The Suitors (9 page)

I considered my options. Our staff had already been requisitioned for the summer at L’Agapanthe. Streaming
in from my parents’ other residences, these chambermaids, cooks, and butlers, who had worked for my parents for ten or twenty years, seemed happy to come back to fulfill their assigned tasks. In fact, some retirees even returned to service for the occasion, to plump up their savings and renew old ties.

With a long weekend coming up, my only course was to find an open employment agency. I had no illusions: finding another treasure like Roberto would be a miracle. He’d been with my parents for twenty-eight years, a paragon of kindness, professionalism, and refinement. And it would not be easy to find a head butler who would share our approach to domestic service.

As we saw it, the expertise of our staff depended on years of apprenticeship and experience. The servants were expected to perform their duties appropriately and without any instruction from us. It would never even have occurred to us to advise our employees regarding their work, and why would we have done so, since we knew ourselves to be incapable of ironing a fluted sleeve or whipping up a soufflé Mornay? The new butler would have to be up to the job, because our long acquaintance with impeccable service made us excellent judges in the field.

He would also have to understand our devotion to protocol. We were never on familiar terms with our
staff, because displaying any growing affection or general sympathy for them would have smacked of demagoguery. That was our way of showing them respect and appreciation for their skill. Sticklers for form, we addressed our cook as “Chef.” And we would never have disturbed the servants during their meals or leisure hours by entering their living or dining rooms, or have meddled in their personal affairs of the heart, family, workplace, or pocketbook. In short, we left them to their own devices. We kept a distance we considered ideal for a long-term relationship. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes. So we all stayed where we belonged: we, by behaving like employers, by giving orders respectfully, unemotionally, without any attempt to manipulate our employees; they, by sheltering behind a tradition requiring them to address us in the third person—“Would Madame like …?” Behind that facade, they were free to think whatever they wanted, and even not to like us.

Our staff enjoyed, if not our affection, our esteem. And so they deserved consideration and pleasant working conditions. L’Agapanthe was a “good house” for them as well. The laundry, kitchen, and pantry were air-conditioned. The servants received excellent wages, had everything they needed for their jobs: professional-quality appliances, the latest model steam
ovens, workstations worthy of the very finest restaurants, plenty of
sous-chefs
, even a raft of “scullions” to do the washing up. They had a private beach at their disposal, dining areas both inside the house and on a patio outside, simple but tasty food, a television lounge, comfortable bedrooms with their own bathrooms, and cars available for going out in the evening. And judging from the noise and laughter from their dining room at mealtime, the atmosphere “belowstairs” was good.

But our family ideal of service was possible only in a house like L’Agapanthe, where we could all live together. Because the social gulf between us was not as wide as the chasm between city centers and their suburbs, fashionable neighborhoods and slums, elegant town houses and tenements—although the town houses were becoming increasingly middle class, doing away with the social distinctions formalized by the parlor floor and the maids’ rooms up under the eaves.

Nevertheless, the invisible barrier between us was impossible to cross. The servants, so close to us and seemingly as varied and picturesque as our houseguests, formed a mysterious tribe whose proximity aroused my curiosity. I sometimes wondered how they lived and thought, like a student in a girls’ boarding school dreaming about the boys’ school next door. When
I was younger, I’d even ventured out on a few nocturnal expeditions into the unknown realm behind the forbidden doors, but I felt distinctly like a trespasser when I studied the staff menu notebook, the cupboard inventories, or the recipe boards hanging on the kitchen walls, or when I tried to eavesdrop from convenient rooms on their conversations during mealtime.

They, of course, knew a lot more about us. The butlers witnessed our conversations and how we behaved at the table. The chambermaids could tell a great deal from the quality of our garments, the way we packed our suitcases, or the state in which we left our rooms. And they evaluated us according to how demanding and polite we were, the generosity of our tips, and our general behavior. But they also judged us by the benchmark of too-daring a décolleté, an arrogant attitude, a tendency to drink too much or to spout unreasonable opinions. And I felt that they were rather conservative, preferring couples to single people, moderates to reformers, people who kept busy to those who lounged around. They had a moral viewpoint on people and things. And I would have been willing to bet that they preferred employment with a traditional family like ours rather than with a Russian mafioso or a movie star.

