Small Lives Read Online Free Page A

ones, their defectionin death, indifference, and departures. She inseminated the void they leave with hurried words, jubilant and tragic, which the void inhales just as the hole of a hive draws the swarm, and which, once inside the void, proliferate. For herself and her small witness, for a compensating god who may have been lending an ear, as well as all those who, up until that day, had held that object in tears, she created once again, she founded and consecrated forever, as her mothers had done before her and as I am going to do here one last time, the everlasting relic.
    The Peluchet line died out with the last century; the last, to my knowledge, was Antoine Peluchet, perpetual son and perpetually unachieved, who carried off his name to distant parts and lost it there. It was this name, fallen into disuse, that the relic carried on to me. The object of women, relayed, handed down from one to another, it compensates for the inadequacies of the males and confers upon the most sterile among them a kind of immortality, which poor peasant issue, hurried off by death and oblivion, would certainly not have assured him.
    Antoine vanished and became a dream, about which we will hear. He had an older sister who does not appear in this narrative because Elise did not speak of her; I do not know the first name of this sacrificed sister, just as I do not know the name of the rustic she married; but I know that the two of them had only one daughter, whom they named Marie and who married a Pallade. In turn, these Pallades engendered two daughters: one of them, Catherine, died without leaving descendants (I knew this ancestor); the other, Philomène, married Paul Mouricaud, of Les Cards, with whom she conceived a single child, Elise, my grandmother. The latter, from her bond withFélix Gayaudon, brought into the world just my mother, who bore a daughter who died as an infant, and me. Here is what I find moving: in this long procession of female heirs, single, well-behaved daughters in their little bonnets and smocks, I am the first man to possess the relic since Antoine, who dispossessed himself of it, but whose name it retained. Among all that female flesh, I am the shade of that shade; after so long a time – a whole century has passed – I am the closest to being his son. Over the heads of so many buried grandmothers, wives in labor, perhaps we nod to one another; our destinies hardly differ, our desires leave no trace, our works amount to nothing.
    The relic is a small ceramic Virgin with child, supremely inexpressive in a glass and silk case that contains, in a sealed double bottom, the miniscule remains of a saint. This object followed the path that I have traced right up to me, and took up all those names; and all the names I have given are attested here and there by the stone slabs in the cemeteries of Chatelus, Saint-Goussaud, Mourioux, constant under the daytime sun and the night frost; and all the inconstant flesh inhabiting those names appealed to the relic when doing battle with the essential, when, in its living nest, essence clashed with itself and, from this struggle, appeared or disappeared, when flesh had to be born or die. Because the relic is a gris-gris. It was brought to the deathbed (in the bustling heat of the harvest outside, the men in sweaty shirts returning to weep for a moment beside the dying one, then going back out to strain under the sky, the straw and its dust, the excess of wine that multiplies tenfold the tears; or in sad winter, when death is banal, naked, tasteless). It was brought in before death prevailed; they looked at it before going under; some wild-eyed, some eyes quiet, they kissed it orcursed it: Marie, who rendered her soul without a word, and Elise, who procrastinated under my vigil for three nights, and all their trembling, cocky husbands, who, even breathless, chattered on to keep denying that their moment had come. Hands that could no longer grasp anything but spasm and