“But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

A love story, a child’s story—the best are—set “in an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines,” on a cobblestoned backstreet today called rue de la Colombe. Colombe means dove. At No. 4, there lived a man and, in the drafty, leaky attic, two doves in love.

Two doves who nested, loved and sang and lived on grains and freshwater from the Seine and… there is no proof of this, but in love and children’s stories, belief is a decision.

One day, the Seine overflowed; the house’s foundations gave way; the edifice crumbled. The man was away, but of the two doves, only the male escaped.

“Great children’s books speak to the most elemental truths of existence,  and speak in the language of children —”

For an entire week, the streets’ residents observed the male dove fly back and forth between the Seine and ruins, transporting water in a hollow reed it would then tip through a crevice; scour Paris for grains it would insert, one by one, with its beak. When they finally understood, the humans cleared the rubble, cautiously. The female dove was released, alive. The lovers flew away,

and in the language of children, and love, “of absolute sincerity, scuttling past the many walls adulthood has sold us on erecting,” lived happily ever after. There remains, of their story, an engraving of two doves over the rebuilt entry.

A love story, not a child’s, set in another house, covered in vines, on a nearby street, in another Paris. At No. 11 Quai des Fleurs, there lived a man whose niece, seventeen fell in love with her tutor, in his thirties. Héloïse and Abelard made love, lived on love and, like children, the belief that it was enough. They loved through separation, an illegitimate pregnancy, a clandestine marriage, her family’ brutal revenge. They were not reunited.

She became a nun, and he, a monk. They wrote to one other—one of the greatest, purest texts, on loving and living—for decades, until he died, through the walls of convents and monasteries. One story says they saw each other again, once, years later. Another says their remains were reunited by Josephine Bonaparte. There is no proof of either ending, but belief is a choice;

Quai des Fleurs means a dock strewn, ever after, with flowers.