The Collector's Apprentice

by B.A. Shapiro

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Don't miss B. A. Shapiro's new novel, Metropolis, available now! 

"A clever and complex tale of art fraud, theft, scandal, murder, and revenge.” —Publishers Weekly

In this surprising, noirish page-turner, B. A. Shapiro once again takes readers into the world of art, glamour, and mystery. Accused of helping her fiancé steal her family’s fortune and her father’s art collection, Paulien Mertens has fled to France. To protect herself from the law and the wrath of those who lost everything, she has created a new identity. Paulien, aka Vivienne, takes a position working for an American art collector modeled after real-life eccentric museum founder Albert Barnes and quickly becomes caught up in the 1920s Paris of artists and expats, including post-Impressionist painter Henri Matisse and writer Gertrude Stein. From there, she sets out to recover her father’s art collection, prove her innocence, and exact revenge on her ex-fiancé. B. A. Shapiro has made the historical art thriller her own, and once again she gives us an unforgettable tale about what we see—and what we refuse to see.

Release date: June 11, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

This isn’t how it was supposed to be, Edwin. Instead of you and the collection, fear is my companion. It’s settled itself somewhere between my stomach and lungs, often reaching its tentacles through to my fingertips, other times lurking in place, robbing me of the ability to take a full breath or swallow even the smallest morsel of food.

As I sit here on this unforgiving bench in the Montgomery County Courthouse waiting for the lunch recess to end, I close my eyes and imagine that after today’s session I’ll head back to my little house and you’ll be there to pour us a glass of wine, that we’ll share a cigarette and a laugh at the prosecution’s allegations. Then I snap back and remember that you aren’t waiting for me, that you’re no longer able to listen or laugh. It’s been seven months, and still I do this.

I’d hoped this morning would go better, that my lawyer, Ronald Jesper, who looks to be all of fifteen years old, would stand up to that pompous district attorney, Mr. G. W. Pratt. Initially the firm assigned me a senior partner as counsel, but after the partner persuaded the judge to release me on bail, he vanished, and I was turned over to this newly minted lawyer, the smell of the classroom still clinging to his suit. Ronald is so green he felt the need to tell me that Pennsylvania executes more convicted murderers than almost any other state in the country. Yet, I trusted he would repudiate the court’s notion that I was the one responsible for your death.

Their lead witness was the policeman who had been the first on the scene. He described what Mr. Pratt prosecution kept referring to as “the fatal event” rather than “the accident,” although any thinking person can clearly see that’s exactly what it was. What else do you call a truck colliding with a car?

Painstakingly, the policeman answered each of Mr. Pratt’s questions. Yes, it was a calm night, dark, no ice or snow on the ground or in the air. Yes, there was little traffic on the road. Yes, he had taken the truck driver’s statement, but the fellow was not forthcoming, an unfortunate circumstance. For although the driver’s only injury was a cut to the forehead from hitting the windshield, the wound became infected, and the man was dead within two days.

Next up were the photographs, over a dozen of them, taken from every angle, labeled Exhibits 1–17. Ronald objected, stating they were prejudicial, but the judge overruled him. The policeman identified each one: the position of the vehicles; the position of the body; even poor little Fidèle, growling and baring his teeth, refusing to allow the medics to tend to you. Then the district attorney passed them on to the jury. Two of the men looked away, and one of the women grew so pale I thought she might faint.

Mr. Pratt, looking so wise and gentlemanly with his thick gray hair and expensive pinstriped suit, collected the photographs. He walked over to the defense table and had the audacity to smile at me. “Perhaps you’d like to see these photographs of Dr. Bradley, Miss Gregsby?” He bowed slightly and held out the pack as if he were presenting a gift.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t look. It was bad enough imagining you like that. Imagining the effect of that big rig on your Packard. On you. Imagining your terror when you finally realized the truck wasn’t going to stop.

“Don’t take them, Vivienne,” Ronald hissed, then stood. “Objection!”

This time the judge sustained, and the proceedings turned to motive. I’m the primary beneficiary, the heir, the inheritor, and therefore I have the most to gain from your death. Pratt implied that because I’m not your wife, this was particularly suspicious, although I have no idea why that would be the case. Two art experts testified to my portion of the estate. One figured the twenty-five hundred paintings and sculptures you left me are worth about $20 million, and the other estimated at least $25 million. Isn’t it remarkable that the art they all derided just a decade ago is now worth so much? As I always said, you were a true visionary.

