SYNTHESIS
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Chapter 09 - "Historical"

When Delphine escorted them to breakfast next morning, they weren't surprised when she said they would be eating in the breakfast room; apparently their actions at the funeral truly had been the last straw for Madame Pepin. Bobby had theorized on that first day that hosting them in the dining room was probably her method of intimidation--but apparently they hadn't been intimidated enough.

Madame was again absent at the table; this, they realized, would probably be the routine until they departed. But in this case it was advantageous because they had counted on it and brought Mignon with them—at the first floor they had diverted from the stairs and made their way to the child's suite, after making arrangements with Luisa via a note the previous evening. Delphine had remained at the end of the hallway, looking somewhat appalled as Mignon appeared, primped to within an inch of her life, in a scarlet corduroy jumper over a cream-colored sweater, cream-colored knee socks and the black Mary Janes, with a red headband confining her curls.

At the door, Bobby murmured, "First things first," and Alex nodded, holding Mignon's hand, but remaining behind. The latter, with a puzzled expression, looked on quietly with Alex while Bobby approached Laurent and conferred with him a few minutes. Then Alex saw Laurent smile and shake Bobby's hand, and Bobby turn to nod at her. She nodded in return and escorted Mignon inside.

Mignon had been chattering about places to visit as they approached the breakfast room, but as soon as they stepped through the door, she pulled herself up as if back at school and curtsied to Laurent, then to Antoine, the server providing the breakfast items. "Bonjour, Laurent. Bonjour, Antoine."

"Bonjour, mademoiselle," Antoine said serenely. He was a short, balding man in his mid 70s who had evidently been working at the home for many years. While he wore the same dark pants and vest and the ubiquitous pink shirt as the other male employees, it was obvious he had seniority, as he spoke to Laurent with easy familiarity. As he transferred food from a wheeled cart to the mahogany table, they noticed that the kitchen had added items to the breakfast menu: crepe-like pancakes with strawberry preserves, and strips of lean bacon along with the croissants, eggs, and tartines, wheat toast, butter and blackberry jam.

"Monsieur et Madame Goren asked me to breakfast, Laurent," she said shyly as Bobby pulled out a chair for her. "I hope you don't mind."

"Not at all, little sister," he said fondly.

"They wish to see the Louvre, and I haven't been in a long time," she said in a dignified voice that Bobby and Alex recognized from their first meeting in Washington, DC. "Isn't it fortunate that it's Friday and they are open late tonight? So I was wondering if we could start with–"

. . . . .

In the future they would remember those two tour days as perfect, even though the first had been cloudy but unseasonably warm, and when they left the Louvre it had been raining.

Mignon, skipping at Luisa's side, directed them to Rue Cler, which was lined with food shops and cafes. Luisa had brought along what looked like a child's wagon with high sides, her "trolley," which Bobby insisted on pulling, and they stopped to buy a variety of cheeses from Emmentaler to goat cheese aux herbes from the fromagerie, early strawberries which Luisa exclaimed over, as well as pears, a small bottle of white wine, assorted meats from a charcuterie, small crispy miniature baguettes for sandwiches from the boulangerie, and macarons and pains au chocolat from a patisserie. Bobby chose a small bouquet of early syringa for Alex from a flower shop and provided Luisa and Mignon little boutonnières of the same, and their final stop was the chocolatier, A la Mere de Famille, Paris' oldest.

From there the little girl and her nanny led them down the streets to the lawns surrounding the Eiffel Tower. At the bottom of her trolley Luisa had included an enormous thick picnic blanket, and they spent ninety minutes working their way through the savory foods they'd purchased, lunch meats tucked into the fresh bread, white wine poured into little cone-shaped paper cups (when Mignon pouted over her milk she was allowed a sip), cheeses as a final course, and then the strawberries, chocolates, and pastries to complete the meal. From around them came the trill of birdsong as well as the murmur of French and multiple other languages, with tourists milling about while paging through tour books or scrolling on cell phones, locals of all ages chatting, some young men kicking about a soccer ball, elders walking dogs—one man even had a cat in harness. The area was alive with the sounds of voices, music, and traffic, including the occasional police or ambulance siren. They cleaned up their picnic site while Luisa called Maison Duplantier; they were just brushing away final flaky crumbs when Robert Escoffier arrived with the big town car to take them to the Louvre.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alex saw Luisa give a tired sigh that only emphasized the exhaustion visible on her face--she wondered if it was due to a confirmation of the diagnosis for her sister--and she was charmed to see Mignon tentatively approach her with the same concern, asking, "Luisa, I know you didn't sleep well last night. Monsieur et Madame Goren are former policemen, you know. If you want to go back to the house with Robert, I will be safe with them."

