Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
“No! I’ve been trying to enjoy this stupid city. Do you know I’ve got an art history professor card that lets me go into the Louvre anytime I want? For free! Three-hour lines of tourists circling around the Pyramide, and I just wave my card at a guard in the Cardinal Richelieu gallery and waltz right in. It’s like having my own secret entrance to the Bat Cave, only better because there is cooler stuff inside.”
“But you’re not an art history professor,” Anna pointed out. “You don’t know anything about art.”
“I wish you wouldn’t get caught up in the details. Valérie gave it to me. She’s at the study abroad program where I work. I can get into the Musée d’Orsay and all the other public museums that way, too.”
“I wish I were in Paris,” Anna said. “I would love to be able to do that. And I wouldn’t spend all my time whining about it like you.”
“Yes, you would, too. It’s freezing here, it hasn’t stopped raining for the past three weeks, and guys keep coming up to me talking about my breasts.”
A pause. We had both grown up in the same small, polite Southern town. “Eww,” she said. “I thought Frenchmen were romantic.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to the non-Disney version. They also seem to think I’m a blonde.”
My sister snorted. Possessed of long, wavy chestnut hair, I had given her a hard time with the blond jokes while we were growing up. “So is the Louvre open late at night? Because I’ve been calling at, like, ten there.” Ten is late in Georgia.
“No, let’s see, last night I went to see Molière with a friend, and then two nights ago, we went to see a play by Marivaux.” A fellow graduate student was doing her dissertation on Marivaux, and I loved his dialogue and his hilarious send-ups of early eighteenth-century society. “Friday night I went out to a restaurant and then dancing with some new students I met here. Oh, and Tuesday, my program had tickets to the opera.”
“Wow,” she said. “It’s too bad you hate Paris. Otherwise, you might be able to have fun there.”
“I do hate it! It’s cold, it’s gray, and people are hateful. They’ve got no call to be that rude, really they don’t. But I’ve got a contract to stay here for a year, so I can’t waste it, can I? I’ve got to try and enjoy it.”