be available to work at a moment’s notice, including Saturdays and Sundays. For Louis, all he could think of was the need to keep his family alive and nourished with a roof over their heads.
    The next four years for Françoise were very sad years. She missed her weekend journeys throughout Paris with her father and, because of the resistance movement, stayed close to home at the insistence of her parents. With no sightseeing and no new buildings with a story to be told by her father, Françoise ached at the dull thought of doing housework or helping with her mother’s laundry.
    In June 1944, Françoise turned twelve years old. Paris had recently avoided being bombed. A Swedish neutral had convinced General von Choltitz of the German army that bombing Paris would serve no purpose. The Allied army was fast approaching and the Germans would soon be forced to surrender the city to the French.
    In August of that year, skirmishes broke out between resistance fighters and German troops throughout the city. Choltitz, under orders by Hitler, was to detonate explosives carefully placed under all the monuments of Paris. Realizing the centuries of culture present in these monuments, Choltitz sent a message to the Allied army urging them to move quickly on Paris before other German officers took action he could not be responsible for. General Charles DeGaulle proceeded toward Paris along with General Jacques-Philippe LeClerc, commander of the Second French Armored Division. French troops, not Americans, were to enter the capital first.
    On August 25, as the French troops began entering Paris, more fighting broke out with the Germans resulting in serious damage to the Hotel Continental, a short distance away from the Hotel-de-Ville on Rue de Rivoli. Shortly thereafter, the Germans instructed a cease-fire. A surrender had been signed and General DeGaulle was presented to the French people in a victory celebration that evening at the Hotel-de-Ville.
    There were tears streaming down Louis Dupont’s face as he stood in the crowd below the window of the hotel as the general appeared. Louis beamed. He had once worked at this place. Few people knew the room General DeGaulle appeared in more than Louis. He could describe the furniture, the paintings on the wall, even the design of the curtains in that particular suite. He envisioned himself standing at DeGaulle’s side at the window, sharing in the glory that surely was in bloom in the streets below.
    The Café Royal was booming with customers now with the return of French and Allied troops to the city and Monsieur Cardin begged Louis to stay at the restaurant. Cardin tried to convince Louis that he would be better off with more hours at the restaurant than at the hotel because it would allow him to be home with his family each night and on weekends as well. Louis was loyal; he had been loyal for all the years he had been at the hotel, and he had no intention of leaving Cardin when he needed him. After all, wasn’t this the man who kept Louis’ family with food during the war years by offering him work, even when