De Potter's Grand Tour by Joanna Scott

Athens. By the afternoon she had a response confirming that Armand de Potter had disappeared at sea, and his body had not been recovered.
    She asked for a glass of water from the agent but couldn’t drink, her hand was shaking so. Yet somehow she managed not to faint. Somehow she managed to get herself back to the hotel and listen to the members of the party tell her all about the scenery she’d missed on their hike, the wild goats perched on rocky precipices, the tiny blue flowers poking out of the snow. What a wonderful time they were having on their Classic, Oriental, and Alpine Tour. Thank you, Madame de Potter, for being such a considerate hostess.
    She traveled to the Italian city of Feltre in the Veneto with the touring party, then back north to Zurich and Lausanne. For three days, she played her part expertly—and why shouldn’t she? All her marriage had been training for this most demanding of roles. She was refined, cultivated, admirable in all respects. Her surface was impenetrable. No one in the party even caught a glimpse of her turmoil, and when another guide from the agency finally arrived to take her place, the travelers could only say that they were sorry to see her go, and that, as Miss Maxwell put it, Madame de Potter was the most gracious woman she’d ever met.
    She took the train from Lausanne to Paris, arriving at ten thirty in the evening. She was met by the director of Armand’s Paris office, Edmond Gastineau, who helped her check in at the Hotel St. James on the avenue Bugeaud. She ate a sandwich alone in her room, then soaked for hours in the marble tub.
    The next morning she discovered that she couldn’t withdraw money from their account at the Crédit Lyonnais Bank. She demanded to see the manager. She waited nearly an hour, and when the manager finally came out from his office, he had an oversize file, which he set on the table in front of Aimée without opening. Pinching and smoothing the tips of his long mustache, he explained that the de Potter account had been closed by Monsieur de Potter nearly a year ago.
    She was beginning to understand what Armand had been trying to communicate in the letters that she’d burned. She returned immediately to her room at the St. James, packed her suitcase, and moved to the Hotel Oxford & Cambridge. From there she met Edmond Gastineau at the agency’s office. She told him about the closed account. And though she hardly knew the man and had never conferred with him on anything more pressing than what he would like in his tea, she said, “I need your help, Monsieur Gastineau. I need you to help me borrow from the agency’s account.”
    He was honest with her: the agency couldn’t pay its bills, and Brown Brothers refused to extend more credit. She touched her fingers to her ears to remind herself which earrings she was wearing—the Venetian pearls Armand had given her for her fortieth birthday. Her mind whirled with calculations—what would the pawnbroker give her for her earrings, and how did that sum compare with their true value?—even as Edmond Gastineau offered to transfer money from his personal account into hers. She refused. He kept insisting, until she finally accepted his charity.
    She sent telegrams to officials in Athens and Piraeus begging for news, but she didn’t wait for a reply. She bought a ticket for Greece, and on the fifth of July, at nine thirty in the evening, she left on the rapide , enduring a hot, tiring journey through the night to Marseille.
    She spent the day waiting at the port on a bench. To people passing by she must have seemed a cold, arrogant woman, rigid in her posture, her mouth frozen in a severe line, the panic in her eyes hidden by the shadow of her hat. To Aimée, the world itself was cold and arrogant, and she cringed at everything: the smoke belching from the steamliners, the harsh sunlight reflecting off the water, the stevedores going about their