By December, the food crisis in Paris was in extremis. The cold at least kept the smell of the garbage down, and there was less garbage also, and what there was had less and less in it that would rot.
The Third Republic had proved no more effective at ending the Siege and fighting the Prussians than the Second Empire, though, of course, I wanted to know only when we could eat again. As winter started, the hunger became unbearable, and now there was also a need for wood for fires. I sometimes longed for my dresses, but the last dresses made in Paris would bag on me where once they had fit perfectly. I could no longer wear them even if I could retrieve them, for fear of appearing a woman of means. I instead contented myself with my one dress and took hat pins and pinned it for some time so it fit until I became too thin, and then I let it hang loose so people would not stare.
To eat, I went to the Bois with Aristafeo and the Lords of the Lower Gardens, and watched them as they hunted for animals while I collected chestnuts for roasting later. Soon I also gathered the leaves, and sometimes pieces of bark, to make soup. I did this until the trees were all bare, stripped from root to just above where the tallest man could reach.
The walking stick was for disciplining Gaston and Frédéric. Aristafeo let them range over the Bois, where as late as November they found rabbits and rats and sometimes a cat. We let them eat first, and then they would hunt for us.
To be so hungry again, hungrier than I’d ever known as winter began, I felt with certainty that my death was coming for me; soon I’d be reunited with my family, called before the Lord; for all of my sins, my lies, my selfishness, and my lust, now I would finally be caught.
And each time I arrived at this conclusion, I put it out of my head until it became a trail I walked regularly in my thoughts, from waking to the hunger, from the remembering to the forgetting.
§
To stay sane as best we could, we adopted a schedule to which we stuck regularly. He would wake first and start a fire for tea—coffee was no longer available. When I woke, the tea kept hunger at bay for a time, and we would then rehearse. I would do my warm-ups first, my Viardot-García scales, at the piano, and then he would do his own warm-ups and play, and then in the late morning we would rehearse together. We would break to hunt for our luncheon, and then we would return, and then I might read, or he would, with more tea to keep us from hunger, and then it would be time for whatever supper we could muster. Sometimes he taught me Spanish, and more and more we drank wine in place of tea, which also kept the hunger at bay and cast a lightly drowsy light in which it was easier to bear the day. But he never took a single visitor, he seemed to have no friends to speak of, and he did not seek out friends at their homes. We had no society except each other and the dogs. We made love still, but I no longer made a display of my body; it was too cold and I was too thin. I wanted his last memory of me to be one of a plumper breast, such as it had ever been.
I no longer asked when we would leave.
Time, for that matter, seemed to have stopped altogether, each day the same until some new shortage would occur, and soon after the streets would fill with hearses and coffins as whoever could not survive this newest famine died.
One afternoon, after we returned to the Marais with a few thin rabbits the dogs caught for us and he had skinned them in the kitchen and I had stirred the fire back to life and set chestnuts to roast, he appeared in the kitchen’s door. He had asked if he should save the blood for blood sausage, which I did not know how to make, and this surprised him some. That is not the woman I am, I said, and he laughed.
When the rabbits had finished stewing and the chestnuts were done, I left the kitchen to find him. He sat staring into a glass of red wine, and without looking up, he poured another for me.
These rabbits I watched stew, they were rare, I knew it. I wished I knew how to make the blood sausage.
Have you never seen him, then? Aristafeo asked me, and I knew without his saying who he meant.
No, I said.
Then the dogs’ work is done, he said.
I nodded dumbly.
There aren’t even rats anymore. The dogs will be taken from me soon, I think, he said. I would prefer they die at my hands.
He had never once spoken this way of them. What do you say? he asked.
I couldn’t say, I replied, and shrugged. I had never loved them, but I knew he had—I knew he did not say this lightly. I knew he had become proud of the way he’d never eaten them. But we risked becoming weaker than those who had eaten their dogs already and becoming prey to them.
Game is better than carrion, he finally said. It is Christmas in a few days. I’ll do it before then.
I laughed to think of dogs for Christmas.
We’ll feast, he said, and pray for an end to the Siege. Though it has brought at least one gift.
I watched him, expectant.
Is it that the Siege has set you free, then? he said.