The First Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I’m looking at you too, and listening to you. How old are you, Raphaël dear?” He says he’s just twenty.
    Flora Fontanges laughs.
    He murmurs:
    â€œYou’re marvellous.”
    His whole body moves abruptly. He brings his face down close to Flora Fontanges’s hand. Tries to kiss it. A slight movement of the wrist, barely perceptible, and her hand turns over, palm up, soft and warm under Raphaël’s caress.
    She says that’s called “faire larirette” and that it’s always the first step in love between Barbe Abbadie and her husband. A tiny little kiss on the palm of the hand.
    She laughs.
    â€œDon’t worry, Raphaël dear, it’s only theatre.”
    A few drops of rain lengthen and trail on the windowpane. Conversations in the café rise a notch, as if everyone, freed now of watching the rain fall, were suddenly starting to talk at once.
    Flora Fontanges gradually calms down, withdraws into herself. Plays with the strap of her bag. Says she wants to go home. Raphaël wonders if he has dreamed. An ordinary woman is standing and waiting for him to finish his orange juice.
    He sips it slowly. Forgets Barbe Abbadie. Accepts only the present. He is content and pleased with it. The acid, sugary taste of orange. He sees on the table before him a big fly that seems to be tirelessly polishing its legs.
    During the storm the light has dwindled, so much that now it is almost dark. All the day seems to have been swallowed by the river water, which glows now from within before the harbour lights come on.

I T’S NO USE TRYING TO explain to American tourists why so many anachronistic cannons are aimed at them, here and there in the city. Raphaël talks about the fortifications that took a hundred years to build and have never been used. Ever since the English conquest, history has been filled with false alarms, and it makes a fine Tartarean desert, an awesome Syrtic shore for the soldiers at the Citadel perched high above. In their red coats and fur bonnets, they guard the beauty of the landscape and watch over the river and the clouds, awaiting a prodigious attack that has been delayed for two centuries now.
    Sometimes Raphaël, the scrupulous guide, recalls that the birth of the city was a misunderstanding, the founders believing they were on the path to the Orient, with its wealth of gold and spices.

A N ELONGATED FACE, HAIR SMOOTHED down on either side of his hollow cheeks, eyes deep-set beneath the brow, and some vague powers that let him hold sway over a group of four boys and four girls. Since Eric left the church, all his attention in this base world is concentrated on seeking a secular moral code that will satisfy him and bring peace to his heart.
    He has sworn that he will start afresh as if he had never lived. To take eloquence and wring its neck seems to have become the main concern of this former preaching brother. One thing only is necessary, he keeps telling himself. If he could just discover that primary necessity, all the rest would be organized around it, like a planet wrapping itself about its fiery nucleus. He thinks he has laid aside all principles and all his former ways of doing things. He imagines himself breathing like a newborn in the absolute new. Yet he has maintained an outmoded sense of charity that outstrips him and leads him where he doesn’t want to go. He believes that the supreme virtue is to be detached from everything, come what may, yet compassion is still alive in him and it gives him no rest. He has not said to anyone, “Follow me and be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect,” but still they come after him and will not rest until he has told them how to become meek and lowly of heart. He has done nothing but talk to them about infinite peace and about the arbitrary nature of all power. His hoarse voice sometimes stumbles over words which he then retracts, confused. They listen and follow even his most stumbling