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♯ NANOWRIMO EXCERPTS, updated 23.09
Sep. 19th, 2022 08:20 pmNANOWRIMO 2022
CHAPTER 1 - CONTINUED
Although there are indeed marketplaces in the city of Paris as well, it is not until you remove yourself from the busy metropolis that one can truly experience a farmer’s market as they have existed throughout hundreds of years in these parts. Farmers from the surrounding area gather in these places to sell their crop and their goods at bargaining prices, and many of them, it seemed, were acquainted with Armand, if not by name, then by looks. Monsieur Duval, they would shout after him as we strolled past with our redingotes and our top hats, if nothing else then for the mere look of money he carried about himself, and a few of them the other man would even grace with his attention for a moment, looking over their selections like one who knew what belonged in a cauldron of soup and what did not. As I, under an air of polite disinterest, listened to him exchange words with first this seller then that, it dawned on me the exact extent of M. Duval’s influence in the town. Not only was he feared as a strict, rule-abiding tax collector, but he was certainly also revered as a charitable man who donated to the church on the monthly to help run the local poorhouses and orphanage. It dawned on me from whom exactly Armand had his good heart. Had I not suspected so previously and with plenty of reason. I observed Armand, then, with a pride spreading in the cavity of my chest that surely wasn’t mine to profit from, but warm me it did, nonetheless.
Here was a kind and caring man! At times, yes, perhaps, too much so, but for which man is it ever justified to blame another for his virtues? Did Christ not say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone? Thus, as we moved along down the aisles, past the girls with their crates of chickens and the row of dairy cattle with their pipe-smoking cattle farmers holding the reins, I found myself questioning the very virtues by which I normally prided myself. Not for my own sake, I was undoubtedly virtuous enough to uphold my own good name and reputation, but when you were dealing with a man such as Armand, name and reputation alone would never meet the standards he set. Did I have heart? Did I have spirit? These questions had never bothered me before, yet at that moment, I wondered, and I doubted, and I feared. And this fear left me trembling, even in the mild May weather, the sun a round, yellow disc above our heads and many a farmer’s wife unwrapping themselves from their scarves and taking off their hats to counteract the impending summer.
We walked at a leisurely stroll until the livestock was substituted by great displays of fruit and vegetables, many wooden crates of tomatoes and eggplants colouring the market in a warm hue of red and purple. As if it were autumn and not spring, the end of summer and not the beginning of it. Down another aisle, a small booth was selling duck eggs and plucked swans and geese, and at this booth, Armand drew to a halt, gesturing broadly to the basket of big, slightly bluish eggs, then to a dead goose. “What do you make of this, my friend?” Well, I thought to myself, the exhibit I could say many things of, but his question? What I made of that, I was not sure. Was he testing me? At my hesitancy, he clasped my shoulder and leaned in over it to pose a question at the young girl tending to the stall.
“Do you sell chickens, mademoiselle?”
The girl looked from Armand to me only once, then shrugged lightly, “my father says specializing in one thing gets you further than being a jack of all trades, sir.”
Rather than giving an answer, Armand turned his head to look at me, the tip of his nose awfully close to my ear and his lips, smiling now, an expression I had not been blessed with often enough for me to appreciate it with less than unquestioning gratitude, were all but brushing my jaw. “What do you make of it?”
Only then did it dawn on me that my dear friend was teasing me. Why, I did not know, but no part of me objected. He had been in the unpitying embrace of grief for months already, and before that tossed about on the turbulent waves of an inner turmoil I found it hard to even imagine. He deserved to tease a friend about a goose-seller’s stall. My answer, under any circumstances, was not important. What mattered was how his eyes were not circled by dark despair anymore and his movements not weighed down by a psychological anguish. So, I reached up and grabbed his hand as he had grabbed mine in his room and I squeezed it lightly, then looked at the girl who was eyeing us both suspiciously and expectantly at the same time.
“I shall conclude that your father, mademoiselle, is both a wise man and a man of means enough to specialize in geese and swans and ducks rather than chickens. These are luxury birds, and you must sell me one, so I can show my appreciation towards the host with whom I am currently staying.”
