The Curse of La Fontaine Read online

  He looked up at a palazzo—a round ceramic plaque proudly gave the building’s date of construction as 1578—that had bright pink bougainvillea cascading down its pale yellow façade. He loved the pink and yellow with the dark green of the shutters. Whoever had chosen the colors had an eye for beauty, and yet the cautious villagers hardly smiled. Perhaps good design taste and general happiness did not go hand in hand. As if on cue an old woman opened the door of the palazzo, looked at him, and then quickly closed the door. He hadn’t even had the chance to say buongiorno. Could these old women see into his soul? Did they, too, think Antoine Verlaque unworthy of Marine Bonnet?

  He sighed and walked on, ducking his head to pass under a low stone arch. It was dark and he kept his eyes on the beam of sun at the end of the cramped tunnel, about twenty feet ahead. As he walked, his footsteps got louder and louder, echoing off the ancient stone walls that dripped in the humidity. He quickened his pace. He thought of his parents’ long, unhappy, and dishonest marriage, his own philandering before he met Marine, his snobbishness and rudeness. Was that what the old villagers could see in him and so they turned away in disgust? Marine had made him a softer and better man; even his best friend, Jean-Marc, had once admitted that to Verlaque. And what had he given to Marine? How did he complete her? He ran out of the tunnel, into a square drowned in sunlight. Blinking because of the sun, he saw the bulk of someone wearing black walking through the square toward him. “Signore Verlaque! Il Giudice!” It was Padre Piero. Verlaque shook the priest’s hand and said hello. “Are you all right?” Piero asked in slightly accented French. “Did you see a ghost in the tunnel?”

  “My own,” Verlaque said.

  The priest smiled and took Verlaque’s hands in his. “You are going to be married today. It’s normal that you are feeling . . . uneasy.”

  “Back in the tunnel,” Verlaque said, trying to catch his breath, “it was as if all my demons were following me.”

  “We do not want demons around on your wedding day.”

  Verlaque smiled. “What can I do?”

  “Well, dear judge,” Piero said, putting his arm around Verlaque’s shoulders and leading him out of the square in the opposite direction, “we have two choices. One, you can go to confession—”

  Verlaque stopped and laughed. “I haven’t been to confession since—”

  “Your confirmation?”

  “Yeah, about then.”

  Piero said nothing and they walked on.

  “What’s the second option?” Verlaque asked, turning to the priest.

  “Un caffè corretto.”

  “Coffee and grappa? I’d prefer that.”

  “I thought you would. Come, let’s go to the café, sit on the terrace, and look down at the sea. You are a good man, Antoine. I meet with many couples who are about to get married; you’ve seen how beautiful this village, and its church, is. It’s a popular place to get married. These couples marry for all kinds of reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad. All I can do is offer my advice, my compassion, and then perform the ceremony and hope for the best. They are, of course, nervous on the wedding day, as you are now. The men worry about the money, the end of their wild days. Maybe I’m being old-fashioned; perhaps the women worry about that, too.” He laughed, and they turned down a narrow street that led to the café. “But most of the women, they are worried about the ceremony. The flowers. Their dress. And then the reception. The food. The guests. But your Professoressa is—how should I say it?—Zen. She has an inner happiness; she is glowing. You have made her happy.”

  Chapter One

  A Duke and His Garden

  L e Duc de Pradet (Michel Xavier to his friends) was a lucky man, and he knew it. He was born in Paris in 1946 and so had missed the war and the German occupation. He was too young to have felt the hardships and rationing that continued well into the 1950s, having been protected by his parents. As a teen, he studied the subject he loved—not law, as many of his cousins were forced to—but history. His father was not very practical. At twenty-five he married Marguerite—again for love, not prestige or land (although Marguerite was rich).

  Of course, not all of his life had been easy. They hadn’t been able to have children, and that had been, in the beginning, heartbreaking, but as the years passed, they got used to the idea of being a family unit of two. To forget their childless state they traveled widely, and whereas another couple might have adopted or become more involved in their nieces’ and nephews’ lives, the duke and duchess became closer as a couple. They were not withdrawn—they had many friends and social obligations—but were simply content with each other’s company. And so they got on with things: tending to their house and garden in Aix-en-Provence, a small manor house in Burgundy, and an apartment on the Left Bank in Paris. It seemed to fill their days. And then Marguerite died of breast cancer when she was sixty-three.

  The duke sat on a wooden bench in his garden. It had rained earlier in the week, and the late April sun was shining. The plants were at their greenest—they would fade as the dry Aix summer arrived—and it was still cool enough, even in direct sunlight, to sit outside. That ability, like the neon green of the leaves, would soon disappear, and the duke would escape to Burgundy until mid-September.

  He got up, stretched his legs, then picked up his basket and clippers and kid-leather gardening gloves. The duke watered the plants religiously, especially the roses, and when he was in Paris or Burgundy, he generously paid the maid to do the watering for him. The pale yellow Lady Banks was in full bloom, its clusters of small, almost-feathery roses cascading down against the stone wall of his town house. He clipped, humming, setting the roses carefully in the basket. Marguerite had been a talented flower arranger, but that task had been taken over by Manuel, the duke’s manservant and cook.

