Alone In Paris Read online

  It was the thought of her mother that brought the tears to Una’s eyes.

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ she said, ‘help me. What shall I do? Where shall I go? I am so alone.’

  It was as she said the last words that she heard footsteps coming up the stairs and hastily wiped away the tears.

  She hoped that it was Monsieur Dubucheron, but if it was not, she wondered what she should do if somebody, finding the door locked, tried to force it open.

  Then there was a knock and a voice called out,

  “Are you there, mademoiselle? It is I – Philippe Dubucheron!”

  With a little cry of thankfulness because she was so glad that he had come, Una ran across the room and unlocked the door.

  “Monsieur, you are back!” she cried.

  She stated the obvious because she was so pleased to see him.

  Monsieur Dubucheron seemed larger, smarter and more overpowering than she remembered.

  “Yes, I am back, mademoiselle,” he said, “and I have good news for you.”

  “Good news?”

  “Yes. I have sold your father’s picture for quite a considerable amount of francs, which I will give you tomorrow when I cash my client’s cheque.”

  Una clasped her hands together.

  “Oh, thank you, Monsieur Dubucheron. I am so grateful and you are very kind.”

  “I have something else to tell you,” he said. “My client, who is an admirer of your father’s paintings, has invited you to dine with him tonight.”

  “Was he a friend of Papa’s?” Una asked.

  Philippe Dubucheron shook his head.

  “Not a friend,” he replied. “He bought a picture of your father’s a year ago and he is delighted with the one I took to him just now.”

  “I am glad! So very glad!” Una cried. “It was kind of him to ask me to dinner – but I am sure you suggested it, monsieur.”

  “That is very perceptive of you, my dear. As a matter of fact, I did!” Monsieur Dubucheron replied. “We are dining at His Grace’s house on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré at eight o’clock.”

  He looked at her and then enquired,

  “You have an evening gown with you?”

  “Yes,” Una replied. “It is in my trunk.”

  As she spoke, she pointed to the round-topped leather trunk that stood just inside the door where the cocher had left it.

  Monsieur Dubucheron looked round the studio.

  “I can hardly expect you to change here,” he said, “and I doubt if there is any water in which you can wash.”

  “There is only a tap in the very dirty kitchen.”

  “I will take you somewhere where you can change.” he said. “Come with me now and I will send my coachman up to collect your trunk.”

  Hastily Una picked up her hat from where she had laid it and put it on her head. Her overcoat was lying on a chair and beside it, with her gloves, was a little leather handbag, which contained all the money she possessed in the world.

  She picked them up and turned her face to Philippe Dubucheron with a worried expression in her large eyes.

  “I shall have to find somewhere to sleep, monsieur.”

  “Yes, I know,” Philippe Dubucheron replied, “but I think for the moment we will leave that in the lap of the Gods.”

  He saw that Una looked puzzled. Then, without making any further explanations, he preceded her down the stairway.

  As he had no desire to let her do anything that might seem strange or reprehensible, at least until the Duke had seen her, Philippe Dubucheron did not take her back to his own apartment.

  It would in fact have been the easiest thing to do.

  He lived in considerable luxury in a quiet road near the Opera and employed a couple of servants who cooked and looked after him in a manner that was the continual envy of his friends.

  But for Una to say, however innocently, that she had changed for dinner in an apartment belonging to a man, would be, he thought, to start her off on the wrong foot.

  Philippe Dubucheron was adept at planning every detail of one of his sales.

  Accordingly he conveyed Una in his carriage to a small but fashionable Art Gallery in which he had a fifty-fifty interest, which was just off the Rue de la Paix.

  He seldom took his more distinguished or more prosperous clients there, finding it far easier to convince them of what they should buy when he showed them one or two pictures in their own homes.

  The majority of people who came to Paris were, Philippe Dubucheron found, extremely ignorant and bought a picture merely because they wanted to take home something that came from the ‘Gay City’.

  It was easy to mesmerise them into accepting what he assured them was a bargain and ‘the chance of a lifetime’ when they were not bemused by a large choice.

  Philippe Dubucheron’s father, an extremely astute man, had told him when he was quite small that most people had very limited vision and even more limited minds.

  “Never confuse a client, my dear Philippe. Decide what you want him to do and make him believe that what he thinks is his own idea, when actually it is yours.”

  It was a principle that had made Philippe Dubucheron the most important and certainly the most successful art dealer in Paris.

  Yet, because he had an original mind, he found it very boring to confine himself entirely to pictures.

  The men whom he came to know in the course of business were Noblemen from every part of Europe and he found that they were interested not only in art but in anything that appealed to their senses.

  It was a game he played with himself and that he should provide every man with what he most desired gave him a satisfaction that was as pleasant as backing a theatrical show and finding it a success.

  His clients therefore ranged from Kings and Rulers, Egyptian Potentates and German Princes to the English who came to Paris merely for amusement.

  Philippe Dubucheron grew to know them all and, because he served them well, they always returned to him, confident that he would fulfil their needs, whatever they might be.