Both Armand and the goose-seller lit up at those words. I reached into my pocket for my wallet and pointed to a large goose hanging in the shade of the awning. She unhooked the thing and wrapped it in paper for me, calling for what could be a younger brother who appeared from beneath the stall and took the wrapped bird. “Give Louis the address and he will deliver your purchase for you,” she said. I gave M. Duval’s address to him, and he nodded quickly, I know the place, sir, before running off. Once he had disappeared into the crowd, I shook two francs out onto my palm and placed them on the tabletop next to the basket of duck eggs. The girl’s eyes widened almost comically, and Armand only now slowly released my shoulder.
“Sir, you can bargain for it,” she hastily informed me.
“I wish to encourage your father’s business strategy,” I replied and began turning away. Armand nodded at the girl, then followed. She didn’t shout after us or object further, I imagine she simply pocketed the francs and told her father to feed the geese a little extra in the name of a kind stranger. Such were the antics that Armand inspired in me.
We walked in silence back towards M. Duval’s house, no doubt right at little Louis’ heels. “What do you wish to encourage in me,” Armand asked quietly after a few minutes, and I turned my head to look at him. The circles of despair were back around his eyes, those deep ponds of emotion and agony. Marguerite was evidently with us once more. I sent her a pitying thought. At least I had him in the flesh, whereas that creature now roamed wherever the Lord houses his fallen angels. With a sigh, I reached for and grabbed Armand’s nearest forearm through his jacket and let him feel my fingers, the hold of them. As I deliberately let him go, I said, “happiness, Armand.”
Only happiness.
The cook informed M. Duval of my gift’s arrival in the kitchens and after dinner, where we had soup, the goose was being saved for Friday’s open supper where selected guests would be invited to share the meal, the elderly man took me aside, both of us casting long glances after his son who was standing melancholy over the piano on which his sister was playing humble church tunes. He had yet to mention Marguerite with a word, outside the privacy of his own room and to me who could no doubt be counted a dear and intimate friend, and I could tell that his father worried, while his mother and his sister centred their innocent worries about their charity work, sewing bonnets for babies at the orphanage, playing preludes on the piano, such things. M. Duval, however, could tell from one look how Armand suffered and, if nothing else, then in spirit, still carried the weight of a coffin-cover of camellias. The lady lying underneath it.
“Monsieur Dubois,” he addressed me, though I quickly grasped his strong hand, giving it a firm shake.
“Call me Jean-Philippe, please, sir,” I implored.
“Jean-Philippe, then,” he obeyed, smiling with that ever-present restraint that I had come to associate with him and which his eldest lacked in everything. “Like a second son, I feel.”
I released his hand and bowed my head, to show that I was certainly aware how an honour had just befallen me. “If that is your perception, I must be said to have an excellent brother to whom I shall do my best to live up.”
And again, we both looked to Armand who did not notice, but merely listened to Parle, Commande, Règne as played by pale fingers on a pair of slim, female hands. He seemed quite lost in thought. To myself, I wondered what image might be playing out before his wet eyes. Marguerite, too, had played the piano – Weber, as far as I recalled. Invitation to the Dance lay on the far-opposite end of the scale from this, I would argue. Yet, I said nothing to his father about it. It seemed a private matter.
“The goose was a kind gesture,” commented the elderly gentleman after a while, without letting his eyes stray from his two children, creating such a picturesque motif. I had no doubt that he was a proud man, also and perhaps in particular of them.
“I felt that I had to contribute something, if I intended to stay longer,” I replied. M. Duval hummed something faintly affirmative in response and crossed his arms in front of his chest, his wife calling for Blanche from the hall. Without a sigh and without a single display of displeasure, the girl got up and left the piano behind, brushing a hand over Armand’s shoulder on the way. He seemed to startle back to a more conscious presence at the touch. At this point, he turned his head and looked over at us, his eyes finding mine. I welcomed his gaze. However, he seemed to sense the importance of this conversation between his father and me, so after a long moment, he too left the piano behind, shuffling after his sister to see if his mother might need his assistance as well. They were that kind of family, I had long since decided, one in which distrust simply did not take root. Despite what had happened between Marguerite and him, he could not imagine his father would turn me against him, or perhaps he didn’t think it was possible. I took comfort in that second notion. Again, there was that pride in my chest which I was not entitled to but felt all the same. I left it to its steady pulsations.
“How much time does a goose buy you, I wonder,” asked M. Duval with a small smile, once Armand was out the door. I turned to look at him fully, frankly. Nothing less than sincerity would soften this man’s principles and the barricades of his fatherly heart.
