Elle Read Online Free

her eyes, shave her head, put her in a brothel or a nunnery, or simply get her pregnant and marry her. Better yet, maroon her on a deserted island lest she spread the contagion of discontent to other girls or even men, though men are generally impervious. Keep her away from shops and books and looking glasses and friends and lovers. Forget her.
    This was the General’s solution.
    And after, when the General met the bear in the darkened cemetery by the Church of the Holy Innocents, he thought of me. When he was found the next morning, clawed to death, the evidence of his mutilated body could not be believed. A young physician, new from Montpelier, pronounced him dead of multiple stab wounds. But the rumour spread that he had met a bear escaped from a circus, a dancing bear from Poland. Knife wounds from an unknown assailant, said the magistrate’s report, but it was a Canadian bear with a woman’s heart, and the General remembered me when he saw it, though he had barely given me a thought in fifteen years.

    And I think, yes, there was a plan about a nunnery. I heard my father discussing it with Maignant, his secretary. He said something about my disobedient temperament, my libidinous and bookish nature, my many indiscretions (including a certain louche tennis player down on his luck who kept coming around, sponging money), and the child, not to mention the fact that in a nunnery I would be legally dead and thus have no further claim on the family purse, no question of dowry or inheritance. The child was already three, a big boy brought up in the household by the servants, of whom one was said to be his mother, though everyone knew he was mine. He was wild as me, with his black curls and a tendency to pull up his little skirts and show his impudent cock to the ladies of the house, which I adored.
    But there came a letter one day from the General asking Papa for money for his voyage to Canada, which, despite the King’s munificence, was under-financed and would be delayed. The General was notoriously improvident, impecunious and impractical (his estate in Roberval had been seized once for debt) but also a gallant, pious relative and a crony of the King, a circumstance which caused my father no end of envy and bitterness. Maignant showed me the letter — have I said Maignant was one of my lovers? Obese and hairless, with an organ the size of a sparrow’s and an insistent lubricity surprising in a priest and bookkeeper, he loved me well, taught me to cipher and kept as many of my secrets as he could.
    I was nineteen, with all my teeth except three, arid possessed of a backside that made my life both difficult and sublime. I had learned to read from Maignant and a Jesuit tutor named Tobini(who I believe was born Jewish and converted in order to join that most modern and decadent of the new orders — later he was burned by the Dominicans in Paris, a direct result of his adherence to certain proscribed or irreverent ideas). I knew Latin, Italian and some English and owned a copy of Tyndale’s little pocket New Testament, which I read daily in order to combine religious meditation with language practice. I loved God and myself and despised Protestants and heretics, though I thought the world a more exciting place for all the conflict and never missed a public burning or decapitation.
    I owned forty-three books, including two by Erasmus, Clement Marot’s Adolescence Clementine, Marguerite de Navarre’s anonymously published volume of devotional verse, Mirror of a Sinful Soul, which the Dominicans banned as blasphemous until the King informed them his sister was the author, three other works still on the List, and a medical textbook with drawings made from the bodies of dead people. I had read The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, mostly for his description of the land of Lamory, where everyone goes naked, women give themselves freely to any man, and adults eat children, a novel form of population