Her backstory, as told in her own words...

It was the first of June of the year of Our Lord Seventeen Seventy-Seven when Aurélie Saint-Simone gave birth. That child was me; I was told as a child that my father was a soldier in the employ of le roi. It was a year of battles in the Americas, when le Marquis de Lafayette defected to the budding country and became a great man.

My mother was a minor noble, in a family with too many daughters. As a small child, I was not so aware of this, but by the time la Révolution sprang to life, I knew too well that the family did not need another daughter. There was talk of dowries, and of men in far-flung palaces that needed wives and children.

Please, do not get me wrong. I was not treated ill; I was kept well-fed and well-dressed, and I never had doubt that maman and les tantes and mon grand-père et ma grand-mère loved me for myself. I had all the proper lessons a daughter of France and the nobility needed; I learned to ride and to read and write, to do needlework and appreciate Art.

None of this did me any good for a number of years.

When the Bastille fell, we fled from Paris to Lyon in the south, hoping to avoid the madness. I thought it all terribly exciting; the rest of the family was far more concerned. The lack of men led us all to learn skills that were not part of the studies of a French lady - the sword, the pistol, the rifle, the ways of dressing like un homme. We tried to pass as a small family of merchants, and for a time, we succeeded.

La Révolution did not stay in Paris, however, and we lost family one by one. Tante Helene and tante Marie were captured on a trip to the market. Grand-père et Grand-mère were captured or killed when they chose to move on to l'Italie. In my sixteenth year, it was only maman and I, until she was captured in the late winter, leaving only me.

I was on my own for more than a year, doing my best to survive. Mostly, I stole. Grand-père had taught me enough bladework that I turned myself to the highwayman's trade more than once. I was passing myself off as a young man every day by then; I had taken on the name Gustave, as it was close enough to my own name. In the end, in the summer of the next year, one of my few friends and I enlisted in la Grande Armée. I brought a horse I'd stolen, so they put me in the cavalry.

I served first la République, and then the Empire; I went to Egypt and to Italy, the Netherlands and Spain and Russia. I was at Salamanca, and in the Pyrenees, and I managed to save my horse and my men on the long march back from Moscow. I was un capitaine by then; they gave me a blade as a prize for my ascension, a blade I still carry. I do not know why they chose to give me one engraved upon the hilt and scabbard with roses, as I know they did not learn my secret, but I named her L'Aiguillon for the thorn she is.

When le petit caporal resigned, so too did I. Not because I had any great idealism left, non, nor that I had any great respect for monsieur Napoleon, but because I had had enough of the wars. I had been in the army for twenty years, and I could not take any more. When l'Empereur returned, I kept my head down in Paris.

I stayed some years in the city of my birth. At thirty-six, I could still pass for twenty, and away from necessity, I rediscovered how to be a woman. I acted for a time, drawing a modest crowd and enough admirers to keep me in homes and food. They were frivolous men, and after a time, they bored me.

So I took a ship to London. I knew little enough English at the time - un peu of Shakespeare, more of the talk of soldiers we captured and fought. I stayed with friends of my admirers until I could speak the tongue, and then immersed myself in la Societé. I must admit to a certain fondness for the dresses of the time. Not the everyday dresses, which were tedious to me after so many years as a soldier - but the formal dresses were exquisite. The dresses of the years before I left my world for Amber have just as special a place in my heart, though their glamour is a different kind.

But once again, I am digressing.

London was not so great a city as Paris. It was large, yes, and busy, and a great population center, but it was a dirty city, and the fog. And, naturellement, the social group that chose to include me was made up of silly fools who spent much time on their own pleasures, not nearly enough on their own creativity, and nearly none on keeping themselves fed and clothed.

After a time, I grew tired of them, too, and of the city and the country. Through chance companions and unusual channels, I procured a trip to India. I spent a while there, first in the fast-disappearing French dominion, and then in the wider British settlements. I traveled as man and woman, Gustave and Octavia, and I learned much of the land, and the people, and the British who tried to rule them both. And I learned how to play polo, which I sometimes still enjoy. I began a small export business in Bombay, transferring pieces of the native furniture and statuary back to France and selling them at slightly less inflated prices than the rest of the exporters; it did quite well for my accounts for several years.

I returned to Paris one hundred years after my birth. I had quite lost track of the years in India; the foreignness of the place held a fascination that took a quarter of a century to shake. It came as something of a shock to realize that I was so old; the face I regarded in the mirror was still not more than twenty-five. It had been a young face at forty; at fifty, the youth seemed improbable. I had been in remote regions of India, not that the country itself was cosmopolitan, and it had been years since I had sat down before a clear mirror to see myself again.

It all came as something of a shock.

The first week after my return to Paris, I spent locked away in my rented apartment, puzzling over this thing. It did not seem sensible. Grand-père and Grand-mère had aged normally. Maman, as best I could tell from my childhood memories, had aged as the world expected.

And yet there I was. I considered that, in older times, perhaps, I might have been branded a witch and long since died of trop de flamme. I considered my nomadic ways, and my ways of dress, and how they must have kept my secret. I took a long walk, down les Champs-Elysées, and back again, and then up through Montmartre to la Basilique du Sacré Cœur. I stood on top of that hill for a long while, looking out over the city of my birth and how it had changed even in the years since I had last been. I tried to remember how it had stood when I saw it last at the age of twelve, but I was but a child and too much had passed since then. I contemplated infinity, for if I still seemed so young at one century, how young would I seem at two? Or three? Or four?

