“Dorian says you are painting again, so you are ready to return,” he said.

“I won’t go,” I argued. “You can’t make me.”

“I can,” Papa said. “And I will. I am not having you stay at home in a sulk for the rest of your life, Rose. You are going back to school.”

A sulk! I am paralysed from the waist down and will never walk again! I have never liked my father, but today that changed. Now, I hate him. And Dorian too, for being a traitor.

December 10, 1852

This morning, when I woke, I knew that I wouldn’t get up from my bed. They couldn’t make me do it any more. Every day I’d tried. I’d put on a brave face and gone out into the world just to please them: Dorian, Madame Gris, my papa. God, but they are patronising! “Oh, good girl, Rose!” “You are doing so well, Rose!”

Do they think I’m an idiot? What am I doing, exactly, other than trying to please them by pretending to want to be alive? I have nothing left in me. I’m dying here in this claustrophobic room, and yet I can’t bear to go outside either. Paris in the springtime is hateful; it glares a cold, hard light on my frailties. I see the way people look at me! The poor girl, so sad in her wheelchair.

At art school, Master Demarchelier has taken to fussing over me in an unseemly manner. The other day in class I drew a horse that was so badly proportioned that a child of five could have done better, but he didn’t chastise me and point out my failings as an artist. Instead, he was positively rapturous about how beautiful it was. “Well done, Rose!” he said enthusiastically. “I love the use of light and colour! Very good indeed!” And I swivelled my chair wheels around to face him and snapped. “It’s not my brain that is damaged. It’s just my legs that are useless. I know this work is no good, so don’t try and humour me. It’s worse than when you hated me.”

I tried to storm out of the class after that, but it’s not possible in a wheelchair and I got stuck. My wheels wouldn’t budge and the master tried to help me to get them free and I swiped at him with my fist, and then I sobbed and sobbed until he got one of the other pupils to fetch my father to come and take me home.

December 21, 1852

Papa asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said, “To walk again.” When he sighed a deep sigh and repeated the question, I said, “I want to be left alone, and I want you to stop making me go to school.”