Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [160]
It was good to see Amadé again.
With Madame Giscard’s permission, G called in an art historian from the Louvre. The man studied both portraits—the one in the château and the one in Amadé’s Bois de Boulogne house—and stated that in his opinion, they depicted the same three people.
Madame Giscard also let G rummage in the attic. He found papers that had belonged to the Comte d’Auvergne—including account books with payments made to various music masters for lessons for his son, a receipt for the portrait in the château, and early compositions written by the young Charles-Antoine—some of which bore a striking resemblance to early works of Amadé Malherbeau.
Music scholars from Yale, Oxford, and Bonn came to confer with G, to look at the diary, and to investigate the cache at Auvergne. G’s going to include Alex’s diary in the exhibition on Louis-Charles in his museum. I’m glad. She wanted the world to know what happened. Now it will.
I didn’t end up with a movie deal like Bender, but I did get an A plus. Beezie herself read my thesis. She said it was excellent and that my tracing of Malherbeau’s influence on modern musicians was fascinating. She especially liked my demonstration of the harmonic parallels between Malherbeau’s Concerto in A Minor and “Stairway to Heaven.” She said that Amadé Malherbeau came to life so fully in my thesis, it was as if I’d known him.
Yeah, it was.
I skipped graduation and I’m almost sorry I did. I heard it was a scene. Nick was so drunk he fell off the stage. Which kind of shocked the president of the United States, who was there because he happened to be in Brooklyn for a fund-raiser that day and he wanted to meet Vijay. Mrs. Gupta sent him a copy of Vijay’s thesis and he loved it. He wants V to intern at the White House during his summer break from Harvard.
I got my diploma from Nathan. He came over to my house to give it to me. We played Bach together for hours. He gave me his Hauser. I told him I didn’t deserve a guitar like that. He said, “No, you don’t, but you will.”
I applied to the Paris Conservatory and I got in. I’m studying with amazing teachers for a degree in classical and contemporary music, and when I’m not at school, I do volunteer work with a group of musical therapists—people who help traumatized children express in sound what they cannot express in words.
I turn onto the Rue Oberkampf now, finally, and pull up close to the sidewalk outside Rémy’s. I cut the engine, take off my helmet, and head inside. The room is warm and smoky and full of people. We’re packing them in. Every Wednesday and Sunday. I make my way through the crowd, scanning faces, searching for someone.
And then I see him. A tall, skinny guy. He’s patting the top of Rémy’s bald head and laughing. Virgil. My heart flips over at the sight of him. Which is schlocky, but true. We’ve been inseparable ever since I moved to Paris.
We went out the next day, Virgil and I—the day after we got out of the catacombs. I showed him Alex’s diary and he read parts of it. He understood the connection I felt to her, the connection I still feel, but he didn’t believe me about my trip back to the eighteenth century. I mean, he doesn’t think I actually went through some kind of time warp. And I can’t say I blame him. Because I’m not sure I do anymore, either.
“It felt real, though,” I told him. We were in his car, stuck in traffic near the Carrefour de l’Odéon, on our way to a café to hear some friends of his play. I had ten stitches in my forehead and a few more under my rib cage. “Paris in the eighteenth century, the catacombs, Amadé—it all felt so real. Even if it was only inside my head. But it’s crazy, right? To think I really went back to the Revolution? Back to something that ended over two centuries