Edwin, why did you have to die now? Just when you finally proved to everyone that you were right all along. You, a man of such brilliance and creativity, who faced so many challenges and beat back every one. You didn’t deserve this fate.

But then, so few of us receive the fate we deserve.

Paulien is aware that being banished to Paris with 200 francs in her pocket isn’t the worst of circumstances. But the city is vast and crowded and lonely despite all the noise and hubbub, not at all the way she remembers it. She wishes she were back in Brussels, filled with hope for the future, standing with her arms held wide as the seamstress made the final adjustments to her wedding gown. She looks down at the diamond on her ring finger. There is still hope. It’s a crazy mistake, which George will straighten out.

His telegram read: not as it seems. stop. going after swiss banker who stole all the money. stop. will come for you when succeed. stop. love always.

It pours the day she takes a bateau along the Seine, and she’s unaffected by either the Eiffel Tower or her walk down the Champs-Élysées. Even a visit to the Louvre, a place of worship to her, leaves her as cold as the classical sculptures there. She worries about her parents and her brothers, wonders how they’re holding up, what they’re doing. She’s edgy and skittish, startles at every sound, searches every face for a sign of George or her father.

Clearly she needs something more absorbing than sightseeing. She decides she’ll look for a position in a gallery like the one she had in London after she graduated from college, gain a little more experience before she goes out on her own. George spoke about starting a new company. Why not here? It doesn’t matter to her if she opens her gallery in London or in Paris or in Brussels for that matter. She smiles as she imagines asking her father’s advice on which artists she should choose for her first show.

True, Papa and Maman were the ones who cast her out. He has destroyed everything we have been building for generations—and you brought him here, allowed him to do this to us, helped him! She can still hear her mother’s words. It is all gone. What we had, what you and your brothers and your children would have had. Everything that we are. Our name. Our proud name . . .

The memory almost doubles Paulien over. But Maman will soon discover that she’s worrying herself for no good reason. George will find the corrupt banker who cheated him and stole everyone’s money. Then her parents will see they were mistaken to believe that there never was a banker or that George is a crook and a con man of the worst sort. George would never swindle them, never swindle her, of this she is certain. Paulien dons the one stylish suit she managed to shove into her valise before she left, tilts her hat at a rakish angle, and sets out to find herself a gallery.

It’s a breezy late summer day in the most enchanting city in the world, and her spirits rise. She steps onto the teeming streets. Fashionable women with strappy shoes and short dresses drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, heads pressed together inside the red-fronted Le Pure Café. Tiny tables and wicker chairs pack the sidewalks, shops dazzle with the latest button-up boots and brimmed hats. The boulangeries, the marble facades, the cascading flowers, the promenades.

From under the bright green awning of Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a handsome young man with a thin mustache calls out for her to join him. She flashes him a smile and walks on. Between the carriages and carts, Paulien catches sight of a Studebaker Roadster dexterously dodging the bicyclists and pedestrians. It’s the same model as George’s, although in bright yellow rather than navy blue, and her eyes follow the car’s path until it turns at the corner. Perhaps he will come today.

She strolls into a gallery called Arnold et Tripp at 8, rue Saint-Georges. The street name is a good sign. The proprietor is at least fifty, with a heavy beard and what sounds like a Polish accent. She introduces herself and tells him about her experience at the Whitechapel Gallery, her studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, her childhood in a house with an extensive art collection.

He’s happy to listen to her, but in the end he says, “I am so sorry, mademoiselle. As much as I would enjoy the company of a young woman as knowledgeable and beautiful as you, I have neither the resources nor the need.” French men are such flirts. Even the old ones.

She moves on to Brame et Lorenceau, a gallery with connections to the Manet family. But there’s no job there either. She speaks with Marcel Bernheim at Bernheim-Jeune and Henry Bing at Galerie Nunes et Fiquet with the same outcome. She stops by a gallery specializing in old masters—painters she appreciates but isn’t drawn to—and then moves on to Boussod, Valadon et Cie, which sells only prints of the popular Salon artists. No luck.

