Yesterday after reading the letter, I spent more time googling Byron. Turns out what I need to look at is a book in an actual library—my mom would be thrilled. I texted Alexandre late last night and asked him to meet me. And here he is, waiting outside the front door of the American Library in Paris, body inclined against the pale yellow-gray stone. Like always, he looks lean and relaxed, but as I approach, his nervous smile betrays him.
He pushes his sunglasses to the top of his head, and that’s when I see his bloodshot eyes. “Salut,” he says as he bends to kiss my cheeks, but then stops himself.
“Salut,” I respond, my shoulders stiffening.
Clearly, neither of us has slept, and we have no idea what to say. This sucks.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other. I spent most of last night waffling between rage and resignation, between hating Alexandre and seeing a piece of myself in what he’s dealing with. I don’t want to bring up his family’s financial situation, but it’s one of, like, five elephants in the room, and it’s so crowded I can barely breathe. “Alexandre, why didn’t you tell me?” I mutter.
Alexandre looks stricken but also confused. There are so many things we hid from each other, why would he automatically know what I’m talking about?
“I mean, about your family,” I say. “The back taxes and the Dumas estate being near foreclosure. That’s what you meant when you said you wanted to save your family, right?”
Alexandre nods almost imperceptibly. “But how did you—”
“You’re not the only one with cyberstalking skills,” I say. It’s petty, but it’s also true. And I feel at least a little entitled to this moment.
Alexandre’s shoulders sag. “Khayyam, I’m sorry. I was an idiot for listening to my uncle. I should’ve been honest with you from the beginning. About everything.” A wave of anguish passes over his face.
My body tenses. Yes, I feel sorry for him. But I still feel like a giant gaping wound of a person, and my sympathies are limited. I nod. “We both should have been.” A moment of silence passes so weighted with regret and longing and things unsaid that I practically have to yank my words out of my belly with a hook. “Look, we both want to find Leila. You want to find the treasure so your family can pay off the estate debts and save Dumas’s legacy, right?”
“Yes. If it is a Delacroix that was gifted to Dumas, it would be worth much more than just the back taxes. We could preserve the estate. Rebuild it. Restore his name—our name.” Alexandre is matter-of-fact. Focused.
I nod. “Well, maybe there’s a treasure I want to find, too.”
“Yes, your paper. The prize—”
“No. It’s not just that . . .” I wave my hand. It’s not. There’s more to it. More to me. I want to find Leila because she deserves to be found. “We both basically want the same thing, right?” If Alexandre can be businesslike, I can, too. “Here’s the deal. We put things behind us and pretend we’re normal people trying to solve a centuries-old literary mystery, okay?”
I need to leave the near past in the past, so we can spend today searching for the long-ago past. Compartmentalize. Save my messy feelings for another day. It doesn’t feel logical, but somehow it makes sense to me.
Alexandre grins, and the smile reaches his tired eyes. “Yes. D’accord. We are one-hundred-percent normal people. Okay, tell me why we’re here again?”
I let out a breath. This is okay. This is going to work. I have to imagine that my ex-boyfriend isn’t wandering around Paris right now after what might have been our last goodbye. I have to pretend that the cryptic puzzle I’m trying to solve to find a missing nineteenth-century woman isn’t leading me on a treasure hunt with a descendant of Alexandre Dumas who Insta-stalked me and who I like making out with. Sure. No problem. People undersell the importance of denial as a coping mechanism.
“Byron sailed from Lisbon to Constantinople on his Grand Tour—basically a gap year for rich British men in the nineteenth century,” I explain. “That’s when he could’ve met Leila. Byron was also a letter-writing fiend, and I’m betting he wrote to Leila. If she inspired two of his poems, she must have been important to him. Harvard published some volumes of his letters—he wrote over three thousand. They’re not digitized, but there’s a set of the books here.” I point to the doors.
