The Oracle Glass Part 3

Each of us found something worthwhile in these trips. For days after, Marie-Angelique would feed on the glimpse of the Marquise of So-and-So's beautiful ribbons, or the new hairstyle of the Countess of Such-and-Such, and I would write in my little book. I was, at the time, testing the validity of religion by using the geometric method of proof to a.s.sess the efficacy of prayer. First I wrote down the illnesses and injuries of those we visited and the likelihood of recovery of the sick persons we had seen. Then, through ingenuous questioning, I attempted to ascertain how many prayers had been offered in each case. This I did by multiplying the number of relatives by a figure of one to five, depending upon how well the person was liked by his family. Then I would write down whether or not the person outlived his prognostication. The project kept me totally content. After all, the use of ordered thinking to discover the truth is the highest occupation of humankind.

Charity did Mother good and made her calmer. The day the carriage was taken, she had rushed shrieking about the house, then battered open the door of Father's study, where he and I were discussing Seneca, and covered him with abuse. He looked up at her, where she stood before his armchair, and his eyes moved slowly, so slowly, with a look I'll never forget.

"Madame, I leave you to your infidelities; you leave me to my philosophers."

"Your-your stupidities, your lack of ambition-your refusal to be seen at court, to carry my pet.i.tions...your Romans have reduced me, Monsieur. They have brought me to this, and it is beyond my endurance."

Father spoke with utter calm: "The day I appear at court it will be to pet.i.tion the King to have you shut up in a convent for your scandalous life. Go, Madame, and do not interrupt me again." He opened his Seneca again to the place where he had left his bookmark.

Mother stood still, all white, her eyes half closed. Then she spoke. "You are utterly tiresome," she said in a cold voice and withdrew from the low, book-lined room, holding the train of her pale green silk morning gown in her hand. Father sat still in his armchair, book open on his lap, and looked over his little reading gla.s.ses to watch her go with exactly the same expression with which one would regard an insect disappearing into a crack in the wall.

After that she had vanished in a hired chair for the rest of the day. Then it was not long before she discovered charity, and all was calm again.

But to return to our hospital visit. Andre Lamotte, bold and poor, swept off his hat for my sister with a flourish as we pa.s.sed.

"Don't nod to him," said Mother, turning her face away. "He is without fortune. I'll not have you encouraging such people." As we turned down the rue de Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs, I turned back to look at him. He was holding his hat over his heart, with a yearning expression on his face. When he saw me peeking at him, he grinned, and I thought I saw him wink.

We crossed the Parvis Notre-Dame, Mother looking to the right and left to make sure that we missed no one of consequence. "Ah, isn't that the Comtesse d'Armagnac I see arriving there?" she observed. "Walk a little slower, Marie-Angelique, so that we may greet her as she pa.s.ses." We entered the low, Gothic portals of the Hotel Dieu and were greeted by a novice, who preceded us down the long salle St. Thomas. As we paused at each of the ma.s.sive curtained beds to offer sustenance to the sufferers lying within, Mother questioned him as to the fate of those who had partaken of her bounty the week before.

"I miss the patient sufferer on the right in bed number eighty-six-Monsieur Duclos, was it? Who loved my little cakes so. And, see here, I brought his favorite ones-" Mother's saintly tones showed only a hint of disappointment.

"Regretfully, Madame Pasquier, his sufferings on earth were ended shortly after your last visit."

"I shall miss him. He had such wonderful wit, even in suffering." Mother pa.s.sed her handkerchief before her eyes and continued down the second row of beds, offering cakes, words of encouragement, and here and there a prayer. I noted it all. Days lingered, estimated number of prayers. So far, prayer was losing.

I left with ten cases. Two, to whom Mother had not given any attention, were getting better. Of the other eight, five had died despite a plentiful dose of prayers and Mother's little pates, and two more had turned that interesting grayish color that precedes death. Writing in my book that night helped clear my heart. If I had a daughter, I would not take her to hospitals.

A thought: perhaps the geometric proof of the effectiveness of prayer has been measuring instead the evil effects of rich food on the sick? I went through my notes that night by the light of a guttering candle. I counted, I counted again. Yes, there it was. Just to take an example, everyone who has eaten mother's pates and candied fruit has died, whether prayed for or not. Devise another proof. Surely G.o.d is not concealed in a pate. I paused, lifting my pen. Was it something Mother was doing? No, surely it had to be coincidence.

"Where are you going, all by yourself like that?" I'd come from our back door out the garden gate with the remains of the hospital food in a basket.

"The rue de la Licorne, and what business is it of yours?"

"You know, I never suspected until this morning that you were a daughter of the house. I thought-well...you know, the way you wander out by yourself and all..." Andre Lamotte was still haunting the street. I stormed past him, nose in the air, insulted that he'd ever taken me for a servant girl.

"You thought I was a paid companion, didn't you?"

"Wait, now-you can't carry that. I'll accompany you." He had a certain breezy charm, but I knew instinctively that, like the sun, he beamed equally on everyone, and it didn't mean anything. It was that egalitarianism of charm that offended me even more than rudeness would have.

"Just because I can't walk straight doesn't mean I'm weak," I said. "Besides, I should inform you right away that we have no inheritance, my sister and I, for all the house is so grand. So you may as well save your efforts for someone more promising." He laughed and continued to follow me shamelessly.

