Paris Is Always a Good Idea Read Online Free Page A

distance while sitting on a bed in the middle of a meadow blowing at a dandelion clock whose individual parachutes transformed into little spinning letters that formed the word yearning .
    Rosalie’s wishing cards, faintly reminiscent of Raymond Peynet’s drawings, sold like hot cakes, and after a while her first customers began returning with their own suggestions and ideas.
    Of course it was mostly the usual events (birthdays, get-well wishes, gift certificates, invitations, Valentine’s Days, weddings, and Christmas or Easter greetings), but again and again there were very special requests.
    Daughters wanted something for their mothers, mothers wanted something for their sons, nieces wanted something for their aunts, grandmothers something for the grandchildren, and women something for their female friends. But the most inventive wishes came from people who had fallen in love.
    Just recently a gentleman—no longer in the bloom of youth—with silver glasses and a very correct suit had come in to the store and handed in his order. He laboriously removed a piece of paper from his leather briefcase and laid it on the counter with some embarrassment.
    â€œDo you think you can do something with this?”
    Rosalie read the words on the paper and smiled.
    â€œOh yes,” she said.
    â€œBy the day after tomorrow?”
    â€œNo problem.”
    â€œBut it must be especially beautiful.”
    â€œDon’t worry.”
    That evening she had sat down upstairs at her drawing table, where, in the light of an old black metal lamp, pens, pencils, and brushes of all sizes stood in orderly rows in thick glass preserving jars, and had drawn a man in a gray suit and a woman in a lime-green dress holding hands and—borne aloft by four fluttering doves with blue ribbons in their bills—floating in the sky over Paris.
    Finally she had taken her drawing pen and written in elaborately curving script: “For the woman I long to fly with.”
    Rosalie couldn’t have said how many of these unique works she had produced over the years. So far all her customers had walked out of the wishing-card store satisfied, and she hoped that all their wishes had hit their target as surely as Cupid’s darts pierced the hearts of people in love. But as far as her own wishes were concerned, the lovely stationer had had much less luck.
    Every year on her birthday Rosalie went to the Eiffel Tower with a card she had painted herself. Then she climbed the 704 steps that led to the second platform and, with pumping heart (she was, as we have already mentioned, by no means an ambitious mountaineer), sent the card with her wish on it sailing through the air.
    It was an innocent little ritual that not even René knew about. Rosalie was generally a great believer in little rituals. Rituals gave some shape to life and helped to put the confusion inherent in existence in some kind of order and helped one stay in control of things. The first coffee in the morning. A croissant from the boulangerie. Her daily walk with William Morris. A little tarte au citron on every uneven day of the week. The glass of red wine when she closed up the store. The wreath of forget-me-nots when she visited her father’s grave in April.
    In the evening, as she drew, she always liked to listen to the same CDs. Sometimes it was Georges Moustaki’s smoky chansons, other times the lighter touch of Coralie Clément. Recently her favorite CD had been by the Russian musician Vladimir Vysotsky. She followed the sound of the songs—sometimes lyrical, sometimes virile—whose words she didn’t understand, while the music created pictures in her head and her pens flew over the paper.
    When she was a girl, Rosalie had kept a diary to record the things that she thought important. She hadn’t done that for ages, but since she’d opened the store, Rosalie had made a habit of writing down the worst and the nicest moment of the