Summary
An urbane Parisian lawyer, Pierre de Coubertin—equal parts libertine and legal virtuoso—accepts a wager to seduce a cloistered heiress before the next blossom falls from the Bois de Boulogne chestnut outside her window; the wager is offered by the girl’s own uncle, a bankrupt marquis who covets her fortune. Enter Simone de Villeneuve, an American-bred niece visiting under the chaperonage of a steel-spined aunt, her days spent translating Sappho and her nights listening to the gramophone sighs of Caruso. Pierre’s calculated courtship begins with a single stolen kiss beneath a gas lamp on Pont Neuf—an osculation that detonates every certitude he possesses. The kiss is photographed by a street urchin hired by a rival aviator, the negative sold to a tabloid whose ink still smells of aniline. Overnight, Simone’s betrothal to a Pennsylvania coal-baron collapses, Pierre’s engagement to a senator’s daughter evaporates, and the marquis demands the marriage be annulled so the fortune can return to the family coffers. But the kiss has already mutated into myth: Parisian café society recites it as a cautionary tale, Montmartre painters render it in absinthe greens and vermilion, and the Société des Gens de Lettres debates whether a kiss without consent constitutes theft of the soul. Pierre, cornered by his own conquest, stages a fake suicide on a Channel packet boat, only to resurface in Marseille as a stevedore with a scar where his vanity once lived. Simone, pregnant and penniless, follows a trail of gossip across the Côte d’Azur, finding him loading crates of Algerian wine beneath a moon the color of tarnished pewter. Their final reckoning occurs inside an abandoned casino in Nice, its roulette wheels seized by rust, its chandeliers dripping crystal like frozen tears. She offers him a second kiss—this one freighted with forgiveness, rage, and the salt of imminent motherhood. He refuses, admitting that the first kiss was never a theft but a gift he lacked the grace to return. She leaves the casino alone; he remains, listening to the sea grind the breakers into forgiveness.