In the end - in the end, it was an artist that solved the riddle. He gave me a bouquet of cherry blossoms and burgundy roses, and a painting he had created of me as I stood there, lost in my own thoughts. He told me it was called, Perdue dans l'infini - "Lost in Infinity." It was a serene image - I suppose I ought to say, "is," as it hangs over my fireplace now.

How could I, in the face of my own serenity, continue to be troubled by my apparent immortality? Did the church not teach that we are all spiritually infinite? Perhaps the extra years, however many of them there might be, would be as much a blessing as the fate of the soul was reputed to be.

That thought in mind, I returned to my apartment with a lighter step and hung the painting over the mantelpiece. It was a new beginning, for me and for France, as the kingdom became, once again, a republic. I played la bell dame de société between the protests and the arguments and the embittered battles, at least for a time. I still wanted no more of wars, and this was a war, though a small one.

After a time, I resumed the identity of Gustave and enrolled in the University. Much of the curriculum was not to my tastes, and I drifted for the first year. I found I lingered after certain classes, to listen to the musicians. On one particular day, near the end of the summer semester, I stayed to listen to a visiting lecturer; he was a violinist, and the tunes he played were not the formal things I was accustomed to, but wild music, Gypsy music. It drew me in a way I did not understand.

I enrolled in music classes.

I surprised myself by proving adept at the very instrument that had drawn my attention. Most astonishingly, I proved a deft, if slow, hand at composition. It took me a decade to graduate, between taking classes as they interested me and a few brief trips back to the hot deserts of Egypt. I was forced to set up an antiquities export business to supplement the failing income from India, but it was no great trial to visit Egypt in the winter, when Paris was grey with rain.

The last few months of class, I worked part-time for an orchestra, and on my graduation, they made the position permanent. Or it would have been, but world events soon interfered.

When the war began - the World War, le premiére - I chose to join the efforts. They sent me to Intelligence, and it was Intelligence that sent me to Germany. I did not stay long in that profession; it seemed a sad sort of war, indeed, where machinery was taking over the battle and leaving the cavalry, for which I still had a fondness despite so many years in one and many more that had passed since, in the dust of Progress.

I fled to the Americas, to the United States. First to la Louisiane, and then up the East Coast to all the cultural centers. I worked as a violinist, primarily in symphonies and orchestras, and I kept a lower profile than I had the last time I was a performer. I have never felt the need to make a show of myself - only occasionally the necessity.

Six months or more per city brought me through the war and well into the decade that followed. It was at one of the smaller soirees I attended that I encountered the first family I had seen in nearly a century and a half. I did not realize she was family at the time, of course; she introduced herself as Evelyn. She drew my attention in a way that I did not expect; I have never been interested in those of my own gender, as some of the artists and musicians I had associated with over the years had been - and yet there was just something about the woman.

I saw her again a dozen times that year, and each time, I could not decide what it was that drew me. Each time, she and I exchanged only a few words before the whirl of movement in the room drew us apart again. It was thus something of a surprise when I received an invitation to a private luncheon at her home in August of the year after we first met. We spent some time talking together, about events in the world and events in the local area, and then I departed.

A few weeks later, we met again, this time at un petit café not too far from my apartment; we talked of Paris then, and vaguely of parents. I laid out much of the truth, but not the whole of it; time, I knew, had to be faked. We had a pleasant discussion, and I returned home. And then again, a few weeks later, she asked for me to visit.

It was at this juncture that my life became considerably more complicated than it had been in many years.

First, there was the small matter of hauling me through what I now know as a Trump contact, with hardly a s'il vous plaî t. And then there was the introduction to mon père. It was strange to meet the man who had sired me, and stranger still to realize that he did not remember maman at all. But then - he is many times my elder; will I, in a century or so, remember every man with whom I've slept over the years? Je ne pense pas ainsi.

I had little time to digest that before they sprang the truth of the number of people related to me and still alive. Then there were endless tasks to take care of to set me up as une inconnue in the Court, to create a cover story and a wardrobe, and to hide me in plain sight. There was war here, too, brother against brother, and mon père judged it safest for me to be seen but not known - un fantôme.

I had been there before. I did not like it any more the second time, though this time, I was not forced to drastic steps to eat.

After a dozen hectic years of Court and hiding and lessons on the sly, and a single trip back to my home to collect L'Aiguillon, they smuggled me down, down, below the palace to the great burning thing they called the Pattern. I walked it and I won my way through; what more need be said? I was sent out to practice my new skills on weekly excursions under the watchful eye of Tante Flora. It did not take me long to master those skills, and so it was with the strict instructions to return first to Tante Flora if I wished to go to Amber, and that carefully, lest one of the other tantes et oncles might see me, that they left me to my own devices.

When released, I returned to my home and stood before my painting, and wondered what had happened to the young man with the cherry blossoms and burgundy roses and canvases in Montmartre. I needed that serenity now, to face new trials and new wars and a whole new epoch of my life with the calmness that had settled over me when I realized I had passed a century of age.

When that did not work, I booked a trip back to Paris, and stood on the hill again until I had worked my way through the experiences and could breath again.