A photo of Felicia Davin
Hi.
I’m Felicia Davin, a writer and reader of romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
A photo of Felicia Davin
I’m Felicia Davin, a writer and reader of romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
On entre dans cette allée par une porte bâtarde surmontée d’un écriteau sur lequel on lit : MAISON VAUQUER et en dessous : Pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres.
One enters this path through a wicket gate, atop which a sign reads MAISON VAUQUER, and below that: Boarding house for both sexes and others.
—Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 1835
Aux autres.
To the others.
Notice to my beloved Reader
Here follows a collection of letters and diary entries arranged by date. They have been lightly edited for clarity and spelling, or decoded if necessary, but are unaltered, even when their contents are an outrage to decency.
Their story will be familiar to you. Where the events retold by these papers escape the boundaries of correspondence, an occasional scene has been inserted between letters. As you will no doubt recall, many other things were also inserted.
It is my hope that this collection will bring you pleasure, and that I didn’t get you too wrong.
The Editor
Paris, 1828
1823
Postmarked Paris
Dear Father,
Aunt Sophie and I have taken rooms at the Maison Laval for now. I do not mean to imply that your allowance was ungenerous, only that perhaps you had not considered everything. I myself was quite surprised by how costly life is.
Now that you have our new address, it is my hope that you might find it in your heart to write to us. I would still like to know what I have done to anger you.
Your devoted daughter,
Victorine
[This diary entry and all others were written in a private cipher. They are printed here in plain language.]
I will never sign another letter “Your devoted daughter Victorine” as long as I live. Every word of that is a lie. Abasing myself writing obsequiously polite bullshit to that bastard makes me want to punch a wall.
Aunt S is the only person in the world who loves me, which I know because she gave me a haircut. We did it by candlelight in the kitchen of my father’s house and then swept a mountain of blond curls out the door. I imagine the sight shocked the servants who discovered it, but I’ll never know because I don’t live there anymore.
Aunt S also spent a fortune of her own money buying me suits so I could have something to wear other than the ill-fitting clothes I stole from Horace before we moved into the Maison Laval.
It’s been several days since I’ve written and this is all out of order. I should start at the beginning: my father’s announcement that, due to my mother’s alleged adultery, he was disinheriting me and naming Horace as the sole heir to his fortune.
What makes me most furious—oh, the list is long—is that I did nothing wrong. Neither did my mother. She followed all the rules to her last breath and still ended up disgraced and with one child disinherited. Men can ruin your reputation even after you die. Intolerable. I wish she had committed this adultery that my father and brother have conjured from nothing. At least then I could rest assured she’d seized happiness where she found it.
And what a relief it would be if someone other than Pierre Faucheux were my father. The nose on my face dashes that dream.
I don’t understand why he’s doing this. I’ve begged and begged for an explanation.
After my father disinherited me, Aunt S and I retreated to my bedroom to cry and rage and pack my things in private. Fury splotched her cheeks red and she shook her head and gesticulated so much that some of the perfectly set silver-blonde curls in her coiffure came loose. I’ve never seen her so angry.
We had only a day to remove ourselves from the house where I have lived all twenty-one years of my life and Aunt S has spent the last few years, first caring for my mother and then protecting me from my brother and my father’s increasing hostility. (Well, my father’s increasing hostility. Horace has always been hostile.) She said she could make arrangements for us to take rooms in a boarding house, and that she would come with me to act as my chaperone since I was a young unmarried woman.
I was holding a dress in my hands—the white one with the multicolored floral embroidery and the short, puffed sleeves—and I thought, if I am not living in my father’s house, if I am not my father’s daughter, if I am not inheriting the wealth of Victorine Faucheux, then why should I bother to continue this charade?
To survive, I played the role in which I was cast. This performance did not protect me, and there is no satisfaction in knowing my own innocence; it cannot feed me or keep me warm.
