The Medusa Child E-Book

Sylvie Germain

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"Sylvie Germain's The Medusa Child beautifully translated from the French by Liz Nash, tells a heartbreaking and violent story about sin and redemption in fantastical language; a myth from la France profonde." Michelle Roberts in Books of the Year in The Independent on Sunday

Leseprobe

THE AUTHOR

Sylvie Germain was born in Chateauroux in Central France in 1954. She read philosophy at the Sorbonne, being awarded a doctorate. From 1987 until the summer of 1993 she taught philosophy at the French School in Prague. She now lives in Angouleme. Sylvie Germain is the author of thirteen works of fiction, eleven of which have been published by Dedalus, her non-fiction includes a study of the painter Vermeer and a religious meditation. Her work has been translated into twenty one languages and has received worldwide acclaim.

THE TRANSLATOR

Liz Nash was born in Northern Ireland in 1952. She was a teacher of French and German and a freelance translator. Her translations for Dedalus are The Medusa Child, Infinite Possibilities by Sylvie Germain and The Man in Flames by Serge Filippini. She died in 2010.

‘By dying and saying nothing of it, you unknowingly caused a great apple tree to spring up in blossom, one day in the middle of winter.’

JULES SUPERVIELLE

To Linda and Henri de Meyrignac

Contents

The Author

The Translator

Dedication

CHILDHOOD

 First Illumination

 Legend

 Second Illumination

 Legend

 Third Illumination

 Legend

LIGHT

 First Red Chalk Drawing

 Legend

 Second Red Chalk Drawing

 Legend

 Third Red Chalk Drawing

 Legend

VIGILS

 First Sepia Drawing

 Legend

 Second Sepia Drawing

 Legend

 Third Sepia Drawing

 Legend

APPEALS

 First Charcoal Drawing

 Legend

 Second Charcoal Drawing

 Legend

 Third Charcoal Drawing

 Legend

PATIENCE

 Fresco

 Legend

Copyright

Childhood

‘And it will come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day …’

AMOS VIII, 9

First Illumination

A strange, sudden night has just appeared at the height of the day. The moon, which a moment ago lay hidden, has burst forth in the middle of the sky, fully armed with darkness, speed and power. It has broken its nocturnal moorings and struck out against the flow of the huge swirling purple and dark-bluish clouds through which it normally makes its entrance into the sky. It has broken the order of time, thrown off all constraints and all laws. The moon is the colour of ink, of war and madness; it is launching an attack on the sun.

It rolls on to the sun, whose corona turns to liquid. The sun bristles with long incandescent feathers, and stretches out sinuous white octopus arms on the perimeter of the moon’s shield. A vast shadow swoops down on to the earth and engulfs it. The ground, walls and roofs tremble; everything is permeated with watery shivers, grey undulations.

A sudden cold descends and grips living beings, trees and stones. The birds have fallen silent; they huddle, hearts racing, against the branches. They have no power to soar into a sky so empty and dim, no song to sing amid such a silence. The dogs whine and flatten their stomachs to the ground in houses and yards. Their spines are stiff, their flanks taut. They give out high-pitched moans, as if they had smelt an odour of wolf in the air. A very large celestial wolf with a coat of ashes. And the little children take fright too; some even start to cry. The celestial wolf is devouring the light.

Yet the sky is beautiful. The moon has engulfed the sun’s body. For a brief moment the two stars hold one another in an embrace of darkness and fire. The inert, ashy body of one lies down on the live, glowing body of the other. A dishevelled light forms around the penumbra, lending a pink, silvery halo to the globe with its fissured, rocky surface, pitted with dead seas and lacquered with dust. And the stars come out all around.

They glitter, myriads of age-old eyes resting a cold goldengaze upon the two embracing bodies in their struggle, their rapture, their fusion.

It is neither day nor night. It is another time altogether, a fragile tangential point between passing time and eternity, wonder and terror. The heart of the world is laying itself bare: a dark heart encircled with glory.

