My mother made plans for us for the rest of the afternoon. I had for some reason never been to Malmaison, so we had our driver take us there, and we sat in the little front garden. Freddy said he had not been to Versailles since his childhood. So we drove to Versailles, partly because of that, but also because my mother wanted to go and visit the Trianon, which she had always loved. Freddy and Helen and I walked across the lawn to look at the building from a distance, and when we reached an optimal vantage point, I turned around to see my parents standing in a measureless expanse of green beside a quick swirl of pink palace at the edge of the limitless woods of Versailles. My mother had put on a pair of large blue sunglasses and I was horribly struck by the picture of her, looking tiny and fragile, next to my father—in the perfect sunshine, with all the laughing thousands who had come to Versailles on a radiant Sunday. The pink of the Trianon is my mother’s favorite color; standing in front of that building, itself so pale and delicate, she looked like a shadow puppet made of paper. She waved; then she turned around and looked up at the folly. I thought of her careful memory focusing for a last view of something she had always visited on happy days. The shock of our situation had settled once over dinner that first night, and then it had withdrawn again. Now it settled once more. How could my mother have become so small so fast?

We drove back to the hotel in almost unbroken silence, and when we arrived we stopped at the Vendôme bar, where I had sat two days earlier with Helen and Freddy. Now, as we tried to get a waiter, I noticed how ridiculous the harpist was, and how ugly the brown velveteen on the walls. My mother sat holding her sunglasses. We discussed the logistics of her flight and of the visit Freddy and Helen and I would make to the south of France. My mother tried to tell us all the things she had planned to tell us bit by bit during the week, her private anecdotes of the Côte d’Azur. She described the hotel where she had stayed in Nice when she was twenty, and told a story about Picasso and a needlepoint pillow. Then Helen went up to the room for a minute, and Freddy and my father stopped at the front desk, and I was left alone in the bar with my mother. She said, “In a real way, today may have been the last day of my life as I know it.” I dissembled, but she put a hand on my arm. Then she said, clearly and urgently, in the new voice she would make so entirely her own over the following months, “Whatever happens to me, whatever this illness may do to me, however grumpy or difficult or unpleasant I become, I want you to promise that you and Freddy will always remember me as I have been until today.”