My mind is still bitter with the taste of envy. You read it right: envy. It is envy that carried the words of my last entry, envy of a simpler life, the kind these men around me live. I wish I could get close to it, feel the radiation of warmth coming off a world untouched by pain, by duty. I will tell you a secret, diary, which I am sure Ashcroft would find quite amusing were he to find. If you’re reading this, Ashcroft, congratulations on learning to read.

When I lived on the Duval family farm, which I had been doing up until the war began, I found a secret place hidden deep between the beeches and ivy thickets, buried in a monumental oleander shrub, the likes of which I’d never seen. It was summer. Beneath a mountain of delicate pink flowers and slithering leaves I slowly began to uncover a cabin I had never known of. My parents made no mention of it, neither did Charles, and the matting of the stems and tangling of the branches told me I may have been the first to find it in a long while. After an hour’s work I reached through a hole in the greenery and brushed my fingers across the cabin’s wall, the clay mortar between two debarked oak logs so soft with rain and age that the wood indented under my touch.

I cleared more of the wall enough to find a door frame a little ways to the left, which was no more than a quartered log with the corner facing out and right. Beyond that, of course, and with the labor of carving out a short tunnel in the branches, I found myself at the door. It was solid, still soft, but solid. I had no way of forcing the door in, so I had to clamour all the way to the other side of it to find the knob. It, too, was wooden, and hand carved. I could feel the edges where the sandpaper had failed to reach digging into my hand as I grabbed it, turned it, and then there was a squeak, and a mighty creak frightened me stiff before I realized it was the rusted doorframe coming loose and opening - falling - away from the frame. I narrowly jumped down my tunnel in time to save a limb or two, and looked back at the door from the muddy ground to find a nice opening had been created in the thicket for me to work in. Of course, there was no more work to be done now, the door was gone and the cabin was open. The only thing left to do was go on. I’d heard stories about this sort of thing before, little children lost in the woods come across an old cabin overgrown with vines, only to enter and be eaten by a witch. This cabin, however, was overgrown properly and in a way such that no living being could possibly be inside, and I was a bravely stupid child, so I peeked my head around the frame, peering into the darkness.

I remember the smell of the place, like a kitchen when an unfinished meal had been accidentally left out overnight, the smell of old leeks and bread, and of old dead tree stumps. It was dark, even as the sun reached over the treeline behind me, for the windows (at least where I imagined the windows would be) were covered by the oleander, and there were no candles inside, not that I expected any. As my eyes adjusted I was able to see the floor immediately in front of me by the little sunlight coming through, the wooden planks covered in dirt and grime, splinters of wood scattered along, pebbles stuck in the cracks. The only sound was the trees swaying in the wind, even the birds had stopped then, leaving me alone in that place, blocked in from the back though the foliage had been cleared a little. I was seven, but when I was five I experienced a similar feeling to that day, when the Duvals made the trek out to the Chateau de la Roche Haute north east of Tulle, the ruins of a feudal castle overlooking the village of Gimel. There was something haunted about it, as if the stones themselves, the ones cleaved in two during some ancient battle, would start to speak at any moment. The very dust we walked upon was tainted with a memory I never possessed, the idea of a lord and his men treading the same ground with centuries between filled my little heart with something akin to dread, though I didn’t have the word for it yet. In a way, I still don’t. A place as old as that, with vines growing across the castle walls and through courtyards which no longer exist, it has a supernatural effect. I remember walking alone with my mother down a gravel path and under a pointed arch and touching one of the stones in the wall, thinking the child’s version of “many hands have done the same here, and it is very well possible that none of them yet live.” I still dream about that place, of the overrun stairs and eroded limestone turned black with the rain, and about the feeling it gave me: that the world is no longer as mysterious a place as it once was, and if I were to find every such castle, or road, or log cabin, then there wouldn’t be anything left to imagine. That is the feeling I got as I first stepped into the cabin, the planks creaking under my feet, dust floating in the sunbeam around me, that I had found another piece of my imagination, right there in front of me, and I was given the privilege of touching it, seeing it, smelling it with my waking mind, as if in that moment of a dream when you try to wake yourself, to prove you are dreaming, and it doesn’t work, so you believe you are awake. It does not escape me how incredible it is to have experienced this twice by that young an age, and yet I cannot tell you the depths of the sinking I felt in my chest when I second glimpsed it in that cabin, the tremor in my hands, the rattling in my head of some forgotten memory which wasn’t mine, like the memory of walking the Chateau de la Roche Haute as a footman, of touching the limestone, newly cut and bone white, and knowing I was safe between its evergreen walls. Now they are evergreen no more, like the forest around them they turn red and orange in autumn.

