Read Online Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer - Free Book Online Page A

cleaning frenzy—like any good salaryman, commuting crosstown twice a day. A very un-good salaryman, actually, I confess, for although my starting point and destination were unvarying, my journey was lackadaisical, and I wandered and lingered at will, gawking through the precipitation, coveting through shop windows (most obsessively admired: in a window on rue du Four, amid a bristle of stiletto heels and sexy flats, a pair of fleece-lined gum boots), stopping in at Shakespeare and Company to peruse the books, making sure to be in Saxe’s room at the time each night when the music started. I bought a pretty, down-filled quilt to spread over Saxe’s counterpane, and also three bottles of lamp oil—enough to last me several years, I realized later—to fill his glass lanterns, which emitted, after I’d wiped the soot from the chimneys and knocked the ash off the cotton wicks, a glow that was sufficient to read by yet still vague enough that the music was not outshone, and what could be seen never obstructed that which could be heard, and the softness of the room, its lack of edge and corners, complemented the strange indeterminate sourcelessness of the playing. Debussy joined Brahms on the program, and Mendelssohn and bits of Fauré and bits of other things I didn’t recognize, all of it bits, fragments lingered over, repeated and repeated, around and around and around, yet the whole of it strangely beautiful, the playing accomplished, searching. At some point, I would lock up and wander home to my hotel, and make my call to the hospital.
    One day early I rang Rouchard. His secretary explained that he was out of town on business and would be in touch upon his return. Was there something I needed? Not a thing, I said, and I headed out to begin my commute, descending in the elevator, striding through the lobby to the street, where no Drôlet awaited me. We’d struck a bargain: on the occasion that I needed a lift to the hospital, I’d contact him the night before. Otherwise, sayonara. His absence as I stepped through la Clairière’s doors always gave me a little burst of happiness. I’d overthrown my jailer! I was practically a modern-day Marianne, wasn’t I, bearing high the Revolution’s standard! So, okay, it was a demitasse revolution; nevertheless, my first morning gulp of Paris sidewalk air always gave me a caffeine jolt, and each day started victorious.
    The snow of my arrival didn’t repeat, but the cold resumed and deepened, and the gray of the season set in with evident obstinacy, another reliable certainty. Half of the days, it rained, but never hard, and the scene I surveyed from under the hem of the hotel umbrella entranced me. The daylight hours grew more and more wan and sordid, but they diminished in number. The gay shop lights, illumined earlier and earlier, the slow glow through drizzle and music from somewhere else gave the impression of a world in night flower, a neon reveille to announce a nocturnal dawn. I stopped in, finally, and bought myself the boots.
    On one of my longer and wilder excursions I ended up on a path through an emerald park, not realizing, until a soldier made the long march down the lawn to tell me so, snapping to attention directly in front of me with a click of polished heels and a spring-loaded salute, that I had managed to breach the grounds of the Élysée Palace. He was as inorganic as a lamppost and as splendid as a cockatiel, done up as Napoleon might have done him up, buttons bright in a tricolor swallow-tailed coat, a dress cap with a patent leather visor, but his barked
“Bonjour, madame!”
was clearly a request not a nicety, and an order not a request, and meant that I should go, now, and quickly. I was entertained by this, really—
“Bonjour!”
I trilled back, silly old thing—thrilled that my dowdy American cluelessness would elicit the same formality this centurion accorded his