passion.â
âAnd little Aurore?â
Little Aurore suddenly shifts to the middle ground in the heart of Flora Fontanges, as a tall old woman, very erect, bony and white, rises and begins to speak. Little Auroreâs tragic end seems to have been evoked by a strange voice as Flora Fontanges drones on, word after word, as if she were listening to each one being dictated in turn from the shadows of her memory.
âOn the day she turned eighteen little Auroreâs body was found, raped and murdered, in Victoria Park, near the St. Charles River. Police investigations were fruitless. The murderer was never apprehended. The case of Aurore Michaud, daughter of Xavier and Maria Michaud, who was born at Sainte-Croix-de-Lotbinière on August seventh, 1897, and died on September seventh, 1915, was quickly closed.â
The news caused horrified shudders, from the upper town to the lower town, providing fuel for conversation for days and days. But ordinary life, after being briefly withdrawn, reclaimed its rights, like water after a pebble falls.
People are cared for with mustard plasters, with leeches, with flax seeds, syrup of creosote, and balsam of tolu, women give birth at home and remain two weeks in bed after the confinement, girls study the piano (for boys, itâs not worth the trouble, it makes them effeminate), funerals, weddings, and christenings are numerous, life and death jostle one another in the porticoes along the Grande-Allée and in the old city, the most stable fortunes are bound up with income from the land, down below, in the seigneuries. The elder Madame Eventurel promised her only daughter, Elodie, that she could have a blue silk gown as soon as the notary had given her the yearâs rent from the farmers.
W HAT SORT OF DREAM IS it, to act as if one had never been alive in the city, to create a vacuum? thinks Flora Fontanges, who has just brought to life a clear, sharp image of the elder Madame Eventurel. Perhaps she need only concentrate on the Grande-Allée as it is today, in the company of Raphaël and Céleste, and she will escape from the house on the Esplanade. Will no angel ever utter in her ear the remark, blessed above all others: âThe past no longer existsâ? How can she not imagine, occasionally, the leap of joy of the prisoner who breaks her chains, becomes free and light, without memory, aware only of the night falling over the city?
Raphaël has walked away with Céleste. They are making plans to go together to Ile aux Coudres. She sits by herself, at a table on the café terrace. She feels intensely alone. The moment no longer supports her. From here she has no choice but to return in spirit to the house on the Esplanade, as if it were no longer in her power not to go there, summoned by her indestructible, stubborn childhood.
A little girl sits on a stool at the feet of an old woman, in the chalky silence of the house on the Esplanade. The steady rhythm of a great ebony clock. The vacant air of Sunday enters everywhere, slips under doors, through the cracks of windows, it throbs, massive and hollow in chimneys.
She is a little girl who escaped from the fire at the Hospice Saint-Louis in 1927.
She has been without roots forever and she dreams of a great tree anchored in the night of the earth, beneath the city, lifting the asphalt from sidewalks and streets with only the dark wisp of its subterranean breath. This tree with its gnarled trunk would stand higher than the towers of the parliament buildings, dense with branches, boughs and twigs, with leaves and wind. Perhaps the little girl might even be the single bird at the top of this tree, rustling with breezes, for already she desires more than anything to sing and tell the story of the life that is in the tree, making it her very own, her family tree and personal history.
This sometimes happens on Sunday afternoon, in the house on the Esplanade. The adoptive parents are at vespers or visiting,
âAnd little Aurore?â
Little Aurore suddenly shifts to the middle ground in the heart of Flora Fontanges, as a tall old woman, very erect, bony and white, rises and begins to speak. Little Auroreâs tragic end seems to have been evoked by a strange voice as Flora Fontanges drones on, word after word, as if she were listening to each one being dictated in turn from the shadows of her memory.
âOn the day she turned eighteen little Auroreâs body was found, raped and murdered, in Victoria Park, near the St. Charles River. Police investigations were fruitless. The murderer was never apprehended. The case of Aurore Michaud, daughter of Xavier and Maria Michaud, who was born at Sainte-Croix-de-Lotbinière on August seventh, 1897, and died on September seventh, 1915, was quickly closed.â
The news caused horrified shudders, from the upper town to the lower town, providing fuel for conversation for days and days. But ordinary life, after being briefly withdrawn, reclaimed its rights, like water after a pebble falls.
People are cared for with mustard plasters, with leeches, with flax seeds, syrup of creosote, and balsam of tolu, women give birth at home and remain two weeks in bed after the confinement, girls study the piano (for boys, itâs not worth the trouble, it makes them effeminate), funerals, weddings, and christenings are numerous, life and death jostle one another in the porticoes along the Grande-Allée and in the old city, the most stable fortunes are bound up with income from the land, down below, in the seigneuries. The elder Madame Eventurel promised her only daughter, Elodie, that she could have a blue silk gown as soon as the notary had given her the yearâs rent from the farmers.
W HAT SORT OF DREAM IS it, to act as if one had never been alive in the city, to create a vacuum? thinks Flora Fontanges, who has just brought to life a clear, sharp image of the elder Madame Eventurel. Perhaps she need only concentrate on the Grande-Allée as it is today, in the company of Raphaël and Céleste, and she will escape from the house on the Esplanade. Will no angel ever utter in her ear the remark, blessed above all others: âThe past no longer existsâ? How can she not imagine, occasionally, the leap of joy of the prisoner who breaks her chains, becomes free and light, without memory, aware only of the night falling over the city?
Raphaël has walked away with Céleste. They are making plans to go together to Ile aux Coudres. She sits by herself, at a table on the café terrace. She feels intensely alone. The moment no longer supports her. From here she has no choice but to return in spirit to the house on the Esplanade, as if it were no longer in her power not to go there, summoned by her indestructible, stubborn childhood.
A little girl sits on a stool at the feet of an old woman, in the chalky silence of the house on the Esplanade. The steady rhythm of a great ebony clock. The vacant air of Sunday enters everywhere, slips under doors, through the cracks of windows, it throbs, massive and hollow in chimneys.
She is a little girl who escaped from the fire at the Hospice Saint-Louis in 1927.
She has been without roots forever and she dreams of a great tree anchored in the night of the earth, beneath the city, lifting the asphalt from sidewalks and streets with only the dark wisp of its subterranean breath. This tree with its gnarled trunk would stand higher than the towers of the parliament buildings, dense with branches, boughs and twigs, with leaves and wind. Perhaps the little girl might even be the single bird at the top of this tree, rustling with breezes, for already she desires more than anything to sing and tell the story of the life that is in the tree, making it her very own, her family tree and personal history.
This sometimes happens on Sunday afternoon, in the house on the Esplanade. The adoptive parents are at vespers or visiting,
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