Free The Woman With the Bouquet by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt Page A

use the side of my body. Otherwise, perhaps I would have had the courage to marry Guillaume.”
    She stared at me intensely and corrected herself: “How idiotic, sentences like that, ‘otherwise,’ or, ‘if I hadn’t been sick!’—tricks of the mind to suffer even more! My fate could not unfold ‘otherwise.’ One should never fall into these hypotheses, they are a deep source of pain where you splash about hopelessly. I have known one disgrace and one grace, I have no cause for complaint! The disgrace: my illness. The grace: that Guillaume loved me.”
    I smiled. She grew calmer.
    “Madame, there is a question I hardly dare ask you.”
    “Go ahead. Dare to ask.”
    “Is Guillaume still alive?”
    She took a deep breath and then stopped herself from answering. Swiveling on her chair, she went over to a low table, picked up a flat silver box, saw that there were no more cigarettes, and pushed it away, annoyed. In disgust, she grabbed an antique tortoiseshell cigarette holder and with a proud gesture, raised it to her mouth.
    “Forgive me. I shall not answer your question, sir, because I do not want to give you too many clues that might identify the man I have talked about. Suffice to say that Guillaume was not called Guillaume, it is just a pseudonym that I gave him in my story. You will also notice that I did not mention his rank in the order of succession. And finally, you will remember that I gave you no indication whatsoever of which royal family is concerned.”
    “Excuse me? You did not mean the Belgian dynasty?”
    “I didn’t say that. It could just as easily be the royal house of Holland, Sweden, Denmark, or Great Britain.”
    “Or Spain,” I shouted, exasperated.
    “Or Spain!” she confirmed. “I told you my secret, not his.”
    My head was spinning. Naïve, I had swallowed down to the last detail everything she had told me the night before. This discovery that, despite her emotion, she had controlled her story, cast a different light upon her—calculating, crafty.
    I wished her a good day and set off on my walk.
     
    As I strolled, a strange thought wriggled between my temples, a thought that escaped me. In a fleeting way, a memory was working its way into my brain, like a word on the tip of the tongue. I had been baffled by what Gerda had told me, and then Emma herself, and I now went about with a sense of uneasiness I could not define. I stopped several times on the long deserted piers. I contemplated the waves: I felt land sick, and I had to sit down.
    It was Tuesday, and the tourists had vanished, restoring my Ostend to me, intact and empty. However, I was suffocating.
    Ordinarily, whenever I stayed by the ocean, I had the impression that the horizon receded as far as the eye could see; but here in the north the horizon rose up like a wall. I was not looking out at a sea on which one could escape, but a sea where one can go no further. This sea was not a call to departure—it raised up its ramparts. Is that why Emma Van A. had spent her life here, to remain prisoner in the exile of her memories?
    I clung to the iron guardrail that ran along the pier. When I had left the villa, for a brief split second I had been stung by something—a sensation, a memory that had left a bitter taste in my mouth. What was it?
    As I headed toward a café in order to get something to drink, the answer came to me, because the brasserie chairs suddenly conjured a sharp image: the madwoman of Saint-Germain!
    Twenty years earlier, when I had just moved to Paris to begin my studies, I had met this strange creature one evening when my friends and I were waiting to go into the cinema.
    “Mesdames, Messieurs, I’m going to perform a dance for you.”
    A tramp of a woman with flat hair of an indefinite color—some of it was yellow, some of it ash gray—stopped in front of the group of people getting ready to go into the theater, left her bundles under a doorway, then stood among us, keeping an eye on her bundles all