Even Madame Francine’s at times crotchety querulousness and Percival Edward’s effeminacy could not ruffle her spirits in Paris—it was all too marvellous, too intoxicatingly beautiful, that she was at last in the one place she had always dreamed of visiting. The torn and unkempt streets could not destroy her happiness—“ c’est la guerre ,” she heard on every side, but for her there was no destroyed beauty—she saw beyond the disorder and envisioned the city as it was before shells and neglect had ruffled its beauty. She loved the reviving splendour and gaiety of fashionable life, loved it so well that Madame Francine was forced several times to remind her not too gently that she was in Paris for work and not as a lady of leisure. These reminders brought her back to herself for a time but soon her thoughts were again far from sketching frocks or absorbing ideas. All too soon for her the six weeks one by one began and ended, one after the other. She did not want to return to America. She wanted to stay forever in Paris. She would do it, she promised herself, with the recklessness of those infatuated with the charm of a place when leaving it. She would bring Jean to France, educate him there, and blot from her memory and his all the dark days in their own America. This dream remained with her for a long time after they returned to New York. …
“My dear, I’m an old woman now and I can’t make the trips I used to,” Madame Francine told Mimi after they had made their second trip to Paris. “It’s nice of you to deny my age,” she smiled at Mimi’s eager protestations that she was not old. “But it’s true, nevertheless, and I’ve got to shift even more of the burdens on you. Do you think you could go without me to Paris next time?”
With a woman’s eye for such signs, Mimi had noticed the telltale wrinkles in Madame Francine’s chin which, despite massages and all the other means she had used to retain her youth, had become each year more evident until now when she held her head at a certain angle they reminded Mimi of the neck of a plucked hen. Under Madame Francine’s