The Suitors - By Cecile David-Weill Page 0,14

for the pantry and telephone switchboard.

In order of arrival, with departure dates, for chauffeurs and chambermaids.

In chronological order with the number in attendance at each meal for the kitchen.

My sister and I had no need to discuss how we would each prepare for the weekend of July 14. Relying on her charm, Marie managed to confirm that our father’s finances were still flourishing, while I scouted around to draw up a list of suitors to whom an invitation to L’Agapanthe would seem both welcome and perfectly natural.

Jean-Michel Destret had the advantage of being a friend of Laetitia and Bernard Braissant, who knew my sister. Destret was rich, but just how rich? Not as much as all that, probably, in spite of his astronomical salary, golden parachute, and holdings in the investment group he managed. A reliable estimate was difficult to come by with celebrity CEOs like him, over whom the newspapers went wild. At last: a French entrepreneur! As for the Braissants, they were delighted at the idea of bringing him along for a weekend at the house, thus introducing this new star in the financial heavens to such prestigious members of the Establishment.

The Braissants were by no means my cup of tea. They belonged to that category of phony leftists whom Marie ran into while on the job, important “cultural figures” who’d found their place in the sun by exposing the official cultural elite for their lack of social consciousness through their endless petitions and loudly righteous indignation. Their role models? Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for beauty and glamour; Sartre and Beauvoir for charisma, moral authority, and the art of pulling strings. Tirelessly trumpeting their political righteousness, they appropriated the allure and importance of any problem they championed, be it the tragedy in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, or the plight of illegal aliens. And they expected to be treated with the gravity and respect such weighty issues deserved. Anyone reluctant to show them enough deference they dismissed as callous, brainless or, even worse, bourgeois, in which last category they naturally filed me away as a rich “daddy’s girl.”

Marie, doubtless benefiting from her association with powerful people (and the Braissants’ healthy self-regard), escaped that fate. The couple treated her with a mixture of condescension and benevolence. They had selected her to be their “rich heiress,” the way anti-Semites invariably befriend a “good Jew.” Except that instead of proving they weren’t racists, they sought to show that while making an exception for my sister, they despised money. It was the least that could be expected from the editor in chief of a satirical magazine and the communications director for a politician, and from left-wing intellectuals in general. In short, the Braissants were freeloaders. I found them as unbearable as they were pretentious. Still, as Marie reminded me, they were serving us up Jean-Michel Destret on a silver platter.

Friday, 7:00 a.m.

“Can you possibly explain to me why this young man is bringing his car and chauffeur down from Paris when he’s flying into the airport at Nice this afternoon?”

Even at seven in the morning, my mother was determined not to be impressed by the prestige of her daughters’ guests, since a success achieved by anyone other than herself, my father, and their friends irritated her purely on principle.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Just imagine, his secretary called yesterday to ask if we could accommodate his driver. Couldn’t he rent a car like everyone else? It’s unbelievable! And so ill-bred.”

“I have to admit it’s rather strange, and certainly cheeky, but would you be able to put him up?”

“Yes, luckily enough, in one of those two small rooms over the garage.”

Having arrived late the previous evening, I was eager to take a tour of the house, making it my own again the way I did at the beginning of every summer. I felt that I bloomed at L’Agapanthe like those Japanese paper flowers that unfold their petals in water.

I went down to the beach. Carved out of the living rock and jutting like a promontory into the water, it nestled at the midpoint of a bay wide open to the horizon and that seemed to hold the sea within its arms. At this early hour, the water was as smooth as a slick of oil. I looked to the left, at a house that was constantly changing hands and where I’d once seen a James Bond movie being filmed. This time, the flag flying near the water’s edge was Russian. Probably a “Russkaya” mafioso.