The first time I saw Solange I was sixteen, lugging my box of clinquaillerie—knives, saltcellars, snuffboxes, hammers—anything I could sell—through the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, calling out my wares as loud as I could. The box hung from a leather strap that was slung around my neck and cut into the skin painfully.
A thickset bitch of a servant in a blood-stippled apron, her hands ruddy, fine red veins threaded through her nose, started pawing through my knives, checking the blades and then tossing them back into the drawer as though she wished she could slice me with them. I stood stock-still, calmly watching this ransacking. When she chose a knife at last and asked me roughly for the price, I bowed slightly.
“Normally I would charge thirty sous, but from you, chère madame, I ask only twenty-five.” She seemed disgruntled by this offer of a bargain and snorted. An involuntary smile twisted her mouth as she dropped the coins into my hand, careful not to touch me. Imagine, a Jew giving anyone a bargain! She took the knife, turned swiftly, and waddled off, eager to forget about the whole incident. I began to make order in my knife drawer again, basking in my pathetic triumph, when I glimpsed the blue-green silk of a fine dress and caught the dark, insistent scent of gardenia perfume.
“Do you have any snuffboxes?” The voice was musical, playful.
“Oui, mademoiselle,” I answered, opening the highest drawer in my box and removing three painted snuffboxes.
“Madame,” she corrected me.
“Excuse me,” I said, my eyes flicking up to her face. She was young, maybe twenty, with a long, mournful Spanish face, small chocolate eyes. Her neck was speckled with a scatter of tiny birthmarks. Her features weren’t nearly as pretty as she was. She took one of the snuffboxes and turned it in her narrow fingertips.
“How much for this one?” she asked.
“Thirty-two sous,” I said.
“How can you possibly make a living like this?” she asked, replacing the snuffbox and setting a small, strong hand on top of my peddler’s box. “You are a Jew, am I right?”
“Yes, madame.”
“My master has a job for you if you would like it,” she said. “You’ll make more in a morning than if you sold this whole box of junk.”
“Who is your master?” I asked.
“The Comte de Villars—this is his house,” she said, gesturing to the mansion behind her, enclosed by a high wall. “It’s only a few little errands. You can leave your peddler’s box in the coach house; it will be safe. And then, after you are done, come to the kitchen, we’ll feed you some soup and bread.” She had a light, sunny way of talking that made everything she described seem enticing.
“What will he pay?”
“One louis,” she said. My father often didn’t make that much in a month. I imagined the suspicion that would spread over the old man’s face when I brought home the golden coin.
“I can’t accept that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I think it’s quite generous!” she said.
“It’s too generous. It’s … absurd,” I said, looking down at my box.
“Absurd!” She laughed. “Are you angry with me? All right. Don’t be so upset. Good Lord. What is not absurd, for a morning’s work making deliveries?”
“Forty sous,” I answered softly.
“My name is Solange,” she said. “What are you called?”
“Jacob Cerf,” I answered.
She led me into the carriage house, a well-swept, tidy room with a gleaming crimson carriage standing at its center, a family crest with two golden lions rampant decorating the door. A larger carriage was parked to one side, covered in a tarp. I dragged the leather yoke of my box over my head and set it down. Now Solange disappeared for a few moments and returned carrying several filled leather pouches, accompanied by addressed letters.
I made the deliveries. Though the shopkeepers looked at me curiously when I arrived, asking, “From the Comte de Villars?” and peeked into the pouches, when they counted the coins inside they were happy enough. I guessed that it had been some time since my employer had paid his bills.
When I returned, Solange was waiting for me outside the great house. She walked me into the kitchen and instructed the cook to serve me soup, cold meat, and bread. The cook was not happy, but she did what she was told, setting the plates down hard before me. I was very hungry, but I didn’t dare eat in a gentile’s house, for fear of breaking our dietary laws. I sat stupidly before the tempting meal, hands in my lap, nearly weeping with embarrassment.
“You think there’s something wrong with it?” laughed the cook.
“Never mind,” said Solange. “Maybe you will be hungry tomorrow. Come back, we have work for you.” I returned to the count’s house the next morning. After that, every day but the Sabbath, Solange found errands for me to execute: dropping a coat off at the tailor’s to be mended, buying a skein of thread, a few buttons, or buckles for a pair of shoes. Solange always gave me considerably more money than I needed for my messages, but I brought back the correct change every time. I wasn’t a thief.
Eventually, I convinced myself it was acceptable to eat the soup and bread they offered me, as long as I ate no meat. Each day when I was finished I came back to the kitchen and sat at the long wooden table, sipping soup, tearing at the fine white bread. I spent the rest of the day selling my wares, then put the money I had made from the Jew’s box into the tin my mother kept above the stove, for food and other household expenses. The count’s money I pocketed, thinking that one day I would put it to use and show my father that I was a savvy businessman.
