"Honestly Lucien - he's like a puppy!" said Julia with a grin. "He bounds about from girl to girl, a dab of lip-gloss here, a touch more eye-liner there, always eager to be useful. If one of us waggles our fingers at him for a light, or an aspirin, or a tampon or whatever, he leaps into action like the entire House of Dior will collapse unless he gets it done."
"Ah! He sounds sweet! How old is he?" asked Lucien, pouring her another glass of white. The moules mariniere and bread had just arrived. Julia grinned at his question, half mischievous, half guilty.
"Oh dear! That's the thing! The poor babe only turned eighteen last week. It's the first job he's ever had, and he's thrilled with it. I've never met anyone so full of bounce: always happy but always in a rush. He makes me feel positively old!"
"Well, so you are, you little cradle-snatcher! I thought you liked your men a good twenty years older than you? - providing they have visible means of support pouring out of every orifice, of course."
Julia laughed, then ate another mussel. "Oh! I do! I do! But project seduce-the-boss isn't coming on too well. I've caught his eye, but I did that ages ago as you know, and it's still the only part of him I've caught. Too much damn competition, is what I put it down to."
"Competition?" said Lucien gallantly. "You don't have any competition. You're Julia. You only have to look at us and all us men are doomed."
She raised two pleased but disbelieving eyebrows. "No competition in Valdois, maybe, but this is Paris. There are fifteen pretty women right here in this restaurant, three of whom could give me a run for my money, and any minute one might walk in so inconsiderately gorgeous she makes me look like a dog's backside."
Lucien looked at her doubtfully.
"If you know of a dog's bottom that looks even remotely like you, my dear. I'd not just like to make its acquaintance, but be on deep and intimate terms."
"Just how much more intimate would you like to be, dear?" she asked, patting his nose with a piece of bread. She had a point. They met up at least twice a month on their own, and a meal and a chat was always followed by bed at either his place or hers. Both had other lovers than each other, but neither they nor the circle they moved in made much of a distinction between good friends and sexual partners. In the milieu of the Sorbonne and the Left Bank, the emphasis was on making life agreeable; to reserve oneself for 'one true love' was frowned upon as rather anti-social. They were young, and their grand passions could come later. Julia and Etienne had at least fifty friends in common, and met up far more often as part of a group than in private chats like this one. Life had been good for both of them, and was only getting better. They'd both graduated from the Sorbonne a few months earlier, and while a degree was quite enough for Julia and she was glad to be working, Lucien was still following his dream and had started his post-graduate studies.
As to her pessimistic outlook on the chances of hooking Xavier de la Fontaine, it was reasonably well founded. He had a lovely wife, a stunning mistress, and a Moroccan girl was kept at all times on his yacht, whether it was moored along the Cote d'Azur, in Capri or Tangiers. He owned the fashion magazine Julia now worked on, and had extensive interests both in France and the Near East. His family was not properly ancienne like Julia's, but some enterprising predecessor had put his finger in the pie after the monarchy was overthrown, investing his ill-gotten gains to fabulous effect in armaments and spices and the last years of the slave trade. He still owned a crusader castle in Alexandria and a palatial mansion outside Casablanca but, preferring Paris and his villa on the Cote D'azur, he only used them for a month or two each year.
"So how many times has Fontaine called in at the office since I last saw you?"
"Precisely once," pouted Julia. "And even then, we minions hardly get a look-in. He just breezes into the editor's lair, while all of us break out in a fight about which of us is going to bring their coffee. It's pitiful, Lucien, it really is; about nine of them rush off to the Ladies to preen themselves and check their make-up, then stick their chests out at him when he finally emerges. I even saw Claudia fish a random file out of the lowest drawer of her filing cabinet. It was so embarrassingly obvious it made us cringe; even Fontaine noticed it and smiled."
"Dear-dear," tutted Lucien with a sparkle in his eye. "You'd never stoop so low, of course."
"Of course!" she grinned back. "I rely on nothing but my natural charm and personality."
"Really? When did you get those?"
"I acquired them at birth, thank-you-very-much, not like all you peasants down the hill."
"Thank you for your insult, M'am. God knows we need them - they're all we have to eat down here." So saying, he respectfully doffed a cap which wasn't there. Julia's high birth had been a source of much hilarity at the Sorbonne, and still was amongst their group of friends. In less radical circles however, that portion of society which shaved, it added that little something extra to a girl who was already special.
The boeuf bourguignon was good here. Lucien had to watch his pennies, and she liked watching him tuck in. The bill would be on her and always was, but that was not an issue for her or him either; his day would come, and it had long been agreed the day he got his professorship he would get a bank-loan and take her for a five-course feast at Maxim's. Her papa had always been more generous with his love than with his chequebook, and her allowance throughout her Sorbonne years had been spartan, but it had still been double what most of her comrades lived on. To live on the cheap and still live well; that was an art, and they were artists at it. On being given a staff job on the The Look of France a few weeks earlier, she'd abandoned the modelling and catwalk work which had helped see her through university. Now, with a decent salary plus daddy's monthly pittance, she was doing fine.
"Ah! That was good," sighed Lucien, pouring both of them some more cheap red. He didn't add a '...and thank you for the meal,' because she had more cash than he did and therefore it was only right. Not only was she used to it by now, she felt the same way too. Life was a big party to which everyone had been invited, but in the view of Paris under thirty, the best party of them all by far would be to up sticks generally and have a revolution. Policemen had been put on earth to have things thrown at them, and those who demurred were either square or fascist and had somehow failed to grasp their Trotsky.
"So why does Fontaine want a classy intellectual magazine like yours? For someone who owes his money to making cannons for Napoleon, it seems an odd investment, surely?"
"Well, he's owned it for years. I've hardly spoken ten words to him, but by all accounts you're right -- it's a sort of chip-on-the-shoulder thing. His real money comes from armaments and god-knows-what, but he's also got the most prestigious mag in the country. He loves style and fashion and food and culture -- the French way generally -- and it puts him at the centre of all that. He's forceful and magisterial and built like an ox, with a voice so deep you think you feel it in your chest, so maybe the mag is the nearest he can get to having a feminine side. And if you think about it, an office-full of extremely well-presented women, all very much belonging to that world, all either scared witless of him or wishing he would notice them or both -- well, it isn't the worst place for an industrial magnate to hang out for an hour or two, is it?"