  The Art Gallery in which he owned an interest established him in the right category from a French point of view.

  “Who is Dubucheron?” a stranger would ask, only to be told immediately,

  “The Art dealer. He has a gallery in the Rue de Cambon.”

  ‘Labels are important in my trade,’ Philippe Dubucheron often thought.

  His own label was respectable enough to satisfy the most carping critic and there were quite a number of them.

  The Art Gallery was, of course, closed by this time of night, but he opened it with a key which he carried with him and, switching on the lights, invited Una to follow him inside.

  “I have an office at the end of the Gallery,” he said, “and there is also a small washing place attached to it. There are plenty of mirrors so that you can arrange your hair.”

  Una wanted to stop and look at the pictures in the Gallery itself, but Philippe Dubucheron hurried her into the office.

  It was luxuriously furnished with a thick carpet on the floor and a somewhat pretentious desk of the period of Louis XIV.

  His coachman carried in her trunk and, on Monsieur’s orders, undid the straps.

  “It is very kind of you to let me come here,” Una said.

  Philippe Dubucheron drew out an expensive gold watch from the pocket of his waistcoat.

  “It is now just after seven o’clock,” he said. “I will call for you at exactly ten minutes to eight. Please be ready and have your trunk packed so that it can come with you.”

  “That gives me plenty of time,” she answered with a smile.

  “I want you to look your very best tonight,” Philippe Dubucheron said. “I hardly need tell you that it is an honour that the Duke should have invited you to dine with him and I hope thatyou will make yourself as charming as possible. I would not like him to be disappointed in your father’s daughter.”

  “No, of course not,” she answered, “and he mu
st be a very nice man to have bought two of Papa’s pictures.”

  “He is a very nice man,” Philippe Dubucheron repeated rather heavily.

  Then, looking once again at his watch, he went from the office, closing the door behind him.

  It was then that Una thought how strange and unexpected everything had turned out to be.

  She had never thought when she left Florence that, instead of being with her father when she lived in Paris, she would be dining with an English Duke and changing her clothes in an Art Gallery.

  ‘The girls will never believe me when I tell them about it,’ she said to herself.

  Then she remembered that it was very unlikely that she would ever have a chance of telling them anything about her life.

  It was not because she did not make friends or because they did not like her.

  She was not being conceited when she knew that she was one of the most popular girls in the school.

  It was just that the fathers and mothers of her friends were all foreigners, who had very strict ideas about whom their children should or should not know.

  Artists, however gifted they might be, were not accepted socially and Una had soon learnt that it was unlikely, once she had left school, that she would ever see any of her friends again.

  It was something she knew that she must accept sensibly and without complaining.

  ‘At least Mama will know,’ she thought to herself as she started to take off the gown in which she had travelled, ‘and Mama will be pleased that he is English.’

  Una could remember many times when her mother had talked not only about England but about the English people.

  To her they would always be preferable in every way to the French, even though the people in the small village where they had lived had been fond of the Thoreaus and had made them feel welcome.

  But Una’s mother would talk of hunting over the English countryside in the winter, of boating and playing tennis in the summer and of attending balls at which the ladies glittered in jewelled tiaras and the gentlemen wore decorations because Royalty was present.

  She had described to Una the drawing room at Buckingham Palace in which she had made her curtsey to Queen Victoria and how charming the Prince of Wales had been when he had danced with her once at a Hunt Ball.

  It all sounded so entrancing that Una would often find herself dreaming about England.

  She would forget that, outside the Convent windows, the tall cypress trees were silhouetted against the sky in the conventional Florentine landscape which was repeated a hundred times in the pictures in the Uffizi Gallery.

  ‘If I dress quickly,’ she told herself now, ‘I shall be able to look at the pictures before we leave.’

  But dressing took longer than she had anticipated.

  First of all she had to shake the creases out of her evening gown, which she realised when she took it out that it was not really smart enough for dining with a Duke.

  She had bought what clothes she required in Florence and the Mother Superior had paid for them out of the money that her mother had left for her education.

  They were very plain schoolgirls’ clothes, well cut and of pricey material, but at the same time they were demure young girls’ gowns that had made Una look very youthful, however much older she actually grew in years.

  Her best gown was white with a little frill of lace round the neck and round the three-quarter sleeves.

  It accentuated her tiny waist and the soft immature curves of her breasts, but she thought a little apprehensively that perhaps Monsieur Dubucheron would not think she looked smart enough and would be ashamed to introduce her to the Duke.

  Because she was worried, she took extra care in arranging her hair.

  It was very soft and fair and she had no idea what was the fashionable coiffure in Paris.

  She finally arranged it as she had worn it at the Convent, swept back from her forehead, seeming to halo her small face and coiled in a bun at the nape of her neck.

  It was, although she did not realise it, a style that had become le dernier cri on the other side of the Atlantic because of Charles Dana Gibson’s brilliant drawings of American beauties.

  To Una it was just a style that her hair seemed to fall into naturally and again she hoped that Monsieur Dubucheron would not think it too simple.

