1849. BAPTISTE WAS TEN years old. The year the Prefect and the Emperor met for the first time. The year after the barricades and the February Revolution. Nearly twenty years ago, and my heart still bleeds as I write this. He moved like a little pixie always on the go, spry, fast as lightning. His laugh echoed through the house. Sometimes, you know, I still hear it.
There were early murmurs of the disease. I was first aware of them at the market. The last epidemic breakout was just after Violette was born, ten years before. Thousands of people had died. One had to be very careful with the water. Baptiste enjoyed playing at the fountain on the rue Erfurth. I could see him from the window, the governess watching over him. I had warned him, you did too, but he had a mind of his own.
It happened very fast. The papers were already full of the oncoming deaths, the toll was rising day after day. The dreadful word sent terror into our homes. Cholera. A lady on the rue de l’Echaudé had succumbed. Every morning a new death was announced. Fear gripped our street.
And then, one morning, in the kitchen, Baptiste collapsed. He fell to the floor with a shriek of pain, crying out that he had a cramp in his leg. I rushed to him.
“What is it, my darling, my sweet?” I murmured as he fretted, twisting and turning in my arms. Germaine suggested we pull up his breeches to see what was wrong with his leg. My fingers clumsily worked the buttons.
“Maman,” muttered my son, “it hurts…” How I remember his thin, weak voice, a voice that tugged at my heart.
There appeared to be nothing wrong with his shin or thigh. I soothed him as best as I could. His forehead felt hot and clammy. He began to sob, wincing with pain. A horrid gurgle was heard, coming from his abdomen. I said to myself that this could not be happening. No, not to my son, not to my adored son. Not this. I remember screaming out for you, screaming your name up the stairs.
You heard my shriek and you rushed down, your face white as a sheet. Yes, I can still hear your footsteps pounding down the steps. You had a book in one hand, your spectacles clutched in the other. Violette followed in your wake, her eyes wide.
“Rose, what on earth…?”
Then you saw our son and the objects clasped in your fingers clattered to the floor. Violette screamed. Remember how we carried him up to his room, you and I, and Germaine rushed to summon the doctor? But it was too late. I could tell by your face that you knew, but you were not telling me. In a mere couple of hours, hours that spelt doom and death with every click of the minutes gliding past, all liquids left his burning, twisting body. They poured out of him, oozed from him and we could only watch with horror.
“Do something!” I pleaded to the doctor. “You must save my son!”
All day long, young Docteur Nonant wrapped my son’s loins in strips of clean sheets, slid clear water down his throat, but to no avail. Baptiste’s hands and feet seemed to have been dipped in black paint. His pink little face, dry and waxen, had gone a monstrous bluish color. The round cheeks had caved in to leave in their wake the disturbing pointed mask of a wizened creature I no longer recognized. His sunken eyes cried no more tears. The sheets thickened with all he was bringing up, soiled rivulets that gushed from his body in a never-ending, stinking flux.
“We must all pray at present,” murmured Père Levasque, whom you had sent for in the last, dreadful moments when we finally understood that there was no more hope. Candles were lit, and the fervent mutter of prayers filled the room.
When I look at the room now, that is what I remember: the stench, the candles and the prayers, over and over again, Germaine’s gentle sobbing, Violette’s cough. You sat very straight and silent by my side, and sometimes you took my hand and squeezed it gently. I was so beside myself with grief that I could not understand your calm. I remember thinking: Faced with the death of a child, are men stronger than women because they do not give birth, because they do not know what it means to carry life within one and to bring a baby into the world? Are mothers not linked to their offspring by a secret, intimate and physical link that fathers cannot experience?
That night, in that house, I saw my beloved son die and I felt my life become a meaningless void.
The year after, Violette married Laurent Pesquet, her fiancé, and left home to live in Tours. Nothing touched me anymore since the little boy’s death.
I watched the events of my life unfold from very far away. I went about my existence in a sort of dazed numbness. I remember you talking about me with Docteur Nonant. He had come to visit me. At forty-one, I was too old to have another child. And no other child could ever replace Baptiste.
