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careful.’
    Stahl tried to laugh it off. ‘Isn’t war always futile, Madame Boulanger?’
    Mme Boulanger wasn’t amused. ‘ Le Matin, mon cher , is a very rightist newspaper.’
    Stahl was puzzled and showed it. ‘Rightist?’ he said. ‘The French right is against war? Has turned pacifist?’
    ‘In its way. The press and politicians on the right try to persuade us that resistance to Hitler is futile. The German military is too large, too strong, their machines are new and efficient and deadly, and their passion for a fight unequalled. Poor France can never win against such a powerful and determined force. That’s what we’re being fed, over here.’
    ‘What do they want France to do?’
    ‘Negotiate, sign treaties, acknowledge Hitler’s supremacy, let him do whatever he wants in Europe as long as he leaves us alone.’
    Stahl shook his head. ‘I had no idea.’
    ‘You are Austrian by birth, no?’
    ‘Viennese.’
    ‘What do you think about what goes on over there?’ She nodded her head in the general direction of France’s eastern border with Germany, a little more than two hundred miles from where they sat.
    ‘Sickening,’ he said. Mme Boulanger’s expression barely changed but Stahl could tell she was relieved. ‘And dangerous,’ he went on. ‘I can’t bear to watch Hitler in the newsreels.’
    ‘ Le Matin doesn’t know where you stand, but they offer you an opportunity, as an actor, as an artist, to speak out against European war.’
    ‘Perhaps I’ll let them know,’ he said. Then added, ‘Where I stand.’
    ‘Perhaps you’ll find a way to keep out of politics, Monsieur Stahl. For actors it’s much the best idea. Those of us who work for your success would prefer that all the people who go to the movies feel affection for you. Why annoy those who don’t like your political views?’
    Stahl nodded. ‘You are a sensible person, Madame Boulanger.’
    She smiled, reached out and rested two fingers lightly on his knee. ‘You are a successful man, a movie star, let’s keep it that way. How long are you in Paris?’
    ‘Four months? Less? It’s hard to know, I have to meet with the producer and the director, then I’ll have a better idea.’
    Mme Boulanger swivelled back to face her desk, picked up an appointment book, its pages thickened by notes in blue ink, and thumbed through it. ‘I see people from the newspapers on a fairly regular basis, and I’ll set up a few interviews. And by the way, is this Après la Guerre an outcry against war? Umm, the futility of war?’
    Stahl shrugged. ‘Three soldiers, foreign legionnaires, try to return home from Turkey after the 1918 armistice.’
    ‘And you play …?’
    ‘Colonel Vadic, of obscure Balkan origin, the leader, and much-decorated hero. I may get to walk with a stick.’
    Mme Boulanger’s face lit up. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘A human story.’
    Walking back to the hotel, Stahl sensed that the city’s mood had changed. Sombre today, the Parisians, unsmiling, eyes down, something had reached them on the morning of 19 September. The headlines weren’t so different than the day before, all to do with the possibility of a German march into Czechoslovakia. If that happened, France was obliged by treaty to go to war. Years earlier, in the last months of 1923, as Stahl was beginning a new life in Paris, war was a thing of the past – the last one so brutal and vicious that all the world knew there could never be another. At least all the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the Left Bank cafés that autumn, the word was barely mentioned, the talk was about paintings, books, music, scandals, reputations, and who was in whose bed. As Stahl’s French grew better, as he picked up the argot, the slang, he fell in love with the world of the cafés.
    He’d come a long way to get there. When he was twenty and working at the legation in Barcelona, the war ended, the Central Powers had lost, and the legation gave all its employees