For the origins of this project, see previous posts in “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude’s first draft was fairly satisfactory on this one, and draft two was me asking for em-dash removal and sentence level fixes in a few places where the AI’s lack of logic became obvious. The words “with her [Frances’s] advice” are mine. I didn’t like what Claude had there but couldn’t justify mucking around with a third draft for it.

Planning the Departure

The trunk in the center of Marianne’s room had been open since morning and was still almost empty.

This was not for lack of things to put in it. The room was full of the accumulated evidence of a life that had been, until very recently, comfortable: the rosewood writing desk their father had given her on her sixteenth birthday, the small shelf of novels and poetry she had read until their spines gave way, the watercolors she had made of the view from the upstairs gallery, the gallery itself now visible through the open shutters with the late afternoon light coming golden across the floorboards. The problem was not scarcity. The problem was that every object Marianne picked up seemed to require her to decide what it meant that she was packing it, and she had not yet found a way to make that decision without it costing her something she could not afford to spend.

She was holding a volume of Rousseau when Éléonore came in.

“The carter comes tomorrow morning,” Éléonore said, with the careful softness she reserved for necessary truths. “We should have the books boxed tonight.”

“I know.” Marianne did not put the book down. Outside, the neighborhood was doing what it always did at this hour, the calls of vendors moving through the streets, the smell of someone’s supper coming through the open window, woodsmoke and roasting meat, the ordinary texture of an evening that had no idea it was the last of its kind. “I have been trying to decide what to leave.”

Éléonore looked at the nearly empty trunk and said nothing, which was its own kind of comment.

“It is not that I cannot pack,” Marianne said, with some heat. “It is that I do not see why I should have to. Papa promised us, you said yourself that he promised, and John has simply decided that the promise did not mean what it meant, and no one seems to think that this is as monstrous as it is.”

“I think it is fairly monstrous,” Éléonore said. “I also think that the carter comes tomorrow.”

Marianne set the Rousseau down on the desk, not in the trunk, and picked up one of the watercolors instead. It was a small thing, the view of the courtyard below, the banana trees and the iron railing and the particular quality of light that came through the gap between their house and the neighbor’s in the early morning. She had painted it two years ago without thinking much about it, and she could not quite bring herself to roll it and wrap it and place it in a box as though it were simply a portable object and not a record of mornings that would not come again.

“The cottage will have a courtyard,” Éléonore said, reading her with the ease of long practice.

“It will not have this courtyard.”

“No,” Éléonore agreed. “It will not.”

This was, somehow, worse than argument would have been. Marianne rolled the watercolor and wrapped it in a length of cloth and placed it in the trunk, because there was nothing else to do with it, and because Éléonore’s quiet acknowledgment of the loss had taken the energy out of her resistance. She picked up another watercolor, and then another, and worked in silence for a few minutes while Éléonore began sorting through the books, stacking them with the quick efficiency of someone who had already grieved this particular loss and moved on to the practical work of managing it.

“Do you not mind at all?” Marianne asked. “Any of it?”

Éléonore considered the question with the seriousness it deserved, which was one of the things Marianne both valued and found occasionally maddening about her sister. “I mind a great deal,” she said at last. “I mind what Frances made of John, and what John did with her advice, and what Papa failed to prevent. I mind that Maman had to sit in that room and hear herself discussed as though she were a problem to be managed. I mind all of it very much.”

“And yet you packed your trunk yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

Éléonore set down the books she was holding and looked at her sister with an expression that was fond and a little tired and entirely honest. “I packed it because it needed to be packed, and because minding something and acting on what must be done are not the same thing, and because if I sat with the trunk open and the Rousseau in my hand I would never leave this room, and we cannot afford for me to never leave this room.”

Marianne looked at her for a moment. Then she picked up the Rousseau and put it in the trunk.

“The cottage is in the Faubourg Marigny,” she said, as though testing the weight of it.

“Yes.”

“Among the gens de couleur. Among people like us.” She had not quite said this aloud before, and she was not entirely sure what she meant by it, whether it was a complaint or an acknowledgment or something in between.

“Among people like us,” Éléonore agreed, without inflection, leaving Marianne to decide for herself what that meant.

The light through the shutters had shifted to something deeper and more golden, the last of it before the long Southern dusk settled in. Marianne looked around the room, at the half-filled trunk and the remaining objects and the watercolor-bare walls with their pale rectangles where the paintings had hung, and understood, with a force that was almost physical, that this was real. Not the operatic calamity she had read about in novels, not the picturesque ruin of a French romance, but something smaller and more grinding and without any promise of a redemptive arc.

She picked up the next watercolor and wrapped it without looking at it.

“We will need more cloth for the wrapping,” she said.

“I have some in my room,” said Éléonore. “I will fetch it.”