Suddenly there is doubt in men’s souls about their destiny in the wind of time, in the flesh of the world: will their death be like that flashing image up there above their heads? Is it possible for a completely dead body to surround itself with pure light, to give out shafts of fire the colour of mother-of-pearl, to shake with splendour once more as if at the height of love? Can a body really wrench itself away from death in this way, and blaze with desire? They long to know!

And so there is a very pleasant agitation in the eyes of men raised to the sky.

But they look cautiously nonetheless. Human beings are timid. They burn for knowledge, but their fear is greater. Everyone gazing at the eclipse observes the sky through a sheet of smoked glass. At the moment of supreme beauty, men’s eyes are consumed.

All the children are gathered in the schoolyard, twisting their necks to gain a better view of this celestial fantasy which they may never again in their lives have the chance to see. They blink behind the shelter of their dark glass screens. Standing in motionless clusters all around the darkened playground, they look like a cloud of insects with large obsidian eyes, peering anxiously into the leaden sky before resuming their quivering flight. They hold their breath. Their familiar stars are at this moment performing a miracle. It is dark in the middle of the day; the moon has stolen the sun’s light.

They look and look, wishing for the miracle to last, for the strange vision to stay in the sky, for the moon to invent yet more magic tricks. But everything happens so quickly; in no time the moon starts to slip, then topples and disappears into the reappearing daylight. As it goes, it takes with it the darkness and the stars, and all the beautiful magic that it brought for a moment to the sky.

Only the sun remains. It has lost its pink halo, its high near-white flames. The children lower their glass masks, and a moment later they are running about and shrieking in their usual way.

One child remains silent, his face raised toward the sun. A radiant smile lingers on his lips. Beside him stands a little girl. She has large black eyes: so large that their brightness gives her face a slightly comical air of infinite astonishment. She gently pulls the boy by a flap of his coat. They are both wearing red woollen scarves around their necks.

The moon has gone away, but the silvery darkness with which it enveloped the earth for a few minutes continues to dazzle the eyes of those two children; it ripples under their eyelids, trembles beneath their skin, and swirls in their hearts.

There is celebration in their eyes, and joy in their hearts. For them the world is still full of enchantment.

Legend

The world is full of surprises. Life is opening up to them like a great adventure game whose rules they are just beginning to fathom. The days of their childhood are light and carefree: soap bubbles blown into a clear sky.

The boy is Louis-Félix Ancelot. He is eleven, and has spiky, copper-coloured hair, a freckled face, and hazel eyes. He is short-sighted, and wears horn-rimmed spectacles behind which he blinks incessantly. This is due to his intense curiosity about the world around him, his fervent desire to see what there is to be seen, and above all his great passion for the geography of the sky. It began when he was very small; from the beginning his eyes were captivated by the stars, the heavenly bodies, the distant planets. He also likes it to be known that he was born at the darkest point in a summer night, when there was neither moon nor mist in the perfectly clear, star-studded sky. It was at the hour when Vega was at its height and the Lyra was shining brightly. And that night, it seems, the Lyra gave out a very clear sound. Its vibrations went right under the new-born child’s eyelids, and its thrilling tones have bewitched the boy’s heart ever since.

Now with his heart and eyes, his every thought and desire, with his whole being in fact, he is in thrall to that other world so close by that glitters every night just above him, stretching away to infinity.

Up there is the sky, limitlessly huge and wondrous. It is always there, day and night, at dawn and at dusk. It is vast: now pink, now blue, now orangey-red or mauvish-purple, now the colour of slate, of metal, of jet: and fertile, with bunches of stars and moonflowers that open and shut, with all its suns shaped like thistles, or enormous crimson sorb-apples, or balls of pale feathers. It is deep, with galaxies floating on its fringes and moving away even beyond them to drift into the gaping unknown. It can be light and gentle, with milky star clusters, clouds, mists, snows and rainbows, and also violent, when there are winds, thunderbolts, or meteor showers.

