“It disgusts me to see you going backwards,” she declared. She turned her back to me, making a small slender figure against the incandescent light of the window. “Ah, but you have always done what you want to do.”

“As opposed to what?” I asked. “Mother, there is no forwards or backwards in this world. My coming here was moving forwards. I was homeless and asked myself, with all the time in the world to ponder it, where I should like to be at home. And voilà! I am here in the castle in which I was born of which a considerable amount remains, though it’s buried now beneath plaster and ornament, and I am looking out on those mountains where I used to hunt when I was a boy, and I like this. This is the Auvergne, the Massif Central in which I was born. It is my choice. Now stop the harangue.”

Of course she had not been born here. She’d lived perhaps the most miserable decades of her existence here, giving birth to seven sons of which I was the last, and dying slowly in these rooms before she’d come to me in Paris, and been launched onto the Devil’s Road as we embraced beside her deathbed.

Of course she didn’t love all this. Perhaps there was some special place in this world she loved, loved with the feelings I had for all this, but she was likely never going to tell me.

She laughed. She turned and came towards me in the same marching stride she’d been using all along and took a turn before my desk and walked about staring at the twin marble mantels, the antique clocks, all the things she hated with specific contempt.

I sat back, hands clasped behind my neck, and looked at the murals on the ceiling. My architect had sent to Italy for a painter to do these in the old French style—Dionysus with his band of garlanded worshippers frolicking against a blue sky full of rolling gold-tinged clouds.

Armand and Louis had been right to paint the ceilings of their digs in New York. I hated to admit it, but glimpsing that baroque splendor through their windows had inspired me to give the order for these ceilings here. I resolved never to tell them that. Ah, pang of missing Louis, of wanting so to talk to Louis, pang of gratitude that Louis was with Armand.

“You’re yourself again at long last,” she said. “I am glad. I am truly glad.”

“Why? Our world may shortly end. What does it matter?” But this was dishonest. I didn’t think our world was going to end. I wouldn’t let it end. I’d fight it ending with every breath in my unwholesome immortal frame.