Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 11: The Theater in the Pines
By the middle of March there were thirty of them at the Villa Mimosa.
They had trickled in. Raphaël had written to a friend in Paris, who told a friend over a drink in a café on the Rue de Buci. The word went through the actors’ world of Paris:
Olympia Batellier has a pink villa on Cap d’Antibes with thirty-one bedrooms and she’s taking in strays.
They arrived by train and walked out along the cape with their suitcases. They arrived in the backs of farmers’ trucks. One arrived on a Vespa from Lyon with a double bass strapped to his back.
Chantal, the girl who had been killed twenty times in the Théâtre Souterrain, came down in a borrowed Renault with three other girls from the Comédie-Française chorus, and wept with joy when the others greeted her at the door.
Madame Vasseur, the eighty-one-year-old contralto who had haunted the corridors at Pyramides, arrived by first-class sleeper, with four trunks, because Olympia had sent her the ticket. The two old women, it turned out, had been rivals in 1929, and fell into each other’s arms on the front steps and did not stop talking for days.
Mireille’s painter friends from the Beaux-Arts came.
The Villa Mimosa swallowed them all. It was built for it. It had been built, in 1911, by a Russian grand duke for a party that was supposed to last the whole of the season. It seemed to Conner, watching the house fill up again after twenty-two years, that it had simply been waiting all this time for the party to come back to it.
But thirty artists are a great many mouths and none of them had any money. Bastien, the ancient butler, the ancient cook, and the ancient gardener Fernand, who were between them nearly two hundred and fifty years old, could not possibly feed and clean for all of them. By the end of the first week, the kitchen was a mess and the bathrooms a scandal.
So one evening, Conner went quietly down to the butler’s pantry. Bastien was polishing silver. He was tall and thin, and he had worked for Olympia Batellier since 1937.
Conner closed the door behind him.
“Monsieur Bastien, I’d like to ask you to do something for me, but do it quietly.”
The old man looked up with his watery eyes and waited.
Conner took an envelope out of his jacket. He had been to the American Express office in Cannes that afternoon, cashing a great many traveler’s checks.
“Hire some people,” he said. “Two cooks and a dishwasher. Some women to clean. Somebody to do the laundry. Somebody to help Fernand in the garden. As many as it takes. Pay them better than well.” He put the envelope on the little table where the silver lay. “And when this runs out, come and tell me, and I will get you more.”
Bastien looked at the envelope. He did not open it. He looked at Conner.
“Madame will want to know where it comes from.”
“Madame knows where it comes from. She’s the only one who does. The others don’t. I’d like to keep it that way. Tell them Madame is paying. She won’t mind. She’ll enjoy it.”
Bastien regarded him for a long moment with an expression that Conner could not read. Then, very slowly, the old man set down the soup tureen he had been polishing, folded his cloth, and put the envelope inside his black waistcoat.
“Monsieur,” he said, “in thirty-eight years in this house, I have seen a great many rich men come through that door. Princes. Bankers. An Aga Khan. Two American senators. Every one of them wanted the whole of the Riviera to know how much money he had. You are the first who has ever asked me to hide it.”
“You find that strange?”
“Very,” said Bastien. “It will be done by Thursday.”
And it was.
Soon the pantry was full, and three sisters from a village in the hills behind Grasse produced vast quantities of bouillabaisse, daube, ratatouille, and bread from a wood-fired oven that Fernand had cleaned out. Three women with mops and buckets restored the bathrooms and the rest of the house.
A fifteen-year-old boy named Loulou arrived to help Fernand with the garden. The artists never asked where they had come from. They probably never noticed. They assumed, as Conner had known they would, that it was Olympia’s hospitality. They toasted her at dinner every night under the chandelier. Olympia accepted the toasts with regal grace. Every once in a while, she’d catch her “son’s” eye from across the long table and wink.
But then they got bored.
It took about ten days. It is a peculiar fact about artists, Conner was learning, that they will tell you their dearest dream in all the world is to lie in the sun with nothing to do, and that when you give it to them, they will be climbing the walls within a week.
They lay on the terraces and smoked Fernand’s excellent grass and drank wine from the grand duke’s cellar. They played cards and made love and quarreled and made up and wrote poems and partied in the ballroom until four in the morning.
And every one of them, sooner or later, would wander out onto the terrace, and look at the sea, and sigh, and say, “Well. It’s not the same as it was in the Métro, is it?”
It wasn’t. The Théâtre Souterrain had been the most fun they had ever had plying their craft, and they all missed it: the crowds, the chaos, the tin cup, the sheer mad joy of making something out of nothing in front of strangers.
Raphaël was the worst. He paced the ballroom and the terraces and the long corridors of the villa like a tiger in a zoo.
“I am rotting,” he announced at dinner one night. “My art is rotting in paradise. This is how it ends, pickled in sunshine.”
Olympia, on the other hand, was not bored at all.
She had changed. The first time Conner had seen her, at the back of the crowd at Montparnasse, she had been a tiny, stooped, wrinkled old woman in dark glasses, leaning on a cane.
