If someone were to ask about my whereabouts that night, what could I say? Alone, I got undressed of my own accord in a hotel room a few blocks from my new house, at a hotel I’d frequented in the past. What could the person who had beckoned me there really be charged with? Who would describe the night as anything but a slightly incongruous whim on my part?
Louie’s absence that night at the Hôtel des Charmes may have come as a shock, but it was not a crime. Nor could he be blamed for my crotch’s unrelenting dampness. I was still wet when I woke up, even though David had long since left the house. As usual, I spent the morning alone, this time after a night of torment.
One thing that could be held against the elder Barlet was this new note:
You can feel me, can’t you, deep inside?
Like the others, it was waiting for me on the console in the entry when I got up. An impressive mound of sand had already formed on the bottom half of the hourglass. Only a few grains left before our wedding day . . .
“Good morning, Elle.”
The tone of voice was playful, almost puckish. It interrupted my dark thoughts with disconcerting lightness. It took me a few seconds to recognize who it was:
“Louie!”
. . . the source of my troubles, recognizable by his heady cologne.
“It is I. Your future husband sent me.”
He bowed his head in exaggerated deference.
What was he talking about? How dare he show himself here? Wasn’t my humiliation the night before enough? Did he have to harass me just as I got out of bed, too?
I held back an expression of exasperation.
“David?”
“Is there another?” he quipped cheerfully.
Was it possible to be such a manipulative monster at night and act so detached the next morning? Apparently. He smiled radiantly, playfully tossing his cane between his hands with the dexterity of an acrobat. Nothing in his comportment betrayed our “meeting” from the night before.
“No, of course not. But what—”
“David has asked me to help make you a ‘real Athenian woman.’ ”
As he spoke, he grabbed my hand and bent down to kiss it. I snatched it back, readying myself to hit him.
“An Athenian woman . . . ,” I repeated mechanically, frozen in indignation.
“That’s what he said. So here I am!”
Armand appeared without warning and smiled in candid approval. The interruption stopped me from expressing my feelings physically. With great pain, I contorted my mouth into a convincing smile.
“That’s right, Mademoiselle,” Armand said. “David wants you to feel at home both here in the house and in the neighborhood generally. As you are now aware, this area is very important to the family.”
“Did you see what a beautiful day it is?!” Louie cried enthusiastically, without a hint of the arrogance he’d displayed on our first meeting. “Isn’t it a perfect day for a walk?”
Refusing this outing was not going to be easy since the head of the family—and my future husband—had orchestrated it. What’s more, there was a witness. I was going to have to find a good excuse, and fast.
Louie threw a sidelong glance at Felicity, who was trotting around a few paces away.
“It is . . . But unfortunately I don’t feel very well,” I lied.
“A little fresh air will be just the thing to perk you up!” Armand insisted.
“Seriously, Elle, what else do you have to do today? You should take advantage of your freedom before your new job starts. You’ll see. Once your schedule adapts to the station, there won’t be any time for recess.”
I pursed my lips to keep from shouting at him in disgust. “Recess”? And how exactly would he describe last night? An innocent distraction?
“No, really . . . Thanks, but I just don’t feel up to it . . . If I want to be presentable Monday, I’m going to have to get some rest.”
Why was David trusting his fiancée with someone who had been manipulating her for days? I clung to this explanation: he didn’t know about his brother’s schemes. And I had to keep myself from thinking: But what if he was in on it? No. Not David.
“Come on, live a little!”
Louie grabbed my hand again, and this time so strongly that I had to put up a fuss.
“Let go! You’re hurting me!”
Armand shot him a reproachful look. Louie bowed his head like a kid being chastised and relaxed his grip.
“As you wish,” he stammered. “I just thought . . .”
I cut him off sharply. “What did you think?”
“That this walk would be a good time to tell you more.”
“More? About what?”
“About us . . . David and me. I know David. He’s so secretive. I’m positive he hasn’t told you anything about our childhood. Or this house, for that matter.”
Touché.
