Under the Stars of Paris

by Mary Burchell

  He was charming to Eve, but shook his head immediately when she began to explain how much she had liked the wedding dress when she saw it on the opening day.

  “It is not for you, madame,” he said. “It does not express you in the least.”

  “No—that’s what my fiancé said,” declared Eve with a laugh, while Anthea felt morally certain that Michael had never used such a term in his life. “He thought it looked wonderful on Anthea—on Gabrielle—— We both know her, you know,” she explained in smiling, condescending parenthesis, “but for me he thought more—more——” She waited for Florian to fill in the gap.

  Instead, he looked reflectively at her.

  “More what, madame?” he said at last.

  “Oh—I don’t know——” Eve laughed, faintly put out, though it obviously puzzled her to find that she was. “What would you suggest?”

  He sat down, without answering her, and began to sketch rapidly. Madame Moisant took up her polite conversation again, though in slightly more subdued tones, and Anthea went on standing there. Until actually dismissed, she could not go.

  “Only until the end of the week this time,” she heard Eve say, in answer to Madame Moisant’s enquiry about her length of stay. “There’s a gala performance at the Opéra on Friday and I want to go.” For a moment her glance went, faintly maliciously, to Anthea. “Roger is taking me—Gabrielle. I wonder if you would like to come too?” she said.

  Astonishment at such calculated spite—without, after all, much reason—robbed Anthea for a moment of the power to reply. Then, without even looking up from his sketching block, Florian said, in that quiet, almost conversational tone of his,

  “Unfortunately, Mademoiselle Gabrielle is already committed to going with me.”

  Eve gasped slightly. So did Madame Moisant, but she managed to turn it into a suppressed sneeze.

  “To—to the Gala at the Opéra?” Eve said.

  “To the Gala at the Opéra, madame. Now—if you will look at this. I would suggest—— Oh, you need not wait, Gabrielle,” he said, with a slight smile at Anthea.

  And Anthea slipped away, not quite sure what had happened, or why this extraordinary proposition had been made. That Florian’s few quiet words had rescued her successfully from Eve’s malice was obvious. But that he should have known what was going on—and, still more, that he should have acted on that knowledge, bewildered her.

  She saw no more of Eve, she took part as usual in the afternoon dress show—and she waited to see if either Florian or Madame Moisant would send for her to give her any further information about this sudden—or perhaps purely illusory—visit to the Opéra.

  It was Florian who sent for her, towards the end of the afternoon.

  This time he was not sitting in state behind his desk. He was walking about the room, in that slightly restless way which was characteristic of him and, as she came in, he paused to light a cigarette.

  “Come in, Gabrielle,” he said, seeing her hesitate in the doorway. “We must discuss the question of the Opera Gala.”

  She came in.

  “Monsieur Florian, I did not know——”

  “No, of course you didn’t,” he interrupted impatiently. “I didn’t know myself until this afternoon. But it is not unusual for me to use an occasion like this to display some very particular model. Odette is usually chosen, because everyone knows she is my chief mannequin. But this time I wish to use you. And, as you are not yet known as part of my salon—at least, not generally so—it is necessary that I should accompany you. Otherwise——”

  “Monsieur, why are you doing this for me?” Gabrielle asked quietly. “You knew, of course, that Miss Armoor was the girl who took away the man I was to marry. You realized—though I cannot imagine how—that she was there this afternoon to humiliate me, quite as much as to choose her wedding dress. Good—it is very kind of you to feel sympathy for me. But why go out of your way to help me?”

  “Mademoiselle, you flatter yourself.” Monsieur Florian smiled slightly. “I intend to show a particular model on that night, and I wish you to wear it.”

  “But what model, monsieur? Even you cannot create and have made a completely new dress by Friday. This is already Tuesday evening.”

  “I don’t propose to create a new dress. You will wear the one I am giving you.”