The sky is a great book of pictures full of strength and speed. Its pages are alive; they curl and twist, fly away, break up and reappear, the same each time and yet different. It is a text which is continually rewriting itself, moving on, and revealing itself in a new light. It is Louis-Félix’s favourite book. There are so very many pages he has not yet read, above all so very many pictures he has not seen. The book is never-ending, and hard to read.

‘When I grow up,’ declares Louis-Félix, ‘I shall be an astronomer.’

And he believes in his vocation, unquestioningly. Already, therefore, he is preparing himself to realize this fine ambition; the little star-worshipper is well aware that he will have to work very hard if he is to be become a real scientific scholar. With eager appetite he devours every article and book for the amateur astronomer he can lay his hands on. His bedside book is a sky atlas; the walls of his bedroom are papered with posters and photos of the sky which he has cut out of magazines. He has even stuck a map of the sky on to the ceiling above his bed, and his reading-lamp is a large plexiglass celestial globe which gives out a bluish light. Every night he goes to sleep surrounded by an artificial firmament and has dreams filled with gleaming sunlight, glistening stars or shimmering northern lights. In his dreams he revolves around the planets, flies in the solar wind, crosses the Milky Way, runs across the vast expanse of the sky chasing meteors like a butterfly-catcher.

For his tenth birthday he received a magnificent pair of binoculars. For him, a short-sighted child who loved the stars, the gift was a double miracle. With these magic eyes he could not only see into the distance, but see it as if it were close up. The invisible became visible; he could gaze far beyond the earth, find a way into the world’s hidden recesses. On the shiny, electric blue paper in which his birthday present was wrapped, his mother had written ‘For our little Prince of Stars.’

The little prince had his kingdom: the sky. Now he needed a palace. And so he has created one for himself by fixing up an observatory in the attic. It is in fact nothing more than a stool set in front of the window; since the window is low, he has sawn off the legs of the stool, so that his throne is at floor level. He has made himself a small wooden tripod with a little shelf on top where he can rest his binoculars, and beside his seat has put an upturned crate on which he has arranged his study materials: a planisphere, a map of his region, a calendar, an alarm clock, some graph paper, two exercise books, a pencil-case containing pencils, pens, a ruler and a rubber, a protractor and a pair of compasses. During his observation sessions he takes notes and measurements, draws graphs, scribbles rough sketches. And sometimes he also writes down his impressions. Into the exercise book with the yellow cover he enters a random jumble of rough notes and sketches; in the one with the blue cover he writes neatly and carefully. In the yellow exercise book he plays at being a novice astronomer, whereas in the blue one he waxes lyrical about his love of the stars.

But the little prince of stars dreams of expanding his kingdom. What he most desires now is a telescope. On the day when he finally possesses one, he will truly be a king. Yet there has been a significant addition to his equipment; for his eleventh birthday he has received a camera. He applies himself to the task of taking negatives of the stars, and particularly of the moon. Once again his eyes have experienced a miracle; they are now coupled with a memory which endures in tangible form. It is in black and white, cut up into little rectangles of shiny paper, and it grows steadily from month to month. His eyesight may be weak in the daytime, but on the nights when he is allowed to stay up and watch in his palace-observatory, it becomes astonishingly good. At those times his gaze is far-ranging and scrupulously precise, and furthermore enables him to make written records which testify to his patient marvellings. All day long Cinderella wore rags and dragged her feet in clogs, but at night she whirled in fine vair shoes and glittering gowns. Louis-Félix feels a little like Cinderella’s brother; for him, nights at the ball take place in his heavenly attic: he dances with the moon and the stars, and for finery he has his supreme power of vision. During these few hours he forgets his daytime myopia, and his eyes become his greatest glory.