If he kept his promise, I wasn’t opposed to the idea. Moreover, it would be a good time to probe him on some issues. Maybe I could even get him to take off the mask he put on whenever we met. Maybe I could gain the upper hand once and for all.
I also figured he wouldn’t dare try anything in the middle of the day in a crowded street. An encouraging look from Armand quelled the anger I’d been feeling all morning.
“Okay . . . fine,” I said dryly. “Do I at least have time for a shower?”
“As many showers as you’d like. We have all day.”
Coming from him, that sounded less like an innocent promise of fun on a spring day and more like a threat of long hours of torture. I expected nothing less.
I crumpled the handwritten note in my fist—there was one that wouldn’t make it in the silver notebook—and with knots in my stomach, I made a beeline for the shower. I reappeared less than fifteen minutes later wearing a simple floral dress that I’d spruced up with hand-sewn felt flourishes, nude flats, and a small bag containing only the essentials. Sufficiently dressed not to draw critique, sober enough not to send any messages. Though it would not be seen, I took the precaution of wearing the thickest and least revealing panties in my collection of lingerie. I tried to erase the image of the sticky pair I had taken off when I had gotten home the night before.
WE STEPPED OFF DUCHESNOIS HOUSE’S antique porch and crossed the crescent-shaped courtyard. Standing curbside in front of 3 Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, we were bathed in the sun’s warm light. I couldn’t deny Louie’s point: it was an ideal day for a stroll.
Louie was in such a good mood that it was difficult not to be infected. Still, every time he looked at me, I remembered the night before, the hotel room, and how I’d undressed for him, showing more of myself to him than I’d ever shown to any man.
“Elle . . . do you have any idea what David meant when he asked me to make you into an Athenian woman?”
The question didn’t sound like a trap. It was asked without the slightest hint of acrimony or hidden meaning. It really seemed like he was just assessing his pupil’s level. Waiting for a reply, he glued his eyes to mine.
“No,” I admitted. “Not really.”
“Okay, well, this neighborhood—between Rue des Martyrs to the east, Rue Pigalle to the west, and Rue Saint-Lazare to the south—is called New Athens. Some of the houses here saw the birth of French Romanticism.”
In spite of myself, my eyes widened with interest. I had been expecting biting commentary, maybe even a few salacious remarks, but not a history lesson. He was acting as though the scene in the Mata Hari room had never happened.
“How’s that?”
“In the mid-1820s, the biggest names in the then-nascent artistic movement came to live here. Poets and writers like George Sand, Eugène Scribe, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Alexandre Dumas, and later the great Victor Hugo; there were also musicians like Liszt, Berlioz, Auber, Chopin, Wagner, and painters such as Delacroix, Vernet, Gavarni, and Ary Scheffer. But people tend to forget that the first artists to set up camp here . . .”
He paused his lecture and raised his eyes in childish wonder up toward the building we’d just left. It was unique in that its curved facade opened onto a small three-sided courtyard.
I noticed that since our last meeting, Louie had let his beard grow. The added hair did not fill out his cheeks; rather, it made his face look even more emaciated. On the surface, the beard seemed to express the feverishness inside the man.
“Yes?”
“The first artists were actors, Elle. Simple actors.”
“Like Mademoiselle Duchesnois?” I suggested.
“Exactly. But before her other great stars had taken up residence: Mademoiselle Mars next door at 1 Rue de la Tour-des-Dames.”
I remembered the hair comb in the window at Antiquités Nativelle, the one that had made my mouth water with desire only a few days earlier. Louie went on, passionate about his subject, clutching my forearm as a way of keeping my attention:
“The great Talma, Bonaparte’s favorite actor, in house number nine. And Marie Dorval, Alfred de Vigny’s mistress, a little lower, on Rue Saint-Lazare. In the early 1830s, the street where you live was the Champs-Élysées of the new artistic scene.”
As I listened to him, I almost forgot his perverted side, that he was the disloyal brother-in-law who asked for strange favors in exchange for silence and the madman who, page after page, detailed aspects of my sexuality in a book from hell.
