squares, while the space for gardens receded into the countryside. The city itself laid out, more and more sharply defined, more precise, with streets of beaten earth racing against each other up and down the cape.
Flora Fontanges is struck by the early days of the city as Raphaël evokes them. He becomes animated. Thinks that the old life is there waiting to be recaptured in all its freshness, thanks to history. She says that time recaptured is theatre, and that she is prepared to play Marie Rollet then and there.
âA headdress from the Ile de France, a blue twill apron with a bib, earth under my nails because of the garden, and there is Eve who has just arrived with Adam, the Kingâs apothecary. And Adam, Raphaël dear, is you.â
She laughs. Shuts her eyes. She is an actress inventing a role for herself. She manages the passage from her life today to a life of the past. She appropriates the heart, the loins, the hands of Marie Rollet. Seeks the light of her gaze. She opens her eyes. Smiles at Raphaël.
âAm I a good likeness, Raphaël dear?â
He asserts that the creation of the world was very near here, and that it is easy to go back to the first days of the earth.
She goes through the motions of adjusting an imaginary headdress on her short hair. She has been transfigured, from head to foot. At once rejuvenated and weightier. Laden with a mysterious mission. She is the mother of the country. For a moment. A brief moment. Before declaring:
âThatâs all mimicry. Iâm a chameleon, Raphaël dear, and itâs terribly tiring.â
Suddenly she goes numb, like someone regaining her foothold in everyday life. She wants to go home. Says again that sheâs very tired. An ordinary woman now, lacklustre, on her sonâs arm, walking through the city streets.
That evening, Céleste assumed an injured look and declared that this whole story Raphaël and Flora Fontanges had made up about the cityâs founders was phoney and slanted.
âThe first man and the first woman in this country had copper-coloured skin and wore feathers in their hair. As for the first garden, there was no beginning or end, just a tangled mass of corn and potatoes. The first human gaze that lit on the world was the gaze of an Amerindian, and that was how he saw the Whites coming down the river, on big ships rigged out with white sails and crammed with rifles and cannons, with holy water and fire water.â
F OR A LONG TIME FLORA Fontanges has been a stealer of souls, in hospitals, asylums, the street, salons, backstage. She would lie in wait for the dying or those in sound health, for the innocent and the mad, for ordinary people and for others full of pretensions, for those who are masked and those who go through life exposed, their faces bare as hands, for those without love and others who are radiant with overflowing passion, like monstrances.
She takes from them their gestures and their tics, the way they bend their heads and lower their eyes, and she feeds on their blood and their tears. She learns how to live and how to die. She has models who are alive, and the dead laid out on their hospital beds. How long has she spent at the bedsides of the dying, spying on their last breath, on the supreme moment when the features stiffen and all at once go white, like old bones? She has held the little mirror to dying mouths, thinking to see the soulâs passing in the mist that forms, wanting to take hold of that evanescent soul and give to it an additional life, wanting to use it this very night when she plays Camille.
And Raphaël? Perhaps he has no soul. All that she can be sure about him is his strange beauty, utterly animal and disconcerting. Is it possible that he has no mystery or any hidden dream, like smooth water? Here there is nothing for Flora Fontanges, who is a thief, to steal. Raphaël eludes her, like innocence.
That night, Flora Fontanges had a dream. Her daughter Maud
Flora Fontanges is struck by the early days of the city as Raphaël evokes them. He becomes animated. Thinks that the old life is there waiting to be recaptured in all its freshness, thanks to history. She says that time recaptured is theatre, and that she is prepared to play Marie Rollet then and there.
âA headdress from the Ile de France, a blue twill apron with a bib, earth under my nails because of the garden, and there is Eve who has just arrived with Adam, the Kingâs apothecary. And Adam, Raphaël dear, is you.â
She laughs. Shuts her eyes. She is an actress inventing a role for herself. She manages the passage from her life today to a life of the past. She appropriates the heart, the loins, the hands of Marie Rollet. Seeks the light of her gaze. She opens her eyes. Smiles at Raphaël.
âAm I a good likeness, Raphaël dear?â
He asserts that the creation of the world was very near here, and that it is easy to go back to the first days of the earth.
She goes through the motions of adjusting an imaginary headdress on her short hair. She has been transfigured, from head to foot. At once rejuvenated and weightier. Laden with a mysterious mission. She is the mother of the country. For a moment. A brief moment. Before declaring:
âThatâs all mimicry. Iâm a chameleon, Raphaël dear, and itâs terribly tiring.â
Suddenly she goes numb, like someone regaining her foothold in everyday life. She wants to go home. Says again that sheâs very tired. An ordinary woman now, lacklustre, on her sonâs arm, walking through the city streets.
That evening, Céleste assumed an injured look and declared that this whole story Raphaël and Flora Fontanges had made up about the cityâs founders was phoney and slanted.
âThe first man and the first woman in this country had copper-coloured skin and wore feathers in their hair. As for the first garden, there was no beginning or end, just a tangled mass of corn and potatoes. The first human gaze that lit on the world was the gaze of an Amerindian, and that was how he saw the Whites coming down the river, on big ships rigged out with white sails and crammed with rifles and cannons, with holy water and fire water.â
F OR A LONG TIME FLORA Fontanges has been a stealer of souls, in hospitals, asylums, the street, salons, backstage. She would lie in wait for the dying or those in sound health, for the innocent and the mad, for ordinary people and for others full of pretensions, for those who are masked and those who go through life exposed, their faces bare as hands, for those without love and others who are radiant with overflowing passion, like monstrances.
She takes from them their gestures and their tics, the way they bend their heads and lower their eyes, and she feeds on their blood and their tears. She learns how to live and how to die. She has models who are alive, and the dead laid out on their hospital beds. How long has she spent at the bedsides of the dying, spying on their last breath, on the supreme moment when the features stiffen and all at once go white, like old bones? She has held the little mirror to dying mouths, thinking to see the soulâs passing in the mist that forms, wanting to take hold of that evanescent soul and give to it an additional life, wanting to use it this very night when she plays Camille.
And Raphaël? Perhaps he has no soul. All that she can be sure about him is his strange beauty, utterly animal and disconcerting. Is it possible that he has no mystery or any hidden dream, like smooth water? Here there is nothing for Flora Fontanges, who is a thief, to steal. Raphaël eludes her, like innocence.
That night, Flora Fontanges had a dream. Her daughter Maud
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