Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) by Lain Douglas

Author:Lain, Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

17

At the Sorbonne Christopher found a pleasant café with sidewalk tables and red-white-and-blue-striped umbrellas right across the street from the exasperated students who were organizing a situation. On May 2 Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been suspended from Nanterre in a disciplinary hearing for the actions of March 22 and on that same day the student union hall was burned down. Dean Grappin had appeared on television to announce that he was shutting down the campus; the students’ response was transpiring as Christopher waited for his drink. Cohn-Bendit, for example, arrived with his megaphone right at precisely the same time as Christopher’s mimosa, and Chris found it difficult to figure out how many francs he owed while trying to follow what Cohn-Bendit was saying. Chris’s French was pretty rusty, and Cohn-Bendit’s words were somewhat distorted.

Chris drank his breakfast cocktail and watched. His stomach was empty and he thought of ordering some tea to offset the effect of the champagne, but when the waiter came around again he settled for a small cup of thick coffee. Chris glanced up at the Sorbonne tower, at the dome, and then down again at the students on the street. The baroque backdrop for the struggle, the Sorbonne with its columns and ornamental statues, the majesty of the institution they were opposing, this seemed to work to the students’ advantage. After all, rebellions and strikes had occurred many, many times since the first revolution. Why not again? Somehow the Sorbonne made its history visible, the past visible right on the surface of the marble façade, and this made change seem possible.

The students all looked quite smart. The boys had short hair and wore sports jackets and ties while the girls had long hair and wore skirts and dresses. Chris wondered which of them was Gerrard Hand. He wondered what was keeping him.

The table Christopher was sitting at was grooved. There were pictures of animals—of snakes and ducks and lizards and owls—engraved into the uneven surface of the marble, and someone had left a copy of a pamphlet entitled “On the Poverty of Student Life” on the chair next to his. Chris let his coffee grow cold as he worked out the French text. “To transform the world and to change the structure of life are one and the same thing for the proletariat. For the proletariat revolt is a festival or it is nothing.”

Chris wasn’t sure if he was reading it correctly. He didn’t see a clear connection between the first and second sentences. He took the letter Gerrard had written from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and separated out the altered newspaper advertisement he’d been sent from the letter itself.

Disney and Slesinger had managed to make his father’s books into cartoon movies in America and one of the advertisements for these, an advertisement for the first film entitled Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, featured Pooh standing in front of a full-length mirror with his stubby arms over his eyes. Gerrard had rubbed out the original text below the drawing and replaced them with French.

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