My eyes adjusted to the dark another degree, and I saw before me a little round table made of wood to my left, only a few feet from the entrance, and upon it stood a wooden cup, carved from a single piece of the same oak the house was made of. It reminded me of when I was three, and my family visited the home of my father’s friend, monsieur Jean-René Auclair, who was the son of a Parisian aristocrat, one Étienne Auclair, who was a low level lord during the reign of Louis Phillippe. Jean-René played the part of a nobleman’s son as well as anyone can. My memory of the visit is foggy, I was only three, but the gaps have been filled in by my father, mother, and most importantly Charles, who was 11 at the time and had no reason to embellish the story. Jean-René, a man of middle age and straight posture, had never worked a day in his life, and it showed in his eyes. Even as a small child I saw clearly the aura of opulence in his gait, the way his eyes stood still in their sockets, always calm and orderly. He wore his raven hair back, the ends touching almost to the nape of his neck, which was as stark white as the rest of his face, and made the darkness of his hair all the more striking. His face was defined by his eyebrows, plucked into a shape I’d never seen before, edged and pointed in such a way as to make him look unnatural, yet there was a certain kindness in it, the gesture of using some part of his fortune to make the act of gazing upon him a bit more pleasant. I can’t imagine how much time and money it must have taken to find a person with the skills to do such a thing, to create a tapestry of acquaintances varied and expansive enough to even have the capability to find them, and to come to them regularly to freshen the effect, or to have them stay in close proximity to you for this sole purpose. Is the world so dull for some that their time would ideally be filled with this type of monotony? I wonder how he would have been had his father been a farmer like mine? Would I truly know him? I didn’t understand and I still don’t. He wore his moustache pointed at the tips, curled upward into almost a full circle. His softly pointed nose needed no work, nor did his smile. Smiles are easy to see through, and his was transparent. It was one of two things which made me understand why my father was such good friends with him: his devilish smile, the one kind you put on when silently letting someone in on a scheme you’re concocting, and a single wooden cup. In the dining room of his house, an extravagant space lit by an enormous crystal chandelier hanging above a white table outlined in gold and topped in indigo, flanked by prussian blue, flower laden drapes, engulfed with silver passementerie, and ivory cabinets with tinted glass to match the table, there was just this one thing that stood out to me, a small wooden cup, hand-carpented, sitting at the head of the table. When it came time to eat, and to my surprise, Jean-René took his seat there and lifted the small wooden cup, a cup fit for the Savior, to be filled with a bottle of the then freshly resurrected Bordeaux, which may has well have been Elysian river water to a three year old Otto Duval. I was struck by the strangeness of it, and thought it would make a good memory. I suppose it’s the only reason I remember it, as I can’t seem to recall any of the dinner, and I’m sure it was among the best I’ve ever had. That memory came to me as I stared at the cup on the table in the cabin, not for its exact resemblance (two hand carved wooden cups can only resemble each other so closely) but for the strangeness of their location. The table sat near but not up against the front wall, a good five feet from the door and three from the wall, and in a cabin of so small a size it struck me even then how odd a spot it was. There was no window nearby, there wasn’t anything at all - only the table and cup, not even a chair.