The shadows lengthen, and Paulien starts back to her hotel. She passes the Durand-Ruel Gallery and almost doesn’t go in, but then she recognizes a Cézanne on the far wall: the luscious brushstrokes; the turbulent, uncontrollable energy; the bevy of rare juxtapositions and color combinations. Home.

She steps into the hushed, musty-smelling gallery and approaches Léda au cygne. Cézanne. Her father’s collection includes Cézanne’s Five Bathers, which she fell in love with as a child: the vivid blues, greens, and yellows; the roughness of the tree bark; the soft, fleshy women frolicking in the sifting sunlight. There was something magical about the diminutive painting, just over two feet square, which soothed and touched her in a way she was too young to understand.

Paulien appraises the canvas in front of her, guessing Cézanne painted it sometime in the early 1880s. She isn’t familiar with this particular picture, and although she prefers his more mature work, her heart slips. Those succulent blues against the yellow-orange of both the swan’s beak and Leda’s ringlets, the sexuality in every twist of their bodies, in every swirl of the fabric, the desire in the swan’s grasp of Leda’s wrist. She catches her breath. She misses George, wants him.

“I see you are admiring our Léda, mademoiselle.” A deep voice interrupts her musings.

She turns to the stocky man with wide shoulders standing next to her. Although he’s broadly balding, his unwrinkled skin hints that he can’t be much more than ten years her senior. “I am.”

“You are a devotee of Monsieur Cézanne?”

“Yes, but I prefer the work he did in the last decade of his life.” She figures she might as well be honest, as there surely are no jobs to be had in this tiny gallery. “When he began to construct objects with color instead of line.”

He bows slightly and then extends his hand. “Alexandre Busler,” he says. “And I most heartily agree with you.”

“I’m Paulien Mertens, and I suppose I’m a little surprised to hear you say that.”

“Not every art dealer is so entrenched in the past that he cannot see what is the future.”

She returns his bow. “I’m sorry if I mistook you for one of those.”

“Apology accepted.” M. Busler turns toward the Cézanne. “But this painting is not without merit, no?”

“No. Not at all. It’s moving, provocative. All these curves—her hip, her arm, the swan’s neck, even her hair and the back of her chair—flow so, so . . .” She wants to say erotically but substitutes, “Beautifully.”

His eyes crinkle with amusement. “Yes, they do. As you say, so beautifully.”

Heat rises along her neck, and Paulien curses her pale skin, which constantly undermines her. “What I really like is how you can see his ideas evolving. Like here.” She points to the face. “Her skin isn’t classically smooth and pearly—it’s blotchy. Made with thick brushstrokes. And with colors you wouldn’t think of as skin tones: greens, purples, oranges.”

M. Busler leans back and crosses his arms over his chest. “Would you like a cup of tea? Or perhaps something stronger?”

“Tea would be delightful, thank you.” Paulien unpins her hat. Perhaps there is a job here.

He ushers her into a small alcove at the side of the gallery and prepares tea while they talk about Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Picasso, and her favorite, Henri Matisse. About when post-Impressionism began and who began it. After half an hour, they’re Paulien and Alexandre.

“Listening to you,” Alexandre says, “I would guess you are an artist. But your fingernails are too clean.”

She smiles fleetingly. “Right now I’m looking for a position.”

He appears confused.

“As an assistant. In an art gallery.”

“But you are only a visitor to Paris, no? I hear from your accent that you are not French.”

“Belgian. From Brussels. But then I was in London for school and stayed after I completed my studies. And . . . and now I’m living in Paris. Or will be soon.”

“You would like to work here? At my gallery?”

“I would. Very much.” Then she plunges into a recitation of her qualifications.

“Why did you leave London?” he asks.

She can’t tell him the truth, so she says, “I didn’t like it there. All that rain. And the English . . .” Her mother once told her that no specifics were necessary to convince a Frenchman of anyone’s antipathy toward the British. “Well, you know how they are.”

“Indeed I do.” Alexandre stands and retrieves a pen and notebook from his desk. He gives them to her. “Please write down all your particulars, how I can reach you, the exact years you were at the Slade, worked at Whitechapel, anything else you think I should know.”

When Paulien finishes, she hands the notebook back and asks, “So you have a position?”

