Jane Our Stranger: A Novel
9781465664150
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished. Jane may live another twenty years—a long time to wait, alone between two worlds. Jane is forty-three, I am five years older, Philibert is fifty-six, my mother nearly eighty, we are all alive, and strangely enough Maman is the only one whose life is not yet ended. Hers will not end till the moment of her death. She has been a wise artist. She is still embroidering delicately the pattern of her days; she still holds the many threads in her fingers. Quietly, exquisitely she will put in the last stitches. They will be the most beautiful of all; they will be her signature, the signature of a lady. Then she will close her eyes and commend her soul to God and the perfect work of her worldly wisdom will be finished. As for me, I see no reason why I should not live on indefinitely just as I have done, and on the whole I am more comfortable here than in Purgatory, a place that I imagine to be like the suburbs of London. I see myself there, tapping with my crutch, along endless tramway lines between interminable rows of dingy perky villas. This little street in the Faubourg Saint Germain is much nicer. It is old and proud and secretive; a good street for a cripple to live in; it shelters and protects him. Once he has entered it he has no distance to go to get home. It is usually deserted and the great pale houses show discreet shuttered windows with no one behind the shutters to stare at him. I am Philibert’s crippled brother. Something went wrong with me before I was born. Nothing else of importance has ever happened to me, except Jane’s marrying my brother. Jane loved this little street. She said that it told her the story of France and conveyed to her all the charm of the Paris she loved best, the proud gentle mysterious Paris of the 18th century that with all its fine reserved grandeur assumes modestly the look of a small provincial town. I came to live here when Philibert sold our house in the Rue de Varenne that is just round the corner, and my mother went to her new apartment near the Étoile. That was twenty years ago, and very little has changed in the street since I came to these rooms at the bottom of this little courtyard between Constantine’s big white house and the Embassy. The little man who peddled bird-seed has vanished long ago, his voice is no more to be heard chanting, but other street vendors still come by with their sing-song calls. What indeed was there that could change, save perhaps old Madame Barbier’s grocery shop at the corner, tucked up against Constantine’s stable wall? But even Madame Barbier has remained the same. Her hair is as smooth and glossy black, her tight corsage as neat, and her trim window with its glass jars of honey and the nice bright boxes of groceries is as it always has been. A thrifty respectable woman is Madame Barbier, with a pleasant word for her neighbours. For the rest, on the opposite side of the street there is the convent, with its pointed roof and the chapel belfry showing above the wall, and there are the five big houses with their great gates that make up the whole length of the street. Not a long street—often when I turn into it at one end, I recognize a familiar figure going out of it at the other, the good Abbé perhaps going home after confessing the sisters in the convent, or old Madame d’Avrécourt in her shabby black jacket, her fine little withered face under her bonnet, wearing its habitual enigmatic smile. Monsieur l’Abbé says that her voluminous petticoats are heavy with the sacred charms she has sewn into the hems, and that may well be; I know that her devotion is very great and her interest in the outside world very small, and the sight of her is comforting to me.
