Nardi and the Chateau: Reflections on Bliss by Judy Cuevas #2

Y'know, I do not know what is going on with Blogger at the moment. For the last few days it has just not let me put a vid in a post and now it won't even let me put an image in! Well, I prolly don't need one for this post.

In my last post, I said that I would next talk about why Nardi, the hero of Bliss, is like a building, the Chateau d'Aubrignon, to be precise.

The Chateau has been the ancestral home of Nardi's family in the past but when the book opens it is owned by a wealthy industrialist, du Gard. As, funnily enough, is Nardi, having stupidly offered himself to du Gard's daughter in marriage, not realising that by doing so, he has handed his very liberty over.

Nardi is, put bluntly, a bloody disaster. He's an ether addict, completely in thrall to his addiction which has robbed him of any desire for anything else at all. This is really just terribly sad, because otherwise, Nardi is extraordinary. A beautiful, talented disaster.

The flower and the pride of the de Vallier family, the youngest, the prize and the prodigy. And the only family member capable of fighting a musical instrument - and losing.

Nardi is on his way to a premature death. There's a terribly sad and gorgeous bit in the early part of the book (the same scene with the alpaca coat I mentioned in the last post) where Sebastien - travelling home with Nardi in a carriage - sees this very clearly:

... he was... aware of Nardi's inertness across from him, the vacant motion of his body rocking along, as unfettered and unbothered by life as if it were already on its way to the cemetry.

He's not the only one in a bad way. The Chateau is magnificent and decaying and ramshackle. It is ruined. Can anyone save it? Hannah arrives with her employer - an antiques expert - to inventorise its contents. At this point she hasn't even met Nardi:

The grandeur of such ghostly beauty beneath the disrepair was eerie. Hannah found the scope of both - the beauty and the devastation - almost impossible to absorb. Mrs Besom on the other hand, not only could absorb it, she could envision dismantling it, selling it, boxing it and shipping it across an ocean.

Nardi has been boxed up and shipped off, by his worried - and money-dazzled - family. Shipped off to be cured of his addiction before his marriage to du Gard's daughter.

I love the hinted reference in the last quote to people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. I have a sense already that Hannah is going to see more - both in the Chateau and Nardi - than others see. I also like the question that is being delicately posed of how far someone can go before they destroy the very thing that they seek to save.