Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [21]
“No,” Anne said. “I am working on a project of my own, and we just get in each other’s way.”
“Tell Lydie your project,” Michael said.
“Well,” Anne said, smiling in a way that indicated she had been waiting for this moment; it reminded Lydie of the pleasure she felt when given the chance to explain her own work to someone new. “I am following Madame de Sévigné around. Forget the fact she has been dead for centuries. She is so fantastic, she lives still.”
“I’m ignorant,” Lydie said.
“Madame de Sévigné is perhaps the greatest letter writer France has known. Her letters tell the story of the seventeenth century; she was trusted by Louis XIV. A member of his court! She was so solid in the middle of all that scandal. And her letters are very funny, sad, poignant. I can’t stop reading them. They are mostly to her daughter. She loved her daughter so much, and once the girl was grown, they lived apart. But Madame de Sévigné told the girl everything in letters.”
“I’d love to read them,” said Lydie, wondering whether the sound of a distant voice had more value than a letter, which could be held. And saved. “Tell me—what is her connection with the Louvre?”
“I am pursuing her connection with Louis XIV, who lived there before Versailles. You can thank him for commissioning many of your husband’s predecessors—architects who have left a mark there.”
“Is she the reason you went to Aix-en-Provence?” Michael asked.
“Yes,” Anne said. “Because that is where her daughter moved after she married Count de Grignan. I begin to feel as though I know them personally, that I am visiting them in their various dwellings … ”
“Anne is really crazy,” Jean said. “She is so obsessive about Madame de Sévigné, she is researching every single connection. And she has already written a book about her.”
“Really?” Lydie asked. “What’s the title?”
“Three Women of the Marais,” Anne said. “She was born on the Place des Vosges.”
“I have a friend who lives there,” Lydie said.
“Really? To live there—that would be something,” Anne said.
Jean laughed in a scoffing manner. “Anne, if you lived there, you might actually start to believe you are the reincarnation of Madame de Sévigné. It would be the worst that could happen.”
Lydie giggled and tried to catch Michael’s eye, but he was looking away: his head tilted toward Anne, and he was staring at her, a little smile on his lips, as if he was trying to figure her out.
I assure you that these days drag on slowly and that uncertainty is a dreadful thing.
—TO POMPONNE, DECEMBER 1664
CHARLES LEGENDRE, THE Louvre’s curator for seventeenth-century art, was a fop. Stickpin, black silk socks, significant tie—obviously from some school, probably in Switzerland. Unfortunately he was Michael’s designated Louvre liaison. Michael had sort of liked him, with reservations, at their first meeting. That was back in October, when Charles had walked Michael through the painting galleries, suggesting works Michael might want to appropriate for the Salle des Quatre Saisons.
“That is a magnificent Poussin,” Michael had said, facing a large canvas depicting warriors in a scene from mythology.
“Ah, yes,” Charles had said, his hands folded as he gazed upon the tableau. “Pierre Dauphin counts that among his favorites. Good luck to you, persuading him to let you have it. But of course you must try. Isn’t that a charming Wando?”
“It is,” Michael had said. But who had ever heard of Wando? The card beside the painting identified Giancarlo Wando as a Milanese who came to Paris in 1672. Michael wanted at least two important seventeenth-century works—by the likes of Poussin and la Tour. At the time he had thought Charles’s motives were innocent. Months later, however, the scene reminded him of his older brother Jack, of a McBride family vacation on Cape Cod, when Jack had tried to trick Michael into wanting the second-best bike: “That red one’s sharp, isn’t it? With the chrome mud guard. You want the red one, Mike?” Later, wobbling down the sandy road, Michael had discovered what Jack had