Characters
Clément Aldric
Rémi's younger brother, who drowned off the Sorvaine coast in 1999, at twenty-four and newly engaged. The warmest of his generation, and the one the cameras loved before he was ready for them. What remains is a photograph the press never stopped running, and a shape Rémi keeps seeing in his own children. The family keeps a silence around one empty chair, and everyone who loves him understands what it is for.
Full Name: Clément Aldric
Date of Birth: 20 June 1975
Height: 6'2"
Title: His Highness Prince Clément of Sorvaine
Youngest child of Édouard III and Yvonne · brother of Rémi and Mathilde · died young
Appearance: Dark hair, thick and unruly, and the strong Aldric features — he was unmistakably his father's son and his nephews' uncle, the same face that turns up now, rearranged, in the generation that followed him. In the photographs that survive he is usually laughing, usually half-turned toward someone off to the side, lit by a Mediterranean afternoon that made everything look easier than it was. The camera loved him. That was part of the trouble.
The man he was: The warmest of Édouard III's three children — socially easy, genuinely interested in people, the kind of person a room organized itself around without being asked. He was also, in a way the cameras caught before he did, quietly haunted, and the European press had been photographing him since his teens without ever quite deciding which of the two men he was. He was twenty-four and newly engaged to Sofia Amedei, a Roman architect's daughter, when he drowned off the Corniche Sorvainaise in the spring of 1999. The official account is an accident. He is buried in Sorvaine.
What he left: Less than a full life, and more than a name on a stone. He left a photograph the press has never stopped reproducing — this one, from the good years, the summer light and the easy smile — and a shape his brother keeps recognizing in his own children.
He is in the cameras that never stop following the Aldric sons now. He is in Lucien's withdrawn quiet, the second son learning the difficult truth of what it means to be second. He is in Nicolas's restlessness, the need to keep moving. He is in Felix most of all — the pretty prince the paparazzi love to make a spectacle of — and in the fear, never spoken aloud, that whatever sadness took root in Clément could reach one of them too. Rémi has never named this. He does not have to. It is the silence the family keeps around one chair at the table, and everyone who loves him understands what it is for.