He was so engrossed in what he had to say that his whole being appeared to be swallowed into the era he was trying to conjure.
“But why ‘New Athens’?” I asked, my curiosity piqued. “And why did they all congregate here?”
“According to the official story, the name was coined by Dureau de la Malle, an editorialist at the Journal des Débats, in 1823. But I think it’s more complicated than that: Greece was really fashionable at the time, what with the Greek rebellion against the Ottomans in 1821. The neoclassical and neo-Raphaelite style of Constantin’s buildings also played a role.”
“Neo-Raphaelite?” I asked, admitting ignorance.
While speaking, he slipped his arm through mine, in the most natural and chaste way in the world, and guided me toward Rue de la Rochefoucauld. We were retracing our steps from the night before. He was so casual about it that I completely let down my guard, and gave in to the soft and enveloping warmth of his embrace.
“The more you let him touch you, the more you prepare yourself to invite him other places in you.”
I think it was my inner arm, yes, that soft, sensitive skin in the hollow of elbow, that whispered the phrase in my ear. I wonder if such an innocuous erogenous zone could make me come?
Anonymous handwritten note, 6/7/2009
A SHIVER RAN UP MY spine as I thought of the indecent, open version of myself he had shown me. Why was I following him so obediently?
“Yes, look at this building: Do you see the rounded niches above the supporting wall between the second and third floors? And on that one, do you see the three Palladian windows, and how the center pane has an exaggerated arch while the other two are narrower, and how they’re supported by a simple lintel?”
His erudite observations did not bore me in the least; rather, they opened my eyes to a whole new world. He was uncovering new mysteries in a city I thought I knew by heart. He squeezed my shoulder and I didn’t flinch.
“All of it,” he went on, “is characteristic of Italian Renaissance Mannerism.”
“Raphael?” I suggested.
“Yes, along with Palladio, Serlio, Sangallo . . . Percier and Fontaine, the Empire’s official architects, drew inspiration from them. And their style influenced all the major private housing projects into the 1830s. In New Athens especially.”
This time, I was gripping his arm, and my left breast accidentally grazed his extremely taut bicep. I quickly unhooked myself from him, pretending nothing had happened. I did not want him to feel my naughty nipple, which had hardened at his touch. I did not want him to see my growing emotion.
“And then the concentration of beauty and intelligence in the neighborhood made it a first-rate cultural center whose reputation quickly spread. People came from all over Europe! Imagine: in 1850, more than a hundred artists lived on these few streets. Posterity hasn’t remembered them all, but they did all help to create the neighborhood’s spirit.”
There was a hint of nostalgia in his voice, as though he missed a time he could not have known but wished he had.
With all the excitement, he’d gotten hot. He took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of his tattoo in its entirety. No matter how partially, the fact that he was now undressing in front of me was a little troubling. But I tried to focus my attention on the design he’d just unveiled. Why were the two unfurled wings and enlaced scepter so familiar?
He caught my insistent gaze and said with a faint, pinched smile:
“It’s Hermes’s caduceus.”
The caduceus, I remembered, was the symbol I often saw in front of medical offices.
A lowercase letter a near the wrist underscored the image. Its font recalled those made by old typewriters.
“And the letter . . . Why just an a? A like ‘artist’? Like ‘anarchy’?”
My childish guessing didn’t make him laugh. Instead, a shadow crossed his brow, erasing his good mood.
“No, just the first letter of the alphabet,” he murmured.
His sudden shift inward should have dissuaded me from digging deeper, and yet:
“That’s all?”
“Oh, don’t worry, the others will follow.”
I grasped his meaning: he would have all the letters of the alphabet carved into his skin. He would become his own alphabet, his own box of tools. It was beautiful and stupid all at once. Touching and laughable. Juvenile, too. The kind of thing you imagine doing when you’re a teenager, not an adult.
“And where does the feather fit in all of this?”
When we’d first met at the Sauvage Gallery, I’d noticed that the caduceus was not accompanied by a basic beveled point but a pen’s feather.
