Adam Gould Read Online Free PDF Page B

going,’ he told himself and thought of the cold water one throws on hysterics.
    ‘And would you bet I’ll get over my passing ill?’
    ‘Why not? I’m no doctor, mind.’
    ‘But as a betting man?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘My brother died in a madhouse three years ago. Badly! Horribly! When I saw the name on his tomb stone: Maupassant ...’
    ‘Better not think of it. You’re wallowing ...’
    ‘What?’
    ‘In despair. They called it that in my seminary. Also “the sin against the light”: the unforgivable one.’ Adam shrugged. ‘They saw us as an army. Despair is desertion.’ I, he was thinking privately, did not despair. What I did was leave and lose all my friends. ‘Priests can be tough.’ For a moment his sadness was for himself, but he refused to indulge it. Perhaps
he
needed cold water thrown over him? He wished he could have supplied the man before him with even a false hope.
***
    The vicomte’s niece had been waiting in the cold for what seemed an age outside the asylum gate. ‘Is anything happening’ she felt like asking the coachman. This would have been an oblique sort of protest, but she didn’t make it for she had been bred to show restraint, and, besides, it was clear that nothing
was
happening. Uncle Hubert had stepped out of the carriage, climbed the gate and got stuck. That was all. She might have giggled at his rashness if there had been anyone to giggle with her, Gisèle say, or some other friend from school. But she had seen none of them since her wedding, so she sat back in the shadows, tucked the rug around her knees and reflected on how, by rights, it should be her turn to be rash. Instead, here she was hiding in embarrassment while her uncle made an exhibition of himself and called people ‘Republican scum’. She had just heard him do this.
    She was not yet twenty, and her husband, whom she scarcely knew, was off in darkest Africa, trying, poor lamb, to make their fortune, which he had better do fast because his family, like her own, was penniless. This was why she was now staying with her aunt and uncle.
    ‘Our friends’ Uncle Hubert liked to explain, ‘have been out of power for too long. Six decades!’ Poverty, he sometimes added, became a badge of honour when you saw how many had turned their coats and joined those who controlled patronage. ‘Poor France!’ he would exclaim, and shake his head. Danièle always imagined a soft-fleshed lady being martyred in some bloody way:
la France
.
    ‘I should have married a Republican,’ she would tease to cheer him. He liked to be teased. ‘Or a Bonapartist. Even an Orleanist would have more hopes.’
    ‘We are all Orleanists now,’ was Uncle Hubert’s stock reply. ‘Willy nilly! The Legitimists died out. Soon we may all have!’
    Danièle wished she had brought her embroidery. Or a charcoal foot-warmer. Life was humdrum. She yearned for something unexpected – not Uncle Hubert’s sort of scrape but something tenderly frivolous and – yes – rash. Perhaps she was just missing her husband? The word pleased her: ‘husband’. It was still quite new. Unused. She had been married for well over a year now. But very little of that time had been spent with Philibert, whose letters from the Congo could have been from a stranger. She found it hard to reply.
    ‘His last letter,’ she had told her aunt, ‘says that cannibals break their victims’ legs several days before killing and eating them. It makes the flesh sweeter. They do the same thing with fowl.’
    Her aunt crossed herself. She was a nun and had been granted leave by her convent to chaperone Danièle who might not otherwise be allowed to share a house with Uncle Hubert.
    ‘Don’t you miss your friends in the convent?’ Danièle had worried.
    But her aunt said that looking after a vulnerable young woman was a corporal work of mercy; so, while engaged in it, she was, spiritually speaking, close to her sisters in Christ.
    ‘I don’t feel vulnerable,’ Danièle