I nodded blankly.
“It is tragic,” she continued in her strange old-fashioned speech. I had a hard time following some of it—at times her words came out like she was quoting Shakespeare, but in Old French. “Why anyone would put themselves through such misery is quite simply beyond me. How could she expect anything other than grief, remaining attached to a human?”
The words came out almost flippantly, and then Violette turned to me with her mouth in an O and eyes wide. “Kate. I am so sorry! You blend in so well with all the revenants here, I completely forgot you were not one of us. And with you and Vincent being . . .” She grasped for words.
“Together,” I said bluntly.
“Yes, of course. Together. Well, it is so very, very . . . pleasant. Please forget that I said anything.”
Violette looked like she was on the verge of tears, she was so embarrassed. I touched my hand to her shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. Really. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember there’s any difference between me and Vincent.” Which was kind of a lie, since that difference was almost always on my mind. But she seemed mollified and, after nodding gratefully at me, stepped forward and bent down to scoop up her own handful of grave dirt.
There was a stir as Vincent held his hand up to quiet the crowd, who had begun conversing softly among themselves. “Excuse me, friends,” he called out. “There is something that Geneviève wanted to read you herself, but she has asked me to take her place. It was a favorite passage of hers and Philippe’s from the book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. She said it helped to keep them ‘in the day.’”
He cleared his voice and began reading.
“‘Time wastes too fast . . . . the days and hours of it . . . are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more—every thing presses on—whilst thou art twisting that lock,—see! it grows grey . . .’”
Vincent looked up and caught my eye and then, looking troubled, returned to the page and continued.
“‘And every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!’”
My heart lurched in my chest. Not just symbolically—it caused actual physical pain. The passage seemed to have been written for me and Vincent. My worst fear about our future had been spelled out in the poetic lines that he was reading like a dirge.
This could be us, I thought once again. Whatever happened, we seemed damned by fate. Even if Vincent suffered through the agony it would cause him to resist dying and grow old with me, someday he’d be like Geneviève, a beautiful teenager standing by his elderly lover’s grave.
And why am I even thinking about growing old with someone? my internal voice of reason protested indignantly, making me feel like a sappy idiot. I’m just a teenager! How do I even know what I will want five years from now, much less sixty? I couldn’t help it, though. The tragedy felt real and immediate, and I couldn’t throw it off with rational explanations.
Irrational and premature grief raked my heart, forcing stinging tears to my eyes. I had to get out of there. I had to escape from this crushing reminder of mortality’s final result. I backed slowly out of the assembly, hoping no one would notice my flight.
Once I was clear of the group, I strode quickly away, pausing briefly to look over my shoulder. No one had seen me leave. Everyone faced Vincent, who was now hidden by a sea of black suits. I myself was lost for a minute in a mob of passing tourists, holding up maps that pointed out the celebrity graves. “Edith Piaf, two aisles over and one up,” called a guide leading a group of American teenagers. Just a year ago, that could have been me, I thought, looking at a smiling, carefree girl my age. I let myself be swept along with them until I was a safe distance away from the funeral.
Not caring what direction I was heading, I plunged deeper into the acres of graves. A cold rain began to pelt down like frozen darts, stinging my skin, and I ducked into a little Gothic-style structure carved in stone.
The roof was supported only by pillars, giving me shelter from the rain, but leaving me exposed to the cold wind. I hunched down next to an aboveground tomb topped by two statues lying side by side, their hands pressed together in eternal prayer on their marble bed. After a moment of casting around in my memory, I remembered where I was—I had stopped here on the walking tour with my mother. It was the tomb of Abelard and Hélo?se. How fitting, I thought, that on today, of all days, I end up at the grave site of France’s most famous tragic lovers.