“Let’s just say that the stylus makes them all irrelevant. In the end, it’s the power of the stylus that heals, thanks to its ability to assemble the letters into words.”
I had read the Bible, so I knew about the creative power of the word. It seemed Louie was borrowing that notion and extending it to health. So for him, in the beginning there was . . . sex, right? How had we been able to accept a genesis stripped of any sort of carnal act, and for millennia?
I had more questions, but I could tell by his reaction that I had touched a sore spot. Suddenly he stopped, somewhere in the middle of Rue Chaptal, and rolled his shirtsleeve back over his forearm, his way of telling me our discussion was over.
We were in front of a building marked 16. A tree shot up between the houses, throwing a leafy shadow over the sidewalk. A narrow, shrub-lined passage stretched at a perpendicular line from where we stood toward a sunny courtyard that looked charming. Farther off, old women sat on a bench, in the shadow of a giant rosebush.
I looked for a moment at the sign on the street:
Museum of Romantic Life
“Speaking of the alphabet . . . ,” he said, smiling delicately, “this place will give you the ABCs of Parisian Romanticism. You can’t understand anything about this neighborhood and its history without a visit here first.”
Did he mean this timeless haven, separated from the brouhaha of modern life by a few feet of paved alleyway? The building at the end of the path was amazing, with its green shutters and balconies that were partially hidden behind tall bouquets of tea roses.
He grabbed my arm when I tripped over the disjointed blocks of granite. Once again, my chest brushed against him; this time it was his dense and muscled flank.
I asked the first question that came to mind, anything to distract him from my state.
“Who owned this house?”
“Ary Scheffer, the painter. He was sort of the official portraitist of the Romantic intelligentsia. Liszt, Sand, Chopin, Renan . . . He painted them all.”
He did not lead me directly into the building but instead seized my hand and guided me to the small garden on the right. A bench-lined flower bed of roses gave way to a splendid conservatory, a massive greenhouse at the back of the main building. Outside and in, smiling tourists with cameras hanging from their necks sipped tea at little round bistro tables.
“It’s pretty, don’t you think?”
I nodded, enchanted. My hand was still imprisoned by his. I couldn’t believe a place like this still existed here, in this city, at the margins of all the tumult. It was a miracle. And that he was the one—he—who had taken me here was in itself a cruel irony.
Louie offered me a chair, sat down in his own, and looked very much at ease in this calm environment. A few sad notes from the piano flowed from an artificial waterfall. There was probably a speaker hidden somewhere between the rocks. After listening intently to the piece for a few seconds, he announced the title, his gaze distant:
“Nocturne no. 20 by Frédéric Chopin, in C-sharp minor. It’s one of his posthumous pieces.”
Who else did I know who was capable of recognizing a piece by Chopin after only having heard a couple lines of music? But then I reminded myself that he could have said it was Schubert or Beethoven, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.
“Did you know,” he went on, “that George Sand and Frédéric Chopin first fell in love here? People tend to talk about their meeting in Liszt’s apartment in the Hôtel de France. Or their paradisiacal Square d’Orléans. But in reality, the two overcame their mutual repulsion here in Scheffer’s abode. Scheffer had a way of getting his friends to mingle.”
As he said this, he slowly gestured toward the building, whose door to the garden was hidden behind a thick gray velour curtain, as though to better protect the secret of the couple’s passion.
“Repulsion?” I asked, surprised, “I thought they were crazy for each other?”
“That’s right, I said repulsion. Do you know what Chopin wrote about Sand after they first met?”
“No . . .”
Our tea and biscuits arrived. Louie kept his magnetic gaze locked on mine as he served me. A delicious scent of jasmine wafted from my teacup. He began citing from memory:
“ ‘What a disagreeable woman that Sand is! Is she really a woman? I have my doubts.’ ”
“How charming! What a gentleman!”
“Yes, well, it’s a good lesson in amorous humility, don’t you think? One never knows where a first impression, no matter how terrible, might lead . . .”
I avoided the thorny topic lurking behind his words. I understood that the place, like the conversation, was not innocent. It would invariably lead to a discussion of our story. Or, rather, his unhealthy obsession with me.