“It was my hope that we can at least agree that I might be allowed to stay until Armand is a little better,” I responded, no longer needing to keep discreet in the face of the subject in question’s close and immediate presence. Monsieur Duval looked pained, the sign of a good parent: sympathy.
“He did not know her for very long. Can one not hope, then, that his grief shall last just as briefly as the acquaintance that caused it?”
I objected respectfully. “She was his whole life, monsieur. He could as well have died himself. You must think of it as if we are currently raising a man from the dead.”
Another faintly affirmative response and M. Duval reached up to stroke his chin, looking deeply engaged in thought. Rather than disturb him in what was undoubtedly important considerations, I looked around the living room with its small upright piano by the wall and the sofa arrangement by the windows and outside, still, that gentle May afternoon, soon to become evening, the light was changing already from its deep golden to a more orange-coloured hue.
“You believe we should heal him with tenderness and time, rather than force.”
With a self-deprecating tug at the corner of my lips and a deeper yet bow of my head, I shook it and said, “against the tendency of the times, I’m afraid I believe very little of worth can truly be obtained through force.”
We both laughed softly, I to soften the implications, he because he understood them.
“I believe, sir,” I continued after we had chuckled good-naturedly and been done with it, “that to ensure his next relationship -” and saying those words made something knot in my stomach for reasons I couldn’t word as easily as I worded the rest of the sentence, “- sprouts naturally which I am certain we are both eagerly expecting and to let it overgrow the old house that is Armand’s love for Marguerite like a strong vine, we must fertilize this period of grief as much as the relations awaiting him in the future. Do you not agree?”
A long silence.
“I agree,” said the noble, elderly gentleman.
Straightening up and squaring my shoulders, I felt satisfied with the development of our conversation. M. Duval, it seemed, felt similarly, because he turned towards me again for a short moment to clasp my shoulder with his strong hand, patting me two times on the back and thereafter, pointed in the direction in which first Blanche and then Armand had disappeared. He did not say the words, but I understood the implicitness of them, run along now with the rest.
So, I stepped back, bowed to him with all the genuine respect I could possibly exhibit like that and went to see the mother and her two little lambs, one slightly more innocent than the other.
They were not awaiting me, but they welcomed me with open arms anyway, as could by now only be regarded as a family trait, a tendency that ran in their blood.
Although there are indeed marketplaces in the city of Paris as well, it is not until you remove yourself from the busy metropolis that one can truly experience a farmer’s market as they have existed throughout hundreds of years in these parts. Farmers from the surrounding area gather in these places to sell their crop and their goods at bargaining prices, and many of them, it seemed, were acquainted with Armand, if not by name, then by looks. Monsieur Duval, they would shout after him as we strolled past with our redingotes and our top hats, if nothing else then for the mere look of money he carried about himself, and a few of them the other man would even grace with his attention for a moment, looking over their selections like one who knew what belonged in a cauldron of soup and what did not. As I, under an air of polite disinterest, listened to him exchange words with first this seller then that, it dawned on me the exact extent of M. Duval’s influence in the town. Not only was he feared as a strict, rule-abiding tax collector, but he was certainly also revered as a charitable man who donated to the church on the monthly to help run the local poorhouses and orphanage. It dawned on me from whom exactly Armand had his good heart. Had I not suspected so previously and with plenty of reason. I observed Armand, then, with a pride spreading in the cavity of my chest that surely wasn’t mine to profit from, but warm me it did, nonetheless.
Here was a kind and caring man! At times, yes, perhaps, too much so, but for which man is it ever justified to blame another for his virtues? Did Christ not say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone? Thus, as we moved along down the aisles, past the girls with their crates of chickens and the row of dairy cattle with their pipe-smoking cattle farmers holding the reins, I found myself questioning the very virtues by which I normally prided myself. Not for my own sake, I was undoubtedly virtuous enough to uphold my own good name and reputation, but when you were dealing with a man such as Armand, name and reputation alone would never meet the standards he set. Did I have heart? Did I have spirit? These questions had never bothered me before, yet at that moment, I wondered, and I doubted, and I feared. And this fear left me trembling, even in the mild May weather, the sun a round, yellow disc above our heads and many a farmer’s wife unwrapping themselves from their scarves and taking off their hats to counteract the impending summer.