“I would not have said so before you walked in, but perhaps there is something we can do. Although it will not be full time and will pay next to nothing. At least not at the start.”

“That’s fine,” Paulien tells him. “It will be fine.”

Alexandre squints at what she’s written. “You are staying at Le Meurice?” he asks. “Why would you want a small position here if you can afford to stay there?”

“I, ah, I . . .” She’s unprepared for the question, looks down at her ring. “Well, you see, it’s that I’m going to be married. Soon. And my fiancé is, well, he’s quite well off. So . . .”

Alexandre glances at her quizzically and then down at the notebook in his hand. “Mertens, Mertens . . . ,” he mutters. “Belgium.” Then he straightens up. “Aldric Mertens? Are you related to Aldric Mertens?”

Paulien is silenced by his harsh tone, by the cold glint of his eyes.

“You are the daughter,” Alexandre declares, disgust creeping into his voice. “The one who was involved with that maggot Everard.” He glowers at her. “It is no surprise then that you are so knowledgeable about art.”

“Please, Alexandre, please let me explain. It’s not what you—”

“My brother is dead because of . . . because of . . .” He chokes on the words, and his face reddens. “Your father, a supposed friend, persuaded him to invest, and he lost everything. Joseph could not bear the embarrassment, the failure. He . . . he left his wife a widow and three little boys . . . without a centime.”

Paulien jumps from her chair and takes a step toward him. “Oh no. No. I’m so sorry. So very sorry. That’s—”

Alexandre holds up his hands, and she stops. “You need to leave.” His voice is raspy; he’s close to tears. “And if you are smart, you will also get out of that hotel. Out of Paris. This city is smaller than it seems.”

“But you don’t understand. It’s all a mistake. My father didn’t know anything. And . . . and there wasn’t anything to know. It will all be cleared up as soon as George finds—”

“Do not tell me your father just wanted to help Joseph make a few francs. No, your father was getting a cut of the profits, of this there can be no doubt. And you, engaged to marry that . . . that bandit!” Alexandre barks a laugh containing no humor, and his eyes are black with derision. “Obviously your fiancé is well off.”

“But he didn’t. Papa didn’t. And George didn’t either. A Swiss banker stole all the money and George is going—”

“Get out of my sight!”

Paulien rushes for the door. She moves quickly away from the gallery, turns at the first corner, slithers into an alley, and pushes herself into a small notch between two buildings. Merde. No one has ever looked at her like that. With such disdain and contempt. Such scorn. She closes her eyes against the shame, but it doesn’t go away.

When she composes herself, she hurries to the telegraph office. i must come home, papa. stop. please come get me. stop. now. Then she returns to Le Meurice to wait for him.

She holes up in her hotel room, afraid of being seen, eating little, sleeping as much as she can. As the days pass and neither her father nor George appears, it begins to dawn on her that they might not. That she may be on her own. Surely it’s just that it’s taking George a long time to find the banker, but she’s troubled that she’s the only one who believes there’s one to be found. And where is Papa? She writes a letter every day, sometimes more than one, but there is no response. She burrows deeper into the covers and sobs like a child.

But she isn’t a child. She’s an adult, almost twenty years old. When her tears run dry, Paulien drags herself from the bed. Although she wishes she were dead, she also wishes to live. She counts her money. Once she pays the hotel bill, she will have almost nothing left. What will she do? How she will survive? She has no answers, but there is no doubt that she must pawn her ring and move to cheaper lodgings.

For the first time in days, she leaves the hotel and heads into districts she’s never seen before. Her family spent many holidays in Paris, but none in these quarters of serpentine lanes and wooden buildings pressed tight to their neighbors. The women on the streets are pale and thin and look exhausted. They wear dresses of rough cotton, often covered by aprons; the dresses and aprons look as if they haven’t been washed any more often than their owners. The men look even more downtrodden in their frayed pants and hats stained with sweat.

What must it be like to live in such poverty? To have so little and perhaps even less hope for the future? It occurs to her that this might be her own state, but despite the silence from home and George, she can’t believe this is true. Still, she must proceed as if it is.