I won’t transcribe the entirety of George Sand’s libertine poem to Alfred de Musset, her lover at the time, but I do remember the first lines:
I want to tell you that I
understood last night that you
still have a mad desire to
dance, so at the next party you should
come and I hope it is
on time, so I can be
in your arms.
Which really meant, once it was decoded by skipping each line:
I want to tell you that I
still have a mad desire to
come and I hope it is
in your arms.
Anonymous handwritten note, 6/7/2009—If he’d hoped to teach me something new, he failed. Sophia had told me about the letter when we were still in college.
I DECIDED TO COUNTERATTACK: IT was my turn to direct the flow of conversation.
“Is it also a tattoo?”
For once, my question seemed to catch him off guard.
“Excuse me?”
“David’s silk armband: Is it hiding a tattoo like yours?”
He paled and searched for words, he who was usually so verbose.
At least he wasn’t angry. I had tried to ask David about it a few nights before as we were getting into bed, and he’d been irate:
“It was an accident, and it isn’t anybody’s business but my own.”
“What about your wife?”
“It’s . . . Well, in any case, it’s in the past.”
End of story.
Louie tugged his sleeve over the caduceus, as though trying to protect his brother’s secret.
“No . . . David doesn’t like that kind of thing.”
“So what is it?”
He had never known me to be so determined, only having seen in me what he had wanted to see: easy prey whom he could manipulate thanks to the information he had on me. A toy, a simple toy, and a woman whose body he now knew, right down to the last curve.
Yet I saw a flash of panic darken his eyes.
“David didn’t say anything to you?”
“About what?”
“About his arm . . .”
“No. What is there to know?”
He swallowed several mouthfuls of scalding-hot tea and then began, with less confidence than usual.
“It’s not just about his arm . . . ,” he said gravely and caught his breath.
His introduction indicated this would not be a happy story.
I gave him an encouraging look.
“When I was twenty, and David nineteen, we both met a young woman over summer vacation. And we both fell in love with her. Both of us. At the same time.”
I remembered what Armand had said about their rivalry. Power had been promised to the one who could conquer the most beautiful women . . .
“What was her name?”
“Aurora. Aurora Delbard.”
The name was bitter on his lips. His cheeks started twitching. What had she meant to him, to the two of him? How was she still able to provoke such emotion?
“How did you meet—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he cut me off. “In spite of her young age, Aurora chose David. They got engaged and then married over the course of a few weeks.”
Married? So I wouldn’t be the first Madame David Barlet? I tried to push the thought aside. It cut like a knife. It bothered me, but I decided to concentrate on what Louie was telling me.
So Louie had lost the girl to his brother. I could see traces of this defeat on his unhappy face. Had this been one of David’s first decisive triumphs? The kind that would win him the Barlet family throne? And what about me? Did I mean anything more to him than a consolation prize, a plaything, a toy to steal and dangle in front of his brother?
For the first time, I was the one to reach for his hand, but he withdrew it before I had a chance to reassure him.
“They were the perfect couple. People called them the Delbarlet. Even their last names meshed.”
I didn’t say the obvious: the play on names would have worked for him, too. I figured it was better to let him talk. He had been manipulating me for weeks, and now, for the first time, I felt like I was gaining the upper hand, like I was in charge. Nervous, he rolled up his shirtsleeves again, revealing the lowercase a on his left arm. A like “Aurora,” I realized.
“But neither David nor I realized how troubled Aurora was.”
“Troubled, how?”
He replied with a wild look.
“Destructive. Manipulative. At the time, there wasn’t a name for what she had . . .”
“And today?”
“Borderline personality disorder. It almost exclusively affects women who were abandoned or abused in childhood. I spent a lot of time researching the issue.”
I had to resist the temptation to dig deeper into the horrible past of my future husband’s first wife. A wife he had never even mentioned to me. I tried to reason with myself. I didn’t want to think of David as disloyal or deceitful. I considered how difficult Aurora’s sickness must have been on him. To a certain extent, his pain justified his silence on the matter.
