After the Bouquiniste [Attn: Hawksley]

[mnemosyne]

Hawksley does not look back, so perhaps it does not matter what happens behind him as he leaves the Quai Voltaire with two volumes in his hand, purchased for forty-four Euros, the exchange as precise and careful as any other. The old man is pleased with the money. He counts it, and nods, there is a ritual to this exchange, see - the bills and the coins counted out.

Hawksley does not look back but: the old man tucks away the cash and pulls his folding-chair forward with a scraaaaape on the old stones and pulls the book he was perusing (a lavishly art deco volume of three Perrault tales: Cendrillon, Le Chat Botté, and La Belle au Bois Dormant.

Hawksley does not look back, so we doubt that he returns to the Quai Voltaire tomorrow or the next day, looking for the old man, who speaks Silesian and that rather inflexible French, who claims expertise in Yiddish and Armenian but not Arabic. Even if he did, he would not find him. The bouquinistes come and go as they please, and the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, there is no such man on the quai. Just a locked up pair of green wood boxes amidst the rest.

--

Sera wants to go to the Moulin Rouge that night. She thinks that there will be naked people there and she is half-right. There will be half-naked ladies there wearing many, many sparkles. She wonders if there is really a trapeze and thinks she would like to swing on it. The evenings shows are sold out as they often are but when you are rich "sold out" just means "talk to the concierge." There is a gift shop! She is thrilled to discovered the fucking giftshop. She buys a kitschy miniature of the place for 35 Euros and a square umbrella printed with vintage posters by Toulouse Lautrec, Grün, Ma Gosse and Villefroy.

They drink a helluva lot of champagne. Enough that Sera ends up on her knees in the marble bathroom at quarter 'til nine a.m., long, long after the sun has risen, throwing it all up again.

She's so happy.

She had the loveliest time.

--

Here's the strange thing, or perhaps it is not really the strange thing: when he wakes up the next day, whenever it is he wakes up the next day, the volumes are still on the nightstands, or the sideboard, or the antique Louis Quatorze What-the-fuck-ever. They should be, shouldn't they?

He bought them, didn't he?

Except, except -

Right. There they are.

--

The leather binding on the first volume is still warmer than it should be.

It feels like skin, he said to himself and then,

It is skin.

This is also true.

There is no title etched on the front page and it is indeed handwritten. The bouquiniste called it the biography of a saint who never lived; or perhaps - the hagiography. Written in verse by a woman confined at the Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune for one hundred and seventy five years, and Hawksley knows that all of this can be both true and false in equal measure because what we write, what we will, we create.

The bouquiniste was not telling the precise truth.

For example, the volume - light and fine and effervescent as the best of champagnes - is not written in verse. It is written in Burgundian which is both a descendant of Latin and an ailing cousin or perhaps now a mere dialect of French, both of which he knows in sufficient part to triangulate the meanings and the code-shifts and parse out the language in which the volume was written.

Also: it was not, he is convinced a quarter of the way through, written in 1453 or 1675 or anywhere in between. It was written in the 1920s, though it claims to have been written by one of the followers of its subject, Saint Étaín des Sorts - Saint Étaín of the Holy Spells - during her lifetime, and in the years after. The author was assuredly familiar with the Hôtel-Dieu and may have been a patient there, but only for a few weeks. It was, after all, merely a hospital for the poor. It was not Bedlam.

It is also charming; a fucking romance and the sexiest book he has ever read about chastity, or denial.

There is a kind of surrender on every page.

It is hard to put down.

--

And yet,

he does put it down, and picks up the other, and it is hard going. It is a fucking slog. The first day he decides that it is all wrong; complete rubbish, there is no goddamned <i>point</i> to this. It takes something out of him,

but he picks it up again, the day after. Because that is another thing he does, and this time he grits his teeth and opens it again and refused, refuses, to be defeated by the cold dry facts.

It is - it seems to be - the journal of a Roman that was absolutely recopied by a querulous monk who complained, variously in the margins about his chilblains or his abbot or the too-think ink or the priory's cat or the sounds his brothers make at night or his fucking urges and these interstitial pieces, these asides, these annotations were copied goddamned faithfully and interspersed between the dry-as-the-Sahara writings of Lucius Vitruvius Gromaticus by the next interpreter / copyist, who inserted even more strange and absolutely medieval lewdness into what otherwise begins as the rather boring and markedly technical account of Gromaticus' early work as a ballista in the Roman legions. The printer printed absolutely every annotation faithfully, making the work of deciphering the underlying -

- well, here's the thing.

The second volume is goddamned difficult.

What he figures out, when he takes it up the second time, is that it is about gravity,

and how to defy it,

and he has barely skimmed the surface.