The terrasse of the Grand Hotel was a miniature opera all on its own, with its coffees and wrapped squares of chocolate, its cubes of sugar and jewel-colored drinks, its speakers of many languages, each one smoking expressively. We had just eaten lunch in our room in the Grand Hotel, and we were heading out for a matinee: I hadn't known the opera house would be just across the street. I remembered my first glimpse of Paris by daylight, on a short walk with the ugly man from the ship. I wafted home on a gust of warm July air, in an evening that lasted and lasted. In this excerpt from Ellis Avery's new novel, The Last Nude, (Riverhead 2012), the narrator, Rafaela Fano, the model for art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka's most famous works, takes a first - and rather brazen - walk of shame home from the painter's Paris studio. Paris Opera House staircase, around 1900.
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