The First Garden Read Online Free PDF

carefully scraped off and wiped away. These are dwellings from another time, as fresh as brand-new toys.
    The river is there, sputtering with rain against the wharfs.
    Soon, torrents of dark water lash the city.
    A café crowded with people dripping rain, their hair plastered down, faces like the drowned.
    Raphaël has joined Flora Fontanges. They talk about Barbe Abbadie. Wonder what good deeds Barbe Abbadie might have done, to have been given a street, and what evil she might have done to have the street taken from her almost immediately. Together they decide on Barbe Abbadie’s age, her marital status, her life and her death.
    Thirty years old, a merchant husband who owns two ships and a large shop on the rue Sault-au-Matelot, four children with a fifth due shortly, an account book impeccably maintained, a shop filled with the good smells of woollen cloth, of silk, muslin, and canvas. There is talk of ells, of sols and gold louis, in the cool half-light of the shop. Barbe Abbadie reigns over the shop and the house. With every step her magnificent legs set aswirl a full rigging of petticoats and skirts. Her deep frills are recognizable from afar. Gripped by fear and respect, servants and shop-girls listen to her move from bedroom to corridor, from corridor to staircase, all the day long.
    As she sips her iced tea, Flora Fontanges imagines the hands and eyes of Barbe Abbadie. Dark blue eyes, soft strong hands. She tries to capture Barbe Abbadie, full face and in profile. Small nose, round chin. She tries to imagine the sound of her voice, swallowed up long ago by the air of time. Flora Fontanges pays no attention now to Raphaël sitting opposite her. She dreams of taking over Barbe Abbadie’s desiccated heart, of hanging it between her own ribs, of bringing it back to life again, an extra heart, the vermilion blood pumped into it from her own chest.
    Raphaël enters into the game. He says they must pin down the time when Barbe Abbadie lived. Why not the mid-seventeenth century, say 1640 for example?
    Flora Fontanges thinks of the odour of Barbe Abbadie, which must have been powerful, at a time when people didn’t wash much. Under Barbe Abbadie’s arms and skirts, her cloth-merchant husband must have choked in savage ecstasy.
    They must dress her, this woman, offer her fine linen and lace, gowns and fichus, headdresses and bonnets, and a set of keys complete with the one to the salt and the wine, the one for the sheets and towels, and the tiny golden key to the jewel casket.
    Raphaël talks about the museum just next to them, that has many objects and utensils used by the country’s first settlers. As soon as the rain has stopped they must go and look for Barbe Abbadie’s vanished household: a pestle for salt in its mortar, a wheel for spinning wool, perhaps even the set of keys that provided access to her whole life.
    It’s a matter of getting your hands on the right key, and Flora Fontanges appropriates for herself straightaway the soul and the body of Barbe Abbadie. She takes from it words and gestures, she causes Barbe Abbadie to hear, see, listen, laugh and cry, eat and drink, make love every night, tumbling happily with her husband in unbleached linen sheets.
    Flora Fontanges grows sad. She catches a glimpse of the end of Barbe Abbadie, dead in childbirth in 1640, in the big bed made for feasts of love, in the master bedroom on the first floor of a fine stone house at 6, rue Sault-auMatelot. Now that house is filled with the screams of a woman in labour and the cries of a child, and with the rumble of raucous sobbing by a man who believes he has lost everything.
    Flora Fontanges beams with the life and death of Barbe Abbadie. She is powerful now, inescapable, at the height of her confidence. Glows with all her fire. She leans across the table to Raphaël.
    She is and is not Flora Fontanges.
    â€œRaphaël dear, how you’re staring at me, how you listen! I am Barbe Abbadie