I still couldn’t see into the darkness near the middle of the cabin, so my eyes drifted past and to my right, where a mirror faced out on the wall facing me. I was lucky I couldn’t make much out, otherwise my own reflection would have sent me sprinting out then and there. Still, I could see the reflection of the front wall in it, the only thing close enough to catch the light, so I knew what I was looking at. I stared into it for what must have been a few seconds, but in my small perspective it felt like hours, and I became lost in the cracks of the glass, an impact wound in its middle that I assume now to be from an agitated strike, though in the moment I only saw the beauty in the design, the center forming the lines of a dartboard, around it the tremulous ripples in a pond when a stone is thrown, and around that the cracks between the stones of the Chateau, all outlined in the slightest sunlight from the entrance, the lines dancing as I moved my head back and forth to catch every detail. I’d never seen broken glass before, though my mother once told me a cautionary tale from Charles’ youth, when he and his friends were playing pétanque too close to the house, and (as children do) toward it, inevitably leading to Charles throwing a boule through the kitchen window and onto the dining table. This is a yet unrepeated mistake in the Duval house. I was not yet born when it happened, so I hadn’t seen the damage, but I imagine it was similar to what I was seeing in the cabin, only with a larger hole in the shatter and with a much more spectacular effect. I can only imagine my parents’ faces as the boule crashed through the window like a cannonball, landing on the table with enough force to lift my father’s coffee two feet into the air and onto his corduroy waistcoat, a stain that would cause my mother years of trouble, even into my early childhood.

At my feet there was a note, written on a piece of paper with two frayed sides, perhaps ripped off the corner of the dedication page of some book, with words scrawled on it in what appeared to be berry juice, a seed still clinging to the bottom of the final ‘m’. I kept the note, I still have it in my room at the Duval house, and have long memorized it. It reads, “I’ve spent my whole life waiting for someone to save me.” Beside it was a twig with dried berry juice on one end, and even now a shiver runs up my spine thinking of the moment my eyes darted up and away from it, the last fixture of my innocence, the final object of my child’s perception and unfettered mind, and to think the bark of it was still the same brown I’d seen all my life, the deep richness of it now lost to me; my childhood’s tabernacle was dismantled there in that very moment, temporary as it was. My memories of Jean-René, of the new Bordeaux, of stones blackened with rain and now of oleander vines two meters thick, these are memories unfit to span one's entire childhood, though they filled so few years so well, a child is not meant to become a man at seven. Yet so I did.

Deep within the dark I saw a chandelier, only the second I’d ever seen after that of Jean-René, but this one was far less magnificent, and that I could tell even from the darkened outline. For one it reached too close to the ground, such that no dinner party could ever be held underneath it, though a chair sat on its side in its traditional place, which made me wonder what it was doing so far from the table to my left, I knew it was of the same set from the swirling pattern in the wood, which I could just about make out from the dim light coming in from behind me, though the light had not yet reached the chandelier above, dark and silent and looming above the little Duval, standing all alone in the cabin, eyes and mind bewildered by the mystery he’d been uncovering. He stood and watched as the sun behind him slowly lowered, the sunbeam rising in the room past the chair, past the corner between the floor and the far wall, which was barren and untouched and unimportant, and his eyes were fixed on that wall with its panelled oak and its waves of dark and light interweaving within each other and being painted by the varying sun caressing it after so long, and little Duval forgot to breathe as the light rose and rose up the wall, the bottom of the chandelier revealing itself, warmed by an unknowing sun, a stranger to this place, this place of shadow and cold, this place containing a chandelier whose bottom was a pair of unclothed, dirt-layered legs smoothed off above the knees, and little Duval tried to keep his eyes on the wall but his mind was on the chandelier, for how could a chandelier’s legs stop at the thigh like that? Between the thighs hung a little prick, and a swollen gut, and hanging beside it were two arms, and they too were smoothed off above the elbows, fat and bulbous and limp, then atop the gut sat a mangled beard, the hair young and thick, brown. Above the beard was a matching mat of hair, rolling down onto the shoulders, and they two covered most of a face blackened with dirt, the cheeks round, the eyes dead. I don’t think anyone would understand. At seven I died. I heard my parents arguing, my mother convinced I had been replaced by a changeling. My father, though he didn’t agree, didn’t have another explanation to give her. I never told them. I never told anybody.