The Eleventh Year by Monique Raphel High Page A

little cry and held her hands out to him, her face aglow. She knew why he had come, and she was glad.
    â€œIt’s all right, dear, we shall be very happy,” he heard her answering moments later. She had accepted and so quickly! He touched the fineness of her hair, the fabric of her blouse. And for once he felt happy.

    P aul de Varenne was handsome . His skin was ruddy, and his brown eyes ringed with curling black lashes twinkled with an ironic merriment that, even as a child, drew attention. His body was powerful. He was well aware of his virile good looks. Nature had blessed him, and he knew it. From his earliest moments, he had seen through his mother, recognizing in her a kindred spirit. But he would succeed where she had never even tried. Charlotte von Ridenour de Varenne was a charmer by temperament; early on, Paul de Varenne had resolved to become a charmer by profession. He watched his elegant mother and was amused.
    He liked people, but Alexandre was a bore, his mother unpredictable, and his father…. Later he would begin to wonder. Robert-Achille was so unlike him, in every way. Except of course that he too had never much liked to study and had loved to gamble and run off to Montmartre.
    At the Lycée Condorcet he was an abysmal student. Alex was always doing brilliant work, whereas Paul was lazy. He only enjoyed an occasional class or two. Things to do with art. He went to the Louvre and the Musée du Jeu de Paume with his governess, and he could hardly tear himself away. But he could not draw, oddly enough. He could only appreciate.
    And then, when he was eleven, catastrophe hit. He would never forget finding his father, dead, in the study. This mass of blood and brains could not possibly be his father. Paul’s head had reeled and he vomited, and then he screamed, screamed for someone—his mother, a servant, anyone! Later, to his own surprise, he did not feel sad, only horrified—and a little disgusted.
    He failed to pass his baccalaureate examinations two years in a row. His mother shrugged the episode off. He thought he knew why: His father, his real father, the one whom everyone in Paris guessed to be his father, must not have been a very serious student either. Paul was very curious, and also embittered. To have been conceived out of wedlock, never to have met one’s true father—this was unforgiveable. His mother, the elegant charmer, was also a whore. All women, Paul felt, were whores. He decided that women were like extraordinary flowers, one more lovely than her neighbor. But women were also deceitful. The world needed them; but like flowers, they should be picked with impunity, for some had poisonous blossoms. This had been Charlotte’s legacy.
    He was not particularly disposed to work. He was an expert in nothing save bridge, dancing, and horsemanship. Alexandre had passed his examinations, was going to law school. Paul spent his days amusing himself. His mother had made it clear that the savior of the family was to be Alex. Paul occasionally felt a sadness, an emptiness nagging at his insides. There was no center to his life—only a void.
    Nothing caught his emotions. He flailed about, trying one thing after another. Life seemed boring. And then Paul made a friend. He was an older man, whom Paul met one day leafing through a book of Sem’s sketches in his mother’s drawing room. He was dressed in a Norfolk jacket and sported a fashionable pompadour of gray hair. He looked every inch the sportsman, and Paul said, advancing into the room: “We’ve never met, have we? I’m Paul de Varenne.” Yet the man looked familiar, a face out of his childhood dreams, maybe, or out of an album of photographs.
    The other smiled broadly. “How do you do. Bertrand de la Paume. I’ve been hearing much about you from the ladies of this city, Paul. You break hearts the way another man looks through his morning paper. Fitting for the son of Charlotte