Now, at the end of March, she was still eighty-one. But she stood straight. She often walked without the cane she usually carried like a field marshal’s baton. She came down to dinner every night dressed to the nines: silk and velvet and sequins she had not worn since the war. She had begun, very carefully, with Chantal’s help, to wear makeup again, and she had had her white hair cut and set by a man from Cannes whose father had done Grace Kelly’s hair on the set of To Catch a Thief. She had thrown away her dark glasses entirely.
She looked and acted twenty years younger. She had discovered that she could still make a room full of people do exactly what she wanted by lifting one eyebrow, and it had gone to her head like champagne.
It was Olympia who announced, on the last Saturday in March, that she was going shopping.
“In Juan-les-Pins. It’s the season. Everyone will be there. And I have not bought a new dress forever.” She pointed her cane at Odette. “You’re coming. You need a dress. That skirt has been patched so many times it’s more patch than skirt.” The cane moved to Conner. “And you, mon fils, will carry the parcels.”
“Yes, Maman.”
“And bring the guitar.”
“Why?”
Olympia Batellier smiled her mysterious smile.
“Because,” she said, “I have a feeling.”
Juan-les-Pins was a small resort town on the other side of the cape from Antibes, built up in the twenties around a crescent of golden beach and a grove of enormous umbrella pines. It had been, in its day, one of the most fashionable places on the Riviera. Americans and English came in the Jazz Age to dance all night and swim at dawn.
These days, yachts still came to anchor in the harbor at Port Vauban—some of them the size of small hotels. They flew the flags of Greece and Saudi Arabia and Panama and the Cayman Islands.
There were rich women in furs walking tiny dogs and men in white trousers and blue blazers smoking Cuban cigars. And loads of tourists from the cold countries delighted in the sun: great number of blond Scandinavian families. Danish girls on bicycles. English couples of a certain age with sensible hats and sunburned knees.
And giggling girls from secretarial colleges and finishing schools on break who were in search of scandalous adventures.
The shopping district featured boutiques and jewelers and cafés and perfumeries running back from the sea. And directly across from the best of them was the Pinède: a grove of umbrella pines, old and gnarled, their flat dark crowns meeting overhead filtering the light coming through into golden shafts.
“Wait here,” said Olympia, at the door of a boutique so exclusive that it did not have its name on the window. “This may take some time. Odette, come. Take off those disgusting sandals. You’re about to meet Madame Solène.”
The door closed behind them with a discreet chime.
Conner stood on the pavement with the guitar case in his hand. He looked at the boutique. He looked across the boulevard at the pine grove, with its golden light, its benches, and some old men playing boules.
He crossed the street and sat on the edge of a dry fountain at the edge of the Pinède.
He opened the case at his feet, took out Louis Bertin’s old Selmer, and tuned it. Then he looked up at the boulevard, at the parade of the season going past—the furs and the blazers and the sunburned knees—and thought:
Well. Let’s see.
He began with something quiet and old: an Italian tune he had learned at school. Nobody stopped. That was all right. He played it through, and then another. The boules players looked up and nodded. An old woman and a child stopped to stare.
A group of girls stopped to watch. Five of them, all about twenty. They had come from the beach, all in a laughing, sunburned cluster, dressed in light summer dresses. Two were very tall and very blond, with the look of Scandinavians. One was small and red-haired and freckled and, when she spoke, which she did constantly, unmistakably Scottish. One was dark and elegant with a Louis Vuitton bag. And the last was a round, cheerful, gum-chewing girl with a ponytail and a Texas accent.
They stopped and nudged each other and whispered, and one of the blond girls said something in Swedish that made the other blond girl shriek.
And Conner, who had been warned by Margot, and taught by Josephine, and loved by Sara, looked up at them with his clear blue eyes, and smiled.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said, in English, strumming. “Where are you from?”
“Sweden,” said the tall blond girls together.
“Glasgow!” said the redhead.
“Paris,” said the elegant one.
“Amarillo, Texas,” said the round girl, and popped her gum.
“And what are your names?”
They told him. The Swedes were Ingrid and Astrid. The Glaswegian was Fiona. The Parisian was Delphine. The Texan was Bobbie-Lynn.
Conner nodded, then he struck a big, bright, open chord and began to sing, to a jaunty tune that he made up on the spot, somewhere between a sea shanty and a drinking song:
Oh, I sailed from Stockholm harbor on a herring boat to France,
For Ingrid had a sister, and her sister wouldn’t dance;
So I sang to Astrid nightly till my fingers bled and cramped,
But she said she’d only kiss a man whose socks had never damped!
So I went up north to Glasgow, where the rain comes down like lead,
And I met a girl called Fiona with a halo round her head:
It was red, it was bright red, it was like a burning bush,
And she threw me in the Clyde because I asked her for a push!
“I never!” cried Fiona, with delighted shock. “I’d never!”
Then Delphine in the Rue de Rivoli, she looked me up and down,
And she said, “Monsieur, your shoes are wrong, you’re dressed just like a clown”;
So I bought a pair from Gucci and I bought a hat from Dior,
And she laughed and said, “Not those, you fool,” and saw me out the door!