After visits to three pawnbrokers, she returns to the one who offered the most money. The shop is cramped and smells like the inside of an old suitcase. The proprietor leers at her as she pulls the ring over her knuckle. She’s not going to cry in front of him, she’s not, she won’t. But it feels as if she’s drowning. She imagines George returning to the shop to retrieve the ring, putting it back on her finger where it belongs. This calms her enough to take the money the man proffers, a fraction of what the ring is worth, one hundred francs. Which won’t last long.

She has to locate a room she can afford, somewhere safe where she can stay until things work themselves out. She can’t go home without an invitation, not after how quickly they assumed the worst of her, of George. How could they possibly believe she would swindle them? Her own family? Nor does she have enough money to leave Paris for another destination. She wanders the streets, wonders if she is walking in circles, finds nothing.

Finally she comes upon a sign for a women’s rooming house on rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The arrow points to a door covered with chipped blue paint that’s squeezed between a butcher and a dank shop that appears to sell gear for horses. She climbs a flight of stairs to another door in no better shape than the first.

Standing on the rickety landing, she tells herself that this, too, is a momentary obstacle. A tale she and George will laughingly tell their children someday: how Papa fooled Maman with one of his silly pranks and how well she survived on her own. George is such a jokester. Like the way he proposed marriage, allowing her to think one thing while he was busy planning another. She knocks.

A slender girl, stringy hair held tight to her forehead by sweat, answers and eyes her uneasily. “You lost?”

“I’m looking for a room.”

The girl laughs, revealing a broken front tooth. “Not here.”

“There’s nothing available?”

“Not for you.”

“But you do have a vacancy?”

“Va-can-cy,” she mimics, looking Paulien up and down, taking quite an interest in her shoes. “What we got is a room in the attic. Not near swanky enough for you.”

“Can I see it, please?”

“Hot in summer,” the girl continues. “Freezing in winter. Cold water down one floor and a WC more like a closet with a slop bucket than anything else.”

“How much?”

The girl narrows her eyes. “One franc a week.” She tries to keep a sly smile from her lips and almost succeeds.

Paulien considers bargaining, as this is surely higher than the usual rate, but she says, “I’ll take it.”

“You got a name?”

A name. Paulien hesitates. She needs a new name. One that will hide who she is, a nationality that isn’t hers. An English surname. A French given name. “Vivienne,” she says, appropriating this from her favorite nanny. “Gregsby,” she adds, appropriating this from a professor she admired at the Slade. “I’m Vivienne Gregsby.”

“Well then, Vivienne Gregsby, give me enough to cover two weeks and it is yours.”

Paulien guesses she’s being taken again, that few of the women seeking shelter here have the means to pay so much in advance. She’s aware she can’t afford to be generous any longer, that the girl probably has more money than she does, but she hands her a franc. “I’ll give you the other half tomorrow,” she says, deciding against seeing the room, fearful she’ll lose her nerve. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

Before she returns to Le Meurice for her last evening as Paulien Mertens, she sends her parents a telegram with her new name and address. Then she stops at a hairdresser and has a coiffeur bob her long blond hair and dye it dark brown. A completely different person gazes back at her from the mirror. She supposes it’s Vivienne Gregsby.

Vivienne’s room is tiny, just enough space for a narrow cot and two wooden boxes to hold her meager belongings. The sounds of squabbling between the two sisters who run the place and the screeching of chickens in the coops just below her window never seem to let up, and neither do the odors of raw meat and horses and leather. She can’t return to her more familiar haunts, fearful of seeing Alexandre’s loathing and pain on another face, so she spends her days roaming the streets of her new neighborhood, chain-smoking and trying to remain invisible.

She eats little, her stomach now shrunk to the size of a clenched fist, knotted like an old woman’s fingers, and she’s dropped at least ten pounds since coming to Paris. She’s always been on the plump side, so this alters her appearance more than she would have thought. It also saves money. But not enough. She has eighty-six francs and must find a job.

Not an unpaid position, as she had in London, but one with a salary large enough to support her and allow her to save money to leave France. She’s never thought much about a salaried position, or making money, for that matter. Her father’s lessons in how to curate the Mertens collection never included the financial aspects, as she was raised to believe it was vulgar for a girl to consider such things. But now she finds herself without income or connections, disowned and disavowed, on her own in a world she doesn’t understand, her lessons in piano, art, and elocution having prepared her for nothing.

