Epilogue

Lucie Lesage

Paris, France

September 24, 1956

“Shall I try to drop you closer to the entrance, madame?” the taxi driver asked as we pulled up to the Gare Saint-Lazare, the classical façade darkened by heavy rains. “Do you have an umbrella? I can escort you in if not, though short of forging a tunnel to the entrance, we will not stay dry. Look,” he said, gesturing outside. “This weather reminds me of the early hours of la crue de la Seine, the great flood of 1910,” he went on, his eyes darting up to the rearview mirror to see me. “I was just a boy then, but I remember it so well. Saint-Lazare, it was like a castle floating on the sea—”

“I do have an umbrella, yes, thank you,” I said, interrupting him and reaching down to pick it up from the damp taxi floor.

“Good,” he said, eyes back on the road. “It will help. A little,” he added, trying to maneuver the black Citroën taxi between the rows of cars all trying to inch closer to the station. I looked at the Citroën’s familiar dashboard as he stepped quickly on the gas to squeeze between two more taxis that had just turned in opposite directions. My family’s company, Michelin, had become the majority shareholder of Citroën at the end of 1934. That celebratory day in December was the first time I’d ever tasted champagne. My parents had consumed at least a dozen glasses between them and were not the least bit bothered when I simply picked up a bottle and gulped straight from it.

After the driver slowed to a stop near the main entrance, I reached in my bag and paid the fare. In front of us, men and women ran quickly, holding all sorts of things over their heads to fend off the rain—umbrellas, newspapers, small traveling bags, heavy suitcases, a towel, even a leafy branch that was doing nothing to keep the inventive young man’s head dry.

“You weren’t alive in 1910,” the driver continued, “but you must have seen photographs of that day. The heavy rainfall. The aftermath. We Parisians are used to a drizzle, but nothing like that. Or this.”

I nodded and pulled the belt of my beige raincoat a little tighter. “I’ve experienced rain like the day of the great flood,” I said, placing a silk scarf over my head and tying it tightly around my neck. “But it wasn’t in Paris. It was in Indochine. Many years ago, in Indochine.”

He turned around in his seat. “Now we say le Viet Nam. L’Indochine, c’est fini.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “I know.” Two years ago, Indochine finally became le Viet Nam, after nearly a decade of war with France. It was still divided between the communist north and anticommunist south, but it was its own now, no longer a French colony. “When I was there,” I said firmly, “it was Indochine.”

I opened the door and ran to the station, feeling like a well-outfitted duck. Inside, I joined hundreds of others who also looked like they’d arrived via bathtub. All around me coats were being removed and shaken out, hair patted dry, laments muttered about ruined shoes and delayed trains.

I took off my own coat and scarf and then joined the line at the ticket counter, requesting a first-class seat for the three p.m. train to Deauville.

“The train is delayed one hour,” the seller said. “And then, it will only leave if the rain lets up. It doesn’t look like it will, but take a chance if you’d like.”

“I will,” I said, handing him the fare. “And you may be surprised. Sometimes the heaviest rains are the shortest.”

He nodded politely and motioned to the man behind me to step forward.

I took my bag and walked to the restaurants near the shopping arcade. The smell of damp clothes permeated the air along with a feeling of agitation, of having to travel with wet stockings. I entered the first café I saw, sat under a large advertisement for Rouyer cognac, and ordered a coffee. In the corner, Charles Aznavour’s “Sur Ma Vie” was playing on a record player, a song that was being hummed in every corner of France. I sipped the coffee and smiled at the waiter. “Do you have anything else?” I asked.

“Besides coffee?”

“No, besides this song,” I said, nodding toward the corner.

“Of course, madame. If you think you’re tired of hearing it, imagine how I feel.” He let the song finish and then changed the record. A few seconds later Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me,” an American hit from a few years before, filled the room and I nodded in appreciation.

I ordered a croissant, ate it slowly, and had started to signal to the waiter for another coffee when I glimpsed something through the café’s glass door that made my heart catch. I stood up immediately, nearly knocking over the table with my knees.

“Are you all right, madame?” the waiter asked as he approached.

“I’m fine. I’m sorry,” I said, reaching into my bag. “I must go.” I dropped coins on the table, too many coins, and pushed the chair back in a hurry.

“You saw a ghost?” he asked.

“No,” I said, without looking at him. “I saw a color.”

I rushed back into the humming crowds. Among the dark pantlegs and damp skirts, I was sure I’d seen a flash of green silk covering a woman’s legs. But not any green. Nguyen green. A dress in the most beautiful hue caught between the practical grays and lifeless blues of the other travelers.

