Free Paris Is Always a Good Idea by Nicolas Barreau Page B

sentence, Rosalie lay on her bed, allowing the story to work its magic on her. While reading, she had seen everything so clearly in front of her that she was almost surprised to see that she was in her own bedroom. Little Héloïse with her golden hair. An apple being handed over a hedge, the park with the ancient trees and the castle in the parc de Bagatelle, which was colored the most delicate pink you could imagine. The cloud-tiger in the Grotto of the Four Winds. The Blue Land which could only be reached by longing. The flight over Paris by night. The little girl’s fluttering hair. The promise never to forget. The blue pebble. The rag with the paint spots.
    Pictures began to form in her head, colors merged with one another, gold and indigo blue, silver and pink—what she really most wanted to do was to take her pens and brushes out and start painting.
    Outside the window overlooking the street a night-blue sky had spread imperceptibly. Rosalie sat there unmoving for a long time, sensing the deep truth that lay in the story and that, for all the amusing elements in it, there was also a gentle melancholy that touched her in an inexplicable way. Suddenly, she couldn’t help thinking of her father, and all that he’d given her along the way.
    â€œYes,” she said softly. “The paint spots are the most important thing. The longing you should never lose. And belief in your own wishes.”

 
    Six
    Paris had welcomed him with a cloudburst.
    Almost like the first time he’d arrived there. He’d just turned twelve, a gawky adolescent with long blond hair who had suddenly gone through a growth spurt, wearing the inevitable jeans. His mother had given him the trip as a birthday present.
    â€œWhat do you think, Robert—a week in Paris, just you and me? Won’t that be great? Paris is a wonderful city. You’ll see, you’ll love it.”
    It was six months after the death of his father, Paul Sherman, an attorney in the well-known New York practice of Sherman & Sons, and in reality nothing was great anymore. Even so, Robert had felt quite excited as their flight approached Paris. At that time his whole family lived in the sleepy little town of Mount Kisco, a good hour’s journey north of New York City. But his mother, whose own mother originally came from France, had often talked to him about Paris, where she, urged by her parents, had once spent a summer as a young woman. For that reason she spoke very good French and had insisted that her son learn the language as well.
    As they then drove through the night in Paris with the raindrops pattering on the taxi roof, he had become infected with his mother’s enthusiasm, and almost twisted his neck trying to see the lights of the Eiffel Tower through the cab’s rain-smeared windows; and then the Louvre, the spherical street lamps on a magnificent bridge, whose name he had immediately forgotten, and the wide boulevards, lined with dark trees whose gnarled branches, reaching up for the sky, were hung with little lamps.
    The wet streets reflected the city lights, blurring the contours of the tall stone buildings with their curved iron balconies and the lighted windows of the host of cafés and restaurants, so that for a moment Robert felt as if he were gliding through a city of gold.
    Then the street became increasingly bumpy and narrow until the taxi stopped outside a little hotel and he stepped straight out into an ankle-deep puddle, soaking his sneakers immediately.
    It was strange what kind of details you occasionally remembered. Things that actually were of no importance at all. Nevertheless, they remained hidden in a corner of your mind only to creep out again years or decades later.
    It must have been the beginning of November when they arrived in Paris that time; a cold wind swept through the streets and parks, and what he remembered most of all was that it had rained a lot. They had gotten soaked more than once