“Where did you spend the summer?” she asked.

“Brittany, some of the time,” he answered.

“Frank was up there too.” She indicated Hadley.

“I’m afraid I missed you,” he said to Frank, with a twinkle in his eye.

His name was Chagall, she discovered, but despite his years in Paris, he certainly wasn’t among the names one had to know. Her uncle had never mentioned him. But he said he knew Picasso.

Frank already knew about him, however, and while Chagall was speaking to someone else he told her: “He paints beautiful, intimate work, especially about his childhood in a Jewish shtetl. It’s strange, almost surrealist stuff. Wonderful colors.”

“I heard that Vollard is arranging a show for you in America next year,” he said to the artist at the next break in the conversation. And Chagall nodded modestly. “Will you go over for it?” Frank asked, but the Russian shook his head.

“Can’t afford it.”

Claire was impressed that Frank was already ahead of her with this information. Obviously she’d better keep an eye out for Monsieur Chagall in the future.

They discussed Paris for a while, and all the exciting people in it.

“It’s funny,” Claire remarked. “If I listen to my uncle Marc, who’s been at the center of everything going on here for three or four decades, he talks of Paris as a French city, full of French culture. But you all see it as something else. As a place where all the artists come to play. So which is the real Paris, I wonder?”

Hemingway reached over and poured her some wine.

“Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “Paris has always been proud of being a cultural center ever since the university was set up. Now it’s become the place that people come to from all over the world. So it’s just a more international version of what it always wanted to be. A city’s a huge organism. It can be all sorts of things at the same time. History may or may not remember the recent French presidents, but it’s going to remember the Impressionists, and the Ballets Russes, and Stravinsky, and Picasso I suspect, all together. So what will Paris be? The memory of all those wonderful things. We remember Napoléon, the Corsican, and Eiffel, who was Alsatian, and most of us also remember that Ben Franklin lived here. That’s Paris.” He grinned. “Paris became an international city, so now it belongs to all of us. Everyone in the world.”

They started ordering food after that. And then Hemingway and Frank got into a friendly argument about Paris and New York, because Frank said that after Paris he wanted to go and live there.

“You stay here,” Hemingway told him. “At the moment, at least, Paris is the only place to be.” He turned to Claire. “Don’t you agree?”

“For painting, dance, and fashion, everyone says it is,” said Claire. “Though I love London theater. What about music, though?”