Paris Is Always a Good Idea Read online

  Another time she’d wished for peace with her mother—a pious hope! She’d also wished for a little house by the sea—well, that was a little extravagant, but there was nothing to stop her wishing.

  On her last birthday—it was her thirty-third and unpleasant; icy rain was pouring down on Paris and its Christmas decorations—Rosalie had marched off in her thick, blue winter coat and climbed up the Eiffel Tower once again. There was nothing much going on that day—some skaters were gliding over the ice rink that was always put up on the first level in the winter and a few Japanese tourists in rain slickers seemed never to tire of photographing each other with thumbs raised and broad grins.

  This year Rosalie had a very modest wish.

  On the card in her hand was a drawing of a bridge, its honeycomb rail hung with hundreds of little padlocks. A little man and a little woman were standing beside it, kissing.

  The bridge was unmistakably the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge across the Seine from which there was a wonderful view of the Eiffel Tower or the Île de la Cité. On summer evenings it was always a very lively place.

  Rosalie loved the simple, narrow iron bridge with its wooden walkway. She sometimes went there, sat on a bench, and looked at the large number of padlocks attached to the railing, each of which proclaimed a love that was meant to last forever.

  As long as love lasts, it’s eternal. Who had said that?

  Rosalie didn’t know why, but every time she sat there she was moved by the sight of all these hopeful little padlocks, guarding love as staunchly as tin soldiers.

  It may have been silly, but her secret heart’s desire was a padlock like that.

  Whoever gives me a padlock like that is Mr. Right, she thought as she leaned over the damp steel framework of the Eiffel Tower and threw her card into the air in a high arc.

  As she did so, of course, she was thinking of René.

  One bright winter’s day at the beginning of December she had walked over the Pont des Arts hand in hand with her lover, and the railing with its padlocks had sparkled in the sun like Priam’s Treasure. “Look, how lovely!” she had cried.

  “A wall of gold,” René had said in an unusual fit of poetry and had stopped for a moment to inspect the inscriptions on the padlocks. “Unfortunately, not all that glitters is gold,” he added with a grin. “I’d like to know how many of the people who have eternalized themselves here are still together.”

  Rosalie wouldn’t have liked to know.

  “But still, isn’t it wonderful that people still fall in love and want to show it? I mean, I’m kind of moved by these little padlocks.”

  She didn’t say anything else, because it was the same with birthday wishes as with the wishes you make when you see a shooting star: you weren’t allowed to reveal them.

  René had taken her in his arms with a laugh. “Oh lord, don’t tell me you’re seriously keen on a stupid padlock? They’re pure kitsch.”

  Rosalie had laughed with embarrassment and thought to herself that even pure kitsch could have an attractive side some of the time.

  Two weeks later she was standing on the Eiffel Tower, calmly watching the card fluttering downward like a wounded dove. She was startled when a heavy hand was suddenly placed on her shoulder from behind.

  “Hé, mademoiselle, qu’est-ce que vous faites là?” thundered in her ear.

  Rosalie started and nearly lost her balance with the fright. A man in a blue uniform and a kepi gazed piercingly into her eyes.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing, giving me such a shock?” Rosalie replied furiously. She felt both caught out and disturbed in her sacred ritual. Ever since the government had placed all the tourist attractions under surveillance for fear of pickpockets, you couldn’t be safe from interference even on a rainy December day. It made her crazy.

  “So? What are you doing here?” repeated the policeman harshly. “You can’t just throw your trash away up here.”

  “That was no trash, that was a wish,” Rosalie replied irritably, noticing that her ears were burning.

  “Now don’t try and get smart with me, mademoiselle.” The officer folded his arms and pulled himself up to his full height in front of her. “Whatever it was, you’re going down right now to pick it up, is that clear? And this empty chips bag here”—he pointed to a crumpled plastic bag at her feet with raindrops dripping from it—“you can take that with you as well.”

