Héloïse sits pensively. Then, glancing at her watch, she gasps. It is 11:30. She is going to be late for her meeting at the conservatory.
“Hubert, could you go over these papers with Georgette? I’ll be seeing my mother when she comes back on Saturday and then visiting my grandmother in Paris for the rest of the weekend. I’ll tell you what we’ve decided on Monday.”
She rises quickly, and leaves Hubert sitting there looking deflated and somber.
MONDAY. 10 A.M. Héloïse is once again on the way to the factory, but this time she takes the main road, the one that doesn’t snake along the hillside. She has also set out later this morning because she wants everything to go differently than the previous week. She secretly hopes she will find Thierry’s car in the parking lot when she gets there.
She has had a trying weekend. She and her mother spoke more that Saturday than they had in the past fifteen years. It was as though her mother was becoming a different person. They met at her place just after she returned from the health spa. Her relaxed, serene expression encouraged Héloïse to tell her everything that was going on with the company. Her mother listened coolly, and had only one response.
“Do whatever you want with the company, Héloïse. It was your father’s, and now it’s up to you to decide what’s best. You mustn’t feel that you owe anything to your parents. Today, as they say, is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Héloïse sat speechless at this. Juliette served the tea and, in a calm voice as though she were speaking of someone else, proceeded to tell her daughter about how life had been with her husband with the company between them. How being able to spend twenty-four hours a day by her husband’s side had seemed like a blessing during the early years of their marriage. She had quit playing the piano to become his accountant and had felt no regrets. The logic of numbers had quickly replaced scales and chord patterns in her affections. Then Héloïse was born, and Juliette, as the boss’s wife, had the luxury of balancing her administrative and accounting responsibilities with her duties as a mother. She sometimes brought Héloïse to the factory when the nanny was not available, which amused the employees. They often came to admire the baby when they had a break.
But, as the company’s product mix increased, the number of employees grew and so did the complexity of Juliette’s administrative work. Hubert, who had become head of sales, was bringing in more and more orders. Because of this, Juliette needed more and more help from a certified accountant, which irritated her husband. Henri became more and more tight-fisted as the company’s financial situation spiraled out of his control. He had already poured all of his resources into the company. Even his mother-in-law’s substantial contribution had not been enough when the time came to buy new machines. Henri had had to borrow money and was ultimately forced to mortgage their house.
Juliette had suggested that she study to earn certification as an accountant. By gaining these skills, she would be saving the company the cost of outside expertise. The return on investment seemed obvious to her but not to her husband, for whom the slightest expense was like a form of torture.
Henri Rami, who was entirely self-taught as a businessman and proud of it, had decided he did not believe in the value of continuing education. He had made it without anyone else’s help, he was fond of saying, and it was up to others to do the same, including his wife. She dared to respond with a wistful smile that not everyone, thank goodness, was like him, or the world would be overpopulated with CEOs. Henri had conveniently forgotten that at the core of his business were the woodworking skills he learned as a young man from his craftsman father. He invariably finished by saying: “Good luck only comes to those who deserve it.”
Juliette wasn’t like her husband. She had taken enormous pleasure in learning new pieces of music with different teachers who opened her up to different nuances of tone. She was terribly hurt by this refusal by her “boss” and grew increasingly depressed. She had already sacrificed her thirst for perfection in music and had no intention of doing the same in her substitute profession.
Gradually she chose to be shrewd, becoming less and less efficient at the office. It soon became necessary to hire an assistant, someone who rapidly became indispensable. Juliette chose a competent successor, who soon gained an essential skill that she herself had lost: the ability to admire Henri Rami unreservedly. This successor, Georgette, soon replaced Juliette in holding the financial purse strings of the company, and when the latter told her husband she’d return to the piano to help Héloïse with her musical studies, Henri Rami didn’t so much as blink.
Juliette never forgave him for this indifference. From that day, their relationship became that of mere housemates.
This deterioration in her parents’ relationship had affected Héloïse since she was fifteen. She became determined to gain financial independence as soon as possible, so that she could move out of the family home. But to hear now, all at once, how her parents had come to that impasse, and especially to discover her mother’s real personality, was overwhelming.
To change the subject, she finally brought up the disappearance of Thierry. Her mother seemed somewhat hesitant and a little confused when the topic was broached. In Juliette’s opinion, it was very important to understand as quickly as possible what had happened to him.
“The whole thing’s a bit mysterious,” she added, apparently not wanting to say more. She proposed that she talk directly to Pierre, the brother of Paul, the mechanic who fixed up old cars and who had repaired Héloïse’s old Fiat 500. Pierre was a unique man who had been more fortunate than his brother. He had joined the police force at a young age and had done very well there. Recently retired, he would no doubt be happy to help Héloïse find out what had happened.
In the meantime, Juliette asked Héloïse to convene an extraordinary board meeting of the shareholders, in order to name Héloïse as chairperson of the board in Juliette’s place. As such, Héloïse would be able to sign all necessary papers by herself. This would be Juliette’s final act as part of the H. Rami company.
When Héloïse left, she felt drained but also somewhat relieved to see her mother so determined to turn the page and start afresh. She knew that from now on, she would no longer speak with her mother about decisions concerning the business. Now, she must see her grandmother who, as a shareholder, would have to approve such decisions in any case.
She caught the last express train of the day. The high-speed train, the TGV, ensured that in less than two hours she was sitting on the sofa in her grandmother’s apartment at 38 Lubeck Street, a nineteenth-century, Hausmannian-style apartment situated in the heart of Paris. Its windows on the third floor—the chic one—offered an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower.
Comfortably ensconced on the leopard-skin cushions, Héloïse told her grandmother the whole story. Geneviève, a Parisian through and through, spoke with the candor of those women who have had enough life experience to allow themselves an opinion on everything. That which she had not lived personally she had experienced vicariously through the countless films she had seen and books she had read, especially since she had retired from her artistic career more than twenty years ago.
She listened attentively to her granddaughter, and then burst forth. “You modern women! You have opportunities that no women in history have ever had. You can live your lives as housewives or happily single, as artists or business leaders, and no one will ever question your choice. In your place, ma chérie, a man would feel obliged to rise to the challenge, lest he be taken for a coward. You have the skills to run this business, at least for as long as it takes to find a buyer who will give you a good price and to assure your mother’s financial future—which, frankly, isn’t looking too good at the moment. If I were you, I’d give it a try. You’ve got to try everything at least once in this life to find out what it is you really