Read Online The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris by Jenny Colgan - Free Book Online Page B

or some grand space; I’d seen them in magazines. Paris had all those grand apartments with the posh rooms and marble fireplaces and high ceilings and…this was basically a coffin. Probably where the maids used to sleep or something. It was painted totally white, with dark brown scuffed parquet on the floor.
    â€œWhat do you think?” said Sami. “Isn’t it AMAZING?”
    I put my head back out of the doorway.
    Amazing? I wondered. What on earth must his be like?
    â€œAMAZING!” he said. I blinked at him.
    â€œOh, AnNA Tron, she is very sad and cross with me,” he said, making his face go sad. “Can I get you something?”
    â€œTea?” I ventured.
    â€œI ’ave no tea.”
    â€œCoffee?”
    â€œ Mais bien sûr !”
    He clattered happily over to the tiny kitchenette, while I advanced inside my little monk cell with my large purple bag. I put it on the bed—there was literally nowhere else it could possibly go—and clambered past the chest of drawers over to the window. And that’s when I saw it. I gasped.
    The window opened sideways and was full-length. I thought briefly of how many children must have fallen out of it. But I didn’t think it for long before seeing past the net curtain and opening the catch, to find outside two extraordinary things: the tiniest balcony, only just big enough to fit a tiny wrought iron table and two wrought iron chairs, but directly in the path of the sun and, from six floors up on the Île de la Cité—Paris. Paris all around. The rooftops of the other buildings across the water, with tables out on their south-facing side. The road down, and the bridges all the way down the Seine. To my left, to the northwest, I could just make out the ominous looking black tip of La Défense, the great center of the financial district, which looks like a sinister black bridge. And everywhere, the teeming, pulsating life of the city, the noise insulated from six stories up—the little fruit van chugging its way furiously down the street; a collection of stunningly attractive people emerging from a sleek black car to a chic bar; two little lines of schoolchildren walking politely down the next street hand in hand. And if I craned my neck really, really far to the left, to the west, I could see it. The one and only unmistakable fretted iron of the Eiffel Tower.
    I gazed and gazed and gazed at the pinkening skyline, as if I were thirsty and this was water. I could no longer feel the pain in my foot, or my longing for a shower, or my general exhaustion.
    â€œYour café,” said Sami, coming in my room without bothering to knock. “You really not like?”
    I smiled.
    â€œI didn’t see the balcony. It’s amazing. Amazing.”
    He had given me a tiny cup of black stuff with a sugar lump sitting next to it. I normally just like lattes or Nescafé. I looked at him.
    â€œHave you got any milk for the coffee?” I asked apologetically.
    â€œMilk? No. Milk is a feelthy thing. You suck the teets of a cow. No. Milk. No.”
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    â€œBrandy? I have a leetle brandy.”
    And as it was such a gorgeous evening, I said yes, why not, and we sat out on my little balcon (he had one too, on the opposite side of the sitting room; we could wave to each other in the morning) and drank coffee with brandy in it and looked out over Paris. I don’t think if anyone could have looked up and seen me (which they couldn’t, because we were up in the eaves, where pigeons flew by and the sky turned pink and yellow and lavender, and there was no one else there but the birds) that they would have thought for a second that I was anything other than as much a part of Paris as anybody else, and I looked out on the strange and extraordinary foreign landscape and I wondered. I wondered.
    - - -
    1972
    Claire was totally charmed by Arnaud and Claudette, her charges. They were incredibly polite,