  He watched the young woman in the blue coat as she tramped grumpily down the steel framework step by step.

  When she reached the bottom, Rosalie, overcome by an attack of curiosity, walked round the base of the tower, actually looking for her wishing card. But it had vanished into thin air.

  * * *

  AFTER THE SOMEWHAT BIZARRE event on the Eiffel Tower, which Rosalie obviously had not told anyone about, more than three months had passed. The cold damp of the winter rain had given way to a stormy January and then a surprisingly sunny February. Her birthday was long past, Valentine’s Day came and went, but this time, too, her wish remained unfulfilled.

  René proudly offered her a box containing running shoes (“breathable, superlight, the Porsche among running shoes, for my love on Valentine’s Day!”).

  In March, too, nobody had the idea of giving Rosalie a little golden padlock. And by now it was April.

  So many wishes, so many disappointments. The results of the last few years led Rosalie to the view that it might well be high time to give up her childish birthday ritual and grow up. If nothing happened this year, she wouldn’t climb up the Eiffel Tower again.

  The air was mild and spring was gradually taking hold. And spring sometimes fulfills the promise that winter has failed to.

  At least, that was what Rosalie was writing on one of her cards when there was an energetic knock at the door below.

  Three

  Le Vésinet was an enchanting little town lying about twenty kilometers west of Paris in a loop of the Seine. Even today you could sense that this little place in the Île-de-France region had previously been a forest where the king had enjoyed hunting. The impressionists had also visited it and conjured up the untouched natural beauty of the dreamy green banks of the Seine: many of the paths still look today as they did in the paintings of Manet or Monet.

  Old upper-class villas were protected behind hedges and stone walls; green meadows, parks, and calm lakes delighted the eye; and when you drove along the old allées and the light fell through the lofty trees, many of which were over a hundred years old, you were automatically embraced by a sense of great peace. In other words, Le Vésinet was the perfect place if you wanted a quiet life.

  Unless, thought Max Marchais grimly, you had a publisher on your back who wouldn’t leave you in peace.

  The famous children’s book author was sitting at his desk looking out at the spring morning, at his idyllic garden with the broad lawn, the old chestnut tree and the blooming cherry tree, the little, dark-green garden pavilion, and the hydrangea bushes when the phone rang yet again.

  It had been going on like that all morning, and Max Marchais knew exactly why. Whenever that guy Montsignac set his mind on something, he was like a terrier with his teeth fastened in his victim’s ankle—almost impossible to shake off. For the last week he had been bombarding his author with letters, e-mails, and calls.

  Max Marchais grinned. His case had obviously become a matter for the boss to deal with. He had to admit that he found this quite flattering.

  He had first been contacted by a Mademoiselle Mirabeau, evidently editor in chief at Opale Jeunesse—the children’s literature imprint of Éditions Opale—who looked after the reprints of his children’s books, which were still very successful.

  Mademoiselle Mirabeau, with her delicate birdlike voice, had been polite but very determined. She had returned to the attack again and again, attempting to convince him to think up one more concept for a children’s book.

  Finally, Max had cut her off with a definite no. What was so d
ifficult to understand about the word “no”?

  No, he had no desire to write another book. No, he had no more fantastic new ideas. No, it wasn’t a matter of the advance. And no, he fortunately no longer needed to earn money. He hadn’t written a children’s book in a long time, and since his wife had died four years previously, Max Marchais had withdrawn once and for all from Paris and social life.

  Marguerite’s death had been as tragic as it was pointless. And it had come without warning.

  She had been cycling along the street to the market without a care in the world when the door of a parked car flew open and Marguerite took such an unfortunate fall that her neck was broken. The arbitrary nature of Fate left Max a shattered and embittered man. Then life simply went on. But it was emptier.

  Max took his daily walk through the friendly streets and parks of Le Vésinet; when the weather was fine he sat out in his wicker chair in the shade of the chestnut tree, looking out at the garden his wife had so lovingly created. Now a gardener took care of it.

