Le Divorce Read Online Free PDF Page A

oil paintings, an inherited tapestry, an array of faience plates on the walls, and correct Louis Quinze furniture covered in faded brocade or fraying needlepoint. The furniture, with its curves and chipped gilding, so like the former grandeur of a rundown Westwood motel, looks very odd and pretentious to the American eye when you first come to France, until you remember that this is their normal furniture, the Louis were their kings.
    Suzanne also has a small château with a tennis court, near Chartres, where the family would gather on weekends. So far, every French person I have met comes with three pieces of real estate—two in the country (one from each side of the family) and the Paris apartment. This place near Chartres did not descend from Charlemagne, however, but had been bought in the 1950s, following a successful business venture by Monsieur de Persand. Roxy and Geneviève and I took the Chartres train on Sunday, with Gennie dressed in her proper little dark blue dress and white stockings, and Roxy wearing rouge, me with my tennis bag, according to Roxy’s instructions. I still remember Roxy’s rouge, it was as if she felt she needed some symbol of brightness, an external antidote to the pallor and terror in her soul.
    Her French family still call Roxy l’américaine , by which they seem to mean that her qualities are typical of us, each with its positive and negative aspect: frank/tactless, impetuous/heedless, fresh/gauche, generous/spendthrift. She got a lot of points in their view from buckling down to the French language with fair success, and secured their hearts by deciding to convert to Catholicism. “You are Protestant, I suppose,” Madame dePersand had asked, at their first meeting. “But nothing peculiar, not Quaker or anything like that?”
    Roxy will not brook loose cultural insults.
    “President Herbert Hoover was a Quaker,” she said.
    “Oh, of course, one of your most notable presidents,” Madame de Persand agreed with hasty politeness, as if she treasured this important fact. The question remained.
    “My parents are Congregationalists,” said Roxeanne, and Madame de Persand had still looked mystified. Then she must have concluded she would rather not know the peculiarities of a cult she’d never heard of, and the subject was dropped. The Persands did Roxy the credit of imagining her conversion was done from wifeliness and that, going against the grain of a stout Protestant nature, it represented a spiritual sacrifice. But in fact Catholicism suited Roxy all along—especially the music and priestly raiment. Chester and Margeeve, needless to say, were horrified.
    We siblings were all surprised when the issue of Charles-Henri’s Catholicism seemed to weigh on the minds of our liberal and nonreligious parents, especially Chester. Some unarticulated Protestant aversion, deeply submerged, now surfaced, invoking an imaginary destiny for Roxy of ceaseless child-bearing, daily mass. They vividly pictured her dressed in rusty black, clutching a rosary, waddling on her knees across the forecourt of Lourdes.
    “But I’m not becoming a Catholic,” Roxy objected. “Anyway, I think you are thinking of Ireland. It’s Ireland that’s priest-ridden, not France. In France they invented the morning-after pill.”
    “I remember the Catholic kids, growing up,” said Margeeve, supporting Chester. “When it became five minutes after midnight Friday night, they stuffed themselves with hamburgers.”
    We were wholly baffled by this seeming non sequitur. She tried to explain. “They weren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays, so they could hardly wait. It seemed so hypocritical. Why belong to a religion you don’t feel wholehearted about?”
    “Charles-Henri is not religious,” Roxy reassured them. This turned out to be true; he was indifferent to where he wasmarried. They were married in the Congregational Church, with a reception afterward in our parents’ garden, and then celebrated in France at