I looking at?”
“My uncle has a letter to the lady of the raven tresses. A copy, anyway.”
“What!” I yell. “And he’s been sitting on it? I thought he was the one who orchestrated this whole thing.” I wave my hand in the space between us. “Unpaid labor to find the missing treasure that’s going to benefit your family that he couldn’t find himself. Now you tell me he’s been holding out?”
“Uncle Gérard didn’t even remember it until I told him about the letters we found and how Baudelaire’s name came up in one of the Revue articles.”
“And?” I cross my arms and raise my eyebrows.
“Dumas died at his son’s house in 1870. Supposedly, there was a copy of Baudelaire’s poems, Paris Spleen, by his deathbed. It was packed away with his things, and decades later, some archivist found a letter tucked between the pages. The letter is at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The book is at the Chateau.”
“Unbelievable. It’s literally filed away in the archives here in Paris? And he never gave the letter a second thought. No one was curious about the woman? Until now, I guess, when she could be worth money.” I shake my head. This is how stories are lost.
“You have to understand that there are literally thousands of letters and journal entries and unfinished stories and essays, unpublished novels. I guess he disregarded it because Dumas had dozens of known affairs—”
“Oh. Of course. How could he possibly have thought it was important—it was just a note to some insignificant woman, right? Another notch in Dumas’s belt.”
“I’m sorry. The men in my family, well, I guess we haven’t exactly been chivalrous or easy to forgive.” Alexandre bites his lip. “Maybe we don’t deserve it.”
“What’s in the letter?” I demand.
June 15, 1870
Chère Madame aux cheveux raven,
By now, perhaps, you are long gone, reunited at last, I hope, with the one love that lay claim to your heart when you were young.
I am old now and near my own end. Time and fate, as is their wont, have proven recalcitrant. I am resigned; there is always an end to every story, and so, soon, there shall be one to mine. And it is thus, in the reminiscences of an old man, that I find my mind returning to you again and again. To the time you were known to me. To those brief years you graced my life. To the stories you told and entrusted me with.
Fear not, fickle and inconstant though I may have been, too easily swayed by the fairer sex, it is certain, but as to my word to you, I have remained true. I have sheltered your secrets and the treasures of your heart. How I longed to share your words with the world to rectify what your poet misrepresented, but neither he nor the world were ready for your truth, nor did I have your permission, and so I curbed my temptation that it would heel to your desire—that your story and your secret be concealed. Though I believed your fantastical tale should find its place amongst the great love stories of our time, of all time, I tried desperately to understand that in a life with little privacy and little freedom, you longed for this to be yours. Did the writing of it grant you some peace at last? Were the words on the page a balm for your heart? If, as your letter, now surely turned to ash, was to be believed, and neither I nor the world have reason to consider your word to be less than truthful, then I am content that, having writ the words on the page, you at last knew the freedom—the agency—you longed for, dare I say, lived for. But who amongst us knows what the future may hold? Whose lives and tales will be remembered and whose lost?
These are questions that trouble the mind of this old man, long past his vigor but still keen in spirit. These thirty years have I wondered what happened to you. I have been tormented that in some final desperation you may have died by your own hand. At first, I feared this, leaving me as you did, abruptly without