An Unsteady Start

I’ve had to recreate this blog because I have let it lay idle for nearly a year, much to the admonitions of ma petite fée. I didn’t know, when I began it, what purpose I was aiming for, what I wanted it to be and become in the future. Believe me when I say that its path is much clearer now. A year of unabated travel can do that to a person, and that is precisely what has happened to me. –Which is all beside the point, I might add. So let me begin at the beginning…or rather, the middle. I don’t even think there is a beginning, it’s all so far in the past and muddied and muddled, like the grey sludge on Rome sidewalks. So let me start with the Here, the Now.

When people ask me who I am, I sometimes find myself not knowing what to say. After two hundred and one years in this world I sometimes get lost in the lives I’ve led, the names I’ve had, the roles I’ve played, and the memories I’ve invented. Eventually, truth and reality, whatever they are, don’t really seem to matter. The imaginary, the invented, are just as relevant to me as anything supposedly “real.” So who am I? I’m a dreamer, who are you? I’m a traveler on a long ribbon of Time that has yet to bring an end to sight. I am a woman sitting in a Lake Suite in the Drake Hotel, typing on a G4 iBook at 2:28pm CST. That’s the Here and Now.

I am seeing a man named Jonathan. He is just below two metres tall, with thick dark hair and smooth, brown eyes. He’s an investment banker and I met him in Washington, DC almost precisely one year ago. In precisely twenty minutes, he will ring the in-house telephone and call me down to tea, after which, I have an inkling, we will stroll the Lake. Twenty minutes isn’t very long, though, is it? So I shall begin as much as possible:

I was born on the 18th of May in 1804. I had a name, but it doesn’t matter. My surname was Lambert. My father, Michel, was a wealthy textile merchant in what is now the province of East Flanders in Belgium, not far from Ghent. We lived in a French-style home, we had French names, my siblings and I, we spoke French at home…after all, we were under the Bonapartes. In fact, I was born on the same day our Emperor became our Emperor. Maman used to say that I was born at the precise moment that Napoléon took the imperial crown from the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head; I was born in that Divine moment. Well, my mother is long-since dead and it was likely nothing more than a childhood faerytale, but I do wonder, sometimes, whether there was some kind of Divinity or another in the moment I was born, which made me as I am: cursed and blessed me as I am.

I was the fourth of five children. Before me had come Charlotte, Marguerite, and Elisabeth. I don’t remember their faces anymore, but I remember that they all smelt warm, like sunshine. It was a good home, where we were raised, and we were wild girls in our youth, roaming the countryside in bare feet in the most ungenteel manner. Charlotte, I remember, had soft blond curls. I can still almost feel my baby fingers wrapped inside her hair, lying on the grass, under balmy summer skies…

Charlotte was six years older than I, Marguerite four and Elisabeth three. I was almost fifteen when Eduard was born –at last the heir my father longed for. Not that it mattered in the end. I didn’t know Eduard. When I was eight, I was sent away to school in Paris. At that time, the Emperor was losing badly in the East, in Russia, and by the next year I was present at the coronation of King Louis XVIII. And we all know how well that worked out.

School was wretched, I recall. I never felt like I fit in. I was not as pretty as the other girls, not as wealthy, not as noble, not as socially acceptable: I was a cloth merchant’s daughter from the country. They, on the other hand, were born into names and histories and all the good things young girls needed back in that day to catch good husbands. I had friends at school, of course, and liked my studies well enough. I learnt Latin and English and bit of German (Flemish was considered uncouth to my peers, though my home in Flanders had, at that point, been joined into the Kingdom of Holland and Dutch was supposedly our official language.). Living in Paris, through all the chaos of the times must have taken a toll on my young self, but it is so long passed that I can’t be certain even of that. There were a couple of English girls who came and went in and out of the school through that turmoil, and I became acquainted with a few, particularly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Anne was to play a key role in my life a few years after we left school. And an Austrian girl as well, Therèse, whom I liked very much and got on with well.

And that is as good a place to pause as any. But I will be more faithful in the telling of my Tale. The phone is ringing Now, and I have told you what that means.

A bientôt, mes chers.