*

People regard Louis-Félix as an odd child. They say that he is too intelligent for his age, that he is endowed with extraordinary curiosity and powers of memory. He has already jumped two classes ahead at school. His teachers feel rather helpless, because he asks so many strange questions, and manifests such an inexhaustible desire to learn and to understand everything. He excels at mathematics, geography and natural sciences. When he was six years old his parents offered him piano lessons, but he asked instead to learn English so that he could read certain American astronomy magazines which were reputed to be the best available. But he also liked his mother to tell him stories, especially tales taken from the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome. Here he came across names that were familiar to him: Jupiter, Uranus, Mercury and Pegasus, Neptune, Saturn and Cassiopeia, Titan, Andromeda and Venus. The loves and conflicts of the gods lent an aura of legend to the stars and planets, and made the great celestial tribes seem even more mysterious and beautiful. The characters he found most appealing – and still does – were fiery Icarus who, like a bird intoxicated with space and light, flew straight up towards the sun and died from the madness of his love, and Selene, the beautiful Moon goddess with radiant white skin and luminous silver eyes.

One God alone created the whole universe: that is what Father Joachim has taught him at catechism. And the one almighty God created this limitless, perpetually expanding universe from nothing. It was after that that all those unruly gods and jealous, haughty goddesses came along. Their reign on men’s earth was short-lived, and it has been over for a long time now. The bellicose gods and beautiful goddesses went off into retirement on the distant horizon of a golden past. Father Joachim said that these divinities were the fruits of men’s imagination, before they received the Revelation of the true God. They were wonderful fruits, full of light and violence; they ripened in the dreams of men, who then hung them on the highest branches of the sky. The one God dispelled this dream, and time swept away those fruits of lightning, pride and anger. But in their exile the fallen gods and goddesses scattered their illustrious names wherever they fell in the sky, dropping them on to the stars and the wandering bodies of planets with ruby-red rings around them: crowns of loose stones, ice and dust adorning the heads of the nomad gods.

Louis-Félix’s reputation as an odd child is increased by the fact that, although amazingly mature intellectually, he is at the same time totally ingenuous. In fact he is so completely without malice that he is often taken for a simpleton, and his classmates, who are far older than he, do not hesitate to hold him up to ridicule. What really makes him the object of their scorn, however, is a nervous habit he has which is a great deal more comical even than his guilelessness. The problem is that as soon as he stands still for a moment, Louis-Félix cannot help starting to jump up and down. He makes little vertical jumps, with his legs held tightly together, his arms hanging loosely, his head stiff and his eyes gazing off vacantly into space. He jumps up and down like a robot, with neither suppleness nor grace, and worst of all for no apparent reason. Nobody understands what sets in motion the invisible springs under his feet the moment he stands up. And he himself would be hard pressed to give an explanation for his preposterous behaviour. He just feels an irresistible need to jump up and down, that’s all. It relaxes him; he somehow feels that he can daydream or think more comfortably in this way. Or is he perhaps, by means of these little syncopated jumps, attempting in some way to test out the delights of weightlessness?

Anyone passing his house in Birdcatcher Street in the late afternoon or on Sundays will frequently notice his slight silhouette jumping about in the garden with clockwork regularity. As a result, in addition to the rather derisive corruptions of his first name that are his usual nicknames, such as Loony-Félix or Loopy Lou, he is often called Mad Mutt, Monkey-on-a-Spring or the Kangaroo Kid. But he doesn’t care; after all, many constellations have been named after animals. There is a gigantic bestiary living in the sky. It is the Court menagerie with which the gods have surrounded themselves in their exile. There are the legendary beasts, such as the Dragon, the female Hydra or the Unicorn, and also very simple animals like the Fish, the Little Dog, the Goat and the Crow. So why shouldn’t there be a Kangaroo? And even Loopy sounds a bit like Lupus the Wolf, who has his place up there as well, in between the Scorpion and the Centaur.

