Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 10: The Riviera
TheCitroën H van was faded blue with a cracked windshield and the words BOULANGERIE DIALLO still faintly visible on the side. It had belonged to Moussa’s cousin, who had used it to deliver bread until it became, in the cousin’s words, “too tired for bread.” It had four bald tires, a heater that didn’t work, but the radio did. There was a hole in the floor in the back the size of a baseball where you could watch the road go by.
It burned oil. It left a trail of blue smoke behind it like a crop duster. Every time they stopped for petrol, they had to add oil. They kept a supply of oil cans rattling around in the back next to the dragon.
The dragon had come along. Odette could not bear to leave it behind. It was folded up in the back of the van on top of their bags and guitars and Mireille’s easel and paint box. Its enormous papier-mâché head, with its bicycle-lamp eyes, rode with its snout pressed against the rear windows, gazing out at the receding road.
There were four of them: Raphaël driving, with a cigarette hanging off his lip and his long hair tied back; Odette beside him with her bare feet on the dashboard, singing along to Johnny Hallyday. Conner and Mireille squeezed onto the bench seat behind, with the hole in the floor between their feet.
They left Paris on the first of December, early, in a thin, cold rain, and took the old Route Nationale 7 south, because Raphaël said the motorway was for bankers and the Nationale 7 was for poets. It took them four days. It should have taken one. They broke down outside Fontainebleau, and again outside Auxerre, and spent a night in Mâcon because the rain came down so hard that the windshield wipers gave up entirely and Raphaël could not see the road.
They got lost in the Beaujolais and ate dinner with a family of wine growers who took them in out of pity, feeding them coq au vin and making them sing for their supper, which they did, all four of them, around the kitchen table, until two in the morning. They drove down the Rhône valley through Valence and Montélimar.
At Orange, they stopped to look at the great Roman theater. Raphaël stood on the ancient stage in the cold wind and recited the whole of Hamlet’s third soliloquy to three bewildered goats and a German couple. He received a round of applause from everybody except the goats.
Somewhere south of Avignon, the rain stopped, the clouds broke, and the light changed.
Conner had never been to the south. He had read about it. He had imagined it. None of it prepared him for the moment the van came over the crest of a hill in Provence in the late afternoon and the whole world warmed somehow. The sky was an impossible, depthless blue. The hills were silver-green with olive trees.
There were red-tiled roofs and pale stone walls and the smell of wild thyme and pine.
Mireille, beside him, had gone completely silent. She had her sketchbook open on her knees but was not drawing in it. She was just looking.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” said Conner.
They looked at each other and did not need to say anything else.
On the evening of the fourth day, they arrived at Antibes. The Mediterranean stretched out below them, violet in the dusk.
Raphaël pulled over and they all got out. They stood in the cool evening air and looked at the sea.
Odette, ever the practical one, broke the spell. “Where on earth are we going to sleep?”
It turned out, as things often did around Conner, not to be a problem. Two weeks before, on one of the last days of the Théâtre Souterrain, a very old woman had stood at the back of the crowd at Montparnasse, in enormous dark glasses and a leopard-skin coat and a turban, leaning on a silver-headed cane, and watched an entire murder mystery from start to finish.
Later, she gave Conner a card, with her name engraved on it and an address written underneath in violet ink, and said, in a smoky voice:
“If you’re ever in the south, young man, come and see me. I’m terribly, terribly bored.”
The name on the card was Olympia Batellier.
Conner suggested he had a possibility. He passed the card to Raphaël and Odette. Raphaël instantly recognized the name and almost drove them off the road.
“Olympia Batellier,” he said in a voice of awe. “Olympia Batellier. Do you know who she is? She was the greatest star in France. In the thirties. In the forties. She made sixty films. Every Frenchman over fifty was in love with her.” He stared at the card. “She’s been hiding for years. Everybody thought she was dead.”
“She didn’t look dead to me,” Conner said. “She looked bored.”
The address on the card was a villa on Cap d’Antibes.
It was called the Villa Mimosa. It stood at the end of a long, crumbling, cypress-lined drive; a sprawling, faded pink monstrosity of a house, with arched windows and wrought-iron balconies, and cracked marble steps. The garden around it was full of palms and bougainvillea and umbrella pines.
The van came up the drive trailing blue smoke and backfired twice under the portico.
The front door opened.
Olympia Batellier stood at the top of the marble steps in a floor-length dressing gown of peacock-blue silk, with a matching turban, holding a glass of champagne with a Pekingese under one arm.
She was very small and very thin with enormous black-rimmed eyes that could still, at eighty years old, hold you in place.
She looked at the van. She looked at the four of them climbing out, rumpled and oily and blinking in the dusk.
“Ah,” said Olympia Batellier, in her voice like smoke and champagne. “The Count has arrived.”
“Madame,” said Conner, and bowed.
“You brought your wife.”
“And her second husband,” said Conner. “And her sister. And a dragon. I hope that’s all right.”
Olympia came down the steps, slowly, one at a time, leaning on her silver cane, until she was standing directly in front of Conner.
“Young man,” she said. “I have been bored in this house for twenty-two years. I have seen every film ever made and I feel like I have been in most of them. A dragon is precisely what is needed. Come in. There are thirty-one bedrooms. Pick any you like. Dinner is at nine. I’ll have Bastien open the Krug.”
They stayed all winter.
Conner thought the Villa Mimosa was the strangest and most wonderful house he had ever been in. It was enormous, and falling to pieces, and full of treasures. There were Matisse drawings hung in the lavatories. There was a Steinway in the salon that had been played by Rachmaninoff at a party in 1931 and had not been tuned since.
There was a ballroom with a painted ceiling and half the plaster fallen off; a library of thousands of books; a theatre in the basement with red velvet seats and a real projector where, on rainy nights, Olympia ran her old films.
She had stories about every one of them.
“That man,” she would say, pointing her cigarette holder at the screen, where some handsome actor in a flying helmet was clasping her young self to his chest, “was a pig. And that director was a sadist and incompetent as well. Look at my eyes there. See? I’ve been crying for four hours. He made me do twenty-one takes.”
She adored Odette, who sang for her in the evenings, playing the out-of-tune Steinway.
“Child, if I’d had your voice, I’d never have had to take my clothes off in Le Jardin des Délices.”
She adored Raphaël, whom she coached relentlessly in the old style: diction, posture, the use of the eyes, how to die on stage without falling like a sack of potatoes. “You’re a peasant, darling. A gorgeous peasant. So was Gabin. It never did him any harm.”
She adored Mireille, who, over the course of three months, painted her in the peacock gown. She made her look eighty-one and magnificent. Olympia made her promise to hang the portrait in the Louvre someday, “next to that simpering Italian woman.”
But she adored Conner most of all:
On the first night, a glass of Krug in hand, they all sat at the long table in the dining room under the chandelier with half its crystals missing.
She had asked him who he was.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.