With a flourish and a tweak of the hat, Natalie Barney emerged from behind a curtain, dressed as a shepherd, complete with crook, and leading a shepherdess, her stick-thin lover, Renée Vivien, in bonnet and numerous petticoats, by the hand. As the piano music softened, the shepherd knelt on the floor, declaiming loudly in French something-or-other that might have started out as a Greek classic, and reached out to touch the shepherdess’s pretty ankle.

After an end-of-afternoon Chambéry and Cassis at Café Prés aux Clercs, and with a glass of crisp Sancerre cold in her hand at the Select, Genevieve was feeling restored. Robert was out for dinner tonight and wouldn’t be home until late, so she could sit back and enjoy herself. Guy Monteray had just materialized again and was in conversation with a couple of men she didn’t know.

“What do you think of Monteray?” Betterson was following her gaze from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, his knee finding hers under the table once again so that she had to draw right back.

“He’s interesting.”

“I think he rather likes you,” Betterson said, then broke into a round of coughing.

“Goodness, are you all right? Can I get you some water?”

Betterson held up a hand and mopped his mouth with a handkerchief. “I’m fine. Would you like to go to bed with me, Genevieve?”

“Oh, Norman…” Was he drunk? To be talking like that even though his wife was just across the room, sitting up at the zinc bar with his secretary?

He saw where she was looking. “You needn’t mind Augusta. She’d be fine about it. She can be…quite welcoming, actually.”

Genevieve had heard things. About the wife and the secretary. Lulu said they were a ménage à trois. Were they after making it quatre now?

“I want to talk to you about my love poems,” she said firmly.

He widened his glittering blue eyes. “I’m very good, you know. Don’t let the illness put you off. It’s not catching.”

“Have you had a chance to read them yet?”

“I only have five years to live, sweetheart. When it comes to beautiful women, I like to seize every opportunity.” And again he was coughing violently.

Genevieve waited for him to finish, letting the coughing itself serve as a conversational full stop. Ernest Hemingway had once referred to Betterson as “the man marked for death.” The tag was so apt that it was becoming more famous than Betterson himself. His “markings” could hardly be clearer.

“Norman, you’re the only person who’s ever seen my poems. Well, except for Robert, but he doesn’t know anything about poetry. I need to know…I need to know if you think I’m any good.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re splendid.” But he was just being smutty again.