In the spring of 1919, when Louise had said she wanted to learn French, her parents had been surprised.

“You learned it at school,” her mother said. “Are you sure you need more than that, dear?”

“I learned schoolgirl French at school,” said Louise, “but I couldn’t really have an intelligent conversation with anybody. You never know,” she continued, “it might come in useful. I might marry a diplomat, or something.”

Her father was quite agreeable to the idea. The war had only just ended. The world was still at sixes and sevens. There could be no harm in his daughter acquiring such a useful accomplishment.

“As long as you work at it properly,” was his only stipulation.

So a French teacher was found and Louise began to work with her.

After six months, her teacher was astounded. “I have never had such a pupil,” she declared.

Louise had never worked so hard in her life. She attacked her studies with a passion. By the end of three months she knew many of the Fables of La Fontaine by heart. They even began to tackle the novels of Balzac together, despite their huge and complex vocabulary.

Her father was pleased with what he took to be signs of a new maturity. At the end of a year, Louise announced: “Mademoiselle says it would be a good idea for me to spend a few months with a French family,” Louise told her parents. “Total immersion, she calls it.”

Her mother was not so happy about this idea. Though she was quite accomplished artistically, she was a conventional woman of her class, and she felt it was unseemly for a girl to have too many intellectual attainments.

But her kindly, round-faced father was more amenable.

“It’s not as if she wanted to go to university,” he remarked. “No man wants to marry a girl who does that.” He paused. “But going to France, it’s more like a finishing school really, isn’t it?”

And so she was sent to stay with a suitable family, who lived in a small manoir, a farmhouse really, in the valley of the Loire, not far from the Château de Cygne. Her hosts were a retired official from the colonial service and his wife, who was from the petite noblesse, the minor nobility. Their children were all grown up, their son in Paris. And for more than six happy months Louise had lived with them like a daughter. By the end of 1920, although she might not be up to date with some of the latest idioms used by the young, Louise spoke perfect French.

Chapter Twenty-two

•  1924  •

Claire was happy to be in Paris. “I’m just a wide-eyed girl,” she would say with a laugh, “whose mother took her to the most exciting place in the world.”

But it was her uncle Marc who really opened her eyes.