And, then, who was I to judge? I hadn’t even introduced him to my mother.
“What happened? I mean, after they were married?”
“At first it was okay. David was able to manage Aurora’s mood swings, her demands. God, there were so many. It’s common of people with that disorder: they’re constantly testing their partner in the morbid hope of one day being rejected. For example, Aurora would inhale everything in the refrigerator in one evening, vomit it all up, and then order my brother to restock the fridge immediately, in the middle of the night after all the stores had closed. She could be such a tyrant.”
I had trouble imagining David the executive, the charming and slightly authoritative man, letting himself be treated like that. It didn’t fit with my image of him. And yet we were talking about the same man.
“Did he eventually just give up?”
“And leave her?” Louie asked, surprised by my question. “No! He hung on till the end. I don’t mean he never thought about throwing in the towel. He did, especially after the more violent episodes. But he wouldn’t give up . . . I tried to help him as best I could.”
“You weren’t a little jealous?”
Could a man as proud as Louie really be capable of one day being the jilted suitor and the next his brother’s confidant? Again, something seemed off. I didn’t trust the noble and chivalrous portrait Louie was painting of himself. It made me empathize even more with the real victim of this tragedy: David.
Had Louie really been as in love with Aurora as he claimed?
“Was I jealous of the hell in which he lived? No, not really . . . In a way, I thanked my lucky stars that Aurora had chosen David instead of me. But in spite of that, I think I still had feelings for her. I couldn’t imagine living with her, but I did sincerely hope that she would find some peace with David. I did hope she could find a way to be happy.”
The tears welling up in his eyes told me she hadn’t. Louie finished his story without any coaxing from me:
“The year after their wedding, we spent the summer at the beach. Our parents were still alive. The weather was beautiful, and we were all more relaxed than usual . . . Even Aurora seemed to be doing better.”
“What happened?”
“One night, she wanted to go for a midnight swim. The waters were rough, and David tried to convince her not to go. She didn’t have a suit and declared that she wanted to go in the nude.”
“So she went?”
His eyes gazed up at the sky as he tried to think of an answer; then they shifted darkly back to me.
“Yes. It was always the same with her: she would challenge David, who would always resist her, and then she would take whatever risk it was she had in mind by herself. And then he had to fly to her rescue. But that night, the waves were really violent . . . There was nothing he could do. Aurora disappeared behind two groups of rocks; she got sucked into a kind of natural siphon . . . She never resurfaced.”
“That’s how he hurt his arm?”
“No . . . Not like that. That would have been better for everybody.”
At least he wasn’t making himself out to be a hero, I thought to myself. What a horrible tragedy. And it did not make him look good. Aurora had rejected him, and he hadn’t done anything more than his brother to help her. He had stood by and watched the young woman’s madness drown the couple, just as she herself had been sucked into the sea’s currents.
“Why do you say that?”
Birds chirped overhead, as though they were trying to cheer us up. In vain. His silence dragged on like torture.
A light gust of wind swept through the garden, just as a group of visitors stepped through the gray curtain, revealing a fleeting glimpse into the sumptuous museum interior. From her frame, George Sand, as painted by Ary Scheffer with a red flower in her hair, gave me a severe look.
“It’s unfortunate his wound does not date back to that tragic night because it took David many years to recover,” he said at last. “Three years after Aurora’s death, he tried to take his own life.”
“What?”
I swallowed a cry. Louie gestured for me to remain calm.
“Happily, the idiot failed. He went about it the wrong way, and he destroyed the veins in his left forearm. His scars are rather . . . spectacular.”
Hence the armband.
Honestly, the mournful and suicidal young man resembled nothing of the implacable captain of industry he had become. The armband was an elementary way of keeping his past under wraps and maintaining his current image in the eyes of the world.
Including me.
I regretted having been so forceful with him about it. I’d been so eager to shed light on his wound, which probably still haunted him, instead of leaving well enough alone and letting his secret remain hidden under white silk. He needed my tenderness, love, and presence at his side. Not an inquisition.