CHAPTER 21So much of Babette’s beauty was in the strong bone structure of her face and the lively eyes that age would never be able to erase it. The years had cut deep lines in it, but it was still there. She was almost as tall as I and still had the build of an athletic Venus. Strong waist, long legs, wide hips, full bosom. Mother Earth.
“It’s Bébé!” a former Minister of Defense cried when he saw her. “Bébé” had been her nom de guerre as a teenager in the Resistance.
We were just making our entrance under the massed chandeliers in the decaying nineteenth-century magnificence of the long and lofty Salle des Fetes, at the rear of the Elysée Palace. The former minister left one of the groups of wartime Resistance leaders assembled there and marched over to us. Babette disengaged herself fr