Having abandoned the basket at its destination, I turned to him and said fiercely, "Now, Monsieur Lamotte, tell me why you are following me." He made a leg in the mud of the alley, right there, and swept off his hat in a grand gesture worthy of the palace of Saint-Germain.

"Mademoiselle Pasquier, I, Andre Lamotte, of poetic soul and gentle manners, am at your service. I am not following you but escorting you. And I am doing so in order to ingratiate myself with the sister of the Divine Angel of the Upper Window."

"That's exactly what I thought," I sniffed, and I limped on ahead of him without looking back. He hurried ahead of me, and before I reached the corner he blocked my way, bowing again, and flourishing his hat. People were staring. I was humiliated.

"Mademoiselle, I will block your way forever, unless you grant me your favor." A woman came out of a shop front hung with plucked chickens and geese, wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n. She laughed.

"Nonsense," I snapped. I stared at them both and fled in the opposite direction. He replaced his hat and sped ahead of me in great leaps, confronting me at the next corner.

"You stop this!" I cried. He swept off his hat again. A gaggle of little boys playing ball stopped to watch. "Cruel woman," he declaimed, in the voice of the professional tragedian, "say yes, or I'll die of grief on the street."

"You quit this," I hissed. "You're humiliating me on purpose."

"When I die, Mademoiselle, it will be all your fault. The world will mourn yet another victim of woman's coldness." He clutched his hat to his heart.

"Tell him yes, you foolish girl!" shouted a woman's voice from a window.

"Yes, do it! He's very handsome!" cried another. Soon the cry was taken up. "Do it, you hard-hearted girl! Yes! Why, I'd do it!"

"If you die here in the street, your relatives will be disgraced," I announced, trying to ignore the gathering crowd.

"Ah, but I have no one-no hope but you." He wiped a pretend tear away. The gathering crowd shouted encouragement, and he bowed genteelly to them.

"Quit mocking me, Monsieur," I cried, stamping my foot as I felt my face turning hot.

"Heartless woman!" shouted a voice from the crowd.

"Stop it now. You take me home." I burst into tears of rage.

"Yes, yes, take her home!" was the joyful shout of the crowd. He replaced his hat.

"Very well, then, if you insist," he said, addressing the crowd and taking my arm with an elaborate gesture. Even then, Lamotte was a favorite of the mob. He nodded and grinned to the gleeful group of ragam.u.f.fins that seemed determined to follow us all the way to my doorstep. As he led them roundabout through the alleys and streets, they seemed to grow in number rather than diminish. Still raging within, I heard a cry. "There he is! The Grand Cyrus at the head of his troops!" It came from the open door of the Pomme de Pin, that notorious gathering place of would-be playwrights and authors of satirical pamphlets. It was often visited by the police in search of the authors of forbidden works, because folks like that have no fixed address. In short, it was a writers' den, a tavern of the lowest reputation among proper people. The ragam.u.f.fins gathered in a cl.u.s.ter behind my escort as he halted to address the source of the voice within the door.

"And like Cyrus, I carry off the prize," Lamotte announced calmly, addressing the swarthy, dark-haired young man in the open door. He was of medium height, slightly stoop shouldered from too much study, and unfashionably dressed in plain black.

"Ha!" responded the black-clad man, emerging from the mysterious opening with a taller friend. "To think that until this very moment I thought the unknown angel was blond."

"Truly, love is madness to so change the color of the adored's hair," agreed the tall, shabbily dressed fellow that appeared beside the first man.

"Her sister," announced my escort with a flourish, "the gateway to the adored, the artisan of my happiness-or despair-Mademoiselle Genevieve, may I present to you two of the companions of my life's journey: this honest-looking fellow in the threadbare coat is Jean-Baptiste Gillet, better known by his imprimatur as the Griffon. He is soon to grow celebrated as the publisher of my collected works, when I have written them." The tall fellow with the droll face bowed by way of an answer.

"Now, this soberly clad fellow beside him is neither a widower nor a Jansenist divine, but Florent d'Urbec, called Cato the Censor by those who know him best. He understands everything and approves of nothing. He believes in the universal applicability of the geometric method of proof, applying it equally to the fortunes of the state, the playing of cards, and the courting of young women."

The dark-haired young man in the ill-fitting provincial suit bowed deeply, with a flourish of his untrimmed, broad-brimmed hat.

"The geometric method?" I asked, somewhat taken aback.

"It is irrefutable," he announced, staring at me with impudent, intelligent black eyes. "From the geometric method, I intend to create a universal science of prediction." He had a fiercely aquiline nose, intense, serious brows, and black curls that fell about his ears in anarchic disarray, as if he had simply clipped them off himself with scissors to save the cost of a barber. But it was his smile that annoyed me most: a wicked, lazy, arrogant smile, as if he were the only clever person in the world. I'll show him, I thought.

"Oh, are you Cato?" I addressed the arrogant young man. "Author of Observations on the Health of the State? I'd always imagined you to be a gouty old gentleman."

"Mademoiselle, it is a mark of the frivolity of the times that you should imagine only the elderly capable of seriousness of purpose," he said, mocking me with his dark eyes. I was furious at his condescension.

"But really," I said aloud, "do you think it appropriate to argue so consistently by a.n.a.logy to the body in the case of an ent.i.ty so very different in composition as the state? For example, the functions of the heart as discovered by the Englishman, Monsieur Harvey, are not at all those previously attributed to-" Monsieur Lamotte drew back and stared at me as if he had discovered a viper underneath his pillow.