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such.”
    He stopped in his tracks, staring at her back-lit profile.
    “They’re each about thirty years old. Your youth might disturb them.”
    Maria Theresia slammed the piano lid shut.
    “I understand. It is best they don’t cross paths with the newcomer in your harem.”
    The silence in the room was suddenly heavy.
    “This irony is beneath you. I will see you this evening.”

Chapter 12
    S MARTING WITH TEARS, HER EYES WERE ON FIRE, BUT she refrained from telling him so. Once he was gone, she huddled up at the leg of the baby grand, put her arms around her knees, and rocked back and forth, just as she did as a child when the pain was too great.
    So this was love? This burning-up inside? Saying the opposite of what you mean? Having your heart race in his presence and feel faint once he is gone? It was Nina’s fault—Nina, who had described Mesmer as an exceptional creature; Nina, who had dwelt on his height, his intense gaze, his charisma, and the kindness of his features. Maria Theresia had been swayed by her chambermaid.
    Now she is in a position to flesh out this impression of him. The heat he gives off when he approaches her; the gentleness of his hands when he clasps hers; the warmth of his breath, which, depending on the time of day, smells like coffee or mint; the volume of his voice which he can switch, as he pleases, from a booming, stentorian tone to one that is stern, cold, and unwavering, like the one he had just employed with her. But she’s also known a gentle tone, which contains his emotion behind rapid breathing, almost panting.
    She has never thought of a man in these terms. She feels herself blushing. She would never have described her father in terms so precise. No man has ever awakened her senses in this fashion. Mesmer is the first. Because he speaks to her as a woman, not as a blind person. He ignores her blindness. He mentions it only when discussing her treatment. This is the difference. He doesn’t see her merely as Mozart’s friend or the Empress’s protégée; as a child prodigy spotted very early on, or a poor little rich girl plunged into darkness, or the daughter of a famous and well-connected father. Behind the social decorum and the handicap that’s been wedded to her name like a preordained condition, he is interested in the person she really is: a quick-witted girl with a hunger to learn and an anxious disposition, at once distrusting everyone and desirous of trust; a budding young woman trapped in a teenage body, waiting for love to satisfy her senses and bring her fulfillment. Yes, she can admit it to herself: She dreams of having Mesmer’s arms wrapped around her body, of taking shelter in that musculature, that massive manly strength.
    Maria Theresia was more than in love. She had projected her every want onto Mesmer. Her need to admire, her thirst to confide, her craving to fulfill desires that she could barely comprehend. She wanted Mesmer to be a brother, a father, a friend, a confidant, a lover. She mixed together all her girlish fancies and womanly hopes and expected them all to be somehow completed by him, her doctor, her magician, her knight, her fearless savior. It sufficed simply to listen to the fugue she had composed in his house, and into which she had poured all her torments, to read her soul.
    Madame Mesmer listened to it carefully, detecting in it everything one woman knows intuitively about another when both are interested in the same man. She felt pity for this vulnerable young woman of extremes. Even if she had wanted to, which was not the case, she would have been powerless to protect her. One woman’s experience can never help another. In love, suffering is the only way to learn: to give in to passion body and soul, to get burnt by the flames of turmoil, incomprehension, jealousy, disappointment, bitterness—then to go off in a corner and lick your wounds, hoping to give less of yourself, and less naïvely, the next time around. Love is like