Free Scruples by Judith Krantz

dinner on we will speak French to you all the time. Louise, the cook, knows no English at all. It will be difficult, I know, but it is the only possible way for you to learn.” Lilianne always made this condition plain to each of her new girls. “You may feel very foolish and embarrassed at first, but unless we do this you will never learn to speak French as it should be spoken. We will not be laughing at you, but we will correct you constantly—so do not become angry when that happens. If we allow you to continue to make the same mistake, we will not be doing our duty.” Lilianne realized that her remarks had almost no hope of penetrating Billy’s mind. In spite of her best efforts, her paying guests spent their days and often their nights with the American students who flooded Paris, and never gave themselves a chance to truly sink into the language. Apparently they had all “studied French” in school. In her opinion every one of them had been abominably taught and they usually remained content to stumble along in ignorance.
    Billy’s eyes were shining. Instead of the trapped look that usually came over the faces of pensionnaires when she made this announcement, this disaster of a girl looked eager. Well, Lilianne mentally shrugged her shoulders, perhaps she would turn out to be somewhat serious. It was certainly the most one could hope for, considering. In any case she would not be like the girl from Texas who treated the apartment like a hotel and asked for fresh sheets three times a week, or the girl from New York who complained about there being no shower because she wanted to wash her hair every day, or the girl from New Orleans who got pregnant and had to be sent home, or the girl from London who brought four trunks, demanded dozens of extra hangers, and actually had the idea that she could share Lilianne’s closet.
    The domestic arrangements practiced at the home of the Comtesse de Vertdulac were simple. Louise did all the housework, all the cooking, all the laundry, and all the shopping. She worked an eighteen-hour day and was perfectly content. She had been with her Comtesse all her working life, and neither she nor Lilianne thought there was anything unusual in this arrangement that was so mutually agreeable.
    Every morning, long before breakfast, Louise went to the shops on the Rue de la Pompe and purchased the food for the day. She bought exactly what was necessary and not one item more. The kitchen did not contain a refrigerator. Anything, such as milk or cheese, that had to be kept cool was put into the garde-manger , a ventilated box built into the kitchen window, which would then be locked.
    Louise was a skilled manager, particularly adept at finding bargains in the market, a well-known figure to the shopkeepers who had long ago stopped trying to sell her anything but the best quality at the lowest possible price. Even so, food accounted for at least 35 percent of the family’s budget. Lilianne de Vertdulac knew, every day, exactly how much money Louise had spent because she doled it out from her purse the night before and took back all the change when Louise returned. It was not a lack of trust in her servant that accounted for these measures but the simple fact that the money she received from the pension she charged her paying guest was the money on which her entire household lived. The rent she received from her small country house, in Deauville, paid only for her clothes and the girls’ school, but food and rent and all other necessities came from taking in a pensionnaire.
    Billy put away her modest supply of clothes, mostly skirts and blouses in dark colors, and stood at the balcony of her room, inhaling with almost beatific rapture the smell of Paris of which she had read meaningless descriptions so many times. Now she understood why authors who should have known better had been tempted to do the undoable, to convey a smell through words. From her narrow balcony she could actually see the