I walked out to the Salle des Pas Perdus, the waiting hall, tempted to crouch onto the floor to have a better look. I was quite sure that there was only one woman in the world who would wear green silk of that particular shade in a rainstorm. Marcelle de Fabry.

I darted from corner to corner as quickly as I could despite my traveling bag starting to feel like a sack of cement hanging on my arm. I looked everywhere, but I didn’t see Marcelle, or any woman in green silk.

I had lived in the same city as Marcelle de Fabry for seventeen years, that much I knew, and I had never seen her. Looking for her had become a habit, especially when I was in the Fourth Arrondissement, as I’d heard she lived on the Quai de Bethune, yet until today I hadn’t even glimpsed her shadow.

Marcelle de Fabry. The woman my mother hated. The woman who had tried to poison her, or kill her, depending on who was telling the story. My father leaned toward kill. My mother had settled on poison. Maybe it was because of these stories, or through my understanding of Indochine as I grew up, of the growing number of people, French and Vietnamese, who believed what Marcelle did, but she had become mythical to me.

I had only met her once, but that moment had sewn itself into my memory. We had spoken in Hanoi shortly after my family arrived on a day when my mother was ill. Marcelle had come into our yellow house, conversed with my mother’s servant Trieu for quite some time, and then talked to me in a way that made me feel very grown up. She’d been wearing green silk that day. A color that I eventually learned was known in Indochine as Nguyen green.

Perhaps I hadn’t seen what I thought I had. Perhaps it was just speaking about Indochine with the taxi driver that made my imagination conjure Marcelle, the old memories flooding me like the rain outside. I’d only spent six years in Indochine, but they were formative years. I arrived at age seven, and when we left in July 1939, just two months before France declared war on Germany, I was thirteen, and a very different child. I suppose I wasn’t a child at all.

My parents didn’t want to leave, even with the war looming, and neither did I, but my father’s family, my grandmother in particular, insisted. The world was descending into madness, she’d said. It was safer for us to be home at such a time. Especially since my mother had just had a baby, my brother Charles.

I had told my mother then that we were already home and she’d nodded and said, “I know. We will come back when the dust settles.” We had never returned. Since 1939, we’d all lived in Paris. Never—much to my parents’ grave disappointment—in Clermont-Ferrand.

The extended Michelin family had made promises to my father, that much I was aware of. I knew that going to Clermont, the fulfillment of those promises, was contingent on peace and prosperity on our plantations. We had prosperity while my father was at the helm, good schools and a nicer orphanage thanks to my mother’s efforts, but we never had peace. He hadn’t been able to get the plantations to settle, as he used to call it. Even when he started spending weeks at a time at Dau Tieng and Phu Rieng when we moved to Saigon, the unrest never stopped. The family in Clermont-Ferrand was disappointed by the ongoing turmoil, the dismal mortality rates, the continued rise in communist activity. They were particularly sensitive to the unrest because from 1936 on, Clermont was no longer immune from it. In June of that year there were twelve thousand strikes in France and Michelin was included. Thousands of workers at our factories hoisted up a red flag and screamed their support for France’s largest labor union. In 1937 it was again my father’s turn to deal with uprisings, a massive strike at Dau Tieng. We sent many men to prison after military intervention, and as my father said, “It didn’t make Michelin look good.”

But since Michelin was still financially prosperous, there were no plans to sell the land. We had held on during the Second World War and during the French Indochina War, even though parts of our plantations had been destroyed and European overseers killed. “Michelin rubber will always come from Indochine,” my father declared.

But Victor Lesage was no longer the one to guarantee that. After we returned, he was placed in charge of the Michelin guides in Paris, which had ceased being printed during the war. But in 1944 the guide was requested by the Allied forces and my father took charge of reprinting our 1939 edition. Within weeks, they were in the hands of all the American soldiers, the maps of utmost importance, and even had translations done by my mother added to the back.

My parents had money and the right name, they’d contributed to the war effort, but they were never let inside the machine at Clermont, even when so many of the Michelins died fighting, a reality that only made the company seem more French, more important, more patriotic. That a decade later they were still making books instead of tires had taken a terrible beating on their pride. They carried that burden, but they carried it together. Through everything, my parents had held on to each other.

Soon after we’d moved back to Paris, I found a picture in the back of an old Michelin guide, made when the covers were blue. The photograph was taken on a beautiful boat in Ha Long Bay and Marcelle and my mother were next to each other, all smiles and lightness, along with the most attractive set of people I’d ever seen. My father was not there.

