She told Fabrice and Jean-Paul what she suspected about the woman in the photographs.
“You’re saying she’s Fabrice’s grandmother?” Jean-Paul asked. “The woman you found in the photograph in your rabbit?”
She nodded but glanced at Fabrice. “I don’t know... I mean, I know there were rumors about your father’s legitimacy as heir, and I hate to add to them.”
“I’m so old now, it doesn’t matter anymore. But the truth is, my father knew Yves was not his natural father.”
“He did?” asked Jean-Paul.
Fabrice nodded. “After the war, when I was reunited with my father, he told me part of the story, and then I found letters at the château that helped me put together the rest. My father spent two years ina German hospital during World War I, and when he was released he had a stack of mail waiting for him. There were letters from his father, Yves, about Josephine, and what she was going through toward the end of her life. Word had reached my father before then that his mother had died in an accident, but it wasn’t until he read the letters that he understood the rumors, the gossip about her.... It was Yves’s brother, Thierry, who was the most vicious. But Thierry’s son Pierre—Jean-Paul’s great-grandfather—was almost as bad. And he passed the attitude on to his son, Gerald.”
Cady glanced at Jean-Paul, who inclined his head. “I never knew Pierre, but my grandfather has always been a mean old man, even when I was a kid. I sometimes wonder if that was why my mother gravitated toward my father; his temper seemed familiar to her.”
“They tormented Josephine and Yves for years. The night of the accident, Josephine asked Yves to help her start the steam engine of the carousel. They’d lost almost everything by then, and no longer had more than a single housemaid, so there was no one else to help her. But Yves refused, so evidently she tried to do it herself, but used the wrong kerosene—she didn’t understand there were different kinds.
“Yves had invested far too much money into commissioning the carousel, which his brother harassed him for mercilessly. So he hated the contraption by then. And on that night his mind had been poisoned by his brother’s innuendo against Josephine as well; so he suspected she was meeting a lover. After the accident, he was distraught, and essentially drank himself to death within the year.”
“So gossip destroyed them both,” said Jean-Paul.
Fabrice nodded. “Josephine had been lying all along, but not in the way her husband thought. She missed her friend Maëlle, and their time together. She was lonely, and anguished not to be able to confide in her husband about their son.”
“And this Maëlle woman was the apprentice who stayed at the château,” Cady began, “and it was she who had a baby—your father, Marc-Antoine?”
“Yes. Yves had never suspected; it was only after Josephine died that he found letters to her from Maëlle, and put it all together.”
“And you’ve known this all along?” Jean-Paul asked Fabrice.
“I’ve known for quite a while, yes. But I swore I would go to my grave vexing Gerald, at the very least. I just kept hoping he’d die before me. Those people killed my grandmother Josephine and destroyed Yves’s happiness, just as surely as they killed my Paulette.”
“But it all happened a very long time ago, Fabrice,” said Cady. “It’s not the same village anymore; there are some very kind people, people who care about you.”
“I suppose. The whole story is written down in the novel I’ve been working on. Another roman à clef, but this one has an actual key this time—and it’s a relatively straightforward narrative of my life.”
“Wouldn’t that be called a memoir?” Cady asked.
“Well, well, look at Mademoiselle Literature over here,” he said, casting her a sidelong glance. “Whatever you want to call it, it lays out the whole story, as far as I know it.”
“So you always knew that the artisan, Maëlle, was your natural grandmother?” Jean-Paul asked.
“Among the letters awaiting my father was one from his mother, telling him about Maëlle, and about the special rabbit she had carved for him. He had run off to the war without telling his parents of his plans, so she wasn’t able to fulfill her promise to Maëlle, which was to tell him about his birth mother on his eighteenth birthday.”
“Why didn’t you ever look inside the rabbit?” Cady asked.
Fabrice chuckled. “We had no idea there was actually something hiddeninsidethe rabbit—we thought her reference to a secret within the rabbit was figurative, not literal. Rabbits are the symbol of fertility, and all that. When we sold off some furnishings and such after the war, the dealer took the rabbit from the nursery by accident. My father hadn’t meant to sell it, but we did need the money at that point.”
“Do you know what ever happened to Maëlle?” Jean-Paul asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “My father searched for a while, but she wasworking as an itinerant carver, and he never found her. He tracked her down to a château in Nice where the family had her carve a niche for their chapel, and the owners there said she had gone on to another position near Bordeaux. Much later, in Josephine’s desk, I found a few letters from Maëlle postmarked San Francisco, but that was the last we heard of her.”
“She came to the U.S.?” Cady asked.
Fabrice nodded. “She sent a beautiful colored postcard to Josephine, displaying the buildings from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. She said she had found meaningful work, and more opportunity, in the ‘New World.’”
After everything that she had gone through to track down where Gus came from, Cady was amazed to think she might have walked some of the same streets as his carver, Maëlle, back in California.
“And do you know for sure who Marc-Antoine’s biological father was?” asked Jean-Paul.
“Josephine mentioned only that Maëlle was ‘friendless,’” said Fabrice, “which was a euphemism for being an unwed mother at the time.”