  A neighbor’s window opened and closed, a child laughed, someone coughed. There was always noise in the garden, as more than a dozen buildings shared it. But the birds made the most noise there, drowning out the foot traffic on the nearby rue d’Italie and the cars and buses that sped along the boulevard du Roi René. The duke stopped and smiled, remembering a fine two weeks visiting his friends Lord and Lady Ashcroft, whose Kensington town house also gave onto a communal garden. His idea of buying a wooden bench came from that London garden, including ordering an inscription to be carved across its back. It read: Pour Marguerite, qui adorait ce jardin.

  He heard the cough again and turned around. “Mme Dreyfus,” he said, smiling. He used the formal madame when addressing her; he was quite sure she had never married, but she was of a certain age. She was a handsome woman, with thick white hair kept short, almost a pixie cut, which showed off her deep blue eyes. She wore tortoiseshell reading glasses permanently around her neck, on a chain, and seemed to wear only black and white. He guessed the antiques dealer to be close to his age, or perhaps a few years younger.

  “Lovely roses,” she said.

  “Would you like some?” the duke asked, pointing to his basket. “You must have a small elegant vase, perhaps from Sèvres, in your shop.”

  “I have the perfect one,” she answered. “Yes, I’d love a few roses, if you can spare them.”

  “Shall I run into the house and get Manuel to wrap these up for you?”

  “No, no,” she said.

  “But the thorns . . .”

  “I have a handkerchief,” she replied, pulling an antique linen handkerchief out of her sweater pocket.

  “Very enterprising,” the duke replied, carefully wrapping the handkerchief around the stems. “Who’s manning the shop?”

  Mme Dreyfus pointed to her watch. “It’s lunchtime.”

  “Oh, so it is,” he answered, looking up at the sky. “I lost track of time.”

  “You can’t hear the clients in the restaurant?” she asked, gesturing behind her. “They have the windows wide open.”

  “No, mercifully; alth
ough I can hear the fountain, especially at night.” The duke realized that Gaëlle Dreyfus’s shop and her apartment were only two buildings away from the new restaurant, whereas his house sat at the garden’s opposite end. He never heard a peep from the restaurant, and, in fact, rarely had the opportunity to walk along the rue Mistral. It was as if it was worlds away.

  “That’s partly why I’m here,” Mme Dreyfus said. “It’s about the restaurant . . .”

  “Please,” the duke said, “sit down.”

  Gaëlle Dreyfus sat down on the very English-looking bench and looked at the duke, realizing for the first time that he resembled an English lord more than a French duke, from his Harris Tweed coat and woolen waistcoat to his thinning gray hair that he wore a little too long in the back. And yet she saw, from his high cheekbones, wide thin lips, and blue eyes (not unlike her own), that he would have been a handsome young man. “I have a client,” she began, “an architect, who has informed me that the chef of the restaurant, who is also its owner, has applied to the city for permission to extend the dining room outside.”

  “He’ll never get permission,” the duke quickly replied, crossing his arms for emphasis. “There’s not a single restaurant terrace in this quartier.”

  “Ah,” Mme Dreyfus said. “But the new mayor, I’m told, is sympathetic to business owners and less to . . .”

  “Residents.”

  “Yes,” she answered, intentionally leaving out the words privileged and nobility.

  “Mais la fontaine,” he continued. “It’s historically listed.”

  “Yes, but the fountain is, technically, on the restaurant’s land, although we all share the greater garden.”

  “My parents used to get water out of it.”

  You mean they sent the servants off to fetch the water, Mme Dreyfus mused. “I still do,” she answered.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course; it’s tested every year,” she said. “All natural springs have to be.”

  “Well, then. What can we do about this situation?”

  “That’s partly why I’m here,” she answered. “I’m on the historical committee of Aix, and we’d like your help.”

  “Of course, of course,” he replied, almost absently.

  Mme Dreyfus smiled. “I’ve just begun to inform the other neighbors,” she went on. “Bénédicte and Serge Tivolle, who live next door to the restaurant, already know of the chef’s plans . . . Bénédicte is the treasurer of our historical committee. I’ve spoken to Thomas and Stéphanie Roche, who live near the restaurant, and Marine Bonnet. Professor Bonnet teaches law at the university and lives on the top floor over there.” Mme Dreyfus pointed to a top-floor apartment about halfway down the garden, with a large terrace that had climbing roses, a jasmine plant that twisted its way around the terrace’s railing, and two potted olive trees.

  “A law professor . . .,” the duke mumbled. They had been at a dinner party together, years back. He remembered an interesting conversation and a great loud laugh.

  “Yes, but she’s recently married Aix’s juge d’instruction.” The antiques dealer beamed, as if she had just delivered the winning answer on a quiz show. A door opened to the duke’s house and the smell of cheese and eggs wafted outside. “I’m sorry,” Mme Dreyfus said, seeing Manuel Arruda, who was wearing a starched apron, standing in the kitchen doorway. “I believe your lunch is ready.”

