So I got my wish. Papa withdrew me from the Paris School and now he no longer makes me do anything I don’t want to do. We’re having Christmas at Fontainebleau this year. We leave tomorrow, me and Papa, Dorian and Philippe and Philippe’s new wife, Claudette. Also, Papa’s sister, Marianne, is coming from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to stay with us. Marianne is Papa’s older sister. I haven’t seen her for a long time now, but I seem to recall that I like her. I’m not looking forward to Christmas. It will be the first time I’ve been back to Fontainebleau since the accident.

December 28, 1852: Fontainebleau

Aunty Marianne is not like a normal aunt. She is very much like myself. She wears trousers instead of skirts, and she likes to smoke little cigars after dinner and she has a laugh that is as hearty as a farmhand’s. She tells me not to call her Marianne. “I cannot stand it. It’s like an old woman’s name.” So I call her Mimi, which is the childhood nickname my papa had given her.

When my papa’s parents died, the Bonifait family estate was split two ways. Papa got the Paris house and Fontainebleau and Aunty Mimi got Flamants Roses, their large country estate in the Camargue. She lives there now with her friend Chantal. Chantal had to stay on the estate and didn’t come with her to Fontainebleau because it’s the wet season right now and the rice plantation needs to be sown. Flamants Roses is a very large farm in the marshlands on the coast. It sounds magical. Aunty Mimi breeds bulls there – big black ones – as well as running the rice plantation. The bulls are used for bullfighting. I admit I got really angry when she told me this.

“They should not be made to fight,” I told her over Christmas dinner. “It’s barbaric.” I had already made a fuss that morning because the Christmas lunch was not vegetarian, so my views hardly seemed surprising to Mimi.

“They do not fight like the bulls in Spain,” Mimi insisted. “It’s not a blood sport. These bulls have long and happy lives and are very well cared for. I treat them like my own children.”

“You don’t have your own children,” my papa pointed out.

“Because, as I just said, the bulls are my children,” Mimi replied snippily.

“I still think it is wrong to make animals do your fighting,” I said.

“Would you come and visit me and see my bulls, Rose?” Mimi smiled. “And my horses of course.”

“You breed horses too?” Dorian asked.