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recedes, disappears. There is only the mix of our breath, the feel of Adèle’s skin, our kiss. Love is a kind of attentiveness, I think. And yet, love also renders the world outside the lovers invisible, without consequence.
    Adèle breaks away first. “I want you so badly,” she says. “I’mnot to be trusted.” She entwines her fingers in mine. “I will think up a lie for tomorrow. We must go to the hotel for the afternoon. Can you get away?”
    I am meant to be at the newspaper tomorrow, but I will work up an excuse not to go. Perhaps I will be ill. I do feel ill.
    “Yes,” I say. “Can you manage to escape for a whole afternoon?”
    “I must.”
    The thought of the pleasures of the hotel room makes me squirm on the hard wooden bench. Adèle tightens her grip on my hand.
    “I’m sorry,” she says.
    “For what?”
    “For causing you pain. For not marrying you instead of Victor.”
    “But you didn’t know me when you married Victor.”
    “I’m sorry anyway.”
    This is what happens in the church. Prayer and wish are entwined, and it becomes impossible to prise them apart. There is a strong need to confess.
    “You wouldn’t have had your children,” I say, “if you had married me.”
    “I love you more than my children,” says Adèle. Her words resound through the empty church, and we are both shocked into silence by what she has just said.
    It strikes me that Adèle has more courage than I do. I have been looking at our future through the filter of my character. I would do better to regard it through the filter of hers. If she can say a thing like that, then she is capable of more than I supposed. She is capable of more than I am. She will have the strength to find a way for us to go forward.

IT HAS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE to meet with Adèle. There has been an outbreak of cholera in the city and it is unwise to leave one’s house as the streets are full of infection – these same streets whose raw sewage caused the outbreak. It is said that two thousand people died on one day alone last week. Hearses prowl the avenues, more numerous than horse and cab. All manner of wagons and carts have been pressed into service to carry the hapless dead to the overcrowded cemeteries. Grave-diggers are reportedly jumping on the corpses to squash them down and make room for the freshly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that, in the haste to halt the spread of the disease, people are being buried alive.
    The pianist Liszt is apparently playing Beethoven’s funeral march in the salons of Paris. There are funeral processions day and night. I lie in bed and listen to the horses’ hoofs on the cobblestones, the creak of wagons loaded with bodies rolling past my windows.
    It is too dangerous to go out. The Cénacle has suspended its meetings.
    I would risk my life to walk the small distance between my house and the Hugos’, but I cannot risk Adèle’s life. So I wait – two weeks, three – each day a torment, each night an unspeakable agony. I wait, for the epidemic to rise and crest, burst its banks and, finally, subside.

    We use an inexpensive, rather sordid hotel, to avoid the moral judgement of the proprietor, but I fear we suffer it anyway. It has been my observation that people like to feel superior, that it is a natural inclination to want to feel you are better than someone else. So, when we sign the hotel register as man and wife there is invariably a raised eyebrow, or a moment’s hesitation before we are handed the brass fob with the key on it. Our time of assignation doesn’t help. We always come to the hotel in the afternoon and leave in the early evening. Lovers are betrayed by the hours they must keep.
    I ask for a room on a high floor at the back, as far away from the street as possible, because it is quieter and more private. Also, the higher floors are less popular because of the climb up the stairs, so it is unlikely that we will have neighbours.
    The wooden stairs have shallow dents in