When Georgiana danced with Bonaparte for the first time, she had once recited an Egyptian poem to him:
All my life, I longed to be treasured, properly placed, carefully preserved. Spare me from fear, spare me from suffering, spare me from wandering with nowhere to belong.
But that person—I knew, I had always known—would never come.
Madmen did not know they were mad, and stubborn people did not know how stubborn they were. He only listened to advice when he wanted to hear it. When he made a mistake, he was overly confident that his approach was right, refused to listen to others and correct it, and finally pushed the blame onto someone else.
Stubbornness was another trait of the Bonaparte family, aside from having a mouthful of neat white teeth. In what way did he not seem like a living person?
The sensation of his fingertips trailing across her back still lingered. A man who had been dead for two hundred years in the era she came from had appeared before her in such a manner.
Even for a dream, this was too insane!
Sooner or later, she would be put into a straitjacket and thrown into an asylum. And who had caused all this?
She wanted to find a little reason in this mad world. Paper mill workers would riot if their wages were cut to fifteen sous a day, let alone eight sous. But that was the wage of temporary workers, with no contract or agreement to protect them, and women were not as strong as men. Jobs such as tailoring and cooking had been snatched away by men as well, leaving them few choices. If they had two children to feed, then sometimes, just to survive, people had no choice but to set aside their dignity