My parents were the Comte and Comtesse de Vauquelin — “Vauquelin de Vauquelin”, it's very funny,
( she doesn't laugh, but she doesn't sound torn up, just: says it, a thing that she is saying, )
— and Guenievre Baudin, in the portrait, bore and birthed me. La comtesse couldn't carry a pregnancy to term, here's my lord's pregnant mistress who shares her colouring, so she goes from lady's maid to estate chatelaine in the space of one pregnancy. Well, one real pregnancy. “Her” baby “dies”,
( and so does the midwife who delivered her, and the entire small family she had been attending to a week later, in a tragic housefire that gwenaëlle has never heard about, )
and I am named Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, my lord's legitimate heir. It's still my name, ( for the sake of clarity and correctness, ) in an, I suppose, legal sense. But I annoyed a few of the wrong people a few years ago, and the whole affair was exposed, and I've used hers the Empress stripped me of my titles and inheritance.
no subject
( she doesn't laugh, but she doesn't sound torn up, just: says it, a thing that she is saying, )
— and Guenievre Baudin, in the portrait, bore and birthed me. La comtesse couldn't carry a pregnancy to term, here's my lord's pregnant mistress who shares her colouring, so she goes from lady's maid to estate chatelaine in the space of one pregnancy. Well, one real pregnancy. “Her” baby “dies”,
( and so does the midwife who delivered her, and the entire small family she had been attending to a week later, in a tragic housefire that gwenaëlle has never heard about, )
and I am named Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, my lord's legitimate heir. It's still my name, ( for the sake of clarity and correctness, ) in an, I suppose, legal sense. But I annoyed a few of the wrong people a few years ago, and the whole affair was exposed, and I've used hers the Empress stripped me of my titles and inheritance.