"I couldn't do that, Miss Mignon–" Luisa protested, but Alex took her aside and spoke with her. She finally admitted that Mignon was correct, so that when they were dropped off at the museum, Escoffier returned Luisa to Maison Duplantier. Mignon patted her nanny's arm and told her to please rest. As the car disappeared into the Paris streets, she sighed. "Something is bothering Luisa—besides the accident, I mean—but she won't tell me about it."

Then she looked up at them, confessing, "I love Luisa, but she's so very traditional, too. She would have taken you to see all the regular things at the Louvre. May I show you some different things?"

Bobby offered her his hand. "Lead on then, guide touristique."

Mignon walked them past the Mona Lisa "just so you can say you've seen it," with an almost disdainful voice that made them suppress laughter, and instead led them to the historical exhibits: the eye-popping Assyrian gallery with its eighth-century relics, the Great Sphinx of Tanis along with a gallery filled with Egyptian antiquities, the Galerie d’Apollon with its golden walls and crown jewels, and the Near Eastern room's beautiful jewelry exhibits. She also made certain to take them past The Winged Victory of Samothrace and through the Michelangelo gallery. While she remained polite and respectful during the excursion, they could tell which items—like the Sphinx and the Assyrian pieces—were her favorites by the manner in which she grasped their hands and arms to pull them toward an exhibit or the way she skipped as they approached a certain gallery. Once she was so enthusiastic that a guard scowled at Alex and Bobby for permitting her to behave so. When the closing bell sounded, they were just as disappointed as Mignon, although she said to them gravely, "You would need months to see this whole museum. Maman brought me here once a month and I have still not seen it all."

The obvious destination the next day would have been Versailles, but when at dinner that night Laurent mentioned a chateau once occupied by Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour and later by Napoleon and his second wife Marie-Louise, located in Compiègne, Bobby's eyes had lit up.

"Compiègne?" he asked, straightening in interest. "Where the Armistice was signed?" so the following morning found them on the day coach of a train heading northeast through the French countryside to the former hunting lodge that had been turned into a chateau for Louis XV, and later was a summer home for the Bonapartes.

When she studied world history, Alex recalled sympathizing with Napoleon's first wife Josephine, whose marriage had been annulled despite her being the Emperor's great love, because she couldn't give Napoleon a child, so she wasn't particularly interested in Marie-Louise, but the chateau tour was satisfactory, if only for Mignon's reactions. Once again the girl flitted from one exhibit to another, peeking into every room even if it was roped off to visitors, pointing out designs within the wallpaper, exclaiming over the massive crystal-draped chandeliers and the magnificent beds with their gold-embroidered draperies. She and Bobby paused for some minutes in the doorway to the library, and he told Alex later she had seriously discussed what books might be inside: perhaps classics like The Iliad. Alex made certain to take a photo of Mignon in front of one of the magnificent lions outside, promising to transfer it to the child's laptop so she could show it to "Renata at school."

Still, Bobby was already restless, and he finally went to the information desk asking in hesitant French, "C-comment se rendre à la clairière de l'armistice?" only to have the woman smile and reply in an American accent, "Any taxi outside can take you there, sir. You're from New York City, I can tell," to which he laughed, then chatted with her for a few minutes before engaging a cab to take them to the Glade of the Armistice, tucked in a curve of the river Aisne. The taxi's route eventually took them along a country road lined with trees, turning right upon a narrower country lane, to pass the reconstructed Alsace-Lorraine monument with its struck-down German imperial eagle and then finally arrive at a level clearing within the woods.

