II. The Belle Epoque
Alice Huet
"Since I can feel confusion in you, and as my friend seems to be losing his mind, I'll go back and explain our story a little better. I am Alice, yes, the singer. I managed more than any other to hoist myself to the rank of supreme cliché of French art, this kind of soup that is served in Hollywood now. My mother was a cabaret singer. My father was a god, but as Nietzsche knew, god died, so my mother started to drink untill one day wormwood's sweet forgetfulness carried her to the Styx. There were vomit puddles on the floor, I was kept away from the attic while they cleaned it up. Montmartre was like that.
Marie saved me, in every possible way. Marie is the only hero you will find in the story. Granddaughter of Champollion, she had learned to read in the classes of Louise Michel, while her father sang the Commune at the wall of the federates. But, since everyone knows how Champollion was slaughtered like a dog by the House of Life, since his children were the standard of the revolution which carried the country and threatened the Pantheons (because after all, after all the troubles Christianity caused, who ended up worshiping at Notre-Dame the goddess reason?), while as the Fourteenth crisscrossed the country to find the readers of hieroglyphics, the girl disappeared in the chaos of our Third Republic's beginnings. They let her go of course, because no danger came from an inept little girl, born of a bastard and a gypsy whore. The magic of the Champollions did not dwell in their blood.
Then everyone returned to their business and while the widow Zoraide remained thougtfull under her great oak tree, awaiting the end of her day, prisoner of Figeac, the Fourteenth watched the last branch of the fateful tree dying out. Meanwhile, Marie, having worked for some time in a factory and then a brothel in Grenoble, married on September 16, 1893, the so-called Henri Desjardins, a small merchant of the trade. The following year she gave birth to her first son. Her husband quickly turned out to be violent and abusive. Aside from a few glances from the Fourteenth, a few visits from Arsène Lupine, life was ordinary, I'm afraid to say, like that of so many women of her time. But had she settled there, had she raised her two children in Grenoble, I would not be here, telling you about the Champollion as if they were my family. What happened then?
Mysteries of genetics. By dint of hanging out with magicians for decades, I see a bit how they function. The magic of Per Ankh had circulated in its great families' blood for millennia. Each child receives a specific genetic capital, a potential if you want. So, you have to understand that some crazy Champollion who shows up one day and starts his spells, it's absolute nonsense.
I don't know what happened, and I know that, unless we put Michel in a laboratory, we won't really know, but it is possible that a little drop of gitan blood revived who knows what Champollion had made with his DNA (because all Gitan are a bit magicians, and besides, why else would they have been called "Egyptians" for centuries in France), or else, Marie had succeeded against all expectations in hiding the potential that had been transmitted to her, or even, Michel could have received a piece of sheut from his ancestor, as it sometimes happens, the shadows of
ancestors that hover over existences There are undoubtedly some dissertation to
write to revisit the canon of blood magic, but I digress it's true.
The real reason, however, is not that Marie suddenly decided to hide her child from the eyes of the Inquisition. It's that she was brave, it should be said. She just left. Then, there were some long wanderings of which I did not know all the details until I was an adult, and believe me, it will be much more interesting to go back there when we are familiar with the other characters. In October 1903, Marie returned to the Butte Montmartre.
To tell you about my family is to show you Europe. In those days, everything was fleeing. The gods had gone across the Atlantic, at the end of our song, leaving the fields of ruin of the Napoleonic epopee. They had skipped the England hut, the British Empire square to go faster to its ancient colony, this new civilization which quivered with promise, shuddered like a great hive. The gods therefore leaned over the cradle of the Starry Republic offering it the kiss of wealth. And while they rebuilt the school of heroes on the Civil War's bunkers, helpless demigods wandered without direction on the old continent. Between Olympus and us there was a vastness as empty as the path to constellations.
