An Atheists' Bible by Kurtis Sunday

Author:Kurtis Sunday
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Cambria Books, Wales, UK
Published: 2020-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

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Bageuret was lying on the couch in the front room of his lodgings above Imprimerie Charpentier. He had covered himself with a blanket – the fire was alight but there was still a chill in the air – when the door opened and a little boy’s head appeared.

“What are you doing, Papa?” Christophe asked.

The child’s fever had passed and he was up and about again.

Bageuret smiled, shifted himself into a more comfortable position and lifted the eight-year-old onto his lap. Sunday was the only day he ever got to spend any time with the boy.

“I was remembering when I was a little boy like you,” he lied.

He ran his fingers through the boy’s brown curls. His hair was like Thérèse’s, soft to the touch, feminine. The boy would never cease to remind him of her. The memory that came to him was of her stepping out of the tin bath in the kitchen of their old place on the Rue des Dragons, her wet goose-pimpled buttocks glistening in the candlelight, her belly full and round. It had been a Good Friday, after three o’clock, the time when Christ was in his tomb again and sins of the flesh unthinkable. Was lust for the dead as sinful as lust for the living, he wondered; he winced for shame at the idea of having to ask absolution for such a thing, even in the anonymity of the confessional. Then, mere months later: the boy’s gory birth, the ferric odour and tinkling sound of her blood dripping into the white glazed dish when Porée had bled her, and Death. It sometimes seemed that he loved her more now than at any time when she was alive.

“Did your papa take you to the Place de Grève, Papa?” the boy asked.

“What games did you play today?” he asked, instead of attempting to respond to the awkward question, surprised by his son’s perception that he too had had a father. At that age he himself, as far as he could remember, had only been dimly aware that his own father had had a father, or his mother a mother, or that time really passed.

“I played Louis and Arnot played Damiens, and then I played a horse.”

The boy’s face was pretty and guileless. Bageuret wondered if he himself had looked angelic at that age. A place in one of the Jesuit schools would enable the boy to get an apprenticeship, or a pupillage or whatever it was called, with a chamber of lawyers. Degrees in law, he had heard, could be had on the most cursory of examinations at Rheims – with, it went without saying, the right introductions and the money. Lawyers could do well. Minor court offices, those that conferred noble status after twenty years – if not on the holder, then at least on his sons – were not beyond the means of the half-successful advocate, especially in the provinces. Years hence, long after he was in his grave, Bageuret imagined a portrait of

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