The American Library in Paris is exactly like any library in the States—except that it’s two blocks from the Eiffel Tower and a boulangerie with heavenly pain au chocolat. Everything is in English, and the furniture is utilitarian library chic. Even the air-conditioning is set at the normal American level of near-frigid—I feel like I’ve stepped through a portal and am suddenly back home, and that sensation is oddly comforting.
I copied the call number from the website last night, so I head straight to the lower level. Alexandre follows.
“It looks like you know your way around this place. You’ve been here before?” Alexandre asks as I search for the right shelf.
“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that an American in Paris in possession of mediocre French reading skills must be in want of English books to read on vacation.”
Alexandre wrinkles his forehead.
“Oh, sorry. It’s a reference to Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice?”
“Ahh, oui. A wildly popular book about repressed feelings. How British.”
I laugh out loud, and it warrants a couple turned heads from studious library patrons. Maybe this denial thing can work. Sadly, it’s all too familiar. We slip between the stacks, and I run my finger across the spines, looking for Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, 1788–1824. I’m focused, but not so determined that I don’t feel the nearness of Alexandre as he follows closely behind me. I can’t completely deny his existence. Or my attraction to him.
Found it. I pull a worn blue book from the shelf. Its cover is encased in plastic, and it has that faint stale library smell. Judging from the creaseless spine, barely anyone has cracked it open.
We find an empty table tucked into a corner in the back of the room. I open the book and flip to the index. All the letters are listed by name of recipient. I run my finger down each column—twenty pages, two columns on each page. No mention of a Leila. “Dammit. I thought there would be something.” I slam the cover shut. Dead end. Without a connection between Leila and Byron—a real, provable one, I have nothing but another hollow theory.
“Let’s not give up yet. Weren’t you the one wearing a Nevertheless, She Persisted T-shirt the other day? Maybe we can still find a glimpse of Leila in some other letter,” Alexandre says as he gently takes the book from my hands.
He’s right. I can’t give up yet. Maybe I’m down, way down, but I’m not out. Besides, Leila is counting on me.
Alexandre reopens the book to the title page. “1788 to 1824. He didn’t live long, did he?” he asks before turning to the index.
I nod. “It’s sad. Imagine all the other things he could have done. But at least he’s not forgotten.”
It’s kind of morbid to consider the upside of someone dying when they’re thirty-six. But it’s also true. Byron had the incredible good fortune of being born a titled British white man. Leila and countless others are forgotten or are only known because they happened to cross paths with famous men. That thought gives me pause.
“Hey.” I nudge Alexandre. “Like your illustrious ancestor, Byron had a lot of lovers. Let’s look at some of the other women he wrote to.”
A roguish grin sneaks across Alexandre’s face. I inadvertently lean my shoulder into his, and he pushes back ever so slightly. I reach for the book, and our hands meet. Alexandre turns to me and holds my gaze. “I meant what I told you before. Mes yeux ne brillent que pour toi.”
“Stop it,” I whisper. “That’s not part of the deal.” My face flushes. I take the book without looking at him. I study the index, pretending I don’t feel the nearness of him.
“Here’s a letter to a countess.” I point it out to Alexandre, who leans closer to me and reads over my shoulder, whispering Byron’s words in my ear:
August 25, 1819
My dearest Teresa,
. . . [Y]ou will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loves you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love. In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours—Amor mio—is comprised my existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist here, and I fear that I shall exist hereafter, —as to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there, with all my heart, —or, at least, that I had never met you in your married state.
But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me, —at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you.
Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us, —but they never will, unless you wish it.
I gulp. I’m not sure a love letter was the right choice at this moment.
Alexandre chuckles. “He was quite the romantic, wasn’t he?”
“He’s writing this to a married woman,” I say. “He’s a total narcissistic jerk who had no control over his passions or his ego. That’s why one of his lovers called him mad, bad, and dangerous to know—his entire life was about himself and his excesses and his incredible ability to seduce women and men.”
“He obviously couldn’t help himself when surrounded by temptation,” Alexandre says.
I roll my eyes and elbow him. He starts laughing.
