Parrot and Olivier in America Read Free Page A

mouth. It seemed she might be vomiting. She was blind to me, half dead with noble shame. She would not be attended to by servants, only by the aristocratic Bebe who now escorted her to the chateau. No one noticed me, and I remained behind while my father ordered his bride and groom back into the court. I stayed to watch the cremation of the pigeons, but even so I did not understand that each parcel contained a victim of the Revolution.
    Inhabiting the wainscoting, as it were, I easily rescued a single fragile sheet of paper and, careful of it as if it were a lovely moth, carried it away into the woods to read.

II
    THE HORRIBLE AUSTRIAN stared at me as I fled toward the oratory whose door I hammered at until the latch jumped free. I threw myself before the altar, blood pouring from my nose. Would God not protect me from that hideous thing I carried crushed inside my hand?
    Then my Bebe kneeled beside me. He took my hand as if to comfort me, then forced it open. Firmly he held my wrist, gently he brushed the fragments from my palm.
    "What is this my child?"
    It was a drawing from the old newspaper that had wrapped a pigeon.
    It showed a machine, an awful blade, a set of tracks, a rope, a human head severed from its body. It was the king's head. I knew his noble face. A hand held the head separate from the butchered neck of whence the blood did spurt and flow. An ornate typography declared: QUE LE ROI SOIT DAMNE.
    Bebe offered his rumpled handkerchief. It was not the complete and total inadequacy of this that frightened me but that he, my own Bebe, should look at his Olivier with eyes so dull and tired.
    "This happened?" I demanded.
    He held out his big hands in resignation. This was terrifying but worse than that, far worse--he shrugged .
    "It is horrid." I cried as bats cry, flying through the dreadful dark.
    Below me was a great abyss, no floors, no walls, and my mind was awash with the monstrous terrors of decapitation. The king's head was a perfect living head that might smile and speak, and its eyes were perfect eyes, and the hair was dressed as a king's hair should be dressed, and everything about him was so fine and good except for this vile machine, these flying drops of blood, this filthy squirt and gush.
    "Is this why my mother cries? Does she know this?" I meant was this what she saw when she lay with the damp sheet across her eyes?
    "Yes, my darling, alas."
    "Then who made this dreadful thing, Bebe? Who would imagine such a horrid sight?"
    "It is thought to be kinder," said Bebe.
    "It was Napoleon who did this? This is why we hate him?"
    "No, this is the father of Napoleon."
    I did not understand what he could mean--a father .
    "Bebe, who killed so many pigeons?"
    "The peasants put the birds on trial for stealing seeds. They found them guilty and then they wrung their necks."
    "But we don't have pigeons, Bebe. The loft is empty. We have never had pigeons."
    "Your grandfather kept pigeons. The peasants felt oppressed by them it seems, to have them eat the planted seeds."
    Can you imagine such a flood of horror washing over so young a child? But so it was, at six years of age, I had my first lesson in the Terror which had been the flavor of my mother's milk. My parents had been thrown into Porte Libre prison where every day one of their fellow nobles was called "to the office" and was never seen again. In these months my father's hair turned white, my beautiful mother was broken in that year of 1793, when the sansculottes came up the road from Paris.
    My family had been at table, Bebe told me, as he "got the boy outside," out past the forge, beneath the linden trees. They had been at dinner, my mother and father and grandfather, when the gardener had come hurrying inside and stood before them with a pair of secateurs in his gloved hands.
    "Citizen Barfleur," he said to my mother's father, "outside are some citizens from Paris asking for you." Even allowing for the fact that it would have been against the revolutionary