That possibility terrified her. Standing suddenly still, she realized that whatever decisions her mind came to, her body might already have made for her an irrevocable choice. Her fear deepened, and then, stealing along her veins, came a furtive exultation, an ill-advised joy; she tried to examine the idea of maternity—and maternity under these circumstances—she tried to see its implications, but they were too huge and her mind could not grapple with them. She watched herself take refuge in a certain fatalism, that woman’s defense.

Wait, she said to herself, wait—because no decision could be made until she was certain, and meanwhile neither Pascal nor Rowland need be involved; she felt, obscurely, that she had forfeited that right.

With that realization, that here essentially she was alone, some equilibrium returned. Clutching Pascal’s letters, she moved to the window and looked out at the Seine, at that slanting view of Notre Dame; from this partial viewpoint it resembled the bow of a great ship.

She thought of Anneke’s mother, and a promise made to herself. She ran out of the room, down the stairs, and into the street. Work, she thought, hastening back to the St. Vincent.

Room 810 was empty. Rowland McGuire, adhering to his schedule, had already left.

Chapter 16

MORTE D’UNE LEGENDE READ the headline on the newspaper delivered to Lindsay’s room that morning. Beneath it was the famous Beaton photograph of a laughing, short-haired young woman, her hands half obscuring her face. Lindsay began to translate the long article.

Her French was serviceable, but not extensive: she could not cope with the lyricism, the orotundity here. She could gather that the facts repeated the authorized version of Cazarès’s life. Beyond that, she could see that Maria Cazarès was already being turned into a symbol, before she was twenty-four hours dead.

But a symbol of what? She struggled with the vocabulary, the syntax. Several things, it seemed: of modern womanhood, of modern women, whom she had freed, the writer claimed, redefining their images of themselves. Of France, in that she embodied the French virtues of elegance, discernment, and chic. By the final paragraph, the claims seemed to have swelled, as if the male writer were drunk on his own prose. L’éternelle feminine, Lindsay read, trying to construe a clutch of dense phrases. She had the gist, she thought. Maria Cazarès, une femme solitaire, unique, et mystérieuse… yes, yes, she understood that… was the something something and the very embodiment of the eternal feminine—whatever that was, Lindsay thought with sudden impatience. Giving up, she tossed the paper aside.

How typical, how predictable, she thought, that having decided Cazarès was an enigma, a female enigma, they should give the task of decoding her to a man. Lindsay, who had slept badly and still felt restless, moved to the window and looked out. It was still early; she could see the day would not be clear. The sky was low, the clouds scudding fast. Wind whipped the branches of the trees and rippled the Seine. The air was watery, gray, promising rain and then more rain: a day of half-light and mist.