  The rest of the time Max’s favorite activity was sitting at his desk writing short contributions to learned journals or commemorative volumes. Or he made himself comfortable with a book on one of the two sofas in the adjoining library with its big fireplace, where thousands of books in the ceiling-high shelving contributed to the homey atmosphere.

  As he grew older, his interest in contemporary literature had declined. He preferred reading the classics that had captured his imagination as a young man and, if you looked closely, were beyond comparison with what were hyped up as “literary sensations” by today’s publishing houses. Who nowadays could write like a Hemingway, a Victor Hugo, a García Márquez, Sartre, Camus, or Elsa Morante? Who nowadays had anything really important to say? Something of lasting value? Life was becoming ever more space consuming, faster and shallower—and books seemed to be doing the same. It was worst of all in the case of novels. For his taste there were too many of them anyway. The market was congested with banalities. Nowadays anyone who had any kind of knowledge of the French language felt they had to write, he thought grumpily. It was too much and at the same time not enough. The eternal return of the same old thing.

  Max stared tetchily at the phone on his desk, which was still ringing shrilly. “Oh, shut up, Montsignac,” he said with a growl.

  Perhaps it was also something about him. Perhaps he had simply gotten tired of continually experiencing the new, and therefore he returned to what was tried and trusted. Perhaps he really was on the way to becoming a grumpy old man, as his housekeeper, Marie-Hélène Bonnier, had accused him of being the previous week after he first complained about the weather, then about a neighbor’s garrulousness, and then about the food.

  So what!

  His back had been causing him trouble again recently. That didn’t help his mood much, either. Max sighed as he tried to find as comfortable a position as possible in his writing chair. He shouldn’t have tried to move that heavy beech-wood tub in the garden—a fatal error! It was enough to make you sick. You had to watch out all the time that you didn’t get a chill or pull some muscle or other. Your old friends and acquaintances all had their little quirks, which got ever more difficult to put up with. Or they simply died, and the loneliness and the feeling that someday you’d be the last to survive grew ever greater.

  It was really boring. Whoever invented the idea of a golden old age must have been a complete idiot or a cynic. It just wasn’t easy to get old and remain likeable. Especially on bad days.

  The telephone went quiet, and Max twisted his face into a triumphant grin. I’ve won!

  He looked out, his gaze resting for a moment on the hydrangea bushes that stood in front of an old stone wall in the rear part of the garden. A squirrel emerged from hiding, scuttled over the lawn and disappeared between the rosebushes. Hydrangeas and roses had been his wife’s favorite flowers; she herself had the name of a flower. Marguerite had been a passionate gardener.

  He examined the photograph on his desk: it showed a woman with bright, friendly eyes and a delicate smile.

  He missed her. Still. They had met quite late in life, and the calm, level-headed cheerfulness with which Marguerite dealt with things in life—and that had lasted until the very end—had been good for him, restless spirit that he was.

  He bent over his handwritten notes once more and then banged out a few sentences on the keyboard of his computer. Now that was a fabulous invention. Not everything that was new was bad, not at all. How simple writing had become these days. How easily you could alter things without leaving any trace. In the newspaper office in the old days they had all written on rattling typewriters whose letters kept getting hooked up on each other. With carbon paper. It hadn’t been possible to print things out as often as you wanted and there was no simple way of copying them. And if you’d made a mistake, correcting it was a really tedious business every time.

  He tried to concentrate on his work again—an essay on the theme of “abstraction as a philosophical phenomenon,” which he was supposed to write for a small academic publisher. Max Marchais had not always been a children’s author. After finishing university he had worked as a journalist and occasionally written articles for academic journals. But it was only through his children’s books that he had become known—no, famous. And he didn’t even have children! The irony of Fate! The tales of Plum-Nose the Hare, the adventures of the little Ice Fairy, and the seven books about the little knight Donogood had made him richer than he would ever have thought possible. But soon after their marriage Marguerite had only just survived an ectopic pregnancy—and that was the end of it. At the time Max had just been eternally grateful not to have lost his wife. Their life together had been good even without children, and the years had just flown by.

