Hotelles (16 page)

“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.