Wonder Read Online Free PDF

themselves teemed with flowers, birds, and vegetation, and that they didn’t hesitate to lift a corner to show off the dazzle of a smile where sometimes a gold tooth shone.
    Both household pets and farm animals behaviour began to behave strangely, some refusing to eat while others, who’d always been absolutely gentle, delivered kicks and bites whenever anyone tried to tie them up.
    Finally, something new was observed, but for obvious reasons only among the most affluent citizens of Saint-Pierre; silver objects were covered overnight with a dark coating similar to charcoal.
    Father Blanchot, summoned before lauds while eating his morning boiled egg, thought at first that it was a bad joke.
    “What’s the matter?” he snapped at a trembling altar boy. It was common knowledge that the
curé
disliked being disturbed during meals, which he ate alone and in silence. Madame Pinson, his housekeeper, put on felt slippers to serve and to clear the table.
    “Father,” stammered the boy, twisting a corner of his child’s size soutane, “it’s the ciborium …”
    “The ciborium? What on earth have you done to it? You can’t have broken it, it’s sterling silver! Or else … have you lost it, you little devil?” he roared, brandishing a toast finger like a threat.
    “No, Father, nothing like that … But … it’s all black.”
    “Don’t talk nonsense, lad,” said the
curé
, reassured in spite of everything, taking a sip of
café au lait
. “You forgot to shine it for a few days, you were too busy playing, and now it’s slightly tarnished. Don’t waste any more time, go and polish it before the service!”
    He tried to brush the intruder away with the back of his hand but the child refused to vanish.
    “I mean, Father, it’s not just the ciborium, it’s also the chalice, the monstrance …”
    “What are you talking about, you disrespectful boy?”
    “And the candlesticks, Father.”
    Father Blanchot got up grudgingly and, glancing at his still half-full plate, warned:
    “Watch out if you’re fooling around, young man.”
    But the altar boy wasn’t fooling around.
    The good Father had never done so well since his arrival in Saint-Pierre. His church was always full; at certain hours the faithful who had been unable to find a seat inside crowded together out front all the way to the steps and listened from there to the sermon that came to them through the half-open doors, which let into the nave a fine black dust smelling of sulphur.
    For a variety of reasons that he couldn’t fully explain, Father Blanchot had always harboured a fascination with the Apocalypse of Saint John. Certainly he appreciated the more subtle rhetorical devices set forth in the Book of Job or in Ecclesiastes, among others. But this fat and rather pusillanimous man, who liked his comfort and his own habits and customs, experienced at the mere mention of lion-headed horses, poisoned grasshoppers, and other baleful harbingers of Revelation, a shudder such as he hadn’t felt since his teenage years, when watching one of his classmates with flowing blond hair being thrashed by a teacher who always had a long wooden ruler tucked into the waist of his soutane. Yes, definitely, the subject inspired him. There was matter there for more than one edifying sermon.
    He had long lamented the fact that it was so hard to waken his flock to the threat of torture awaiting those who did not obey the precepts of Our Lord during their earthly existence. This did not prevent him from brandishing the terrifying promise of eternal fire and damnation every week before parishioners already half stunned by the heat, fanning themselves by waving their Bibles in front of their faces as if trying to chase away a fly.
    All that had changed around a month earlier. At the first indistinct rumbling of Mount Pelée, tearful women had banged on the closed doors of the cathedral in the light of a mauve dawn to confess sins they had just most willingly committed.