Gods, however, had never completely given up the bones of our beautiful Europe. And as the child so pampered increasingly revealed the ugliness of its industrial growth, they took care of their nostalgia in the bars of our capitals, in the contemplation of our architectures, leaving behind them a trail of half-blood. Europe was small for all of us, and with Italian migrants, Greeks and Romans, Phoenicians, Slavs and Nordic gods flocked to Paris, while the heads of Basque and Corsican clans, the old spirits of the provinces of France, weary of this Jacobin Republic silently bid their time, sharpening their knives. Celts were missing, they were banned from residence in the capital since the Saint-Barthelme massacre. Paris received everything, this fauna of diviners and warriors haunted the hill, but also Montparnasse and Belleville, crowded along the Canal Saint-Martin. The Fourteenth Nome sought to keep tabs on it all, assuming its usual role of mediator since the Clovis years.
The new law of separation of Church and State changed everything. The newfound secularism of the French state was going to destroy the treaties between the Pantheons. After its failure in the Civil War, the Thirteenth Legion sought to control Europe. Celts wanted to resume their millennial war against Rome. Western Slavs were raising forces to resist the Russian Empire. The last Champollions were lost in this mess, while the Fourteenth was still traumatized by its old civil war.
So this was the set of my life, when I met Marie. I was eight years old. My mother sang at the Folies de la Butte. Marie rented a room and worked there in the evenings, after the factory. Since the Ferry Laws, we didn't always have food, but we went to free school. I would stay at the cabaret in the evening with Michel, we did our homework on the stairs, then we hid in the backstage and tried on the wigs. We wandered around on Sundays and in the evenings, we escaped our mothers' watch, drank the end of glasses, stole stuff, sang the Internationale during the week, the ave maria at mass.
There is so much to say, and all this is still next to nothing. I must finish though, Lethe is waiting for me. There is no Lethe for magicians, they are like Tolkien's elves, clusters of memories and eras, and they never flee from the world. But I want to leave lightly, having cried for my sorrows and having loved my pains, regretting nothing. I have lived a long life for a demigod, and even more, for a Man who lived in the shadow of Great Wars. Here is a picture of me on my deathbed, July 30, 1971, I wear a beautiful black dress, Morrigan and Michel have left roses, the most beautiful roses, around my coffin, and there are in the streets from Paris a huge crowd. All I wanted to do was sing, so I sang until the last day.
I am Alice, daughter of Apollo. When my mother died, I stayed with Marie. It was my young years, before the barricades arose in the streets of Paris. Marie did not have custody of her children as she had fled the marital home. One day the Father Desjardins found them, he was with this magician from the Fourteenth, but Michel opened the coach door and disappeared. Monsters were everywhere. The police were hunting down anarchists. Marie hid his younger brother with a druid and took me to the Atlantic ocean. Her father's old friend, one of those from the Commune, who was fleeing France took me on the boat with him. I cried for three days. With me there were mostly Jews, Italians, Poles, and I tried to learn some English.
I will never forget the statue, its fire lit against the wind, as we docked at dawn. I remember the sparkle on the waves, the great shout of passengers, and this beauty broke my heart like no man ever.
I told you about Mary, because she was the one who taught me how to forgive. I will give you one last memory : it's a sunny morning, back in France, I am sitting in her kitchen. I have just landed my first contract. Michel, at the time, has passed his competition of grandes écoles, and is now studying for the Per Ankh exam. There he is, helping brother with a Latin exercise. We are peeling green peas, a lazy ray of sunlight hanging over the rough wooden table, as in a painting by Vermeer. Marie has aged a little, gray strands trailing in her black hair. Michel looks a lot like her ; he is lucky, she was a beautiful woman. She had the same eyes as her grandfather: black, intense, feminine, bordered by very long eyelashes.
That day she told me that she had had a very good life. And I saw her hands worn from workshop work, and her tired features, and her splendid smile, and she told me again, that she wouldn't have wanted another life. I sang the old tune of cherries.
A year later, Michel had passed the exam, and definitively regularized his position within Per Ankh. I was scheduled at the Olympia, and the vast field of possibilities opened up for me. But the gentle wind of luck ceased to blow, when the gods spit on our little dreams and forever turned their backs on our gardens of bones. All it took was one carelessness on the part of the magician of the Eighteenth Nome, sent to reinforce the Nome of Serbia, and Setne, in the vile guise of nationalism, killed the peace in Sarajevo. Then, imperceptibly, Europe loaded its weapon with the bullets it had melted for decades, placed the barrel to its temple and fired. "