“Well, now... you look nothing as I had imagined!” She let out a gentle laugh. “But I suspect neither do I.”
He was unable to reply.
***
If my calculations are correct, she must have been close to forty when my father first met her, though it is impossible for me to know that for sure. Even when I met Marthe years later, she claimed to be an age that would have been impossible given my father’s age and my own. But this was certainly not the first step in her reinvention. As I would eventually learn from her, one needn’t be born into a beautiful life in order to have one.
***
I met my grandmother in the last months of 1938, when I had just turned nineteen years old, a few years before everything in Europe would smolder under Hitler’s torch. Her existence came as a complete surprise to me, like a hidden steamer trunk that was suddenly pulled down from an attic and opened to reveal a forgotten treasure.
My father spent most of his hours running his small pharmacy on Rue Jacob. Since my mother’s death, he had struggled to find ways to occupy me, his only daughter. I had finished my schooling five months before, and now spent my days dreaming of adventures and writing down imagined stories and plays.
We were mutually frustrated with each other, and my restlessness only made it worse. At night, when he returned home from work, all he wanted was solitude, while I was eager for companionship.Our apartment was dark, the paint worn and the furniture practical. My mother’s legacy was her books that lined the shelves. Every time I pulled a bound leather volume down from its resting place, a part of me ached, and my mourning felt like a fresh wound.
When I complained one evening about the lack of excitement in my life, he seemed to be on the brink of despair.
“I’m sorry I can’t be more entertaining.” The exasperation in his voice was apparent, and it was clear he was unprepared for the trials of rearing a daughter on his own.
For a moment we sat across from each other without speaking, his eyes focusing on the tower of bookshelves before finally settling on me. At first, I thought he was thinking of my mother. The woman who had kept his house tidy, cooked his meals, and nurtured my love of books. But then, something unexpected happened.
The light in my father’s eyes shifted. It was as though he had stumbled upon an elixir in a forgotten cabinet in his shop, and he believed this tonic might have the power to alleviate the ennui that plagued me.
“I know someone I believe you’ll find interesting... Perhaps she’ll even give you some material for your writing... I haven’t seen her in quite some time, but I will write and see if she will meet you.”
Three days later he walked into my bedroom with a letter in his hand.
“Tomorrow, we’ll visit someone you will not believe is actually related to me. But it’s the truth,” he said, as if he, too, could not quite believe the veracity of his statement.
“And who might that be?” I asked, perplexed.
“You’ll finally meet the woman who bore me. Marthe de Florian.”
***
The next day, after our lunch, we set off for Chaussée d’Antin in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, where Madame de Florian’s apartmentwas located. On the way, he told me he never thought of her as anything more than the woman who had given birth to him, as they had been estranged from each other most of his life.
“The only thing we share is her original last name,” he told me as he shook his head. “But even that is something she’s changed along the way.”
“And does she know about me?” I asked him.
“Yes... she knows. I took your mother to meet her before we married, and we later visited her again to announce we were expecting a child. But you will see when you meet her, Madame de Florian has little interest in marriages or births...”
I raised an eyebrow. “Whatareher interests?” I pushed him.
“Things I find tiresome... her own comfort and pleasure... her own beauty... her belief that she is somehow above the banality of this world.”
We had nearly reached her apartment.
“She’s an actress of sorts, so be prepared,” he warned. “She enjoys an audience.” He paused for a second and looked at me. I was dressed in my best clothes, a navy hat and wool coat, and one of my mother’s dresses that I had taken in for the occasion.
“She will like you very much, Solange. You’re pretty enough to fit in amongst her things.”
“But you haven’t seen her in so many years,” I told my father. “How do you know everything will still be beautiful?”
“I don’t... but I suspect that she has kept herself quite well preserved; that was very much her nature.”
***