But I knew why the Lord had reclaimed my child. I shake as I write this, and it is no longer the cold.
Forgive me.
Rue Childebert, August 20th, 1850
Rose of my heart,
I cannot bear your pain, your sorrow. He was the loveliest child, the most delightful boy, but alas God decided to call him back to Him and we must respect His choice, there is nothing else we can do, my love. I write this by the fireplace, as the candle flickers through the quiet night. You are upstairs, in our room, trying to find rest. I do not know how to help you and I feel useless. It is a loathsome feeling. I wish Maman Odette were here to console you. But she has been gone so long now, and she never knew the little boy. Yet she would have surrounded you with her love and her tenderness in these agonizing moments. Why are we men so hopeless at this sort of thing? Why do we not know how to soothe, how to bestow our care? I am furious with myself as I sit here and write this to you. I am but a worthless husband, as I cannot bring you solace.
Since he left us, last year, you are the ghost of your former self. You have become gaunt and white, you no longer smile. Even at our daughter’s recent wedding, on that gorgeous day by the river, you did not smile once. Everyone noticed and of course everyone spoke to me about it, your brother, very worried, and even your mother, who never notices what state you are in, and your new son-in-law, a young doctor, had a quiet word with me about you. Some of them suggested a trip down south, by the sea, to seek the sun and warmth. Others said to rest, to eat nourishing food, to exercise.
Your eyes are empty and sad, it breaks my heart. Oh, what am I to do? Today I walked about our neighborhood and I tried to find you a trinket that would cheer you up. I came back empty-handed. I sat down at the café on the place Gozlin, near where you grew up, and read the newspapers, all full of Balzac’s death. As you know, he is one of my favorite writers, and somehow, because of what you are enduring, your acute pain, I simply cannot feel sadness at Monsieur de Balzac’s passing away. The poor fellow was more or less my age. And he too had a wife he loved passionately, as I love you with a passion that inflames my entire life.
Rose, my love, I am a wistful gardener who no longer knows how to make his lovely plant come into full, promising bloom. Rose, you are now frozen, as if you no longer dared to burst into flower, no longer dared to offer yourself to me, to let your enticing perfume bewitch me as those delicious petals open up one by one. Is the gardener to blame? Our beloved son is gone, and with him, a part of our life. But our love is still powerful, is it not, and it is our greatest strength, it is what we need to cherish in order to be able to survive. Remember how our love preceded our child, how our love gave birth to him. We must treasure it, nurture it and revel in it. I share your sorrow, I respect and mourn our son as a father, as a parent, but can we not mourn him as lovers? For after all, was he not born of two splendid lovers? I long for the sweet scent of your skin, my hands yearn to caress the curves of your beloved body, my lips burn to bestow thousands of kisses on the secret places that only I know of and adore. I want to feel you undulate against me under the softness of my caresses, under the sweet violence of my embrace; I hunger for your love, I want to taste the sweetness of your flesh, your womanly intimacy, I want to go back to the feverish ecstasy we shared as lovers, as a husband and a wife deeply, truly in love, up there in the quiet kingdom of our bedroom.
You are my prior
ity, Rose, and I shall fight with all my might to restore your faith in our love, in our life.
Yours forever,
Armand, your husband
I FELT THE OVERPOWERING need to take a pause and could no longer write for a short while. But now, as my quill once more slides along the paper, I am connected with you again. I did not write you very many letters. We never separated, did we? I have also kept all your little poems. They are not really poems, are they? Little sentences of love that you would leave here and there for me to find. How I miss them. When the longing becomes too great, I give in, and reach for them. I keep them in a small leather pouch with your wedding ring and your reading glasses. “Rose, dear Rose, the light in your eyes is like the dawn, but only for me to behold.” And this one: “Rose, enchanting Rose, no thorns on your stem, only buds of sweetness and love.” No doubt a stranger would find them puerile. I do not care.
