Read Online Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice - Free Book Online

It seemed an insignificant thing, yet made the hair on the back of his neck rise.
    Juliet leaned wearily to one side on her hand. And raising her eyes to Marcel slowly with a sweep of dark lashes, she smiled. “Look,
cher,”
she whispered, and held the small framed object out to him so that it exploded all at once with the light.
    He sank down in the chair beside her own. It was not a mirror at all.
    In fact, it was a portrait so finely drawn and so lifelike in its little ornate frame that it gave him an almost unpleasant start. All painting broke his heart over his own crude sketches, but this was quite beyond belief.
    “But what…” he murmured.
    “Christophe,
cher
…” she said. “My Christophe…he’s a man now, look at him. The boy is all gone…” She herself looked mournfully away.
    Marcel had realized this, of course. He had seen that face in numerous engravings, the frontpiece in his novel, on the published text of two essays, and once in a journal, and he had copied it himself in ink a dozen times. Pictures of Christophe covered the wall above Marcel’s desk. He had even cheated for the making of these pictures, using paper to trace or crude devices rigged from lamps to throw the printed image on fresh paper for him to copy it there with his pen.
    But here was such a lively picture and so perfect that the technique staggered the imagination. Marcel could all but feel the smoothnessof the small square face, and the rougher texture of the dark coat. He rose, almost upsetting the chair behind him, and held the picture at the window in the light.
    The man was breathing there, and only the eyes seemed lifeless, like gems in the marvelous plasticity of the face. “But this can’t be a painting!” Marcel sighed. And with his nail he tapped it lightly to discover that it was made of glass. However, the most baffling aspect of it was the color; it was done entirely in muted tones of black and white. And suddenly with a loud gasp, he realized what he was holding in his hands. “Monsieur Daguerre!” he whispered. This was not a painting at all. It was the living Christophe in the frame, captured in Paris by Monsieur Daguerre’s magic box! All the newspapers had been on fire with the news of this invention, and yet he had not believed it until now! And as he realized he was looking upon a genuine photographic likeness, even to the slight scuff on Christophe’s boot, he felt the blood drain from his face. The implications of the picture dazed him, never had the world known such a miracle, by which men and women could be captured exactly as they were and the pictures, clear as the reflection in a mirror, kept for all time. And the papers had spoken of Daguerreotypes of buildings, whole crowds of human beings, the streets of Paris, moments in time fixed forever from the clouds in the sky to the expression on a man’s face.
    “Perhaps he lies in his letter,” came the voice, weary and rather deep behind him.
    Marcel was startled. “Oh, no, Madame, he’s coming home, I read this in the papers,” he said. He sat down beside her and placed the portrait against the bowl. It took an act of will for him to detach himself from it and look into her eyes. “They said he was coming back here to found a school, Madame…for us.” He touched his breast lightly when he said this. “You can imagine what this means to us, Madame…the way that we admire him, the way that everyone admires him. Why, we follow him through every bit and piece of news that we can find.”
    Again he glanced at the little Daguerreotype, Christophe in Paris as he lived and breathed. Christophe among the men who invented such magic, and on his way home.
    She was looking at him with that same dreamy expression that he had seen before in the street. It wasn’t clear that she was listening to him at all. “He’s a hero to us, Madame,” he went on anxiously, eyes lighting again and again on the small image. “We have his novel, copies of his