Mistral's Daughter

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Book: Mistral's Daughter Read Online Free PDF
Author: Judith Krantz
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women
restaurant she passed was full.   It was just after noon and on the terraces of Le Dome and La Rotonde
there wasn't an empty chair to be found.   Waiters whisked about adding extra chairs and tables so that the terraces
sprawled out almost to the edge of the pavement, but there was no place for the
uninitiated to sit, since no one was fool enough to leave a front-row seat at
the most exciting theater in the world.
    Maggy stopped at a street
vendor and bought one red carnation and pinned it to her blouse. Her spirits
rose abruptly and she turned, head high, into the Select, hoping that the
smaller café might have room for her inside.   She zigzagged sharply left at the door to avoid the crowd of men
standing in front of the long bar and discovered a tiny empty table in the far
corner of the room, next to the big, lace-curtained window, sheltered and inconspicuous.
    Thriftily, she ordered only a
cheese sandwich and a lemonade, staring at the crowd of rowdy, roaring,
bizarrely dressed, carefree people packed in together behind the little wooden
bar tables as if they intended to spend the day.   The sound of raucous, high-pitched
conversa-tion, swelling like a river in spring, mounted around her.   As the room grew smokier she caught snatches
of French spoken in a dozen different accents, for this was the era in which
foreign artists dominated Montparnasse; the days of Picasso, Chagall, Soutine,
Zadkine, and Kisling; the years of de Chirico and Brancusi and Mondrian, of
Diego Rivera and Foujita.   French
artists, like Léger and Matisse, were in the minority as Americans, Germans,
Scandinavians and Russians flocked to the quartier.
    Happy in her anonymity,
feeling invisible because she knew no one, Maggy didn't notice the interested
glances that were directed at her.   Here
at last was the exotic spectacle she had expected to find.   This was the life Constantine Moreau, her
high school art teacher, had talked about.   A failed artist, he had filled his pupils' minds with high-flown tales
of the cultural life of Montparnasse, stuffing their heads with half-accurate
stories of parties to which he had never been invited and feuds in which he had
never been involved.   What he lacked in
teaching ability he had made up for in the passionhe felt for the life
of the artist, in the aching exile he conveyed as he made real the violently
pigmented, tempestuous drama of a Paris to which he had so vainly yearned to
belong.   It was Moreau who had given Maggy's
imagination the home it had been seeking, Moreau who made a bohemian life in
Montparnasse her ever-present fantasy, he who had assured her that Renoir
himself would have wanted to paint her even if she were taller than most of the
other women in the world.   She gazed,
almost open-mouthed in wonder, at the display of deliberate eccentricity inside
the Select.   This is what heaven must be
like, she thought.   If only she were part
of it.
    "Well, my little one, so
you're the new girl, no?   Let me offer
you a drink."
    Maggy turned, startled.   She hadn't even noticed a woman who sat at
the next table, inspecting her closely from the outrageous orange of her hair
to the remarkable and almost equally outrageous boldness of her features.
    "Well, are you or aren't
you?" the woman asked.
    "Oh, I'm new, that's for
sure," Maggy said, startled, looking around at the stranger.   She must be over forty, Maggy thought, and
yet still so rosily pretty, even though she was more than just plump, like one
of the luscious girls Fragonard painted, who had grown middle-aged and fat.
    "I am Paula
Deslandes," the woman announced, with an air of importance. "And
you?"
    "Maggy Lunel."
    "Maggy Lunel," she
repeated slowly, as if she were tasting the name.   Her shortsighted eyes, the warm brown of an
expensive cigar, peered intently at Maggy.   "Not bad. It has a certain charm, a certain dash, a brio — perhaps it will do.   In any case it has
the essential two syllables and since there
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