The Paris Children by Gloria Goldreich

Author:Gloria Goldreich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

The cruel winter slowly drifted into spring. Tender new grass covered the meadows, and wildflowers grew in colorful profusion. Golden forsythia and violet masses of grape iris waved in the gentle wind. Riding through the countryside to meet with her Vichy supervisors, Madeleine leapt off her bicycle and gathered up sheaths of bluebells and clumps of lavender. She smiled and offered them to a rotund Vichy officer who accepted them gratefully. He threaded a bluebell through his epaulette so that it rested against the burnished pin on which the Battle Ax of Gaul, the official Vichy emblem, was engraved. She flinched, angered by the contiguity of the sweet, small flower with the emblem of betrayal and hatred.

She discussed the incident with Claude later that night as they shared a hasty dinner on one of his brief and infrequent visits to Toulouse.

“And of course I advised him to put the flowers in water,” she concluded. “He thanked me profusely. That might earn me some protection.”

“Foolish, Madeleine,” Claude murmured, and she understood that he refrained from saying that protection of any kind was transitory and unreliable.

Summer swept in with a burst of warmth. Wild roses bloomed along the banks of the Garonne and forced their way through the hedges of country roads in a riot of color. Lucie Dreyfus favored wild roses, Madeleine remembered, as she clipped sprays of red and white blossoms and lilacs of a vivid blue. A Bastille Day bouquet, she thought as she inhaled their fragrance. A memory of Bastille Day 1935 came to her with startling clarity.

Seven years had passed since her grandfather’s death. Standing in a circlet of sunlight, holding the flowers close, she thought of all that had happened during that span of years. War and occupation. Painful separations. The Dreyfus family scattered, friends vanished. Death and danger. Her dreams were an amalgam of visions of smoke curling darkly skyward from chimneys of death in Poland and roses that burst into blossom. She smiled, marveling at their beauty and their imagined fragrance.

She was grateful, she assured herself as she inhaled the scent of those red, white, and blue blossoms, for the companionship of her comrades, of Simone, her brothers and parents, for Claude’s protective tenderness. Hope was alive, memory endured. Bastille Day offered both sadness and solace.

She decided, impulsively, that she and Simone would visit their grandmother at her convent retreat, her most recent hiding place; together they would light a memorial candle and mark the anniversary of Alfred Dreyfus’s death.

She cycled swiftly back to Toulouse. The boulangerie was open, and she purchased the last remaining apple tart, Simone’s sweet of choice. A good omen, she thought happily.

Clutching the white bakery box and the flowers, she entered her sister’s home. She was surprised, at this unlikely hour, to find a small group of Résistants in the kitchen, listening attentively to the radio. The room was dimly lit. The shades had been drawn again, and the air of the small room was heavy with the smoke of Gauloises and unwashed bodies.

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