The Fable of the Romantic Mouse

A minuscule rodent, no larger than a thimbleful of dusk, scampers across the warped floorboards of a forgotten tavern where gaslight drips like molten honey; he is a poet in whiskers, a musketeer of the heart, convinced that a moon-white glove abandoned on a windowsill belongs to the duchess of his feverish dreams. Through slats in the wainscot he spies human giants—courtiers, duelists, gamblers—whose passions loom like cathedrals, and he translates their sighs into his own epic of devotion. Each night he drags a thorn of rose across the flagstones, tracing love letters that dissolve beneath boot heels at dawn. When the glove vanishes, traded for a coin to pay a drunken captain’s wager, the mouse pursues it across rain-slick cobblestones, down gutter-rapids, into a candlelit ballroom where chandeliers tremble like crystalline hearts. There he confronts not a duchess but a scullery maid wearing borrowed silk, her own illusions stitched from discarded theatre costumes. In their mirrored delusions—one of noble romance, the other of escape—they dance, a spinning clockwork of fragile desire, until the strike of twelve loosens plaster and the whole château of fantasies crumbles into an abyss of silence. He scurries back to the tavern attic, clutching a single bead fallen from her gown, now a relic more radiant than any crown, and dies clutching it, believing the bead to be the moon itself, while outside, indifferent Paris keeps breathing.