life from the beginning.
âItâs quite an accomplishment to go back in time and draw their secrets from the dead,â Raphaël murmurs in Flora Fontangesâs ear.
Once again they agree, perfect accomplices in a game that enchants them. They wish and are able to summon the past to the city, to restore the light and colour to the air that covered everything when the city was merely a village tucked away between river and forest. Now it is a matter of reviving a faded sun, of replacing it in the sky like a ball of light: is that so difficult, after all?
The high tide spreads itself from shore to shore; one can hear it lapping gently against the wharfs when the forge is still and the flame stands briefly erect and motionless. A girl wearing a leather apron that falls to her feet is doing a boyâs job at her fatherâs forge on rue Saint-Paul. Standing in the heat and glare of the fire, she wields the forge, the hammer, and the tongs, she pounds the iron, gleaming and streaming with sweat, then takes it from the furnace to the basin of cool water in which she plunges her work. The flame is no longer on her face and she is all black in the dark. Her father, arms folded, watches with admiration as she works, and his heart is heavy, for his daughter must leave him soon to enter the convent.
For a long time she has been childlike and good, the delight of her father and stepmother. Then, at the table one day, she declared before everyone that she wanted to become a blacksmith like her father. There were no boys in the family. Six daughters from the first marriage, like a garden in which all the flowers are blue, without the shadow of another color. She wrote with a black pencil on a sheet of white paper, in highly wrought and ornate letters: THIBAULT AND DAUGHTER, BLACKSMITHS . You could see at once that it would make a very pretty sign. The father smiled, quite dazed, and overcome by uncertainty and doubt. The stepmother shrieked that she must be possessed by the devil to be thinking of such a thing. She talked of bringing in the exorcist.
A tall girl with broad shoulders, a sweet face, and strong hands effortlessly lifts heavy weights, and she smiles almost all the time. Guillemette Thibault is a fine name, one to bear all oneâs life, never to change for the name of some stranger who would take her as his wife. She has already refused two suitors and she wants to take over from her father at the forge. Everyone has joined in to reason with her, the stepmother first, then her five sisters and the curé. The father is silent and lowers his head.
She listens to them, her face leaning into the shadow of her coif, her sturdy hands flat on her knees. What she is hearing now has been told her time and time again. There is menâs work and womenâs work, and the world is in order. Marriage or the convent: for a girl thereâs no other way out. She looks at her hands on her knees, she listens to her heart beat in her chest, and itâs as if all the strength and the joy in her heart and in her hands were freezing inch by inch.
Guillemette Thibault decided in favour of the convent. But before she entered the convent her father allowed her to forge on the anvil and in the fire a pair of scissors and a little hammer, so delicate and finely made that she brought them along to the General Hospital with her trousseau and her dowry, as an offering.
What she feared most in the world, that her name be taken from her, subsequently came to pass. After two years of novitiate, she became Sister Agnès-de-la-Pitié and no one ever heard of Guillemette Thibault again.
T HEY LIKE WALKING IN THE port at the end of the day, when a warm mist rises from the water, and sky, earth and water, ships, wharfs, docks, sailors and strollers, are mingled, mixed, confused in a single white and hazy substance.
So much looking at the river has given her a vacant stare; she can no longer sort out her images, but lets
âItâs quite an accomplishment to go back in time and draw their secrets from the dead,â Raphaël murmurs in Flora Fontangesâs ear.
Once again they agree, perfect accomplices in a game that enchants them. They wish and are able to summon the past to the city, to restore the light and colour to the air that covered everything when the city was merely a village tucked away between river and forest. Now it is a matter of reviving a faded sun, of replacing it in the sky like a ball of light: is that so difficult, after all?
The high tide spreads itself from shore to shore; one can hear it lapping gently against the wharfs when the forge is still and the flame stands briefly erect and motionless. A girl wearing a leather apron that falls to her feet is doing a boyâs job at her fatherâs forge on rue Saint-Paul. Standing in the heat and glare of the fire, she wields the forge, the hammer, and the tongs, she pounds the iron, gleaming and streaming with sweat, then takes it from the furnace to the basin of cool water in which she plunges her work. The flame is no longer on her face and she is all black in the dark. Her father, arms folded, watches with admiration as she works, and his heart is heavy, for his daughter must leave him soon to enter the convent.
For a long time she has been childlike and good, the delight of her father and stepmother. Then, at the table one day, she declared before everyone that she wanted to become a blacksmith like her father. There were no boys in the family. Six daughters from the first marriage, like a garden in which all the flowers are blue, without the shadow of another color. She wrote with a black pencil on a sheet of white paper, in highly wrought and ornate letters: THIBAULT AND DAUGHTER, BLACKSMITHS . You could see at once that it would make a very pretty sign. The father smiled, quite dazed, and overcome by uncertainty and doubt. The stepmother shrieked that she must be possessed by the devil to be thinking of such a thing. She talked of bringing in the exorcist.
A tall girl with broad shoulders, a sweet face, and strong hands effortlessly lifts heavy weights, and she smiles almost all the time. Guillemette Thibault is a fine name, one to bear all oneâs life, never to change for the name of some stranger who would take her as his wife. She has already refused two suitors and she wants to take over from her father at the forge. Everyone has joined in to reason with her, the stepmother first, then her five sisters and the curé. The father is silent and lowers his head.
She listens to them, her face leaning into the shadow of her coif, her sturdy hands flat on her knees. What she is hearing now has been told her time and time again. There is menâs work and womenâs work, and the world is in order. Marriage or the convent: for a girl thereâs no other way out. She looks at her hands on her knees, she listens to her heart beat in her chest, and itâs as if all the strength and the joy in her heart and in her hands were freezing inch by inch.
Guillemette Thibault decided in favour of the convent. But before she entered the convent her father allowed her to forge on the anvil and in the fire a pair of scissors and a little hammer, so delicate and finely made that she brought them along to the General Hospital with her trousseau and her dowry, as an offering.
What she feared most in the world, that her name be taken from her, subsequently came to pass. After two years of novitiate, she became Sister Agnès-de-la-Pitié and no one ever heard of Guillemette Thibault again.
T HEY LIKE WALKING IN THE port at the end of the day, when a warm mist rises from the water, and sky, earth and water, ships, wharfs, docks, sailors and strollers, are mingled, mixed, confused in a single white and hazy substance.
So much looking at the river has given her a vacant stare; she can no longer sort out her images, but lets
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