I loved that my mother looked happy, as it was taken during a period during which I remembered her as anything but. I now understood why. After Indochine, my mother was very frank with me. The early days in Hanoi had been a difficult time in her marriage, but not the hardest time in her life. That had been her childhood. I knew about Eleanor, my namesake. I’d still never been to America and my mother had only returned once, to attend the funeral of her brother Peter, who had hanged himself from an oak tree. She’d explained why he had, and said that if I ever wanted to travel to America, she’d allow it. Even to Virginia. I told her that I had no desire to. Where I wanted to go was back to Indochine. “When the dust settles,” she repeated. We both knew that it was a place where the dust had a lot of trouble settling.

Wandering back to the Salle des Pas Perdues, the room of lost steps, I looked at my mother’s watch, flipping it around to the face, and realized it was time to make my way to the trains. I entered the Salle d’Échanges and was suddenly flooded by sunlight streaming in from the pointed glass canopies. It was still raining, but the drops were falling much softer now. When I reached the middle of the platform, I surveyed the tracks, remembering a story my mother had once told me about one of the strangest days we spent in Indochine. I wondered which one of the tracks I was looking at now would take me to Normandy, to Deauville, where my husband and children were waiting for me to begin our holiday. I had stayed back to finish our first Michelin guide to Italy and had closed it with the decision to award no stars. Italian cuisine was all one flavor, I’d determined: tomato.

Then, in the noise of the station, I heard something. A name called out, the name of a man I had never met.

Across the platform was Marcelle de Fabry, in a green silk dress. Walking toward her was Nguyen Khoi.

I moved a few steps back, not wanting to be seen. I was thirty years old now, and Marcelle surely wouldn’t be able to place me as the seven-year-old girl she’d made such an impression on, but I didn’t want to take the risk.

I had never seen Khoi before. I had stared at his picture many times in the newspapers, and had followed his movements over the years because of Lanh. Once my family sailed back to France, Lanh returned to Hanoi to be closer to his sister and started working as the driver for the governor-general, thanks to a good word from my father. Despite the miles between us, we exchanged letters often. It was he who told me that during the war for independence Khoi’s beautiful house, one filled with a wife and four children, had been taken over by the government and turned into a boarding school.

Lanh and I also wrote about the train stations. We still called Hanoi’s the House of a Hundred Suns and Saigon’s the Second Sun. Saint Lazare, we decided, was the Waiting Sun. One awaiting his arrival. And we wrote about the people we had shared our lives with. He told me about Trieu and her role in the rise of the Communist Party. About how she had traveled to China and had led an underground cell in Tonkin upon her return. She’d married a fellow leader and had been in prison herself when he was shot by a French firing squad in 1940. Now she worked for the party in the north, no longer hiding her political identity.

Khoi had his arm around Marcelle now, who was as elegant as I remembered. She looked as if she’d been born in that color green, and he was as striking as in the picture on the boat, even though his hair way starting to gray.

It was Lanh who had told me of Marcelle de Fabry’s divorce after the Second World War. Almost a decade later, in 1954, he wrote to say Khoi had moved with his wife and children to Paris, as they had lost everything in the revolution. Nguyen silk had been nationalized, all the family’s private property seized by the government. He had come to Paris and was living as other moneyed Vietnamese were, as an émigré. In 1955 he had been granted a divorce and two months later had married Marcelle, the woman who haunted me, and my family; the woman who’d always had his heart.

Lanh once said that all roads led to train stations, and as I had learned in my childhood, Lanh was seldom wrong. I looked around me, at the station that Claude Monet had painted eleven times, at the people waiting for their trains. There were no shoeblacks desperate for customers, no bags so worn at the edges that the clothes were falling out at the seams. The porters didn’t have glassy eyes, the sugarcane had been replaced with chocolates and roasted hazelnuts. And almost everyone looked cut from the same cloth. Except for Marcelle and Khoi.

To some, I imagined, they were just two elegant people well into middle age. To others they were an upsetting sight—a pair who shouldn’t be together. But they were proof that the outside world didn’t matter, all you needed was two—coupled with a youthful daring that for them was proving to be ageless. In France the color green meant money, envy, new beginnings. In Viet Nam it meant Nguyen lua. And for those few souls who didn’t know the silk company, the color green meant lust. That’s what they were to me. The passion of a nation desperate to be its own, the desire of two people trying to live differently. I looked again at the woman who was still audacious enough to wear three yards of green silk in a rainstorm and then closed my eyes, listening to the light tap of the raindrops. It now sounded like applause.