It was still light when they began their stroll, meandering along the Quai des Grand Augustins, over the Pont Neuf, onto the Île de la Cité, past the cathedral of Notre Dame, onto the Île Saint-Louis, back to the left bank to nip in and out of the bars of the Boulevard Saint-Germain—the Deux Magots and the Café de Flore—to end up, as dusk rolled down upon the city like a theatre curtain, at the restaurant Porquerolles.
He talked nonstop all the way, pausing only to acknowledge people he knew—a wave to Jean Cocteau (striking, bony, handsome); a few words in two languages and a formal introduction to Pablo Picasso (broad, woolly in a bald sort of way, looking like a Spanish peasant); a joke that set them both giggling with Samuel Beckett (bony, mysterious, far from handsome, piercing eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles).
“Do you know everyone in Paris?” she asked.
He took her arm and slipped it through his. Strolling like lovers now.
“I’ve lived here, on the same street, in fact, since I was five or six years old. Yes, I know a lot of people, but most of them not well. Paris is a moveable feast. For example, I spent the war here. Beckett and Picasso did not. I suppose they might have been at risk. And I suppose I was not. Meanwhile, who stayed, who left, who did what has become the subject of a fiction as massive as La Comédie humaine. And it drives people apart. For almost a year France has been eating itself alive. I have learnt to value any friendship and not to ask too closely about who did what, with whom, when.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, let me give you the obvious example. The war is scarcely over—Japan has not yet surrendered—and Marshal Pétain is on trial. Today in fact, Pierre Laval took the stand to give evidence on behalf of the Vichy regime. It’s possible they’ll both hang.”
“And it’s possible,” she said, “that that would be justice.”
“Indeed, but it is not a healing process. And I fear that France will go on devouring herself for a generation.”
They had reached the door of Porquerolles. He held it open, she paused on the threshold. She did not want this to be a subject that dominated their meal.
“You will understand, Serge, that I am even less likely to forgive than any French citizen.”
“I do, and I would never expect you to. But we must walk away from the mess of recrimination or go on eating ourselves alive.”
“And you think that can apply to an individual as well as a nation, do you?”
“Let’s eat.”