Love Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

and his four children near Béziers. We shall probably never see each other .
    Remarks about her future husband continue, and they are calm, sensible, one could say respectful. There is, however, an entry describing a day in her married life. I shall wake up in that comfortable bed beside him, when the maid comes in to do the fire. Just as his wife did. Then I will kiss him and I will get up to make the coffee, since he likes my coffee. Then I shall kiss him when he goes downstairs to the shop. Then I shall give the girl orders. At last I will go to the room he says I can have for myself and I shall paint. Oils if I like. I will be able to afford anything I like in that line. He usually doesn’t come to the midday meal, so I shall ignore it and walk in the gardens and make conversation with the citizens, who are longing to forgive me. Then I shall play the piano a little, or my flute. He has not heardthe music I am writing these days. I don’t think he would like it. Dear Philippe, he is so warmhearted. He had tears in his eyes when the dog was sick. He will come in for supper and we will eat soup. He likes my soup, he likes how I cook. Then we will talk about his day. It is interesting, the work he does. Then we will talk about the newspapers. We shall often disagree. He certainly does not admire Napoleon! He goes to bed early. That will be the hardest, to be shut up in a house all night .
    Not once is there a suggestion of a financial calculation. Yet she was quite alone in the world. Her mother had been killed in the Mount Pelée earthquake, having gone to visit a sister living at St Pierre, which was destroyed. It is not recorded whether Julie ever asked her father for help.
    A week before the mayor, who was an old friend of Philippe’s, was to marry them at the town hall, she drowned herself in the pool where gossips said she had killed her baby. They did not believe she had killed herself. Why should she, now that all her problems were solved? Nor had she slipped and fallen, which was what the police decided. Absurd!—when she had been jumping around those woods for years, like a goat. No, she was murdered, and probably by a disappointed lover no one knew about. Living all by herself miles from any decent people, she had been asking for something of the sort.
    There were suitable condolences for the citizen who had lost his love, for no one could doubt he adored her, but people said he was well out of it. The gendarmes collected up her papers, her sketches, her pictures, a good deal of sheet music, and for lack of a better idea put it all into a big packing case that went to stand in the cellar of the provincial museum. Then, in the 1970s, Rémy’s descendants found some of her music among their papers, were pleased with it, remembered there was a packing case in the museum, found more music there, and got it played at a local summer festival. That is where the Englishman Stephen Ellington-Smith heard it. As musiclovers will know, Julie Vairon quickly became recognized as a composer unique in her time, an original, and people are already using the word great .
    But she was not only a musician. The artistic world admires her. ‘A small but secure niche…’ is how she is currently evaluated. Some people think she will be remembered for her journals. Excerpts appeared in both France and England, and were at once praised: very much to the taste of this time. Three volumes of her journals were published in France, and one volume (the three abridged) in Britain, where no one disagreed with the French claim that she deserves to stand on the same shelf as Madame de Sévigné. But some people have too many talents for their own good. Perhaps better if she had been an artist with that modest sensitive unpretentious talent so becoming in women. Which brings us to the feminists for whom she is a contentious sister. For some she is the archetypal female victim, while others identify with her independence. And as a musician,