When I read them, I can still hear your lovely, deep voice. Armand, I miss your voice, above all. Why can’t the dead come back and talk to us? You could whisper to me as I take my tea in the mornings, and you would murmur more words at night, when I lie awake in the silence. And I would like to hear Maman Odette’s laugh, and my son’s babble. My mother’s voice? No, not in the least. I do not miss it whatsoever. When she died, of ripe old age, in her bed, at place Gozlin, I felt nothing, not even a twinge of sadness. You were standing beside me and Émile, and you kept looking at me, as if you read something on my face. I wanted to tell you that it was not my mother I missed, no, it was still yours, Maman Odette, who had died nearly twenty years before. I think you knew. And I was still mourning my son. For years after his death, I went to his grave every other day, walking all the way to the Cimetière du Sud, by the Montparnasse barrier. Sometimes you came with me. But most often I went alone.
A strange, painful peace invaded me when I sat by his tomb, under the rain, or the sun, my umbrella protecting me on every occasion. I did not wish to talk to anyone, and if someone hovered too near, I would swoop under the umbrella to safety and privacy. A lady of my age came to a nearby grave with the same regularity. She too would sit for hours, her hands in her lap. Was she praying? I wondered. I sometimes prayed. But I preferred to talk to my son directly. I talked to him in my head, exactly as if he had been standing in front of me. In the beginning, the presence of the other lady disturbed me. I soon got used to her. We never spoke to each other. Sometimes we nodded, very quickly. Who was she mourning? A husband, a son, a daughter, a mother? Did she talk to her dead the way I did?
You never asked what I said to Baptiste when I visited him. You were most respectful. I can tell you now. I gave him all the news and tidbits about our neighborhood. I told him how Madame Chanteloup’s shop on the rue des Ciseaux nearly burned to the ground and how the firemen fought all night long to master the flames and how exciting yet horrible it had been. I told him how his friends were bearing up (funny little Gustave on the rue de la Petite Boucherie, and rebellious Adèle on the rue Sainte-Marthe). I told him how I had found a new cook, Mariette, talented and timid, and Germaine bossed her around in a scandalous fashion until I put my foot down, or rather you did, as the man of the house.
Day after day, month after month, year after year, I went to the graveyard to talk to my son. I told him things I never dared tell you, my very dear. Our new Emperor, for instance, and how I was not impressed by the runt of a man parading on his horse under a cold drizzle with crowds hollering, “Long live the Emperor!” especially after all those deaths during his coup d’état. I told him about the great balloon bearing a majestic eagle that floated over the roofs in the Emperor’s wake. The balloon was rather impressive, I whispered to Baptiste, but the Emperor was anything but that. However, you believed, at that time, like the majority of people, that the Emperor was “remarkable.” I was far too soft-spoken to voice my true political feelings. So I quietly told Baptiste that in my humble opinion, those haughty Bonapartes were far too full of themselves. I told him about the lavish wedding at the cathedral, with the new Spanish-born Empress that everyone wanted to see, that everyone made a fuss of. And then, when the Prince was born, I told him about the cannonballs fired from the Invalides. How jealous I was of that baby prince! I wonder if you ever felt it. Seven years beforehand, we had lost our own baby prince, our Baptiste. I could not bear reading the interminable articles in the press about the new royal child, and I carefully averted my eyes so that every new and sickening portrait of the Empress preening herself with her son could no longer be seen.
GILBERT HAS INTERRUPTED ME with the most astounding news. He has just seen Alexandrine skulking along the street. I asked him what he meant. He looked at me sternly.
“Your flower girl, Madame Rose. The tall, dark one with all that hair and a round face.”
“Yes, that’s her,” I said, smiling inwardly at his description, which was most fitting.
“Well, she was just outside the house, Madame Rose, peering in. I thought she was going to ring on your bell or open the door, so I gave her a little fright. It’s getting mighty dark out there, and she nearly jumped out of her skin when I popped out of that corner. She scuttled off like a frantic hen, and she did not have time to recognize me, I can assure you.”
