Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen Read Online Free

canvas blinds hanging down from each frame. Precious documents are thus protected from rays that would fade them, while the readers themselves turn delicate pages with white-gloved hands.
    In fact, the leather books that surround them are something of a fraud, or at least an irrelevancy, row upon row of out-of-date catalogues, and seldom-consulted nineteenth-century annuals stored here for want of other space: the heart of the
salle des manuscrits
lies elsewhere. Its pages are unpublished and unbound, yet all the more closely guarded for that, secured in the stacks hidden behind this room. I imagine a vault filled with a scaffolding of metal shelves on which cardboard containers the size of big shoeboxes and portfolios as large as kitchen tabletops are balanced. Secreted in this storehouse, watched over by dutiful librarians who will expose their precious charges only to those who can show good reason why they should be permitted to behold them, are tons and tons of paper, parchment and vellum—diaries, notes, letters, recipes, typescripts, illuminations, Bibles, psalters, account books, chapbooks, books of hours, books of days.
    These are the literary treasures of France. It is these manuscripts that the scholars have come to consult and admire. It was from this collection that a precious copy of Froissart’s
Chronicle
, a manuscript scrupulously copied out by some anonymous hand more than six hundred years ago, was carefully removed to be placed in front of Voltaire, waiting somewhere in this same building, working in what was then a rather new library. It was from here that Voltaire’s originalnotes for his eighteenth-century histories of Charles XII and Louis XIV were brought forward to be shown to Michelet, who was seated in this very room, then just recently constructed. It was here that Zola, who used to position himself at that far table, waited to consult Michelet’s manuscript for his
Introduction to Universal History
(1831). You can imagine the great novelist over there, his coat tidily folded on the chair beside him, and his head bent so low to decipher Michelet’s scrawl that his beard almost touches the table. And it is here that you, in turn, if your credentials pass muster, can examine Zola’s manuscript for his 1885 novel,
Germinal
.
    But mind that you arrive at the library early. The regulars snag the best spots, and if you tarry, you may be placed near the reserve counter, where the comings and goings will disturb your concentration. Soon, the Bibliothèque Nationale will move to giant new premises over on the Quai François Mauriac, where four book-shaped glass towers will be stuffed with computers and the manuscript room will be a windowless vault with low light and strict humidity controls. But for now, this is the place.
    I do not belong here. My white shirt is crisp, my grey flannels freshly pressed. A cashmere sweater thrown over the shoulders with a deceptive casualness and a few well-chosen pieces of jewellery soften the plain clothes, while on my feet I wear the Italian leather loafers favoured by generations of well-dressed Parisians. My accent is impeccable, without trace of the Canadianisms that so incense the French. My letter of introduction, quickly faxed across the Atlantic by an obliging friend at the University of Quebec, manages to suggest that I am a student of literature without actually lying about my profession. Down in the ground-floor reception area, they have read it casually, issued me with a reader’s card,and waved me encouragingly upstairs to the second floor. I approach the glass cage framed in ornate wooden carving that blocks the entrance to the manuscipt room and exchange the library card for a small disc of green plastic. It assigns me a seat at one of the long tables where I settle my belongings before proceeding to the reserve desk at the far end of the room. There, I exchange the green disc for an orange one that I must finally surrender before a manuscript may be