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"Hugo and I are down that hall," Olga said on the second-floor landing, "with Élodie next door."
"I have a train set," Élodie said. "Maman set it up for me. It runs all the way under the bed." She squeezed my hand to punctuate her point.
Many of the ten bedrooms, Olga said as we went up the next flight, remained in the same triste état, or sad state, in which they'd been when she inherited the manor. "Thus all of the closed doors." She was determined, she said, to hold on to the house and the grounds, but the upkeep of a property like this one cost a fortune.
"If you hear thumping at night, don't fear ghosts," Hugo said. "It's only the pipes."
On the third floor, we walked into a room big as my entire apartment in Back Bay.
"Et voilà," Olga said, "votre petit coin de paradis."
French doors, open like most of the windows in the house, led to a balcony with a view of the forest. I could imagine a gilded dressing table and four-poster bed, although the current décor consisted of a vinyl armoire that closed with a zipper and a lumpy, high bed covered with a paisley duvet.
"It's the prettiest room," Olga said. "It was mine for years."
Hugo set down my bags. "Vous n'êtes pas dépressive, j'espère. We specifically requested a young woman in good mental health."
"Stop that, Hugo," Olga said. Once, she explained to me matter-of-factly, the lady of the house had jumped off the balcony, where Élodie had gone and was now calling to me to come join her. "Madame Léger had been in her youth a famous courtesan, a grande horizontale of the Second Empire. She was forty when she died. It was said that she hadn't taken well to the aging process."
"It might have only been meant as a dramatic gesture," Hugo said. "She had a réputation de folle. It is only three stories. Only she landed poorly and broke her neck."
"Don't worry," I said, as I went to join Élodie. "I grew up in the Midwest. We don't go crazy."
"Hemingway aside," Hugo said.
I had tried to be clever and he had outclevered me. I was used to this kind of behavior from men in academia. I was a good student of French—solid in my verbal constructions, even the plus-que-parfait, versed in the gender distinctions of nouns. My accent was passable. My graduate school papers on Flaubert's love letters and the symbol of the corset in the nineteenth-century novel received As. But I was not brilliant. I would have preferred in some ways to be terrible.
Outside, Élodie stood on her tiptoes on the balcony, looking over the iron railing, which was supported by spindles that looped and twisted in a rusted web.
Excerpted from The Balcony by Jane Delury. Copyright © 2018 by Jane Delury. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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