Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe Read Free Book Online

of eight hundred thousand. There were pottery statuettes of the General and cheap clay pipes with their bowls fashioned in the likeness of The Man on Horseback. You could scrub yourself with Boulanger soap and eat your dinner from a Boulanger plate. His office in the Ministry of War was flooded with letters from
the women of France offering their bodies to him with fervent, erotic patriotism. France gave its heart to Boulanger, but Boulanger’s was pledged to his mistress, the Vicomtesse Marguerite de Bonnemains, lover, advisor, and administerer of ever increasing doses of morphine to alleviate the pain of an old war wound of the General’s
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    On January 27, 1887, General Boulanger was elected to the constituency of the Seine by a stunning majority of 80,000 votes. That night France was his for the taking, virtually without opposition he could have established his dictatorship. In the Restaurant Durand, where he awaited election results throughout the evening, an enthusiastic mob was kept at bay with the iron shutters closed over the windows. Admirers urged him to act, to seize the government. Workingmen, students from Montmartre, aristocrats chanted
“A l’Elysée! A l’Elysée!”
in the streets. Boulanger withdrew to a private room in the restaurant and consulted Marguerite. When he returned he issued orders that nothing was to be done
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    Sensing indecision and weakness on his part, the government set in train steps to arrest The Man on Horseback and General Boulanger fled wife and France accompanied by his mistress. A brief period of fashionable acclaim in English society followed, but the General was a spent force, an article for the shelf. In exile on the isle of Jersey, Marguerite fell ill while the General sat in front of a large portrait of Tunis
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    The unhappy couple removed themselves to Belgium. There Marguerite died on July 16, two days after the date of the General’s greatest triumph on the field of Longchamps. Several months later The Man on Horseback shot himself on his lover’s grave. A large photograph of Marguerite which he carried under his shirt was so firmly pasted to the skin of his chest with dried blood that it had to be torn to be removed
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    A horse can carry a man only so far and no farther
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    Joseph Kelsey left home at the age of seventeen. For four years he attended the University of Saskatchewan, supporting himself with part-time jobs and scholarships. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship took him to the University of Wisconsin. From there he went on to the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in modern French history. While in Chicago he met and married Catherine Bringhurst, a medical student and a native of the Windy City. In 1974 Catherine completed her medical degree, Joseph took a job teaching history at Carleton, and they moved to Ottawa.
    Each of these steps removed Joseph Kelsey a little further from his father, geographically and emotionally. Distance made visits more expensive and more infrequent. The world he lived and worked in now made the one he had departed seem impossible, at the very least improbable. Whenever he told Catherine stories of his childhood, of life in a shacky house, of a father and mother who never read a book, he felt self-dramatizing and false. The stories were true but in the alchemy of Catherine’s imagination they were transformed and he became located in an unreal world of glamorous destitution. In rare moments of self-knowledge, Joseph Kelsey knew that this had always been his intention – to make his origins as romantic to her as hers were to him. His goal was a reciprocity of envy, something conceivable, given the mood of the sixties. Raised in an affluent suburb of Chicago by a doctor father and a psychiatrist mother, whom she addressed as Claude and Amelia, Catherine seemed inconceivably exotic to her young husband.
    Joseph and his new wife made trips back to Saskatchewan twice in the years between 1974 and 1977. On both occasions they stayed in the local