When he was promoted to a higher class for the second time at the end of the last school year, certain pupils, especially some of the older ones – those who had already been held back a year so many times that they were even further behind than Louis-Félix was ahead – made their contempt for him very clear: ‘There ’e is all on ’is own jumpin’ up and down on ’is dad’s lawn like a randy rabbit, but if a girl came near ’im ’e’d run a mile, wouldn’t ya, twit?’ But he doesn’t get angry, he just feels very ill at ease among all these large adolescents, some of whom already look like men; and most of the time he is bored in the lessons, which are too slow-moving and limited in scope for his taste. He is rather like those little peasants in legends who dream of becoming knights, of setting off to conquer unknown lands, of crossing the whole wide world in search of adventure. He loves tales of Chivalry; he admires Percival, Lancelot of the Lake and his son, the pure-hearted Galahad.

Louis-Félix wants to become a knight of the stars. His Holy Grail is hidden far up above, at the deepest point in the sky, at the other end of time. It has a curious name; it is called Big Bang.

But never mind if he has not yet found valiant companions, or even true masters, to accompany him on his quest. At least he has found his Lady. A Lady fit for the unformed, awkward knight that he is. A pretty little mini-Lady, as cheerful as she is affectionate. It’s that little girl there, the one who is just pulling gently on his coat.

*

Her name is Lucie Daubigné. Unlike Lou-Fé she is not in any sense a child prodigy, and has no odd characteristics. She is a little girl of about eight, who is always cheerful. If there is anything remarkable about her, it is her huge black eyes. Their gaze is very direct, and they sparkle with merriment. She has long black hair which she wears in plaits. She is interested in her appearance; she adores coloured hair-slides and painted wood or glass necklaces, and loves to wear pretty dresses and embroidered socks. ‘My daughter already has a passion for trashy clothes and baubles,’ her mother often declares, ‘you can see that she’s going to be a woman of fashion!’ But the crimson woollen scarf that she wears around her neck on this cold February day has nothing to do with a desire to be fashionable; it is an oriflamme, a rallying banner, a manifest sign of her fondness for the boy she nicknames Lou-Fé.

It was she who had the idea that each of them should wear an identical scarf. And it was she who chose the colour.

When her mother asked her before Christmas what she would like to have as a present, she declared: ‘A scarf, in fact two scarves! Both the same, and red! The most beautiful red possible!’

Her mother said mockingly, ‘Oh I see, the other one’s for your boyfriend, isn’t it?’

But Lucie hates that word; it’s fine for grown-ups and idiots, but not for her and Lou-Fé. He means a great deal more to her than that; he is her twin. One day in the street she walked past a woman holding two children by the hand who were so alike that they appeared to be the same person twice over. This struck her imagination so forcibly, and seemed to her such an admirable phenomenon, that she declared twinhood to be a superior condition. A great deal superior to the banal condition of being in love. And so she sealed her friendship with that beautiful word which in her opinion sums up and expresses to perfection the absolute of affection. What does it matter if her supposed twin is older than she, if his hair is red and hers is dark, if he has light eyes and hers are very black. After all, her own brother Ferdinand, her mother’s son by her first marriage, is seventeen years older than she, and has golden-blond hair and blue eyes. That shows that all these physical details are of little importance. What is more, she is a Gemini: that must mean something, surely. And then there is the fact that they are now sporting these beautiful red scarves in honour of their friendship. For Lucie that is proof enough.

Their friendship came into being more than two years ago now, when Lucie left the little school to go to the middle school which Lou-Fé attended. As they were neighbours, they took to walking to school together. She lives in Weeping Barn Street which runs perpendicular to Bird-catcher Street. Weeping Barn Street is on the way out of the little town, leading down towards the marshes in a wide, gentle bend. Just on the curve stands the Daubigné family’s home. It is a beautiful house, sheltered from view behind leaf-green painted gates, clipped boxwood hedges, dog-rose bushes, small shrubs and slender little columns of hollyhocks and lupins.

