The Lollipop Shoes Read Free Page B

cantrip that would have done it just as easily as switching off a light – but I had promised us no more magic , and so we slept in little slices between the red and green, and Rosette went on crying until Epiphany (or so it seemed), and for the first time our galette des rois was not home-made, but from a shop, and no one felt much like celebrating anyway.
    I hated Paris so much that year. I hated the cold and the grime and the smells; the rudeness of the Parisians; the noise from the railway; the violence; the hostility. I soon learnt that Paris is not a city. It’s just a mass of Russian dolls boxed one inside the other, each with its customs and prejudices, each with its church, mosque, synagogue; all of them rife with bigots, gossips, insiders, scapegoats, losers, lovers, leaders, and objects of derision.
    Some people were kind: like the Indian family who looked after Rosette while Anouk and I went to the market, or the grocer who gave us the damaged fruit and vegetables from his stall. Others were not. The bearded men who averted their gaze when I walked with Anouk past the mosque in Rue Myrrha; the women outside the Eglise St Bernard who looked at me as if I were dirt.
    Things have changed a lot since then. We have found our place at last. Not half an hour’s walk from Boulevard de la Chapelle, Place des Faux-Monnayeurs is another world.
    Montmartre is a village, so my mother used to say; an island rising out of the Paris fog. It’s not like Lansquenet, of course, but even so, it’s a good place, with a little flat above the shop and a kitchen at back, and a room for Rosette and one for Anouk, under the eaves with the birds’ nests.
    Our chocolaterie was once a tiny café, run by a lady called Marie-Louise Poussin, who lived up on the first floor. Madame had lived here for twenty years; had seen the death of her husband and son, and, now in her sixties, and in failing health, still stubbornly refused to retire. She needed help; I needed a job. I agreed to run her business for a small salary and the use of the rooms on the second floor, and as Madame grew less able to cope, we changed the shop to a chocolaterie .
    I ordered stock, managed accounts, organized deliveries, handled sales. I dealt with repairs and building work. Our arrangement has lasted for over three years, and we have become accustomed to it. We don’t have a garden, or very much space, but we can see the Sacré-Coeur from our window, rising above the streets like an airship. Anouk has started secondary school – the Lycée Jules Renard, just off the Boulevard des Batignolles – and she’s bright, and works hard; I’m proud of her.
    Rosette is almost four years old, although, of course, she does not go to school. Instead she stays in the shop with me, making patterns on the floor with buttons and sweets, arranging them in rows according to colour and shape, or filling page after page in her drawing-books with little pictures of animals. She is learning sign language, and is fast acquiring vocabulary, including the signs for good , more , come here , see , boat , yum , picture , again , monkey , ducks and most recently – and to Anouk’s delight – bullshit .
    And when we close the shop for lunch, we go to the Parc de la Turlure, where Rosette likes to feed the birds, or a little further to Montmartre cemetery, which Anouk loves for its gloomy magnificence and its many cats. Or I talk to the other shop owners in the quartier : to Laurent Pinson, who runs the grubby little café-bar across the square; to his customers, regulars for the most part, who come for breakfast and stay till noon; to Madame Pinot, who sells postcards and religious bric-a-brac on the corner; to the artists who camp out on the Place du Tertre hoping to attract the tourists there.
    There is a clear distinction here between the inhabitants of the Butte and the rest of Montmartre. The Butte is superior in every respect – at least, to my neighbours of the Place des