Seventeen years passed in this way, seventeen years of making do, moving, fighting, reconciling, separating, reuniting, over and again, never the same and yet always the same. Our life together stumbled on, season after season, year after year, ever more nomadic and desperate. One by one Charles’s dreams of literary fame were extinguished—and every defeat sharpened the blade of his bitterness. He made enemies everywhere he went. His poems sold poorly; the one book he ever published was pulped; his journalism paid pittances; his ideas for plays and novels never amounted to anything more than notes scrawled in a notebook. In the meantime, we moved from furnished room to furnished room, boarding house to boarding house—each one slightly more rancid than its predecessor—ever watchful for the next place to stay once the proprietor of our current lodgings began to hound us for our arrears. Every few weeks or months, we found ourselves somewhere else, under another name or another combination of our old names, in perpetual motion, trying to keep a step ahead of creditors and bailiffs, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of debt and want.

While we were waging our private battles, Paris was changing around us. The old Paris of our youth was being dismantled brick by brick and stone by stone, with pickaxes wielded by swarthy southern workers. The city became a strange and unwelcoming carnival of novelties. Even night was vanquished, as gas lamps were installed along every boulevard and street and the new city of light sparkled as seductively after dark as it did during the day.

Our love was marked by stories, but in time Charles wearied of my tales. Rather than consoling him, they began to exasperate him. Eventually, if he woke in panic in the middle of the night and I tried to soothe him, he would become irritated. Certain subjects, even certain words, became forbidden: island, ship, soul, crossing. At first, out of fear of losing him, I obeyed his will, but later, when I realized that he was already lost to me, I shed my reserve. I became more strident: you are Koahu and I am Alula, I told him time and again, let me prove it to you. When I offered to cross with him, he dismissed me like a parent dismisses a child’s inventions. He responded to my provocations with increasingly virulent contempt, his fury heightened by the pox, from which we both suffered, and the great quantities of laudanum he drank for the pain.