After his arrival at the Gare du Nord, Lucien took a carriage to the Île, where he found his father about to sit down for lunch. As much as Lucien might have wished otherwise, his gaunt expression could not disguise a continuing struggle with grief, even now, four years after Eduard’s death. “I wish you could find a way out of this,” Guillaume said as he pulled the cork out of a bottle of red table wine. “I’m sure when you were a teenager you never would have predicted the day I would say this, but you should be singing.” “I’ve tried,” Lucien replied, “but it’s not there—I still can’t seem to breathe.” Lucien’s grief had not been constant; in the first days, his friends had to prevent him from jumping out the window like a trapped animal, and then he had been gripped by an irrational belief that Eduard was not actually gone, so that he ran through the apartment opening and shutting doors. During the funeral cortege, which had snaked all the way from the opera house to St.
