The Lost Carousel of Provence Read online

  “I’m sorry, Jean-Paul,” Cady said. “I’m just . . . not good with people.”

  “If anyone deserves to be angry, it is I. You have moved in with my cousin, and I imagine you are supporting his belief that he should fight against my attempt to sell the château. Isn’t that correct?”

  “You’re saying I’m interfering?”

  “I’m saying that this is family business, and it’s complicated. I don’t mean to be unkind, but you don’t understand all the players, or the history—not to mention that you will be long gone while the rest of us suffer the consequences.”

  “There’s— I’m—,” she stammered as the waiter set two steaming copper pots on the table. “I know sometimes I push too hard. But I think Fabrice—”

  “Cady,” Jean-Paul interrupted, “could we make a pact, just for the present time, to enjoy our food? One should never argue over a meal.”

  “Of course,” Cady said, holding up her wine. “To détente.”

  “À détente,” he said, clinking her glass.

  After a leisurely lunch of monkfish and potato dauphinoise, followed by pungent local cheeses and crusty bread, accompanied by the delicious and delicate wine, Jean-Paul insisted they share a citron tart with Italian meringue.

  “I can’t believe I ate all that,” she said as they left.

  “Yes, you put up a good fight, but you were seduced by our local cuisine. It has been known to happen to many an American tourist. What you need is a long walk, which is fortunate, because the car is parked quite some distance away.”

  As they strolled in the early spring sunshine, Jean-Paul pointed out various local landmarks and features of Avignon’s medieval architecture.

  “You know, if you ever get tired of being a fancy Parisian architect, you would make an excellent tour guide.”

  “Thank you. That is good to know.”

  “Or . . . I forgot. You plan to become a wealthy developer of historic properties.”

  “So our détente is over already,” he said with a sad smile. “Do you have something against making money?”

  “No. And of course, the château will be yours to do with as you will. It’s just so historic; it seems a shame to have some hotel chain turn it into some plastic version of itself.”

  “Best Western does a wonderful job.”

  “Best Western?” In Cady’s mind any motel chain was synonymous with cheap lodgings. She thought back to motels she had stayed in over the years—the funky carpets, the dubious sheets, the moldy showers. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I’m completely serious. They’ve been acquiring old properties, renovating them, updating when necessary—you may have noticed that the bathrooms in old buildings can be appalling, for example. And they run them as luxury hotels. They’re very beautiful.”

  “If you say so,” she said skeptically. “You bought me that fantastically sumptuous lunch, so at this point I’ll pretty much agree with anything you say.”

  “Aha, so I have found the way to make you cooperative.”

  “I’m always cooperative.”

  He chuckled. Back in the car, he negotiated heavy traffic and a string of roundabouts to get out of the city, then announced: “I am taking you on a quick detour.”

  “I still need to do the shopping and make dinner.”

  “It will be quick.

  “You see?” he said, pulling up in front of an eighteenth-century stone building called Le Najeti Hôtel la Magnaneraie in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, just five minutes outside of Avignon proper. “It is a beautiful hotel, run by Best Western.”

  As Jean-Paul rolled past slowly, Cady caught a glimpse of the ornate lobby.

  “Wow. I have to say, you were right. This place is . . . well, it’s gorgeous. I really had no idea. So they’re interested in turning Château Clement into a hotel?”

  “I’ve only had a preliminary discussion with some of their people. It is a possibility.” Jean-Paul glanced over at her. “I know it sounds romantic to renovate a château, Cady, but not only do I lack sufficient time and money—something like that has to be a labor of love. I would have to move back to Saint-Véran full-time. . . .” He shook his head.

  “Was your fiancée interested in updating the château?”

  “She . . .” He trailed off, seemingly searching for words. “She decided she did not like the idea of small-village life.”

  “I think it’s charming,” Cady said with a sigh. “And I think renovating the château would be enchanting.”

  “I think you are a romantic,” Jean-Paul said. “Fabrice learned the hard way how difficult it is to bring a place like Château Clement back to its former glory.”

  “Yes, he mentioned that. Fabrice has no children, has never been married?”

  “I believe he was married, briefly, a long time ago. When he lived in Paris. But from what I understand, it lasted only a few years. He’s been in love with someone else, a different woman, all his life.”

  “But he’s so . . .”

  “Old?”

  “I was going to say grumpy. Hard to imagine him being head over heels in love.”

  “He’s not the first man who’s been a fool for love.”

  “I’ve got news for you: It goes both ways. So who is—or was—she?”

  “I guess you have not gotten to that part in Le Château.”

  “It’s in the book?”

  “You have to look for it. If my memory is correct, I believe he just refers to her as ‘la minette.’”

  “I thought that was a sauce for oysters.”

  “That’s mignonette.”

  “Language is hard.”

  “It is.”

  “Hold on—Fabrice wrote the book a very long time ago. You’re saying he’s still suffering from unrequited love?”

