Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen Read Online Free Page A

brought out. I fill out my first request form but the clerk will not take my little orange token and sends me back to my seat.
    Twenty minutes later, I am summoned to the desk of the assistant manuscript librarian back at the end of the room. He also reads my letter, more carefully this time, inquiring about my interests. M. Richaud—that’s the name engraved into the little sign sitting in front of him—seems unhappy and faintly annoyed by my presence, asking in a high quavering voice how long I plan to stay. A day or two, a week perhaps. Who knows what I might find here? How can I really say what I am looking for? After much negotiation, he finally grants me cautious permission, wiping a pasty brow with a pale hand before correcting the call number on my request form and appending his signature. Within a few days, M. Richaud clearly regrets his decision. From time to time, he rises nervously from his place at the end of the room and ventures forward to spy on all the scholars, his scrawny body hovering awkwardly near the central information desk, his damp eye peering at me with particular distrust. He must suspect that I am only a tourist in the halls of scholarship, a dilettante, the kind who probably harbours a forbidden ballpoint somewhere on her person. He worries that he was wrong to let me pursue my quest. I have been here several days. I do not seem to be going away.
    Certainly, his confident underling, the assistant assistant librarian, a tall, chestnut-haired man all too aware of his own good looks, knows that I am only an interloper. Every day, as I arrive in the morning but minutes after nine, eager to exchange my green disc for the orange one, and settle at a desk that is comfortably removed from M. Richaud’s line of sight, the assistant’s assistant spots me and salutes me with an ironic
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,”
as if to say, “My pitiable boss may not have the stamina to challenge you, but I see right through your scholarly pretensions.” He smiles knowingly and moves on. Standing guard at the counter of the reserve desk, the clerks, in their turn, eye me warily as I pass over my request and return to my place. Ten minutes later, one of them rolls up to the table with a metal cart, the top of which is fitted with a bin lined in yellow felt. The clerk removes a document box and places it in front of me. I don my white gloves, lift off the lid of File 263, and take out the first notebook: 1890–1891. Here, at least, is a kind of home.
P ARIS . S UNDAY , N OVEMBER 16, 1890.
    Ah, but he’s handsome, my soldier. I met him alone at the station yesterday afternoon—Adrien and Dick were both busy—and I was quite surprised when he stepped off the train. He looked so grown-up. I have seen him often enough in his uniform, on weekends and at his dear grandmother’s funeral last winter, but yesterday for some reason he looked so full of authority and health. To think that he did not have a single attack in Orléans since his summer break—or at least no serious ones, just some laboured breathing. If growing up means being free of that horrible ailment, it will be ablessing, even if I will miss my little wolf.
    The doctor was home for dinner, anxious to see Marcel, and, of course, he wanted to launch into a discussion of studies and careers right away. I had to hold him back so that our first evening together would remain a lighthearted affair. The boy needs time to settle in and let his lovely dark hair grow again!
    After all his loneliness (and mine), he told us that he quite enjoyed the military life in the end. I wonder what happened to the twelve tablets of chocolate that I instructed him to set aside. He probably gobbled them all up in one go last autumn and by summer had utterly forgotten our scheme to get him through his exile!
    He even asked the Colonel to extend another six months. The man quite rightly rejected such a request. It was nonsense, just one of my Marcel’s little fantasies. Anyone