I had never set foot inside Maxim’s until the night we met. But I had been outside the establishment many times. On most days of the latter half of June, I stood across the street, waiting to see if Victor Lesage was going to enter. About twice a week, he did.
I wasn’t picky about who would help me complete the one very important detail of the plan I’d created when I was still at the teachers’ college. I was convinced that becoming a French teacher was my ticket out of Virginia. Then in New York, I decided that since I was having no luck meeting rich enough men in Manhattan, where the men seemed to be able to size up your pedigree in a single glance, I should move my sights to France, where there was a history of American women reinventing themselves. I set my sights on Paris.
I could have saved up more money before I sailed, but marrying well had become imperative. Life at home in Virginia had become unbearable for my siblings. I had to get them out, and in a matter of months.
When I arrived in Paris, I started reading the society pages voraciously. Anyone with a title was excluded from the list of potential husbands that I’d started on the back of a sturdy bag from a boulangerie in the Thirteenth. They would be too snobbish. I was looking for someone who would indulge himself in the form of a pretty American who came from humble beginnings but had learned how to hide it. And I needed someone who wanted to tumble into bed with me immediately, because I knew that the only way a woman like me was going to marry the type of man I wanted was to become pregnant with his child. And even that was no guarantee. But I was my mother’s daughter, and she’d birthed eight children.
During my first week in Paris, the Michelin name popped up in the newspapers several times. It was the summer of 1925, not long after the family had acquired its first acres in Indochine. According to reports in Le Figaro, they had their eyes on even more land in the Orient, with plans to plant rubber trees on a massive scale. The family, it was said, had wealth already through their tire production—it was the height of the automobile boom—but Indochine provided great potential for more, as the Michelins were very technologically advanced, far ahead of the planters they’d been buying from for years to make their tires in Clermont-Ferrand. And it was abundantly clear by the mid-twenties that rubber was destined to become white gold for the colony.
The reporter had been kind enough to mention all the members of the family who were not yet married and had even managed to pull a few sentences from Victor. When asked whom in his prominent family he admired the most, he’d said Thérèse Michelin, the wife of his uncle Édouard, who had been a teacher before she married. Victor had called her “the most curious person I know.” After reading that, and seeing a picture of Victor in the same newspaper, one that confirmed that he was not only wise but exceedingly handsome, I knew whom I had to go after.
I began by turning into the kind of woman Victor admired, and soon I knew where Victor ate lunch. I knew the route his driver took to his office. I knew where he had his hair cut and the names and measurements of all the girls he took out for dinner. And when the moment felt right, a moment that coincided precisely with my running out of money, I went into Maxim’s and made quite sure that Victor fell in love with me.
I was living in a tiny chambre de bonne near the place d’Italie. The room had a leaky roof and a toilet far down the attic hallway that somehow managed to be ice-cold in summer. If I could play my hand right, I would not be living there much longer. Luckily, Victor fell for me like ripe fruit.
“Not quite,” I said, pushing my mind back to the present.
“Thinking about Victor?”
“I was actually,” I said, smiling.
“I guessed so,” she said. “You had a dreamy sort of look on your face, one where you had to be thinking about a man. He’s in the south, though, right? He mentioned he had to go soon when