The Dream Maker Read Online Free PDF Page A

siege was lifted. Our town breathed deeply. Life could go on as before.
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    *
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    While the war may have spared us, it was still being fought elsewhere. I had no idea what other towns were like, particularly the one known as the capital. Paris seemed to me to be a great tormented body. All one ever heard were tales of murder, massacre, and famine. This curse, in my opinion, could only be explained by the city’s proximity to the mad king who lived there and spread his insanity all around him.
    Oddly enough, it was my mother who gave me the opportunity to get a more precise idea of Paris, and yet she was a timid woman who hardly ever left the house and had never ventured outside our town. She was tall and extremely thin. Averse to drafts, cold weather, and even light, she lived in our dark rooms and kept the fires going all year round. Our wooden house was tall and narrow and served as the décor to her days, providing her with any number of plans which she implemented as the day went by. Her bedroom was on the second floor. She stayed in bed until fairly late then dressed carefully. The courtyard and the kitchen occupied her for the rest of the morning until it was time for lunch in the adjacent room. In the afternoon she generally went to see my father in his workshop to help him with the bookkeeping. Then, when the canon arrived, she went upstairs to take mass in the small chapel she had arranged on the top floor near our bedrooms. Our house was built in the fashion of the era: each floor spread wider than the one below, in such a way that the room at the top was also the biggest.
    It was a reclusive life, and it seemed infinitely monotonous to me, but my mother did not complain. I learned much later that she had been a victim of violence in the best years of her youth, perpetrated by a gang of lepers and
écorcheurs
. They had plundered the village where my grandparents lived, and my mother, who had only just gone through puberty, was taken hostage by those thugs. She had come away with a deep horror of war and at the same time a great interest in it. Of all of us, she was always the best informed of the situation. No doubt thanks to visitors, she garnered precise information about the latest events in the town, the neighboring regions, and even beyond. She had a vast network of informants, because through her father she belonged to the powerful butchers’ brotherhood.
    The memory I have of my maternal grandfather is of a man of refined manners, his nose red from perpetual rubbing with the cambric handkerchief he held clutched in his fist. He was always elegant, and gave off a scent of perfumed oil. No one could ever have pictured him splitting the skull of an ox. So, while he might have been resigned to doing so in his youth, for many years he had had at his disposal a host of apprentices and slaughterers who took care of these chores for him.
    The butchers’ guild was strictly organized, and not just anyone could join. The representatives of this chapter corresponded with butchers in other regions, and this enabled them to keep abreast of news. Although they conducted their business in town, the butchers also knew the countryside, because that was where they bought their animals. And so they were informed of the slightest event even before it reached the ears of the king’s entourage. This world of the butchers’ trade was ordinarily a discreet one. Other burghers looked down on them, so the men who traded in meat sought honorability by forming alliances with more highly respected guilds. My grandfather was pleased that his daughter had not married a butcher, but he was of the opinion that my father’s trade still smelled too strongly of animals. He liked me very much, no doubt because I had a more delicate constitution than my brother, and was, therefore, naturally destined for a profession of the mind. His greatest joy would have been to see me become a man of law. To him I owe the debt