We walked at a leisurely stroll until the livestock was substituted by great displays of fruit and vegetables, many wooden crates of tomatoes and eggplants colouring the market in a warm hue of red and purple. As if it were autumn and not spring, the end of summer and not the beginning of it. Down another aisle, a small booth was selling duck eggs and plucked swans and geese, and at this booth, Armand drew to a halt, gesturing broadly to the basket of big, slightly bluish eggs, then to a dead goose. “What do you make of this, my friend?” Well, I thought to myself, the exhibit I could say many things of, but his question? What I made of that, I was not sure. Was he testing me? At my hesitancy, he clasped my shoulder and leaned in over it to pose a question at the young girl tending to the stall.
“Do you sell chickens, mademoiselle?”
The girl looked from Armand to me only once, then shrugged lightly, “my father says specializing in one thing gets you further than being a jack of all trades, sir.”
Rather than giving an answer, Armand turned his head to look at me, the tip of his nose awfully close to my ear and his lips, smiling now, an expression I had not been blessed with often enough for me to appreciate it with less than unquestioning gratitude, were all but brushing my jaw. “What do you make of it?”
Only then did it dawn on me that my dear friend was teasing me. Why, I did not know, but no part of me objected. He had been in the unpitying embrace of grief for months already, and before that tossed about on the turbulent waves of an inner turmoil I found it hard to even imagine. He deserved to tease a friend about a goose-seller’s stall. My answer, under any circumstances, was not important. What mattered was how his eyes were not circled by dark despair anymore and his movements not weighed down by a psychological anguish. So, I reached up and grabbed his hand as he had grabbed mine in his room and I squeezed it lightly, then looked at the girl who was eyeing us both suspiciously and expectantly at the same time.
“I shall conclude that your father, mademoiselle, is both a wise man and a man of means enough to specialize in geese and swans and ducks rather than chickens. These are luxury birds, and you must sell me one, so I can show my appreciation towards the host with whom I am currently staying.”
Both Armand and the goose-seller lit up at those words. I reached into my pocket for my wallet and pointed to a large goose hanging in the shade of the awning. She unhooked the thing and wrapped it in paper for me, calling for what could be a younger brother who appeared from beneath the stall and took the wrapped bird. “Give Louis the address and he will deliver your purchase for you,” she said. I gave M. Duval’s address to him, and he nodded quickly, I know the place, sir, before running off. Once he had disappeared into the crowd, I shook two francs out onto my palm and placed them on the tabletop next to the basket of duck eggs. The girl’s eyes widened almost comically, and Armand only now slowly released my shoulder.
“Sir, you can bargain for it,” she hastily informed me.
“I wish to encourage your father’s business strategy,” I replied and began turning away. Armand nodded at the girl, then followed. She didn’t shout after us or object further, I imagine she simply pocketed the francs and told her father to feed the geese a little extra in the name of a kind stranger. Such were the antics that Armand inspired in me.
We walked in silence back towards M. Duval’s house, no doubt right at little Louis’ heels. “What do you wish to encourage in me,” Armand asked quietly after a few minutes, and I turned my head to look at him. The circles of despair were back around his eyes, those deep ponds of emotion and agony. Marguerite was evidently with us once more. I sent her a pitying thought. At least I had him in the flesh, whereas that creature now roamed wherever the Lord houses his fallen angels. With a sigh, I reached for and grabbed Armand’s nearest forearm through his jacket and let him feel my fingers, the hold of them. As I deliberately let him go, I said, “happiness, Armand.”
Only happiness.
The cook informed M. Duval of my gift’s arrival in the kitchens and after dinner, where we had soup, the goose was being saved for Friday’s open supper where selected guests would be invited to share the meal, the elderly man took me aside, both of us casting long glances after his son who was standing melancholy over the piano on which his sister was playing humble church tunes. He had yet to mention Marguerite with a word, outside the privacy of his own room and to me who could no doubt be counted a dear and intimate friend, and I could tell that his father worried, while his mother and his sister centred their innocent worries about their charity work, sewing bonnets for babies at the orphanage, playing preludes on the piano, such things. M. Duval, however, could tell from one look how Armand suffered and, if nothing else, then in spirit, still carried the weight of a coffin-cover of camellias. The lady lying underneath it.
“Monsieur Dubois,” he addressed me, though I quickly grasped his strong hand, giving it a firm shake.
“Call me Jean-Philippe, please, sir,” I implored.