  “As far as I can tell, he has been in love with la minette since he was a teenager. They met during the Second World War, fighting with the Résistance in Paris.”

  “Really? Fabrice was part of the Résistance?”

  “He doesn’t like to talk about it, of course. He was very young at the time.”

  “And what happened to ‘Minette’?”

  “According to Fabrice’s book, she was consumed by the dragon of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s one of the parts of the book that is very hard to understand. As I recall, the story is a lyrical, stand-alone chapter toward the middle of the book. A little on the pretentious side, if you ask me, but that was the style he was writing in.”

  “So I’ve been learning. What else can you tell me?”

  “In the book la minette is from the town of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. When she disappears in Paris, the main character—who I assume is actually Fabrice—goes to search for her there. It’s not far from Saint-Véran and Château Clement, which was what brought him to the family château for the first time.”

  “But he never found her?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not clear in the book. It’s possible he found her and she rejected him, or perhaps she really had been killed, though not by a dragon, of course.”

  “Did you ever ask him?”

  “As I believe I’ve mentioned before, Fabrice and I are not close.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t like me.”

  “He doesn’t like anybody,” Cady pointed out.

  “True, but he really doesn’t like me.”

  “Why not?”

  He gave her a look. “You’re very direct.”

  “Sorry. No guiles.”

  There was a long pause as they drove past acres of vineyards and olive orchards. Cady rolled down her window and inhaled deeply of wild thyme and rosemary.

  “In the summer there are fields here of sunflowers, strawberries,
and cherries,” Jean-Paul said. “And soon that whole hill, there, will be covered with almond blossoms.”

  “It’s a lovely region,” Cady said. “So different from Paris. I suppose that’s why people speak so fondly of Provence.”

  Jean-Paul nodded. After another long silence, he said, “As I told you, there’s a long-standing rift in the family. Yves and Josephine Clement lived at Château Clement from the turn of the twentieth century until after World War I. They had one son, Marc-Antoine.”

  “Marc-Antoine was Fabrice’s father, right?”

  He nodded. “Yves inherited the estate from his own father, which meant Yves’s two brothers—not to mention his three sisters—did not.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair that they wouldn’t get anything.”

  “It is not fair, of course. But it is necessary. Otherwise a large estate would be divided up among the children, and then their children. . . .”

  “Until there’s no estate left.”

  “Exactly. The right of primogeniture, under which the firstborn inherits the family property, isn’t fair, but it makes a certain amount of sense to property holders—not just the aristocracy, but wealthy farmers as well.”

  “So that’s what caused the rift? They were jealous of Yves? It wasn’t his fault he was the firstborn.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “The woman at the grocery store said something about rumors concerning Josephine . . . ?”

  He swore under his breath and shook his head. “That is the problem with living in a small town.”

  “She didn’t tell me what the rumors were,” Cady added. “Just that there were some.”

  “That’s in the past, long gone.”

  “Probably easy to say that, since you’re the next in line to inherit the château.”

  “Actually it goes first to my mother, but she doesn’t want it. I’ll share any proceeds with the family. There’s no one else in my generation who wants to take it on, anyway. It’s part of a bygone way of life, in some ways more burden than gift.”

  “So, what were the rumors?”

  “You are very curious about my family. I thought you were looking for a carousel.”

  “I am. I just . . . I never knew my family, and I find convoluted intergenerational stories fascinating.”

  “From my perspective, they’re less fascinating than tedious. But how is it that you never knew your family?”

  “I’m an orphan,” Cady said. The punch to her gut was still there, and she supposed it always would be. But she forced herself to say the unvarnished truth: no softening, no beating around the bush. She was an orphan with no family. Still, she didn’t look at Jean-Paul at that moment, preferring to be spared the sympathy or morbid curiosity she so often saw in people’s eyes when she told them about her upbringing.

  “You were raised in an orphanage?”

  “That sounds like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. Do they still have orphanages in France? In the States it’s the foster system, usually.”

  “You grew up in a foster home?”

  “A series of foster homes. I was a bit of a handful. When I got older I was moved to a group home, until I met a woman who let me live with her my last few years of high school.”

  “You never knew your parents?”

  She shook her head, focusing on the passing landscape and concentrating on keeping the emotion out of her voice. “There was some kind of legal issue—one of my bio parents refused to sign the paperwork, or couldn’t be found, or something. In any event, when I was a baby I wasn’t adoptable. And the older kids get, the harder it is to find adoptive parents. I never got that lucky.”

  “So you are a woman without a history,” he said. Cady still hadn’t looked over at him, but his voice was soft, kind. Too kind.

  “I have a history,” she said, her tone defensive. “I just don’t happen to know what it is.”

  “Even families that know one another may not truly know their own history,” Jean-Paul said tactfully. “If you wish to know the truth, the rumor in my family is that Marc-Antoine, the only child of Yves and Josephine and heir to Château Clement, was not, in fact, Yves’s natural child.”

