You know Paris
from birth, baptized this day
in 1634. Maid of honor
to Austria’s
Queen Anne, you gain haute ways
of salons, learn Latin from Ménage. Your
marriage brings you country estates, two sons;
the comte’s a caring man. By twenty-eight,
your anonymous novels have begun
to appear. By forty-four, you create
fiction to challenge each psyche, our first
novel of its kind. You mine deep inside
Clèves’ princess—agony of duty, cursed
with irrational love for the duke—ride
realism through a new world. Beguiled
readers never know you. You barely smile.
Roger Armbrust
March 18, 2013
