Mistral's Daughter by Judith Krantz Page A

going
to give him a one-man show.   I haven't been
wrong so far, have I?"
    "Kate, I can't tell this
man that I'm going to go ahead and do everything I can to establish him unless
I have an absolute assurance that he's not going to leave me and go off to
another gallery someday," Avigdor said, with a firmness of a breeder
discussing the stud fee of a prize bull.
    "You have my
assurance."
    "Do you expect me to go
all-out on nothing but your promise?   What makes you so sure that you speak for him?"
    "You just take my word
for it," Kate insisted, quietly.
    Adrien considered her for a
moment.   He was not certain that he liked
Kate Browning but he admired her.   She
had a sureness of taste that was remarkable for someone not in the business,
and she had distinction.   Could Mistral,
that haughty, impatient, rude giant be under her influence?   There had been nothing in the way he greeted
her to indicate it, and yet...   and
yet...   it was impossible to doubt Kate,
as she spoke with such fine, clear determination.   It was a risk worth taking.   In fact he did not see how he could avoid
it.   The same instinct that had led
Avigdor to decide to open his season with the paintings of a man whose recent
work he had never seen until little more than an hour ago, told him that he
could not get to Mistral except through Kate.   He made a gesture of acceptance and turned toward the door to the
garden.
    "Shall I tell him, Kate,
or willyou?"
    "Adrien!   You , of course.   It's your decision, your gallery."   Kate's precise mouth curved in delicate
mirth.
    Oh, yes, Avigdor thought, she was clever.   A tiny shiver touched
his spine.   No wonder she had never
appealed to him physically.   He didn't
like women who were as clever as he.   Or
more clever.
     

6
     
     
    Adrien Avigdor was only
twenty-eight when he first met Julien Mistral, but he might, with truth, have
said that he had spent his life preparing for the day when he would be able to
change a painter's future in a single moment of decision.
    He had been brought up in the
antique business.   "We," his
father used to say, gesturing grandly toward his flourishing shop on the quai
Voltaire, "were selling them antiques before they built Notre
Dame."   "We" were the
Jewish Avigdors, "they" everyone else in France.   Adrien, who loved his grandiose father, as
much as he laughed at him, wondered why he had stopped short of saying the
Avigdors had been selling the Pharaoh antiques while they built the
Pyramids.
    As a child, Adrien traveled
about the countryside with his father on buying trips.   So quickly that he seemed to be drinking
rather than learning, young Adrien had grasped the profound difference between
the way antique dealers think and the way antique buyers think.   When he was only eight, he could judge
merchandise by imagining himself looking through the window of his father's
shop and having to have a certain pair of goblets.   Better yet, by the time he was ten, he could
just as easily distinguish the teapot or inlaid box that would never call out
to be bought, that would be admired, even picked up and discussed for a quarter
of an hour, but was destined somehow to never change hands.   Presented with two dozen Limoges teacups, his
hand, as if of its own volition, wouldpick up and turn over the only
cup with a tiny crack on its base. When his father died, rather than work in
the family business with his two older brothers, Adrien opened his own shop, in
the rue Jacob, only a few steps from the church of St. Germain-des Près. He was
convinced that people bought more freely from a shopthat was built in
the shadow of a church, preferably a cathedral.   By the time he was twenty-five, his fortune was made and, unheard of for
an Avigdor, the traffic in antiques had ceased to fascinate him.   He realized he had reached a dangerous point
in his life when he sold a chocolate service that might not have — perhaps — belonged to the Empress Josephine,