Notes From The Garret

“And so the little girl, well-warned against the wolf and snug in her bright red cloak, skipped along into the woods to see her grandmother…” Guilhaume Barthélémy wiped his balding pate in consternation as he listened, the nursemaid’s thick Germanic accent now lilting lightly over the words. Her new fluency hardly registered, however, in the face of the story’s sense. Whatever could Pernette be thinking, telling this to his daughter, his fevered Agnes? Now? Not a month back, they had called him, the village doctor, to witness a babe savaged in its crib, soft limbs rent to gobbets. He had taken in the red-stained feathers of a ripped mattress that drank in the scarlet fluid, examining it for its claw marks. It had to be wolves. No famine had yet landed, despite these long glacial months following an early winter. At least, none he could compare to the one just before he left Dijon for Montpelier to study medicine with a full head of hair. Back then, the wild beasts had prowled not ...