“Let’s pack it in,” I say. I don’t think I can handle any more flirting in the stacks.
Alexandre and I stand up to place the book in a “to be reshelved” cart. “I’m sorry we didn’t find anything about our lady with the raven tresses,” he says.
I stop short. “Oh my God,” I nearly yell. “That’s it. It’s so obvious.”
“What? What did I say?” Alexandre asks.
I don’t reply. I’m too nervous. Please let me be right. I cradle the book in one hand and flip back through the index, quickly running my eye down the columns. All the letter recipients are listed alphabetically by last name. But what if Byron didn’t use a name but an endearment? My hands get clammy as I search for her. Maybe it’s luck. Maybe it’s destiny. But it doesn’t matter, because there she is: Lady, Raven Tresses, of the . . . page 312. Alexandre squeezes my elbow.
“Holy crap,” I whisper.
January 12, 1815
My Dearest Lady of the Raven Tresses,
Though fate, and, in truth, your own will, have distanced us since our return, know my love is a fix’d mark. Neither time nor place can alter its course. I am ready, upon your word, to arrive with all haste to Paris. Indeed, if you bid me fly to the moon, I would give up all pleasures of this earthly realm and build a ladder to the heavens to live with you amongst the stars. I can think of no more rightful place, for your beauty is celestial; more so, your heart.
You have made your own feelings clear. And of mine, you can be in no doubt. God knows I wish you only happiness and a peace, which I hope comes through time, dripping slowly through the days and hours. I know your heart longs for another. Mourns for he who was cut down so cruelly in front of your tender eyes. Would that I could return him to you, had I but that power.
I write in no true hope to sway your course. Merely to declare, once more, that I am, as ever, in your service. This is no time for mere words. Yet I offer you these verses enclosed here. Though I have kept your identity hidden, I write these words that you and the world may ever know that I was and am yours, freely.
Ever Yrs,
I close the book and look at Alexandre. I want to throw my arms around his neck and squeeze, but I muster all my self-restraint and suppress my feelings. But then a smile sweeps across my face as I library-whisper, “Boom.”
Alexandre invited me to his place to look at a couple other old books that could yield clues. But I said no—not wanting to tempt fate or be tempted. And part of me wonders if it wasn’t an excuse to spend time with me in his library where we shared our first kiss.
I walk home, my mind whirring with things lost and found. It’s overcast, and there’s a slight breeze—a welcome break from the heat that’s been pretty unrelenting all month. Tourists pass by, oblivious to me and the cautionary tale that is my life, in a rush to get to a monument or museum that’s been waiting for them for centuries, to pose for a photo that probably will never exist on paper. Is a JPG even a memory? Or as the French say, a souvenir? I have literally thousands of pictures on my phone, but I barely look at them and definitely don’t remember them all. Byron wrote thousands of letters during his life, and he died when he was thirty-six. And here I am, hundreds of years later, reading them. That is a souvenir.
I sigh. I always grow into Paris when we’re here. Despite the chaos in my life this summer, as I watch windswept tourists pulling along little kids with ice cream melting down their arms, I feel content in my own French skin. Like I belong here. Like it’s okay to have more than one home. That home is a place I can carry with me.
I notice a missed call and a text from my parents, who apparently are having such fun taking the waters in Brittany, they’re staying on a couple more days. I haven’t told them a thing about Zaid, except to say that his big surprise was garbage cookies like I suspected, which is, in part, true. I didn’t tell my mom about the ugly scene in our apartment. I didn’t tell her about how I wished I could’ve given Zaid and me a better ending. Looking back, maybe we were always a bit of a mess together, but sometimes it was a beautiful mess.
Anyway, if I told my mom everything, my parents would be on the next train back. I know she’s been worried about me, more than usual, but there’s nothing she can do about Zaid or Alexandre or my confusion. I wished them a happy second honeymoon and told them I was fine. And honestly, I am okay. There is so much unrequited love and straight-up tragedy in these notes and letters we’ve found that it makes my troubles seem small.
