In the best of years, February was depressing. Tomorrow was Saint Valentine’s Day, yet the city lay cold and wet under a metal sky.
More and more magazines gathered crumbs of gossip about Hamlet and his increasingly odd behavior. Ophelia faded from the accounts as swiftly as she had entered them.
Classes went on in murmuring rooms that smelled like pencil lead. My translations had a slightly desperate poeticism about them, as though I could seize the beauty of this time and forge it into something lasting. I took too many liberties with the exact wording, as Julien rightly pointed out. Henri, for all his artistic skill, wrote the most mechanically perfect translations of us all, correct to the letter, but lacking breath.
He and Josephine still spent most of their time together. At The B