  Worrying about herself and, having taken so long in washing in the elaborately fitted china basin encased in heavy mahogany, she only had time to pack into her trunk the clothes she had worn before the door of the office opened and Monsieur Dubucheron reappeared.

  “You are ready?”

  She thought that his eyes looked her over from top to toe and she felt embarrassed by his scrutiny and at the same time anxious in case he should find fault.

  “You look charming!” he said with a smile. “And now we must not be late, so come along!”

  The coachman appeared and picked up her trunk.

  Then, as Una, slipping a plain woollen shawl over her shoulders, reached the carriage with Monsieur Dubucheron, she realised that there was someone else inside.

  She stepped in and, as Monsieur Dubucheron followed her and sat down on the small seat with his back to the horses, he said,

  “Yvette, let me introduce Miss Una Thoreau – Mademoiselle Yvette Joyant!”

  “What is all this about, Philippe?” a deep voice asked from a corner of the carriage.

  “I told you that Miss Thoreau will make a foursome at dinner. I think afterwards we may go our separate ways, but I am not sure.”

  “I am quite sure!” the deep velvety voice replied.

  When she had been introduced, Una proffered her hand, but then realised that she had made a mistake and quickly withdrew it.

  The carriage moved off and now, in the light of the gas lamps shining in through the windows, she had a quick glimpse of the woman sitting next to her.

  She was enveloped in scarlet ostrich feathers and her face was very thin with a straight thin nose in the centre of it.

  But her eyes, dark and slanting upwards, with eyelashes that were heavily mascaraed, made Una think that she was different from anyone else she had ever seen or imagined in her whole life.

  On her dark hair she wore a hat over which more crimson feathers cascaded and it was set at an angle that was both provocative and daring.

  In the light of every lamp they passed, Una could see a little more and now she was conscious of a heavy perfume that seemed to pervade the whole carriage with an exotic fragrance that was cloying and inescapable.

  Philippe Dubucheron watched the women with a smile on his face and they drove in silence for only a short distance before they turned in through a gateway.

  There was a courtyard and then the entrance to the house, blazing with light with a red carpet beside which six footmen with powdered wigs and white satin breeches were waiting to help them alight.

  “At least your Duke has style,” the woman with the ostrich feathers remarked.

  Then she alighted, her crimson feathers floating about her like little tongues of fire.

  It was quite obvious, Una thought, that she considered her not worth speaking to.

  Because she was nervous, not only of the strange woman but also of the grandeur of the house, she moved a little slowly as she stepped from the carriage.

  Philippe Dubucheron sensed what she was feeling and said,

  “It’s all right! Don’t be nervous. I should have warned you that Yvette Joyant does not like other women.”

  “Perhaps she would rather – I had not – come,” Una said in a whisper.

  “The Duke is your host,” Monsieur Dubucheron replied, “and she is only another guest, just as you are.”

  They were walking, as they spoke, down a corridor decorated with magnificent pieces of furniture and huge vases of flowers whose fragrance Una thought was far preferable to the perfume worn by Yvette Joyant.

  Then she told herself that she should not be critical. This was all new to her and
therefore rather frightening, but at the same time it was exciting.

  She was to meet a Duke and an English one at that. That should please her mother and even if she never saw him again and never went to another house half as impressive as this, it would always be something to remember.

  She heard the Clerk of the Chambers announcing the Duke’s guests,

  “Mademoiselle Yvette Joyant, Your Grace. Mademoiselle Una Thoreau, Monsieur Philippe Dubucheron!”

  For a moment there was so much to look at that Una found it hard to focus her eyes. Then, in a kaleidoscope of elegant furniture, flowers, pictures, china, and mirrors, she saw a man.

  He was, she thought with a leap of her heart, exactly how an Englishman and a Duke should look.

  He was tall, handsome and magnificent in his evening clothes and somehow, in a way she could not explain even to herself, so overpowering that she felt inexpressibly shy.

  Una was never shy as a rule. She found everyone she met interesting and even the long tales of their childhood that the nuns would relate when they had the chance always held her attention and her imagination.

  Now, as she reached the Duke and he turned his eyes from Yvette Joyant to her, she felt her self-confidence leave her and it was impossible to look him in the face as she had intended to do.

  Her mother had said to her often enough,

  “Always look at the people you shake hands with and remember that shyness is merely being selfish. You are thinking of yourself and not of the person you are talking to.”

  She had therefore always shaken hands in the manner that her mother had taught her and with a smile on her lips looked at the face of the person to whom she was being introduced.

  Now she took the Duke’s hand, but it was impossible to look at him and her eyelashes were dark against the paleness of her cheeks.

  “I am delighted to meet you, Miss Thoreau!” the Duke was saying. “I am lucky enough to possess two of your father’s pictures and I can only offer you my sincerest condolences on his death.”

  “Thank – you,” Una replied in a low voice.

  Then, because she was ashamed of her own stupidity, she forced herself to look up at the Duke and to meet his eyes.

  He was looking at her with an expression that she could not understand. It was almost as if he looked her over in the same way that Monsieur Dubucheron had done earlier.