She is a chaplain attached to the search-and-rescue department of the Maine Forest Service, and her book starts when she suddenly finds herself a widow with four small children. I started crying on cue, until a little further on in that chapter, when her seven-year-old son suggested that his father had already been reincarnated. As a tiger. At that, I laughed aloud, which turned into a pattern: moved to tears, soothed with laughter. Every once in a while I would glance out at the chilly, blue-gray Parisian sky, cuddle deeper into my down quilt, and pluck another tissue. Alessandro came in to check on me at one point, sympathetic about my cold but very disapproving when he realized my pile of soggy tissues was the result of tears rather than a virus. “I never cry when I read,” he pointed out, with perfect truth. His nighttime reading, a biography of Catherine the Great, seemed unlikely to generate tears, even from one as susceptible to sentimentality as I. His book also didn’t seem like much fun, especially after I inquired about the one thing I knew about Catherine—to wit, her purported erotic encounters with equines—and he informed me that the empress was a misunderstood feminist whose sexual inventory, while copious, was nevertheless conservative.
