And so, after some fifty years, we had found each other again, and a new chapter began in our story: seventeen years of life together. In those days, Charles had money, having come into half of his deceased father’s estate when he reached his majority. He liked to spend it extravagantly. His fortune was one of those inconvenient sums, somewhere between being large enough to seem inexhaustible to a young man and small enough to worry his elders it would soon be exhausted. He spent impulsively, mostly on art, antiques, and, especially, on me. I was his exotic bird, his creature of display, his most precious jewel. While he was courting me, he set me up in my own apartment, on the Île Saint-Louis. It was a short walk from the Hôtel Pimodan, where he lived, a modest seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the Quai d’Anjou that had been transformed into apartments. It overlooked the river and the Right Bank. A hive of young dandies and wealthy eccentrics resided there. Charles rented a three-room apartment on the top floor, and he began to fill it with rare objects, dubious antiques, and paintings bigger than could possibly fit into his quarters. Eventually, his stepfather was forced to intervene to stop the dissipation of the inheritance. What was left of it was put in trust, and Charles was paid a modest monthly stipend. To anyone else, it would have been more than enough. But modesty was inconceivable to him. The thought of earning money by conventional means—as, one by one, most of his friends began to do—never so much as crossed his mind. He already had a profession: writing, translating, and reading.

To save money, I moved in with Charles. There is nothing more fatal to passion than when two lovers chain themselves together. Constrained by the modesty of his allowance, he began to sell off the objects he had accumulated so wantonly, only to discover that much of it was worthless. Soon enough it became apparent that he could no longer keep up the rent of the Pimodan apartment. We moved out and into another apartment.

Between his stipend, funds his mother sent in reluctant response to his almost-daily letters begging for money, the money my gentlemen admirers gave me, and the credit he accumulated without the slightest intention of repaying, we lived for the next several years constantly on the move from one shabby furnished room to the next. Charles was always dreaming up a new endeavor to make him rich but in practice he had as little talent for making money as for saving it. He would spend it on clothes, wine, hashish, laudanum, and, above all, books, the greatest of his vices.