larity in every woman he painted, the glow of her coloring as he first saw her. A pale bees-wax luster from which emerged the ochre-white skin, amber eyes, henna hair, and the exaggerated black form of the dress. This time he had her, and he need never paint her again. Memory was better than the object before your eye. Now she was in New York but he need not see her until the canvas was finished—though he wanted her.
Vermillion did not telephone Simone.
Chapter 24
MA DOUCE ANNETTE
High up under a painted Heaven where Eros sported with a not-too-garlanded Venus amid rosy clouds, and against a soft blue wall emblazoned with golden fleur de lys, bare-breasted Diane de Poitiers, occasional mistress of French kings, father and son, and others, sat in a gold frame and surveyed with complacent smile the long rectangular room below named after her chateau at Chennonceaux. Lining the walls under the gilded laurel molding on the same level to Diane's right and left hung her successors, the Mesdames d'Estrees, Montespan, du Barry, Pompadour, La Vallière and so on miscellaneously along the apparently inexhaustible but unacademic line through the court of the first Napoleon.
The living world began halfway down the two long sides where ran narrow candelabraed balconies reserved for mortals dining à deux. On the rose-carpeted floor under the balconies were grey plush banquettes, and around the small dancing space, marked off with a rose plush cord, were circled white tables, a tricolor ensemble bringing France from its past royal state above to the Republican present.
This was unintended symbolism as Piselli, the proprietor, regarded the Chennonceaux as elevation into the upper crust for himself and two sons, approaching Princeton. Proud of the spectacular rapidity of his rise in the land of free enterprise as No. 1 Bootlegger, Piselli had noticed the standoffishness of society customers and had hit on the Chennonceaux as his open sesame. Only time and a little
