TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER2, 1941
The poster offended Lucie to the core. A grotesque caricature of a Jewish man hovered with greedy fingers digging into a globe. The poster advertised “Le Juif et la France,” a new exhibit at the Palais Berlitz run by an antisemitic French organization with German funding.
If there hadn’t been so many people passing over the Petit Pont, Lucie would have ripped down the poster, wadded it up, and thrown it in the Seine. The Greenblatts, Jerzy, all her other Jewish friends—nothing greedy about them—unlike the Nazis, who stole and plundered.
Lucie marched over the bridge to the Île de la Cité. The hideous exhibit blamed everything wrong in France on the Jews rather than the Germans or the French. And people went to the exhibit. They paid three francs and went, thousands of them, even Véronique Baudin.
Just curious, Lucie’s roommate had said. Just something to do with her friends, she said. It made her think, she said.
Thinking of it made Lucie feel ill.
Thank goodness she saw her roommates less and less each week. Last night Marie-Claude and Véronique had grumbled about résistants destroying the peace in Paris.
Was that how Paul felt too? Was that how he talked to his collaborating friends at his fancy soirees?
To her right, Notre-Dame de Paris rose in the partly cloudy sky, graceful and majestic.
On the plaza in front of the cathedral, Lucie sank onto a bench and set her lunch basket beside her. She’d come here to eat lunch away from roommates and customers and résistants.
Not much of a lunch, but she didn’t have much of an appetite. She shoved aside her cloth napkin and pulled out a little jam sandwich.
A pigeon waddled over. For hundreds of years, people had sat on these benches and fed pigeons. The bird cocked its iridescent head at her and cooed.
“I only get 250 grams of bread a day,” Lucie told him. “I’m not sharing. Be glad worms aren’t rationed.”
“Lucille Girard?” An elderly woman in lavender stood before her, the Marquise de Fontainebleu, formerly Ethel Marshall of Manhattan.
Lucie rose and greeted the woman, who attended the American Church in Paris.
“May I join you?” The marquise pointed to the bench.
“Please do. I was about to eat my lunch.”
“I brought mine too.” She sat and gazed at the cathedral.“Our Lady and I have weekly lunch dates. She’s remarkably accepting of this old Protestant.”
Lucie mustered a smile and studied the edifice. The twelve apostles flanked the central door, including the Apostle Paul.
Paul. Her heart sank.
“Please pardon my prying, but I noticed your face was downcast.” The marquise’s blue eyes homed in on Lucie. “It isn’t like you.”
Lucie picked at her sandwich. “Oh, you know. The résistants and the Germans keep killing each other. It’s escalating, and it’s horrible.”
“It is. I guess I was wrong.” The marquise tipped her tiny chin. “I thought it was about a man. You had that look.”
There was a specific look?
The marquise studied her with a knowing twist of her lips.
Lucie sighed. “It shows?”
“Paris is the city of love, my dear, so it is also a city of heartbreak. I have seen much in my many years here. And on Sunday, I saw you and a handsome widower trying not to eye each other.”
A groan filled her throat. The last few weeks, she’d come close to forgetting who Paul Aubrey was. Yesterday he’d reminded her, inflicting more pain than her dentist had.
“Would you care for a listening ear?” Silver hair swept back from her kindly face to a chignon below her hat.
Lucie took a bite of her sandwich. She did want a listening ear. Talking to her parents or the Greenblatts was impossible. Her artistic friends wouldn’t listen to one word about an industrialist, and her church friends had made their opinions of Paul clear.
