All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-three)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part sixty-three) 

A riffling through the notes, a glance at the floor, the discarded morning’s papers. Gilbert mimed his cares and worries unaware. But if Michelet was no byword…Honoré forgot which lies he’d told…the warning was too subtle.

He told another lie, a saving one. “Pardon. I believe I have the name wrong.”

“Was it Gérard Costa…?”

“Not at all. Gérard is never talked about.”

Limolette, alive to tell, had won a seat in the legislature, a man who’d stirred all the trouble he might in the Commune days, without ever quite joining…

But Gilbert had not met Honoré’s friends.

They eased back, as they did, into amity. Everything in Washington seemed being built…

That, my friend, is America. No different for Cookesville, if you’ve looked around. Has Ebrach given a tour?

No, there was something urgent…at least busy, that Miss Gremot was about…

Shrug. What else?

What else.

Gilbert heard from no one in Brussels. That propagandist disgrace of the Catholic political arm, that squatting basilica on the hill of Montmartre, was underway. Perhaps it might yet be stopped.

“Is that what you do these days, when Amédée doesn’t want you?”

“You are still, I mean, of the party?” Honoré added this, in censure of his lapse. The forgiving face, just that, pained him.

For after all, Gilbert ought to ask a number of things. He ought to feel it his mission, a Paris reporter come to study America. Amédée’s was a paper of middle-class preoccupations, of the racetrack syndicates’ narrow escapes, the curious undergarments shaping fashionable women, of screw-driven steamers and their new luxuries, inventor’s tinkerings with flying machines…

And the promise of cures for diseases of the mind, through the science of hypnotism. Ebrach, as a topic, was never necessary, but as a conspicuous void, irritated Honoré’s news-sense. Amédée’s readership would like making this acquaintance. He could write the article himself.

Gilbert, though, his old friend…

Growing old, a bit. Had no pitch in him—an American turn of phrase. Honoré would embarrass Gilbert if he urged it.

Then, what else was new?

The children had an aunt for governess today; they played on the lawn under an instructive eye. Already Madame had found an intonation for Marie-Claudette. Honoré’s daughter was new, very new, to the thought of self-discipline, but this had been introduced.

68

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-four)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)