Denounced at one time under the banner of class struggle, this rigid social barrier between servants and
employers now evoked a certain nostalgia for the past. Having died out elsewhere, it was no longer really under attack, especially since nothing more equitable or persuasive had replaced it. Such an organization was now an anachronism, a weird and wonderful curiosity. And that’s what made it precious.

One had only to look at the servants of our nouveaux-riches neighbors. Because although we still accepted invitations inland, from around Monte Carlo or Saint-Tropez, we no longer had much to do with the houses on the bay, which now belonged to Greeks, Arabs, or Russians whose security concerns required an army of bodyguards with walkie-talkies and machine guns. Aping the aristocracy, some of our neighbors in their Palladian villas kitted their servants out in white gloves, gaudy uniforms, and even full livery, delighting in the spectacle of entire brigades of costumed minions marching at attention into a dining room, subjecting a captive audience to their ostentatious choreography. Other neighbors, envisioning their staff as an advertisement of their own fortunes and cultural savviness, hired young and beautiful people whose irreproachable “look” complemented the designer furniture and clean, pure lines of their employers’ glass-and-concrete houses.

Whether they aspired to splendor or to the
very
latest fashions, our neighbors had one thing in common: all were all jumped-up vulgarians in our eyes. Their desire to broadcast their status and lifestyle betrayed way too much social insecurity. They might be rich, hip, swooned over by the press, pursued by paparazzi, and courted by the owners of art galleries and clubs, but they hadn’t a clue how to run what we considered an inherently gracious household. And they didn’t impress us with their noisy hired help, who brayed their announcements or demanded immediate replies to their questions, not to mention those flunkies who looked us over like maître d’s in trendy restaurants, just long enough to decide if we were worthy of the lousy service they might deign to bestow on us.

Such parvenus, however, had every right to show off to their guests instead of demanding proper household service. And we would have bowed before the onslaught of history, feeling simply out-of-date, like dinosaurs, if these people hadn’t
all
mistreated their staff. They did so for various reasons, but chief among them was their contempt for underlings who were in essence interchangeable yet burdened with the task of enhancing their employers’ standing. Lashing out, the nouveaux riches could savor the full exercise of their power only
by oppressing their hirelings, whose beauty, inexperience, and sheer numbers they found wearisome in the end. Demanding of them anything and everything, our neighbors played their roles as lords of the manor by being condescending, capricious, and abusive.

The funniest part was that we inspired exactly the same disapproval in these upstarts. Our conception of luxury was too subtle for them to grasp: they recognized neither its standards nor its stereotypes. And they despaired over our refinement, which they saw as an appalling lack of comfort and luxury. Where were the massive flowerbeds, the statues, the fountains they considered the sine qua non for any self-respecting garden? What about our cars, our boats, our helicopters? And where was our staff? Had we no security personnel? No control rooms with plasma screens and intercoms, no loudspeakers on the grounds? What was behind this inadequate, ridiculous, pathetic setup? Were we broke, or just cheap? And so we seemed as vulgar to them as they seemed to us.

Someone named Gérard, bristling with references, was assuring me over the phone that he had always dreamed
of working “in a bourgeois house” when the sound of a diesel engine out on the front drive informed me that a taxi had arrived. Just what I needed! I hired our new butler then and there, arranged for him to get here in time for dinner, and went downstairs.

“Talk about a warm welcome!” remarked my sister. “Did we miss Roland at the airport, or did you simply forget about us?”

“Sorry, we forgot about you, because it’s total chaos here. Poor Roberto has just broken his hip, and Roland went to the hospital with him. Which means he must have forgotten to alert the caretaker about your arrival, so no one came to pick you up.”

“Poor Roberto! A broken hip, that’s not good, is it.… I’m sure you remember Bernard and Laetitia Braissant?”

Although Bernard looked rumpled and sweaty, he seemed pleasant enough, but I took an instant dislike to Laetitia in spite of her glowing complexion and masses of dark hair. There was something vaguely superior about her attitude. She was wearing a tank top with a long peasant skirt in the Provençal style, and I would have sworn that the affected simplicity, the fake “local color” of this outfit had been intended simply to give a
lesson in authenticity to us rich people, whom she was visiting only reluctantly.

“Where are you putting us?” asked Marie, looking exquisite in beige and white pants and a bush jacket.

“You’re in Ada’s Room; Bernard and Laetitia are in Sasha’s Room,” I told her, consulting the room assignments posted in the secretary’s office just off the entrance hall.

