Palace of Tears

His family wanted him to live in the country and cultivate grapes as the rest of them had for twenty generations, but Casimir de Chateauneuf had finer needs. Casimir was a dreamer. He wanted to find his destiny before his destiny could find him. The year was 1868. Europe was in a frenzy, seeking its spiritual opposite in the recesses of the Maghreb and the Levant. An obsession for Orientalism permeated everything, from pulp fiction and fashion to the grand canvases of Delacroix. But what intrigued everyone the most was that, after years of toil, the waters of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean were about to merge in the Suez, a symbolic union of the East and the West, a union promising faster trade and immense fecundity. Casimir de Chateauneuf was thirty-five. He had already succeeded in turning grapes into gold. Casimir's childhood was monotonously vast vineyards. His adolescence, dark cellars. The estate was called Grange du Souvenir. The town was called Chateauneuf-du-Pape. His wife was called Esparance. And his children were named Andre, Antoine, and Alphonse. Casimir knew every street, every house, every person in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. He had pursued all the vices that prevailed in the provinces. "I'm bored -- bored to death. Bored as never before," he confided to a friend. He set off for Paris to market the wine and to explore the city's unique perversions. His great talent for assimilation and his country gentleman's social ease quickly gained him entrance to the best men's clubs and women's salons. With dismissive panache, he grasped the nuances of couture. Refining his accent in no time, he cultivated his eloquence. He kept a mistress, an alluring courtesan, who lived above the arcades at the Palais Royal. What distinguished her was an abundant red mane and small, voluptuous lips. (In fact, important men whispered to each other about her "other" small, voluptuous lips which compensated sweetly for their own deficiencies.) Casimir could see the turrets of the Louvre out of her bedroom window. He could measure the pulse of commerce parading through rue de Rivoli. He could spend hours at the BibliothAque Nationale, engrossed in unusual books and journals, in pursuit of things that had occurred during his boyhood in the country. He could gush through the volumes written, the continents explored, the machines invented. Casimir celebrated follies of luxury and every new expression of the arts. In the evenings, the theater and the opera. Three times a week, fencing and pistols at the Cartoucherie. On Tuesdays, Bezique with foreign businessmen at the Faubourg Saint-Honor. Every Tuesday afternoon at four, a retinue of street people bared their palms outside the club. Among them, he distributed the day's revenue.Croutier, Alev Lytle is the author of 'Palace of Tears' with ISBN 9780385334884 and ISBN 0385334885.