  “Oh, Monsieur Florian! It is the most wonderful dress in the world to me, but you can’t make me believe that you would arrange a special gala visit to the Opéra to display a—a modified version of Number Forty-two in the present Collection,” Anthea exclaimed. “Even I am not so new and simple as to think that.”

  He actually laughed slightly—a rare thing with him.

  “You are indeed new and simple, mon enfant. Over the dress you will wear an evening cloak which will make Paris gasp. That is what you will be displaying at the Opéra. It did not need to be made on you. It is almost ready. You will try it on tomorrow and then it will be completed. I take it you are free—or can make yourself free—to come with me to the Opéra on Friday.”

  “Of—of course,” stammered Anthea.

  For a moment she accepted his explanation so completely at its face value that she thought she really had been mistaken in supposing that the visit had been arranged for her benefit.

  But then she remembered the quiet, unexpected words which had so completely disconcerted Eve.

  “Monsieur Florian, you explain very plausibly.” She smiled fleetingly at him. “But I find the whole thing too à propos to believe that it was not partly designed to save me from further humiliation at Eve Armoor’s hands.”

  He smiled and shrugged, as though to say that he would not argue further if she insisted on her own story.

  “Tell me,” she said curiously, “how did you—how did you guess what she was getting at?”

  For a moment she thought he was still going to disclaim all knowledge of what she meant. Then he smiled slightly and said,

  “I remembered that the big Englishman, who so charmingly called me a beast, was also addressed by you as ‘Roger’. When she suggested that you should make a party à trois, it was not difficult to see that one should—prevent that. But prevent it with the explanation that you already had a more distinguished escort,” said Florian without any false modesty.

  “Oh—oh, I see!” She laughed a little doubtfully. “I’m afraid I have never been able to explain to you that—that Roger is not really the man who turned me down. He——”

  Up went Florian’s very clear-cut eyebrows.

  “You mean this is a second admirer whom she also wishes to acquire from you? But, mademoiselle, this is too much! Why did you have to let her know that this one also admired you?”

  “He happens to be her cousin, Monsieur Florian—and she knew him many years before I did,” Anthea confessed with a smile. “I don’t know that he does ‘admire’ me particularly, come to that. We’re just very good friends.”

  Monsieur Florian muttered something about the British being incomprehensible.

  “I’m so sorry!” Anthea looked at him and laughed with real merriment. “It was still a most welcome rescue, I assure you. If my heart was not greatly concerned, my pride undoubtedly was. I hated her at that moment, and had no defence at all. When I heard you say I was to come to the Opéra with you I—I could have——” She remembered suddenly that she was speaking to a distinguished Frenchman, not an easygoing and understanding Englishman, like Roger, for instance. So she coughed slightly and left her sentence unfinished.

  Florian, however, missed little.

  “What could you have done, mademoiselle?” he enquired with real interest. And his second use of “mademoiselle” instead of “Gabrielle” showed her that he was regarding her at this moment as a woman instead of a mannequin.

  “Oh—I—don’t know,” she said quickly, and blushed. “Anyway, I can’t thank you enough. But—you don’t really have to make good the invitation, if you would prefer—I mean, you have no real reas
on for taking me, now that I’ve explained about Roger and—and Michael.”

  At the introduction of Michael’s name he looked a little as though he thought the explanations had been rather incomplete even now. But he said, with that faint, charming smile which was usually kept for most favoured clients,

  “I was going to the Opéra on Friday night, in any case, and no man asks for a reason for taking a beautiful girl with him on such an occasion. It so happens, mon enfant, that it—suits me very well to have you there then. In the cloak I have designed.”

  “Well then, there is nothing more for me to say except—‘Thank you very much,’” Anthea told him. And she thought that his little nod of dismissal had indulgence as well as amusement in it.

  That evening, instead of going straight home, she walked down the Champs-Élysées, looking for one of those huge circular street stands on which all the many amusements and attractions of Paris are displayed. If she was going to the Opéra with Florian on Friday, it might be as well to know what she was to hear.

