"Laryngite," he wrote. He pointed to his throat.
Margaret stared at her new friend. Laryngite? She took the pad from him, and the little pen.
"Sorry," she wrote irritably.
They sat silently for a while.
"Was there a dead baby?" the Frenchman suddenly wrote.
She started to write "Huh?" on the leather-bound pad. Why am I writing? she thought then, and shoved the pad rather ungraciously back to the Frenchman.
"Huh?" she said.
"A dead baby in the opera?" he wrote.
"No. Just a dead girl."
"Katya Kabanova," he wrote.
"Oh yeah," Margaret said. "Katya Kabanova."
In her dream, the Frenchman on the airplane stared at her as if she were a jewel he was appraising. His green-and-white-striped shirt rubbed suggestively against her bare arm. He examined her as if she were a jewel, with a jeweler's glass, while she lay naked on the hotel bed and his green-and-white-striped shirt stretched alluringly across his stomach.
"Enlightenment," said the Frenchman, "is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage."
I know, she thought.
"Nonage," he said, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance."
I know.
"Kant."
Kant.
"Kant said, 'Dare to know,'" said the Frenchman, handing her the jeweler's glass, but keeping hold of her hand once the jeweler's glass was in it. "Dare to know."
"Okay."
"FOLLOW ME!" he said, and pulled her into a little orange car with peeling paint.
Three
Because of a short journey I was obliged to take, to Geneva to attend to some matters regarding the publication of an edition of my Treatise on Sense and Sociability, I was forced to abandon temporarily my instruction of Rameau's niece. Separated from my pupil for over a month, I found myself bound to her more and more in imagination. I could not concentrate. I tried to write but could not. I tried to find something to do and began one task and gave it up for another, and that for yet another; my hands stopped of their own accord. I had never experienced anything like it.
At last, my business was successfully completed, much to my advantage, I might add, and yet I had so regretted the necessity for a trip that interrupted the education of my remarkable pupil that I returned with the greatest alacrity at my command.
Immediately upon reaching the house of the marquise, I inquired as to the whereabouts of Rameau's niece and, hearing that my student was walking alone in the garden, without stopping even to change my clothing, I followed in order to search her out.
My trip had afforded me many new experiences and given me much time for contemplation of new ideas, as well as the ideas my pupil and I had explored so diligently together, and I longed to impart to my student the fruits of my discoveries and of the many evenings spent in lonely contemplation, as soon as was feasible.
Walking through the garden, I recalled with rising spirits our first meeting, for memory can produce the most delicious state in a sensitive soul. I recalled how the affection we had conceived for our studies had grown from day to day. I rapturously recounted the observations I had made during our mutual pursuit of enlightenment: her sweet breath; her forehead, white and smooth and beautifully shaped; her eyes, sparkling with curiosity and intelligence; her tiny, dimpled hands; her bosom, firm as a statue and admirably formed; her rounded arms; her neck, exquisitely unusual in its beauty.
I walked on, thinking of how, after a night of the give and take of rigorous philosophical discussion, of delving unrelentingly for knowledge and for truth, my pupil would wrap her figure, which was of perfect proportions, in a muslin nightgown and leave my room, turning back at the door, running back to me to thank me for my efforts on her behalf, throwing her arms around my neck and covering me with kisses of gratitude. Truly, there is nothing so rewarding as the instruction of the young.
When Margaret married Edward, she felt as if she'd walked in through a door and closed it gently behind her. Now that door had somehow opened. She'd looked through it, and it would no longer stay shut. It rattled with every breeze.
I have become an adulteress, she thought. An adulteress in the head. Many people are adulteresses. But until now I was not one of them and could not imagine becoming one of them. Now it is all I imagine.