When they were finished with the chocolate, he retrieved their shoes from the rental desk, and afterward they walked together along the path toward the edge of the Bois. He kept looking for his chance to take Madame Morgenstern’s elbow, to let the others go on ahead while the two of them walked behind. Instead it was Marthe who dropped back to walk with Andras. She was purposeful and grim in the deepening cold.

“It’s hopeless, you know,” she said. “She wants nothing to do with you.”

“Who?” Andras said, alarmed to think he’d been so transparent.

“Elisabet! She wants you to stop looking at her all the time. Do you think she likes being looked at by a pathetic Hungarian?”

Andras sighed and glanced up ahead to where Elisabet was now walking with Madame Gérard, her green coat swinging around her legs. She stooped to say something to Madame, who threw her head back and laughed.

“She’s not interested in you,” Marthe said. “She’s already got a boyfriend. So there’s no need to come to the house again. And you don’t have to waste your time trying to charm her mother.”

Andras cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “Well, thank you for telling me.”

Marthe gave a businesslike nod. “It’s my duty as Elisabet’s friend.”

And then they had reached the edge of the park, and Madame Morgenstern was beside him again, her sleeve brushing his own. They stood at the entrance to the Métro, the rush of trains echoing below. “Won’t you come with us?” she said.

“No, come with us!” Madame Gérard said. “We’re taking a cab. We’ll drop you at home.”

It was cold and growing dark, but Andras couldn’t bear the thought of a ride on the crowded Métro with Elisabet and Marthe and Madame Morgenstern. Nor did he want to crowd into a cab with Madame Gérard and the others. He wanted to be alone, to find his way back to his own neighborhood, to lock himself into his room.

“I think I’ll walk,” he told them.

“But you’ll come again for lunch next Sunday,” Madame Morgenstern said, looking up at him from under the brim of her hat, her skin still illuminated with the rush of skating. “In fact, we’re hoping you’ll make a habit of it.”

How else could he have replied? “Yes, yes, I’ll come,” he said.

CHAPTER TEN. Rue de Sévigné

AND SO ANDRAS became a fixture at Sunday lunches on the rue de Sévigné. Quickly they established a pattern: Andras would come and exchange pleasantries with Madame Morgenstern; Elisabet would sit and scowl at Andras, or make fun of his clothes or his accent; when she failed to whip him up as she’d done at the first lunch, she’d grow bored and go out with Marthe, who had cultivated her own towering scorn for Andras. Once Elisabet had gone he would sit with Madame Morgenstern and listen to records on the phonograph, or look at art magazines and picture postcards, or read from a book of poetry to practice his French, or talk about his family, his childhood. At times he tried to bring up the subject of her own past-the brother whom she hadn’t seen in years, the shadowy events that had resulted in Elisabet’s birth and had brought Madame Morgenstern to Paris. But she always managed to evade that line of conversation, turning his careful questions aside like the hands of unwelcome dance partners. And if he blushed when she sat close beside him, or stammered as he tried to respond after she’d paid him a compliment, she gave no sign that she’d noticed.

Before long he knew the precise shape of her fingernails, the cut and fabric of every one of her winter dresses, the pattern of lace at the edges of her pocket handkerchiefs. He knew that she liked pepper on her eggs, that she couldn’t tolerate milk, that the heel of the bread was her favorite part. He knew she’d been to Brussels and to Florence (though not with whom); he knew that the bones of her right foot ached when the weather was wet. Her moods were changeable, but she tempered the darker ones by making jokes at her own expense, and playing silly American tunes on the phonograph, and showing Andras droll photos of her youngest students in their dance exhibition costumes. He knew that her favorite ballet was Apollo, and that her least favorite was La Sylphide, because it was over-danced and so rarely done with originality. He considered himself shamefully ignorant on the subject of dance, but Madame Morgenstern seemed not to care; she would play ballets on the phonograph and describe what would be happening onstage as the music crested and ebbed, and sometimes she rolled up the sitting-room rug and reproduced the choreography for him in miniature, her skin flushing with pleasure as she danced. In return he would take her on walks around the Marais, narrating the architectural history of the buildings among which she made her life: the sixteenth-century Hôtel Carnavalet, with its bas-reliefs of the Four Seasons; the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, whose great medusa-headed carriage doors had once opened regularly for Beaumarchais; the Guimard Synagogue on the rue Pavée, with its undulating façade like an open Torah scroll. She wondered aloud how she’d never taken note of those things before. He had pulled away a veil for her, she said, revealed a dimension of her quartier that she would never have discovered otherwise.

Despite the reassurance of the standing invitation, he lived in the fear that one Sunday he’d arrive at Madame Morgenstern’s to find another man at the table, some mustachioed captain or tweed-vested doctor or talented Muscovite choreographer-some cultivated forty-year-old with a cultural fluency that Andras could never match, and a knowledge of the things that gentlemen were supposed to know: wines, music, ways to make a woman laugh. But the terrifying rival never appeared, at least not on Sunday afternoons; that fraction of the Morgenstern week seemed to belong to Andras alone.

Outside the household on the rue de Sévigné, life went on as usual-or what had come to seem usual, within the context of his life as a student of architecture in Paris. His model progressed toward completion, its walls already cut from the stiff white pasteboard and ready for assembly. Despite the fact that it was now as large as an overcoat box, he’d begun carrying the model to and from school each day. This was due to a recent spate of vandalism, directed only, it seemed, at the Jewish students of the École Spéciale. A third-year student named Jean Isenberg had had a set of elaborate blueprints flooded with ink; a fourth-year, Anne-Laure Bauer, had been robbed of her expensive statics textbooks the week before an exam. Andras and his friends had so far escaped unscathed, but Rosen believed it was only a matter of time before one of them became a target. The professors called a general assembly and spoke sternly to the students, promising severe consequences for the perpetrators and imploring anyone with evidence to come forth, but no one volunteered any information. At the Blue Dove, Rosen advanced his own theory. Several students were known to belong to the Front de la Jeunesse and a group called Le Grand Occident, whose professed nationalism was a thin cover for anti-Semitism.

“That weasel Lemarque is a Jeunesse stooge,” Rosen said over his almond biscuits and coffee. “I’d bet he’s behind this.”

“It can’t be Lemarque,” Polaner said.

“Why not?”

Polaner flushed slightly, folding his slim white hands in his lap. “He helped me with a project.”

“He did, did he?” Rosen said. “Well, I think you’d better watch your back. That little salopard would just as soon slit your throat as bid you bonjour.”

“You won’t make friends by setting yourself against everyone,” said the politic Ben Yakov, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be to get as many people as possible to admire him, both male and female.

“Who cares?” said Rosen. “This isn’t a tea party we’re talking about.”