What If I became riche one day?

My life

The work in the country lasted four days, from dawn to dusk, interspersed only with long silent walks through pine woods and damp clearings, where only Poupoune broke the solitude of the walker with her joyful runs. Then, when the plot of the story was firmly knotted and the mind demanded a wider tension, Victoire packed her trunks and took the road to the ocean.

In Biarritz, the perspective suddenly widened to infinity.

The arrival at the Hôtel du Palais was part of a perfectly regulated ceremonial. The former summer residence of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III, majestically set facing the Grande Plage, offered Victoire the ideal setting to face the great swells of the imagination. The red brick façade, the Second Empire salons with patinated gilding, the rotunda open onto the marine abysses: everything exuded an imperial splendour tempered by the harshness of the Atlantic.

The staff of the house, trained to the strictest discretion, knew his habits. In his corner suite on the third floor, tall vases of white arums were arranged near the Empire console, and an embroidered cushion was already waiting for Poupoune near the French window opening on the immensity of the ocean.

Victoire always opened the window as soon as she arrived, whatever the wind. The crashing of the waves crashing against the rock of the Frigate filled the space with a continuous, low, powerful vibration that drowned out all human noise.

She leaned on the wrought iron balustrade, dressed in a thick cloak of black cloth, Poupoune nestled under her arm. In front of her, the Atlantic spread its lines of white foam under a sky heavy with spray. This direct confrontation with the marine element, charged with the memory of Napoleonic splendour and the decline of empires, awakened in her a fierce energy.

It was here, facing the Bay of Biscay, that Victoire's prose found its definitive rhythm. The imperial grandeur of the place was in dialogue with the history lessons it drew from Tacitus and Plutarch: the fragility of purple, the vanity of material conquests, the eternal sovereignty of the poetic word.

She pulled her mahogany pedestal table towards the bay window, arranged her inkwell and resumed her work until the first light of night. Between Paris for its analytical rigour, La Chalosse for its silent rootedness and Biarritz for the excesses of the sea horizons, Victoire had built an impregnable existence, freed from all attachments, where the only sovereign master remained the requirement of the text.

The Atlantic night enveloped the Hôtel du Palais in a dense darkness, pierced only by the regular and sharp sweep of the lighthouse of the Pointe Saint-Martin. In the imperial suite on the third floor, the west wind gently groaned the cremones of the high French windows, bringing with it the acrid smell of seaweeds torn from the rocks and the dull, continuous, almost telluric murmur of the Great Beach beaten by the waves.

Victoire was not asleep. Her mind still tense from the hours of literary forging, she contemplated the bundle of leaves that was drying on the gilded mahogany console. Each word had been weighed with a trebuchet, freed of all parasitic ornament, polished with that geometrical rigour which she had formerly devoted to the memoirs of appeal before devoting it, entirely and undivided, to the sovereignty of the word.

On the large four-poster bed topped with Napoleonic eagles, Poupoune slept in a circle, curled up in the hollow of a vicuña plaid. Her tenuous and regular breath marked the only domestic beat in this vast room steeped in history. For Victoire, this little dog was much more than a company: she was the center of gravity of an emotional life freed from all social debt. No husbands to take care of, no children to raise in bourgeois conventions, no cumbersome family to satisfy during obligatory ceremonies. Poupoune embodied love in its purest and most unpretentious form—a benevolent, silent presence that did not judge, asked for nothing more than a glance or a caress as it passed, and never interrupted the sacred flow of thought.

Victoire put on a long coat of dark woollen cloth, took the little beast in her arms and slipped the fine leather leash to her collar. It was two o'clock in the morning. The palace slept in a half-light muffled with muted gold and thick carpets where their footsteps made no sound.

Downstairs, the night watchman bowed with mute deference as he opened the side door opening onto the esplanade. He knew the habits of this exceptional client, whose European fame preceded her discreet arrivals. In Biarritz, Victoire did not grant any interviews, did not frequent any social salon, refused any invitation to dine with local notables. She came in search of the excesses of the elements, the purifying wind of the sea and that strange resonance between the fallen splendour of the Second Empire and the mineral eternity of the Basque cliffs.

As soon as they crossed the threshold, the slap of iodized air seized them. Poupoune proudly pricked up his silky ears, smelling the night breeze greedily while trotting briskly along the deserted promenade.

The sea was high, swollen by the equinox tides. Sprays of phosphorescent foam gushed against the before falling in fine salt rain on the asphalt. Victoire stopped at the parapet, resting her gloved hands on the cold stone. In front of her, the black chasm of the Bay of Biscay stretched to the coast of Cantabria.