Marie and Michel are lovers. Michel is a young poet who works at a newspaper in order to pay the bills. He rents a tight mansard room behind Avenue Montmartre. The blotchy walls are gratis.
They spend much of their nights together in here. They lay on the narrow bed, cuddling, while Michel is whispering his poems in her ear about love and the same kind of sweet little nothings. They truly love each other. They make love; they laugh at their poorness; they invite their friends to drink and sing along and one night his painter friend made this painting of them standing by the window looking at the city. Their world is full like this.
They listen to the sounds of a Paris that never sleeps. Smoky bars are nearby and crowded cabarets. A noisy group is walking on the cobble and a musician is playing a gloomy tune on an accordion. Michel turns to Marie, embraces her waist, and dances with her to the tune. Some nights, at the open window, they just dream about their future: Marie wants Michel in it, while Michel wants Marie and success.
One day he meets a woman from high society who is eager to help him reach what he wants. As he becomes bewitched by the whole new glittering world of opportunities, Marie and Michel drift asunder, slowly and unawares. Michel comes home later and later every night, he has never a nice word to her as if being annoyed. Marie realizes that she herself is the only obstacle for him to reach success. She cries a lot and one day she packs her stuff and leaves the tight mansard room and him.
Years later, when Michel becomes a recognized poet, the favorite of the Parisian salons, and when publishers fight for publishing his works, he regularly reads out his poems to elegant ladies who are fluttering their fans in excitement. He recites his old poem about love, but the words sound strange and empty now. Where was it when he whispered those words and the same kind of sweet little nothings in a girl’s ear and those words meant something?
He soon becomes exhausted from the “bravos” and claps and champagnes. All these vivid cavalcades of success and intoxication blur into a big pinwheel and in that very moment he remembers. He remembers what he misses in the height of his victory: his skimpy attic behind the Montmartre Avenue with the narrow bed and the blotchy wall, the rip-roaring nights with his misfortunate friends. He misses the days when he was drunk with joy and absinthe and pure love. And he misses his lover, Marie. Does anybody know where is she now?
Michel drinks himself to sleep that night: he has nothing left, only the reverie of the past.
Comments (2)
Well written 👌👌👌
Thank you very much!