The streets might as well have been mud, and the gas lamps dim and grimy, and the barrooms packed with deliciously filthy riverboat men and the sound of dice and billiard balls, and carriages might have been crowded in the Rue Saint Peter with people coming from the old French Opera on Bourbon at Toulouse. And it might as well have been the night, long after Louis and Claudia had left me after trying to kill me, that Antoine, my fledgling musician, and I had gone to see the premiere of a French opera called Mignon. I’d been scarred and broken and crushed in soul, led as if blind by Antoine, as people scurried out of our path to get away from the burnt one, yet I’d allowed him to bully me to sit there in the dark with him and hear that lustrous clarinet or oboe begin the overture. Music like that could make you feel that you were alive. It could even make you feel like all the pain in the world was headed someplace glorious that could be shared by the simplest of the beings around you.

Well, what did it matter now?

Rain, light rain.

Dampening the spirits of the line outside the Café du Monde. But I loved it, and loved the scent of the dust rising from the wet street.

I moved to the head of the line, and dazzled the waiter in charge to believe I had some special right to a table now, a simple little trick of words and charm and soon I was seated in the midst of the throng, and with my hand locked on a hot mug of café au lait. The place was packed and noisy with chatter, and waiters coming and going with trays of mugs and plates of sugar-covered beignets. And the open air moved sluggishly in the wet breeze. I looked up at the slowly churning overhead fans, descended on long rods from the dark wood-paneled ceiling, and I fastened on the blades of the nearest fan and felt myself drifting away from memory and reason and just thinking, I am alone, I am alone, I am alone. Amel is with me night and day, yet I am alone. I am a prince and live in a château with hundreds under my roof nightly, yet I am alone. I am in a crowded café filled with beating hearts and laughter and the sweetest most innocent merriment and I am alone. I stared at the marble top of the table, at the white powdered sugar heaped on the hot doughnuts, and felt the coffee mug growing colder and colder by the second, and remembered from long ago, my father, my old blind father, sitting up in his wretched bed, hung with all the mended mosquito netting, being fed by a sweet lovely servant girl, and complaining, Nothing is hot enough, nothing is hot enough anymore.