Andre ordered the coachman to return him to L'Hotel de Montreuil in the Faubourg St. Germain. His headache had gone, and now he felt only a pleasant languor. He wondered if anyone would take it amiss if he were to retire for a nap before dinner. He still had a wedding night before him, after all, for which he intended to be fully fit! He was going home to his wife. Such an unexpectedly enjoyable thought that was. Smiling to himself, he slouched comfortably against the side of the carriage and watched the city pass by.

Even under a slate grey sky that threatened at any moment to let fall a cold November rain, Paris was beautiful, he thought. Her life, her beauty, was eternal, and disregarded the triumphs and the follies of those who came and went from her palaces, who railed in her churches and bled in her streets. He felt a wistful sort of love for her, as a man might on seeing the woman who was once the girl who had been his first unrequited passion---still warm, still fond, a little angry and a little sad.

The first drops of rain began to fall as they passed by the empty square that fronted the garden of the Tuileries. Andre could not help but think of the hot, bright day in August when he had first returned to Paris, and had happened on the extraordinary sight of group of some thirty officers of the former Imperial Guard being marched through the square, escorted by a few dozen bayonets of the 104th North Derbyshire. An onlooker informed him that there was a ship at Le Havre, waiting to take them to join Bonaparte on St. Helena. They had been his elite, and he had kept them in reserve until the last at Waterloo, for they were to be his glorious coup de grace. Andre could see them still, the hundreds upon hundreds, their glittering ranks advancing on the Duke's line in perfect order, like the waves of the sea flowing over the softly undulating ground, and he had thought surely that all would be swept before them---until Wellington's own Guard, whom he had ordered to lie concealed in the corn, upon his cry of "Stand up, Guards!" sprang to their feet and opened a scorching fire that sent the French columns spinning back down the gentle slopes to La Belle-Alliance where the Emperor himself waited. In their white breeches and top boots, their long-tailed blue and white coats with lavishly bullioned epaulettes, and the tall bearskin cap with its red-tipped green plume, they still carried themselves with pride, as if they were still the never-defeated heroes of the Grande Armee.

Unforgettable days, and he wondered if he had enough years left in his lifetime for those memories to lose their vibrant urgency, to recede and fade like those of his childhood and young manhood; the good and the bad to be brought forth still by the oddest of promptings, but now with their accompanying joy and pain muted by time, as shadowy and inconsequential as flitting ghosts.

It seemed impossible, however, to imagine that any generation had ever lived in such memorable times.

 "The longer we live, the more we live in the past," the old Duchesse de Montreuil had said to him. "Until you wake up one morning and see that you might as well be dead! Despicable habit! Well, not me! I live to see what will happen next! It is why I shall never die. Oh, you laugh, but I am ninety-six if I am a day. Ask me to dance, Andre!"

And so he had. It had been Brussels in April, just seven months before. He had arrived with the Duke from Vienna to a city that overflowed with visitors---and with intrigue. The presence of the Army of Occupation in the Low Countries had made Brussels an attractive destination that spring, and the cream of London society had flocked abroad at the news of Napoleon's abdication and exile to Elba. The festivities surrounding the return of William of Orange as King of the Netherlands had attracted still more from all over Europe. But now the Monster had escaped his cage, and the hero of the Peninsula had been called upon to assemble the Allied Armies once more. Europe trembled in anticipation of what tomorrow might bring, and in Brussels, they danced as if tomorrow might never come.

"And what will happen next?" Andre asked with amusement as he gave her his arm. Upon seeing the ancient, diminutive Duchesse taking to the floor the musicians quickly altered course, commencing a slow, mincing minuet. The Duchesse screwed up her face in disapproval, and with a scowl at the conductor, turned to Andre and dipped into a low curtsy that would have tasked a woman a fourth of her age to execute with equal grace.

"Pah! How should I know!" she replied, "If I knew everything, I might also just as well be dead!"

Andre laughed, turning in the dance, and when he came to meet her once more, said, "You disappoint me! I had thought that you might tell me my future, Madame la Gitane!"

