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warm, sunlit hair. “What heavy things I am laying on you, so young!” She turned toward the open French doors. “Come. Let’s go inside. I need to lie down for a little while. You can lie beside me and I will tell you a story.” Her long, thin arm was lightly furred with sun-shot gold, as she reached to push aside the lace curtain.
    She nudged Roberto ahead of her into the bedroom, and he was so blinded from the outside brilliance that he felt pushed into the lake of Death. He turned and grabbed her skirt, crying out in terror and burying his face in her legs.
    Lifting and carrying him with infinite gentleness to her bed, his mother sat with him against her breast, then reclined against the pile of creamy pillows and pulled a pale pink cashmere blanket, light as thistle down, over them. She settled him with his head nestled onto her shoulder. The crisp linen of her blouse smelled of starch and a faint trace of
l’Heure Bleue
.
    Slowly, his sobbing subsided and turned to hiccuping. The comfort of his head cradled on his mother’s breast and the subtle rocking of her torso to some internal rhythm, as if her whole body were singing inside, relaxed him. He closed his eyes in ecstatic comfort, listening as her beautiful voice began to speak, telling him a tale of magic.
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Loire Valley, France, 1953
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Maria-Elena Villanova y Mansart’s Story
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    The countryside lying before her was bleak. Frost-burnt foliage of dull umber bordered a winding road with gravel the color of dirty white chalk. Evergreen trees, forming a tunnel overhead and bowed down by pillows of frozen snow, were so dark a green as to seem black in their somber wetness. The chauffeur eased the ancient car through shallow ruts with greatest caution.
    Maria-Elena reflected on the story her host for the weekend had told her about this car, as they dined at l’Etoile two weeks earlier. How during the World War II he had driven it into the family chapel, the doorway and windows of which were then sealed up with stone. Then, trees and shrubs were dug up and brought into the courtyard of the chateau and were planted before the newly rocked-up portals.
    By the time the Nazis commandeered the place as their strategic headquarters, the chapel appeared as nothing more than part of the old fortifications. Thus, the car had waited, immured in the chapel along with the altar’s rare twelfth-century limestone polychrome Christ, whose outstretched arms sheltered the entire property in unseen benediction throughout the War.
    “After the War, Christ and the Duesenberg were resurrected on the same day,” he recounted, with civilized glee. She remembered how they had laughed together, gazing out the window into the waters of the Seine,
sémé
with a million shards of light shattered on water black as oil.
    Maria-Elena was in Paris to study voice. As befitted the family of the great Eduoard Mansart, who had come from France to Mexico in 1763 to found the family’s fortunes in mining, sisal, and ranching, it was traditional for the young men of the family to take their educations in London. There they could learn sound business practices and so ultimately run the family enterprises, which had grown to include oil and the railroad. The Mansart women, however, were traditionally educated in the arts in France.
    Le Comte de MontMaran was an old friend of her grandmother’s from her college days, studying at the Art Institute. It was into his keeping that each successive wave of Mansart women had been proffered, both as a responsibility and a gift of refreshing
jeunesse
.
    Since Maria-Elena’s arrival in France, her grandmother, Maria-Amalia, had been on a nonagenarian spree of vicarious living. Her letters were filled with directives to go to specific places, view certain works of art, hear particular singers, all of whom were long since retired or dead, and to dine only in special restaurants, many of which no longer existed or the reputations of which had suffered