Nuit de carnaval

On the Côte d’Azur, where confetti drifts like snowflakes of sin, Jeanne Olier—her skin still tasting of salt and fiancée’s lipstick—steps into a ballroom gilded for betrothal. A harpsichord twitters; champagne flutes catch chandeliers in crystal cages. Suddenly a silhouette cuts the light: a woman draped in midnight crêpe, veil clinging to a face that seems carved from guilty marble. She does not ask—she commands. Renounce the ring, the kiss, the future. Her voice is a scalpel. Jeanne flees, heels clacking across mosaic roses, through alleyways that smell of orange peel and gunpowder, past commedia masks leering like patent-leather gargoyles. The lady in black pursues, pace metronomic, cloak billowing like a negative comet. Nightclubs vomit jazz; ferris wheels spin like astronomical clocks; casinos cough gold. Each step peels another layer of Jeanne’s innocence until, on the Promenade des Anglais at dawn, only two shadows remain—one trembling, one implacable—while the carnival band strikes up a waltz that sounds suspiciously like a funeral march.