Small Lives by Pierre Michon

Author:Pierre Michon [Michon, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781935744702
Google: B5lItxTcY1AC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 16476599
Publisher: Archipelago
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Life of Father Foucault

It was the beginning of summer, in the early seventies, in Clermont-Ferrand. My brief sojourn into the world of theater was coming to an end; the theater company had disbanded, some having moved on to engagements elsewhere, others, like myself, passively awaiting a change in the wind of their destiny. Marianne and I were the only ones left in the big house we called “the Villa,” which a short while ago we had all occupied, on the hill at the far end of the long garden; the time of cherries had gone by; the hot bronze shadow of the large cherry tree flooded the mansarded windows on the first floor where we lived; in this fervent shadow, I slowly undressed Marianne, examined her in its blaze, threw her onto the blond floorboards baked by the torpor of the days. In the midst of these interplaying reflections, the too-rosy passages of her thighs took on the tones of one of those Renoirs where, violently displayed in a burst of sunlight but then withdrawn into the half shadow of a haystack, the mauve sculpting of the flesh springs more nakedly, shadowed with gold, from the purple wheat. My vehement hands, her exultant leaps and excessive mouth made that heavy flesh and its heavy nuances tremble infinitely. Marianne’s cries in her lifted skirts, the sweat, and the rich half-light are what I retain of that summer, before the event that I am going to recount.

Marianne had accepted some temporary underpaid summer job I have since forgotten; thus we had a little money. Tired, perhaps, of our sweaty exchanges, one evening we went out; Marianne may remember something of that late afternoon, some fragments of that moment in time, my face changing in the successive shadows and light as we crossed the main square beneath the shade of the lindens, some words I said, my glance toward the high presence of the Puy de Dôme, which turns violet in the dusk; I have forgotten all that; but I remember, and surely she remembers as well, that I was holding in my hand a book I had bought that same day, the Gilles de Rais by a great author, and she remembers the softened radiance of its deep red cover, like a gift book. We ate at a restaurant on the Rue des Minimes, which fills in the evening with heavily made-up presences, shady looks passed in the shade of the porches, hard, ringing heels. I drank a good deal; I completed the operation with the help of many glasses of Velay vervain, a liqueur made by monks, which is green as a Chassériau fountain and has a sly, feverish, viscous effect. I went out into the night drunk; Marianne was anxious, the indifferent gaze of the prostitutes followed us to the end of the dark street; the light from the central avenues exasperated me. We went from bar to bar, my ire growing as my speech became thicker, more and

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