Le Temps des Cerises Read Online Free PDF

fingers. She always put off lighting the lamp for as long as possible to save on the oil and it was only when the statues in the corner started reminding her of bodies in the morgue that she succumbed to the need for light. The blue flame sputtered and smoked for a moment, throwing ghastly shadows about the room of Mary Magdalenes on top of each other, headless Baptists with begging hands and Jesuses grinning from ear to ear. Once upon a time her father could have made anything he wanted to out of clay, wood or stone but now his forms were a little distorted – the robes too long, mouths stretched too wide, the eyes a little too sly – as if his fuzzy brain and fumbling fingers lingered too long or cut too abruptly. They reminded her of the gargoyles in the Place Vendôme and they piled up in the corner like bones in a charnel house because nobody wanted to buy them. She sighed and set the table, bringing out the old, stained, but clean linen cloth and placing a spoon beside each bowl. One good thing about having nothing to eat was that there was little to lay, little to wash, little to prepare. It was an advantage certainly. If you wanted to look on the bright side then that was it. She smiled at the thought of making a case for lack of food and sending it round to all the cooks, bottle-washers and housewives in the area, distracting herself from the waiting.
    She always seemed to be waiting for something: in queues for food, for her father to come home, to stop drinking, for Jacques to grow up, the war to be over, for Laurie to whisk her away to the Place de l’Etoile. Maybe everyone was waiting for something, even the shop girls and la Païva, though they seemed to have everything. Laurie was waiting for his poems to be published so he could afford to whisk her off to the Place de l’Etoile – or so he said. She didn’t think anyone would want to buy his poems any more than they wanted to buy her father’s statues, not when they couldn’t even find potatoes, but when she so much as hinted at such a thing Laurie gave her a look which meant she didn’t understand because she was a woman and only read newspapers and recipe books. It was Laurie who didn’t understand, she fumed now, deciding then and there that he’d have to beg and plead till his knees were sore if he ever wanted her to go and live with him in the Place de l’Etoile. You couldn’t fry poems. You couldn’t eat words. And however much a rhythm might nourish your soul it didn’t put flesh on your bones.
    There was a commotion at the door and Eveline got up to let the two men in, her father staggering under the arm of his sturdy old friend.
    â€˜Two old sodjers back from a campaign. The bullets whizzed! I nearly lost my scalp to a Fritz. What’s on the menu, then? Chopped Prussians?’ Monsieur Lafayette smacked his great red lips at her – lips which looked, Eveline always thought, as if they’d sucked on too many caramel pipes or been stung by a bee.
    â€˜Sorrel stew,’ came her rather sardonic reply.
    â€˜Sard ine and sorrel stew,’ Monsieur Lafayette corrected, bringing out a small box from somewhere about his person.
    Eveline tried to appear disgusted but only succeeded in looking pathetic­ally grateful. She took the box and proceeded to empty its contents very carefully into the saucepan, resisting the urge to scoff the lot then and there with her fingers and be damned to the rest of them. Monsieur Lafayette always brought a morsel with him – she wouldn’t have let him come otherwise – something strange and exotic, something she hadn’t tasted for months or years, and something you couldn’t find on the stalls in the Rue Marcadet or even on the black markets beyond the fortifications. He was a little tiresome and a bore but she put up with him for her father’s sake, for Jacques’ sake and for her own shrunken stomach’s