titled butterfly.

[divertissements]

(The butterfly, Diderot writes, is symbolic.)

Claude finds the small butterfly hairpin at a trinket store, it’s no true art and of little worth, what pays she for it, enough to buy a crêpe, still she purchases it with great veneration, remembering those exact words from the grand Encyclopédie. So that Fanny won’t see it and think it hers, Claude has it gift-wrapped.

Because Isabelle, she thinks, will understand what is meant by the gesture, her fellow Symbolist will know what to derive from that which is left unsaid.

(Here you have a butterfly and the butterfly is my soul.)