Victoire by Maryse Conde

Author:Maryse Conde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

From the time Jeanne left for Versailles, Victoire’s life took on a more somber coloring. It was not just the gray routine of life, even grayer since the aborted dream of Martinique. It was the black of frustration and suffering that was slowly overwhelming her. She had trouble getting over her daughter’s bitterness and had difficulty understanding it. She plunged herself in her cooking while her talent reached a perfection of fantasy and inventiveness, even though the Walbergs were the only ones to profit from it since they no longer entertained at home. She knew only too well that Jeanne was ashamed of her. Consequently, against Anne-Marie’s advice, she refused to go and visit Jeanne in Basse-Terre. She could see herself in the visitor’s room, in the covered playground with her daughter under the gaze of the nuns in cornets. She would stick out like a sore thumb from the other parents, educated and well dressed white Creoles and mulattoes. How they would all look her up and down! How they would snigger behind her back! As a result, for one entire school year, mother and daughter communicated solely through the letters that Jeanne sent to La Pointe once a month and that Anne-Marie read out loud:

My dear mother,

My dear godmother,

Dear Monsieur Walberg,

I am very well except for a cough that starts especially in the evening because the air that blows down from the mountain is cool, almost cold. I had to buy two woolens chez Rivier. Yesterday the nuns took us to mass for the month of Mary at the Carmel church. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and not a soul in the streets. Every house had its shutters lowered. Apparently that’s how they live in Basse-Terre: behind closed shutters.

With love and affection.

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