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prodigal sons, like that monk and all those who revive their embers from the ashes with which they cover them, he had to see himself refused everything in order for the chance to possess it all. I imagine him, his face unforgettable in that moment and entirely forgotten, rediscovering this formidable commonplace; I imagine him, Antoine, still smooth-cheeked, leaving forever that always-nocturnal church, rage and laughter contorting his mouth, but emerging into the daylight as into his glorious future.)
    What is there to say about a Le Châtain childhood? Skinned knees, hazel sticks to while away the days and beat down the grass, clothes out-of-date and “stinking of the fair,” patois monologues in the luxurious shade, gallops along narrow swaths, wells; the herds do not vary, the horizons persist. In summer, the afternoon is fixed in the gold eye of the hen, the patient tipcarts raise the sundial of their shafts; in winter, the racket of crows holds the land, reigns over red evenings and wind; the child nourishes his torpor on hearth fires and ringing frosts; heavy, he makes the heavy birds scatter, is surprised that his cries mist over in the icy air; then another summer arrives.
    His parents, I suppose, loved this late-coming child. Juliette has her silences; bread under her arm, she stops, she sets a bucket on the threshold and the grayer stone drinks the fresh water, or stoking the fire, she turns her head and one cheek blazes while the other falls into shadow; she gazes at the blessed boy, the little thief, the last of the Peluchets. The father is tall; he can be seen small and far off in the fields and already he is framed there in the doorway, high as the day and all in shadow, a yoke or flintlock across his shoulder, and he hands the child a ringdove, a fistful of broom. He is loving; one day he makes Antoine whistles from fresh bark, alder or aspen; the big knife has the precision of a needle, the sap beads on the raw wood, in his rough hand the whistle is light as a feather, fragile as a bird; the serious child blows diligently, the father experiences great joy. And finally, he is brutal.
    In Saint Goussaud, there is a school master, or a parish priest with a bit of culture, who dispenses it. Beginning in November, in the grip of January, and until the March muds, early each morning the child brings his log, settles into the odor of the cassock and the mangy odor of the village children, year after year learns bits and pieces: that words are vast, that they are uncertain; that beggars’ grass is also called la clématite , that the five herbs of Saint John, from which you make crosses to nail over cowshed doors, and the herbs of Saint Roch, Saint Martin, Saint Barbe and Saint Fiacre, are also called molène, scabieuse , and cirse ; that patois is not coextensive with the universe, and neither is French; that Latin is not only the violin of angels: that it bears presences, names the joy one feels in sleeping and the joy one tastes at waking, gives rise to the tree and the edge of the forest as much as the wounds of the Savior, and is itself insufficient; finally – and perhaps this is the samething – that other objects are gold besides the ciboria, wedding rings, and old coins.
    I invent nothing here. There is – and at this moment, small creatures blindly gnaw at it, owls indistinct in the night cover it with droppings – there is, I say, stored away in Les Cards, a tin box that Elise called “the Le Châtain box” and there rest the meager remains of the House of Peluchet: among the Shepherds’ Almanacs, a few wedding menus and old bills registering receipt of barrels or coffins, and other odds and ends, three books are my witness, three books, incongruous and marvelously right, in which the universe is almost contained in its entirety, three improbable books that bear the clumsy initials of Antoine Peluchet, too legible, right in the middle of the page. They are a