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screwed her whether she liked it or not. When Marcel met her, he understood at a glance that Josiane just wanted a way out of the gutter. He flipped a mental coin and hired her. A few weeks later, he got her into his bed.
    Nine months after starting the job, she came to him and said, “My salary is pitiful. Why don’t you cheer it up?” He did that and more. He taught her business, made her his executive secretary. And little by little, she displaced the other mistresses consoling him for his loveless marriage. And he didn’t regret it. He was never bored with Josiane. The only thing he regretted was that he’d married Henriette in the first place.
    “Are you listening to me, Marcel?”
    “Yes, sweetie-pie.”
    “Specializing is over. We need generalists again, people who are good at lots of things. And that’s exactly what Chaval is.”
    Marcel smiled. “I’m a generalist.”
    “That’s why I love you.”
    “Tell me more about Chaval.”
    As Josiane talked, Marcel could see his own past before him. Marcel’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who’d settled in the Bastille neighborhood of Paris. His father had been a tailor, and his mother took in laundry. With eight kids living in two rooms, there was very little tenderness, many beatings. Very little luxury, lots of stale bread.
    Marcel earned a degree in chemistry from a second-rate school, and landed his first job at a candle factory. The boss there didn’t have any children and took a liking to him. He loaned him the money to buy out a business that was going under, then another one, and another. That’s how Marcel had become a turnaround specialist, a vulture capitalist. He didn’t like the phrase, but he loved the work, buying failing companies and building them back up with savvy and sweat.
    Maybe because his own home life had been so barren, Marcel decided to launch a company built around the concept of “cozy.” Within a few years, his Casamia stores were offering scented candles, table settings, lamps, couches, frames, bathroom fixtures, kitchenware, and so on. Hominess on a budget. Everything was made abroad. One of France’s first businessmen to outsource, Marcel opened factories in Poland, Hungary, China, Vietnam, and India.
    Then one fateful day, a big supplier said to him, “Look,Marcel, the stuff you sell is fine, but your stores don’t have any style. You should hire a designer. Someone who can give your products that certain something, turn your business into a brand.”
    Marcel was still mulling this over when he met Henriette Plissonnier, a stylish middle-aged widow.
    What class!
Marcel thought when she showed up in response to his help-wanted ad. Henriette had just lost her husband and was raising two daughters alone. She didn’t have any experience, she admitted. What she had, she said, was a first-class education and an innate sense of elegance, form, and color.
    “Would you like me to demonstrate?”
    Before he had the chance to answer, Henriette moved two vases, rolled out a rug, pulled a curtain aside, and shifted three knickknacks on his desk. Then she sat down, smiling. His office suddenly looked like something out of an interior design magazine.
    He first hired her as an accessories consultant, then promoted her to decorator. She designed his shop windows, and chose the color of the season—blue, tan, white, gold.
    And Marcel fell head over heels in love with her.
    Henriette represented a world that would forever be out of his reach. At their first kiss, he felt he was touching a star. During their first night together, he snapped a Polaroid picture of her while she was asleep and put it in his wallet. For their first weekend together, he took her to the Hotel Normandy in Deauville. She didn’t want to leave the room. He interpreted this as modesty, because they weren’t married. Much later, he realized she was ashamed to be seen with him.
    A few months later, he asked her to marry him.
    “I have to think