Lucy Crown

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AT THAT MOMENT, IN a good many of the bars and night clubs of the city, people were singing, “I love Paris in the Springtime, I love Paris in the Fall …” It was two o’clock in the morning, in the month of July, in the year 1955; champagne was being sold at eight thousand francs a bottle, and the singers were working hard to convince the tourists that being in Paris was worth eight thousand francs a bottle.

It was a colored man, with a broad, industrious Harlem face who was singing it as though he meant it, sitting at the yellowish piano at the back of the long narrow room, when the woman came in through the door. She hesitated a moment, checked by the blare of sound and the stares of the drinkers at the bar near the entrance. Then the owner came over, smiling, because the woman was clearly an American, and well dressed and not drunk.

“Good evening,” he said in English. He spoke English because his bar was in the eighth arrondissement and a high proportion of his clientele, at least in the summertime, was American. “Madame is alone?”

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