Pierre Faucheux was, in a sense, paying me to be Victorine. Now that I have no promised dowry or inheritance, I refuse to do this work for free.
If I am to fend for myself, I want to be myself.
I had been silent for a long moment. The dress was crushed in my fists. Aunt S asked me what was wrong. We shared a bitter laugh when she added, “Other than the obvious.”
I blurted out, “I’d rather be Victor than Victorine.”
And she brushed her fingers over my cheek and said, “So be Victor, if that’s what you want.”
I don’t know what jumble of words came out of my mouth, some combination of what, really, but I, you’d let me, and another really for good measure.
She laughed and said, “Let you? What does that mean? I’m your aunt, not a prison guard, darling. Close your mouth. I love you.”
She embraced me. Aunt S gives the softest hugs. Stunned, it took me a moment to return the gesture. Could I have told her long ago? Perhaps she would always have understood. It made my throat close up.
“If I were a young man—not to say that I am, but if people thought of me that way, instead of as a young woman—I wouldn’t require a chaperone. You wouldn’t have to move to the boarding house with me. You’d be free to return to your life.”
Aunt S so rarely displays anything other than sparkling cheer. She made a series of unaccustomed facial expressions, trying them on and discarding them like dresses that didn’t suit her. At last she said, “Victor.”
Hearing that was a pleasure.
“Are you asking me not to accompany you?”
“No!” How alone I’d feel without her. “It’s only that I thought you might prefer…”
“If it’s your desire to live more independently, I will absent myself whenever you wish,” she said. “But while you might not be a young woman—and perhaps not exactly a young man—you are still a young person, one without means or connections. I think I can be of use to you. More than that, I like your company, and you’re the only person in the world who misses Anaïs as much as I do. If you’ll have me, I would like to remain with you.”
“Oh,” I said, because I wanted to say twenty things at once and I also wanted not to cry, and that syllable was the best I could manage. “I’d like that. I love you, too, Aunt S.”
I’d never said that to her before. I haven’t said it to anyone since Maman died. The words felt strange in my mouth. Light where I’d expected them to be heavy.
“Good. Now do you want to keep any of these dresses or are we pawning them all to buy you some suits?”
Aunt S was so at ease with the possibility that I might be a person named Victor who wore both dresses and suits. Whoever I was, whatever I wanted to wear, she was coming with me. The thought still suffuses me with warmth.
We’d amassed a colorful pile of fabrics, whites and pinks and lavender ruffles. I’d enjoyed wearing most of them—I do have a taste for luxury, and dresses never bothered me in the way that other social strictures did—but the thought of never seeing them again aroused no strong emotion. It was as though they already belonged to someone else.
“Let’s pawn them. I want new clothes to go with my new name,” I said. “I want a new family name, too. Can I have yours?”
“My sister did all the work of bringing you into the world,” Aunt S said. “I think our name suits you perfectly, Monsieur Victor Beauchêne.”
I bowed low. “My pleasure, Mademoiselle Sophie Beauchêne.”
She curtsied in her dressing gown and then we slipped down to the kitchen so she could cut my hair. Aunt S doesn’t know anything about cutting hair and it was dark, so it isn’t a good haircut, but it’s also the best haircut of my life.
We tiptoed back upstairs so I could admire myself in the mirror and Aunt S could tell me how exceedingly handsome I was.
“Let’s get out of this house and go make a life somewhere else,” I said.
“Let’s,” she said. She smiled at me, small at first and then wide and wicked. “Don’t stay up too late reading. I promise to continue not noticing when you steal novels from my collection, you little thief.”
While I was stuttering a denial, she disappeared through the doorway, calling “Goodnight, Victor.”
So that was our last night in the Faucheux townhouse. Now the two of us live in this hovel full of weird strangers and we barely have enough money to cover room and board. My brother’s still at home living like the banker’s son he is, waiting to inherit the whole fortune.
But I have Aunt S and I have myself.