The Lost Carousel of Provence

by Juliet Blackwell

  “So you mean to tell me you’re the heir to a grand château, and you’ve never mentioned that in all your attempts at seducing me?” she said, a teasing smile playing on her lips.

  Fabrice could feel himself blush. He had never thought of himself as an heir, but of course he was; he was the eldest son of Marc-Antoine, himself an only child. Fabrice had a sudden flash of the future: he and Paulette, returning to Château Clement after the war, mending the rift in the family, becoming admired, invitations to their sumptuous dinners highly sought after.

  His daydreams made him blush even more intensely.

  Paulette pretended to straighten the stacks of papers coming off the printing press, to give him a moment to pull himself together. Fabrice wondered how he knew this, but he did know. This was how she was. He knew her. He loved her.

  “Paulette,” he said, taking her hand in his, “I am old enough to feel what I am feeling. I know I’m younger than you, but my mother is older than my father by two years. It is not unknown.”

  She gave a breathless sort of laugh and pulled her hand away, fiddling with the printing press. “It is not only that, Fabrice.”

  “Please, Paulette,” he said, sensing he must make his case, that he might not have another chance. “I’ve never felt anything like this before. I can’t think, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything unless it’s for you. I will love you forever, Paulette. I would never leave you. I would never hurt you.”

  He leaned in, hesitated for a moment, then kissed her.

  She kissed him back. It was everything he had fantasized about, and more. It was sunshine and gold, it was a Shakespearean sonnet. It was an end to this war, it was the defeat of the Nazis. It was manhood. It was exquisite.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  PRESENT DAY

  CHTEAU CLEMENT

  Cady

  Jean-Paul dropped Cady where she had parked the Citroën, saying he needed to stop by his mother’s house and would meet Cady later, at the château. She went grocery shopping and as she was driving back to Château Clement, she realized that his car was right behind her. When Jean-Paul pulled up alongside Cady in front of the château, Fabrice was outside with Lucy, and frowned at the sight of them together.

  “Why did you bring him with you?” Fabrice demanded. “And where have you been all day? My invitation for you to stay has been revoked.”

  Cady hoped she misunderstood, but this was an easy one: Mon invitation est révoquée.

  “Fabrice.” Jean-Paul stepped in. “Be reasonable. Cady—”

  “What do you have to say about it? Her being American is a lot more interesting than your being Parisian. At least she brings whiskey.”

  “I brought bread,” said Jean-Paul, holding up the bag from the boulangerie.

  “Well, that’s something,” Fabrice said grudgingly.

  Another car turned into the long gravel drive.

  “Who’s that, now?” Fabrice demanded.

  “I believe that would be Dr. Miller,” said Jean-Paul.

  A fifty-something bespectacled man pulled up and got out of the driver’s seat. “Salut, Fabrice! Ça va?”

  “Go away,” Fabrice said. “I didn’t call you.”

  The doctor greeted Jean-Paul and Cady politely, then faced Fabrice.

  “Annick Boyer, from the grocery store? She tells me you’ve been laid up for a while. And Jean-Paul mentioned it as well, as did his mother. So you see, people worry about you.”

  “I’m fine,” groused Fabrice.

  As Cady watched the old man, thinking of what Jean-Paul had told her about an unrequited love, she wondered about his cantankerous ways. Was it simply the grumpiness that at times accompanied old age? Or was there something more going on? At the moment, Fabrice seemed truly overwhelmed, standing with three people in front of him. Perhaps he had a social phobia; these sorts of things weren’t often diagnosed in his generation. Maybe that was why the two of them got along so well.

  “Well,” said Dr. Miller in an upbeat tone. “Since I came all the way out here, and you are clearly using a crutch, why don’t you let me examine you?”

  “Please, Fabrice,” said Jean-Paul. “Let the doctor take a look.”

  “Fine,” said Fabrice, limping over to a stone bench. Jean-Paul moved to help him, but he waved him off, saying, “I’m no invalid.”

  Dr. Miller did not seem put off by Fabrice’s attitude. He knelt in the gravel and examined his ankle and lower leg. After a few minutes, he stood.

  “We would need to take a radiograph to be sure, but it does not appear to be a break, only a bad sprain. That is good news. But for a man your age, it will take some time to heal.”

  “I do just fine.”

  “I have to tell you, Fabrice, I don’t feel good about you being out here all by yourself. The risk of re-injury or a complicating fall is great. There are rehabilitation centers—”

  “Don’t waste your breath,” said Fabrice. “I’m staying here.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not alone. The little girl’s here. She cooks.”

  The doctor looked at Cady.

  Cady raised her hand. “C’est moi, I do believe.”

  Fabrice had called her petite fille, which meant “little girl”—but also meant “granddaughter.” Cady had never had a grumpy grandfather or a goofy uncle. She had read about such characters and had watched them in movies for years. Now she had Fabrice, at least for the time being.

  “I’ll take good care of him,” she said.

  “I’ll be around for a while as well. He won’t be alone,” Jean-Paul said to the doctor, stepping forward.

