Parrot and Olivier in America Read Online Free PDF Page B

floor.
    Among the manure and straw, I beheld a broken vase and silverware, damask curtains in a pile--small damage if you consider what was happening across the Seine, but horrid violence just the same. A shudder passed through my bowels.
    Behind the horse, the servants were still assembling with their candles and my mother was on show once again and I, her son who had imbibed her terrors in the womb, knew she could not possibly endure this public trial. For instance, what would she call them? I made a horrid smell. The Comtesse de Garmont squeezed my hand once, briefly, and then she laughed, not desperately at all, rather girlishly in fact, as if the awful sight was a very droll amusement.
    "Come," my mother said, but I dared not move. My mother touched me lightly on the head and then, having addressed her servants from the chilly distance of her majesty, gracefully ascended the curling marble stairs. Thus was I abandoned to the violence of the room.
    I thanked the chatelaine for greeting us. She answered me appropriately. She explained that the horse was there because the stables had been burned down and that Hobbes thought him certain to be stolen by the Cossacks. She made me understand my nose was bleeding.
    Six strange servants escorted me to bed.
    Then Odile arrived carrying a large rose-tinted Ch'ien-lung goldfish bowl. This contained my leeches. She set it on an English giltwood stand and removed the muslin cloth from around its neck. These vieilles amies had always been in her charge and she was constantly ready, at whatever hour her bell rang, to scoop out the starving parasites with an instrument I have seen nowhere since--an English tea strainer strapped with leather shoelaces to a wooden spoon. Odile was slow and heavy-limbed but extraordinarily dexterous and, when required, she would select a single creature and hold it between thumb and forefinger and then, when the doctor had departed, she would--without fail--fix one to her nose and through the kindness of her heart, to lessen my distress, roll her eyes at me as it wagged its vile body in the air.
    Thus for our first two days in Paris I was declared an invalid, and although I complained bitterly it was not so bad. The Blacquevilles had not returned from Normandy. I watched for them from my window and saw, if not my tall young Thomas, then many other visitors arriving by coach and foot, carrying their baskets or parcels or portmanteaus or simply holding the trains of their dresses high. I could also see my mother's coach, in no way hidden but standing on call, with its team in harness all day long. People of the most surprising type stood in the street to stare at this, and when one urchin rushed through the gate it was not to slash the horse's tendons but to tenderly place a white daisy in the harness before the poler's ear. So did my blood spill over, my lungs rip and roar, the louder for witnessing the guildsmen and market women arrive at our gates with gifts of furniture and mirrors and other items "taken into safekeeping" during the Revolution.
    As my father had refused to join the nobles' flight into exile, the house, no matter what spiteful damage it had suffered, had always remained his property, and the items now returned had been, even by the laws of the Directory and Empire, quite frankly stolen.
    I lay in bed and Odile brought me chamomile relentlessly. If this calmed me I do not know. My mother visited me often but was always in a rush to see a returning friend, sometimes carrying a broth, sometimes no more than her glad and nervous heart. I had never seen her eyes so bright, and these visits, ever so brief, filled me with happiness, and gave birth to a very clear expectation of what my life might now become.
    And I was not disappointed. For when I rose from my sickbed she brought me a new sailor suit. As for her own dress, she had moved from black to white, from age to youth. She had raised her hair. She descended those wide marble stairs dressed