  “You mean he was adopted?”

  He shook his head. “Marc-Antoine was rumored to be illegitimate, the child of Josephine’s extramarital affair.”

  “But if Yves was not Marc-Antoine’s biological father, then one of Yves’s brothers, or one of their sons, should have inherited the estate, not Marc-Antoine, right?”

  “Exactly right. My grandfather’s grandfather, Thierry, was Yves’s brother. He insisted that Château Clement should have gone to him, and therefore to his eldest son, and then to Gerald, and then to his eldest, Louise, who is my mother—Gerald had only girls. My grandfather Gerald is still alive, and he continues to insist that Fabrice has never had a legitimate claim to the château.”

  “Ironic, then, that you’re inheriting it anyway.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” He gave her a sideways glance. “Generations of bad blood in the family, and all for nothing. On the other hand, I suppose my grandfather, and his father, would have loved to preside over the château these past decades. Though with the world wars and the economic changes, I’m not sure they would have done anything more with it than Fabrice has. Probably would have bankrupted themselves trying. All things considered, it worked out for the best.”

  “And you’ve been trying to stay out of the drama?”

  He nodded and blew out a long breath. “It’s not easy. Every family gathering, every holiday, every event . . . It may have been beautiful at one time, but ever since I’ve known it, Château Clement has been a broken-down old place, and a source of contention. What is the phrase in English? An ‘albatross’ around the family’s neck?”

  “How is it that you speak English so well?”

  “I was at Cambridge, England, for a year. And English is the default language for international contracts. It was necessary that I become reasonably fluent.”

  “Still, it’s impressive.”

  “Hey, your French sounded very good when you were asking the waiter for the monkfish recipe at lunch.”

  She sat back in her seat and patted her stomach. “Speaking of lunch, I can’t believe you convinced me to eat that meringue. Though I’ll be dreaming of it tonight.”

  His eyes slid over to her, and lingered. “Perhaps you need a sieste.”

  “I thought that was a Spanish thing.”

  “Close enough. In some ways this region has more in common with Spain than with the rest of France. We’re only a few hours from the border.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Wait—what? Where?”

  She laughed. “I think I just found an expression you don’t know. It means, ‘I don’t believe you.’ We’re only a few hours from Spain?”

  “Maybe four to the border. About four and a half to Barcelona.”

  “Europe amazes me. It takes six hours to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco—and that’s all still within a single state—but here you could drive from France to Barcelona in less than that.”

  “Perhaps you should stay longer and explore.”

  “You’re right. I probably should.”

  Jean-Paul sat up straighter. “It looks as if you will—we seem to have forgotten to go by the car rental office.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  1944

  PARIS

  Fabrice

  “This is disgusting,” Paulette said, reading one of Fabrice’s pamphlets, in which he summarized reports from Vichy-controlled France, where Marshal Philippe Pétain—chief of state of Vichy France—blamed moral corruption for France’s defeat. He called on women to return to the domestic sphere and have babies, and officially banned them from wearing trousers. Women
were not allowed to hold a job or have a bank account without the permission of male relatives.

  “And now, from what I hear from my relatives in Provence, the Italians have withdrawn and the Germans are rounding up the Jews,” Paulette said. “Just as they did here.”

  “I heard about that, too,” said Fabrice. “I wrote about it last night.”

  It was just the two of them in the printshop. It was heaven. Fabrice was doing all the work while she read through his pamphlets, but he didn’t mind. He would do anything to keep her here with him, always.

  They were supposed to use only their noms de guerre and not to mention anything personal, but Fabrice spoke to Paulette honestly, sharing with her about his life, his father’s experience in a German hospital, his carpentry shop. He even mentioned the Château Clement.

  “Château Clement?” she said, putting down the tract she was reading. “You are related to the Clements of Château Clement?”

  He nodded, unsure whether it was a good thing or a bad one. His father had been ashamed of his aristocratic roots, preferring to create what he referred to as his happy-but-humble family home as a carpenter.

  “But I am from a village called Fontaine-de-Vaucluse,” Paulette exclaimed. “That is not more than a few miles from Château Clement!”

  “I’ve never been to Provence.”

  “Never?”

  He shook his head. “My father is estranged from his family.”

  “Why?”

  It was odd, but until this moment Fabrice had never really wondered why, had never inquired as to the details of the family drama. It was not a secret so much as simple knowledge, something he had grown up with, like the scent of freshly cut wood. The Clement family rift had seemed as natural and expected as the incessant sawdust on the tile floor of the workroom, mounding in the corners until his mother would become angry and finally sweep it up herself, giving the sawdust to the man who kept rabbits, or to the icehouses to keep the ice frozen during the sweaty summers. Or now, during the war, to the neighborhood bakers and butchers as a filler for breads and sausages.