  Again Cady bristled. After the day they’d spent together, she should have felt closer to Jean-Paul, and she did . . . except that she still hated the idea of turning the château into a chain hotel, no matter how well done, or how much economic sense it made. Château Clement was like a treasure trove of family history; how could he even consider letting that go?

  Dr. Miller left them with basic instructions: Keep the ankle elevated as much as possible and apply cold packs.

  As the good doctor’s little car disappeared down the drive, Jean-Paul turned to Fabrice and said, “Thank you for not greeting us with the shotgun this time.”

  Fabrice shrugged and scratched under Lucy’s chin.

  “So,” Cady said, “am I now allowed to stay here again? It’s up to you, of course, but I’d like to know one way or the other.”

  When Fabrice didn’t answer, she held up the heavy grocery bags and added, “Because if I go now you will never know the wonders of American garlic bread, which is an experience not to be missed. I have all the ingredients right here, ready to go. Yes or no?”

  He looked at her for a long minute, heaved himself off the bench, and limped into the house.

  “Comme tu veux,” he called over his shoulder.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Cady said as she and Jean-Paul followed.

  * * *

  • • •

  “And that, gentlemen, is why garlic bread is universally beloved by my people,” said Cady as Fabrice and Jean-Paul served themselves third helpings of the wonderfully flavorful concoction. It had turned out particularly well tonight, probably because the bread itself was so good. “And here I thought the French were the ultimate gourmets.”

  “I have no idea what she’s talking about; do you, Fabrice?” Jean-Paul teased.

  “No idea,” Fabrice said, slipping a crust of the buttery bread to Lucy, who was trying to hide beneath the table but was so tall that when she stood, the table hovered and tilted, forcing them all to dive for their glasses.

  That Fabrice deigned to answer at all made Cady smile. “You two probably haven’t ever had really good mac-n-cheese either, have you?” She didn’t know how to say the term in French, so she said it in English.

/>   “Mac and . . . quoi?” Fabrice said.

  “It’s pasta with a cheese sauce. Baked in the oven, and sprinkled with bread crumbs or, if you’re feeling wild, with potato chips. It’s incredibly good. Not as good as garlic bread, I’ll grant you, but still very good. I’ll make it for you,” she promised, then wondered if she would be here long enough to try out all her recipes. She already felt . . . what was it? At home? Was that possible?

  Perhaps the garlic bread had worked its magic on Fabrice, or perhaps he was just tired, but tonight he seemed to be in a halfway good mood and enjoying the conversation. Cady wondered if, despite his protestations to the contrary, he might be lonely. How could he not be, out here in this huge château, all alone except for Lucy? But then perhaps he wasn’t as alone as she’d thought; he had people like the doctor and the teenager who delivered his groceries, and everyone in town seemed to know him.

  “Fabrice,” she said, “when you were in Paris after the war, in the late forties and early fifties, is it true you knew Albert Camus and James Baldwin?”

  The men launched into a discussion of authors and artists she’d never heard of, tossing around terms like “phenomenological—in the Heideggerian sense” and the “theory of pure surface.” She regretted her lack of formal education now more than ever. Yes, she read voraciously, and was observant. But how did one make up for a pure lack of education? How long would it take to catch up?

  On the other hand, did anyone really need to be able to toss around terms like “Heideggerian”?

  Cady set about opening the wine, filling their glasses with a generous splash of the ruby red liquid, feeling like a servant at a literary salon in the Latin Quarter.

  “To the power of American garlic bread to bring people together,” said Jean-Paul, holding up his glass. “Salut.”

  Even Fabrice joined in the toast.

  Cady decided to get over herself; to listen and learn. She brought out her journal and started taking notes as Fabrice and Jean-Paul continued to talk of the Parisian post–World War II literary scene.

  “What are you writing down?” Fabrice asked.

  “I don’t know a lot about that time period. Actually, I don’t know much about literature in general. I’m taking notes of authors I’d like to look up.”

  Fabrice nodded, as though approving of her actions.

  “You know, Fabrice,” said Jean-Paul, “Cady will have to leave soon, probably in the next day or two. Why don’t I come stay with you for a little while?”

  Cady opened her mouth to contradict him, but swallowed her words. She already felt so comfortable here and had imagined staying for longer than “a day or two,” but she was reminded once again that Fabrice was not her cousin. It bothered her that Jean-Paul seemed to be pushing for something diametrically opposed to what Fabrice had always wanted, but this was not her family’s château, or her ancestral village, or really any of her business. Jean-Paul had been kind, but he couldn’t have made that distinction any more clear.

  Staring at the fire, she absently stroked Lucy’s espresso brown coat. Most of the dog’s fur was wiry, but her head and ears were pure velvet. Lucy’s breath was steady as she slept, counting off the seconds, the moments. Once, Cady had been sent to “mindfulness class” and learned that Buddhists occasionally rang a bell, at which point everyone was supposed to stop what they were doing and concentrate on nothing more than breathing: in and out, in and out. The whisper of the air traveling through one’s throat and into one’s lungs, a reminder that all we have is the here and now, what’s in front of us. No past, no future, just this moment.

  But, Cady remembered thinking in class, as she sat uncomfortable and cross-legged on the floor, what if this moment, the one right this second, sucked?

