I took the glass of wine that Mary offered and we moved away. My gaze was drawn to a group in the middle of the room, clustered around a large, heavyset man. He had dark skin, large jowls, and a face that looked like a cross between a shrunken head and a gorilla. I nudged Mary. “Who is that exceptionally ugly man over there?”

“Oh, him? That’s Vollard—he’s the most important art dealer in Paris. If he likes your work, you are in. He and Reynold Bryce had a long-standing mutual loathing. Reynold said it was because he only liked beautiful objects around him and Vollard’s face distressed him, but it was really because Vollard had called his paintings trite and meaningless.”

Even as she was speaking Vollard looked up and saw Mary. “Ah, la belle Cassatt comes to grace us with her presence,” he said and held out his hand to her. “What are you doing here? Not trying to sell Gertrude a picture.”

“I came to be sociable, Monsieur Vollard,” Mary said, “And to introduce my young friend, Mrs. Sullivan, visiting from America.”

“If she wants to buy paintings she had better come to me,” Vollard said. “I only deal in the best.”

“She is not buying. She is reporting on the art scene for her newspaper back home,” Mary said, catching me off guard. We had never discussed this. “Everyone at home wants to know about Reynold Bryce.”

“He insulted the Jews once too often,” Vollard said.

“Is that what everyone thinks?” I asked.

Vollard looked around the group. “What else could it be? A robbery and nothing is taken? I don’t think so. He has not helped himself to someone else’s wife lately that I have heard—or even someone’s mistress, or volatile young people like our dear Picasso over there might have stabbed him.”

“Did he ever help himself to someone’s wife?” I asked.

Several heads were shaken. “Or mistress?” I continued. “He was still officially married, wasn’t he? Did he have mistresses?”

“Not since Pauline,” one of the group said. “And that was some time ago now.”

“Pauline?” I realized instantly how helpful Mary’s ploy had been. I was a reporter, therefore not personally involved. They were quite willing to share gossip with me.

“Pauline Hubert. She was a model, but she never modeled for him. He stuck to his landscapes.”

“Did she leave him or the other way around?” I asked.

“She got too old,” one of them said and there was a general chuckle.

“Someone told me he was painting again,” another of the men said to his companions, seemingly unaware now that I was part of the group.

“Really? That explains it then. He had quite a twinkle in his eye when I met him at the American Club last week. I said to him, ‘You sly old dog. I think you’re on the prowl again.’”