  She found what she wanted at last—not in the detailed, smaller printed announcement that covered the opera dates for the week, but splashed in large capitals across a big yellow poster on its own—

  Vendredi—2 avril: TOSCA.

  Then, in only slightly smaller print underneath—

  Floria Tosca—Giulietta Peroni.

  Chapter Eight

  Anthea read the announcement of the gala performance at the Opéra twice. Then she turned away and walked on rather soberly down the Avenue in the fading spring twilight.

  Peroni. She remembered the name perfectly well. That not very likeable girl at the Daviots’ had spoken of her and had declared there was supposed to be—or, to have been—an affair between her and Florian.

  There was no need to take that very seriously, of course. More than likely it was some absurd rumour. For, thought Anthea shrewdly, the girl was the kind to spread innuendoes and half-truths. But if she had been right——

  Anthea found that she disliked the whole idea quite passionately. Once more she assured herself that Florian’s private life was no concern of hers. If he cared to go to the Opéra to hear an old flame—or even a present flame—of his, who was she to have views one way or the other about it? Even if he took her too.

  For her part, she would be attending simply as one of Florian’s mannequins, displaying a creation of his. Incidentally, thanks to some sort of kind impulse on his part, she would also have the very welcome opportunity of cutting a good figure before Eve, who had wished to humiliate her.

  There was really nothing to worry about. If only he had not said—“It so happens, mon enfant, that it suits me very well to have you there.”

  Why did it suit him very well to have her there?

  At the time she had given him the credit for wishing to put her at her ease, by implying that it was she who was doing him a service, rather than the other way round. But now she was not so sure.

  She knew it was foolish of her to seek so earnestly for motives and to split hairs over something which she was never, in any case, likely to know much about. But—it was just as she had said to Roger when Florian gave her the green dress—she wanted to see him as the great man who made a generous gesture. Not as someone who used her just a little for his own ends.

  Curious how often he made these seemingly generous gestures. And afterwards one wondered if there had not perhaps been some ulterior motive behind them.

  She was a trifle shocked to discover this, and thought remorsefully that perhaps the fault was in herself rather than Florian. She even wondered if her experience with Michael had made her sceptical and unable to believe in generosity for its own sake. And, in case this were the fact—and she was doing less than justice to the man to whom she owed so much—she determinedly dismissed the whole thing from her mind.

  But it returned, of course. Particularly when, the next day, she caught a glimpse of Florian, and he gave her that brief, faintly enigmatic smile and said, as he passed,

  “The dress is completed, I hear. We will try it—with the cloak—this afternoon after the show.”

  “Very well. Thank you, monsieur,” she said composedly, and went on into the dressing-room where, most unusually, she found Odette sitting alone—her feet up on a chair, in the automatic attitude which all mannequins assume in moments of rest.

  “Odette”—Anthea spoke on sudden impulse—“I’m to go to the gala performance at the Opéra with Monsieur Florian on Friday, and wear some wonderful cloak he has just designed.”

  “So?” Odette glanced at her quite benevolently. “I heard it was probably to be you. Mostly he uses me for these occasions, but it seems the cloak is too—soft and young and ‘endearing’ was I think the word Monsieur Florian used. For me the designs must be dramatic.”

  “Oh,” Anthea said rather thoughtfully. “What sort of cloak is it, do you know?”

  “White mink,” Odette told her carelessly.

  “White mink!—I should have thought that was dramatic enough,” Anthea exclaimed, at which Odette laughed.

  “It depends on its use,” she said.

  “I—suppose so.”

  There was a slight silence, while Odette went on reading a fashion paper and Anthea considered the use of the word “endearing”.

  Then Anthea spoke again, rather determinedly.

  “Odette—do you often go out with Monsieur Florian to display designs in this rather—rather more subtle way?”

