Life Interrupted

Well, that was an inconvenient interruption. Luckily, Amelia sleeps Now and I can try to pick up the thread of my Tale once more. I will speak more of Amelia some other time.

Shortly after Charlotte’s marriage, I received another letter from my home, informing me that my mother was with child. It was great news, perhaps even greater than Charlotte’s match. We were all instructed to pray for an heir to the Lambert name and fortune. At school, I did my best to do my part, but soon forgot to include that request in my bedtime prayers and Sunday penance. This did not inhibit my mother, however, for she gave birth to a healthy, rosy-cheeked baby boy fifteen years my junior, and he was named Eduard Michel Joseph Lambert. The family’s future was secured on the shoulders of an infant, and I merrily went about my daily lessons in feminine virtue and afternoon gossip with Anne. Gossip, you see, was even better than virtue back then, and I am often inclined to think that it still is.

I was not called home to see the new child and was therefore blissfully ignorant of his entire life. In a year, just one brief year, I would finally be allowed, with the other girls of my age at school, to go about in Paris society. We would make curtsies and be fitted out fashionably. I wrote my father in preparation for this momentous occasion. I asked for and was granted a ridiculous sum of money and came into contact for the first time with M Durant, my father’s Parisien man of business, and quite actually, my legal guardian should my father pass while I remained unwed.

M Jean Durant was a short man, although surprisingly enough, not as stout as one might imagine a “man of business.” He was, instead, terribly average: medium height, brown hair, nondescript eyes, and even features. He didn’t even wear spectacles, which I had thought a critical component to his profession. Alas, I was fooled.

A brisk man, I remember being ushered into his office and offered a seat. He gave me a short lecture on how I’d grown and he was to understand any number of things about my life, which I could not fathom how he knew, unless my father had written him of me. I was briefly instilled with a sense of responsibility over the money he was about to place in my hands and instructed to continue to be a good girl. It was only by the kindest miracles he did not pat me on the head. I remember telling Anne that he was quite possibly one of the strangest men in the world. –Recall, however, that I’d not met many men.

Here, I must interrupt myself again, simply to point out that I amaze myself occasionally with the sheer volume of details I can conjure from such a long time past. I can remember the face of M Durant, but I cannot remember the face of my mother. Silly, isn’t it? The things memory chooses to save and discard?

I’m afraid that I am about to embark upon one of the more bizarre parts of my life: the tender age of sixteen. Sixteen has always, I think, been a momentous age for females, and mine was rather stressfully so. I don’t know if I can tell it in one piece, but I shall try. For now, however, my body demands rest, and I cannot help but comply.