Read The House I Loved for Free Online

and the passage Saint-Benoît where I used to stroll with my brother, where you played as a boy. The pickaxes began their grisly business right there. I have not seen it, but I can all too well imagine the damage. Your childhood neighborhood has been destroyed, oh, my sweet love. Gone is the quaint coffee shop you used to go to in the mornings. Gone is the crooked passageway that leads to the rue Saint-Benoît, that dark, musty little alley with uneven cobblestones, where a friendly tabby cat used to frolic. Gone, the pink geraniums in the windows, gone, the cheerful children running along the street, all gone.
    I feel safe down here in the hidden recesses of our house, with the flickering flame of the candle throwing tall shadows on the dusty walls around me. The occasional mouse scurries by. When I am nestling here, I lose track of time, of the day passing. The house holds me in its protective clasp. I usually wait till the crashes have abated. Then I creep up again to stretch my cramped limbs once all is silent.
    How could I ever leave this house, beloved? This tall, square house is my life. Every room tells a story. My story. Yours. I need to get those stories down on these leaves of paper, it is a terrible and unquenchable urge. I want to write all the stories out so that the words stand strong with a life of their own, so that they truly exist. So that the story of this house and its inhabitants will remain forever. So that we will not be forgotten. Yes, we the Bazelets of the rue Childebert. We lived here, and despite the snares that destiny threw our way, we were happy here. And no one, mark my words, no one can ever take that away from us.

 
     
    REMEMBER THE FIRST BELLOW of the water carriers just after dawn, coming to us as we lay upstairs in bed still, slowly emerging from sleep? The sturdy fellows would traipse down our street and across to the rue des Ciseaux, a tired donkey laden with barrels in their wake. Remember the regular swish of the street sweepers’ brooms and the early morning peal of the church, so near it seemed the bell rang in our very room, and how nearby Saint-Sulpice would chime back like an echo, in harmony? The beginning of a new day, on our little street. The morning walk to the market with Germaine, when the cobblestones were still fresh, when cesspools had been emptied overnight, the little trot down the rue Sainte-Marguerite, shops opening one by one with the clang of metal shutters, down the rue Montfaucon and into the huge square of the market building, full of enticing smells and feasts for the eyes. I used to take Violette with me when she was a girl, as my mother had taken me with her, in her day. I took the little one too, twice a week. (I cannot face writing about the little one at present. Forgive me. Lord! What a coward I am.) You and I were born and raised between the black spire of Saint-Germain and the towers of Saint-Sulpice. We know this vicinity like the back of our hand. We know how the acrid tang of the river can linger through the rue des Saints-Pères when the heat of the summer is strong. We know how the Luxembourg Gardens flaunt a glittering coat of frost in the winter season. We know how the traffic becomes dense along the rue Saint-Dominique and the rue Taranne, when elegant ladies set out in hackneys sporting their coats of arms, when cabby drivers tussle with overburdened market carts and impatient, crowded omnibuses. Only riders on their horses manage to pick their way through the throng. Remember the rhythm of our young days, a pace that did not alter as I became a wife, a mother, and then your widow? Despite the upheavals that several times overtook our city due to political crisis and uproar, the business of living our life, the everyday preoccupation of cooking, cleaning, looking after the house, never wavered. When Maman Odette was still with us, remember how particular she was about the flavor of her bouillabaisse or the quality of her snails, even if