The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson Read Free Book Online

as if the creatures had manifested their own abundance before things went back normal.
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    Thus, the priest was uneasy. Like a dog sniffing out its prey, a primitive voice inside him could sense that Maria was an anomaly, an envoy from the world that owes nothing to God, and this secret side of himself, which the man of the Church could express only in his pages on the curative decoction of mugwort or the application of nettles in an unguent, also sensed the connection between the appearance of the infant in the snow and the astonishing mildness that had enveloped the region. He looked at the child: she seemed to be sleeping, but he perceived a palpable vigilance in her, and he understood that she could hear and see everything around her, and that her apparent distraction came from one of those states to be found in the trance of prayer, when the mind may be detached from the body yet still registers the world with greatly enhanced acuity.
    He took a deep breath.
    â€œThere’s some mystery here that must be brought to light,” he said, raising the little snifter of brandy which a charitable hand had placed next to the remains of his honeyed pear. “The little girl has been blessed, and we will find out how.”
    And after resolving not to lecture these good folk, who would have liked to see fantastical creatures spread their mist all the way to the Morvan hills, he also resolved to have a word with Maria when next the opportunity arose. His words produced the desired effect: everyone was quite satisfied that their spiritual authority had acknowledged the mystery; for all they enjoyed stuffing him with headcheese, he nevertheless remained above his flock, aloof. They were also quite satisfied that there was something reassuring about his words, because it meant that sooner or later they would find out, and from the Good Lord Himself, what it all meant. So everyone, therefore, was
more or less
satisfied with the conclusion the priest had drawn from a remark they were all relieved had been made in the first place, but no one was
deeply
satisfied, the priest least of all: this was merely an acceptable pause in the enlightenment of the riddle, they would catch their breath and calmly await the next stage, but everyone knew that one day they would have to enter a circle of life that held considerable surprise and commotion in store. True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but it does believe in the communion of mysteries, and with its unworldly fusion of beliefs, it crushes any temptations that prove too intolerant.

G USTAVO
A Voice of Death
    A t the beginning of September, two months before the events on the French farm, Clara arrived in Rome, escorted by Pietro.
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    Leaving her mountains behind had been a source of pain, which the glory of the landscapes through which they traveled failed to appease. For as long as she could remember, she had been unhappy when it was time to go home to the presbytery; every time, she would go through the enclosed garden before opening the door to the kitchen; and as that vestibule planted with magnificent trees was as vital to her as the air she breathed, she dreaded the walls of the city more than any scourge in her nightmares. Clearly, no human being had ever managed to touch her soul the way the mountains had, and therefore the snow and the storms lived inside a heart that was still equally open both to happiness and to the sortileges of misfortune. And now, the further they went into the city, the more her heart bled. She was discovering not only a terrain that had surrendered to its interment under stone, but also what had been done to the stones themselves: they now rose to the sky in straight, dull walls, having ceased to breathe beneath the onslaught that had defaced them forever. Thus as night fell upon the joyful crowds drunkenly celebrating the return of the warm breezes, Clara saw only a mass of dead stone and a cemetery where living