“You, Irishman,” he said in English. He had been drinking.
“Come in,” Cormac said.
“I am in.”
“Then close the fucking door.”
M. Breton closed the door and gazed around the small studio. He glanced at the books and studied the drawings.
“Laurence Sterne?” he said. “Jonathan Swift. Théophile Gautier? Goethe… You’re a reader.”
“When there’s time.”
“I’m a musician,” he said with a shrug. “Musicians don’t read. They feel. They play.”
“I’ve heard you play,” Cormac said.
M. Breton waited as if expecting a blow.
“You’re very good,” Cormac said.
M. Breton sighed. “Not as good as I once dreamed of being.”
“But very good, nevertheless.”
“Merci. Do you have anything—”
“I don’t drink. But I can pull that cord near the door and—”
“Cognac,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Cormac ordered cognac from the black servant who answered the pull of the cord.
“I came to apologize,” M. Breton said, and asked if Cormac understood French, and switched with Cormac’s affirmative nod. “I’ve come here, Irishman, to apologize.” There was a scatter of rain on the windowpanes. “I have disrupted your life. My wife has told me the story, and of your… arrangement, and of how you have comforted her.”
The hall porter arrived with a bottle of cognac and two glasses. M. Breton poured a glass for himself, offered the bottle to Cormac, who declined, then inhaled the aroma of the drink. His features seemed to loosen.
“I loved her from the day I met her,” he said, staring into the glass. “She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.”
“She’s beautiful now.”
“Of course. But then she was still innocent. Then she was still flowering in music. I would see her, and sing. I would think of her, and play.”
Cormac thought: Please don’t say “We were meant for each other.”
“We were certain to destroy each other,” M. Breton said. “Music made her innocent. It made me corrupt. And corruption is always stronger than innocence.”
He drained the cognac and poured another. The rain spattered the windowpanes now, and from away off to the west, Cormac heard thunder.
“So, Monsieur Breton, why did you come here?”
He looked at Cormac for a long beat.
“To die.”
He didn’t know where he had picked up syphilis. He was sure it was after he abandoned his wife in New Orleans. It could have been in Mexico City, where he played violin in a bordello on the Calle de la Esperanza; or in Vera Cruz, among the Africans and Indians and mestizos of the waterfront; or in Havana, where he lived for three years in a house on the Malecón facing the sea. He wanted the sun, not the cold drizzle of Paris. He wanted bodies warmed with the sun. He wanted to coarsen his talent with drink and women and the smothering stupor of heat. He found his way to Martinique, so that he could speak in French, and cursed Bonaparte for a fool, with his dreams of conquering arctic Russia while he had Louisiana and New Orleans and the islands of the southern sea.
“He could have ended his days glazed by the sun, a free man,” he said. “But his vanity was too strong. He ruined himself. He ruined France. He ruined Europe.”
He was happiest in Italy, where he landed in 1829, playing in Frenchified Milano, wandering on foot south to Tuscany, to Florence, listening to madrigals in cathedrals, on to Rome, then back again, instructing the children of the Italian rich. He was already sick, although the first stage had faded, and cognac was the only consolation. Until suddenly some guttering ember of his youth burst into flame. Charles X in France decided to bring back the hard old authority of the hard old regime, smashing freedom of the press and dissolving parliament, and M. Breton knew what would happen next. He took a coach to Paris in time for the July Revolution.
“I wanted to die on the barricades,” he said. “A properly romantic death. One that would absolve all my sins.”
He was wounded in the taking of the Hôtel de Ville, with a bullet through his side that just missed his kidneys, and did not see the celebrations after the August abdication. A woman nursed him back to health, a woman who loved him, who took him to the countryside near Lyons, who fed him, who dressed him and bathed him. When he could walk again, he fled.
“I could not give such a woman what I had,” he said. “Could not kill her with my prick.”
He shrugged again, shook his head. He was quiet for a long time. The storm rumbled around the New York streets. The windows trembled.
“I don’t sleep with her,” he said, motioning at the door and the apartment of the Countess de Chardon. “You should not worry.”
He stood up heavily.
“I wish you’d play something,” Cormac said. “There’s some melody of yours that I’ve never heard before….”
“Berlioz,” he said. “It’s from the Symphonie Fantastique.…”
“It’s beautiful.”
M. Breton sighed. “Yes.” He gazed around the room. “But not tonight.”
Three nights later, M. Breton insisted on a dinner for three in the suite of the countess. The service was handsomely laid out, with golden light from gas lamps and candles and the silver gleaming. There were oysters, and cheeses, and chilled wines, and veal and asparagus and small roasted potatoes. He had bathed and was crisply dressed, his shoes polished, his cravat precise, his fingernails scrubbed. The countess looked at him in a cautious way, laughing at his jokes, accepting his pouring of the wine, nodding at his ruminations on the fevers of politics.
“I must play,” he said, and then took his violin and limped a few feet to the side, and gave them the aching, then soaring melodies of the Symphonie Fantastique.
Cormac saw tears welling in the eyes of the countess and held her hand. She placed her other hand on top of his. When M. Breton finished, he took a mock bow, and they applauded him.
Around three-thirty that morning, M. Breton hanged himself.
She buried him in St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Cormac did not attend. She returned with her face dry, and he sensed her anger struggling with her pity, as it must have struggled within her mother after Haiti. But she said nothing and he asked no questions. She had his own old custom of closing a book and leaving it closed. With his door open, he heard her tell the maids to air out the rooms and cast out the clothing of M. Breton, and place his violin in its case on a high shelf of a closet. That night, they resumed the habits of their lives together. In the morning, he sat down again to run his fingers on the keys of the piano.
And yet it was not the same. A shadow had fallen upon them, as indefinite as any shadow. On a primitive level, it was simple: He knew too much about her now and she knew nothing of consequence about him. The old symmetry of unknowability had been upset. But he’d learned something about himself too. After so many years, he could be jealous. He could tremble with anger and weakness and need. As old as he was, that tangle of nerves still lived within him. And he knew a larger truth: He loved this woman.
Just after dark on December 16, the countess came to his room.