Where The Seine Forgets

WHERE THE SEINE FORGETS — A Novel — A story of forbidden love, identity, and the price of freedom Paris, 1926 "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." — Plato PART ONE The Girl Who Listened Chapter One — The Cage with Golden Bars The dress was the color of mourning. Élise Moreau stood before the tall mirror in her bedroom on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and stared at the pale ivory gown her mother had selected, the one with the high neck and the modest hem that brushed the tops of her silk shoes. It was a beautiful dress. It was a terrible dress. It was the dress of a woman who had already surrendered. "You look exquisite," said her mother, Marguerite Moreau, from the doorway. Marguerite was a woman of fifty-two who had the posture of a duchess and the eyes of someone who had long ago traded wonder for pragmatism. She wore her silver hair pinned tight, her pearls always straight, her opinions always delivered as facts. "Armand will be very pleased." Armand. Armand Fontaine. The name settled over Élise like a second dress, heavier than the first. He was thirty-eight years old. He had a factory in Lyon that produced fine gloves, a townhouse in the seventh arrondissement, and a mustache that reminded Élise of a sleeping caterpillar. He was perfectly adequate. Her parents thought he was magnificent. "Has he confirmed the date?" Élise asked, her voice carefully neutral. "The fourteenth of September," her mother said. "The cathedral, of course. Father Bertrand has already agreed." September was only four months away. Élise looked at herself in the mirror — the pale dress, the pale face, the dark eyes that stared back at her with an expression she had learned to disguise as serenity — and thought about how a woman could disappear inside a life that looked perfectly lovely from the outside. She was twenty-three years old. She spoke three languages, painted watercolors that her mother called charming, and had never once in her life chosen her own dinner. "I'd like to walk this afternoon," Élise said. Marguerite frowned. "We have the Beaumont reception at four." "I'll be back by three." A pause. The kind that contained a full argument, compressed into silence. "Take Céleste with you," her mother said finally, meaning the maid, meaning the leash. Élise agreed. She was already planning how to lose Céleste near the Luxembourg Gardens. * * * The city was alive in a way that always undid her. That was the thing about Paris in June — it conspired against unhappiness. The chestnut trees along the boulevards were in full canopy, casting pools of shade over the café tables where men read newspapers and women laughed too freely and the whole city seemed to have agreed, collectively, to be gorgeous. Élise walked beside Céleste through Saint-Germain, past the bookstalls along the Seine, past the street artists and the accordion players and the couples who kissed without apology on bridges, and she felt the familiar ache that she had never been able to name. She lost Céleste near the Odéon, which was easier than expected. The maid had stopped to argue with a bread seller, and Élise simply... continued walking. Away from the correct streets. Away from the correct neighborhoods. Toward the bridges that crossed toward the northern banks, toward Montmartre, toward the part of the city her mother called unsuitable. She had heard about Le Chat Bleu from her cousin Victoire. Victoire Leconte was twenty-six, divorced, and widely considered a catastrophe by the Moreau family. She wore trousers. She drank cognac without a chaser. She had been to New York twice and spoke about it the way priests spoke about heaven. It was Victoire who had pulled Élise aside at Easter dinner, while Armand Fontaine was discussing glove production with her father, and whispered: "There is a jazz club in Montmartre, on Rue Lepic, where the music will make you feel like God invented you for a purpose. Go before you marry that man and forget that you had a soul." Le Chat Bleu. The Blue Cat. It was barely past noon and the club would be dark until evening, but Élise wanted to find it. To see the door. To know that it existed. She found it tucked between a bakery and a print shop, its facade painted deep navy with a cat stenciled in cobalt above the door. A chalkboard outside listed tonight's performers in a cramped hand: QUARTETTE JAZZ DE HARLEM — JIMMY COLE & LES TROIS ROIS — MINUIT. She stood in front of it for a long time, reading those words. "You are looking for tonight?" She turned. A young man was sweeping the steps — perhaps nineteen, with dark eyes and a serious face and an apron dusted with chalk. He was watching her with the polite curiosity of someone who had seen many women like her stand in front of this door. "I was just — yes," she said. "Is it — is it a good show?" The young man smiled, and it transformed him. "Mademoiselle," he said, "there is no show in Paris like the one inside that door. Jimmy Cole plays trumpet the way other men breathe. You come tonight, you will never hear silence the same way again." His name, she would learn later, was Théo Blanchard, and he was Le Chat Bleu's busboy, coat-checker, and most devoted audience member. He was also, though neither of them knew it yet, the only reason she managed to find a seat that first night. She went home. She dressed for the Beaumont reception. She smiled at Armand Fontaine across a room that smelled of lilies and old money. And that night, at eleven-thirty, while her parents slept, she climbed out of the window of their rented townhouse on Rue Pierre-Charron and walked north toward the music.