"I might yet," she returned, her bright blue eyes sparkling in her wrinkled face like the diamonds she wore in her ears, at her throat, on her gown, and in her powdered hair. "In fact, do not look now, my love, but I believe I see your future standing in the doorway just there with her maman. Ah—but you looked!" she laughed, turning away.

"The most beautiful girl in Brussels," the Duchesse whispered as they joined hands. "And she even has a little money!"

Andre snorted. "Very beautiful. But also a child! And surely you know better by now, Marie. Why are you still trying to get me married?"

"Because I can't marry you myself, and you are too handsome to go to waste!" Her delicate hands squeezed his, surprisingly strong. "All of our children are dead, Andre, and you were like a son to my Bertrand. I would like to hold a child of yours in my arms before I die."

"But Madame," he said softly, "You have just given me your word that you will never die." He turned and bowed next to a plump, red-haired beauty in a clinging gown of gold-threaded gauze so fine that the dark, round, shadows of her rouged nipples were plainly visible through her low cut bodice, which of course had been precisely the desired effect. Andre met her sultry green eyes with a dazzling smile, and made certain to observe correct form by casting his gaze downward, lingering appreciatively upon the proffered charms.

"Scandalous!" giggled the Duchesse, reclaiming him. "What man wants to have it all thrust in his face like that? A man likes a bit of mystery, is it not so?"

"I think, Madame, despite your experience, you do not know much about men," Andre smirked.

"You! Never mind her. Tell me what you think of Ivoire de Vosges. I will introduce you, yes?"

"Ivoire? What sort of name is that?" Andre cast his eyes towards the doorway as the beauty and her mother advanced into the room. The girl was impossibly lovely, luminous, with jet-black hair piled and curled and braided in the fashion a la Greque, violet-eyed and pale, her perfect figure demurely but enticingly gowned in shining white.

"A fanciful name," answered the Duchesse, following his gaze. "But it suits her. She is as lovely and as pure as ivory."

"But not for long if you have your way, hm?" Andre teased. "Never mind, Marie, I believe I will marry you after all. After the war is over. Will you wait for me?"

"Pah, what war? It will all be over soon, you mark my words."

Andre clucked his tongue in mock disapproval. "Madame, how you do contradict yourself. Did you not claim not to know what will happen next?" He bowed finally, deeply, as the musicians struck the final chord of the minuet.

 "Come and have a glass of champagne and tell me of this paragon of yours for I know that I shall have no choice but to meet her." Gently he took her arm once more to guide her off the floor. "And I begin to think it make take some time," he said dryly, nodding his head in the direction of the divine Mademoiselle de Vosges, her circle already two deep with red, blue, and green-coated admirers. Her mother had stepped a little away from her daughter, and was being greeted by the hostess, Lady Lennox. Madame de Vosges was a tall woman, elegantly made, and dressed in the pale lavender that had become almost ubiquitous in these months, just over a year after the final battles of the Peninsular War, as the color of half-mourning.

"A widow?" he asked his companion. The lady wore a shawl of silvery gossamer that covered her dark hair and wrapped around her shoulders.

"Her husband, Ivoire's father, was the son of the old Comte de Vosges, and a Major General of the Grand Armee, under Marshal Soult. He was killed at Toulouse last year. She has a son, also, Gervais, who is now with the Dutch-Belgians here in Brussels. C' est la guerre, eh?"

She had a good profile. A long, aquiline nose, a high forehead and a delicate chin. She turned her head to speak to Lady Lennox, and the shawl slipped from her hair to fall about creamy, white shoulders. And although she was not young, he saw that her face was quite beautiful, pale, like her daughter's, shaped like a heart, and her eyes were large and grey.

"I know her…" Andre whispered, unaware that he had uttered the words aloud.

"You may well have," the Duchesse said. "Her papa was an old friend of your own papa's, Gervais d'Orvigny. Dreadful the way he died. Like so many. He was a good, but a very foolish man." She sighed. "But she was called Valentine…Valentine d'Orvigny."

After a moment, Andre began to laugh. "Ha ha!" he burst out, and his hand flew unconsciously to cover his heart. "My God, it cannot be! Oh my God, not Valentine!"

Go to Part Three