  “Cady?” Jean-Paul interrupted her thoughts.

  “Sorry. What?”

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Of course. Sure.”

  “Cady”—Fabrice waved a scrap of paper in her general direction—“go get us another bottle of that Bordeaux. I drew you the damned map you asked for.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Jean-Paul, getting to his feet.

  “No, really,” said Cady, taking the note and grabbing the flashlight from the counter. “I like going. It’s a mysterious French wine cellar. Can’t get enough of it. We don’t have anything like it where I’m from.”

  Lucy lifted her anvil-size head.

  “Especially with my trusty canine companion for protection. C’mon, Lucy.”

  She left the men talking about Paris in its bohemian heyday. Jean-Paul, of course, had gone to the Sorbonne and to Cambridge. He was educated, erudite, at home with great literature and great ideas. Meanwhile Cady could barely make it through Fabrice’s novel, and even then didn’t understand most of what she was reading. She had realized with a start last night that Fabrice had been younger than she was now when he wrote it. She yearned for a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or maybe Harry Potter. Something she had read before, repeatedly; a book with a story line told in a straightforward fashion. Fantasy was one thing; this “new novel” business was something else entirely.

  Down in the cellar, lost in her thoughts and with only the beam of the flashlight to guide her, she turned into the wrong room and walked straight into a pile of boxes.

  Out of one spilled some very old film cartridges. Exposed, but undeveloped, film cartridges.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PRESENT DAY

  CHTEAU CLEMENT

  Cady

  “I thought maybe I’d have to send a search party.”

  “Look what I found.” She set the bottle of Bordeaux on the table and beside it the box of film cartridges.

  Fabrice gave her a side-eyed glance. “A box of garbage? Plenty more where that came from.”

  “It’s not garbage, Fabrice,” Cady said, unable to contain her excitement. “These are photographs waiting to be developed—and look at the handwritten notes! I think these must have belonged to your grandfather.”

  “That reminds me,” said Jean-Paul. “I brought Yves Clement’s photographs from my mother’s house as well.” He leaned over and extracted a thick manila envelope from his leather courier bag. “These are copies; the originals are in the archive. Do you remember, Fabrice? I tried to show these to you a few years ago—”

  “Ça me fait chier ça,” said Fabrice. Cady wasn’t sure of the expression, but she caught the general gist: He didn’t care to see them.

  “But they were taken by your grandfather, of this very estate,” Cady urged. “Okay if I look through them?”

  He shrugged.

  Cady took the photos out of the envelope and studied them. As Jean-Paul had told her, most were of the people who used to work the estate, primarily in the fields. They fed right into her imagination of the ghosts roaming the grounds of the château, though unfortunately there weren’t many interior shots. Yves Clement appeared to have been a nature lover: There were dozens of photographs of birds—quail and grouse—horses, goats, and hunting dogs.

  “And these are of Josephine Clement,” said Jean-Paul, handing her half a dozen photographs of a lovely young woman with a delicate face, her dark hair piled in a huge halo in the Gibson-girl style. A distinctive mole on her neck looked almost like a heart. “She was very young when she married Yves: only eighteen, and he was nearly forty. But by all accounts they appeared happy together.”

  “At first,” grumbled Fabrice.

  “What happened later?” Cady asked. As soon as she spoke, she remembered the rumor that Josephine had been unfaithful.

  The men exchanged a quick glance, but neither spoke.

  “Where’d you get these pictures, anyway?” Fabrice asked.

  “My mother had them.”

  “Stole them, more like.”

  Jean-Paul’s jaw tightened. �
��After Yves’s death, when Marc-Antoine remained in Paris rather than returning to claim the château, it was left to ruin. Some family members came in and took things, yes. Mostly mementos.”

  Fabrice stared into the fire.

  “I’ve told you before, Fabrice. I would be happy to arrange for some of the items to be brought back, if you like, or at least arrange some visits so you could see them.” Jean-Paul seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “But if family hadn’t come in, it all would have been lost. You know the place was thoroughly ransacked during—and after—the war.”

  “I came here then. I know exactly the condition it was left in. What I’m unclear on is the extent to which my so-called family took part in the destruction.”

  “Anyway,” Cady said after a long, uncomfortable pause, “these photographs are great, right? Not just in subject matter—Yves was a talented photographer. Look at his use of shadows. They’re so . . . evocative.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” said Jean-Paul, digging through the tall stack. “And these will be of particular interest to you—they’re of the carousel.”

  Cady accepted the photos with reverence and starting flipping through them. Most showed the actual construction of the carousel, men fitting together the different parts of the mechanism. Carousels were driven by steam engine back then, and Bayol was famous for using bellows in some of his animals to create sounds. Unfortunately, there weren’t many close-ups, and the faces of the workers were hard to make out: The shots were mostly of groups of people laboring at their tasks. The photographs most interesting to Cady were those of workers doing touch-up painting and applying protective varnish, since these showed the fanciful animal figures: horses, chickens, cats, dogs, pigs, and rabbits—as well as one rocking carriage and a spinning tub.

  The photographs were all black-and-white images, so the typically garish, whimsical colors were lost. But the images did give a sense of the carousel.