The Paris Daughter by Kristin Harmel

Author:Kristin Harmel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

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The fifth of August began like any other day. Elise walked to the cemetery alone in the morning, knelt and spoke to Mathilde, and then returned to the apartment. She took the carvings she’d done the week before and brought them to Monsieur Vasseur, who gave her a small handful of francs from the previous two weeks’ sales. Her pieces never brought in much money, and he insisted on paying her on commission rather than purchasing her pieces outright as Constant Bouet had done with Olivier, but it was enough to pay for new wood, as well as the food and milk the children needed, and the other bills she had fallen behind on. Her most precious work, her Mathildes, she kept for herself, but collectors on a small budget were interested in her birds and her trees, her solitary forms on horizons, and the faceless dancing girls she had begun to create. As her chisels and gouges found her way over their forms, she imagined an older Mathilde, her face always obscured by windswept hair, twirling in the breeze, the wind ruffling their dresses. This is how her daughter came to her now in dreams, always dancing, her face always turned away, and when Elise brought those forms to life, she didn’t feel guilty about giving them away, for Mathilde was meant to be in the world, dancing through life.

“Shall we go?” she asked Georges and Suzanne after she’d put the money away in the box where she kept it, hidden behind her blocks of wood.

The children followed her out of the apartment and down the stairs, into the sunlight. This was their routine; each afternoon, they walked down the rue de l’Assomption, crossed the Seine, and turned left on the avenue Émile Zola, making their way through the fifteenth and seventh arrondissements, over to the Hôtel Lutetia, which loomed like an oversize ship on the corner of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Sèvres. The art deco–style palace had once been a haunt for artists and writers; she’d heard that Joyce had written Ulysses while staying in the hotel, and that de Gaulle had reportedly honeymooned there before he was the hero of France.

Now it was a place of both joyous reunion and repeated tragedy. While at first the place had bustled with people, today it was much quieter, awash in sadness rather than hope, resignation rather than desperation. People still milled, checking lists, sighing to themselves, trudging away in despair. Returnees moved up and down halls, many of them with haunted eyes that had seen too much, all of them with sallow skin that hung limp from protruding bones.

While Elise scanned the lists, looking for the name of Ruth Levy, the children searched faces, trying to recognize something familiar in features that had been forever changed by horror, grief, and starvation. Once, they’d spotted a man all three of them had known, a shoemaker from Boulogne, who had been arrested early in the Occupation and had never come back.

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