The street owes its name to an old legend according to which there was once a barn on this land, long ago, when there were no other human dwellings nearby. And this barn, so they say, had a spell on it. If you went past the walls of the hayloft at dusk, you could hear a confused sound of sad, melodious sobbing. An unhappy old Mad-woman lived there. Nobody had ever set eyes on this poor, broken-hearted fairy, but her unseen weeping inspired pity. In the end, even the sky took pity on her; one day there was a thunderstorm in which the legendary barn was struck by lightning. The Madwoman’s tears evaporated in the fire which set ablaze the old, long-neglected hayloft. The fairy’s sorrow writhed in the flames, then rose up into the sky and disappeared. Nothing was left on earth but the memory of those tears, and the deserted spot was then given its name as a tender echo of those long sobs which had now at last fallen silent.

It was on September mornings as they walked to school together that Lucie and Lou-Fé began to be friends. They would set off together into the light mist, not daring to speak much yet. Then came cold, frosty-white winter mornings, when little clouds fluffed out around the children’s mouths every time they spoke – which they had finally begun to do – and every time they burst out laughing. After that came spring mornings, with a taste of sugar and freshness on the lips of the two children, who by now chattered incessantly. Lucie, who read nothing but fairy-tales and legends, made her companion’s head spin with improbable tales peopled by fairies, wolves, malicious will-o’-the-wisps, sylphs and ghosts. Louis-Félix gave free rein to his astral lyricism. Her imagination added colour and brightness to his knowledge; the fairies and wizards migrated from the earth to the sky, and went to meet the divinities who had come to rest on the distant planets. By the time summer arrived the children were inseparable; they branched out from the road to school and went exploring in other directions. Lucie took Lou-Fé off to her domain in the marshes, fields and forests, and he took his friend up to his attic-observatory. Then a new autumn came, another whole year went by, and now they have reached the middle of their third winter. But it will be the last one they spend so close to one another. By dint of missing out stages of his school career, Louis-Félix has reached the top class. At the beginning of the next school year he will have to go away. In their little town there is no senior school, so Lou-Fé will have to move to a larger town in the region, where he will be a boarder. Lucie is already tormented by the idea of this future separation. She does, however, find some small consolation in thinking ahead to the new bedroom she will soon have, where she will be able to invite her friend to stay overnight whenever he comes home. At the moment she has a very small room which is sandwiched between those of her mother and father. The new bedroom will be ready some time in the summer.

For Lucie this imminent move to another part of the house is a great adventure. She is going to leave her cramped childhood nook for a huge room at the other end of the corridor. Her new bedroom will open on to the kitchen garden, on the east side. On the other side of the kitchen garden wall is an expanse of fields and meadows, beyond which there are forests. There are also the marshes. The history of this region is inextricably bound up with that of the marshes, and the legends associated with them. It dates back to the time of King Dagobert, when the monks came and cleared the land. They cut down the trees with their axes; the land was unworkable, the area hostile and poor, the soil acid, but from their years of praying and chanting the monks had gained the strength to persevere against all odds; they dug the earth, built dykes, collected rainwater like manna from heaven, and re-enacted the miracle of Christ’s multiplying of the fish; birds came to nest on the banks of the sleeping waters, in the reeds, bulrushes and mosses. The birds stayed. The monks disappeared. But the ponds they dug out still offer up to the sky their gentle mirrors of grey water, as a humble memorial to the monks whose chants are no longer heard; and the birds still sing. Those ponds were like beads on which the monks told their rosary; and they have never been reduced to silence.

There are many other voices as well, many other cries, songs and murmurings that rise from the marshes. Any number of frogs live there, and toads with voices like pealing bells. On spring evenings they ring out strange Angeluses.

In the kitchen garden lives an enormous, solitary toad. He is very old, so old that he seems to Lucie to be immortal. Hyacinthe, Lucie’s father, who has always lived in this house, assures her that this toad is almost forty years old. He is rarely seen, but he is heard. Every spring his raucous voice returns after his long winter of silence beneath the ground. His voice rings out, on one low note, in the twilight. His monotonous chant holds sway over the place, the night and the stillness; the moon rises into the sky in accordance with its rhythms. He is the benign genius of the Daubigné home. When she was very small, Lucie was afraid of the toad, but her father told her all about him.