“Jean-Philippe, then,” he obeyed, smiling with that ever-present restraint that I had come to associate with him and which his eldest lacked in everything. “Like a second son, I feel.”
I released his hand and bowed my head, to show that I was certainly aware how an honour had just befallen me. “If that is your perception, I must be said to have an excellent brother to whom I shall do my best to live up.”
And again, we both looked to Armand who did not notice, but merely listened to Parle, Commande, Règne as played by pale fingers on a pair of slim, female hands. He seemed quite lost in thought. To myself, I wondered what image might be playing out before his wet eyes. Marguerite, too, had played the piano – Weber, as far as I recalled. Invitation to the Dance lay on the far-opposite end of the scale from this, I would argue. Yet, I said nothing to his father about it. It seemed a private matter.
“The goose was a kind gesture,” commented the elderly gentleman after a while, without letting his eyes stray from his two children, creating such a picturesque motif. I had no doubt that he was a proud man, also and perhaps in particular of them.
“I felt that I had to contribute something, if I intended to stay longer,” I replied. M. Duval hummed something faintly affirmative in response and crossed his arms in front of his chest, his wife calling for Blanche from the hall. Without a sigh and without a single display of displeasure, the girl got up and left the piano behind, brushing a hand over Armand’s shoulder on the way. He seemed to startle back to a more conscious presence at the touch. At this point, he turned his head and looked over at us, his eyes finding mine. I welcomed his gaze. However, he seemed to sense the importance of this conversation between his father and me, so after a long moment, he too left the piano behind, shuffling after his sister to see if his mother might need his assistance as well. They were that kind of family, I had long since decided, one in which distrust simply did not take root. Despite what had happened between Marguerite and him, he could not imagine his father would turn me against him, or perhaps he didn’t think it was possible. I took comfort in that second notion. Again, there was that pride in my chest which I was not entitled to but felt all the same. I left it to its steady pulsations.
“How much time does a goose buy you, I wonder,” asked M. Duval with a small smile, once Armand was out the door. I turned to look at him fully, frankly. Nothing less than sincerity would soften this man’s principles and the barricades of his fatherly heart.
“It was my hope that we can at least agree that I might be allowed to stay until Armand is a little better,” I responded, no longer needing to keep discreet in the face of the subject in question’s close and immediate presence. Monsieur Duval looked pained, the sign of a good parent: sympathy.
“He did not know her for very long. Can one not hope, then, that his grief shall last just as briefly as the acquaintance that caused it?”
I objected respectfully. “She was his whole life, monsieur. He could as well have died himself. You must think of it as if we are currently raising a man from the dead.”
Another faintly affirmative response and M. Duval reached up to stroke his chin, looking deeply engaged in thought. Rather than disturb him in what was undoubtedly important considerations, I looked around the living room with its small upright piano by the wall and the sofa arrangement by the windows and outside, still, that gentle May afternoon, soon to become evening, the light was changing already from its deep golden to a more orange-coloured hue.
“You believe we should heal him with tenderness and time, rather than force.”
With a self-deprecating tug at the corner of my lips and a deeper yet bow of my head, I shook it and said, “against the tendency of the times, I’m afraid I believe very little of worth can truly be obtained through force.”
We both laughed softly, I to soften the implications, he because he understood them.
“I believe, sir,” I continued after we had chuckled good-naturedly and been done with it, “that to ensure his next relationship -” and saying those words made something knot in my stomach for reasons I couldn’t word as easily as I worded the rest of the sentence, “- sprouts naturally which I am certain we are both eagerly expecting and to let it overgrow the old house that is Armand’s love for Marguerite like a strong vine, we must fertilize this period of grief as much as the relations awaiting him in the future. Do you not agree?”
A long silence.
“I agree,” said the noble, elderly gentleman.
Straightening up and squaring my shoulders, I felt satisfied with the development of our conversation. M. Duval, it seemed, felt similarly, because he turned towards me again for a short moment to clasp my shoulder with his strong hand, patting me two times on the back and thereafter, pointed in the direction in which first Blanche and then Armand had disappeared. He did not say the words, but I understood the implicitness of them, run along now with the rest.
So, I stepped back, bowed to him with all the genuine respect I could possibly exhibit like that and went to see the mother and her two little lambs, one slightly more innocent than the other.
They were not awaiting me, but they welcomed me with open arms anyway, as could by now only be regarded as a family trait, a tendency that ran in their blood.
