Tita by Houzelle Marie

Author:Houzelle, Marie [Houzelle, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Summertime Publications Inc
Published: 2014-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

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This evening Coralie is already asleep when Mother, smelling of carnation in a pink and green floral-print bustier dress, comes to kiss us good night. Our parents are going to a dinner party at the Viés’. As soon as I hear them walk down the hall and close the front door, I go back to the last pages of Henry Brulard, about the “five or six months of celestial, complete happiness” he spent in Milan. I love “five or six” because it means that he doesn’t know exactly, and he admits it. Mother would never say “five or six”. She always knows exactly, because she doesn’t care about the truth.

Milan, for Henry, becomes the most beautiful place on earth. “I don’t at all feel the charm of my fatherland,” he says. “I have for the place where I was born a repugnance, a physical disgust, like sea-sickness. Milan, from 1800 to 1821, was where I constantly yearned to live.” Milan! A place I’d never heard of until now. I try to think if there is a place in the world where I could yearn to live. Maybe Paris, in spite of the bad reputation Justine and our brothers give it.

“Reader, forgive me!” Henry writes. “If you are older than thirty or if, younger, you are on the side of prose, close this book!” He’s always telling us to close his book, or asking his future editor, if he ever gets one, to cut his digressions. It’s a bit much but I like him so I decide that I’m not on the side of prose either.

Henry starts telling us about the woman he loved in Milan: “She did love me, somehow. She had other lovers but I told myself that, if my rank had been on a level with theirs, she would have preferred me! I had other lovers too.”

This is what I’ll do. I don’t know if I’ll go to Milan, it might be some other place, but I won’t stay in my fatherland either. I’ll be happy sometimes, celestially, and I’ll have quite a few lovers, like him. He doesn’t say much more about these times: “How can I paint the extravagant happiness everything gave me?” The last sentence of the book is, On gâte des sentiments si tendres à les raconter en détail, One spoils such tender feelings by recounting them in detail.

I hear Grandmother and Loli go up to their rooms. The house is totally quiet now. The clock on the mantelpiece says ten to eleven, so our parents should still be safely away. I decide to take Henry Brulard to Father’s study, and look up prose in the Petit Robert.

I don’t quite understand the definition, but the word came into the French language in 1265, from the Latin prosa oratio, “speech that goes in a straight line”. And I can see that Henry does exactly the opposite: as soon as he starts telling us about something, he remembers something else.

I also look up porridge: it was

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