Lovers (9781609459192) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Balthazar tells himself, he could, he can do anything, he is the Angel.

56
    V ersailles seems to exude a smell of shit.
Créon is done for, they say in the corridors.
Because the King has been told that Balthazar is said to have declared that the Créons are a more ancient line than the Capetians.
    The words have hit home. They are repeated. It is like a game of pass the slipper. They are already bleeding their victim dry.
    He will be led to the stake, his corpse will be public property, it will belong to everyone, offered to the spectators and to the crows and tiercels.
    Tiercel
: it was my father who taught me that word.
    Be quiet, says Anne de Créon.
    Then: Never again venture outside our mansion.
    What proof can he give that he is innocent? he wonders all at once, beginning to panic.
    He feels homesick for the wooden lodge.
    What proof? What innocence?
    Oh, my God, and this despair in him.
    Don’t leave me again, he implores his lover.
    Toward what pit is Sébastien dragging him?

57
    O ne evening, the silence in the Créon mansion becomes deafening. It is the lull before the clamors, before sentence is pronounced.
    Balthazar, who cannot die, who was not born to die, as they both know, is condemned to death.
    My love.
    Two little words that Sébastien can no longer bring himself to say, so overwhelmed is he with fear.
    He rarely leaves Balthazar now.
    What am I still to him, the matchless one? Balthazar asks himself, in torment.
    Let me die, before I am abandoned.
    But who can affirm anything at all?
    Why must fate always have the upper hand?

58
    S he takes her meals downstairs, in a kind of boudoir, at a richly laid table next to a French door that looks out on a garden no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, green with box trees, a yellow rose bush in one corner. She no longer strolls along the three short paths. If she made up her mind to do so, if she forced herself, she would immediately begin to rail against the world, men and kings, to loathe them. Screaming will be for later. She can only imagine screaming deep in the woods, as she can only conceive of dying in one’s own bed, unless one is a man, for any man, as is well known, might meet his fate on a battlefield. Bed or battlefield, but not at the stake.
    She imagines the stake, very high and very red, making a noise like a smithy.
    Hell on earth—men have been accustomed to it for centuries.
    She says no to hell.
    He must flee.
    But Balthazar rejects such cowardice.
    No, he will not flee. She despairs of him. Just as he despairs when Sébastien stays out all night, although that happens less often now.
    They share a room. Like the poor. They have barred their door to Anne de Créon.
    This prohibition has plunged her into a terrible state of somnolence. She is heavy with lethargy. She drags herself along. It is as if she is welded to the marble of her mansion. She shivers. Chaos is nigh.

59
    H e paints the birth of a shadow. Balthazar’s shadow. Managing to do so is a bad omen.
He will leave me the memory of his shadow. Perhaps more. His eyes, the shape of his body, his smell, the sound of his voice. But how to paint them?
    I will paint them. I will find a way. I have to find a way. I must be worthy of him. Are we not more than brothers? What can compare with lovers like us?
    He has not yet tried depicting the things that fill his memory.
    This morning the shadow is coral, this evening it will be golden. A changing, dazzling shadow, but no more than a shadow. There is an eternity between dawn and twilight. And people die.
    There is a pounding at the gate. There are cries. The servants are thrust aside. Anne de Créon is manhandled. She screams.
    Where are the forests? Where is the wooden house? Where is the night that cradled the Créons’ estate?
    Today is the day of disaster.

60
    S he is listening to her voices. There are ten, twenty, a hundred of them, weaving a litany of despair. She talks to herself, and her words