Born into the lap of luxury and a time of turmoil, Duchesse Eleonore Vigneron experiences her coming of age in the Court of Louis XVI . Embroiled in the chaos that surrounds Versailles, Eleni uses her unique blend of wit, charm, and beauty to ensure...
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"I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."---John Green, Looking For Alaska
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30 décembre 1802 Roma, Italie
Dearest Journal-Friend
I must apologise for not having written for very long. I do have a very good excuse, my constant companion.
I am very much dead now.
Before that saddens you too much, you should also know that in a way, I am also alive. Michel tried to murder me. I should be angry about that, but in all fairness, I also tried to murder him. Now we are both dead, but I am the only one able to write to you.
The ordeal was painful and humiliating, one I think meant to break me. I never even knew what he was, Papa's friend and our neighbour. I thought he was simply a lonely middle-aged apothecary as lost as the rest of us. But he is something more, something different, and he made me that too.
It was not out of kindness. He wanted a beautiful and obedient wife, a doll that would be always alluring and cooperative, no matter what he asked. And so he made himself my Sire--my second father, my lover, my husband, my master. The bond between a Sire and his Childe forms into something so strange that somewhere along the line, saying no or rebelling against the Sire's wishes is almost an impossibility. As he was telling me this, what I was, what he had made me, I had only two thoughts.
The first was that I must get away before the bond took. The whole ordeal should have incapacitated us both for days, but I fought it. I am not a large-boned woman, but my mind is stronger than any realise. The coachman, Henri, he helped a good deal and I should not have survived without him. He traveled with me from Romano's estate and I suppose he figured there was no going back. It would have been better for him to leave me, but the state I was in, I may have killed him and not realised it. Either that, or there is honour amongst thieves. He helped me to take everything owed me from that house, my childhood home that became my final resting place. It was a long journey, but finally, he got us to Rome.