Delphine, the elegant Parisian, tried very hard to maintain her dignity, and failed, blushing to her hairline.
By now a crowd had gathered. Not a big one, not yet: twenty, thirty people, drifting in off the boulevard and out of the pines. Nannies with prams. Two English couples in sensible hats. A family of Danes. A man in a blue blazer with gold buttons, who had stopped with an expression of patrician disapproval and hadn’t left.
Conner saved the Texan for last.
But the girl I love the dearest, and I’ll love her till I die,
Is a girl from Amarillo with a gleam in her eye;
She can rope a steer at sixty yards and chew gum all the while,
And her name is Bobbie-Lynn, and she’s the reason I still smile!
Bobbie-Lynn put both hands over her heart and swooned backward into the arms of Ingrid and Astrid, and the crowd, all thirty of them, burst into applause.
Conner stood up and bowed. It was, he thought, one of the silliest things he had done in recent memory.
He was having the time of his life.
Across the boulevard, the boutique door chimed.
Olympia Batellier came out onto the pavement in a new silk coat the color of an oyster shell, carrying her cane like a baton, with Odette behind her in an extraordinary sea-blue dress that swirled around her knees, carrying her sandals in one hand. They stopped on the pavement and looked across the boulevard at the crowd under the pines, at the girls, at the applause. At Conner in the middle of it all, bowing.
Odette and Olympia looked at each other.
Conner, straightening up from his bow, saw them. He saw Olympia’s eyes narrow and a slow smile start at one corner of Odette’s mouth. As one, they stepped off the curb.
Oh no, he thought happily. Here we go.
They came across the boulevard like a pair of battleships. Cars stopped. A Vespa swerved. A man in an orange BMW leaned on his horn. Olympia turned and pointed her cane at him. He stopped instantly.
They reached the edge of the crowd who parted to let them through.
Odette stopped at the front. She flung out one arm. She pointed, with a shaking finger, straight at Conner.
“THERE HE IS, MAMA!” she screamed, in English, in a voice that stopped traffic. “THAT’S HIM! THAT IS THE MAN WHO STOLE MY PRECIOUS HONOR!”
The crowd gasped. Thirty people turned, as one, to look at Conner.
Conner looked at Odette. He looked at the crowd. He looked at Ingrid and Astrid and Fiona and Delphine and Bobbie-Lynn, whose mouths had fallen open.
“I have never,” he said, with enormous dignity, laying one hand flat upon his heart, “seen this woman before in my life.”
“NEVER?” shrieked Odette. “NEVER? In the vineyard at Saint-Tropez? Under the MOON? You SANG to me?”
“It must have been a different man with a guitar. There are a great many men with guitars. It’s the season, after all.”
And then Olympia Batellier stepped forward.
She did not shout. She drew herself up, all five feet nothing of her, in her oyster silk coat, in the golden light under the umbrella pines, and raised her cane slowly into the air, until it pointed directly at Conner’s heart.
And something happened to her face. Every line of it shifted, darkened, tightened, until the eighty-one-year-old woman in the silk coat was gone, and in her place stood something old and terrible and not entirely human.
The crowd went silent.
“You,” her voice seemed to come up out of the ground, low and snapping with malice. The voice that had frightened a whole generation of French children out of their wits in La Sorcière de Brocéliande in 1947.
“You. Faithless one. Seducer. Liar. You have taken my daughter’s honor, and you will pay.”
A Danish toddler burst into tears. Its mother picked it up but did not leave.
“I curse you,” said Olympia, and the cane began to tremble, and her eyes blazed. “I curse you by the moon you danced under. I curse you by the vines of Saint-Tropez. I curse your guitar, that its strings shall snap. I curse your voice, that it shall croak like a frog in a well. I curse your feet, that they shall turn to stone whenever you try to run from a woman you have wronged. And I curse your heart...” She paused, and the crowd held its breath. “ ... that it shall never know peace, until every woman you have ever deceived has forgiven you. One by one. On your KNEES.”
She lowered the cane.
The man in the blue blazer with gold buttons, who had been standing with his arms folded and his lips pressed together in patrician disapproval, said, very quietly, “Good Lord.”
Conner instantly dropped to his knees on the carpet of pine needles.
“Madame,” he cried, stretching out his arms toward Olympia, in anguish. “You have made a terrible mistake. I am innocent. I am a humble street musician from Luxembourg. I have never been to Saint-Tropez. I don’t even know where it is. Is it near Saint-Raphaël?”
“It’s across the BAY,” shrieked Odette. “You can SEE it from HERE!”
“Well, I’ve never looked.”
And then Odette did something Conner had not expected. She turned away from him entirely and strode over to the five girls: Ingrid and Astrid and Fiona and Delphine and Bobbie-Lynn, who were standing in a paralyzed cluster at the front of the crowd with their mouths open. Odette seized Bobbie-Lynn by both hands.
“Did he kiss you?” she demanded, in English, in a low, urgent, tragic whisper that carried to the back of the crowd. “Tell me. Tell me the truth. Did he kiss you?”