Don Juan handed back the sketch, showing no indication that he had taken note of the information it contained.
“Because I presumed that the matter of her fate might be of concern to you.”
Samuel sighed. Suddenly, he was growing tired of this.
With an air of finality, he closed the box with cigarettes that he had set out.
“If one is disinclined to see and disinclined to do, the only thing left is to move on, I suppose.”

He stood up from the windowsill he had leaned against.
“Trough my own fault, I witnessed quite a bit of your life. I will keep silent about this incident and anything I learned. It is clear to me that you do not remember us meeting in Paris, nor do you wish to know me or my advice. So I am sparing you”, he said dispassionately.

He thought of the painter, who had been left disgraced and without the opportunity to gallivant trough europe to forget. She was bound to the Yaxleys and that city, likely without any network of support. A man like Dempsey, well-connected and rich as the family was, could do something for her situation, if he cared to.
But alas, it was fruitless labor to let himself feel attached to the parallels he saw in Dempseys and his own life trajectories, for they might simply be too different in character to come to the same conclusions about what they meant.

The responsibilities we bind our hearts and souls to by the covenant of love or blood are precisely the ones that do not disappear because we decide not to see them, he thought. Though it had never stopped a man from trying.
“Shall we return to the table?”

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There was a shift in the attitude of the room, and one he recognized easily. Griffith had written him off. This was hardly a surprising turn of events; most people did. Usually Don Juan took these instances with a carefree shrug — he clung desperately to the facade that he didn't care what anyone thought, and he had perfect this particular facet of it through years of practice — but in this instance he took a breath, on the verge of protesting. The assumptions Griffith had made riled him more than most assumptions about him did. He did care what became of Elfrieda, and it seemed to him Griffith's short-sightedness that had lead him to the opposite conclusion; he clearly hadn't thought the matter through very well if he thought the only way to demonstrate care would have been to clamber for information and then rush to her side. Indiscretion had burned them both before, and her far more than him. Which was not to say that Don Juan had learned discretion — quite the opposite. A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all, someone had written once. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms. Indiscretion seemed baked into his core; certainly it was interwoven in everything the pair of them had shared. He didn't know how to proceed without it, but was too cautious of hurting her again to ignore it.

So he had straightened up slightly, inhaled, ready to protest — but ultimately deflated again. What did it matter, in the end, what Samuel Griffith thought of him? Probably nothing Don Juan would say would sway his opinion much; even if it did, his opinion was unlikely to matter much. It wasn't as though he'd intimated that he was in her confidences, and after their interactions so far at the dinner party it seemed unlikely he would be counted amongst Don Juan's friends any time soon. So he was on the verge of merely shrugging the whole interaction off and letting Griffith go back to the table — except that he couldn't make sense of Griffith's follow-on remark, and they were odd enough that he couldn't quite let them go unremarked upon, either.

"Wait," he said, having made no move to follow Griffith to the door yet. "Paris?"

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MJ made this <3

Samuel turned around. On seeing Don Juan's face, he thought that the man had not liked his dismissal, even though he took great care not to show it. He had quite expressive eyes; they were not as carefree as his demeanor seemed intent to suggest.

"We have met before, a number of years ago. At a rather particular festivity in Montparnasse."

Samuel paused, deliberating how much more to say. Entirely sure why he had mentioned it at all, he was not. It was perhaps unwise to let his guard down any more than he already had, with this reply. Truth be told, he was not certain if he could trust his memories. He was certain that he had sat down beside Don Juan in one of the rooms of the catacombs beneath that residence in Montparnasse. Samuel had been down in these magically altered labyrinths too much at that time of his life. Things had started to blur together. It was likely Don Juan had been the young man with the dark curls who had been so terribly out of it, on some concoction or the other; or more likely, a mixture of many. Samuel had sat down next to him and on seeing in what a state the man was, he had stayed around and kept watch and listened to the things he had said in his delirium; With wide eyes and a racing heart and twitching muscles in his face he had told things that made no sense and some that were poetic. Those had stayed with him enough that Samuel thought he had likely written them down in one of the countless notebooks he kept. He could go back through them and look, but he would not. They had talked a bit when the man came to, but he would be unsurprised if that memory did not survive the night.

Maybe that had not been Don Juan at all. Maybe the night he remembered had instead ended with the dark-haired Englishman that had followed him home. They had walked along the Seine quite drunk and Samuel had made a very morbid comment about the dead in the river and passive thoughts of dying, which he had regretted burdening a stranger with. He was not proud of that time of his life. Maybe it was for the better to let the matter rest.

So he smiled slightly at Don Juan and said: "It was likely not an interaction of note. If you are worried about sitting back at the table with me—I am done being unpleasant to you. I will behave and stay out of your head and your business, you have my word."

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