THE house in Paris to which Sabine and Richard Callendar returned after their honeymoon stood in the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. It belonged, properly speaking, to Thérèse herself, an enormous florid house of white stone built in the baroque German style which came to dominate the new parts of Paris in the early part of the twentieth century. In all honesty it could be said that Thérèse was not responsible either for its architecture or its decoration; the house came to her in partial payment for the loans she had made a year or two before the mysterious collapse of the international banking firm, Wolff and Simon. It had been the property of Wolff, and Thérèse, examining it one day shortly after the transfer to her possession, decided that it would suit her admirably as a pied-à-terre in Paris. Instead of turning it into cash she kept it and used it, unchanged, during her visits.
Wolff, in the heyday of his prosperity (long before he shot himself after fleeing half-way across Europe from such tender creditors as Thérèse) had fancied himself as a collector of art. The house remained as a monument to his bad judgment in this matter; in a German fashion he had absorbed quantities of sentimental pictures and rococo bronzes that hung or stood on marble pedestals between enormous second-rate tapestries. All pieces of any value had vanished long ago when Wolff, in a frantic effort to save the collapse of his firm, had summoned a dealer who stripped the place of its Degas, its Rodins, and even the Seurat and the Rousseau which a mistress had led Wolff into buying against his will because she thought it chic to "buy moderns." All that remained were remnants, grandiose, vulgar and sentimental, among which Thérèse Callendar moved and lived with as great an indifference as she displayed toward the solid house on Murray Hill. The vast mass of marble and tapestry satisfied, it seemed, an Oriental longing for pomp and splendor. All that was Greek in her and much that was
