Free The House I Loved by Tatiana De Rosnay Page B

it. If I do, I will drown in it. If I do, I will have no strength left.
    The day you died, you gathered up a last spark of lucidity. You said to me, upstairs, in our bedroom, my hand in yours: “Watch over our house, Rose. Don’t let that Baron, that Emperor…” And then your eyes were coated over by that film of strangeness and you once again gazed at me as if you did not know me. But I had heard enough. I knew fully what you demanded of me. As you lay there, the life gone from your body, with Violette’s sobs at my back, I was aware of the task you had left me. I was to honor it. I made you that promise. Ten years later, my dearest, and now that the time is coming, I have not wavered.
    The very day you left us, the fourteenth day of January, we learned that a terrible attack had been planned on the Emperor near the old Opéra, on the rue Le Peletier. Three bombs were thrown, nearly two hundred people were wounded and a dozen died. Horses were torn to pieces, and all the windowpanes of the entire street were shattered. The royal carriage was turned upside down, and the Emperor narrowly escaped death, as did the Empress. I later read that her dress had been drenched with a victim’s blood, but that she went to the Opéra all the same, in order to show her people that she was not afraid.
    I did not care for that attack, as I did not care for the Italian who perpetrated it, Orsini (who was later to be guillotined), nor did I care about what his motives were. You were slipping away and absolutely nothing else mattered to me.
    You died peacefully, with no pain, in our room, in the mahogany bed. You seemed relieved to be leaving this world and all the things about it that you no longer understood. Over the past years, I had watched you gradually slip into the illness that lurked in the recesses of your mind and that doctors talked about prudently. Your disease could not be seen or measured. I do not even think it had a name. No medicine could ever cure it.
    Toward the end, you could not stand the light of day. You had Germaine close the shutters of the sitting room as of noon. Sometimes you would jump in your seat, startling me, and you would cock an ear, straining, and you would say, “Did you hear that, Rose?” I had not heard a thing, be it a voice, a bark, the slam of a door, but I learned to say that, yes, I had heard it too. And when you began to say, agitated, over and over again, your hands twitching, that the Empress was coming over for tea, that we must have Germaine prepare fresh fruit, I also learned to nod my head and to soothingly murmur that all that was being done, of course. You liked to read the paper thoroughly, every morning, poring over it, even the advertisements. Every time the Prefect’s name was printed, you let forth a stream of insults. Some of them were very rude.
    The Armand that I miss is not the old, confused person you were at fifty-eight, when death overcame you. The Armand I long for is the strong young man in his knee breeches with the gentle smile. We were married for thirty years, dearest. I want to go back to those first days of passion, your hands on my body, the secret pleasure you gave me. No one will ever read these lines, so I can tell you how well you pleased me, and what an ardent husband you were. In that bedroom upstairs, you and I loved each other like a man and a woman should. But then, when the illness started to gnaw away at you, your loving touch relented and slowly withered away with the passing of time. I suspected I no longer sparked any desire. Was there another lady? My fears abated and a new anxiety dawned when I understood you no longer felt any desire, for another lady, or for me. You were ill, and desire had waned forever.
    There was that abominable day, toward the end, when I was returning from the market with Mariette, and we came upon Germaine in tears in the street in front of the house. You had gone. She had found the sitting room empty, and your hat and