Montparnasse. They had dinner on the Bateau Mouche and finished up by having onion
soup at four in the morning at Les Halles with the butchers and truck drivers. Before they
were through Larry had collected a large group of friends, and Noelle realized that it was
because he had the gift of laughter. He had taught her to laugh and she had not known that
laughter was within her. It was like a gift from a god. She was grateful to Larry and very
much in love with him. It was dawn when they returned to their hotel room. Noelle was
exhausted, but Larry was filled with energy, a restless dynamo. Noelle lay in bed watching
him as he stood at the window looking at the sun rise over the rooftops of Paris.
“I love Paris,” he said. “It’s like a temple to the best things that men have ever done.
It’s a city of beauty and food and love.” He turned to her and grinned, “Not necessarily in
that order.”
Noelle watched as he took off his clothes and climbed into bed beside her. She held
him, loving the feel of him, the male smell of him. She thought of her father and how he
had betrayed her. She had been wrong to judge all men by him and Auguste Lanchon. She
knew now that there were men like Larry Douglas. And she also knew that there could
never be anyone else for her.
“Do you know who the two greatest men who ever lived were, Princess?” he was
asking.
“You,” she said.
“Wilbur and Orville Wright. They gave man his real freedom. Have you ever flown?”
She shook her head. “We had a summer place in Montauk—that’s at the end of Long
Island—and when I was a kid I used to watch the gulls wheel through the air over the
beach, riding the current, and I would have given my soul to be up there with them. I knew
I wanted to be a flyer before I could walk. A friend of the family took me up in an old
biplane when I was nine, and I took my first flying lesson when I was fourteen. That’s
when I’m really alive, when I’m in the air.”
And later:
“There’s going to be a world war. Germany wants to own it all.”
“It won’t get France, Larry. No one can cross the Maginot Line.”
He snorted: “I’ve crossed it a hundred times.” She looked at him puzzled. “In the air,
Princess. This is going to be an air war…my war.”
And later, casually:
“Why don’t we get married?”
It was the happiest moment of Noelle’s life.
Sunday was a relaxed, lazy day. They had breakfast at a little outdoor café in
Montmartre, went back to the room and spent almost the entire day in bed. Noelle could
not believe anyone could be so ecstatic. It was pure magic when they made love, but she
was just as content to lie there and listen to Larry talk and watch him as he moved