One chilly afternoon, when I had finished the count’s errands and sat gratefully spooning pea-and-mint potage into my mouth, I heard the cook whisper to Solange, “Look how handsome.” My throat closed up with embarrassment and I had to leave before I had finished my soup, which I regretted later as I lay hungry in my bed.
After five weeks, Solange said, “Would you like to meet the master of the house?”
She asked me to strap my box back on. I did so. She led me down a long parquet corridor and up a marble staircase, along a strip of Persian carpet, pistachio-green walls trimmed with gold, light spilling through high windows.
“I have brought you what you wanted,” I heard Solange say proudly, standing before me, partially blocking the room I faced. Her silk skirts were so wide, set on an armature the shape of an oblong hen cage, that she could not enter straight through the doorway, but had to turn sideways and sidle through it. She stood half in the room, half out, her face turned toward her master, elbows resting on the wide frame that held up her dress.
“My dear Solange,” said a high, youthful voice, “you never disappoint me.” Solange slipped into the room fully now, and gestured for me to follow. The count was sitting down. He was younger than I expected, maybe thirty. His short, plump legs were encased in tight apricot silk britches; as he crossed them, they made the sound of two palms sliding across each other. His neck was fat, his nose wide, his lips fleshy. He had the eyes of a basset hound. My first impression was that this man had too much face.
He looked up at me with interest. “Come in, young sir,” he said, taking a pinch of snuff from an enamel snuffbox, laying it into the hollow between two tendons where his wrist met his thumb bone. He then leaned over, blocked one nostril, and sniffed.
“It might be quite impossible, you know,” said Solange.
“Of course,” said the count, sniffing. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”
Standing dumb a few feet from the door, I ogled the room: the count’s study was both intimate and grand, with gilt-edged chairs, marigold silk walls, a pale blue desk on bowed and spindly legs, four sleek paintings of neat-headed horses in profile set against emerald fields, and one of a fleshy nude reclining on a red silk divan. I turned my eyes from the painted figure, the first naked woman I had seen in my life; my gaze landed heavily on an identical red divan, before which Solange stood in her red-and-white-striped dress. Her young face was serious; she stared into the middle distance, thinking. The blood-red silk covering of the divan was embossed with little pelicans and glowed richly in the cool morning light filtering through a tall window. On the opposite side of the room, among various other luscious pictures, a narrow painting of a raggedy Jewish peddler boy framed with swirls of gold hung in the center of the wall. His clothes, though more or less in imitation of the fashion of the day, were shabby and patched; his three-cornered hat shone with wear. His Jew’s box hung heavily from his thin neck. In an instant I saw my mistake: it was a mirror. I took in my black, shabby, shapeless coat, red vest, baggy black trousers, the peddler’s box with its many drawers dangling from my neck. Seeing myself as if for the first time, in this magnificent gilded room, I was filled with disappointment and disgust. I felt my face grow hot.
The count cleared his throat. “May I call you Jacob?”
I nodded.
“Solange is right, you are a Jew?”
“Yes, monsieur,” I whispered.
“In that case,” he said, jumping from his chair and standing, his back swayed, padded behind jutting out, “I have a proposal for you. Solange has been telling me that you are a very reliable young man. Really extremely reliable and … agreeable. As a man, quite apart from your … heritage. I know that you have been trained from an early age to think you cannot really mix with people like us, to fear us and to pity us, I have a feeling. Is that right?”
Fear constricted my throat.
“You may be right,” he continued. “Your people are amazingly loyal to their traditions. But … I want to make you a proposition, something for you to think about. A new future. I need a second valet. I would like to offer you the position. In order to take it you will have to leave your family and your previous life, and in exchange I will pay you handsomely. Three louis a week. You will live here, and in my other houses whenever we go there. You will accompany me on all my personal outings and help me in all of my affairs. You will be treated absolutely without prejudice, if you choose to join my household. You will see the world.” He said this last with a grand gesture, opening both his arms and widening his eyes. His manner was so foreign to me—I didn’t know how to read it. He was slightly ridiculous, with his tubby dancer’s posture, his splayed feet, his enthusiasm—and yet he was encased in such finery, and spoke such beautiful French.
I felt perplexed and embarrassed—for the count as well as for myself. I turned to Solange, who was now looking at me expectantly.
“Please excuse me, monsieur,” I said. Then I backed out of the room and escaped down the hall, my wares skidding and crashing about inside my Jew’s box. I rushed down the marble stairs, through the kitchen, out the door, and away from that great house.
I returned to my old life, determined never to set foot in the count’s voluptuous home again. The master had asked too quickly.