Leila watched while the love of her life was killed. In a way, a part of her died that day, too. Dumas was doing his best to woo her, and even after they were apparently sleeping together, he didn’t have her heart. And Byron, damn, was he pining away—though he probably deserved it. Talk about an ugly, tangled heap of emotions. Decades of heartbreak and death make Instagram scandals seem small. Byron sent that letter from England to Paris by ship. I was going bonkers when Zaid didn’t text me for four days. I cannot imagine the nail-biting anxiety of having to wait months or to never even know if the letter of your heart ever reached the intended. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by gratitude that fate landed me in this era. I mean, when my parents reminisce about the 1980s and ’90s and mix tapes and talking on a landline and watching TV with commercials, it feels like the Dark Ages. It’s snail mail. It’s a poem being hand carried over land and sea.
My phone dings. I stop on the street in front of my building. A text from Alexandre. A photo of another Gautier essay he found in the Revue he wanted us to look at. Okay, maybe inviting me over wasn’t an excuse to relive our romantic moments. Seems this Gautier article may never have been published, though, because Alexandre says he found it in an appendix. I unlock the door and read as I walk up the steps to my apartment.
September 1849
. . . Ceremonially dressed in Arab costume, as my compatriots, I notice a somber mood has befallen our usual jolly gathering. Few partake tonight in what Baudelaire has termed his “playground of the seraphim.” Dumas broods in the corner, and his dark humor fills the room. I dare not ask what troubles him. Even Delacroix, his confidant, cannot convince him to indulge in the green sweetmeat that may open the door to celestial voices. “I do not seek a muse,” he utters under his breath. “There is no solace for me here. Only pain.” It is only when the concealed panel opens and Leila—for we have come to know the tarot reader by this name—emerges from her hidden chamber that his mood lightens and an expression reminiscent of a smile dares appear on his face. But it is merely a ghost of what once was, I fear. The tarot reader finds her seat at the small wooden table in the corner. She takes care to cover it with a crimson scarf, placing her deck in the center, then folds her hands in her lap, waiting for the evening’s first customer. She observes the room from her advantageous positioning, smiling at each of us in our turn. When her face falls upon Dumas, her eyes warm to him, and she gives him a discreet nod that only I, attuned to minute observation, comprehend.
Dumas rises and places himself at the mercy of the cards. The lady with the raven tresses gestures to the deck with an open palm—bidding Dumas to separate it into three small piles. He whispers his question to her, then reaches out, but rather than the cards, takes her hand in his. Swiftly, she removes it to her lap, her smile faltering only briefly. But her eyes soften, and an unspoken understanding seems to pass between them. Dumas looks down. Since I first entered these doors, I cannot recall a moment where Dumas seemed so overcome by melancholia. He chooses three cards: past, present, future. L’Amoureux, La Roue de Fortune, La Mort. Even the tarot reader, insouciant though she often seems, gasps and pushes back from her chair. She utters her apologies and retreats to the hidden chamber that none but she is allowed to enter.
Those are the tarot cards we found—well, two anyway—the Wheel of Fortune and Death. A lump wells in my throat as I unlock the door and step into my empty apartment that suddenly feels full of ghosts. I’m not sure why I feel sad for people who are ancient history. Their story just feels so real. So of this moment. I text Alexandre:
Me: We need to go back to the Hôtel.
Alexandre: The secret chamber?
Me: Obviously. Tonight.
Alexandre: Okay. Then pack your bags, because tomorrow we go to the Château de Monte-Cristo.
Me: I’m not staying overnight there with you. My parents would freak.
I don’t add that I am freaking out right now.
Alexandre: Sorry. I was trying to use that American idiom. The Château is only 1 hour by train.
Me: 
Alexandre: . . .
Alexandre: . . .
Great. My assumption was so ridiculous he can’t figure out how to respond.
Alexandre: I will come by your place at 9 p.m. I will bring no bags.