Was it only when hearts broke that they revealed their true nature?

Sidonie, the sculptress, sensed a surge of something inside her that she hadn’t experienced for many years: sadness. She caught a tear as it ran down her cheek, and examined her rough, chapped fingers. She failed to hear someone knocking on the garden door to her studio.

“Hello. Anyone there?”

As Marianne came in, Sidonie set down the two halves of the broken stone heart that she’d been sculpting on top of the laboratory report. It had just arrived from her doctor’s office this morning.

Marianne’s smile faded and was replaced by a look of concern. “What’s wrong?” she asked, noticing Sidonie’s tears.

“Nothing,” said Sidonie. “Just…some dirt. And the sun.”

And death and love.

Marianne crossed the studio in a few long strides and put down on the table the basket containing groceries for the Goichons and a bag of chocolates resembling small pebbles that she had brought for the sculptress. Then she embraced Sidonie, who was too surprised to dodge her approach. To an unwitting observer it must have looked as if Marianne were forcing the other woman to dance with her. Sidonie’s arms hung limply by her sides, her head resting on Marianne’s shoulder, and together the two of them rocked back and forth, their feet moving in time.

As they performed this strange waltz, Sidonie sobbed, noiselessly at first, then more and more uncontrollably, until she had to cling to Marianne to prevent herself collapsing. Her sobs were interspersed with words of attempted explanation. She felt that Marianne’s embrace was drawing something out of her—a torrent of fear, anguish, sorrow, and rage at the injustice of death.

Marianne felt Sidonie’s emotions flooding toward her like a spring tide. She also felt pulsing inflamed areas as she let her fingers glide a few fractions of an inch, like sensors, across the sculptress’s stout torso. Her fingers picked up what her eyes would never be capable of seeing. She wanted to heal her friend.

“Cancer” was the word that Sidonie kept repeating as she pointed to various parts of her body—her chest, her head, her kidneys and her abdomen. The cancer was everywhere. It had slumbered inside her for decades, then exploded in a matter of months.

Marianne’s palms were burning. She had a taste of copper on her tongue, and she pulled Sidonie close to her again. Abruptly, the sculptress stopped weeping, as if her reservoir of tears had run dry. Now Marianne was rocking her and humming a melody until Sidonie stopped shivering. She guided her to an armchair in a corner of the studio, and slipped into the kitchen to make some tea. Catching sight of a bottle of cognac in the corner, though, she turned off the gas under the kettle and poured some of the vintage brandy into two cups. One she filled to the top, and handed it to Sidonie.

“Down the hatch,” she urged.

Gradually she wheedled out of Sidonie how long she’d known (a long time), who knew (no one except her) and that she didn’t intend to tell anyone, not even her children Camille and Jérôme: they ought not to feel obliged to uproot themselves for a few months from their normal environment and bear the burden of their mother’s death. Not Colette either—under no circumstances!

“Why under no circumstances? I thought you were friends?”

“Yes, we’re friends. Only friends…” The way Sidonie said only made Marianne prick up her ears.

“Seulement la grenouille s’est trompée de conte”—only the frog ended up in the wrong fairy tale—she said under her breath, quoting one of the countless phrases Pascale Goichon had taught her.

Sidonie stared at her. “I’m the frog,” she said. “I’m never going to turn into a prince—not even into a princess’s lapdog. I love Colette. She loves men. End of story.”

“End of story?” said Marianne. “A terrible story.”

Sidonie shrugged her shoulders.

“You must tell her.”

“What?”

“Everything!”

“I’m not going to do anything.”

“Do you just mean to lie down and…die?”

Sidonie shut her eyes. The fact that she knew she was soon going to die was one thing, but that someone else should say it out loud was quite another. Much worse. It made it true. “Exactly. I’m going to die. Just like that.”

Marianne sighed deeply. “All right,” she said, and stood up to pour them both another brandy.

Sidonie put on a record, and Maurice Chevalier’s voice filled the studio. As she walked back to the table, the familiar pain seared through her, but this time it went deeper than usual. The devastation was beginning. She held onto a chair, which toppled over, banged against the table and swept the broken stone heart to the floor. She waited until the pain relented and took several deep, regular breaths. Marianne bent down to pick up the pieces of stone. There was something hidden in the core: a red streak with a shimmer of pale blue. She helped Sidonie to her bed.

“Anyway, why did you come here?” asked the sculptress.

“To apologize,” said Marianne.

“But…for what?

“For lying to you all. For being married and for not being the person I pretended I was.”

“Yes, but you’re still yourself, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Marianne. “Yes, I am.”

But I had forgotten myself.

—

When Marianne had left Sidonie, she rode her scooter restlessly to Pont-Aven. She longed to escape into Yann’s arms, and yet he was the one she had hurt the most. Could she really expect that he was going to make light of that? No, he would reject her, as every man of reason and honor would do. She headed for Colette’s gallery and waited with feigned patience until she had finished advising a group of tourists from Hamburg. When they had left, Marianne turned the sign on the door round to “Fermé.” Closed.

The first thing she did was to stammer her apologies, but Colette waved them away with a flick of her cigarette holder. Marianne’s concerns were as inconsequential as the smoke that drifted out of the half-open window. “We like you,” said the gallery owner. “Didn’t that ever occur to you?”

Marianne smiled before pronouncing the hardest words she’d ever had to utter: she told Colette of her friend Sidonie’s imminent death. Colette slumped back onto the chair behind her elegant bureau. It was only from the quaking of her shoulders that Marianne could tell she was weeping. She was weeping for all the years she had not lived with Sidonie, and she was weeping for the brief span of time that she had left to make up for what was gone forever.

The brandy’s effects on Marianne had eased, and she was hit by a wave of sober shame for daring to meddle in other people’s lives.

“Merci,” Colette said in a tear-choked voice. “Merci. She would never have told me. That’s how she is. She never wanted to make things hard for others, only for herself.”

The sign would not be turned back to “Ouvert” again that day, nor in the weeks and months that followed.