“What was she doing?” I asked.
“Well, I believe she was looking for you, Madame Rose.”
I stared at his grimy face.
“But she thinks I’m with Violette, or on my way there.”
He pursed his lips together.
“She’s a bright girl, Madame Rose. You know that. She won’t be taken in that easily.”
He was right, of course. A few weeks ago, Alexandrine had supervised the packing up and removal of my furniture and valises with an eagle eye.
“Are you truly going to your daughter’s place, Madame Rose?” she had asked nonchalantly, bent over one of my cases as she struggled to close it with Germaine’s help.
And I had replied, even more nonchalantly, gazing at the darker patch on the wall where the oval mirror used to hang:
“Well, of course I am. But first I shall spend some time with the Baronne de Vresse. Germaine is going down to my daughter’s with most of my luggage.”
Alexandrine had shot a keen eye in my direction. Her grating voice hurt my ears:
“Now, that is unusual, Madame Rose. Because I was with the Baronne recently, delivering her roses, and she never once mentioned you were coming to stay with her.”
I was not to be deterred. No matter how much I was fond of the girl (and believe me, Armand, I am far more attached to that odd creature and her button mouth than to my own daughter), I simply could not let her tamper with my plans. So I tried another tactic. I took her long slim hand in mine and patted her wrist.
“Now, now, Alexandrine, what do you think an old woman like me would do in an empty house on a closed-down street? I have no choice but to go to the Baronne’s and then to my daughter’s. And that is what I shall do. Trust me.”
She glared down at me.
“I will try to trust you, Madame Rose. I will try.”
To Gilbert, I said worriedly:
“She somehow learned from my daughter that I have not yet arrived … And the Baronne has informed her, I presume, that I never did come and stay. Oh, dear…”
“We could always move somewhere else,” suggested Gilbert. “There are a couple of places I know. Warmer and more comfortable.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I will never leave this house. Never.”
He sighed ruefully.
“Yes, I know that, Madame Rose. But you should step outside this evening, to see what is going on. I will darken my lantern. The condemned areas are not watched as closely since the cold set in. We won’t be bothered. It’s icy, but if you hang on to my arm you’ll be safe.”
“What is it you want me to see, Gilbert?”
He gave me that crooked, rather charming grin.
“You may want to say good-bye to the rue Childebert
and the rue Erfurth. Do you not?”
I swallowed with difficulty.
“Yes, you are right, I do.”
WE SET OUT ON a sort of expedition, he and I. He bundled me up as if we were heading for the North Pole. I wore an unknown bedraggled greatcoat which reeked so much of anise and wormwood that I suspected it had been drenched with absinthe, and a top-heavy fur cap, caked with grime, but that kept me warm. No doubt it had belonged, in other times, to a friend of the Baronne de Vresse or such like. When we stepped outside, the cold reached out to envelop me in an icy embrace. It made me gasp with surprise. I could not see a thing, the street was too obscure. It reminded me of those ink-black nights before the public lighting was installed, when walking home even in a safe part of the city became frightening. Gilbert raised his lantern and slid it open so that the dimmed blaze fell softly around us. Our breaths rose in great puffs of white above our heads. I was bracing myself, expecting the crater I had seen when Émile’s house had been swallowed by the hungry boulevard. I squinted through the gloom to get a better look.
The row of houses in front of ours had gone. They had been razed to the ground and, believe me, it was stupefying to behold. In their place rose mountains of rubble that had not been disposed of yet. Madame Godfin’s boutique was a stack of timber. Madame Barou’s building had one flimsy partition still standing. The printing house had vanished into thin air. Monsieur Monthier’s chocolate shop was a mass of charred wood. Chez Paulette had disintegrated into a mound of stones. On our side of the street houses still stood bravely, but they bore a new frailty that made me wince. Most of the windows had been broken, at least the ones which had not been shuttered. The façades were all plastered with expropriation orders and decrees. Litter and papers lined the once-clean cobblestones. It was heartbreaking, dearest.