From the desk of the most esteemed Algernon St. Philippe, upon his death bed. Recorded by Tomas, his ward.

Paris, France
June, 1848

My Dearest Erin,
I am writing to you from the studio which my publisher arraigned for me in my final days. Do not protest, my friend, for I have felt the pages of my Book of Life flitting rapidly towards the end and I do not fear it, dearest, as I know I did in my youth. Fear of death will not drive me to darkness and murder, I have not the energy for such things, and they would not help me. It seems that the entire world is dimly lit, colored with smoke, and muffled. It is as if Death himself has placed his hands over my ears to quiet the rushing winds of the country around me. I am not as you once knew me, there was aging in my eyes at Monsieur Joubert's Salon, creases in my skin, and I have taken to not wearing powder, as it clings to those, dare I admit that they are, wrinkles. Pure absurdity that a woman over sixty should be embarrassed of herself, but I was ever the vain one in our youth, do you remember? Do you recall our times in Spain? The adventure and the raucous fare of the savage land? I have been able to summon up less and less in my age, but I remember key events that will always warm my head with their absurdity. It pains me to tell you that I must go to great lengths to call upon the memory of your face as of late, but while your continence may be fleeting, your perpetually cheerful wiles will remain with me until Judgment Day and beyond.

There is not one clear conscious in Paris these days, if there ever was! I do not know where this letter will find you, but I feel I may safely assume that it is better than the dreary Parisian streets, home of madcap radicals and violent offenders of the absolute worst kind. Happily none of them with the literary machinations of this concealed comtesse! The boy, Tomas, tells me that there is great strife in the streets. Fortunately, the mob at large believes in the esoteric Monsieur Algernon St. Philippe, who lives on his own income in a small alcove with a multitude of ghost writers. Were they to guess that the only occupant is a lone suffragette with an English schooling in law, the truth would surely astonish them, do you not agree? A lone woman with naught but her letters and her manservant in blissful solitude, writing articles on gardening and dying of a cancer of the liver. Yes, Erin, that is what afflicts me, not the source of my aging, but a consequence of it.

All of our acquaintances from the past seem gone now. Even monsieur Savant, who did not, in the end, succumb to drink, but was killed in one of the riots which has thrown Paris into chaos, is dead. His wife and daughters have been accommodated for, of course. All the others seem lost to me. Their stories, the mirthless circumstances of a redcoat, the wild cavorting of a would-be pirate, the wounded submitting of a young girl to a strange world, a frightened recruit, and even my own of the exiled aristocrat, seem at both times lost and immaterial, little figments of my imagination placed just out of my mind's reach by the Devil, which I stretch to touch, only to have them escape from me. My mind is as the fens, slippery and deceptive. I hope you will not be offended if I include my recollection of the events of our own lives and the lives of those before use with my letter. Tomas records it for me as I recline and speak. He is a good boy. I have also enclosed certain documents of antiquity which aid in the telling of the tales, perhaps they will help in your appraisal of my efforts.

I pray this letter finds you in good health and fine weather.

Your ever affectionate friend,
Aurelie D'Orleans