‘There is no need to be frightened of him, he will do you no harm, and you must never do him any either. This is his domain. He is called Melchior; I was the one who gave him that name long ago. Melchior is a sage, you know.’

‘What’s a sage?’ asked the little girl.

‘It’s someone who knows many things, who forgets nothing, who is steadfast and patient. Melchior sleeps in the winter, he buries himself under the earth or in the hollow of a tree stump. He sleeps when the earth sleeps. He wakes with the sun, and when the days are fine he comes back. And then he stands calmly in the new grass, looks at the world with his big golden eyes, and sees and hears things which neither you nor I can see or hear.’

Hyacinthe could remember very well the day when Melchior had taken up residence behind the house. It had happened not long after the death of his father. One evening his voice had arisen, sombre and muffled like a death knell tolling out tears and sorrow. The toad chanted an obscure, murky prayer, full of darkness and grief. Was this the voice of the deceased coming to haunt the place, or was it perhaps Hyacinthe’s own tears that found expression thus, since he was unable to cry himself? Which heart had this strange animal, hidden somewhere down on the ground, suddenly sprung from: the dead man’s or his son’s? Was it perhaps actually a heart, a real human heart? Perhaps so, because when a human heart is seized by grief, invaded by distress, gripped by cold, it becomes a hollow crater, filled with a deep, heavy emptiness; it swells with tears and takes on the colour and sonority of bronze. And absence resonates within it.

For the human heart is subject to metamorphoses, to migrations, to exile. It lingers in the places it has loved, long after the body in which it dwelt and grew has decomposed in the earth. The hearts of the dead are beggars who wander in search of a memory in which to make their home. In the same way, the hearts of the living – or rather of the survivors, as they become once they have passed through their first bereavement – are vagrants who journey backwards, calling out to the departed. Melchior was at the intersection of these two trajectories of memory.

Every spring for almost forty years, Hyacinthe Daubigné has waited for Melchior the toad to return. He dreads the day when the voice no longer arises from its long winter silence, when the spring remains silent, and the sacred heart of memory has ceased to beat.

But Lucie knows nothing of this legend which her father gloomily turns over and over in his mind. Lucie has not passed through any bereavement. For her Melchior is nothing more than a fat, ugly, funny little creature who will soon start up his familiar croaking again under her window.

‘You know,’ she says to Lou-Fé, ‘Melchior is a bit like you, he really likes the night-time and the stars, and he sings when the moon is out. And what’s more, he jumps about in the grass just the way you do!’

She has already asked to have two beds in her new bedroom; she wants twin beds, but her mother has refused.

‘For goodness’ sake Lucie, don’t be silly, Louis-Félix isn’t your brother, he isn’t even your cousin …’

‘Of course not, he’s far better than that, he’s my twin!’

‘Come on now, stop being so childish, will you? He’s only your imaginary twin. He’s not going to come and move in with us, he has his own family and his own home, and when he comes back from boarding school his parents will want to keep him with them. Of course I have no objection to his coming to spend a night here from time to time if he wants to. But a simple divan will be perfectly adequate.’

So Lucie has had to resign herself; she will make do with a divan. What’s more, ‘divan’ is a pretty word; in French it sounds like ‘dix vents’. You must have wonderful, swirling dreams when you sleep on ten winds. It will be ideal for Lou-Fé.

*

But just at this moment Lou-Fé has no thoughts of going to bed. He is dreaming on his feet, with his head in the air. He stands there, full of wonder, in the daylight which has now returned. He has just seen the most magnificent of all the winds: the solar wind. And his eyes, despite the brightness of the sun, remain fixed on the spot where the miracle took place.

A very great wind burst forth in the sky, a wind of pure light which stretched its arms wide open and embraced the ashy, sooty body of the moon. Selene’s heart must have sparkled with joy. That vision endures in the child’s eyes; that incandescent wind continues to vibrate through the clear sky. The world gleams, vast and new, as it comes out of the eclipse which for a moment enveloped it in mystery.