The Oracle Glass Read Free Page A

‘salon’ and demands that people call her ‘Amérinte’ instead of by her Christian name. Genteel, indeed—it’s nothing but cards and court gossip…that, and an occasional bad poet who can’t make a name for himself somewhere better. Oh, it was a ruinous day when that poverty-stricken family of parasites attached themselves to my son! Hand me my Bible from that nightstand, Geneviève, and I’ll read to you about Jezebel, and what happens to wicked women.” And so I heard something very interesting and lurid from the Bible, about the dogs eating up Jezebel except for her hands and feet. For Grandmother had been a Huguenot before her family had been forced to convert, and she’d kept the Protestant habit of Bible reading—to the scandal of the rest of the family.
    On my way back downstairs, I crossed through Uncle’s room, where he’d been sleeping all morning because he never went to bed at night. I saw his head and a strange woman’s peeking out from under the covers. Uncle, my mother’s brother, called himself the Chevalier de Saint-Laurent, although Grandmother always said the title was as false as he is, and it is what one could expect of a worm who made his living sinning at the gaming tables and borrowing from women. Uncle was accounted handsome by many, but there was something about his narrow, foxy face and arrogant, pale eyes above the high, slanting cheekbones that I did not like. Still, women thought him dashing.
    So I peeked into the tall, gilt reception room on Wednesdays, hoping to see some interesting sinning like Jezebel and the hands and feet, but it was just grown-ups calling one another by pretend names and saying sharp things to one another and drinking from the good glasses, while Mother laughed her special, silvery little laugh that she saved for Wednesdays. She wore her tight dress in violet silk that was cut very low in front and her gold bracelets with the diamonds on them. This was the time she would glance sideways under her lashes at the men, who would praise her green eyes and perhaps recite an impromptu verse on the subject of her nose or lips. There were only a few ladies, and those not as pretty as she was, and a lot of men who dressed like my uncle in baggy pants with lace hanging down their shins and embroidered doublets and short jackets all in silk. They talked a lot about luck at bassette or hoca , and whom the King had looked at last Friday, and pretended to be interested in Mother until, at a signal from her, my big sister, Marie-Angélique, would glide through, blushing. Then she was the only person they’d look at. Everyone knew she had no dowry because Father had no money—or, rather, had to save it so that my older brother, Étienne, could stay at the Collège de Clermont and become an avocat and get rich again for the sake of the family. But Mother hoped my sister might “meet someone important” on her Wednesdays, someone who could launch her into society on account of her beauty.
    On Wednesdays Father shut himself up in his study to read about the Romans. That, and take snuff from a little silver box Monsieur Fouquet had once given him. He never really wanted to talk to anyone, except sometimes me.
    â€œWhy the Romans, Father?” I asked him one afternoon.
    â€œBecause, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead,” he answered. “You see here? Epictetus shows that reason governs the world, being identical with God.” He pointed to a place in the Latin book he was reading.
    â€œI can’t read it, Father.”
    â€œOh, yes, of course,” he answered in that distant, absentminded way he had. “No one has seen to your education. I suppose I shall have to myself. Modern education is nothing but fables anyway, fit only to enslave the mind. Look at your sister—nothing but the most fashionable empty-headedness.