The Suitors - By Cecile David-Weill Page 0,7

was right. Knowing people can mean so many things. It’s like books: there are plenty of gradations between the books one has read and those one hasn’t. There are the books one has heard of, those with a plot or style we already know by heart, those we can tell by their cover, those whose jacket copy we’ve read. Those we want to read and those we never will. One can also read a book and forget it—in fact, that’s my specialty—or just skim through it. It’s the same with people.

Can I say that I know the guests I’ve seen summer after summer at L’Agapanthe for all these years? Their political opinions and literary tastes are familiar to me, of course, and I know whether they’re funny or wearisome companions, chatty, timid, or reserved. I have an informal relationship with them. And yet I hardly know them. What are their characters like? Are they happy? What kind of childhood did they have? What do they think of one another? I haven’t the foggiest. At L’Agapanthe, the courtesy de rigueur in a “good house” encourages us all to keep up the finest of fronts, thus preventing anyone from speaking from the heart, just as our luxurious life in the villa shields us from those petty details of day-to-day existence that inevitably reveal our deepest natures in their failings and virtues alike: thoughtlessness, fussiness, generosity, stinginess, devotion, silliness, or lazy self-indulgence.

Sometimes this paradoxical intimacy plays tricks on me. Unable to say much of importance about any of these often prestigious people with whom I’ve been superficially acquainted since forever, I rarely mention that I know them from L’Agapanthe. If I happen to run into one of them anywhere else, my real friends are then surprised when I say hello.

“You know So-and-so?”

“Yes, a little.”

And the next second, So-and-so calls out gaily, “Laure, dear heart! How’s your backhand? And how are your loonies? Don’t cure them too much, or you’ll do yourself out of a job. Don’t you think I’ve slimmed down?”

So right away I look like the modest little hypocrite who pretends she can barely stand up on skis, until, having dazzled her companions on the slopes, she confesses that she’s the all-around champion of France. And my friends, wrongly assuming that my discretion stems from my loathing of name-dropping or my professional habit of keeping secrets, remind me that not saying anything can be just as annoying as boasting.

Eyeing Frédéric, who was leaving an astronomical tip on the table, I remarked fondly, “I gather that you’ll be perched in a box seat at L’Agapanthe, eager to critique any dramatic developments.”

“Precisely.”

“What do you mean, a rich husband?”

Marie had actually gasped in disbelief when I suggested Frédéric’s solution on the phone the next day.

“Why not?” I countered.

Wasn’t that the oldest game in the book? Women from Paris to Moscow and on to New York went husband hunting! All right: the idea would never have occurred to me before my conversation with Frédéric, because I’d always considered this sport something reserved for women who were flat broke, which I wasn’t. So joining the hunt, I’d felt, would be immoral, a ploy as unthinkable as my applying to get my health expenses reimbursed from the Sécurité sociale.

“Why not? Because we already are.”

“Are what?”

“Rich, dummy!”

Marie was right. We were rich. At least on paper. We were shareholders in companies that didn’t pay dividends, but we were still good catches.

“And so what?”

“But … how would we get started?” Marie insisted.

Ironically, unlike true gold diggers, we were used to being courted ourselves by people dazzled by money, and we could smell them a mile away.

Romantic idealists, my sister and I were interested only in love and friendship. Money turned out to be a most inconvenient advantage, attracting fortune hunters while often driving everyone else away. Few decent men even dared approach us if they weren’t well-off, and if they were, they couldn’t quite stomach the fact that we frankly didn’t need them to get by. It was the same thing with friendship. How could we invite people on holiday or to a restaurant if they couldn’t return the favor? It was equally complicated for us to give our friends gifts without unintentionally making them feel obligated to us.

“No arrogance, no ostentation”: the mantra of our childhood. As if we’d needed that! Because we were so miserably conscious of our wealth that we had always tried obsessively to hide it from our friends.

Sometimes that was easy. We never mentioned our