13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [15]
Paris
February 10th
Dear Sir,
Something has been going around among the people I work with—just when the sickness was dying down and I thought I was safe, it came for me. Also, it has been dreadfully cold lately in Paris: it has hovered around –10°C for a while now, which, like the snow I told you about earlier, is a highly unusual occurrence for this part of the world. Had I imagined such frigid temperatures were a possibility, I would have brought one of my funny-looking down-filled monster coats from my years in Michigan. I did not, however, and brought with me a very smart-seeming black wool coat that makes me look quite dashing but is absolutely useless to me in this absurd weather: I was destroyed by my desire for fashion.
In any case, my entire musculature is seized with pointless hurt, and I feel awful. My head is stuffed with mucus-logged cotton and I am in a constant vomitous haze. I violently regurgitate anything solid. I called the secretary this morning to let her know I was not coming in, and she actually came over to my apartment to make me soup! It was certainly unexpected. I did not even know she was in the least fond of me: she has behaved quite crisply toward me, as I am one of many foreign professors she must push paper around for. Such are the French: I cannot even tell when they care for me.
She busied herself in my kitchen for a while, and then brought me the soup on a tray. She sat at the foot of my bed and watched me sip it gingerly like the grateful invalid that I am.
“Vous avez besoin de quelque chose d’autre?”3 she asked after a bit.
I shook my head no, as my throat is so scruffed that speaking pains me. She surprised me then by looking upon me with something like motherly tenderness and saying:
“Pauvre Trevor, vous avez attrapé une grosse crève.”4
I laughed then, though it was uncomfortable. It was the first time she called me anything besides Monsieur Stratton, though she still addressed me in the formal second person.
In any case, in my weakened state, I was flooded with irrational love for my secretary and her unexpected kindness toward me—her name is Josianne, by the way. I nearly died some sort of little brain death and told her about the record when she asked me how my research was going. This record—I could get in some degree of hot water for not sending it to Preservation, and I nearly told a coworker about it! She looked at me somewhat piercingly when I told her my work was coming along just fine, as if she were evaluating me, as if she knew there was something I very much wanted to tell her and then didn’t. I must have imagined that strange flicker of intensity in those striking hazel eyes. Most likely, she does not care a great deal about the research business of us fusty academics, and what we may consider correct in that regard.
And yet what a moment! It is entirely probable that had my body not been such a vanquished wreck of illness, I might have felt the impulse to make love to her. The woman was, after all, sitting on my bed. Truly, sometimes the French have a bizarre effect upon me.
Ah, I’m sorry, Sir: I tell you too much! Chalk it up to my having a variety of drowsy medicines in my bloodstream at the moment, and also to the queer fact that my body seems to forget how miserable it is when I am writing, these days. I study the record in an attempt to help my fever, so without further meandering, my latest findings:
a letter from “Victor, Camille—Sous-officier” to “Mademoiselle Louise Victor,” dated 31 October 1915.
a letter from the front lines in Belgium, from Camille Victor to his cousin, whom he affectionately calls Louisette—dated 28 June 1915.
a strange and lovely object that is something like a postcard, and something like a greeting card: a marriage of paper and lace that I find odd and cannot completely understand—dated 22 November 1915 (also from Camille to his Louisette—something strange happened when I translated this one).
a postcard on which the date and location are not indicated, from Camille to Louise