  The duke turned around and waved to Manuel. “J’arrive!” he called. He would have liked to invite Mme Dreyfus for lunch, but he had no idea how much omelet, or soufflé, Manuel had made.

  • • •

  “Montaigne had quotations carved into the beams of his library’s ceiling,” Frère Joël said after taking a sip of his strong hot coffee. “I used to visit his house all the time; my grandparents lived nearby.”

  “I remember the library and the carved beams,” the duke replied, passing a tray of cookies to the brother. “But I can’t remember what was written on them.”

  “Words of the Roman philosophers,” the brother answered. “One was Seneca’s advice on living well.”

  “A subject of great interest to Montaigne.”

  “Exactly,” Frère Joël said. “It says if you get depressed or bored in your retirement, just interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things around you . . .”

  “Gardens, for example,” the duke quickly said.

  “Your roses,” Frère Joël suggested, looking up at the Lady Banks. “Or our historic buildings in Aix.”

  “You could carefully study all the Cézanne paintings in the Musée Granet.”

  The men laughed and both took another cookie off the porcelain plate Manuel had brought out. Aix’s museum owned only ten works, minor ones, of its most famous son.

  The duke slowly chewed and then asked, “Are you saying I look depressed? Or bored?”

  “No,” Frère Joël replied after a moment’s hesitation. “But I’m afraid something is bothering you.”

  It had been more than a year since Frère Joël and the duke began their coffee tradition, now almost daily, at 5:00 p.m. The half-Gothic, half-Romanesque church of Saint-Jean de Malte shared the same garden; its access was a small wooden door that opened on the rue Cardinale, across the street from the church. The duke wasn’t an especially religious man, or even a believer, but he was so used to going to Mass that the thought of not going seemed impossible, like not eating breakfast or not stopping to wash oneself. Marguerite, a Bavarian, had been deeply religious, and a fine singer as well, and so if he went now it was more to listen to the choir and hear Père Jean-Luc’s thought-provoking sermons than to be beaten over the head with the Scriptures. But no one was getting beaten over the head at Saint-Jean de Malte, and although the duke admired Père Jean-Luc, he had more in common with the young brother from Périgord who had arrived at the church two years previously, and who, like the duke, had studied history as an undergraduate.

  The duke looked at his young friend and said, “I’ve had a rather disagreeable visit to my physician.”

  Frère Joël put his head down for a moment and then looked at the duke. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Has the doctor made a prognosis?”

  “Not yet,” the duke replied. “More nasty tests are needed. And before you tell me not to worry, I’m not worrying about death. Like your fellow Périgourdin, Montaigne. I don’t remember what’s written on the carved beams, but I do know what he said about death: Don’t give death a second’s thought.”

  “So there’s no use worrying about it,” Frère Joël quickly said, trying to smile. “Is there something you’d like to talk about?”

  “Get off my chest?” the duke asked. “Before—”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Frère Joël quickly said.

  “I haven’t been to confession in years. Decades.”

  “We can do it here.”

  “In the garden?” the duke asked, looking around at his carefully pruned hedges. “All right. There is something I’d like to confess. But not today. I suppose I should prepare myself for the worst. Prepare to die, if needed.”

  “I wouldn’t worry—”

  The duke laughed. “Are you quoting Montaigne again? What was it that he wrote? ‘If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry. Nature will show you. She’ll do it beautifully.’”

  Chapter Two

  The World According to Philomène Joubert

  May I congratulate you, Marine?” Philomène Joubert said. They were in the market, at the same stall, looking at bundles of local springtime asparagus.

  “Oui, merci beaucoup, Mme Joubert,” Marine said, smiling and taking Mme Joubert’s hand and squeezing it. “It was a small wedding,” she quickly added, in case Philomène Joubert had the feeling that the entire choir of Saint-Jean de Malte should have been invited. “In Italy . . .”

  “Your mother showed us photo
graphs, just before Mass last Sunday,” Philomène said.

  “Really?” Marine asked, not hiding her surprise. Of her parents, a family doctor and a retired theology professor, it was her mother, the theologian, who was the least likely to show her emotions, or enthusiasm, especially over sentimental matters.

  “Oh yes,” Philomène replied. “You were beautiful.” She selected a bundle of asparagus and examined it. “Mme Martin,” she called out, holding the bundle up and waving it in the air, “vous en avez des blanches?”

  Marine smiled, hoping that Mme Martin had white asparagus for her neighbor, and that way she could have more of the thin green ones for her dinner party that evening. She had been introduced to the green variety by an old woman selling her produce out of a small boat in Venice. “Risotto, risotto,” the elderly Venetian insisted, and Marine had bought the whole lot.

  Mme Martin handed her client a bundle of fat white asparagus. Philomène looked at the vegetables, nodded to Mme Martin, and set them into her cloth bag. She went on. “And that jewel of a pink church; it looked like candy or a wedding cake.” She then laughed at her joke, and Marine joined in.