  “No. More often I go alone or with an escort of my own choosing. But then everyone knows I am his mannequin, and so they know also that any model I am wearing must be one of his. With you it is different. Until he has made you famous—and I think perhaps he wishes to do just that—it is necessary that he accompanies you.”

  “Yes—I see. He said something of the sort himself.”

  “You need not look so solemn, chérie. You will enjoy yourself. Monsieur Florian is a charming escort. And it is always pleasant to be looked at very much in our profession,” Odette said.

  “Of course,” Anthea agreed hastily. “But—Odette, have you ever been to the Opéra with him?”

  Odette slightly wrinkled her beautiful forehead and obviously made an obliging effort to remember.

  “Once—yes. About three years ago, when I also was not so well known. I recall it was the première of some modern opera. Inexpressibly boring,” Odette said reflectively. “But I contrived to look interested throughout the evening, since we were sitting in a loge and very much on view,” she added, with a touch of professional pride. “Afterwards I found this was quite unnecessary since all the critics had been bored too and said so the next day.”

  Anthea laughed.

  “Who sang, Odette?” she enquired carelessly.

  “How do you mean—who sang?”

  “Who was in the cast?”

  “Petite! How should I know at this date?” cried Odette, to whom the opera had evidently been of less than no importance. “I remember nothing at all except the dress I wore and the terrible length of the time between the intervals, when of course I strolled about with Monsieur Florian and was, most discreetly, on show.”

  “I see.” Anthea bit her lip, and then, seeing that the indirect method was getting her nowhere, she asked outright. “Did you ever hear Peroni? She is going to sing on Friday night. In Tosca.”

  “Tosca?” Odette smiled approvingly. “Ah, there is an opera in which something happens! All die—and violently. You will enjoy yourself.”

  “I’m sure I shall.” Anthea agreed hastily, wishing that Odette had not taken up the wrong part of her remarks. “But did you ever hear Peroni?”

  Odette, who had rare but keen flashes of humour, looked amused then.

  “Never. Nor do I know if she is really Florian’s ‘amie’,” she said. “Which is, of course, what all this conversation has been leading to.”

  Anthea flushed and gave a rather vexed little laugh.

  “It’s not
just curiosity——”

  “No?” said Odette, to whom curiosity was a perfectly natural and commendable trait which required no excusing. “What then?”

  “Oh—never mind. But, tell me, Odette. You know him so well that——”

  “Florian? No one knows him well,” Odette interrupted. “He is the complete enigma. It is part of his stock-in-trade.”

  “Is it?” Anthea was startled. “Well, then—in your experience, let us say, is he what you would call a generous person?”

  “Financially—no. But it is difficult to be a successful business man and financially generous,” Odette admitted tolerantly. “If, however, you mean—is he capable of sudden flashes of imaginative generosity? I think—yes. Just as he is capable of sudden cruelty,” she added thoughtfully.

  “Like the time he gave me the green dress?” Anthea said, ignoring the remark about cruelty.

  “It could be.” Odette measured her with a considering glance. “I could not say. It was also, of course, a little bit of posing.”

  “Posing, Odette!”

  “Of course. Either to you or himself,” Odette replied indulgently. “Like most great artists he is something of a poseur. And why not? The great should be allowed their foibles. Only the foibles of the mediocre are insufferable.”

  “Bravo, Odette!” said Monsieur Florian, coming in at that moment. “Of whose foibles are we speaking?”

  Anthea was struck dumb with confusion, but not so Odette. She had been longest with Florian and was least afraid of him. Besides, as she never presumed on her position in minor matters, she even occasionally allowed herself the indulgence of speaking frankly to him.

  “Yours, monsieur,” she said, with her slow smile. “I was telling Gabrielle that you are something of a poseur.”

  “A poseur?—Am I, Odette?”

  To Anthea’s amazement, he sat down on the side of the long dressing-table with—for the first time in her experience of him—an air of relaxing for a few minutes. And he smiled consideringly at his chief mannequin.

  “At times, monsieur. But aren’t we all in this profession?”