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at the Letter Killers Club. By the time I arrived, they had all assembled. I sought Rar out with my eyes: he was sitting in the same place as before; his face looked somewhat sharper; his eyes had sunk deeper in their sockets.
    This time the key and the floor belonged to Tyd. Upon receiving them, he inspected the key’s steel bit, as though searching for a theme in its scissure. Then, shifting his attention to the words, he began carefully extracting them one after another, inspecting them and weighing them. The words came slowly at first, then faster and faster, all jockeying for position; Tyd’s sharp cheekbones bloomed with ruddy blotches. All faces turned toward the storyteller.
    The Feast of the Ass. * That’s the title. I see it as a novella, I suppose. My theme is found some five centuries before our time. Place? A small village somewhere in the south of France: forty or fifty hearths; an old church in the center, vineyards and fertile fields all around. Nota bene : it was in this period and these places that the custom of celebrating the Feast of the Ass arose and took root, the so-called Festum Asinorum : the Latin name belongs to the church with whose blessing the festival wandered from town to town and hamlet to hamlet. It arose as follows: on Palm Saturday the peasants would reenact events from Christ’s last days; for greater edification, they would lead an ass into church; meant to recall the animal glorified in the Gospels, the ass was chosen for its providential role once all its points had been checked against passages in the Bible. One imagines that at first the donkey showed only confusion and a desire to return to its stall. But the Feast of the Ass soon became a sort of inverse Mass, a riot of sacrilege and debauchery: surrounded by a crowd of cackling peasants, amid hoots and a hail of cane strokes, crazed with fright, the ass brayed and kicked. Lay brothers would grab it by the ears and tail and drag it up to the altar while the crowd howled, singing cynical songs and screaming curses to droning ecclesiastical motifs. Censers gorged with all sorts of rot swung devoutly to and fro, filling the church with smoke and stench. Cider and wine flowed from holy chalices, parishioners scuffled and blasphemed and roared with laughter when the exalted ass fouled the altar flags. Then it would all stop. The feast would roll on and the peasants, having blasphemed their fill, would go back to crossing themselves piously as they stood through long Masses, contributed their last coins to the church’s magnificence, lit candles before icons, did meek penance, and endured life. Until the next asinaria .
    My canvas is primed. Now then:
    Françoise and Pierre loved each other. Simply and dearly. Pierre was a strapping lad who worked in the vineyards. Françoise looked more like the women inscribed in gold nimbuses along church walls than the young girls who lived in the cottages next to hers. No gold nimbus encircled her delicately delineated head, of course, for she was her mother’s only helper and it would have hindered her in her work. Everyone loved Françoise. Even ancient Father Paulin, whenever he met her, always smiled and said, “Here is a soul aglow before God.” Only once did he not say “here is a soul”: when Françoise and Pierre came to say that they wished to be married.
    The first publication of banns was made after Sunday Mass: Françoise and Pierre waited together in the vestibule, their hearts pounding; the old priest slowly climbed the pulpit stairs, opened his missal, and searched at length for his spectacles; only then did the two standing side by side hear their names said—through the incense and sunlight—one after the other.
    The second publication took place during the evening service on Wednesday. Pierre could not be there, he had to work; but Françoise came. The dusky church was empty—except for a few beggars by the