Rowena

[Louis Janmot, detail from Rayons de soleil, itself one piece of a large collection of works he completed between 1835 and 1855 and titled Le Poème de l'âme]

It was something that had happened long before he was born, when his mother was yet a young girl, in a place that he knew and yet did not know.

She first told him the story when he was perhaps fourt…