Mignon absorbed the scene with frank curiosity: an oval-shaped open area with several different curiosities including a concrete marker designating a short length of railroad tracks, a concrete slab with words carved upon it, a huge metal ring engraved with words standing on one end and mounted on a stone base, a small tank, a statue of a man in a funny brimmed cap like she had seen in the vintage black-and-white films her mother sometimes watched, and finally a building set back from the rest, inside which there was an old wooden railway car. Six people had just walked off the site toward the parking area, so it appeared they were quite alone, the only sounds that of the birds calling from the surrounding trees. "Monsieur Goren, what is this place? You said it was 'the Glade of the Armistice'?"

"Have you had any World War I history at school?"

"That's before Adolf Hitler, isn't it?" she said after a moment. "These things look...older." The hush over the site seemed to have permeated her and she stood very still, looking around.

"Yes, it is. There was a war before the one Hitler was involved in," Alex said.

Bobby added, "Hitler was a soldier in World War I, but he would later become the leader of the Nazi party and Germany in World War II. He's become so infamous that he's now known as a personification of evil."

Mignon wore a grave face. "We were told about Hitler at school. He sent Jewish people to horrible camps where he killed them. One of the girls in Fifth Form lost her great-grandmother in one of the camps. I wanted to read The Diary of Anne Frank but Maman said I wasn't quite old enough to understand it yet." She looked up at Alex questioningly. "Why do people kill other people?"

It was as if an arrow struck Alex's heart and she saw Bobby flinch. "Because...of so many reasons–"

How many reasons had they seen in Major Case? Greed. Hatred. Jealousy. Fear. Revenge. Mistaken identity or intentions. Robberies gone bad. Sex. Ambition. Profit. Incest.

And the irony of it struck Alex, Nicole Wallace's child asking why people killed.

"Resentment, mainly," Bobby finally responded. "People feel they have been wronged in some way and in their anger they strike back. Sometimes they truly have been wronged, but it's never a reason to kill." He took her hand. "Come, Alex and I will explain these things to you." And they circled the Glade, then finally entered the building to show her the reproduction of the railway car where the Armistice ending World War I had been signed, tying it to her existing knowledge of Adolf Hitler by telling her how he had forced the French government to capitulate to the Nazis in the same rail car, which was then taken away as a war trophy and later destroyed, and the reproductions of the other monuments like the slab and the Alsace-Lorraine monument, the originals smashed beyond repair by the Nazis, save for the statue of Marshal Foch, which Hitler had left overlooking the ravaged clearing as a sign of contempt and derision.

Now awaiting a taxi to return them to the city center, Mignon looked up from the little book they had bought her about the history of the Glade and said shyly, "Monsieur et Madame Goren?"

"Yes, sweetie?" Alex said, almost automatically now, then smiled. "I'm sorry, Mignon. It's what I call my nieces. I hope it didn't make you uncomfortable."

Mignon shook her head minutely. "It...felt nice."

Bobby looked up from his own book, a volume about the psychological repercussions of the first World War. "Do you need something? Did you want the other book you were interested in?"

"No, thank you," the girl said softly. "I just wanted to say thank you for letting me come with you during Laurent's tour of the city. And letting me show you my favorite things at the Louvre. For bringing me here and to the chateau. It will be a long time before I can do it again."

"We enjoyed having you with us. It gave us a different perspective on what we were seeing." Bobby's eyes were kind.

"Tomorrow's the reading of Papa Marcel's will," Mignon felt the need to explain, "then the next day I shall go back to Creatwood and you will be leaving, so I wanted to say 'thank you' before then. I'll be busy tomorrow finishing my assignments." Then Mignon added hastily. "I didn't have many. Miss Bradford-Smith was very nice. She knew I could make up the work when I get back."

Alex still had the eerie feeling of talking to a much older child, as she had the previous year. "May we have your e-mail address?" she asked. "We could write to you about our book tour and all the cities we visit. In fact, if it's permitted, we can send you postcards, too. We'll be visiting San Francisco and Boston and Montgomery and several other historic cities."

Mignon gave a shy smile. "I'd like that, thank you. Miss Bradford-Smith should say yes about the postcards."

They were all very somber on the return to Compiègne and then the return train to Paris, where Escoffier delivered them back to Maison Duplantier and they ate a light supper. Mignon recovered enough to give Laurent a lively account of her day and seeing a location where her maman had never taken her, but Alex and Bobby ate their dinner in relative silence.

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