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clamoring.” She had also taught me to describe things by calling them something else, so I told them that the voices I heard singing in Notre Dame were “a brotherhood of seraphim,” which delighted them both.
    Maxime discreetly tipped his head toward some painter at a distant table and whispered, “Fernand Léger.” When no one was within earshot, Maxime spun a tale of a wealthy art buyer assessing Léger’s paintings in the Galerie Laforgue, where, as Monsieur Laforgue’s protégé, he was learning how to praise a certain passage of painted light, or a strong, unifying diagonal, or an inventivecomposition. Maxime dropped casual comments about this rising star or that, and who was buying what, and how much the buyer had paid, and how one particular painting, newly arrived from the painter’s studio, though a few centimeters smaller, was more exquisite in a number of ways, a vastly superior purchase to a larger canvas. I lapped up his stories like a starving cat.
    “Why don’t you ever have a lady friend with you?” I asked.
    “I would be forced to ignore her in your presence. My devotion to you is a million times stronger.”
    I threw my shoulders back, sucked in my stomach, and laughed at his exaggeration, tossing it off as though it were a fallen leaf, yet all the while waiting for his next murmur of flattery, hoping for a private glance that would say he meant it. This easy talk, in a way, I think, charmed André as much as it did me.
    “It’s a good thing André is taking you away from Paris,” Maxime said the last time the three of us met before our departure. “I would have pestered you until it became dangerous.”
    I knew beyond any doubt that he was only half teasing.
    B UT I WAS A NDRÉ ’ S . From the first time I saw him, I was his. He had found me on boulevard Saint-Germain at rue de Seine as I was hurrying home from picking up an herbal remedy for Sister Marie Pierre at the boutique d’herboriste . I was drenched with rain, and he held his umbrella over me. I took sly, sideways glances at his profile—his long neck, angled jaw, and dark brown eyes, whose mysteries I could not decipher, though I learned his name: André Honoré Roux. We walked the lengths of a few streets together, and when he had to turn onto rue des Saints-Pères and I had to continue straight toward rue du Bac, he wrapped my fingers around the handle and, with a blithe “Enchanté, mademoiselle,” turned the corner and was gone.
    The next day my search for the tall stranger in the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés began.

CHAPTER FOUR
    PASCAL’S NEGOTIATION
1937, 1874
    T HE MORNING AFTER WE ARRIVED , A NDRÉ AND I WERE awakened by roosters, the first morning in my life that I had ever heard their raucous cackle. Apparently the roosters of Roussillon had a robust language too. We left Pascal snoring in rhythm with the roosters and with the cigales’ scraping calls, harsher than a chirp, maddening in their incessant repetition.
    André peered down a side street. “A sawmill. That’s good. I’ll need lumber to build sawhorses and a plywood work table.”
    I gave him an apprehensive look. Who would buy a frame in a village that had no gallery?
    In the boulangerie , a middle-aged proprietress who introduced herself as Odette wore a white daisy in her hair and a beauty mark made by twisting the point of an eyebrow pencil on her right cheekbone, a practice five years out of date.
    “So Pascal prevailed upon you to come. This must be—”
    “Lisette. My lovely, lovable, smart, spirited—”
    “André, stop. You’re embarrassing me.”
    “Wife.”
    Looking me over, she said, “Your Parisian wife.” She shouted into the kitchen, “René, come take a look at André’s wife.”
    Superb. What was I? A department store mannequin?
    His cheeks and hands dusted with flour, the baker poked his head through the doorway, greeted us, and disappeared.
    As a gesture of welcome, Odette refused payment for the two baguettes we