“The whole of Europe is devastated after the Great War,” he liked to say, “but in Paris, we are recovering with style.” Certainly for a struggling artist, a poor writer or a young person like Claire, Paris was heaven on earth. And nobody knew more about what was going on than Marc.

After Aunt Éloïse died, and left everything to him, Marc moved into her apartment. He kept all her pictures, adding his own, so that the walls were wonderfully crowded. More than once he had given Claire a guided tour, explaining where each picture came from, and something about the artist. One day, when she’d admired a painting of the Gare Saint-Lazare, he told her, “That picture really belongs to your mother. She can take it anytime she wants.”

But when she asked her mother about it, Marie told her: “Aunt Éloïse bought the painting for me, but I never paid for it.”

“What made you choose it?” Claire asked.

“That’s a little secret from long ago,” her mother replied with a smile. “Anyway, it looks very well in the apartment where it is. Let it stay there.”

Her uncle would tell her about the artists he’d met.

“I’d love to take you to Giverny to see Monet, but he’s getting so old now that I don’t like to trouble him,” he remarked.

“The last survivor of Impressionism,” she suggested.

“I’d say he’s lived right through it and out the other side,” her uncle replied. You have the post-Impressionists like van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Expressionists—people who created a world that seems almost more vivid, urgent, even violent than real life—though they’re all tending toward abstraction—Cézanne especially, I’d say. But Monet’s gone on for so long that those pools of water lilies and screens of willows he does have turned into a sort of dream world of color that’s almost pure abstraction.”

“Have you met Picasso?” she asked.

“Yes. He’s a brilliant draftsman, you know,” he said. “He could have been a pure classical artist. He has incredible facility. Instead of which, he decided to break every rule of art.” He smiled. “Naturally, if he was going to invent Cubism, he did it in Paris.”

They talked about Surrealism, which was all the rage just then. And Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. “They operate mostly in Paris, but they’re going to Monte Carlo for the winter now,” he explained. Her uncle had been at the stage scandal of L’Après-midi d’un faune, and the riot which took place when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was first performed.