  This year he would be seventy. As a young man he’d never have thought it possible that it would happen to him. Seventy! He didn’t like thinking about it.

  “You should go out more, Monsieur Marchais. Find something to do, go back to Paris occasionally, go to the café, meet your friends, go to your holiday house in Trouville or invite your sister from Montpellier for a visit. It’s not good for you to bury yourself in the house the whole time. You’ll end up completely alone. Every human being needs to talk to someone sometimes—that’s what I think.”

  Marie-Hélène and her long-winded reproaches sometimes drove him mad.

  “But I’ve got you,” he said.

  “No, no, Monsieur Marchais, you know exactly what I mean. You’re withdrawing into yourself more and more. And your moods are getting worse all the time.” Marie-Hélène had been in the library, energetically dusting the shelves. “I’m starting to feel like the housekeeper of that, now, what was his name, that grumpy man who also did nothing but stay at home and found out everything through his housekeeper.…”

  “Marcel Proust.” Max completed her sentence drily. “Now don’t get carried away, Marie-Hélène, and stop talking such nonsense. I’m just fine. And I like my life exactly as it is.”

  “Oh yes,” Marie-Hélène had said, holding up her feather duster like a lance. “I don’t believe a word of it, Monsieur Marchais. Do you know what you are? A lonely old man in a big, empty house.”

  Those were powerful words. He’d have liked them if he’d read them in a novel, thought Max with amusement.

  The silly thing was that his housekeeper had hit the nail right on the head.

  When the telephone began ringing again two hours later, Max clapped his computer shut crossly and put his notes on the theme of abstraction to one side. Then he reached firmly for the phone.

  “Yes, hello, who’s there?” he said irritably.

  “Aaaah, Marchais, it’s great that I’ve gotten through to you at last. The bird had flown the coop, huh, ha ha. I’ve been trying all day.”

  “I know.” Max rolled his eyes. Of course—Montsignac, he should have guessed. The publisher’s voice oozed friendliness.

  “My dear Marchais, how are you?
Everything in the garden blooming? Has our enchanting Mademoiselle Mirabeau told you about the little proposition we have for you?”

  “Yes, she has,” he growled. “But I’m afraid we’re not going to agree on that.”

  “But, but Marchais, don’t be so pessimistic, there’s always a way. Why don’t we meet in Les Editeurs next week and discuss everything at leisure, just you and I?”

  “You can save yourself the bother, Montsignac. My answer is still no. I’m almost seventy—things have to come to an end sometime.”

  “Poppycock. I beg you, Marchais, don’t be childish. Seventy? What sort of argument is that? You’re not old. Seventy is the new fifty. I know a lot of authors who only start writing at your age.”

  “Good for them. Why don’t you ask them?”

  Montsignac obviously felt there was no need to respond to this and simply carried on talking.

  “It’s precisely because you’re turning seventy that you should write another book, my dear Marchais. Think of all your fans; think of all the children you’ve made happy with your books. Do you know how many copies of Plum-Nose the Hare are still sold over the counter every month? You’re still the greatest children’s writer in this country: France’s Roald Dahl, so to speak.” Max heard him laughing. “Except that you have the unbeatable advantage of being only just seventy and can still write books.” He began to wax lyrical.

  “A new children’s book that we can bring out on your round-numbered birthday. Et voilà: that should hit the spot. I tell you, it’ll be a sensation. I can see it now: all the papers will be in a feeding frenzy. I can see thirty foreign licenses. And then we’ll promote your entire backlist. It’ll be a real celebration.”

  Max Marchais could almost hear old Montsignac rubbing his hands. “Old Montsignac”—he had to laugh, almost against his will, as the euphoric publisher’s prophesies whizzed past him.