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bought the rights and it would later be reprinted by another U.S. periodical, The Living Age . She’d certainly shown Wells what she could do if she set her mind to it.
    There was only one thing wrong with this success story, however: Martha hadn’t actually seen the atrocity she wrote about so vividly. She hadn’t heard the victim “making a terrible sound, like a dog whimpering”; she hadn’t smelled the kerosene with which the onlookers doused the body of the hanged man, nor the sizzling flames nor the burning flesh. In fact, although she and Bertrand had indeed taken a road trip through the Cotton Belt on their way to California in 1931, they’d never come within miles of a lynching. But Martha had spent time in the poor backcountry South; she’d driven those dusty roads, talked to those angry white farmers and downtrodden black sharecroppers; in North Carolina, when she was working for FERA, she’d once got a lift from a truck driver who said he was on his way home from “a necktie party”—the slang term for stringing up a black man without benefit of the law. Sometime later she’d met a man whose son had been lynched. It was just a little step, wasn’t it, from there to writing about this fictional incident as if it had really happened? In any case, Martha didn’t give the matter a second thought: once she had the Spectator ’s check, she left for Paris to begin research for her proposed pacifist novel.
    She arrived on a continent much changed from the place she’d left two years before. Germany had become an increasingly bellicose and anti-Semitic dictatorship whose ruler, Adolf Hitler, had illegally sent troops in March to occupy the Rhineland, the buffer area along France’s northeastern border that had been set aside as a demilitarized zone by postwar treaty. Some of the idealistic pacifists who had formed part of her and Bertrand’s set, such as the novelist Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, had now veered politically to the right, saying that the only real enemies of peace were the Communists and the Jews. Even Bertrand himself managed to look like an apologist for the Nazis when, trying to promote the rapprochement with Germany that he felt might ensure peace, he published an interview with Hitler in which the Führer said that he loved France, despite what he’d written in Mein Kampf about its being “the mortal enemy of our nation.”
    In the meantime, the Depression had caught up to France in earnest; the streets of Paris were full of the unemployed and the homeless; and armed fascist hooligans, some in uniform, were increasingly preying on anyone whose politics, ethnicity, or appearance they didn’t like. In fact, they had nearly killed the Socialist leader Léon Blum—a professorial-looking former theater critic, and a Jew—in the days before the general elections, dragging him from his car and beating him half to death. In the end, however, Blum’s Popular Front coalition had been victorious, and the new government proceeded to give workers the right to organize, the right to strike, and the right to a forty-hour workweek with two weeks of paid vacation every year. The right-wing daily Le Temps complained that Blum had ushered in “the dictatorship of the proletariat” but the very best, most expensive restaurants were still so full they had to turn people away; although the newly legitimized strikes disrupted the collections at most of the couture houses, Martha’s beloved Schiaparelli had a triumphant season, accessorizing many of her ensembles with a Phrygian cap modeled on the one worn by the Revolutionaries of the 1790s.
    Martha herself wasted no time in buying a smart new wardrobe and a paletteful of fashionable face paint; but she found the atmosphere in Paris “vile.” There were too many “gloomy rich” people complaining that guests at the strike-torn Hotel Crillon, or the Ritz or the George-V, had to make their own beds. Weary of privileged self-pity, she decamped for