Book of My Mother Read Online Free

suit, a stupid pap which I shared with admiring classmates who came and licked it off my hand and which we called Bishop’s Delight. Yes, the Mother Superior, for whom I nurtured a respectful passion, sighed as she gazed at my black curls and sometimes murmured, “What a shame” – an allusion to my Jewish origin.
    Strangely enough, I was the favorite of the gentle Catholic sisters. They used to give me deportment lessons and urge me to maintain a modest bearing and never swing my arms in the street as common boys did. Completely won over and full of admiration, determined to make no pact with the Devil, and sporting an enormous floppy tie, the memory of which makes me blush, I took care to walk in the street just as the sisters had advised, hands devoutly clasped and – right little idiot – eyes lowered as if in perpetual prayer. As a result my pious little person was constantly jostled by passersby or mocked by horrible kids from the State school, who called me papist and pelted me with stones, which I bore like a martyr to the cause of my beloved Catholic sisters, to whom their Albert today addresses a tender and respectful greeting.
    Then, as my father’s affairs had improved, I was sent to secondary school when I was ten. I can see myself now at the age of ten. I had huge girlish eyes, peach-bloom cheeks, and a suit bought at the Belle Jardinière – a sailor suit with a white cord from which hung a whistle I loved to blow to make believe I was the son of a rear admiral who was also a lion tamer and a train driver, a heroic son and ship’s boy intrepidly sailing the seas with his father. I was a bit cracked. I was sure that everything I saw really and truly existed inside my head, absolutely real but on a very small scale. If I was by the sea, I was sure that the Mediterranean before me was also inside my head – not a picture of the Mediterranean but the Mediterranean itself, minute and salty inside my head, in miniature but real and with all its fish, though very tiny, all its waves, and a little burning-hot sun, a real sea with all its rocks and all its ships, absolutely complete inside my head, with coal and real live sailors, each ship with the same captain as in the world outside, the same captain, dwarf-sized, whom you could touch if your fingers were small and delicate enough. I was sure that inside my head, as in a circus version of the world, lay the real earth with its forests, all the horses on earth, though extremely small, all the flesh-and-blood kings, all the dead, the vast sky with its stars, and even God Himself, dinky as could be.
    I can see myself now. I was loving, delighted to obey, so eager to be commended by grown-ups. I was keen to admire. One day after school I followed a general for two hours just so I could feast my eyes on his medals and revel in them. I was wild with respect for my general, who was very short and bowlegged. Every now and then I ran past him and then turned round suddenly and walked toward him so that I could gaze for a while upon his face wreathed in glory. I can see myself now. I was too gentle, I blushed easily, I fell in love quickly, and if in the distance I saw a pretty little girl I did not know – whose face I would notice, but nothing else – I immediately galloped for love, I cried out with the joy of loving, and my arms made little windmills of love. A bad sign, all that.
    I had a secret altar to France in my room. On the shelf of a cupboard which I kept locked I had set up a sort of shrine to the glories of France, surrounded by tiny candles, bits of mirror, and little cups I made out of silver paper. The relics in the shrine were pictures of Racine, La Fontaine, Corneille, Joan of Arc, Du Guesclin, Napoléon, Pasteur, Jules Verne of course, and even a certain Louis Boussenard.
    On my secret altar to France there were also a number of tiny French flags, which I had torn a bit to make them look more glorious, a little cannon on a lace doily near a