How had Leonora done this, living on just a single memory of one love over the years while another suitor made his case to her daily there in her own castle? I had been braver in Paris, with my fantasies of returning to him at the Bal Mabille, but now, by the edge of the Black Forest, I foundered. I wanted to see him that very night. While I did not know how to leave this room, I did not know how to stay, either. I knew it would destroy me to go to him that night as I wanted to, uncertain even of finding him; but the thought of staying here and thus somehow fating him to be the one to come here and die at the tenor’s hands, sealing him into this strange game of destiny, wasn’t this sending him to his death? And my own?
The only way to save him from that fate was to leave here before it came true. If this was what I feared it was, he should never come, never walk out of that forest; it was too dangerous. If there was a way to warn him that he should not come for me should his circumstances ever conspire . . . But this was the madness I spoke of before—I knew it even as I thought of it—even if I knew how to reach him, it would be a madwoman’s letter. He would not believe it. He might even try to come here to convince me it was not true and thus bring it all to fruition.
Where, to that end, would a letter find him? Where did he reside, and was he safe or in danger, a captive like me? If our little moment in the night had made me so valuable, he, under the direct caresses of the Empress, would have become much more so. Did she keep him in an apartment the way the tenor kept me or was there a golden cage, brought from palace to palace, in secret? Or a cave beneath Compiègne guarded by assassins? He was almost certainly a kept man or a prisoner, or both, and whichever was true, he would not be at the Bal Mabille come spring no matter what I hoped—his days of playing for whatever they paid were behind him. I knew from the Majeurs-Plaisirs of a house much like ours nearby, full entirely of men, and their clientele also almost entirely men, though it was said a few wealthy women availed themselves of them as well. I had never once tried to imagine this, but now I did, the composer at a piano in a salon, playing and waiting, amid laughter and champagne . . .
But the Empress would never risk such a thing, she in a domino on some velvet chaise looking on as others drank merrily around them both. She would never do this. His quarters were likely even more mysterious than any of this, and the more hidden.
There was only the very slightest chance he was still free. And if he would be there in Paris, at the Mabille come spring, the dream of our reunion would likely conclude with my being caught by the Comtesse’s agents, or the Emperor’s, or the Empress’s; and if any of them had not found him before this, I would lead them to him just by going to him.
How stupid I’d been to dream of it.
This world is not made for us to be together came the thought.
More ordinary ways of losing him intruded. I could lose him to another woman, or I had already lost him, or I was only a bit of fun in the garden to him; and all of this was only some ridiculous fever dream—the dream of a prisoner. All of the scenarios I imagined, extraordinary and ordinary both, ended with us apart.
The wind blew even harder as these scenes proceeded in front of my mind’s eye. I have gone mad, I told myself, this final self-betrayal, unforeseen and bitter—more bitter than the others. But as the wind surged, that sense of madness ebbed, and what returned was the very real feeling of the outline of that god’s hand, as if the wind were the very heel of that hand pressed to my face.
I was not mad.
If I can be with him, let me be with him, I said, into the fingers of the wind. Make me your plaything; do as you will. But do not give me all of this and not him as well. Do not make him the price I must pay; I will not pay it.
I waited, fearful for a moment, as if I might hear a response. And how would I refuse? I wondered to myself. I knew only that I would. And I knew only one way that I could. This little game would end if this Leonora died before her lover’s capture.
I will not pay it, I said again. I will pay some other price.