“And I suppose you’re in Flora’s Room, and Jean-Michel Destret has the Yellow Room?”

Marie had supposed correctly, and I smiled in reply, because this distribution of bedrooms observed an unspoken hierarchy we both recognized. By giving us the two smallest and least attractive rooms in the house, my mother was reminding us that we were merely her daughters, not honored guests, and that our friends would receive nothing more from her than a carefully calculated graciousness.

Had we been in a hotel, my parents’ room would have qualified as the presidential suite. A vast room with four windows and a fireplace, it had a linen closet, a dressing room paneled in cedar, and a spacious bathroom worthy of Hollywood. Half boudoir, half ballroom, this bathroom was where the family often got together to chat, far
from our staff and guests. With its pearly pink light, the veined yellow marble sinks, the bronze faucets shaped like dolphins, and the 1930s furniture laminated in beveled mirror with valances of raw silk, the room seemed to await a visit from Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn in satin slippers, trailing the fragrance of tuberose and rice powder.

Next in grandeur came the Peony and Lilac rooms, which had perfect proportions and a fantastic view of the lawn and the sea. Less sumptuous, the Turquoise Room looked out over a small terrace that seemed to relegate the sea to the background. Although they were huge and enjoyed an oblique view of the water, the Yellow and Chinese rooms were one notch below the Turquoise, since they overlooked the staff’s outside dining area, a nuisance that in a hotel would have justified a distinct reduction in their rates. Finally, dead last, came a trio of rooms at the entrance to the hall leading to the servants’ quarters, rooms that no amount of remodeling could change into bona fide guest rooms and now named after Flora, Ada, and Sasha, frequent guests in the house in my grandparents’ time.

L’Agapanthe had originally had so many more staff rooms than guest rooms that my parents had built what we called the annex, over by the entrance to the property.
The annex so lacked the charm of the main house that guests lodged there sometimes felt slighted, but others were flattered, because my parents gave those rooms only to previous visitors whom they were inviting back for another stay.

Colette, a lovely young woman from Normandy with a Louise Brooks bob, was already in Sasha’s Room when Marie and I escorted the Braissants upstairs. Laetitia stiffened with indignation when the smiling chambermaid asked her, “Would Madame like me to unpack her suitcase?”

“No, thank you, I’ll manage by myself,” she replied, with the studied manner of someone who, scandalized, refuses to participate in a degrading ritual from another era.

The dismayed Colette was about to withdraw when Marie returned her smile and asked, “Colette, would you be good enough to unpack mine?”

I heard the sound of crunching gravel again. Was it Odon Viel arriving, or Jean-Michel Destret and his chauffeur? (It turned out to be Jean-Michel.) While Marie
and I were heading for the front door, I remembered a sidewalk game we used to play when we were younger: you had to pick, from the first ten men who came toward you, the one who would be your husband for life. I always panicked; should I be cautious or optimistic? Take the first one who wasn’t either elderly or repulsive, or wait for a good-looking boy, at the risk of missing the boat and getting stuck with the tenth passerby, who might well be a ghastly old man?

Sex was a topic often and broad-mindedly discussed in our presence by my parents and their friends, who for the sake of appearances would pretend to lower their voices around our innocent ears. They treated sex with the humor and relaxed detachment expected of cultured people, because a light, bantering tone was to them an essential ingredient in any civilized conversation. Artful and amusing, amorous dalliance was thus a required subject, just like literature or the opera. Compared to my friends’ parents, who never broached the subject and certainly not in front of children, my own parents sometimes even struck me as obsessed. Marie and I were privy, as it turned out, to a real education. Whether down-to-earth or laced with literature, those conversations instilled in us the vocabulary and aesthetic nuances of a libertine freedom of thought that never stooped to a vulgar
familiarity, ranging from the naughty, spicy, smutty, and just slightly perverse language of a Choderlos de Laclos, to sensual and voluptuous concupiscence, or brazen Rabelaisian ribaldry—and from the grandiose debauchery of a Sade to the crudest, ugliest, most unsettling pornography and all the raunchy, sordid, lubricious, salacious, libidinous depravity drawn along in its wake. Thus educated in indecency by proxy, as we had been in wine and painting, we ended by appreciating this cultural inheritance passed down by parents who were most unusual, to be sure, but who had the merit of being emancipated and nonconformist.