The Woman With the Bouquet by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

the dancer . . . scheming bitch . . . adventurer . . . thief . . . thank you, for the dance . . . that bitch Fabiola!”
    So that was who my dreamer from Ostend was taking me back to, none other than the beggar woman who used to cart around her dozen or so plastic bags and whom the students at the Sorbonne used to call the madwoman of Saint-Germain, since every quartier in Paris has its own eccentric.
    Was my landlady any better? In a flash, the improbability of her story struck me. An affair between an invalid and a prince! To have power over a rich, free man, going so far as to choose his mistresses for him! The beginning and the end on the beach, between the dunes, so impossibly romantic . . . It was all too surprising, far too artistic! It was no wonder there were no longer any material traces of their story: it had never happened.
    I went back over her story in the light of my doubts. Her peach leather notebook containing the lovers’ menu: did it not correspond to the best erotic texts, those written by women? Masterpieces of sensual audacity in literature: aren’t they often the work of marginal eccentrics, spinsters who know they are not destined for motherhood, and who find fulfillment elsewhere?
    When I went back to Emma’s, there was a detail that acted like a key opening every door: above the glass canopy there was a silver and gold mosaic spelling the name of the place: Villa Circé! You could tell that the panel must have been added after the building was completed.
    It was all becoming clear: Homer was her womb! Emma Van A. had been inspired by her favorite author to conceive her episodes. Her meeting with Guillaume, foretold by a premonitory dream, transposed the meeting between Ulysses and Nausicaa, the young woman discovering a naked man by the water’s edge. She had called her villa “Circé” the better to identify herself with the enchantress in the Odyssey who worked her magic artifices on men. She hated knitting, weaving women, those Penelopes to whom Ulysses takes so long to return. As for the menu of erotic recipes, that too was inspired by ancient Greece. In short, she had made up her so-called memories with literary memories.
    Either Emma had had a laugh at my expense, or she was an inveterate liar. In either case, it seemed obvious to me, given her disability—that she had tried to hide—that she had embroidered the truth.
    I went through the door, determined to prove to her that I was no longer fooled. But when I saw her slim silhouette sitting in her wheelchair looking out at the bay, my irritation subsided.
    A tender pity came over me. Gerda had been right when she said, “the poor woman,” when speaking about her aunt. The unfortunate woman had not had to work for a living, but what must her life have been, with her body—surely a sweet one—so humiliated by disability? How could anyone hold it against her for using what was left—her imagination—to escape from her existence, to enrich it?
    And what right had I, a novelist, to reproach her for her poetic improvisation?
    I went up to her. She was startled, smiled, pointed to a chair.
    I sat down across from her and questioned her.
    “Why don’t you write all of this down? It is so captivating. Write a book, use fake names, and call it a novel.”
    She looked at me as if she were talking with an infant.
    “I am not a woman of letters.”
    “Who knows? You should try.”
    “I already know because I spend my time reading. There are enough impostors as it is . . .”
    I grimaced, reacting to the word impostor, because it seemed revealing to me that she was using the word, when she had lied to me the day before: an admission of guilt, in a way.
    She noticed my grimace and took me by the hand, kindly.
    “No no, don’t take it badly, I wasn’t referring to you.
    I was amused by her misunderstanding. She inferred that I had forgiven her.
    “I am sure that you are an artist.”
    “You haven’t read me.”
    “That’s true!”