Everyone called him Charlie. The serious boy she’d first met at the Gobelins factory had still been at school when she’d married his father. He was already a tall, good-looking young fellow by then, though still a little gangly. He looked quite like his father, except that his hair was dark where his father’s had been fair, and Marie suspected that before he was thirty, his hairline would be receding. Like many boys, he’d been a little unsure of himself, and occasionally withdrawn, but she had been very straightforward and friendly with him, and he seemed to like that. She’d never pressed him to confide in her, but she’d ask him what he thought about all sorts of things, and freely shared her own thoughts about everything from politics to marriage. She hoped she’d made his home a warm and comfortable place for him.

But they’d only really gotten to know each other for about a year before it was time for him to do his military service.

The liberal French governments of the twenties had no great wish to build up the military, which had always been their enemy. So Charlie’s military service had lasted only one year. But that had been long enough to transform him from a gangling boy to a strong, athletic young man. The experience hadn’t awakened any desire to follow a military career, however, nor did his father encourage it. Charlie had begun to study law at the Sorbonne, though he didn’t study very hard. But that didn’t mean that he had no ambition. Indeed, his ambition soon became absolutely clear.

He wanted to be a hero.

It was only natural, Marie supposed. He was a young aristocrat, heir to a fine estate. He’d fallen in with a crowd of young men who obviously expected him to play a certain part. And he’d found he could do it.

He already rode well, and hunted. The first winter after his return, he took up skiing. And his father let him buy an open-top Hispano-Suiza in which he drove about in great style.

He and Marie continued to get along famously. They’d hunt together with his father. He’d drive her at breakneck speeds through the countryside, on condition that she never tell his father how fast they went. In 1934 he had replaced the open-top with something rarer—one of the latest, aerodynamic Voisin C-25 coupés, whose powerful, American-designed engine and elegant Art Deco body was a wonder to behold.