The Nightlife: Paris (The Nightlife Series) by Travis Luedke Read Free Book Online Page A

same.  He/she relived
flashes of her life, hazy half-remembered moments filled with detail,
sensation, and emotion.
     
    * * * *
     
    I roamed the hills of the vineyards of Bordeaux for hours as
a young girl.  I had it so very good, a simple country life.  Oh, the glorious
freedom back then.
    In the Château, the servants bustled here and there
constantly.  My home was a vast mansion of rooms and hallways to manage, but
our carpets and furnishings were always immaculately clean.  My mother, ever
vigilant, ran a tight household.  Père called her “Napoleana,” and it was true.
 Never a lazy servant in my mother’s employ.  She stayed busy, and I stayed
away, roaming the fields, a free spirit.
    Père said I inherited mother’s feisty attitude, but my smile
was all his.  Père’s powerfully charismatic grin lit up every room he entered. 
At least it did for me.  I loved him dearly.  His only child, he lavished
attention on me.
    He said more than once, “I gave you my blond curls.”  Then
he would ruffle my hair, pat his belly and chuckle.  “But the lord in his
wisdom gifted you with your mother’s grace and figure.  And thank heaven for
that.  Tu es ma petite fille .”  You are my little girl .
    I didn’t understand the power of my beauty, or the things
men would do to taste that power.  I remember the workmen staring at me whenever
I passed by.  I smiled and nodded as they weaved my name into their sly songs
when my father wasn’t around to catch them.  Of course, some of them simply saw
me as a means to get their hands on the vineyards.
    Père soon noticed.  “Stay away from the men, Michelle.  You
know not what men do to girls with smiles such as yours.”  He was very
protective, and I suspect he didn’t consider them good enough.  He had such
hopes for me, for my life.
    The servant girls teased me, “Monsieur de Mornac will have
you married to a baron or a marquis!”
    They filled my mind with epic sagas of romantic love, and it
wasn’t an impossible dream.  The red wines of our vineyard brought our family financial
independence.  Père, Jacques de Mornac, rapidly gained social status alongside
the inherited titles of the few remaining gentry that survived the French
revolution.  Ours was the industrial revolution, when fortunes and reputations
could be forged, birthing a new nobility arising from affluence, rather than
breeding.
    Père harbored great plans for my future.  “To keep my jewel polished
and gleaming, I must take you to Paris.  To be a true lady of France, you must
be Parisienne .  The
country life is not enough, Michelle, ma belle .”
    I have often wondered what could have been if Père hadn’t
insisted I be educated in Paris.  How happy I might have been as a rural wife
to a husband raising children in the Château.
    Instead, at the age of fifteen, I left the luscious bounty
and simplicity of the vineyards for Paris.  I would never return to the country
life.  I went to live with my mother’s older sister, Tante Agnes Silvane, a
mousy woman of good humor.  At times she seemed so old, but really only in her
fifties.  Her husband died on the battlefield in World War One, 1918, and she
never remarried.
    Tante Agnes welcomed me with open arms and gave Père precisely
what he wanted.  She baptized me in the life of a Parisienne – theater, film, cafés and all the
premier designer dress shops a girl could want.  We did it all from a modest
but charming loft apartment with a wonderful view of the River Seine, and Père
paid for everything.  Such happy days.  Agnes became my second mother, my Parisienne mother, teaching
me the ways of the metropolitan lifestyle.
    Naturally, I fell in love with the city.  The music in the
streets, the posh way they spoke to each other, and the fashions!  Oh, how I
loved the fashions.  They were so elegant, bold and sexy, yet still
conservative.  This was before the war, before all those drab colors and horrid
heavy