The Little Man From Archangel Read Online Free PDF Page A

he and yet people could sense an affinity between them of the kind that is normally only found between twins. There were times when one might have thought Frédo was in love with his sister, and that she reciprocated it.
    It was enough for them, wherever they were, to exchange a glance to understand one another, and if Gina frowned her brother became as anxious as a lover.
    Was that why he disliked Jonas? At the wedding he had been the only one not to congratulate him, and he had left right in the middle of the reception. Gina had run after him. They had whispered together a long time in the corridor of the Hotel du Commerce where the banquet had taken place. When she came back, still dressed in white satin, it was obvious that she had been crying, and she had at once poured herself out a glass of champagne.
    At the time Frédo was only seventeen. Their marriage had taken place two weeks before Clémence Ancel, their bridesmaid, had hers.
    Resigned, he opened the drawer with his key, picked up the wallet and discovered to his surprise that there was not a single note missing.
    It was explicable. He hadn't thought. The day before Gina had not left until after dinner and, up till the last moment, he might have had to open the cash drawer. With the stamps it was another matter, as sometimes he went a whole week without touching the steel box.
    There were still some details which he did not understand, but they were material details of no great importance. For example, he always carried his keys in his trouser pocket, attached to a silver chain. When had his wife managed to get hold of them without his knowing? Not at night, because he slept more lightly than she did, and besides he was the first one down in the morning. Occasionally, it was true, in order not to wake her, he would go downstairs in pyjamas and dressing-gown to make his coffee. It had not happened the day before, but the day before that, and he hadn't touched the safe since then.
    'Have you got a book about bee-keeping, please?'
    It was a boy about twelve years old, who had just come in, and spoken in an assured voice, his face covered in freckles, his copper - coloured hair streaked with sunlight.
    'Are you thinking of keeping bees?'
    'I found a swarm in a tree in the vegetable garden and my parents are going to let me make a hive, provided I do it with my own money.'
    Jonas had fair ginger hair too, with freckles on the bridge of his nose. But at this child's age he must have already worn glasses as thick as the ones he was wearing now.
    He had wondered to himself sometimes whether on account of his short-sightedness he saw things and people differently from others. The question intrigued him. He had read, for example, that the various species of animals do not see us as we really are, but as their eyes show us to them, and that for some we are ten times as tall, which is what makes them so timid when we approach them.
    Does the same phenomenon occur with a short-sighted person, even though his sight is more or less corrected by spectacles? Without glasses the world was to him only a more or less luminous cloud in which floated shapes so insubstantial that he could not be sure of being able to touch them.
    His spectacles, on the other hand, revealed to him the details of objects and faces as if he had been looking at them through a magnifying glass or as if they had been engraved.
    Did this cause him to live in a separate sphere? Were these spectacles, without which he had to grope his way, a barrier between himself and the world outside?
    In a shelf of books about animals he finally found one on bees and bee-hives.
    'How about that one?'
    'Is it expensive?'
    He consulted, on the back cover, the pencilled price.
    'A hundred francs.'
    'Would you let me have it if I paid half next week?'
    Jonas didn't know him. He was not from the neighbourhood. He was a country boy whose mother had probably come into the market with vegetables or poultry.
    'You can take