But then Claire had left for America. She hadn’t realized what an effect that would have. Life at the Joséphine store was not the same. They tried to replace her, but none of the replacements worked. Before long both she and Marc came to the same conclusion. They weren’t having any fun. The store was still doing well, yet they could both foresee that it would slide into mediocrity. They’d decided to close it.

So now she had nothing to do. And she was lonely.

She had no right to be lonely, she told herself. She had her brother and her aged parents, and even Gérard’s widow and children. She had many friends. She had a lover.

But her only child—and her grandchildren, when they came into the world—would probably remain three thousand miles away. The store which had filled her days was no more. She hadn’t enough to do.

Roland, reading her mood, had proposed again, and this time she had accepted. Cleverly, he had pretended that his affairs were in less good order than they actually were. And the château, he assured her, needed a thorough renovation. She had a project now, to keep her busy. She felt a sense of purpose again.

And indeed, there were all kinds of decisions to be made. The first was what to do with the mansion in Paris. For ample though de Cygne’s resources were, the place had become drainingly expensive to maintain. “The sensible thing would be to live in the country, and to maintain an apartment in Paris,” she told him.

“I wouldn’t know how to live in an apartment,” he complained. But she guessed that he knew very well that this was what he ought to do, and that her role, as the new wife from the upper-middle class, was to organize the business while he told his aristocratic friends that she had made him do it. Since many of those friends had long ago done the same thing, Roland could still claim that he was one of the last holdouts from the old regime. For the truth was that, apart from a few industrialists, or the great Jewish families like the Rothschilds, who had a magnificent mansion above the Champs-Élysées, and a handful of Sephardic families near the Parc Monceau, few people could maintain such houses now.

But Marie had thought of a clever compromise. For two seasons, the de Cygnes had entertained brilliantly in the mansion. This had given Roland a chance to show off his wife to all his old friends and many new figures she was able to entice to the house. With her practice at organizing and her knowledge of the fashionable world, Marie made these parties memorable. They culminated in a magnificent party for Roland’s son.