Despite Parisian snobbery, which wrote off the Seventeenth as the poor man’s Sixteenth—“très Dix-septième” was the chic set’s ultimate damnation—Capucine thought it was one of the most pleasant neighborhoods in Paris, filled with spacious apartments overlooking broad, tree-lined avenues. The apartment turned out to be well lighted and spacious, with a view of the grassed-over rail bed of the abandoned little train that had puffed around Paris’s perimeter in the days prior to World War II. The flat was filled with sleek inexpensive Ikea furniture contrasted by the occasional heavily ornate Louis Philippe piece, testimony to Karine’s share of an inheritance from previous generations of prosperous bourgeois that had undoubtedly consisted more of manners and taste than hard assets. Karine was in her late forties, unselfconsciously rejoicing in her svelte figure, carefully dressed in a pencil skirt and a striking, flowered silk blouse. Genuinely curious, Capucine asked her where she had purchased it.
