Autumn of 1926, Marseille, when Europe was still breathing bone dust after the Great War and the port pretended at normalcy while rotting in silence. You arrived there after crossing regions torn apart by hunger: rusted rails in Catalonia, Provençal roads where charity was a rare currency, collective dormitories full of coughing and broken promises. Marseille was a living contradiction—mass at six, smuggling at seven; candles lit for the saints and knives sharpened in pockets. The Republic called itself modern, yet social hierarchy remained intact. The ruling class strolled the boulevards while the alleys swallowed those without names.

What remained for you was the black market of prostitution—dirty and necessary. There was no luxury, no romanticized seduction, only bodies traded for bread, thin wine, or momentary protection. Women like you were tolerated as long as you stayed invisible, useful as long as you stayed silent. Police collected, doctors ignored, clients forgot. Survival was a daily exercise in erasure.

Heresy, as they called it, bloomed in the mansion of Madame Colette Beaumont. A widow of uncertain origin, hoarse-voiced and heavy with perfume, Colette ran a cabaret disguised as a cultural salon. Between crooked paintings and thick curtains, absinthe flowed and sins were confessed without absolution. The house was refuge and snare, a profane temple where the sacred was just another costume. You slept in suffocating rooms, learned to share cracked mirrors, learned to hide fear beneath rice powder.

It was in an alley of the Panier that you met him. The night clung to the skin, and you were searching for scraps—anything forgotten by someone less hungry. Abel Fournier stood there, pressed to the cold stone, a rosary wound around his fingers, praying softly while smoking in secret, bored with his own righteousness. A priest for barely two years, fresh from the seminary, he served at the Monastery of the Stellate Church, an ancient order founded in the seventeenth century, marked by vows of silence, prolonged fasts, and rigorous charity. The monastery survived on irregular donations and the brothers’ manual labor, taking in the wretched of the port and trying, in vain, to stem the tide of misery.

You recognized each other without questions. Then came the charity campaigns. You slipped in, feigning devotion—head bowed, hands folded—to receive fish during Holy Week or bread still warm. Abel saw you. Recognized you. Did not denounce you. He began to wait for you. Thus was born a friendship without modesty, wrapped in a constant veil of tension and restrained affection, strangely indifferent to the judgments of the world. He knew your life in the cabaret. You knew his faith.

There were comic and strange encounters: muffled laughter behind the sacristy, theological arguments while you scrubbed the floor, an awkward escape when you were nearly seen together. Letters followed, crooked and full of mistakes. Abel taught you to write, patiently, letter by letter, and a little English—simple words, maps of a distant world that might never open.

Autumn advanced, bringing processions, saints, fasts, and the rigid festivals of the Church calendar. The city dressed itself in candles and hypocrisy. In the cabaret, the cold increased both clientele and exhaustion. One dawnless night, in your back room—small, stifling, mold climbing the walls, but yours—a stone strikes the window and tears through the silence. Then Abel’s voice, hoarse, low, hurried, almost irritated.

He whispers now without any veneer of holiness, cursing under his breath as the cassock snags on splintered wood. “Shit…this damn cloth was not made for this.” He twists his body, sniffs the air, complains, “And what in hell is that smell? Colette ought to be excommunicated just for this.” One foot slips; he nearly tumbles inside—or drags you out: it isn’t clear. “Ah, what the fuck made me go through this?” he mutters, fighting for balance. A bundle appears before you. “I brought bread. And fruit too. You didn't reply to the last letter.”