The salon smelled of opium and expensive perfume, a cloying mixture that made Charles de Morvilliers dizzy. He sat in a velvet armchair, a half-empty glass of absinthe sweating on the table beside him, and watched the candlelight dance across the walls of his own apartment.

He was thirty years old and already felt seventy. The poetry had taken something from him—something essential. His verses, celebrated in the salons of Saint-Germain for their exquisite morbidity and hidden violence, seemed to draw life from some dark wellspring within him. Or perhaps they drew life from the suffering of others, and he was merely the conduit.

He could feel it now—the city's pain, radiating through the walls like heat from a furnace. Paris in 1890 was a city of contradictions: gleaming boulevards and dark alleys, opera houses and workhouses, beauty and rot. And Charles felt it all. Every grief, every rage, every moment of despair that passed through the minds of the two million souls who called Paris home.

At first, it had been beautiful. The pain was a symphony, and he was its conductor. He had written poems that made grown men weep and women faint. But gradually, the line between his pain and theirs had begun to blur. He could no longer tell which suffering was his and which belonged to the city.

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