Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online

his eyes and pictured the great ship of state plowing through the night.

VII
    THE RUDIMENTARY COMFORTS of our first night suggested only a brief diversion. Who would have expected we would live there all that summer and that our bivouac, of necessity, would assume an established character, with Turkey rugs and armchairs and my grandfather's campaign bed, an antique brass construction held together with verdigrised butterfly nuts and wire cross bracing.
    A refectory table was discovered in the old pigeon loft, and when this was scrubbed and waxed it was where we spent our mornings, classifying the previous day's botanizing according to Linnaeus.
    We had a wide low roof over our heads and if, from time to time, the rain blew in from the river, the summer was warm and our rugs were easily resuscitated in that gorgeous dry air, ripe with the perfumes of hawthorn blossom and grass and manure and fresh rich hay. Black honeybees and bumblebees danced around me as I studied. More than once we had speckled wood butterflies basking on our table, and once the sexton's cow awoke me with a dreadful bellow in my ear.
    M. le Blacksmith constructed an Indian's fireplace, that is, a babracot , and the servants split firewood and the English cook finally consented to grill the game as Bebe ordered.
    My mother wrote a letter every day. I looked forward to her pale blue tutoiements with a simple joy one would never feel in approaching her quite formal person. One broke the sealing wax with a dreamy sort of pleasure such as an eagle might feel lazily gliding on a warm delicious current. It was as if the windows had opened in my mother's life and the air was filled with cyan dragonflies. Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.
    These love letters were delivered by means of the postal system my father had designed as an improvement on that arrangement the emperor so famously devised. In our corner of Normandy there was no household, be it as low as a charcoal burner's, where a letter would not arrive as quickly as it did at the chateau. It was as a result of my father's particular system that we were blessed to have Marie-Claude, the sexton, deliver our mail directly to the pavilion. He had no horse, nor did he require one, for we were less than a kilometer from the village and every morning--provided there had been no death in the night--he would amble, long-armed and poke-necked, as if demanding that the peculiar world explain itself. He would stumble through the dew-wet pasture to that place where he would be pleased to withhold my mail while he inspected the botanical samples spread across our table.
    I was infuriated by the sexton but also nourished in all my dreams and expectations by what he brought me, that is, my mother in all her blindness and bubbling intoxication.
    From inside the sexton's pocket, she sang to me like a captive bird: Lovely boy she called me, and brave boy and good boy too: the king had not yet dined at the rue Saint-Dominique but she and my father had been to the Tuileries. This visit, she wrote, meant that the king had not forgotten the service given by her family nor by the valiant Barfleur who had died for Louis XVI, and she was confident that, for this reason alone, my father might reasonably expect to be made a pair de France and sit in the Chamber of Peers.
    My father wrote less often and, far from calling me a boy, seemed to have forgotten I was not a man. His tone was both sophisticated and familiar--wry, ironic, fed by a disenchantment that I could not have named. The taste of his letters stayed with me, producing in me a profound unease. For instance:
    I shall never forget the impression Louis XVIII made when he came out to receive us; we saw an enormous mass emerge from the king's study, shuffling and waddling; this mass was topped by a fine and noble head but the expression of the features was entirely theatrical; the king came forward with his hand over