Dark clouds shadow her wanderings. Papa, Maman, Léon, Franck, do they miss her? They know where she is, her new name, how to find her, but still no one has come. Do they think about her? Do they still love her? She would never have believed the answer to these questions could be no. She aches for them all. For George.

She yearns almost as much for the world of art. Her father is the fourth-generation owner of Mertens Mills and Textiles, the largest producer of cotton in Belgium, and he’s also an art collector. She’s dreamed of becoming a skilled collector since she was a girl, preparing to take over the family collection, which was started by Arrière-grand-père Mertens, ignored by her grandfather, and enhanced by her father. But her aspirations go far beyond simple stewardship. She’s going to convert a large barn on the eastern end of their estate and create the Mertens Museum of Post-Impressionism, the greatest post-Impressionist art center in the world.

The majority of the Mertens collection, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European paintings purchased by her great-grandfather, is located in the formal north wing of their manor house and is open to the public five days a week. But the pieces she and Papa like best—the paintings he acquired over the past few decades against the advice of his friends, all of whom believed the works to be inferior and the artists mad—hang together in a room in the east wing, which they refer to as the colonnade because it opens into a hallway framed by two sets of Corinthian columns. Three by Henri Matisse, The Music Lesson, Dishes and Melon, and Still Life with Gourds; two by Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman and Young Woman Holding a Cigarette; Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte; and Cézanne’s Five Bathers.

Originally, these seven paintings were in the north wing with the more traditional works, but closed-minded patrons complained that they weren’t art, only smudges by untalented pretenders, and Papa removed them to the colonnade. Growing up, she spent as much time there as she could, sneaking away from her nannies and tutors to be with the pictures.

The room was furnished with a few comfortable couches and chairs, and her preferred spot was directly across from Matisse’s The Music Lesson, her favorite of the seven. She would curl up on the silver-blue sofa with her sketchbook and pencils, sometimes drawing and sometimes just looking, drifting, dreaming, allowing the paintings to transport her into a distant world.

Aside from the staff, she didn’t have much company as a young girl. The family property expanded for miles in every direction, and her mother insisted she be educated at home by the same tiresome teachers who had taught her and her sisters eons before. Paulien’s older brother, Léon, was too straitlaced to be any fun, and although she was crazy for her younger brother, Franck, he was too little to be much of a playmate.

Her mother, whose interests lay in gossip, parties, expensive jewelry, and being a beauty, was unhappy that her only daughter wasn’t concerned with any of these things. Maman often predicted that, despite her pretty face, if Paulien didn’t start acting more like a proper girl, she would be forced to “marry down,” the worst fate imaginable. The paintings, on the other hand, were always there, welcoming her, opening up to her so she could crawl into their swirling emotions and bring them to life with her imaginings. Bring herself to life.

One day when she was about eleven, her father came upon her softly weeping in front of The Music Lesson. Embarrassed and afraid he’d think poorly of her, she jumped up and wiped her tears with the sleeve of her dress. “Hello, Papa.”

“Why are you crying, my dear?” he asked.

She didn’t know how to explain what she was feeling, but he hardly ever asked her a personal question, and she wanted to answer him. For him to take notice of her. She pointed to the picture. “I, ah, I always feel sad that the people are so alone. They are a family just like us—a sister and two brothers, but there is no father in the picture, and the mother is so far away. As if she does not care what her children are doing. And maybe the father does not either.”

He gave her an intense look she couldn’t read. “What makes you think they are alone? They are home together enjoying their amusements.”

“I . . . I do not know,” she stuttered. When he glanced at his watch, she blurted out, “Maybe it is because they are not looking at one another. The older brother is reading his book, the mother is knitting behind the house, and even though the small boy and the sister sit together at the piano, there’s . . . there’s something that seems to keep them apart. I do not ever want our family to be like that.”

“Very good.” Papa pointed to a wide band of gold—ostensibly the edge of a gilded frame—that cut between the heads of the two piano players, separating them. “Very good, Paulie.” He glanced at her, at the painting, back at her. “You are an insightful girl. Not like your brothers, who cannot be bothered to sit still long enough to look at anything.”

This comment astounded her. The times her father was at home instead of at his offices, he gave most of his attention to her brothers, once in a while glancing at her indulgently but dismissively. Just the night before, at dinner, he’d grilled Léon about his lessons in physics, threw