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Boulogne and took out a rowboat to commemorate a certain Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1935. We had been rowing in the upper lake that day, and I happened to mention that the park had once been the hunting grounds of kings, while he said it was a promenade for queens.
    “You are the queen of my heart. Lise, la reine de mon coeur, ” hehad said in a liquid voice as he rowed slowly. “Will you be my queen for life?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”
    I hadn’t considered it a serious promise of marriage, only a flirtation, but, acting quickly, André told me he loved me on the point of Île de la Cité, proposed formally on Pont Neuf, and by year’s end we were married under the dome of Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in the motherhouse of Daughters of Charity, although he would have been happier with just a civil ceremony conducted by a magistrate. I was eighteen and in love.
    He was a romantic as much as I, which showed itself when we took our walks. The first time we’d passed by a confiserie and smelled the almond and vanilla candies, I had tugged on André’s arm to stop and look at the brightly colored marzipans laid out in neat rows. Little apples, green with red streaks; strawberries with flecks of black; peaches with candied skins blending golden yellow to orange to deep rose at the stem. Miniature works of art they were. André had just sold an expensive frame carved with interlocking arabesques, so he tried to guess which piece I would like in order to buy it for me. Cherry, he had said, but I chose a peach, just to tease him, laughing that I had fooled him. He called me Lise, my precious peach. Lise, the strawberry of my heart. Lise, the succulent melon of my life. Lise of the lavender eyes. Lise with skin like blushing ivory. Lise, my own true love, my life. Hearing him say extravagant things like that as we walked along holding hands made me feel that I was the luckiest girl in Paris.
    That’s what you did in Paris. You walked and you looked and you posed for the other people looking, and you pretended not to hear their conversations, and it was all a pageant of color and laughter. And through all this walking and looking, I heard Sister Marie Pierre calling after me as I left the orphanage, “Find some beauty along the way. Tell me in picture words.”
    Nibbling that marzipan, we walked until our feet ached, then stopped at a pâtisserie and had a café crème and shared a palmier, a flat, flaky leaf-shaped pastry drizzled with caramel. All over Paris, lovers fed morsels to each other, just as we did.
    We often arranged to meet Maxime Legrand, André’s good friend, the art dealer who had asked his employer, Monsieur Laforgue, to consider taking me on as an apprentice. Whenever André and Maxime were together, they were exuberant, gesturing in broad arcs, Maxime taking stairs two at a time, long-legged André taking three. They fed each other’s spontaneity, bowed to old women, called them a breath of spring, danced in the streets with little girls, and sang Maurice Chevalier’s “Louise” or “Valentine” while their mothers beamed.
    In summer we three often sat outside at Café de la Rotonde to watch the parade of people. André and Maxime wore straw canotiers , and Maxime sported a white carnation in his buttonhole and striped trousers and white spats. But in winter we met him in the Closerie des Lilas, where it was warm and where the Montparnasse painters came to have a café and talk about each other’s work.
    Coming inside all smiles one afternoon in his beaver-collared overcoat, Maxime exuded an infinitude of charm— infinitude , a word I learned from Sister Marie Pierre. She loved teaching me words, and I liked to surprise André and Maxime with them, so that day I said, “I am experiencing an infinitude of elation in your presence,” and then giggled at my affectation. On hearing cups and saucers being stacked by waiters, I said, “Listen to the infinitude of