Read Under the Wide and Starry Sky for Free Online

hand at making silk purses out of sows’ ears,” Fanny told her friend, who looked confused standing in the middle of one dusty shop after another. Hendricks was clearly an innocent when it came to junk stores. “It just takes some imagination,” she explained. She bought the cheapest possible chairs and tables, after which the sweet fellow whisked her into his waiting carriage and called out to his driver the name of a restaurant in a better neighborhood, where he treated Fanny to a meal of oysters,
mignonnettes d’agneau,
and vintage Veuve Clicquot, interspersed with tender squeezes of the hand.
    â€œYou get good light in here,” Margaret Wright said the first time she visited Fanny’s apartment. They stood looking out the window of her parlor, with its view of windmills at the top of the hill, and below, the city’s battered buildings.
    â€œIt’s not the Paris my friends back home crowed about,” Fanny said. Dora and Virgil Williams had seen Paris in the days before the Prussians blasted the city to rubble.
    â€œIt’s a ruined battlefield,” Margaret observed. “I know a woman who was one of the Commune people. She’s quite poetic when she talks about those glory days. All the workers rallying to be heard in the new government after the siege, women demanding new rights … This neighborhood was a main outpost for them, you know. Awful how it all ended. So many Communards executed, maybe right around here—and only, what, five years ago?”
    â€œFive years ago,” Fanny said thoughtfully. “I was carrying Hervey and setting up a new household in Oakland. I knew almost nothing about it.”
    â€œHow brave those people were, to stand up that way,” Margaret mused.
    Fanny realized that when her new friends talked about the siege and the uprising afterward, she lost interest. She saw signs every day of the war that had been waged in these streets; on either side of her building, the former houses were piles of stone and boards. She had only to walk around the neighborhood to see abandoned cannons strewn here and there. But it was somebody else’s war, not her own.
    â€œYour Communard friend would probably despise me,” Fanny said to Margaret. “I’m not very political. I can’t bear the type of woman who makes a profession of going around giving speeches. Oh, I believe in women’s rights in a general sort of way. But truth be told, I’m more of a clinging-vine type.”
    Margaret burst out laughing. “You? A clinging vine?”
    Fanny shrugged. “I don’t want to be an oak that stands alone. It makes me lonesome to think of the oak with no shelter, no support, except what it provides for itself.”
    â€œNow, that surprises me,” Margaret said. “You are the woman who left her husband and brought her children over here so you could
paint,
for goodness’ sake.”
    â€œI know. How can I say it? I don’t want to live the rest of my life without a man. Some day I would like to find another … a good man. Right now, though, what I want from Paris is some beauty in our lives, some peace and happiness. And do you know? I think Paris, after what it has been through, wants the same things.”
    Once Fanny had settled her family in Montmartre, once Hervey began to return to himself, a wave of freedom washed over her. Away from Sam and her family and neighbors and even her artistic friends in San Francisco, she felt a sense of contentment unlike anything she had known since she was a child. Six thousand miles it had taken, but at last, the seething hurt inside her calmed. She commenced taking notes for a story she would write about the new Paris growing up around her. Maybe a story about construction of the basilica of Sacré Coeur, which was under way at the top of Montmartre. People seemed to like stories about European cathedrals. There wasn’t much to see