Urban Exploration - Victorine's House

We received photos from a traveler and compiled them into a historical summary.

Victorine: The Silent One of the Grey Village
{ My thanks to my friend Xavier, without whom none of this would have been possible. Preamble. Necessary. You pass by the house without noticing it. I did too, in fact, until I made a U-turn after the phone call—my friend Xavier helped me with many key and/or thorny points of my urbex travels. A precious memory; small, but precious nonetheless. }

{ Discourse: My name is Victorine. I was born on January 6, 1891, and I died on March 21, 1973—both in the same hole-in-the-wall. That’s it. End of story. Basta. To any well-intentioned person wanting to know more, go look elsewhere, or even elsewhere-of-elsewhere, for my dull life is empty; I did not know how to write. }

{ Postamble. Necessary. I Was born in a pointless village with the greyish reeks of a morbid countryside, with its bleak features, on the banks of a river long-contemplated during my childhood days. Those were my happy days: my farmer parents, myself destined for the same de facto, without much of a choice. "Farmer," you’d say, though I’d call it the peasantry of small subsistence—but from your modern days that I contemplate with my dead eyes, you don't even know what that is anymore. We did everything for ourselves and it was hard, but well, you can guess the rest. }

{ You Found my photos, the last ones showing my happy gaze. You posted on your modern-gadget-things to ask how old I might have been; you averaged the answers: 17 point 61 years old, they say. You asked your young friends Lukas and Alicia; 16, they say, recognizing my face as one of their own. My dog’s name is Jaquin, and he drools. }

{ I Never wanted to marry. Wild, stubborn, fleeting to the core, and yet with a peaceful gaze and a strong character; still, there was the "not-much-of-a-choice," but the abject refusal that so deeply disappointed my father, Louis—he died a bit later, but that’s to be expected, the way of things—but there, if it must be written: in truth, body and soul, I was in violent opposition, despite my soft gaze, I know: no, never. Never married and good-for-nothing; my dog Jaquin who drools. Perhaps there was a time for it, but at the dawn of my 23rd year, the war broke out, all the men left for the front, and poverty leapt at our throats. My brother Anselme died there. Then my mother, Marie, passed away. }

{ You Then scoured my house in every direction. I’ve been dead for half a century of years-of-oblivion, and here you are… barging into the abandoned shack, you even climbed into the attic; no one had trodden those floorboards for fifty years. I don’t even know if I’m angry at you—I resisted marriage with all my might, and here you come, everywhere like a ferret, with what curiosity? Why? What was I? You found the rifle shells; you understood I was a hunter. You found the old, petrified coffee at the bottom of the tin; you understood I was suffocating from poverty in my grey village. I asked nothing of you; I’ve been dead-and-gone for ages, and yet you are here. }

{ I Know that when Jaquin left, it was somewhat the last rampart of solitude forming. I was always alone, thick black hair; we had paid for the photographer's passage by a bridge over the river—we didn't have the means, but my father had insisted—is it for this that, at the fringes of your urbex, you cling to my memory? I died at 82, wizened, clinging to my crumbling house of no interest, dark my grey village. No one. There was no one at my funeral, but I don't really care, truth be told. }

{ You Found my slippers; yes, I know you contemplated 50 years of abandonment at the foot of the bed, but there, that’s all, it was there when I croaked, and it hasn't moved since: a hell of a dust encrusted in the fabric, disgusting. You saw that I had small feet. I heard your steps, felt your presence, and when you came to the cemetery, I was shaken, for never had anyone taken an interest in me. I was simply a bit-of-a-bitter-crank, but above all a silent-one, a shriveled woman who lived alone in the dark lair, waiting for death like a deliverance, or at least like a relief. Then you bought my grave. I didn't understand a thing. But I let it happen. }

{ Postamble. From a "us" that no longer resembles anything understandable, you the stranger, me the dead woman; here you are sweeping my grave when you’re in the area, giving it a scrub with sodium percarbonate. Who are we to deserve this, we the family of the deceased? My name is not on the grave; you even bothered the town hall about it. We are nothing but star-fragments in an infinity of indifference, a tiny spark of light in an omnipresent grey. The house will finish dying on its own, it’s only logical—it took fifty years of oblivion—a wandering ghost of a solitary fate—for this story to emerge, tiny but oh-so useful. We owe it to ourselves to say thank you, to one another; it is the last word that remains. }