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our spirit of individualism.”
    Evelyn had grown up in a family that had once been wealthy, an old shipping family. Her grandfather May had turned out to be a drunk and a gambler. He lost everything but his sense of distinction. It had formed her politics and her work ethic. And her machine of judgment. Evelyn had confessed she thought Pascale was pompous, a phony who had grown up poor and now carried herself like a baroness. “Individualism, after the Second World War? Please do tell me more about that.”
    To run off the cake and to avoid boring her with politics before a boring hour of television politics, Kruse took Lily outside.
    Before the flood, they had a routine. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the Kruse family would walk to Place Montfort and visit the bakery for pain au chocolat, croissants, or maybe brioche with a spotof jam. The baker-politician-landlord would walk out from behind the counter to move a strand of blonde hair and kiss Lily on the forehead, leaving a trail of flour. Here, Kruse became comfortable with synonyms for “beautiful”:
belle, jolie, ravissante, superbe.
Other mornings, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kruse volunteered at Boulangerie J.F.
    The de Musset garden was spread out and concentrated in pockets of the best sun: ripe tomatoes grew here, lemons there. The fig tree had produced lovely fruit that Kruse would carry home from the bakery, his payment, after his mornings around the oven. After only a month in school Lily understood everything and she was learning the singsong Provençal accent:
Bonjour-uh. Au revoir-uh.
School, she said, was
chouette-uh.
When she played with the toys they had packed for her, she made nasal sounds—French sounds—if not words. They hunted for cicadas in the shrubbery around the de Musset house and failed to find any. They played hide-and-seek,
cache-cache.
Lily could not remain hidden for longer than a minute without giggling or singing, betraying herself. Hiding in silence made her lonesome and scared. The heat of the day had collapsed into the cool of the early October night. They inspected the grapes, which were just about ready to be picked. In neighbouring villages, the big harvest party—the
vendange
—had already begun.
    Lily wore a grey cotton dress with short sleeves and her arms were covered in goosebumps. Kruse took her hand and led her back into the house.
    There was a musical introduction and then Bernard Pivot. Pascale had explained about the famous man: he was a socialist, surely, if not a communist, but a very smart and curious one. The moment the camera revealed Jean-François, Lily screamed and clapped. Evelyn gave her an ultimatum. If she did not remain quiet for this very important show she and Papa would walk home early together. Lily promised—if, if, she could have one more tiny sliver of chocolate cake.
    Pivot put on and removed his reading glasses with startling honesty. Much of what they discussed was beyond Kruse, who knew little andcared little about French, or any, politics, but the theme was clear. Most thinking people would say the Front National, since its birth in 1972, has been a race-obsessed party with a limited view on who is and is not sufficiently French. Yet many of those Jean-François had helped rescue from the wreckage on September 22, often at personal risk, were North Africans and gypsies. Pivot contrasted the baker-politician’s heroism with the reputation of the Front National as isolationist, anti-Europe, and anti-intellectual.
    “Aunty?” said Lily.
    Evelyn shushed her. “
Anti
is ‘against.’ We’ll explain later.”
    On TV they spoke for twenty minutes about the soul of France and how it too might be rescued. Pivot, it turned out, was also a nostalgist. He remembered the thirty glorious years after the Second World War with as much affection, and melancholy, as Jean-François. They remembered growing up in this enchanted place, where French people were French people and where immigrants—there