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..."
    "So you're from the
South, when it gets down to it?"
    "Yes, on my father's
side too.   His name was David
Astruc.   Astruc means 'born under a lucky
star' in Provençal...   but not for him!   My grandmother used to tell me stories about
my family to

cheer me up when the other kids called me a
bastard.   She said that even though my
parents had made a mistake they came from the oldest Jewish families in France — from many hundreds of years before the Crusades — and that I should
always remember it with pride."
    Maggy gestured with her long
arms in an ardent arabesque, fired by memories of the tales her grandmother had
woven of a life in cities with musical names:   Nîmes, Cavaillon, Avignon.
    "But what happened after
she died?" Paula asked, touched by Maggy's almost childish sense of
vanished grandeur.
    "Ah, that's why I'm
here, that's why I had to leave Tours forever and why I'll never go back. My
aunt couldn't wait to get rid of me.   The
funeral was hardly over before the hunt for a husband began.   Not in Tours of course — there I'd
always be the Lunel bastard — but in other cities.   Finally she found a family in Lille whose son
was so ugly that they couldn't find a girl who would even go out with him, much
less marry him...   and they arranged
it!"
    Furiously, Maggy pushed her
hair away from her elegantly positioned ears.   "An arranged marriage.   In
this day and age...   yes, they still do
it.   As soon as I heard I started to make
my plans."
    As she paused to eat the
marinated lamb she remembered the day on which her rebellion had changed from
an insubstantial dream into a necessary act.   The proposed marriage took the idea of running away to Paris out of the
realm of fantasy.   She had saved five
hundred francs over the years out of her grandmother's little gifts and she
spent three hundred of them in the department stores on the rue Bordeaux for a
cheap suitcase and a few ready-made garments.   Her only extravagance had been the silk stockings, three pairs of them,
but how could she confront Paris in black cotton?
    "So," Paula
interrupted her thoughts, "you are, in short, a beautiful, orphaned
Jewish virgin."
    Maggy laughed at this
interpretation, on a rising, blithe note, showing the glint ofher
perfect teeth, her yellow-green eyes sparkling like the target ofa
treasure hunt in the dimness ofthe restaurant.
    "Nobody ever put it
precisely like that before and I've been called a lot of things.   My grandmother used to send me to the rabbi
of our town, Rabbi Taradash, to be properly scolded because she knew that she
could never do it convincingly.   And I'd
go to him indisgrace at least once a month — it gave him a
change, he said, from preparing bar mitzvah boys — and he'd get so
involved in the logic ofmy explanations that finally he'd just make me
promise not to do it again and I never did.   I'd do something worse.   But
'beautiful' — no, nobody but my poor grandmother ever called me
that.   Or 'virgin', either."
    "Are you a virgin
then?"
    "Of course I am!"
Maggy looked startled.   She'd been in
trouble all of her life for running wild with a bunch of boys but they had been
companions only, partners in troublemaking.
    "So much the
better," Paula said, "at least for the moment.   You have everything still ahead of you and
that's the best way to begin in Paris."
    Paula had seen generations of
Montparnasse girls come and go.   She had
seen them drive off in Bugattis with millionaires and never return and she had
seen them die in a week of a raging form of syphilis; she had seen them marry
artists and turn into proud housewives, and more often, she had seen them marry
artists and turn into harpies.   She
didn't believe she'd ever seen a girl with the promise of Maggy Lunel.   This girl, she thought consideringly, wassomeone
inevitable.
    "Well, that's it, that's
all there is to me.   Except that I've
made the worst possible start."   Not
even a full stomach, not even