The first image hit me. Émile sitting with me at Le Dôme Café. I could smell the cigarettes in the air above us. I touched his hand. This version was warm and healthy. Then the image shifted to his bed—the one he’d just died in. Only he was very much alive and on top of me. I could touch the sweat on his back as he entered me. I lingered there, sensing that this image would remain as long as I wanted it to, but then another moment revealed itself and I thought my heart would break leaving my Émile. The scene was him sketching me at the circus. The way he looked at me. Then Émile, breaking the cheese on a steaming bowl of onion soup. Me, walking at Les Halles. I could see how much he’d wanted to hold my hand, though I hadn’t noticed it then. The woman in a silver gown with a tiara scurried by with a man in a black evening jacket chasing after her. I envied them their happiness and my eyes recalled the wonder at the market in the wee hours of the morning. Next I was standing in the Rue Mouffetard market, where he handed me an apple. With this scene I felt the energy of the world shift. Father was wrong. Émile could have painted me or not painted me; the outcome would have been the same. I loved Émile Giroux. The horse slowed and light began to leak through the image of him as though he were a curtain eaten by moths. And then he was gone.

When I finally looked up, satiated from Émile’s images, Father sat on the control box. “Well?”

“It’s not the same,” I said. “It’s not him.”

“You said you’d take him in any form.”

I slid off the horse and stepped down from the carousel, passing him as I walked down the Grand Promenade.

“You didn’t ask the price,” he called after me.

“It’s because I didn’t care,” I replied.

November 30, 1925

For the last few months, as my condition has become more pronounced, I have been unable to perform. Instead I now ride the carousel. Once, I found Esmé descending from the carousel’s platform. She looked forlorn and in what appeared to be a drunken stupor; then she saw me. I was livid to think that she was on the carousel lost in her own images of him. Émile and my carousel do not belong to her.

Had I not been pregnant with our child—with his child—I believe I would have killed Esmé with my bare hands and taken Father’s punishment. I have never felt such anger. I hadn’t spoken to her in months. As she passed me, I said, “Now neither of us has him.”