Parrot and Olivier in America Read Online Free PDF

his lap and the former with his whip cracking the road lest anyone approach. The sun set along golden boulevards as we veered away from the Cossacks, whom we feared, and cantered beside the Austrians, whom we trusted, although both, together with the Prussians, were our saviors come to destroy the tyrant the Revolution had brought forth.
    As we crossed the Seine the sun was at the horizon and the ancient river flowed beneath our path like mercury, carrying the bodies of our own French sons and fathers like so many sawn-up logs. You would think the enormity of this sight, all this blood paid to remove Napoleon, would disgust me, squash my child's happiness like a stinking rose petal in the street, but you see, my noble father was ahead, the blacksmith above, and as we arrived on the Left Bank I was in fact a thoughtless disgusting little thing, a general returning in glory from the wars.
    Vive le roi , I thought. Vive la France . I kissed my mother's cheek and squeezed her little hand. The house of Garmont was restored.

V
    ABANDONING THE BLACKENED SILVER of the Seine, emerging from behind the solemn sooty shadow of the ministries, we found the rue Saint-Dominique. Broken bricks and cobbles were everywhere beneath our wheels. The air, previously sulfurous, was here foul and fetid. Gustave the blacksmith dismounted and, having fired his musket at the sky, shouted instructions so the coachman might ease the carriage around a bloated horse whose shiny green bowels rose like an awful luminous bubble from the chiaroscuro night. There were very few lamps burning in the great houses and this, the absence of our kind, was not comforting. I had only visited the rue Saint-Dominique twice in all my life, but it loomed massively in my imagination--Blacqueville's family lived here too, so we would both be neighbors of King Louis XVIII.
    "No, no," my mother cried when the light of Gustave's lantern revealed a high thin town house with its eyes gone blind. My mother had been born in this street. She knew each house by family name. "There, Blacksmith, there," she cried. "Onwards."
    At that moment there appeared, on the penumbra of the wavering light, some towering phantom, as tall as a house, pressing down toward the carriage, bleeding black against the charcoal sky.
    "Maman," I shrieked.
    "What is it?" she demanded, her voice rising to a pitch quite equal to my own.
    I was literally dumb with terror, all the hairs on my neck and head bristling. I could do no more than point.
    "Oh." She saw, then slapped my leg. "It is the Blacquevilles' wisteria."
    If it was the Blacquevilles' wisteria it was also a living thing, abused, attacked, wounded, hacked, pulled away from the house so it teetered in a mass above our heads. This was the house of my friend Thomas. I felt sick to see how it had been punished, as the pigeons had been punished, as it was said the printers of rue Saint-Severin had held a trial and hanged their masters' cats.
    "Maman, where is Thomas?"
    But she shrugged off my hand.
    Our iron picket gates were now opened to us by our blacksmith, who, it seemed, could think of nothing but the gold fleurs-de-lys which had been melted down for bullets. I heard the grind of steel on steel, the heavy hinges swinging, and my heart was beating like the devil, my blood sluicing through my arteries and veins. Then-- another fright --the high front door opened and I beheld a pair of deep dark staring eyes. Standing hard against my mother I slowly understood that the eyes belonged to one of ours and she--that is, the chatelaine--was refusing to admit her mistress.
    "Don't fret," my mother reprimanded me, but she was the one who was fretting. I could feel the heat of her body. In a moment she would enter the grand dining room, where she planned to welcome the king himself amidst a sea of lilies.
    Imagine my confusion when I discovered, by the light of twenty candles in that same room, a large black gelding, eighteen hands high, shitting on the parquet